First Monday in December

"Depending on who you want to believe, one deer has a dollar value somewhere between $1,250 and $2,500."

I read this on the internet so it must be true.  I don't know the value of the carcass but it must add up, the meat (I'm guessing) having the greatest value, followed by the hide.  The tallow must be worth something, it doesn't seem the kind of thing that you would throw away.  As I pictured Mr. Beagles breaking the deer down into manageable cuts of meat (Mmm...tenderloins!) I remembered this taxidermist in my old neighborhood.  He had a shop that I used to walk by with a delightfully creepy display window that had a heavy Norman Bates vibe.  I never went into the place, though.  A single mounted animal or bird doesn't bother me but a bunch of them were too much for my childhood sensibilities.  The stuffed critters of my rural kinfolk were simply part of the decor; the moose head always made me smile.  I wonder if people still use deer feet to make table legs, a popular craft of days gone by when nothing went to waste.  Sadly, I found nothing online about the taxidermist but I never forgot his name: Otto Wanke.

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I'm not an expert on rabbit holes, Uncle Ken, but it seems to me that you can never go down the same rabbit hole twice.  There are twists, turns, bifurcations, and dead ends all over the place.  I was curious about the BLM demonstrations and, to me, they were nothing like a riot.  Now, the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago; that was a riot!  So was the Grant Park riot in '70 when Sly and the Family Stone didn't show up.  A buddy of mine and I left the park about ten minutes before it began and heard about it on the radio during our ride north on the Outer Drive.  Sometimes you just know when a situation is going to turn very wrong, it's like there is something in the air, a strange energy field.  Maybe it's instinct, I don't know, but when something doesn't feel right it's time to get the hell out of there.

Oh, almost forgot the original point I was going to make about crowds and riots.  I did a Google on "BLM international demonstrations" and looked at photos showing the crowd sizes.  Some were huge, much larger than any in the U.S. and no violence, no broken windows, just a bunch of folks showing solidarity.  I'm still working on my theories about why American crowd behavior can become unhinged so easily.

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Near as I can tell there haven't been any posts from the new guy yet.  I wonder if it's weather related, I think he's in the path of a genuine nor'easter, as those folks call it.  But looking at his profile it seems that he also has his own blog, Baker Hill.  It only has one post, from last January, when he started it.  I wonder what's up with that but the picture of the turkeys is nice.