Plains Indians did not evolve to handle alcohol.  Their most basic genome is Asian and did not evolve where people routinely drank alcohol of some kind with all meals as Europeans have.  This is not a lot different from lack of immunity to smallpox.  One’s body develops in a context and if the element, whatever it might be, isn’t there, then the body doesn’t learn...

During lunch with a friend in East Glacier, a former student came table-hopping.  In the course of conversation, he confided that he was a little worried.  In high school he had played football and been knocked unconscious several times.  Now, in middle age, he was beginning to have mysterious blackouts and brain glitches.  He was not a drunk.  I paid close attention...

On August 9, 2011 a memorial service remembering the 66th anniversary of the day the American atomic bomb devastated the city of Nagasaki near the inevitable end of the Pacific theater in World War II was held 3 days after the Hiroshima memorial service. The memorial service held respectful silence at 11:02 A.M. which was the exact time the bomb detonated killing more...

It was this day that three Soviet soldiers, Mikhail Yegorov, Meliton Kantaria and Alexei Berest raised the victory banner of the Soviet Red Army at the top of the German government’s Reichstag. It was a significant war-time event that was parallel to the American marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. It was this day that the most notorious European dictator...

In this part of the world we don’t have spring.  One day we’re getting desperate over the severity of the winter and a day or so later we’re dumped into early summer.  Or sometimes people say that winter is when the really bad days outnumber the good days and summer is when the balance tips over so the really good days outnumber the bad ones.  Because tongues...

Sometimes I pick out a topic and fiddle with it for days and other times, the topic more or less spears me with a frog gigger and there I am.  From the photo you can guess what got me this time.  (There’s usually a little cluster of Japanese tourists within trident range.  You can tell they’re Japanese by the cameras.) According to NPR (wouldn’t you know?),...

The sun comes up tarnished brass and sheets a shadowed world, frosted cold. The grass is ochre, leaves are gone. The world is stripped, burned by cold.   Today is Veteran’s Day in the States and Remembrance Day in Canada. I think I will take the occasion to talk about the terrible beauty of death and destruction in time of war and the wrenching truths of poetry...

Sports are a place for the mentally tough, the fiercely competitive, the physically gifted. Often, a soldier is someone that is mentally tough, fiercely competitive and physically gifted. Many blessed athletes have perished at the hands of war and conflict, and we owe a token of gratitude for both their efforts on both fields: As an athlete and as a soldier. Many athletes...