Malibu morning picture of the day - Columbus Day, Monday, October 13, 2014

And a Happy Columbus Day to you all!

Columbus never saw this ocean (at least from this side, don't know if he ever made to Asian coast by the land route; I'll have to check the history books). He never made it onto either American continent. He got pretty close to seeing the Pacific on one of his trips through Central America, so close it's almost tragic. I recall a TV show saying had his party crossed two more ridges, there it would have been. Would you have pressed on through more Malaria-filled jungle? And here I give you this view every workday; don't you feel blessed?

Here's the second shot. Looks pretty dreary on the coast, but on bus I saw the blue peeking through looking to the north. It is supposed to get into the 80s today.

Why lookee those parrots there ...

And while we're at it, here's a snapshot of some birds that were gathered on the round as I was making my way up the hill from the bus. The unusual thing about them is that they are feral parrots. I showed you a picture of them before, perched in a tree. They don't photograph very well in this camera and they get spooked very easily, so you cannot get close to them. I did a count and there are almost 50 of them.

"I am no' lef'-handed ..."

My employer has a Christopher Columbus statue on the campus here in Malibu. It is so cliche it looks exactly like what you would imagine such a statue to be. It's tucked away in an a part of the plaza around our amphitheatre with a view to the south (not west, how apropos!), looking past the chapel. If I didn't know better, I think we're ashamed of it. The standard campus tour does not point out this statue at all.

When I was a schoolboy in the 1960s, Columbus was pretty much revered and honored as the discoverer of America. Since then I have watched his star fall to being misguided, to a fool, and ultimately to a malevolent harbinger of European aggression against the indigenous people here in the Americas.

I'm kinda surprised this is still a national holiday. It's telling that not everybody gets it off, like MLK Day, the difference being that King's star is rising. A guy I knew from El Salvador said that this day was called "Race Day" in his country, I guess commemorating the day that horny seamen got off the boat looking for local women and immediately started on the rigorous historic work of pumping out the first mestizos in earnest.

Crying Indian stereotypes really make me weep.
BTW, did you know I'm Italian, just
like Columbus?

If you've got the day off, enjoy that extra hour of sleep for me. But politically incorrect or not, I gotta admire a guy with balls of steel to sail off farther than anybody did before. So, in that spirit, go out and discover something this week, even if it's been found before, and even if you're totally wrong about what you think you found. Your mistake may endure admirably. After all, we still call our indigenous people "Indians."

Love,
Pops