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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Responsibility educates.
Birds, Birdhouse, Guttenberg, Iowa, Purple_Martins
Feb 08, 2026
#SuperbOwl #BarredOwl #Owls #Birds "Keep looking up!" I hear these guys/gals every day, often in the late afternoon. 🙂 🦉
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).
Bookhouse Books Camping
Ed Dodd (1971)
This little book brings back memories of reading the Sunday newspaper when I was a teen. There would always be a non-humorous cartoon by and about the fictional Mark Trail
promoting life outdoors. These cartoons often depicted humans and wild animals in close proximity. This book of camp cooking tips borders on the whimsical.
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).
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.
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 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 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.
Galleries History Panoramas Travel Turkey_2016 2016
Here is a gallery of all the panoramas from our 2016 trip to Turkey and the The Turquoise Coast. We started in Istanbul and ended at Ephesus. Best viewed on a large screen!
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.
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 Medicine Medinfo Projects 1997
Jrju
(Chinese for spider) is a Perl program that weaves hypertext 'notebooks' from plain text files. An author creates notebook pages using the JTX markup format. Jrju will process a directory of JTX files into a cross-linked collection of HTML pages. Jrju rebuilds the entire notebook each time so there are no broken links or orphan pages.
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2019
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.
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Hdr Travel 2012
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 Everglades Galleries Travel 2014
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.
Everglades Galleries Hammocks Travel Video 2022
The plan for this year was a clockwise tour around Whitewater Bay, with options to go out to the Gulf of Mexico and explore the Watson River. My cousin David Rathe and nephew Theron Pray decided to join me.
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Panoramas Travel 2017
Everglades time again! This year I went for five days/four nights with my sister Diana Pray from LA. We did a lazy double figure eight route around northeastern Whitewater Bay and the Gulf. With the exception of a few distant motorboats we were completely alone for four days, quite remarkable! I brought along a 360° panoramic camera and took some impressive shots! [note1]
Commentary Medicine Medinfo 2017
The History of Present Illness (HPI) has not changed appreciably since the introduction of the Problem-Oriented Medical Record in 1968. Until recently most medical documentation was created via dictation or handwritten notes. Narrative was the natural format for the HPI. This is no longer true in the era of online forms and computer-generated text.
Birds Camping Everglades Galleries Hdr Travel 2010
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.
Audio Critters Nature 2016
One of the most relaxing sounds I’ve ever heard occurs late at night in the spring and summer, usually after the frogs settle down. After wondering about it for twenty years I finally know who’s singing… Broad-Winged Tree Crickets (Oecanthus latipennis)!
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.
