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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A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it.
Panorama, Sunset, Lake_Santa_Fe, Florida
Jan 31, 2026
Latest comic: Hollowed out shells #cartoon #comic #uspol #media #authoritarianism #minnesota
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Nature Travel 2026
This was my 30th trip to the Everglades—different from all the others in several respects. First I was trying out new equipment (a sit-inside folding kayak). Second, I planned to just camp on a desert island, read, and take it easy. Third, I left from the Smallwood Store on Chokoloskee Island because the actual Ranger Station was closed for long-awaited hurricane repairs. I was also alone as there were no takers to join me this year.
Books History Reviews
Barbara Tuchman (1984)
With America “at war” [2006 & 2026] on several fronts, I was stimulated to recall this wonderful and important book by the eminent historian Barbara Tuchman. The first line says it all…
Commentary History 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've decided to 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).
Camping Hammocks How_To Reviews 2025
There are various configurations of camping hammocks that I'll outline below. Most are gathered
with single tie-on points at each end. Some have integrated bug nets. Complete packages come with both nets & rainflies. After a brief survey of the different types, I go on to propose my criteria for the Ideal Hammock
.
Galleries Panoramas Photography Travel 2008
About a year ago I upgraded the iOS on my iPhone 4s. A few days later I discovered a new option in the Camera App—Panorama Mode! Over the next few months I slowly realized that this was a serious photographic tool. Now I take it along as an important part of my photographic gear. It appears to work like a slit camera, but instead of moving the film, you must move the camera. This has interesting ramifications if some or all of your subject is moving (see my Treatise on Panopainting).
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.]
Bookhouse Books History Reviews Technology
Margaret J. Mitchell (1919)
When I first saw this book I thought it was about making meals for a camping trip. It turned out to be much more interesting. Cooking with Insulation is a mostly forgotten technique with great potential. (The author knew this over one hundred years ago!) The concept is very simple: after heating food to the desired temperature, hang on to that heat and make it do some work!
Galleries Photography Southwest_2024 Travel 2024
Fantastic Rock Formations in Utah
Galleries Photography Southwest_2024 Travel Video 2024
The entrance to The Wave is a long curved corridor of twisted stone stripes with no real floor. The stripes vary in both color and indentation. It’s a remarkable visual/tactile surface! The actual Wave is tulip-shaped, looking a bit like a skateboard park designed by Dr. Seuss. There was an ephemeral pool at the lowest point.
Books How_To Projects Reviews 2026
I've been a novice bread baker over the years, specifically breads leavened with yeast. I've made bagels and pizza crusts from scratch. I have a pizza stone in my oven and a wooden peel for that purpose. My last big endeavor was using my bread machine to make no knead bread (based on the famous NY Times recipe) with some success. All of this pales by comparison with the Five Minute
approach outlined in the book discussed here.
Camping Hammocks Reviews 2022
The Kammok Mantis is most notable for the superior materials used. My favorite is the night sky
bug net material, which nearly disappears on dark starry nights. The hammock fabric feels very light and sturdy, while having a slight texture that makes it less slippery. The fly is made from an extremely light waterproof fabric (silnylon). It all goes into a very small package weighing 2 lb 11.5 oz (per Kammok website).
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.
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!
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2020
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.
Projects 2024
BLIS is an alternative to Wordpress and other database-dependent online publishing environments. One obvious problem with such systems is portability. They generally store text in a database—while media such as images are stored in nested directories by date. It can be daunting to put all these scattered parts back together again outside the original site. (I'm working on converting my WP materials now…it may take several months!)
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.)
Nature Video 2025
I was out walking at dawn today and saw this slow motion display. I could not tell if it was a plane with lights shining forward or something else. It turns out to be rocket or satellite debris falling back to Earth (aka Spacejunk).
Birds Galleries Nature 2026
Photos from our recent visit to Sweetwater Wetlands Park. Not sure I've been there in January before. There were the usual denizens and one surprise (Roseate Spoonbills). It was a bright shiny day and it warmed up quickly.
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.
Galleries History Rock_Art Southwest_2024 Travel 2024
Photos of Petroglyphs (pecked
into the rock) and Pictographs (painted onto the rock) from my most recent trip to Arizona and Utah. In some cases the panels are Palimpsests (newer inscriptions covering older, faded work).
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.
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.
