More this n' that!

Dear Friends: "Let's get things back into perspective!"

Saw this headline today: "Man who lost fingers and toes to frostbite crossing into Canada gets refugee status." (Apparently he also automatically qualified for disability benefits!)

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How's THIS for creating an international incident kids: Dozens of Ford pickup trucks with the Afghan National Army’s logos on them surfaced in Iraq not because they were smuggled in, but because they were delivered by the United States with the wrong paint jobs, according to the Pentagon. (An official at Ford was quoted as saying: Ops!)

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I don't know why it took them about six months but  nearly 200 Democratic members of Congress agreed to file a lawsuit Wednesday against President Trump alleging that by retaining interests in a global business empire he has violated constitutional restrictions on taking gifts and benefits from foreign leaders. (They also threw in the tax return thing just for good measure!)



THIS BEGS THE QUESTION: "WHY DID IT TAKE THEM SO LONG?"

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Back in the 40's Thor Heyerdahl sailed a log raft from the South America mainland to South Sea Islands to prove that this was the way people got to all those islands out in the middle of nowhere. (Of course for everyone that made it, there were probably dozens, or even hundreds who didn't!)

Anthropologists have long debated how the Pacific islands—separated by thousands of miles of open ocean—were first settled.

In 1947, Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdahl sailed the balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki from the Peruvian coast to Polynesia to advocate his idea the region was colonized from the east by descendants of the Incas. Heyerdahl's theory, however, has been widely contradicted by more recent linguistic and ethnobotanical evidence that indicates human migration began in Southeast Asia and proceeded eastward in stages to Melanesia and then to the islands of Micronesia and Polynesia over the course of several millennia.

In keeping with that seafaring tradition on June 17, a 62-foot-long double-hulled canoe is slated to arrive in Honolulu, completing the first-ever round-the-world voyage by a traditional Polynesian vessel—a predecessor of the modern catamaran.

The trip began in May 2014 when the Hōkūle'a (Hawaiian for Arcturus, a guiding zenith star for seafarers) sailed westward from Hilo on Hawaii's Big Island. Since then it has plied five oceans, visited 19 countries and traversed more than 40,000 nautical miles.



The round-the-world journey was planned in part to celebrate Polynesia's seafaring achievements in developing and using a unique form of traditional navigation. During an era when most Western sailors still feared to leave sight of shore because they had not yet developed a way of determining longitude, Pacific islanders were already routinely crisscrossing a region spanning 25 million square kilometers—an oceanic world covering nearly one quarter of Earth's surface—according to Wade Davis, an Explorer-in-Residence at the National Geographic Society and author of The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World.