Georgia gets “Georgia on My Mind.” Kentucky gets “My Old Kentucky Home.” Oklahoma gets “Oklahoma!”
With its insipid lyrics and unsingable melody, why do we Californians get saddled with “I Love You, California“?
I love you, California, you’re the greatest state of all.
I love you in the winter, summer, spring and in the fall.
I love your [...]
“Downtown statue draws protesters” — some folks don’t like the statue of Sacagawea in Charlottesville, Virginia (via my friend Kira Gale and her newsletter at Lewis and Clark Road Trips):
The protesters complained that the statue depicts explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark looking into the distance as their guide, Sacagawea, crouches in a subordinate position [...]
Bottom words which start with “A”
(Like “aft”) seem rather sparse.
Yet sit your ass beside the Thames
By Jove, it’s now an arse.
The denouement of my Pierre Cruzatte program arrives when Cruzatte finally reenacts the accident in which he shoots Captain Lewis in the butt. I struggled for a long time to find the best word for [...]
José de Gálvez, the ambitious and periodically loony visitador (a sort of inspector representing the Crown) of New Spain from 1764-1772, once considered importing 600 apes from Guatemala to quell an Indian uprising.
Sounds like a private simian security force to me, which got me thinking about the other animal adjectives I know — like [...]
I admit it: I wasn’t listening when we studied the U.S. presidents in school. I know 1 through 3 and I’m okay with the last few, but I get lost from 4 to almost 40.
I learn best through music, so I figured there must be a song that will make it easy for me to [...]
Azariah Smith was nineteen years old when James Marshall discovered gold on the south fork of the American River. Smith, there with Marshall helping him build John Sutter’s mill, had only one thing on his mind once he saw the gold. It was the same thing he wanted before he saw it: to get to [...]
From a 1907 Sunkist advertising poem (via California’s Los Citrus Groves):
…If long life you would be having,
Knowing naught of human ills,
Daily eat at least one orange,
Brought from California’s groves.
So what we really needed all along was an orange a day to maintain distance from our physicians.
But it did get me curious about the origins [...]
Richard Henry Dana shipped from Boston to California in 1834. Back then, California was still part of Mexico; it was the era of the Californios and fandangos, of the hide and tallow trade, of sailing ships from all over the world and of the songs that came with them.
Dana’s account of his travels, TWO [...]
Father Junipero Serra, the founder of the California Missions, walked for months throughout baja and alta California on a swollen, infected leg. “But even though I die on the road,” he said, “I will not turn back.”
Of course, he didn’t say it in English, so I wanted to find the original Spanish. Californiahistory.net has [...]
