The Art of Tetman Callis

“A good dog is a natural super-soldier: strong yet acrobatic, fierce yet obedient.  It can leap higher than most men, and run twice as fast.  Its eyes are equipped for night vision, its ears for supersonic hearing, its mouth for subduing the most fractious prey.  But its true glory is its nose.” – Burkhard Bilger, [...]

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There’s this:

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Ninety-eight years ago on this very day the so-called Great War (aka, the World War, aka the First World War) “broke out,” as wars are said to do.  How did this misfortune come about?  Through an unstoppable cascade of double-dog dares, to wit: A Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian (aka, Austro-Hungarian) duke; The Austrians (aka, [...]

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This was featured on APOD today:

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“Success is the enemy of future success.” — Garry Kasparov (quoted in The Most Human Human, by Brian Christian)

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Colorado is one of the places where God kissed Mother Earth.  Susanne and I spent the past few days there, in and around the Conejos River valley. When we arrived at our lodge, the first thing management wanted us to know was that a bear had been through the compound the night before, thoroughly inspecting [...]

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Amtrak runs the Southwest Chief between LA and Chicago.  Last week, Susan and I took it eastbound from Albuquerque.  She was born and raised in Chicago* and we went there to be wed and to honeymoon. (*Onion-town, the legendary, big-shouldered, fog-footed Kenyan capital of the glittering island kingdom of Kansas, where edible dogs are raised [...]

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“Though prudence, intrepidity and perseverance united are not exempted from the blows of adverse fortune, yet in a long series of transactions they usually rise superior to its power, and in the end rarely fail of proving successful.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VII

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This guy’s brilliant: http://www.benloory.com/

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I went out this morning to water my back yard, which is mostly desert with a few patches of wild grass and herb borders and a vegetable patch, and there was a falcon there, eating a breakfast of fresh dove.  I went back inside and called my wife and said, “Come quick!”  We watched the [...]

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Leonard Cohen has inspired me to set out in search of that elusive and ideal reader, the one who is otherwise unemployed and bored enough to read my work from the alpha through to the omega.

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I had a Joomla website, but had neither time nor capability sufficient to get it to look like anything more than something half-assed and tossed up on the web, so I switched over to this WordPress bloggy thing, the advantage to which being, I don’t have but the most minimal of capability with it, either, [...]

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