Still in Awe
High on the list of people I have admired over the years is the late J. C. Collins of Pecos, Texas, the grandfather of my ex, Deanna. He was a genuinely nice guy and the epitome of the kindly grandpa: patient, gentle, supportive, even-tempered.
He was a telegrapher for the Santa Fe Railroad in the days before wireless communications. He sent messages over the telegraph lines, tapping out the dots and dashes in Morse Code. Deanna still has a few old keying devices he used on the job.
He grew up in Kentucky, and he had the amazing ability, learned as a kid, to identify virtually every species of tree he saw. White oak, red maple, sugar maple, sycamore, willow, walnut, white pine, spruce — he knew them all. It was uncanny.
I can remember testing him, and, with a chuckle, he would reply with a name and maybe a few facts about the species. I am still in awe.
Jim Crow
I live in Jackson County, Georgia, which, like most of the South — most of the country — has an ugly history regarding race and justice. Slavery ended with the Civil War, but, as you probably learned in school, the white majority had no intention of treating blacks as equals or relinquishing any power.
By the 1880s, whites in Jackson County outnumbered blacks by a large margin, so the black vote was inconsequential. Therefore, black men were allowed to vote if they payed a poll tax. But eventually, local activists began lobbying to allow black men to serve on juries. As if.
In 1881, the editor of a local newspaper wrote that, although some black men might be qualified to serve on juries, there is "a higher law of moral integrity." And moral integrity, he wrote, is something "our colored brethren do not possess." What a sanctimonious jerk.
In the South, the white establishment prohibited blacks from serving on juries until the Supreme Court forced it on them in 1935.
Today, our conservative white brethren don't want real history taught in schools because, you know, feelings might get hurt. These dipsticks think like their ancestors. Jim Crow isn't dead.
Know Your Camels
The camel is an ungulate, a hoofed mammal, native to Asia and Africa and noted for the hump, or humps, on its back. The hump stores fat (not water, as often believed), which the animal can convert to energy as needed. This allows them to survive for long periods without food or water in the desert regions they inhabit.
The three living species of camels are the one-humped dromedary (or Arabian camel) of the Middle East and Sahara Desert, the two-humped bactrian camel of central Asia, and the wild bactrian of remote China and Mongolia.
Dromedaries make up 94 percent of the camel population, bactrian six percent. Only about 1,000 wild bactrians remain, and they are listed as endangered.
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