Where I Stand

Last night the Twins and White Sox played a well-pitched game at Target Field, with the Twins picking up a 3-2 win in less than 2 hours. That was important, because not too long after the game ended, strong winds swept into the metro from the northwest. Some tornadic activity was observed and when we got up this morning, there were instances of wind damage in North Oaks. Perhaps the most photogenic of the damage I saw was this one on the island:

The next day Hana and I saw this tree blown down across the Long Marsh Trail:

Hana and I also saw some serious clean up along the Pleasant Lake Trail:

I was up in Blaine again this morning for playoff action in the USA Cup. The games were all semi-finals, and included teams from Sweden, the Yukon, Puerto Rico, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Some photos from today can be found here on the web.

I was up in Blaine this morning for first round playoff action in the USA Cup. Some photos from today can be found here on the web.

Last night I went over to Charley Lake to watch the annual osprey banding. There is an osprey nest at Charley Lake, the nest sitting on a platform attached to the top of a “telephone” pole. The idea behind the banding is that folks with the technical expertise get there at the proper time of the year, when the birds hatched this year are pretty much fully grown but have not yet learned to fly. This allows someone to climb up the pole, rather easily grasp each young bird (two is a common number), put each one in a bag which is lowered to the ground. The birds are banded, and returned to the nest. The adult birds, or at least the mother, fly around while this is happening, rather agitated, but do not attack.

Here is a shot of the guy who climbed up the pole to the nest:

This is an adult osprey, flying around in the vicinity of the nest:

Unfortunately, this year the banding was attempted a trifle too late. The young birds were old enough to attempt to fly when the guy reached into the nest to grab them. They flew well enough to not crash into the ground, and there ensued an attempt to get a canoe to rescue the one that landed in the lake. At that point, I decided that while interesting photographic opportunities might emerge, it would likely take quite a while, so I threw in the towel and went home. On the way back to my vehicle, I got a shot of the very nice English Setter that belongs to the guy who climbs up the pole:

Today was the first day of the USA Cup Weekend, which is an event that is something of a warm up for the USA Cup (which will be played next week). The USA Cup is the largest youth soccer tournament in the US, and is held not too far from our house up in Blaine. I went up there this morning to photograph some of the games, with the focus on getting some shots of foreign teams. Photographed games that had teams from the Yukon, Sweden, Manitoba and Morocco. Hope to get up there again next week, when even more international teams will be competing. A few shots from today are on the web here.

I recently finished reading a pair of books on the Comanches that Pat had given me:

• “The Comanche Empire” by Pekka Hamalainen
• “Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History” by S. C. Gwynne

This was really fascinating material. The Comanches were a band that split off from the Shoshones. A less-than-promising group of nomadic hunter-gatherers, at most a few thousand people in the early 18th century, they rose to absolutely dominate the southern Great Plains. Much of the explanation for their rise was that they learned how to employ horses, skills initially learned from the Utes. Comanches became so adept at using horses that they were able to force the Apaches off the plains, no small feat. Horses had the obvious advantage of being able to move 3-4 times as much weight as the dogs they replaced, plus they could be ridden. Moreover, the horses that the plains Indians used were horses brought to the New World by the Spanish, breed that was genetically well suited to live on the shortgrass southern prairie. Moreover, dogs had to be fed meat, while horses could use the widely available grasslands. Horses allowed the Comanches to hunt buffalo much more effectively, permitting them to tap the energy resources of the buffalo herds, which got them past the energy bottleneck of nomadic life. And, since the Comanches were on the southern Great Plains, the winters were mild enough for good colt survival. The prominent tribes of the northern plains who went on to master horse-based life, like the Sioux, tended to be horse poor and were trading partners with the Comanches.

Having become adept at hunting from horseback, Comanches could quickly kill great numbers of bison. But the work of processing the meat and hides continued to take great amounts of time. This lead to the Comanche adoption of both polygamy and slavery. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the Comanches held a massive advantage over their main colonial rival, New Spain. This was the same Spain that routed the Aztecs and the Incas, with their literate, hierarchical societies. Spain’s record when they ran into these pre-literate, nomadic (pretty much) barbarians was spotty at best.

When the US went into Mexico during the Mexican-American War, the US army took Comanches along as scouts. This war was quite one-sided, which some attributed to the strength of the US military, while others viewed as an indication of Mexican weakness. A fact that many observers overlooked was that the Comanches had been raiding in northern Mexico for decades, depopulating many areas and weakening others. The Comanches were, at times, so powerful that they rolled back the “frontier” by 100-150 miles.

It took a number of developments to finally dislodge the Comanche grip on the southern Great Plains, including:

• European diseases
• Technological changes in firearms
• Prolonged drought
• Changes in US Army tactics
• Destruction of the buffalo herds by market hunters

It is an historical quirk that northern tribes like the Sioux are lodged in the popular consciousness as the great warriors of the plains, rather than the Comanches.

This afternoon there was a baseball game in North Oaks played in the style of the game during the 1860’s. I have wanted to see and photograph a game like that for several years. Today wasn’t quite the opportunity I had hoped for, as only one of the two teams was outfitted in period-specific uniforms. Nonetheless, it was an interesting experience and I got a few decent shots (which can be seen here).

On Friday night I was scurrying into our local liquor store, not long before closing time, to pick up some beer. The likely suspects were rattling around in my mind, when I saw a sign that said “Odell Brewing from Colorado, first time in Minnesota”. When we lived in Fort Collins, Colorado, we knew some of the Odell’s, so I immediately reoriented my purchasing. Among the several Odell offerings was St. Lupulin, one of their seasonal beers. Have to say it was quite good, and I am looking forward to drinking some of their other offerings.

This week I devoted quite a bit of time to photography, with two great photographic opportunities in the Twin Cities. On Wednesday and Friday evenings, as well as Sunday afternoon, I photographed the criterium stages of the Nature Valley Grand Prix bike race. There were spectacular finishes to both the women’s and men’s races in Stillwater. The criterium photos can be found on my bike photos web site.

On Saturday, I was over at the state fairgrounds for the Back to the 50’s display of street rods. The state of the economy had an impact on the number of entrants this year. After several years with more than 13,000 cars, this year the number fell to 11,795. Trust me, that wasn’t a problem. Nearly 12,000 cars still is guaranteed to produce sensory overload. Of course, not every one of those cars is what any one person would find interesting – I saw more Corvairs than anyone should be subjected to, and I saw more ‘58 Chevy and Pontiac convertibles than I thought GM actually produced. The street rod shots are on the web here.

I just finished looking at another set of lectures from the web site AcademicEarth. This class was on game theory, taught by Professor Benjamin Polak at Yale. This was, in a very real sense, a follow on to a class I took 45 years ago when in college. That class was taught by Thomas Shelling, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work in this area. Professor Polak is an accomplished lecturer, and his class was an exceptionally good refresher.