Have you heard the one about squawberry shortcake?

Every time this claptrap about offensive place names hits the press I recall a jingle in one of the old Boy Scout handbooks. How to make a fire:

"First you get your tinder, dry as can be,
"Then a little squaw wood, dead but from a tree...".

As far as I know this did not lead to widespread disrespect for female Indians, or Native Americans, or if you must, indigenous people of the American continents.  If it had any implication at all beyond simple bush craft, it taught scouts an anthropological fact. In many tribes, men hunted and made war.  Women cooked and kept wigwam.

"Squaw wood" was the term for firewood light enough to be handled by women.  I know of no case in which a lad, upon hearing it, was carried off into perverted reveries about primitive females' private parts or had even heard that "squaw" is a vulgar synonym for the v-word. (Which it probably isn't.)

That came later when white (mostly) America became rich enough to afford to pay idlers to point out and rectify the moral failures of our fathers in naming the new places they ran across. It continues to this day.

And so it is that the board (of  Geographic Place Names) , which tends to listen to what locals want, has slowly set about scrubbing the word from the landscape. Late last year, for example, Squaw Peak in California’s Inyo National Forest became Wunupu Peak, a Paiute name for “tall pine” or “pine-nut tree area” ... and Squaw Creek in Montana became Two Moons Creek, in honor of a Cheyenne leader of the 1870s.

"Wanupu?" Say it out loud and think thoughts of wholesome purity.

"Two Moons?"  If I were a Cheyenne I'd be less than thrilled about a place named for a turncoat who -- after helping lead his band in a couple of victories against the white eyes -- became a turncoat and spent most of the rest of his life as a lackey for paleface General Bear Coat Miles.

I was pleased to see the term "niggerhead" (a rock awash) disappear from United States nautical charts, but beyond that sort of thing this preoccupation with titivating the language of our fathers strikes me as expensive, time-wasting, history-denying bullshit.

And if that ain't the Taku-Wakan's own sweet truth I'll kiss your arse in the shadow of the Grand Tetons and give you three sleeps to gather the tribes.

Good Morning. Let's Welcome a Super Tuesday

A Maryland win for gun rights, and -- for that matter -- all the others

Maryland cops were looking for an excuse  to refuse a gun permit to Raymond Woollard.  He got one in 2002 after a home invasion. Seven years later the masters denied him a renewal . They decreed that he couldn't prove he still had a need to exercise a Constitutional right. 

Now, Federal District Judge Benson Everett Legg has a birthday coming up, on June 8, and we should send him a nice card.  He told the regulators to stand near  a rope, unzip, and aim high. 

Or, in his more temperate  language:  “A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights,” Legg wrote. “The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”

Needless to say, the Bradyites didn't bother to unzip before wetting, but in due course they whipped out their lawyer who said, " “The Supreme Court has recognized the right to have guns in homes, but there is no right in public places,”

Uhh,  Lawyer Lowy, you don't get to make binding judgements like that. Courts do.  And Judge Legg did.

Our friend Alan Jura again led the attack, and we suppose he'll still be with us when the case hits the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.


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A cursory Bing of the 4th doesn't give much fodder for speculating about how it views self-defense rights lately, but there's a small clue in US v. William Chester, Jr., (4th Cir. 2010).  (That's a long and complicated opinion, but, effectively, it questions government power to deny Second Amendment rights on the sole basis of a misdemeanor domestic violence  conviction.) 

Quote of the Day

From my government via the National Weather Service which ruminates about the minutia of advection and troughs and progging 850hb molecule collisions and all that before getting to the money quote:

...EITHER WAY NO COLD AIR IN SIGHT. 


Free market Nostradami agree, warm for at least the next two weeks.


Ahhhhhh.