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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Experts often possess more data than judgment.
Birds, Florida, Sweetwater_Wetlands, Palm_Warbler
Jan 31, 2026
Latest comic: Hollowed out shells #cartoon #comic #uspol #media #authoritarianism #minnesota
Critters History Travel Video 2019
On my trip west this year I made sure I had time to visit this unique area. The Dinosaur Tracks are located within and along side the Purgatoire River within the Comanche National Grassland. It is located 35 miles south of La Junta, Colorado off the lightly maintained County Road 25 (upper left in the map above). The last few miles are on a primitive forest service road that ends at the Withers Canyon Trailhead and Campground (four sites with fire grates and a pit toilet).
Camping Hammocks How_To 2026
It has taken me a couple of years to fully understand this knot. The Becket Hitch provides a strong but temporary way to tie a rope or webbing onto a fixed loop (such as a hammock). It is basically a slipped
version of the venerable Sheet Bend (shown below).
Books Commentary History 2026
I've reworked these extended quotations from The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman (1986) for today's wannabe King
Trump. Tuchman's words speak to greater truths. My words are my own and speak for more immediate truths in desperate times.
Camping Hammocks Reviews 2026
I recently bought a Ridgerunner Hammock from Warbonnet Outdoors. These are my first impressions. I'd been aware of this type of hammock for a few years and I was curious about them. Online descriptions and 2D photos don't really help much. This design makes much more sense when you actually lie in one.
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 V Bar V
referenceed the now defunct ranch on the property.]
Books Commentary History Music 2026
![Preparing to Fly the Flag (July 4, 1976) [source: DC Public Library]](commentary/america_at_250/img/bicentennial-1976.jpg)
I put out my American Flag today. 🇺🇸 I only fly the flag on special days and this is one of them. Thinking about what makes this day special is what gives the act meaning. One cannot be patriotic every day, but that's not required. We need days like this to think hard about history (those actions and actors who mattered), the present (our current situation and how it differs from what it should be), and the future (the history we might make during the time remaining to us).
Flowers Galleries Nature Photography Plants 2025
My neighbor Dave transplanted these roadside Iris plants to our local drainage ditch. The seeds must be spreading down stream with new plants and flowers popping up at each culvert. 🙂
Commentary Protest Video 2026
Joined my community to protest the Trump administration. Larger crowd than No Kings 2 back in October. Amazing how much has changed since then: the Demolition of the East Wing of the Whitehouse, the invasion of Minneapolis/St. Paul, the public execution of Renee Good & Alex Pretti, the Kidnapping of the President of Venezuela, the Epstein cover-up, starting an Illegal, Senseless War with Iran. Airlines are shutting down because TSA workers have been unpaid for a month. Gas is headed for $5 a gallon. And those are just some of the highlights.
Galleries Hdr History Travel 2015
This fortification along the Florida/Georgia border dates from the era of the Second Seminole War (1847) and served the needs of both the Confederacy and the Union in the Civil War. It is a asymmetric pentagon built out of red bricks with gun emplacements on the top of four walls. There are several lovely internal architectural features such as arched ammunition magazines and spiral stairways, No shots were ever fired here!
Books History Music 2006
While vacationing on the Mississippi River we noticed this small steam-powered riverboat called the Julia Belle Swain. That name seemed very familiar. Then I recalled a John Hartford song by the same name (from his 1976 album Mark Twang). Sure enough, this was the very boat he piloted and sang about!
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel Video 2007
This is a quick-and-dirty gallery of my Everglades photographs. Only a placeholder for now while I work on converting my older sites. See my Everglades Wilderness Guide for more trips, maps, & photographs.
Camping Galleries Hammocks Okefenokee Travel Video 2021
I last traveled to the Okefenokee in 2004, and I had been hoping to return sooner. My return was delayed in part by a multi-year drought and Major Fires in 2011. This year the water was high thanks to record rainfall in the late summer.
Boats Camping Reviews Technology 2025
Oru kayaks started out small. The first one I saw in a sporting goods store several years ago looked like a toy. Since then they have developed several larger, more serious designs. Here is a summary of my experience with the Coast XT, their longest and most ambitious model—a 16ft sea kayak that weighs in at 32 pounds.
Commentary Medicine Medinfo 2016
I have worked with home-grown and commercial Electronic Medical Records for over thirty years. The use of dot commands
(a period followed by a trigger phrase) is about as old as personal computing. (I first encountered dot commands in the WordStar word processing program during the 1980s!) These commands generally fall into three categories:
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).
Music Reviews 2005
I’ve always enjoyed yodeling, both alpine and the more bluesy American variety. So this public radio piece was a pleasant surprise. In spite of my interest I had never heard of this duo from Minnesota; they recorded only a handful of songs.
Flowers Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Rock_Art Travel 2026
I established my campsite and went for a walk about an hour before sunset. It was a magical time to be out in the desert. Some of the rocks are volcanic in origin. I think that may be a cinder cone in the distance. There is a large abstract petroglyph on the right (click to enlarge).
Commentary Protest 2018
I participated in the March For Our Lives & common-sense gun laws event in Gainesville today. This was in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Mass Shooting on February 14 of that year. There were about 400 people there for the speakers swelling to as many as a 1000 during the march itself.
Books How_To Projects Technology 2026
I first encountered this delightful self-publishing format while visiting family in Sacramento. The city has many older neighborhoods with small houses and small yards. The locals take great pride in their sidewalk-facing gardens, including pro-social embellishments like little library
boxes and such. One house had a dispenser with these little pamphlets. I was impressed and intrigued.
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2001
This is a quick-and-dirty gallery of my Everglades photographs. Only a placeholder for now while I work on converting my older sites. See my Everglades Wilderness Guide for more trips, maps, & photographs.
Art Galleries History Photography Travel Turkey_2016 2016
Hagia Sophia is one of the most historic buildings in the world! It is a strange palimpsest of Islam superimposed on top of Orthodox Christianity. Finished around 537 CE in Constantinople (now Istanbul), it was the largest building in the world for a thousand years. When we visited it was a secular museum and world heritage site. In 2020 a theocratic government turned it back into a functioning mosque. I do not know if the Christian art and iconography has been covered or possibly removed since then.
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.
