Scotch Porn

Here it is.

The Balvenie Doublewood, 17 year, single malt Speyside Scotch.

Dark and earthy, yet crafted, astoundingly, to finish sweet.

Matured first in traditional American oak casks for 12 years, the Scotch takes on a hint of vanilla.  Following that, the Doublewood is transferred into European sherry casks for an extra 5 years of finishing.

So worth the wait.

—Mitchell Hegman

Evil’s on the Run

A song by Blues Saraceno.

—Mitchell Hegman

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7MJBnrgFgE

Bearded Men are Gross

Researchers at the Hirslanden Clinic near Zurich, Switzerland, recently ran out of things to research.  They decided—since they had the resources—to compare the bacterial load in colony-forming units (CFU) of human-pathogenic microorganisms in specimens sampled from the beards of 18 men to samples taken from the fur of 30 dogs.

Turns out, the beards of men are gross.

Clinically gross.

All of the bearded men exhibited high microbial counts.  Only 23 of the 30 dogs showed elevated counts.  Moreover, seven of the men had beards that put them at risk of serious infection.

—Mitchell Hegman

Source:  www.huffpost.com

Human

Clearly, my thinking is too small to fill even the tiniest crack in the face of a mountain.  The slowest growing pine will always beat me to the sky.   Ever in a frenzy, I come and go from my valley or dance madly in place.  Though silent, the shadow of a single passing cloud leaves a more lasting mark.     

—Mitchell Hegman

Blue Roses

Red roses represent love and passion.

Pink roses stand for youth and beauty.

White roses often symbolize purity and innocence.

Yellow roses represent friendship and gratitude.

Blue roses stand for unattainable love.  Blue roses do not occur naturally.  They are, fittingly, a manipulated thing. 

—Mitchell Hegman

Sources: flowermeanings.org, fiftyflowers.com

Compatibility Telemetry

My computer is very smart.  I mean, hello, it’s a Google machine.  You can’t get smarter than that.  Early this morning, upon first firing up my computer, I noticed a bit of sluggish behavior on its part. 

My computer does not drink coffee, so that could not account for the lethargy.

As I ponk-ponked at the keyboard repeating commands to no avail, a window popped-up and warned me of high disk usage by “Compatibility Telemetry.”

Wow.

That sounded like a really smart thing going to work.

I stopped poking my computer in the face for a couple minutes and let it wake up.  Once my machine seemed to respond normally, I Googled “compatibility telemetry.”

Turns out compatibility telemetry is a spy.  Yep.  A spy built right into Widows 10.  Compatibility telemetry collects and regularly reports software usage, performance, and diagnostic data to the Microsoft mothership.

The idea here, apparently, is to root out potential software problems.

Hello, Windows 10, I found your problem.  It’s called compatibility telemetry.

—Mitchell Hegman

Thoughts

This morning, I am doing my best to entertain happy thoughts.  Soft bunny-rabbit thoughts.  I must invent these thoughts, of course.  And it’s not easy to output bunny-rabbit thoughts from inputs of bombings in Sri Lanka and news that the deadly “kissing bug” has made a move from Central America to Maryland where a young girl was bitten by one.

—Mitchell Hegman

Specifically

Specifically, I want to be happy.  With just a little sunshine on my face.  And at least one mountain range out in front of me.

—Mitchell Hegman

Moon Crash

When I lean outside to check the moon, I find it smoldering like a crashed jet airplane atop a heap of inky clouds.  The clouds rapidly absorb the wreckage.   Light fades all around me.  I close my door and withdraw into my house, thinking: “This will likely be a very bad day.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Proverbs From Around the World

Kenyan Proverb: “When elephants fight, it is the grass that gets hurt.”

Spanish Proverb: “A monkey dressed in silk is still a monkey.”

Colombian Proverb: “Shrimp that fall asleep are carried away by the current.”

Turkish Proverb:  “Those who want yogurt in winter must carry a cow in their pocket.”

Thai Proverb:  “Don’t ride an elephant to catch a grasshopper.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Source:  https://www.boredpanda.com

Something Thomas Arnold Said

—It was from an old friend who thought he was dying. Anyway, he said, 'Life and death issues don't come along that often, thank God, so don't treat everything like it's life or death. Go easier.'

Connie

We have reached that place where our words fail us.  Where songbirds fall silent.  Where light falters at the edges.  Where wind leans against pine trees, crying.

Yesterday morning, the biggest of the “big” girls in my family, my sister, Connie, perished at her home in Butte, Montana.  With her family at her side, she quietly sieved away.

Rest in peace, big sister.

We miss you already.

“Little” Constance Elaine

Christmas in Butte

Connie and Tony

—Mitchell Hegman

A Brief Rain

Came yesterday afternoon a brief sunshower.

Not even a full minute of rain.

I stood on my driveway for the duration of the shower—watching drops of rain mint new coins against the windshield of my truck, and against some fresh blades of grass at the edge of my drive.

I saw a tiny weevil there in the grass, too.

The new coins soon melted right through the grass.

And on shone the sun to fashion new life from a gathering of wet stones.

The new life and the weevil being the precious things.

—Mitchell Hegman

A Slight Change

Every so often, my brain opens up the wrong valve at some unspecified location and I have an inclination to imagine how some simple alteration in the world will change everything.

This happened again the other day. 

What, I wondered, would the world be like today, if, instead of becoming ill after being bitten by poisonous creatures, the physiological reaction for humans was to blurt out at irregular intervals from then on: “Come on, people, let’s dance!”

That would be something.

—Mitchell Hegman

True Love

Research (though I am not sure how this research was conducted) suggests that true love will generally last for 18 months to 3 years.

—Mitchell Hegman

Two Statements

Statement I have never used:

“It never occurred to me that I could drop paperback books into my toaster and lightly brown them until one morning when a porcupine came to my door and suggested it.”

Statement I would like to use:

“But, then, we all loved our parents in spite of everything.”

—Mitchell Hegman

Selenite

Mark Susag, my good buddy of forever, asked me to attend Helena Mineral Society’s Gem and Mineral Show with him again this year.  We have attended this together for the last dozen or so years.  While there, he always buys me a fossil or pretty rock of some sort for my birthday.

One year, while hunting elk, mark found a strikingly orange and red twenty pound stone and carried the thing for over a mile (back to this truck) just so he could give that to me on my birthday.

This year, Mark arrived earlier to the event than me.  When I met him at the entrance to the show, he said, “I already have something picked out for you.  I think you will like it.”

Mark led me back to a table filled with geodes, crystals, and various highly polished stone specimens.  He pointed to a display of selenite carvings with light shining up inside them from their bases.

I think my exact quote upon seeing the display was “Oooh-Wow!”

Selenite, according to the paper I got with the stone, “instills deep peace.”  This is also a stone thought to enhance mental clarity and flexibility.  Additionally, selenite is a “sweet angel stone.”  According to the literature, I can contact angels with the selenite.

I can always use that.

And even if none of that is true, it’s still a spectacular gift from my buddy Mark.

Posted is a photograph of my selenite with my Buddha light in the background.

—Mitchell Hegman

April 13

From 1900 until the present, April 13, has fallen on a Friday 18 times.

This matters to me because, well, Happy Birthday to me!

More importantly, I was born on one of the years (1956) when April 13 landed on a Friday.

That’s something.  Especially when you consider that April 13 will generally land on a Friday only one or two times each decade.   Furthermore, three or four times each century these April 13^th Fridays will see a span of eleven years between them. The nearest year before 1956 (my year) when April 13 struck a Friday was 1951.  The nearest after: 1962.

Since—and including—my year of birth, my birthday had fallen on the 13^th ten times.

Today is a Saturday.

—Mitchell Hegman

Leaving Yellowstone

Posted today are a few photographs of wildlife I captured in the morning before leaving Yellowstone National Park for Helena.

A pair of elk

Bison on the road

A young buck pronghorn antelope

—Mitchell Hegman

Ten Thousand Times

If I knew I had to strike a stone ten thousand times with a hammer before the stone emitted a beautiful sound, I would do so.  I might strike the stone ten times one day.  Fifty another.  I would work every day hammering at the stone until I struck the stone ten thousand times because I want to make beautiful sounds.

—Mitchell Hegman

Bison and Scotch

That girl and I drove to Gardiner, Montana, yesterday so I could set up for a class I will be teaching to Yellowstone National Park employees today.  While the day was filled from end to end with brooding clouds and storm squalls in the high mountains, we saw hundreds of elk and dozens of bison as we crossed Paradise Valley and then climbed into the park.

That always does my heart good.

When we finally settled into our room along the Yellowstone River, the clouds parted for an hour.  We were immediately drawn to the deck outside our room.  We sat there in the sun sipping a drink before walking out to dinner.

Posted below are a couple shots of bison and a shot (pun wholly intend) of Scotch along the Yellowstone River.

—Mitchell Hegman

Radical Honesty

I bumped into the term “radical honesty” the other day.

I wondered: What is that?

Radical honesty, I discovered as I drilled down, is quite simply telling the honest and brutal truth at all times.   While you might think this is a brilliant way to live, practitioners of this often leave in their wake a lot of bruised and disillusioned people.  At a certain point (constant) honest criticism will be perceived as an attack.  You cannot always be radically honest and polite at the same time.    

Love often requires a blind eye or a white lie.

I don’t want to be radically honest if it hurts.  So I give you this: “You are all looking lovely this morning!”

—Mitchell Hegman

Gone Country

Rap artist Lil Nas X did a funny thing.  He wrote and recorded a hip-hop song that not only went viral, it soon landed on several Billboard Charts, including the Hot Country Song chart.

The single debuted at number nineteen on the country chart.

The song, Old Town Road, is definitely not your grandmother’s country music.   The producer called the song “country trap.”  Lil Nas X’s label called the song a “country-inspired rap track.”

As Old Town Road began to chart slightly higher, some people on the “industry” side on country music became a little nervous.  In late March, Billboard quietly removed Lil Nas X’s from the country chart.  The song, they explained to his label was “not country enough.”

I must admit, I have no firm grip on country music.  I am not a regular listener.  I do know country music has been drifting toward pop music in recent years.  If it drifted far enough to fall into hip-hop…well, I guess that would be fine.  And Billboard yanking Lil Nas X from the country chart has done little to slow the rise of Old Town Road.    

Just the other day Billy Rae Cyrus stepped into the music studio to record a new release of Old Town Road with Lil Nas X.  As of this writing Lil Nas X and Billy Rae Cyrus are number one on the iTunes country chart.  Blake Shelton rests in the number two slot.

I have posted the new version of Old Town Road.  I must admit, I rather like this mix.

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ysFgElQtjI

Stuff (Another List)

—Grasshoppers have ears on their bellies.

—You are more likely to yawn during winter months.

—Porcupines live in dens (I don’t have one in mine, but you may want to check yours).

—October 6^th is National Noodle Day.

—Mitchell Hegman

Skiing

While looking through some of my older photographs, I ran across a few from a skiing trip a group of us took up into Canada in 1978.  While there, we went heli-skiing in the backcountry.  A pair of choppers worked on plucking up and dropping off our group and a group of Swiss tourists onto remote mountaintops. 

A pretty obvious difference in expertise existed between the two groups.  I have posted a photograph I captured of a mountainside we carved.  That’s us on the left.  The Swiss carved the trails on the right.  The photograph really tells the story.

And here is me jumping off a cornice above Marysville, Montana in June of 1979. 

 

—Mitchell Hegman

The Great Migration

Yesterday morning, as I sat calmly soaking in my hot tub, I began to hear geese honking on approach to the far side of my house and out of view.  This is not uncommon.  My house lies directly under the migratory flyway for geese on their way north.

This time of year, geese overfly my house daily.

But the cacophony of the geese calling back and forth soon grew to an unusual level. I am talking block party gone awry noise.  New Year’s riot noise.

At just about the time I was ready to fling myself from the tub and trot around the house, naked, to see what was going on, geese appeared high overtop me. 

Skein after skein of geese slid overtop me.  Thousands upon thousands upon thousands of geese.  More geese than I have ever seen in the air.

They absolutely filled the sky above my house and far beyond.

Fortunately, I had my smarter-than-me-phone with me.  I managed a few decent shots.  I have posted two of my photographs here.

What you see in my photographs are but a fraction of a fraction of what I saw.

—Mitchell Hegman

Defying the Odds

The likelihood of one person being bitten by a bear, shark, and a venomous snake are 1 in 893.35 quadrillion.  In case you are wondering, this is what the odds look like:

1 / 893,350,000,000,000,000

In more technical terms, those are what you would call “minuscule” odds.

Strangely enough (I really, really, really fought the urge not write oddly enough), one man actually defied these odds. 

Dylan McWilliams started this grim trifecta in 2015 when a rattlesnake stuck him while he was on a hiking excursion in Utah.

The odds of getting bitten by a venous snake in the United States are 1 in 37,500.

Dylan registered his next attack while camping in the mountains of Colorado in 2017.  Not a shark attack, mind you.  Nope.  In this attack, Dylan woke from sleep only to find his head was clamped firmly in the mouth an enormous black bear.  He managed get the bear to release by repeatedly poking the bear in the eye.  Nine staples were required to close the lacerations.

Odds for getting injured by a bear are 1 in 2.1 million.

In 2018, while body surfing the blue waters off Kauai, Hawaii, a shark chomped on Dylan’s leg.   He managed to break free of the shark—believed to have been a tiger shark—by kicking it with his other leg.

Until that shark attack, his odds for such occurring in U.S. waters were only 1 in 11.5 million.

You might think Dylan McWilliams’ unlucky relationship with the odds of attack would dissuade him from all outdoor activity.  Hardly so.  Dylan, just now entering his twenties, participated in a survival challenge on Naked and Afraid, the Discovery Channel reality program.

I don’t mean to be a spoiler here, but he made only 6 out of the 21 days.  No, he was not taken down by a lion.

This time it appears to have been bacteria.

Odds are pretty good on that.

—Mitchell Hegman

Sources: National Geographic, Discovery, BBC

Strange Pollution

Strange Pollution

Ever since the mid-1980s, an ongoing mystery has been a hot topic along the beaches in northwestern France.  We are not talking about your garden variety mystery here.  A particular and weird type of pollution has plagued the beaches.

For the past thirty years, plastic Garfield phones have been washing ashore.  The phones are orange and black just like the cartoon cat they were modeled after.

Recently, members of an environmental group solved the mystery when they found a damaged shipping container in a cave along a stretch of rocky shoreline.  Though the container was empty upon discovery, the group feels certain this was the source of the phones.

Here is a minute-long video about the mystery:

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OzYXZGvIWI

Generations

I have been more than a little confused about generations.  You know—the X, Y, Z thing.  This morning, I used my Google machine to sort things out.  Here is what I found:

Baby Boomers (my generation) are those born between 1944 and 1964.

Gen X encompasses those born between 1965 and 1979.

Gen Y includes people born between 1980 and 1994.

Gen Z embraces anyone born between 1995 and 2015.

If you are doing the math here, you will notice a bit of imbalance in the length of time these various generations encompass.  This is because our designation for generations is more concerned with the world in which they were raised than the date of birth.  What wars influenced each generation?  What shaped the consumer markets?  What music?

Maybe more telling is the technology and media surrounding each generation.  Baby Boomers, for example, grew up with newspapers in hand.  Gen Y grew up on a diet of television.  Gen Z is online and going mobile.

To further add confusion (by this I mean mine), the term Millennials is used for those who reached adulthood in the first few years after the turn of the 21^st century.

Clearly, technology and war shape the generations more than any other factors.  I hazard to guess what the next generation will become.

—Mitchell Hegman

On the “Not Funny” Side

Ethan Hawke shares his story:

—Mitchell Hegman

Video Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD9O3vPUqBg