Scruffy city squirrel with a taste for chocolate peanut clusters

If the weather was nice or even just bearable I liked to enjoy lunch in a park near my workplace. That meant Independence Plaza or Washington Square Park.

There was a candy store on 7th. Street on my walk to Washington Square Park. One time I bought a small bag of chocolate covered peanuts, peanut clusters, enough to eat with lunch with a little bit extra to take home.

The torn off hair on the squirrel's tail told me he was a warrior. He, or maybe it was she, controlled a piece of sidewalk and trees on the northeast corner of Washington Square Park.

He knew I had the chocolate covered peanut clusters.

I was on his bench.

They were his chocolate covered peanuts.

He sat on his hind legs 6 feet in front of me staring.

I didn’t throw him any peanut clusters.

He barked. Squirrels bark.

The staring and barking didn’t work so, his next move was charging my (his) bench, biting my ankle, running back to the 6-foot line and staring.

I threw him peanut clusters.

He ate them.

He barked for more.

He bit my ankle again.

I didn’t have any peanut clusters left to take home.

Some people recommended having at least $10.00 cash at all times in case you were mugged. You didn’t want to anger the mugger and get beaten up. So I bought a bag of peanut clusters being sure to have enough for the squirrel when I ate my lunch at Washington Square Park.

Coal is following whale oil into extinction and Republicans are fighting to the death to preserve coal

Did you ever inhale coal smoke? We don't need to burn coal and nobody wants it, except the Koch brothers. The Koch brother's inheritance is coal based. The Koch's are almost matching the Republican Party in campaign spending. Republicans are very unpopular. Without the Koch money they can't win elections. 

Coal is following whale oil into the extinction bin of energy sources. 

The Republican Party has chosen to march to extinction along with coal. This summer the coal industry and the Republican Party will march into oblivion shoulder to shoulder. 

“Called the Manning brothers of climate change, the mild-mannered, dry-witted Nordhauses are scions of a New Mexico family long rooted in the land, which powerfully shaped who the brothers became. But for the Nordhaus brothers, protecting the earth depends far more on dispassionate thinking and intellectual rigor than on showy protests outside the White House.
They have neatly divided their world — Bill is the academic theorist, Bob the legal mind and political pragmatist — but their work is intertwined…
Bob wrote the provision — it became Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act — at a time when carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, was not considered harmful. It was not until 2009 that the Environmental Protection Agency defined carbon dioxide as a harmful pollutant because of its contribution to global warming. Thus it falls into the category of an unknown “pollutant of the future.” Section 111(d), after languishing in obscurity for decades, is now the legal rationale for the Obama administration’s plan to regulate carbon emissions without a law passed by Congress…
In the ensuing decades at Yale, Bill developed an economic model that put a price tag on the effects of climate change, like more droughts, flooding and crop failures and stronger hurricanes. He called it the Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy model, or DICE.
“The name was both descriptive (representing a dynamic integrated model of climate and the economy) but also consciously aimed to suggest that we are gambling with the future of our planet,” Bill wrote in an email.
DICE profoundly changed climate policy. Although the chief political argument against curbing carbon emissions from cars and coal plants has long been that doing so would harm the economy, the DICE models show that, depending on various scenarios, one ton of carbon pollution can inflict $20 to $30 in economic damage — a major cost, given that the global economy emits about 36 billion tons of carbon a year.
From:
New York Times
May 11, 2014
Brothers Battle Climate Change on Two Fronts

Earth Day Coatesville 2014

There was a large turnout of volunteers for the Coatesville Earth Day planting and cleanup. I made a video of the projects.

All Pennsylvania fish have mercury contamination. New study finds toxic levels in pristine areas.

"A new government study has found that, even in the pristine waters of western national parks, fish can carry enough mercury to endanger wildlife and, in some cases, people.

Scientists from the U.S. Geological Service and the National Park Service teamed up to sample fish in 21 national parks found that even fish in regions as remote as Glacier National Park and Alaska high levels of mercury."

SEE:

BOZEMAN DAILY CHRONICLE

Park study finds high levels of mercury in fish

By LAURA LUNDQUIST, Chronicle Staff Writer

Posted: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 8:00 pm

WHAT YOU CAN AND CAN'T EAT FROM PENNSYLVANIA WATERS:

Watching True Detective brought up mind pictures of real places in Pennsylvania.

True Detective' Recap: A Light at the End of the Tunnel 

A familiar finale proves our obsession with the show was about the journey, not the destination
  

"By locating its human monsters in the countryside, far from the supposedly corrupting influence of the modern city, this horror subgenre makes the argument that America's rot spreads up and out from the core. As Errol's sister-lover might put it, it's all around us: before you were born, after you die...
  

Whatever its faults, and they were many, True Detective's power lies in the way it made us feel when we watched it. Like Rust and Marty, we'll always have the memory of being drawn into its dark territory."

There are places in Pennsylvania that look like scenes in “True Detective”.

They never took them out for show and tell but I knew that some of my flyfishing buddies carried a firearm in their vest. It seemed like a little much, at first.

Sometimes I drove to fishing spots on macadam, then dirt roads then just wheel tracks.

The best fishing is usually at sunrise and sunset. Which means that it’s dark when you walk in or dark when you walk out. If you let it your primal fear of the dark can take over.

I don't think there are Hoodoo believers in Pennsylvania’s countryside but there are some strange people. Like the guy who answered the female Census taker’s questions naked behind his screen door. At least he would talk. Most of the “backwoods” people in Montgomery County hid from the Census takers.

The Perkiomen flows through more civilized areas of Pennsylvania in Montgomery, Bucks and Berks Counties. There were “cross lighting celebrations” along the Perkiomen with KKK, skinheads and people with swastikas. The skinheads were or are illegal drug entrepreneurs. The “celebrations” still go on to this day slightly subdued and maybe without lit crosses because of the Perkiomen Trail.

I think the Perkiomen Watershed has about as much or more drug dealers as Coatesville does. It’s one more reason some of the locals didn’t want the Perkiomen Trail and the armed Montgomery County Park Rangers and State Troopers who patrol it.

It’s said that “Wilderness is a place where you can be eaten.” If you pay attention to the signs in places like Yellowstone Park that say “Bear in Area” I believe that wilder areas are safer than more civilized areas. It’s the civilized accessible fringes of wild areas that can be dangerous.

Maybe my flyfishing buddies had good reason to pack heat in their vests.