Beaver questions from around the world find their way to Martinez. Yesterday I was reminded I had a very weird life. I received an email written by a man who said he works as journalist for a cultural quiz show on the Need a punchline? The email was addressed to “Mr. Martinez“.
(Well, I’ve certainly been called worse things in my life.)
I also heard from our old friend Caitlin McCombs of the famed Mountain House Beaver story who is now snugly at Boston College working on her journalism degree and has decided to author a paper on the environmental destruction caused by the fur trade. She wondered if I could point her towards any resources on the impacts of removing beaver?
Then I heard from our English friend in Kent who sent along this video. You must watch all the way to the end because the NOSE CLOSEUP is the very best part.
Even if it is single-themed, my odd little life is apparently very multi-cultural.
One of the civics lessons from my high school government class that stayed with me was reading a passage about how the younger generation was lazy, selfish and disrespectful compared to how valuable their parents had been at that age – and learning that this familiarly insulting diatribe had been written in ancient Greece. We always think our generation was the best. Here’s a fine example from the 1624 book The Wise-Man’s Forecast against the Evill Time, Thomas Barnes, the minister of St. Margaret’s Church on New Fish Street in London, bemoaned:
Youth were never more sawcie, yea never more savagely saucie . . . the ancient are scorned, the honourable are contemned, the magistrate is not dreaded.
I’m going to do you a favor and post something that will clarify for you that this younger generation is nothing to be afraid of. Watch this now. You will thank me for it.
