Daniel’s Internet Blog Website

I've often heard it said that there were no horses in America before Columbus.  There may not have been horses in America at the time of the first European explorers, however, I recently ran across some information in a Daniel Pinkwater book that I'm reading to my kids.  The book is The Neddiad (which I recommend as a very fun book to read with your kids).  In the book, the boy Ned is fascinated by a visit to the Le Brae tar pits in Los Angeles.  As he explores, he tells about all the interesting fossils.  Among them he mentions Equus occidentalis–the Western Horse.  I looked it up at the official Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County La Brea Tar Pits website.  The tar pits preserved the evidence of the Western Horse.There is no reason to believe that these horses couldn't have flourished for a long long time.  Also mentioned on the tar pit website is the Ancient Bison which later evolved into the American Bison–prevalent well after Columbus (just like the paleontologists I'm only assuming since we don't actually have a clear fossil record to connect the two species over time).   Since we don't have a clear fossil record of where the American Bison came from, we wouldn't have known they even existed if they had become extinct before the European explorers who first explored the Americas.  There is no debate as to whether the Western Horse existed or not, and I see the survival of the American Bison without a fossil record to show it's connection to Ancient Bison as clear evidence that if there were a hypothetical American Horse, it could have survived as a species well into the 1300s or so without leaving a fossil record.Other interesting mentions include the elephant-like American Mastodon, the Extinct Camel, the Llama, and the HUGE Ground Sloth which "stood over six feet tall and weighed almost 3,500 pounds".  I'm clearly no paleontologist, but I find it fascinating to imagine what sort of animals may have existed between ancient and modern times.

The mighty Taj Ma Soul of your little toothpick cabin
confuses the arsonist in me
until my grand arsenal is tamed into a tiny flame on lips
from habanero antics

you, me, you;
we're both scrambled backward into the overly easy undulations
of a once awkward landscape
now homogenized into a perfect egg crate sine

I took the rise and fall of granted breath for average,
and now it's one waffle away from obvious
that a small polystyrene box could carry this out
almost untouched

so I'll leave a gift horse on the table with his runner-up smile
and blame the Wranglers donned by the drugstore gangsters
for this misprint between the lines

©Daniel Bushman

"Some may count this experience as simply a nice coincidence, but I testify that the tender mercies of the Lord are real and that they do not occur randomly or merely by coincidence. Often, the Lord's timing of His tender mercies helps us to both discern and acknowledge them." –David A. Bednar

I started listening to Elder Bednar's talk yesterday morning, and the timing of the talk itself was an answer to prayer.  As of Monday, it has been one year since my baptism.  I started my wonderful new job working for the Church on Monday.  My life has been overflowing with blessings and I was starting to feel as if it couldn't possibly be fair for me to be blessed so abundantly.  The Lord spoke to me through Elder Bednar's talk and now it's clear to me that the timing of these blessings is not a coincidence.  He really does want to pour out blessings on us when the time is right.

This brings something else to my mind.  Just before my baptism a year ago, while I was wading through much pain and loneliness, the following talk gave me immense comfort and hope:

"With ever-increasing envy and mounting desperation, one day Rachel explosively demanded of Jacob, “Give me children or else I die” (Genesis 30:1). Leah subsequently bore two more sons and a daughter.

The Apostle Peter testified that “the Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering” toward us (2 Peter 3:9). In this age of one-hour dry cleaning and one-minute fast-food franchises, it may at times seem to us as though a loving Heavenly Father has misplaced our precious promises or He has put them on hold or filed them under the wrong name. Such were the feelings of Rachel.

But with the passage of time, we encounter four of the most beautiful words in holy writ: “And God remembered Rachel” (Genesis 30:22). And she was blessed with the birth of Joseph and later the birth of Benjamin. There are millions on earth today who are descendants of Joseph who have embraced the Abrahamic promise that through their efforts “shall all the families of the earth be blessed, even with the blessings of the Gospel, which are the blessings of salvation, even of life eternal” (Abraham 2:11).

When heaven’s promises sometimes seem afar off, I pray that each of us will embrace these exceeding great and precious promises and never let go. And just as God remembered Rachel, God will remember you. I so testify in the name of Jesus Christ, amen." –Spencer J. Condie

This is true.  I promise.

Place this small unit for 20 minutes in a cooking fire, let it cool for 1 hour, and it yields 24 hours of refrigeration. Sure it would be cool for road-trips and camping, but imagine how this could benefit hunter-gatherers, pastoral nomads, tribes, and villages in sub-poverty.

It's all in the metaphor and presentation.

One of the biggest problems in the world is the billion or so people who don't have access to clean water. Enter the merry-go-round water pump–harnessing the unlimited power of play.

I'm usually quite a geek, but please forgive me for being a bit of a nerd for a moment. I'll try not to use the word "actually" too much. As in, "actually, not many people know this, but there is a distinct difference between geeks and nerds." (nerds love the word "actually").

Nerds, you see, are really super knowledgeable about stamps and will, given the chance, tell you everything that is currently known about them. Geeks, on the other hand, are really super knowledgeable about stamps so, given the chance, they are spending time with their stamps–not you.

So while you're out shoveling your walks, the nerd is there beside your driveway elucidating the differences in how dwarfs and hobbits handle inclement weather conditions. But where is the geek? Well, he's the one off in his basement gluing hair to his feet.

I think it's kinda funny, seems somehow like a caricatured sketch. If I didn't know Ian and I saw this story, I think I would imagine him to be quite different that he is.