At Last!

After long planning and infinite patience from web designer Matt Mullenix, my website and blog are up and running. Please look around and, I hope, enjoy. Eventually-- like perhaps later this week-- I will post longer and even coherent posts, but it has been a long weekend. For now, let me give you a few links that have been sent to me in recent days, which may give you an idea of what kind of subject matter you may expect to encounter here. Also, please check out my blogroll, which starts with friends but will expand. There are also MANY links in the website.

From Jonathan and Roseann Hanson of Alpha Environmentalist (http://jandrhanson.com/j-blog.html) : the further decline and fall of the publishing biz. Chain bookstores are demanding fees for displaying books: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/books/review/05KENN01.html?8hpib

From Roseann: Private land conservation: http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/index.php?page=opinion&story_id=060205b5_guestdesert&page_number=0

From Chas Clifton of NatureBlog(http://natureblog.blogspot.com/): Wimpy parents are making it impossible for children to connect with nature (I have also written on this for Chas): http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2005/06/02/Louv/index_np.html

And for sheer fun, also from Chas: Cave Bear DNA. Does this mean that we can clone bears from the Ural cave bear hand given me by Peculiar of Odious and Peculiar? (http://www.odiousandpeculiar.blogspot.com/) Or the cave bear TOOTH and mammoth hair I got from his mother last Christmas? Sadly, science isn't there yet, but it would be a great boon to Pleistocene Park (http://www.faculty.uaf.edu/fffsc/station.html). Hunting mammoths in Siberia while great cats wait silently nearby-- sounds like fun to me. Mammoth steaks.... mmmmmm.

More soon. Meanwhile, does anyone know anything about St. Tryphon, falconer to Tsar Aleksei Mikhailovitch in the 17th Century and patron saint of falconry in the Eastern Orthodox church? I know he is depicted on his ikon with the gyrfalcon that he lost and miraculously found....