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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A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Panorama, Panopainting, Driftwood, Florida
Jan 31, 2026
Latest comic: Hollowed out shells #cartoon #comic #uspol #media #authoritarianism #minnesota
California Galleries Plants Travel 2025
We recently visited the Bristlecone Pines within Inyo National Forest in the White Mountains of Eastern California. While there we took a five hour hike on the Methuselah Trail amongst some of the oldest trees in the world!
Galleries Nature Plants 2026
While walking in the woods we came upon this huge pore fungus called Dryad's Saddle described as …an annual mushroom commonly found attached to dead logs and stumps or on living hardwood trees at one point with a thick stem. …On the underside one can see the pores that are characteristic of the genus; they are made up of tubes packed together closely. The mushroom's smell resembles that of watermelon rind.
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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.
Birds Flowers Galleries History Road_Trip_2026 Travel 2026
The next day I had a three hour drive to my next destination—Petrified Forest National Park. The southern entrance is less used than the north but two of he major hiking trails are there: Crystal Forest & Blue Mesa. Unfortunately there is no trail to Newspaper Rock—a major Petroglyph site. It was cold and windy, but apparently I came at a good time to see the many desert flowers in bloom. 🙂
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 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.
Commentary History Medicine 2020
I've annotated this NY Times graphic, rounding the estimates for COVID19 (aka the 2019 novel coronavirus) to 2% mortality and 2 people infected for every one who has the disease. What this suggests is the infection rate will be similar to a bad cold season, but unlike the common cold, a significant number of people will die of the disease.
Bookhouse Books History Reviews Technology
C & B Johnson (1914)
Back in the days when long distance telephone calls were very expensive, families had various ring codes to let their loved ones know that they got there safe but avoided paying for an actual call. Ours was to let it ring twice and hang up (if I remember correctly).
Camping Everglades Travel Video 2021
It started out so well… then the wind and waves shut us down—again. I haven't had a normal
Everglades trip since 2017! I decided to try December to see if conditions would be better than the usual time in January. It did not make any difference in the end. On the plus side there were no bugs!
Birds Bwca Galleries Photography Travel 2024
This year we decided to base our trip out of Ely. We spent the night in the bunkhouse on Snowbank Lake. The next day we took the short drive to the official entry point #27 to head out into the wilderness.
Camping Everglades Galleries Travel 2006
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 Panoramas Photography Travel 2014
About a year ago [2013] I upgraded the iOS on my iPhone 4s. A few days later I discovered a new option in the Camera App—Panorama Mode! Over the next few months I slowly realized that this was a serious photographic tool. Now I take it along as an important part of my photographic gear. It appears to work like a slit camera, but instead of moving the film, you must move the camera. This has interesting ramifications if some or all of your subject is moving (see my Treatise on Panopainting).
Birds Galleries Hdr Travel Video 2017
I had the opportunity to travel through Southern Illinois on my way back from Iowa in June. I large part of this hilly country is contained within the Shawnee National Forest There are miles of trails, several wilderness areas, and many points of interest. I stopped for the night at The Garden of the Gods (not to be confused with the area in Colorado by the same name!).
Birds Nature 2018
Yesterday we kayaked over to the Egret Rookery on Little Lake Santa Fe. There were at least ten great egrets sitting on nests and one nest had a raucous bunch of chicks (3 or 4). Then we noticed there was a much smaller chick on the edge and its siblings were attacking it! After a minute or two we watched the little guy fall sixty feet into the water…
Books How_To Projects Technology 2026
I first encountered this delightful self-publishing format while visiting family in Sacramento. The city has many older neighborhoods with small houses and small yards. The locals take great pride in their sidewalk-facing gardens, including pro-social embellishments like little library
boxes and such. One house had a dispenser with these little pamphlets. I was impressed and intrigued.
Panoramas Photography Technology 2016
I've always been fascinated by 360° spherical photographs (sometimes called mirrorballs, planets or wormholes
). These are some of the first photos I took with a Ricoh Theta S (basically a black slab with two 180° fisheye lenses pointing in opposite directions.
Music Reviews 2005
I’ve always enjoyed yodeling, both alpine and the more bluesy American variety. So this public radio piece was a pleasant surprise. In spite of my interest I had never heard of this duo from Minnesota; they recorded only a handful of songs.
Commentary History Medicine Science
Willett & Stampfer (2003)
For more than ten years the U.S. Department of Agriculture has promoted its food pyramid as a guide to proper nutrition. The only problem is that it isn't very good advice! The authors of this January 2003 article in Scientific American provide much better guidance. But first a little history…
Birds Galleries Travel 2025
Out with friends to canoe down the Santa Fe River in north Florida. We saw many large turtles sunning themselves along the way plus a juvenile bald eagle! Stopped for lunch in the outflow from Blue Spring.
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.
Commentary Protest 2018
I participated in the March For Our Lives & common-sense gun laws event in Gainesville today. This was in response to the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Mass Shooting on February 14 of that year. There were about 400 people there for the speakers swelling to as many as a 1000 during the march itself.
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.
