Are You Kidding Me! -- June 13, 2020

Link here.

I wonder who called whom? LOL.

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Meanwhile ....

.... as long as we're scrolling through ZeroHedge ... this study on corona virus is an interesting read.

So, now:

• my blood type is O-negative (apparently naturally resistant to Wuhan flu -- previously posted);
• not bald (bald men more susceptible to Wuhan flu -- previously posted); and, now, 
• most of us who have had the "common cold," are probably "resistant to Wuhan flu).

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PGA Live

Some still wearing their masks.

Right here in Ft Worth, TX.

Charles Schwab Challenge.

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Reading For The Week

Out of Africa, Karen Blixen / Isak Dinesen, first published in 1937.

"I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The Equator runs across these highlands, a hundred miles to the North, and the farm lay at an altitude of over six thousand feet."

Probably one of the best opening lines of any memoir, immortalized, of course, by Meryl Streep.

I've read this book two or three times, but each time it seems new to me. I don't know if I've ever really paid attention to the exact geographical location or the history of the indigenous people. With current events in our own country, all of a sudden, that history is more meaningful now.

Nairobi: 1.2921° S.

One degree of latitude is approximately 69 miles.

1.2921 * 69 = 89 miles.

The general area of Karen's farm is easy to locate on an atlas. The area is now a suburb southwest of Nairobi; the suburb is called ... Karen.

I'm drawn to the geography of her farm because I hope to visit my parents' vacation home on Flathead Lake later this summer. The house is on the west side of the north end of the lake. We have a beautiful view of the Mission Mountains which lay on the opposite site of the lake.

I sort of imagine the same feeling that Karen Blixen had, when she was looking toward the Ngong Hills, when I sit on the balcony and look at the Mission Mountains. 

Karen writes that the chief feature of the landscape was the air. And that's true of Flathead Lake, especially in the late spring and early fall. The air crisp, clear, and invigorating, then. It must be the elevation. Lakeside, MT, is only 3,000' in elevation compared to 6,000' for Nairobi.

From the Ngong Hills:

• to the south, the vast plains of the great game-country that stretches all the way to Kilimanjaro;
• to the East and North, the park-like country of the foot-hills ... toward the Kikuyu-Reserve which extends to Mount Kenya a hundred miles away;
• to the west, the dry, moon-like landscape of the African low country; brown desert; with Mimosa trees and cacti, and giraffe and rhinoceros

The Mountain of Ngong is crowned with four peaks.

Her coffee farm:

• twelve miles from Nairobi
• six thousand acres of land
• six hundred acres with coffee trees
• six hundred coffee trees to the acre
• coffee sacks: twelve to a ton
• sixteen oxen to each wagon
• two thousand acres of grassland where cattle were run
• the rest of the farm: native forest and "traditional" vegetable farm, predominantly maize and sweet potatoes, goats and chickens, and stock pigeons
• the "traditional" vegetable farm managed by the shambas, or squatters as the colonists called them;
• Karen says the shambas would have seen themselves as "something different" than squatters

I think she first mentions the Kikuyu -- the Kikuyu shambas -- on page ten. The wiki entry is here.

When she first arrived, there were no cars and they rode to Nairobi in a cart pulled by six mules.

And I will quit here. As I read her description of Nairobi I am reminded of Graham Greene's masterpiece, The Heart of the Matter, though that story is from the west coast of Africa. That takes me back to 2004 or thereabouts when I was reading every spare moment I had. I had worked myself up from the classics to the 17th and 18th century British women authors, and then to the 19th and 20th century British writers.

If there has been any one negative aspect to blogging it is this: blogging has cost me much lost time that I would have given to reading had I not blogged. It's a trade-off.