Karlek's Blog

I have known for several years that there was some writing about the Caribs on St. Vincent in 1795 in the memoire that Alexandre Moreau De Jonnes wrote in 1858 but the translation I got had nothing in it. Recently I got a 1920 translation by General Arby that does. I've put those 5 chapters on my St. Vincent blog at
http://svgb.karleklund.net

It is a very exciting story. Almost too exciting to believe, but it makes sense and De Jonnes turned into a very respected scientist in his mature age. At worst it is like George Washington at Valley Forge--if it has been touched up for the sake of making it more interesting it is no worse than any other history. I think every Vincentian kid, especially young Vincentian girls, should read it; which is why I spent a fair amount of money to buy the book and why I put it on the internet.

Read it and see if you don't want to spread the word.

1Myricks05
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

This is just to remind you that we are still in Massachusetts, the Myricks section of Berkley to be precise. You can look here if you want to see some old pictures.

We will be going back to Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in mid-October and staying there until mid-May.

The picture is the interior of our post-and-beam barn, circa early 1700s. The house is also post-and-beam from about the same period with a baloon frame addition on the back.

There are a couple of little stores and a gas station a mile down the road. The nearest supermarket is about 6 miles away. Myricks is an isolated corner of a small town, which is about as rural as you can get in Massachusetts.

A few years ago I wrote a year's worth of columns for a local newspaper. You can read some of them at rfd.karleklund.net. Here's one.

. . . .
I don't know why, but 1 get a lot of pleasure watching chickens wandering around scratching the dirt. Some of it must have been useful, I suppose: if they hadn't we'd probably have had more bugs than we did. But they won't touch potato bugs and they aren't that fond of squash bugs either. and one summer the chickens got to all of the early tomatoes before 1 did. So it must be at least partly aesthetic.

Ours were pretty, even if they were a mongrel crew. Our roosters are part Aracana, so aside from the dozen we got as chicks from the 4H exhibit at the county fair, and the banties we were given by someone who didn't like their habit of roosting in trees, the new generation shows traits of various breeds.

It may give them hybrid vigor, it certainly makes them more individual. But even I wouldn't call them bright, and they were certainly excitable. If you walk where they are they'll try to sidle away, but if they find themselves in a blind alley they'll give one hell of a ''scrawrk" and fling themselves into space as best they can. Which isn't all that graceful.

But one such incident did remind me of an old folktale that l'd like to share with you.
. . . .

A sparrow, seeing a motion in the sky that she took for a hawk, dropped the piece of bread she was carrying home to her babies. It fell to earth and dropped right on the head of Chicken Little: who was engaged in grubbing out lunch.

"Ouch" said Chicken Little, "something hit me on the head." She made a few more scratches.

"But there isn't anyone around." she continued to herself. "and l'm not under an oak tree. I remember that grandfather said that an acorn fell on his head, once, and he got all excited and ran to tell the King that the sky was falling. Boy! Did it ever take him a long time to live that one down!"

Her scratches grew absent-minded—gestures of habit, like when you pull at your beard when you are thinking. She continued her ruminatory soliloquy.

"But there are no oak trees around now. And nothing else, either!"

The sparrow had long since vanished. "This time the sky MUST be falling!"

She started running, crying: "The sky is falling. the sky is falling!"

She bumped into Gander-Lander. ''Gander-Lander. Gander-Lander, the sky is falling"

"Oh, my goodness." said Gander-Lander, "Oh, my goodness." He started to run around in a small circle saying "Oh, my goodness" over and over.

Chicken Little was taken aback. She appreciated that Gander-Lander was concerned, but this didn't seem to be solving the problem. She might be running and crying out, but she had a direction. So she left Gander-Lander to his circles and ran to Piggy-Wiggy.

"Piggy-Wiggy, Piggy-Wiggy, the sky is falling."

"Wurgm" said Piggy-Wiggy, opening one eye halfway.

"Don't you understand?" asked Chicken Little, anxiously.

Piggy-Wiggy opened both his eyes and put his snout in the trough. With his mouth impolitely full of swill he said. "I'm all right Jack, grunt you!" and turned his back.

Chicken Little was understandably both offended and disgusted. And getting a little desperate. She ran to the barn. "Horsey-Lorsey, Horsey-Lorsey" she screamed. "The sky is falling!"

"That is certainly a matter for serious concern." said Horsey-Lorsey, buttoning the vest of his threepiece harness. "And if I had the time 1 would certainly apply my extensive experience to helping you create an appropriate, sensitive but hard-hitting public awareness campaign. But right now I have an important business appointment in the South Forty and that will keep me very busy for a few days. Why don't we do lunch next week and run it up the flagpole and see who salutes." He turned back to the mirror and adjusted his collar.

Well, that kind of calm acceptance dampened Chicken Little's excitement a little, but she figured that she might as well make the date for lunch anyway. After all, Horsey-Lorsey was a solid citizen, wasn't he?.

But she still felt, as she watched Horsey-Lorsey amble off fo the fields, that it wasn't enough. Something should be done now. And then she thought of the police. Didn't they handle emergencies? So the ran to the police station.

She ran through the door shouting:"Fuzzy-Wuzzy, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, the sky is falling!"

"What was that you said?" Growled the burly desk sergeant, hall rising from his chair. (He hated hippies.)

"Oh. Sorry, officer. I would like to report that the sky is falling."

"Your name?"

"Chicken Little."

"Address?"

"What difference does that make?" said Chicken Little frustratedly.

"Just give me your address."

"Oh, all right. The Chicken Coop @ MacDonald's Farm."

"1 see. And you want to report that the sky is falling?"

"Yes, yes. What are you going to do about it?"

"I'm afraid that that is out of our jurisdiction. Have you seen the Board of Health?" And without waiting for an answer the nice policeman turned and began typing up a report of the incident.

Chicken Little went over to the Town Hall, mumbling to herself, but when she got there she found from the Clerk that the Board of Health only met on the third Thursday of every month, and today was the fourth Monday. It might not be possible to get a sky question on the warrant, it being the season for perk tests, but they'd try. Had she tried the Conservation Commission?

But Chicken Little had had enough. Chicken Little trudged back to the Coop, too exhausted even to mumble. It had been a trying day. She considered going to see the King, but what she had seen of the Governor on TV hadn't impressed her. [The name of the Governor of Massachusetts at the time was "King".] It would be the Town Clerk all over again. If that.

"Oh. well." she said to herself. "maybe I was just being a silly chicken anyway. Like Grandfather."

But that hadn't been a hawk that the sparrow had seen-it was a piece of the sky falling. The next day the rest of it fell and squashed everyone flat.

MORAL: listen to the message and not the messenger.

Porter
Originally uploaded by Karlek.

When I was a kid and read about the Arabian Nights, I wondered about these people they called "porters". I knew about the porters who moved bags at train stations, but they had no trains.

In Kingstown (in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines) you don't move packages in Taxis, like you do in New York, because there are still a lot of places where it is easier to walk. If you have a lot of packages, you use a porter like this fellow.

I have been working on the site at svg.karleklund.net by editing out a bunch of the pictures so it was small enough to put it on a site without ads. These pictures, and a bunch that were waiting to go somewhere, have been uploaded to pix.karleklund.net. I have been putting lables and tags on those and I'm starting to weed out the duplicates. The pictures that are still in the SVG book are being uploaded to the new server, slowly.

I have some texts that will eventually go, in full or as extracts, to the SVG Book. They are being sorted out and, if appropriate, published on the SVG Blog.

Between them that's going to take up a bit of time.

The only time I think of stuff like evolution or God or behavior is when somebody else writes something and I send them an email. Some of those will get stuck up here or on the Socevol Blog.

And then there is ordinary life, too.