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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You grow up on the day you have your first real laugh at yourself.
Bison, Badlands, National, Park, Sunset
Jul 16, 2026
"Those little white flowers you see here are known as the Arctic mountain heather, and they are highly toxic to this little pika. Collared pika create what we call haypiles under the rocks that will serve as food for the 9 months of winter they endure beneath the snow. That’s 9 months of dead rotting plants for fungi, bacteria, and other parasites to completely destroy. That is, unless the pika layers toxic species like this arctic heather through the haypile. This particular species of flower releases its toxic brew of phenolic compounds into the the pika's cache of food as it begins to break down. Those very same toxins, it turns out, are a natural food preservative that kills the very fungi and bacteria that would otherwise ruin an entire winter’s worth of food for the pika. And amazingly, by the time the pika makes it down to these layers, those toxins are completely harmless to the little mammal. None of this is by accident. Researchers have documented that not only are pika meticulous at how they layer toxic plants into their haypiles, they use different species, with differing levels of toxicity, at specific levels through the cache to ensure that their food is not only well preserved but also timed to be edible for themselves as they work their way through it. This is the most sophisticated pharmacological knowledge and behavior ever documented outside of humans." photo and text by jaredlloydphoto #Photographie #Photography #Fotografie #Nature #Wildlife #NaturePhotography #WildlifePhotography
California Galleries Plants Travel 2025
We recently visited the Bristlecone Pines within Inyo National Forest in the White Mountains of Eastern California. While there we took a five hour hike on the Methuselah Trail amongst some of the oldest trees in the world!
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).
Birds Flowers History Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
I was called to California for a family wedding. The first part of my journey took me through several southern states, the Florida Panhandle, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, New Mexico, & Arizona. I left about two in the afternoon so I arrived in Pitcher Plant territory after dark. Fortunately I knew where there was a patch just off the shoulder of a county road.
Commentary Medicine
T.R. Reid (2008)
This PBS Frontline Documentary from 2008 explores the healthcare systems of the U.S. and several comparable countries.[1] The corespondent T.R. Reid visited five capitalist countries that provide affordable, nearly universal coverage for their citizens. How do they do it? He observed that here in the U.S. we have the British model for veterans (socialized medicine), the Taiwanese model for seniors (single payer), the German model for some workers (private insurance), but for the rest we are just another poor country
. His conclusions…
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).
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.
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.)
History Technology 2010
Anthropologists Steven Churchill & Jill Rhodes recently wrote a fascinating article on the development of projectile weapons by early Homo sapiens and subsequent effects on large carnivores (extinction!) and human evolution.
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2009
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.
Bookhouse Books History Reviews
G. A. Henty (1886)
The original Luddites were millworkers who rebelled against factory automation back in the 1800s. They had a lot to lose. In the present time, to call someone a Luddite
or Neo-Luddite
is to write them off as a kind of techno-hermit, using a non-smartphone and writing in a paper notebook. This is a mischaracterization. The full text is available at Project Gutenberg.
Apostle_Islands Galleries Hdr History Panoramas Photography Travel Video 2022
Over the past eight years I’ve walked along the Lakeshore Trail to admire the Cliffs and Sea Caves from above.
Audio Galleries Kist Projects Video 2026
KIST combines the best elements of various markup formats I've worked with over the past forty years. The original purpose of these tools was to generate valid HTML without special editors or technical knowledge. The plain text source files are nearly universal, portable, and reusable!
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Hdr Travel 2011
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.
Kist Projects 2026
Kist.pl renders documents as plain vanilla
HTML by default. Generated pages will degrade gracefully
to the degree possible. These pages contain a minimal set of CSS styles and javascript in the <head> element. (This helps make each kist-generated document self-contained.) Authors are free to override these styles with their own custom styles (using the -s flag).
Commentary History Medicine
Lawrence P. Garrod (1944)
Consider the so-called War on Raw Milk
. I was amazed to discover in my Grandfather's scrapbook an article from 1944 debating the benefits of unpasteurised (raw) milk. These are echoed today by the public health nihilist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
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.
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2015
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.
Apostle_Islands Galleries Travel 2025
This year we boated to Sand Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. It is the western-most island where camping is allowed. It also has a historic lighthouse and was the site of a small fishing village. We took the campsite overlooking Justice Bay and a small set of sea caves.
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!
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2006
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.
History Medicine Science
Willett & Stampfer (2003)
For more than ten years the U.S. Department of Agriculture has promoted its food pyramid as a guide to proper nutrition. The only problem is that it isn't very good advice! The authors of this January 2003 article in Scientific American provide much better guidance. But first a little history…
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.
