They’re Not the Prettiest Birds, But They Are HUGE!
Along the south rim of Peru’s Colca Canyon, midway between Chivay and Cabanaconde is a place called Cruz del Cóndor. We stopped there late one morning waiting for the thermals that bring that condors up from the canyon below. I had a hard time focusing on the birds when they were against a dark background, so I was not able to take the above picture. Below is the best of the ones I shot, up against a blue sky:
Condor at Colca Canyon
To be a good wildlife photographer, you have to be patient … and you have to have the right equipment. Unfortunately, I have only a digital rangefinder camera, and I wasn’t able to stay put and wait for the right shot to happen. So it didn’t.
Condor on the Dining Room Wall in Chivay
Here’s one condor I was able to photograph—at the restaurant where we ate lunch after viewing the condors. Then it was on to the high point of the trip—Patopampas at 15,000 feet (4,600 meters)—enroute to Puno and Lake Titicaca.
My Covid-19 Vaccination Card (with Date of Birth Obliterated)
Yesterday I finally got my second Pfizer Covid-19 second dose. As my doctor predicted, I came down this morning with a slight fever, some chills, and achy shoulders. I hated to think that I would die of the ’rona after all the quarantining I did over the last year. I went all the way out to Kaiser Permanente Hospital in Baldwin Park, where it all went down like clockwork.
Coporaque, Peru with Volcán Sabancaya Erupting in Background
On my kitchen table, I have two guides to Peru which I consult from time to time. Even at my advanced age, I am thinking of going there once the coronavirus is but a dim memory (should that time ever come). I see in my mind a tour I took from Arequipa to the Colca Canyon area back in 2014.
We were in the Andes at between 12,000 and 15,000 feet (3,600-4,600 meters) altitude. I was chewing coca leaves with an alkaloid to keep me from suffering the effects of soroche, or altitude sickness. With meals, I would drink a tea of maté de coca, which had the same effect. Man was not made to live at that kind of elevation without some assistance. Please note that the difference between coca leaves and cocaine is like the difference between Lipton’s Tea and Bath Salts. At that level, it is simply not a narcotic.
Colca Canyon with Farming Terraces Created by the Inca
As it works its way down to the sea, Colca Canyon becomes even deeper than the Grand Canyon. At its deepest point, it is 10,730 feet (3,270 meters) deep. And the whole canyon is only 43 miles (70 km) long. (Just north is an even deeper canyon: Cotahuasi Canyon at 11,004 feet or 3,354 meters deep.)
There is a place west of Coporaque called Cruz del Cóndor where you can see giant Andean condors rising on thermals from far below. At a wingspread approaching 9 feet (3 meters), it is one of the most incredible things I have ever seen. Later this week, I’ll show you some pictures I took there.
A Fiesta in Chivay, Largest Town Around Colca Canyon
The Colca Canyon area is inhabited by the Cabana and Collagua peoples. It is only about three hours from Arequipa along a high, desolate, and unbelievably picturesque route.
I spent only a single night in Colca, and I would like to remedy that. There are scheduled intercity buses that go from Arequipa to Chivay along the same route I took, and I can probably find a tour guide in Chivay. He might not speak English, but my Spanish is tolerable—if the person I’m talking to is patient.
What It Looks Like When You Don’t Cover Up a Sneeze
When I was a child, I was an allergic mess. I would both look forward to and dread visits to my uncle and aunt, because they not only had a dog, but cats as well. My eyes would start to itch and swell up, I would sneeze, and I would constantly blow my nose into one of the two handkerchiefs I always had on my person. I even saw an allergist named Myron Weitz once a week for the better part of a year. He performed numerous scratch tests on me, indicating that I was allergic to tomatoes, oatmeal, tobacco, and a few other things. Then I would get a shot each week which was supposed to make me immune to allergens. It never did.
In the end, I think I was allergic to Cleveland. Once I moved to Southern California after graduating from college, my allergies lessened—especially after I learned to stay far away from cats. There was a time in the 1970s when I developed asthma and had to take a horrible medication called Tedral which kept me awake all hours.
Now I come down with allergic reactions for only a few days each year. Unfortunately, this is one of those times. Something is in bloom that disagrees with me. My nose is stuffed up, I’m sneezing, and my eyes feel as if I had sandpapered them. It could be that the winds are blowing something in from the desert. I just don’t know.
I checked the pollen reports, and supposedly there currently is no major threat. Yeah, but tell my nose and eyes that!
Do I think that Andrew Cuomo should be impeached for being clueless about women? No, because I think most males are clueless when it comes to women; and there do exist angry women who think they should have their heads chopped off. Even the bit about undercounting Covid-19 deaths of nursing home patients is sort of a peccadillo. Let’s face it, our former president would have raped the young women and murdered the nursing home patients through spineless inaction. And moreover, he would have gotten off scot-free.
By insisting that Cuomo be thrown out of the New York governor’s office, people are just being woke. For that, they get one million S&H Stamps, which can be exchanged for a knowing smirk and a small baggie of fresh dogshit.
While the right was inventing Jewish space lasers and Democrats abusing toddlers in shady pizza parlors, the left was, usual, setting up a circular firing squad.
… In Which Democrats Are the Only Casualties
One of the reasons I left the Democratic Party was that I was sick and tired of seeing good politicians fall by the wayside due to political correctness—people like Senator Al Franken of Minnesota. Who gets points for otiose political virtue? No one. We all lose (except for the Green Stamps).
So am I woke? For one thing, I would never use the term in reference to myself. I am no Mother Teresa. I do not wash the feet of lepers. All I do is try to make my way through the labyrinth without destroying myself or it.
Bags of Apples from Green Mountain Orchards in Putney, VT
The best apples I ever ate were from Vermont and New Hampshire. Sorry, Washington State, but you’re a distant third. I remember when Martine and I went to New England and Quebec in September 2012. We flew to Boston, rented a car in Salem, and drove to Green Mountain Orchards in Putney, Vermont, where we bought several bags of apples. I swear that for the next three weeks, our car smelled of the tangy Vermont apples.
As good, when we could find it, was unpasteurized apple cider from Vermont and New Hampshire. The pasteurized stuff is just like supermarket apple juice—a big yuck!—whereas the unpasteurized stuff had a tang and a bite that went down well. We indulged at the cost of diarrhea during the early part of our trip, but it was worth it.
We hoped to find good apples in Quebec, but we were sorely disappointed. I guess there’s something about the soil of the Connecticut River valley that separates Vermont from New Hampshire that makes for great apples.
I dream of going back and spending more time in Northern New England.
It seems that all the older people in my family were diabetic: my father, my mother, and even my great grandmother. Now even my younger brother is borderline.
Each day, I have to give myself three shots of Humalog (Lispro) and one shot of Lantus (Glargine). The Humalog shots all come before or immediately after meals, and the Lantus just before going to sleep. That’s not so bad, because both types of insulin use a KwikPen with an extremely skinny needle. I administer the insulin either in my gut or my thigh, with only occasionally a bad stick that hits a nerve.
What is worse are the finger sticks, which I have to do three times a day before meals. I have to poke a lancet into my fingertips and squeeze out a bead of blood so that I can tap it with a test strip connected to a device that reads the glucose level of my blood at that point. The problem is that I have trouble getting enough blood to give me a reading. Sometimes I have to poke the same fingertip as much as three times to draw enough blood.
As if that weren’t bad enough, some of my fingers (left thumb and right thumb) require a thicker lancet in order to get blood. My left forefinger has sustained some damage from all the finger sticking, so I usually skip it altogether. So I do a 9-finger rotation over a three-day period.
I don’t mind going with pen needle, nibs, and insulin to a restaurant, but I refuse to also prick my fingertips at the same meal. After all, the finger sticks are for measuring, whereas the insulin keeps my blood sugar low.
The good news is that what I’m doing is working for me. My last A1C reading was 6.5; and my finger stick readings tend to be in the low 100s.
Interior of the Palace of the Archbishop, Lima, Peru
What shocked me more than anything during my 2014 visit to Peru was that the archeology of Spanish Catholicism in Peru was fully as interesting as the archeology of the Incas and other pre-Columbian peoples. The pictures here all come from my visit to the Palace of the Archbishop next to the Cathedral in Lima on November 9, 2014. I was guided through the Palace by a very cute young Peruvian nun who kept addressing me as “Gentleman.”
As I visited the Palace and the various churches and convents, I thought to myself that the Christian religion in Peru had passed its peak. What remained was partially syncretic, but in any case visually stunning.
Chalice Flanked by Two Monstrances
I have often thought that it was not the King of Spain who benefited from the wealth of gold and silver transshipped from South America, as much as Holy Mother the Church. The churches and monasteries in the historic center of Lima are glistening with gold, silver, and precious stones. At the Monastery of Santo Domingo are the remains of three 17th century Limeño saints: Rose of Lima, Martín de Porres, and Juan Macías—all of whom were affiliated with the Dominican Order.
Brought up as a Roman Catholic, I found myself spending a lot more time in the churches than at the Inca ruins. They were usually beautiful and peaceful, even if I wound up attending Mass a number of times. In fact, I felt myself more a Catholic in Peru than I do in Los Angeles.
Statue of the Blessed Virgin
Whatever their original colors, it seems as if the paintings and statues of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints are predominantly reddish brown. This is particularly true of the Cusco School of Painting which predominated at the time. At some point soon, I will repeat a past post on the iconography of archangels shown in Peruvian paintings of the Cusco School.
It is time for another poem by one of my favorite poets, the late Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo of Argentina.
Robert Browning Decides To Be a Poet
In these red labyrinths of London
I find that I have chosen
the strangest of all callings,
save that, in its way, any calling is strange.
Like the alchemist
who sought the philosopher's stone
in quicksilver,
I shall make everyday words—
the gambler's marked cards, the common coin—
give off the magic that was their
when Thor was both the god and the din,
the thunderclap and the prayer.
In today's dialect
I shall say, in my fashion, eternal things:
I shall try to be worthy
of the great echo of Byron.
This dust that I am will be invulnerable.
If a woman shares my love
my verse will touch the tenth sphere of the concentric heavens;
if a woman turns my love aside
I will make of my sadness a music,
a full river to resound through time.
I shall live by forgetting myself.
I shall be the face I glimpse and forget,
I shall be Judas who takes on
the divine mission of being a betrayer,
I shall be Caliban in his bog,
I shall be a mercenary who dies
without fear and without faith,
I shall be Polycrates, who looks in awe
upon the seal returned by fate.
I will be the friend who hates me.
The persian will give me the nightingale, and Rome the sword.
Masks, agonies, resurrections
will weave and unweave my life,
and in time I shall be Robert Browning.
The line about “if a woman turns my love aside” is particularly poignant. For most of his life, Borges was in love with a fellow writer, Norah Lange, who instead married Oliverio Girondo, whom he hated with a passion.
Argentinean Writer Norah Lange (1905-1972)
Borges did eventually get married in his old age—twice. The first one was a disaster, the second one more of a helpmate.
I have just read a library book in which the entire text was edited for political correctness by some ignorant vandal. The book was Rosario Santos’s The Fat Man from La Paz: Contemporary Fiction from Bolivia. If you’ve read yesterday’s post, you know that I am interested in visiting Bolivia, which is one of two Andean countries I have not seen (the other is Colombia).
The copy I checked out from L.A.’s Central Library is full of ballpoint editings enforcing a rigid code of PC relating to feminism, religion, sexual preference, and aboriginal peoples. The stories ranged from interesting to outstanding, but I was constantly being outraged by the marginal comments.
Below is a table showing some typical examples:
Page
Original Text
PC Corrections and [Notes]
68
a prayer of health to the Virgin
a prayer of health to Mary
104
Since Rosemary had her baby
[Birth Control!]
134
saints with expressions of satisfaction
“saints” with expressions of satisfaction
141
they went around poisoning the lives of others
[Sexist]
143
why her grandmother hated men
why her grandmother hated marriage
235
a mestizo born of an Indian woman
a mestizo born of a native woman
236
the spire of the Mother Church
[Patriarchal]
239
the Indians shifted restlessly
the people shifted restlessly
246
his worn out little love of his dreams
his worn out love of his dreams
250
making holes for their women to toss in seeds
making holes for the women to toss in seeds
254
the Indians maintained their balance
the workers maintained their balance
I have decided that the only punishment worthy of this vandalism is to locate the individual responsible, strip him or her naked, and tattoo them all around their body with the most politically incorrect terminology possible. Anyone want to join me?
Tarnmoor 
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