Author Archives: Ponderer

About Ponderer

Ponderer also writes science fiction and science-inspired rhyming poetry. Check her out at katerauner.wordpress.com/ She worked at Rocky Flats for 22 years - you may know her as Kathy London.

Picnic Time

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Summer_Picnic_Spread_Free_Clip_Art_01mdSummer is coming and it will soon be time for picnics.  As reported by Word Detective and confirmed on NPR, “picnic” first appeared in English in 1748.  It seems to have come from a French word “piquenique,” which appeared in 1692.  This was a nonsense rhyming word and roughly meant to pick a trifle. The first picnics were what we today would call pot-luck dinners. Only in the mid-19th century did “picnic” come to mean a meal eaten outdoors.  For wealthy Victorians, a picnic was hardly a “trifle”.  They staged elaborate outdoor gourmet meals on tables set with linens and crystal; all tended by servants.  My sense of today’s usage is that “picnics” carry prepared foods away from home, while “barbeques” include cooking and occur in the back yard.

An unpleasant rumor spread in the late 1990’s, confirmed by Word Detective and Snopes, that the word originated as a racist term related to lynchings.  I wonder how a pleasant family-oriented “picnic” inspired such a rumor?

Making America Crazy

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Anatomy of an EpidemicPreviously I reviewed the book Overtreated which explains why too much medicine is making us sicker.  Robert Whitaker’s book Anatomy of an Epidemic explains why too much reliance on psychoactive drugs is making us crazier.

This seems like the right time for a book on treatments for mental illness.  With today’s increased public concern about mental illness that leads to violence, evidence that our current treatments may be making the problem worse should worry us all.  On a personal note, I have ties to four people who committed suicide.  All were under doctors’ care when they died and had been for a long time.  That seems hard to accept in the world of modern medicine. Continue reading →

Many Ends of the World

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apocolyptic_planet

Craig Childs, who is a commentator on National Public Radio, has written a strange book.  Apocalyptic Planet is primarily a collection of Childs’ extreme treks, each inspired by a different view of what the Earth might become after “the end of the world” as we know it.

Various possible scenarios are represented by Childs’ travels through a desert in Mexico, crumbling mountain glaciers in the Andes, an island remnant of the land bridge that once connected Asia and North America, an arctic research station buried in snow, and other terrains.  The one man-made landscape is a huge corn field of giant plants grown for industrial uses with “leaves so sharp they cut skin and cloth”. Continue reading →

Don’t Be a Jerk

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I recently attended a lecture by Dr. Benjamin Cline at Western New Mexico University: How to Talk About Religion and Politics Without Being a Jerk.  The world would be a better place, even without listening to the lecture, if we all wanted to try.

Cline discussed why our passions run so high on these topics: religion and politics are at the core of what makes life worth living for each of us.  Our ideology is tied to what we see as the meaning of life.  It is how we decide what’s valuable and what sources of information are valid.  These topics are important and underlie much of what we do.  Cline asks us to forget the old etiquette advice to avoid these subjects.  He says we need to talk about them. Continue reading →

History of ‘Billy the Kid’

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history_billy-the-kidThis short book (only 61 pages) was first published in 1920.  It caught my eye because I live outside Silver City, New Mexico, where “the Kid” lived for a time and where his mother is buried.  The author Chas A. Siringo, was “personally acquainted with him, and assisted in his capture”.  His book is based on what he was told by Billy the Kid himself, and by others who knew the Kid.

Siringo’s style is Spartan.  There are many one-sentence paragraphs.  He presents facts of the Kid’s life with little explanation or description.  I learned what the Kid did, but was left with no real understanding of what drove him through his violent life. Continue reading →