If you won't eat it, then just take its picture

The shooting of the Zimbabwe lion Cecil by the Minnesota dentist Palmer has created a hubbub that is taking on a life of its own. I am already tired of it, but since everybody else has spouted off about it, I think I am entitled to do the same.

I think killing animals for food is perfectly acceptable. I am a carnivore at the top of the food chain.

I think killing animals for sport is despicable. I even object to people who go fishing for fun but throw back all the fish they catch.

People will agree or disagree with those statements, and I don't really care who does. What I want to know is this:

If the dentist with more money than decency had shot an unknown lion with no name and no microchip in whom no researcher had ever taken an interest, would people from all over the world suddenly be all up in arms about it?

But I already know the answer to that: No, they wouldn't.

And isn't that a shame?

Pilgrims

I recently took a flying interest in the Mayflower colonists and found a list of passengers at mayflowerhistory.com that pretty much satisfied my curiosity. Before I lost interest completely, I happened to follow a link they provided that sent me to the website of the Archives of the State Library of Massachusetts.

There I found a picture of a manuscript written by William Bradford in 1651. He was governor of the Plymouth Colony from 1621 to about 1657, and for some reason, he took it upon himself to write down the names of all the Mayflower passengers, grouping them by family and including, as appropriate for each entry, the husband, wife, children, and any servants they brought with them, including indentured ones. In the margin next to each entry he wrote the number of people listed so that he could easily get an accurate count, which might have been part of his motivation in writing it all down about thirty years after the fact.

It took me a while to get used to the antique handwriting, what with the funny double-S and the word the looking like a y with an e on top of it (which he doesn’t use all the time), not to mention the old haphazard spellings, but by the time I had plowed through about half of it, I was able to read it just fine. (In quoting from the document here, I have spelled all the words the way he did; there are no typos.)

At the top is his lengthy title:

“The names of those which came over first, in ye year 1620 and were (by the blessing of god) the first Beginers, and (in a sort) the foundation, of all the plantations, and colonies, in New-England. (And their families.)”

Bradford’s own entry is fourth on the list and reads:

“William Bradford, and Dorothy his wife, having but one child, a sone left behind, who came afterward.”

After concluding the list of the original passengers, he writes further, telling what has become of them all. This entry contains familiar names:

“Mr. Molines [Mullins], and his wife, his sone, & his servant dyed the first winter. Only his doughter Priscila survived, and maried with John Alden, who are both living, and have .11. children. And their eldest daughter is maried & hath five children.”

His accounts include nothing but prosaic facts: who “dyed,” who is still living and how many children they have, all reported without comment or criticism. All he says about John Billinton, for example, is, “executed, for killing a man.”

All but one of them, that is, and this particular one is what I find so fascinating:

“John Turner, and his .2. sones all dyed in the first siknes. But he hath a daughter still living at Salem, well maried, and approved of.”

She must have been a very special person for him to editorialize even that much.

___________________________________

You can see the manuscript for yourself at:

http://archives.lib.state.ma.us/bitstream/handle/2452/208249/ocn137336369-Mayflower-passengers.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

How's this for fugitive thoughts?

I need to schedule some time to sit down at my computer and write for this here blog thing. God knows I have plenty to say, I just don't get around to typing it out. Here's what I would have been saying in the past several weeks:

When I said I thought it was inappropriate for the Confederate flag to fly at the South Carolina capitol, I did not know that it is (was) flying at a memorial to the state's Confederate soldiers. I take it back. We would not object if the Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho erected a monument of war feathers and tomahawks to honor their fallen warriors at the Little Big Horn or at Wounded Knee, would we? No. As I said in the previous posting, people have a right to honor their war dead, even if they lost and even if their cause is now embarrassing, politically speaking.

The association of the Confederacy with slavery is not going to go away any more than racism is, so we might as well just suck it up.

I let the Supreme Court's decision on same-sex marriage go right past me. As blog topics go, that one was right up my street, as the Brits say. Well, good for SCOTUS, and good for us. Maybe America is growing up.

Although not a big soccer fan, I do like to watch Olympic and World Cup matches if the USA is playing, and I got a major thrill out of our women winning the World Cup. I was just sorry that no player on the American side took her shirt off like the men do and Brandi Chastain did. A great victory nevertheless.

And finally, sick and tired of Bruce/Caitlyn Jenner as I am, I still think it is incumbent upon me to point out that he must have wanted to become a woman real bad if he was willing to give up the ability to pee standing up.

Now I think I'm all caught up.