Practical Advice

Treat everyone as you would like to be treated.  Treat those who give you single malt Scotch or show you their best fishing holes better.

-- Mitchell Hegman

The Gravesite

I don’t always admire the sun.  Sometimes, it burns my skin and cracks the earth at my feet.  But, yesterday, the springtime sun felt like a warm kiss against my entire body.

At midday, encouraged by the warmth, I strode out into the honey-colored prairie grasses in front of my home.  I was hoping to discover the first green fingers of bitterroot emerging from the soil.  Maybe a tufted phlox renewing against open ground.

Late last spring I buried Carmel, one of my cats, below a long-needled pine tree at the rim of the gulch at the back of my home.  Near the end of summer a grave robber tried to burrow down to Carmel.  Maybe a skunk.  Maybe a fox or run-around dog.

When I discovered the transgression, I raked the disturbed stones and dirt and pine needles back into the hole.

Yesterday, thinking about Carmel, I turned back and walked to his gravesite. 

A new layer of shed pine needles lay overtop Carmel’s resting place.  The needles shone a deep red where brushed by sunlight.  Above me, the branches and green needles of the tree lifted a little in a cool up-wind from iced-over lake below.

He was a good boy.

Spring is the hardest season.  Not winter.  Spring is when you realized we are not all coming alive again.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Spiders, if They Wanted to, Could Eat All Humans in a Single Year

I am not a huge fan of spiders.  I don’t understand why they need to be so creepy and violent.

And why black widows?

Recently, I bumped into several of articles from different sources making claim that the world’s present population of spiders, if they all worked together, could eat all humans within a year.

That’s really creepy.  And what does it mean?

I am thinking it means we need more humans.  Not Spider-Man type humans.  We need more regular, coffee-drinking humans.  Humans willing to remove spiders from the bottom of bathtubs and sinks.  Humans with spider swatters.

For now, I need more coffee.

-- Mitchell Hegman

The Upside

Yesterday, that girl and I drove home from Billings by way of Harlowton and White Sulphur Springs.  The mountain country remains snowy and often swathed in clouds.  Crescent snowdrifts still cling to the lee side of the blonde grass hills at lower elevations.  Antelope, deer, and cattle mill about the meltwaters collecting in the bottoms. 

There is a distinct upside to our gradual exit from winter. 

The beauty of a warm day with snow and a bluebird sky is hard to match. 

Today, I give you, to illustrate, a couple photographs from an early April visit to the Yellowstone Club three years ago.  Big Sky is the backdrop in both images.

Thanks goes to my buddy Mark for inviting us there and taking a photograph of me and that girl with my camera.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Something Other Folks Said

I wish I could play little league now.  I’d be better than before.

—Mitch Hedberg

Lead us not into temptation.  Just tell us where it is; we’ll find it.

—Sam Levenson

There are lots of people who mistake their imagination for their memory.

—Josh Billings

Three Questions

—Is what’s good for ping pong also good for the economy?

—If I stopped using silent letters when speaking would anybody notice?

—Considering the state of technology, is the statement “that’s virtually impossible” false?

-- Mitchell Hegman

The Wild East

Yesterday, after winnowing through the National Electrical Code while teaching an exam preparation course for some journeymen about to take the master electrician’s test, I came home and melted into my sofa.

This teaching stuff is hard work.

As my teaching buddy, Steve, always expounds: “Electricity is hard!”

For some strange reason, I am one of those fraction-of-a-percenters who really enjoys the Code.  To me, the provisions written within the Code range on a scale that starts at confounding but ends at Shakespearean.  Between the ends of this spectrum, I truly enjoy the knitting of shalls and shall nots, the formalized structure.   I even enjoy the run-on sentences dragging ahead like heavy freight trains.  And, in the end, I enjoy toying with my own plain English conversions for better understanding.

Crazy, thick, and perplexing as the Code can be, I think we really need it in place.  I can express why we need it in photograph after photograph.  Today, for example, I am posting a couple photographs I captured in Vietnam in 2009.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Clutching an Elk Antler (A Sure Sign of Spring)

The arrival of spring is marked in different ways from place to place.  In Washington, D.C., spring is official when the city is awash in cherry blossoms.  In Hinckley, Ohio, it’s the arrival of buzzards.  In Chicago, the gunplay moves outdoors.  Here in Helena, Montana, the surest sign of spring is seeing people standing outside clutching elk antlers. 

I can explain that.

Elk antlers are a big deal.  First of all, they are pretty cool to look at.  You can make artsy stuff out of them.   Also, they can be sold.  Fresh brown antlers can fetch something like $12.00 a pound.  Sun-bleached antlers rake in about $8.00 a pound.

This time of year, people from around here begin probing areas of receding snow in the nearby mountains seeking antlers shed by elk and deer.  Yesterday, while visiting my sister, a mutual friend stopped by to show us a nice elk shed he found north of Helena.  We all went outside and took turns clutching the thing.

Elk antlers are astonishingly heavy; as if made of stone.

As I mentioned, elk antlers are a big deal around here.  People pay attention to them—especially how many points they have.  Years ago, a story appeared in our paper about a man in Bozeman who beat his girlfriend with an elk antler.  As I recall, the woman did not experience any long-term injury.  But quite a few people I knew were upset because the article failed to mention how many points the antler had.

So my blog will not suffer a similar fate, I have posted a photograph of that girl clutching the antler we saw yesterday.  You can count the points for yourself.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Banging Your Head Against the Wall (Some Odd Facts)

—The letter “Q” is the only letter of the alphabet that does not appear in the name of any state.

—Similar to humans being right-handed or left-handed, most dogs use their right ear when listening to humans and use their left ear when listening to threatening sounds.  Additionally, most dogs use their left nostril for “good” smells. 

—Your nose and ears will grow long after the rest of your body has ceased growth.  They will continue to grow throughout your life.

—Heat expansion on a hot summer day can cause the Eiffel Tower to grow six inches taller.

—Banging your head against the wall for an hour will burn 150 calories.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Sources: Scientific American, Reader’s Digest, The Fact Site

Pairs

Sometimes, I think we care about beauty only in an over-defined sense.  We will, for example, drive for miles to stand outside in the night and watch a fireworks display where bright pyrotechnic blossoms explode against the sky one after another.  But, at the same time, we may not bother to step out our back door to witness a meteor shower when shooting stars flash above us only every few minutes.

Last night, I experienced something unusual.  Something small and beautiful. 

It is said that Canada geese are monogamous.  They will mate for life once they pair up in their second year of life.  This time of year, huge flights of geese fly overtop my house in northward migration.  More notably, the pastures and grain fields in the surrounding valley fill with flocks of geese resting or feeding.

Last night, just before dusk, I sat out on my back deck to take in the last of a warm and sunny day.  As I sat there, pairs of geese, having lifted from nearby pastures, began to fly over my house.  Not whole flights.  Just pairs.  Most of them many seconds or minutes apart.

They were often no more than a dozen feet above my house as they flew off in the direction of the Big Belt Mountains.  Often, I could hear the soft whistling of air through their wings.  Some pairs were gabbling back and forth in their unintelligible language.

This was no explosion of geese above my house—just the passing of pairs.  I didn’t count the pairs, but I am guessing somewhere near a dozen flew over me.  A dozen pairs of life-mates, on their way to spring nurseries.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Reality Sets In

I stepped outside and slipped into my hot tub early this morning.  In the calm and relative silence of predawn I contemplatively imagined I might hear the stars and planets jostling about in the royal blue dome of sky above.

After no more than a minute or so of soaking, reality, in the form of a garbage truck, set in.  With headlights scouring the hills and scattered trees beyond my home, and a single orange light strobing on top, the truck rattled and clanged out to the far reaches of Dana’s Point.  For the next few minutes, my only significant input was the advancing and receding sounds and the occasional beeps of the backup signal of the garbage truck making predawn rounds through country homes.

Oddly enough, I found a certain pleasure (if not reassurance) in the rumblings of the truck looping through the hills.  We are never fully alone out here.  You can always count on the garbage truck making the rounds on Wednesdays.  

-- Mitchell Hegman

A Half-Reminder

In a very real sense, life on our blue planet is founded upon savagery.  We are surrounded by predators.  Consider the hawks in stiff circles above.  The leggy spiders bursting from shadow to light as they ambush hapless passersby.

Big fish eat little fish.

And, of course, we fully acknowledge the apex beasts afield: wolves, bears, big cats.

Our own pets—sweet as they seem—are predators just the same.

On occasion, a field mouse will somehow gain entry to my house.  My 20 pounds of housecat is first to notice such events.  He immediately switches into hunting mode when he detects a mouse.  I will find him hunched at various places around the house watching corners or peering under furniture.  I might notice him sniffing along the floor.

The day before yesterday, my cat switched into hunting mode.  I saw him sniffing at the space under the range.  He lingered near the toe space below the kitchen sink.  While I was in Missoula teaching a class yesterday, that girl texted me a photograph of what she found on the living room floor.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Door Check

I’m not sure what the deal is with my 20 pounds of housecat.  He’s developed a new quirk.  Now, when I find him at the door and try to let him outside, I am required to open and close the door three or four times before he will actually walk outside.  He sits there watching the door (not looking outside) with great interest as I conduct the “practice openings.”

It’s as though he is some kind of building inspector making sure the door is in perfect working order before he will use it.  Or, perhaps, my cat has developed obsessive compulsive disorder and I and the door are caught up in one of his OCD loops.

 -- Mitchell Hegman

Driving Open Range under Low Clouds

The open range can quickly close in on you.  Low clouds can press down hard, squashing distant mountains into a nearby mist.  An empty highway will soon dissolve into gray on both ends.

Seventy miles-per-hour becomes perfectly still. 

Without an accompanying fence, or a river to tag and run alongside, a quiet highway becomes dangerous.  If you’re not careful, you’ll crawl deep inside yourself.

One wrong song on your sound system and you’ll quickly find the road has led you back to that cliff you almost jumped from many years ago.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Cats

I checked outside early this morning and found the stars as they should be.  At present, my 20 pounds of housecat has opted to sprawl across my lap as I sit drinking my first cup of coffee.  On my television's Sirius XM 60’s on 6 feed, the Beach Boys’ I Get Around fell immediately into Hugo Montenegro’s The Good the Bad and the Ugly.

Cats are a sort of ego grounding mechanism.  If you are of a mind that you are “kind of a big deal,” that the world is going to stop if you don’t get out there and spur it along, having a cat sprawled across your lap will tone you down in a hurry.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Stephen Hawking

Stephan Hawking died yesterday.  Bound to a wheelchair, he lived fifty years longer than expected after being diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease.  More importantly, as his body continued to shutdown, his brain unleashed.  His contributions to research in physics are remarkable.  But his biggest contribution to humankind might be the grace with which he faced his utterly debilitating disease.

He gives us all hope that we might flourish in the face of the worst hardship, in the face of our own demise.

Following are two quotes from Stephen Hawking:

—“I believe things cannot make themselves impossible.”

—“In my opinion, there is no aspect of reality beyond the reach of the human mind.”

-- Mitchell Hegman

To a Practical End

For a time, I clung to dreams that I might change my corner of the world in some significant way.  I swashbuckled my way through imaginings of what might come.  I saw myself paralyzing forever horrible diseases.  Maybe three or four of them.  Perhaps I would invent a glowing widget that would improve all doodads.  Having now struggled to simply reach the age of retirement and still keep my refrigerator filled along the way, I am today happy I can change my own socks.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Avenging Angels

I have known more than a few people who aspired to be avenging angels.  Such aspirations always turn out ugly in the end.  The “avenging” necessarily comes first, and “angel” is enduringly beyond reach.

-- Mitchell Hegman

First Bluebird

Yesterday, on a trip to town, I spotted my first bluebird of the year.

I saw five of them, in total.

Two perched on the wires of a fence.

One hovering in the air above a patchwork pasture of blonde grass and melting snow.

Two more in stitching flights across the country road directly in front of the car.

The arrival of bluebirds to our open prairie land is the surest sign of spring in our northerly habitat.

Today, we celebrate the arrival of spring.

You may begin dancing at this time.

-- Mitchell Hegman

The Loco Horse

My friend, Dave, as a sort of kindly hobby, nurses sickly calves back to health.  Right now, he's tending six whitefaced runts.  He gets them from ranchers he knows along the Front Range near Augusta.  Some of the calves must be bottle‑fed.  Some require medicine.  The ranchers have no time for them, and their impatient mothers soon abandon them if they seem sickly.  So Dave takes them in as pets, more or less.

Dave took me out to see the calves in their cozy barn.  I patted their shoebox heads and told them they were pretty, though, actually, cattle are oafish and their shoeboxes mostly empty.  Not pretty at all.  Cattle, I think, are as caviar an acquired taste.

While feeding a handful of alfalfa to one of the calves, Dave told me about a horse he "put down" recently.  "Horse went loco on me," he said.  "Didn't know up from apple butter."

Dave is one of those people who never exactly looks you in the eyes when he talks.  He stares at the ground.  He watches his hands.  Whatever.  But you'll not find a man more sincere than he, not in this particular life.  When he gazed at the calf's flank and said, "laying down a horse is the hardest thing in the world," I knew he meant it.

Purple loco is lupine's cruel cousin.  Lethally toxic to most range animals, locoweed washes up into patches all along the eastern slopes of the Rockies, all along the plains.  Dave's horse apparently found one of those patches while out to pasture.

Normally, a horse will not eat locoweed, and will in fact graze all around the pretty flowers, leaving them standing alone. But every so often a horse will nip a morsel of loco while munching through the tall grasses.  From that moment on, the horse's world reverses itself.  Having tasted the locoweed, the horse will forsake all grasses and hays and will forage near and far, often frenetic, to find more locoweed, more sweet poison.  Sometimes a horse will starve to death while standing knee‑deep in grass.  They no longer hear the red‑wing blackbirds fluting from cattailed ponds.  They don't feel the wind in their long hair.  They feel only loco.

Though you can sometimes pen a horse that has ingested a small amount of locoweed and nurse them back to our forward world, if they find enough loco before you notice, they become 'loco' for good.  The best thing then is euthanasia: the happy death.

Dave's horse found plenty of locoweed.

By the time Dave captured and penned his horse, the damage was done.  His horse had forgotten how to drink water, and would submerge its whole head in the watering tub, doing nothing. Several times, Dave rushed out and yanked the horse's head from the water to keep it from drowning.  The horse no longer recalled the simple act of turning around.  Anytime the animal walked itself into one of the fence corners, it remained there, greatly agitated, unsure of the next move, like a chess player refusing to accept an obvious stalemate.  On a few occasions, the pitiful creature finally freed itself by falling over backward.  Plodding slowly about the pen, the horse thought only locoweed, its small mind purpled and craving—craving one more taste of the summer flower's sweet lunacy, craving until Dave gave it a death like a good wind fanning Timothy and bluebunch wheatgrass.  

-- Mitchell Hegman

A Change in Hair Color Changes Everything

The other day, I bumped into a woman who immediately called me by name and struck up a conversation.  I recognized her face, but could assign neither name nor any thread of connection to my life.

I tried to place her as we spoke, but nothing surfaced.

I mean nothing.

I walked away from our chance meeting very frustrated by an utter lack of registration within my memory.  I spent hours following the meeting scouring through my brain in an effort to place the woman.

What the hell is wrong with me and my brain?

This morning, at once and out of the blue, the woman popped into my head with a completely different hair color and I immediately recognized her.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Satellite

A happyish and somewhat popish song by Guster.

-- Mitchell Hegman

Video Link:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAkvb2Rhces 

A Blade of Grass

A blade of grass, without thought, does the best it can every day with what it has been provided.  Why shouldn’t we, augmented by positive thoughts, make the same efforts?

 -- Mitchell Hegman

Leaving Yellowstone

Posted today are photographs from the upper terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs, a photo of the Roosevelt Arch at the north entrance to Yellowstone Park, and a photograph of a couple bull elk just off the road near Gardiner, Montana.

 -- Mitchell Hegman

A Wintertime Fox

Just above the steaming orange and white travertine steps at Mammoth Hot Springs, a fox detached itself from the evergreens and pranced across the snow before dropping onto the cleared roadway.  Once on the roadway the fox, nose down, zig-zagged back and forth across the asphalt heading directly toward our car.

Naturally, that brought the car to a full stop.  I jumped outside and began snapping photographs.  The fox approached to within a dozen feet of me before leaping back onto the snow above the roadway and vanishing amid the blue shadows of evergreens once more.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

Where the Buffalo Roam

I am in Gardiner, Montana, for a teaching engagement.  I will be conducting a National Electrical Code refresher with electricians employed by Yellowstone National Park today.

It’s not all that difficult to figure out you are at the edge of the park when you are in Gardiner.  It’s pretty obvious when you walk out to the parking lot where you are staying and immediately bump into Bison wandering through.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

Something Other Folks Said

“It is to be observed that ‘angling’ is the name given to fishing by people who can’t fish.”

—Stephen Leacock

“If at first you don’t succeed, find out if the loser gets anything.”

—William Lyon Phelps

“Frisbeetarianism is the belief that when you die, your soul goes up on a roof and gets stuck.”

—George Carlin

Big Nose

Taking selfies warps your face.  Not your actual face.  The image it captures is a bit warped.  Most notably, smartphone selfies make your nose appear bigger than it actually is.

According to Boris Paskhover, an assistant professor Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, people are increasingly seeking plastic surgery to make their noses smaller.  To support the need for surgery, many people will use smartphone selfies as justification for surgery.

“Young adults are constantly taking selfies to post on social media and think the images are representative of how they really look, which can have an impact on their emotional state,” Paskhover noted.  “I want them to realize that when they take a selfie they are in essence looking into a portable funhouse mirror.”

Paskhover and another researcher named Ohad Fried developed a mathematical model to quantify the selfie distortion.  They discovered that a selfie taken at a distance of twelve inches from the face makes the nasal base appear approximately 30 percent wider and he nasal tip will appear 7 percent wider than an image captured a distance of 5 feet..   

Up next: men taking smartphone images of their junk from a distance of 12 inches.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

Source: ScienceDaily

Switching Channels

Robotics are disrupting our jobs market in many sectors.  Wealth is not evenly distributed across the population. Cryptocurrency might be forming a bubble in the financials.  As a taxpayer, my personal share of the U.S. national debt has grown by $4,000.00 in the last year.

All of this discovered by watching business channels for ten minutes this morning.

On the brighter side, the movie Toxic Shark is playing on the SyFy channel.

-- Mitchell Hegman 

Hissing

I never believed I heard the ocean

When I pressed a seashell against my ear

I knew it was something bigger

Not God exactly

Maybe me hearing the whole universe at once

The hoosh of galaxies scooping aside time as they spin

Flung particles of star stuff hissing against my inner ear

A friend suggested I was hearing myself in the shell

The rush of my own blood reflected back at me

Like a sound mirror

But how can that be?

How can I be louder than the universe?

Me

Soft and pale as bread dough

And quiet on the inside

A speck holding a seashell

-- Mitchell Hegman