Remain calm, be kind, and carry on regardless!
You've reached the online journal of Richard Rathe — online since 2004! In this iteration I'm trying a few new ideas: minimal markup, working with mostly plain text, and moving beyond the timeline. I call it BLIS (BLog It Simple). Find me online…
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The sinner who knows no guilt is truly disabled.
Panorama, Coyote_Buttes_North, The_Wave, Vermilion_Cliffs, Utah
Mar 13, 2026
What we get upset about. Cartoon for Dutch newspaper Trouw: https://www.trouw.nl/cartoons/tjeerd-royaards~bcb45712/ #GasPrices #oil #OilPrices #Iran
Galleries Nature Photography Travel 2018
My brother-in-law Rick flew out from Colorado so we could go on a road trip together across South Dakota and beyond. We entered the Park via the Northeast Entrance (extreme right on map) and spent most of our day slowly moving west, stopping frequently—sometimes to take photos, sometimes due to bison migrating across the road. We ended up at the Sage Creek primitive camping area (upper left).
Camping Hammocks Reviews Technology 2016
I went out last night to get some experience pitching and sleeping in my new hammock tent. It came with no instructions and there is only limited info available online. I’m getting better using a bit more tension and added a small relieving line to the fly so it can hang along the side (keeping the netting clear for viewing the trees and stars!). In future I’ll keep it rolled so it stays off the ground. I paddled in the dark to a place I’d picked out. Once you find two trees the rest is pretty easy. In fact, it’s trip-over-a-log easy compared with a surface tent! Plus everything stays dry!
Birds Flowers Galleries History Panoramas Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
We entered Arches National Park about 8am the next day. This was a great time for photographing the rock formations in the southern part of the park (near the entrance). Our plan was to take a leisurely drive north—exploring along the way—until we reached the Devil's Garden area. This is where the majority of the notable arches are. You might also like to view photos from My November 2024 Trip.
Birds Flowers Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Rock_Art Travel 2026
We left Green River heading north to Wellington and the Petroglyph megasite known as Nine Mile Canyon. The backway
road went over a small pass before descending into a beautiful flat-bottomed canyon. This is the best map I could find on the web. [source: National Scenic Byways Program]
Birds Flowers Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
The next day I had a three hour drive to my next destination—Petrified Forest National Park. The southern entrance is less used than the north but two of he major hiking trails are there: Crystal Forest & Blue Mesa. Unfortunately there is no trail to Newspaper Rock—a major Petroglyph site. It was cold and windy, but apparently I came at a good time to see the many desert flowers in bloom. 🙂
Birds Flowers Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
My target for this segment was inspired by a used book I came across while working at my local Friends of the Library Sinagua Sunwatchers
by Kenneth Zoll. At first I had a bit of trouble finding the site online because the name has been changed very recently to better reflect its Native American origins. [The old name was V Bar V
in reference to the now defunct ranch on the property.]
Everglades Galleries Photography Travel Video 2024
This year we planned an aggressive trip—going down the Gulf Coast to access the narrow Wood River, revisit Camp Lonesome, stay at Willy Willy, and then loop back through the various inland bays on our return. Yet again we were thwarted by adverse winds.
Camping Canyonlands Galleries Hdr History Travel Video 2018
I recently returned from a backcountry bike trip on the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands National Park near Moab Utah. We were a mixed group of twelve riders with three high ground clearance support vehicles coming after us. We started near the Island in the Sky
Visitor Center and camped four nights along the trail.
Projects 2023
No regrets! Mastodon has been so much better! I decided to try my hand at creating an automated robot
to post quotations alongside some of my photographs. And this is the result…
Critters Nature 2023
I was recently walking through a dense hemlock forest in upstate New York where I came across some chewed-up mushrooms and several little orange critters crawling around them. I instantly thought a) salamanders? and b) they must be eating the mushrooms. Turns out I was right on the first point and only half-right on the second.
Flowers Galleries Hdr History Panoramas Travel 2010
This was only my second trip to Lake Powell with my friend Rick. We had made a multi-stop journey across western Colorado and Utah, stopping in Moab and Colorado National Monument. (I returned to the area once again for a houseboat trip in 2020.)
Galleries History Panoramas Southwest_2024 Travel 2024
We made several day trips to Lee's Ferry Utah while waiting for our other adventures (Paria Canyon, Coyote Buttes & The Wave) to start.
Bookhouse History Panoramas
L. P. Gallagher (1914)
I came across these rolled-up postcards
(yes, they have a place for a stamp and address on the back!) in an old collection of regular postcards that had nothing to do with Duluth or Minnesota. After some research by friends and family we came up with approximate dates. Based on the early automobiles and horse-carts we dated the downtown view before 1920 (Full-Res Image).
Bookhouse Books History Reviews
Theodore Roosevelt (1914)
This book records an expedition lead by Teddy Roosevelt in 1913-14 after he was president! It has the most amazing cover… embossed, leather (I assume) with a Golden Anteater?!
Apostle_Islands Birds Camping History Plants Travel 2021
We made an amphibious landing to offload our gear and then moored the boat about a mile away at the pier. I pitched my hammock tent right on the beach between mature white and red pines. The level of Lake Superior had recently gone down so there was a more normal amount of beach exposed.
Books History Technology
Thomas F. McGilvray (1905)
The northern city of Duluth Minnesota is famous for its Lift Bridge connecting the Canal Park area with the long sandy beach of Minnesota Point. However, the current bridge was not the first. The original structure was a more exotic Ferry Bridge. There are only a few examples left in the world. I found these images in a digitised book from that time.
Galleries History Medicine 1930
![The Tilden Company circa 1930 [source:NLHS]](medicine/patent_medicines/images/tilden-company-from-above.jpg)
My Wife's Grandfather worked as a chemist for The Tilden Company in Upstate New York during the early 1900s. As a result we came into possession of his Recipe Book
for the plethora of nostrums and remedies he helped create. Some of the ingredients are still sold today under various brand names. Some are humorous, others are forgotten, while still others are downright dangerous. The following installments are my exploration of this unique window into the medical past. [Note: We donated the actual book to the historical section of the National Library of Medicine.]
Birds Critters Galleries Nature Video 2024
A recent cold snap in the Tampa Bay area forced hundreds of manatees inland in search of warmer water. One ready source is the outflow from the TECO powerplant. To their credit, the company provides a dedicated viewing dock and surrounding wildlife preserve for birds and other critters.
History 1745
Distant relatives of mine built this Fort
in southern Pennsylvania before the Revolutionary War. (Yes, a stone farmhouse was considered a fort back then!) The fort/house had two things going for it: fireproof walls and a fresh water spring in the basement.
Camping Everglades Travel Video 2021
It started out so well… then the wind and waves shut us down—again. I haven't had a normal
Everglades trip since 2017! I decided to try December to see if conditions would be better than the usual time in January. It did not make any difference in the end. On the plus side there were no bugs!
Panoramas Photography Technology 2016
I've always been fascinated by 360° spherical photographs (sometimes called mirrorballs, planets or wormholes
). These are some of the first photos I took with a Ricoh Theta S (basically a black slab with two 180° fisheye lenses pointing in opposite directions.
Commentary Technology 2026
My Critique of: Your Voice, Your Choice
— A Guest Post by Claude Sonnet 4.5
The ELIZA Effect is a tendency to project human traits—such as experience, semantic comprehension or empathy—onto rudimentary computer programs having a textual interface.
This little book was conceived neither as a medical history nor as a technical discussion of surgery. It is instead a story of people, of friends with whom I have shared joy and sorrow, in short, bits of the day-to-day drama which is the life of a country doctor. Many of the incidents are trivial, in one sense of the word, yet each has had in it something which appealed to me enough to make me remember it as a highlight in my forty-five years as a country doctor.
