The Fewcher

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It was my least favorite question in school. “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

On one occasion, I remember being forced (forced!) to draw what I pictured my life to look like … in … the … few … cher-er-er. (Echoes.) If I had had the sense of humor I now claim to have, I would have drawn someone who was capable of drawing. Maybe I would have drawn someone holding a board with many colors on it. The person would be wearing a smock. And a beret. (That was how Mr. V—, our art teacher in elementary school, dressed. It was almost a parody of a cliché of someone’s parodied cliché of what an artist looks like.) The caption to my drawing would have stated that I hoped I would be able to draw when I was a grown-up.
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My Favorite Cave

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The aurochs is an extinct form of cattle that overlapped with humans for tens of thousands of years. It lived in Europe, North Africa, and western Asia; the last one died in 1627. We domesticated it: Our modern-day beef cattle and dairy cows are descended from the aurochs and some of them bear a deep resemblance to the extinct animal. (Picture a bull in a bullfight, but make the animal taller and even more muscular; this would have made a bullfight a bit more even.) The reason for the extinction of the aurochs is the all-too familiar one, and it can be summed up as: Humans have enjoyed beef for a very long time.

Early modern humans, homo sapiens, showed up around 100,000 years ago, and we really started to leave a mark on the landscape around 40,000 years ago. This is deep in our prehistory, and no one knows what our Upper Paleolithic ancestors were thinking. It just appears that thinking is something they were doing.
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Legacy Project

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“Bacon makes everything better.”—a sign in Susannah Mushatt Jones’s kitchen.

Susannah Mushatt Jones of Brooklyn, NY, is 116 years old today. She was born on July 6, 1899, in Alabama, and one of her grandparents was a slave. When Jeralean Talley died in June at the age of 116, Miss Jones became the oldest verified person on Earth. “I’m the oldest person in the world? No I’m not,” she is said to have exclaimed to her relatives.

At the moment, Mushatt Jones and Emma Morano of Italy, who was born in November 1899, are the last two people alive who were born in the 19th Century. The last breath of that century is upon us.
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