Bear with me

Well time to bake the corn muffins.

And a fine batch of muffins they were, too.  Uncle Ken is on a roll with marked improvements in both the muffins and the watercolors.  I've seen enough cat variations to last me a while but the new paintings of the night time winter scenes were impressive.  I think I mentioned a YouTube video by a Japanese watercolor artist a while back and Uncle Ken asked me to repost it, so here it is for those who are interested in this sort of thing.

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I recall back in the army days a reference to cock meaning pussy but it was in a different context.  Some guy was describing another guy as a "real cockhound" and I had no idea what he meant, and he wasn't a southerner.  Maybe it's a weird east coast expression, I don't know, but I haven't heard it since and it's been more than forty years.

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Months ago, back in April, I mentioned a book, How To Hide An Empire.  I reserved it at the library and finally a copy was available which I picked up this past Saturday.  So far, so good, but it's not a quick read.  I'm less than a hundred pages into it but the underlying theme seems to be that American expansion was the white man's destiny and the hell with everyone else.  No surprises there but I'm interested in how it unfolds; there's plenty of stuff that never made it into the classrooms I attended.  I didn't know that Andrew Carnegie wanted to buy the Philippines so he could give it back to the people.  I should probably keep notes as I read this lest I get confused; we'll see.

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It's funny that Mr. Beagles has been talking about bears in Beaglesonia.  I just saw a video clip of a small black bear climbing a tree and it was not what I expected; he practically flew up the tree like a giant squirrel.  Amazing!