Burning the Zozobra (Old Man Gloom)

The Fiesta de Santa Fe, celebrated annually since 1712, began Thursday night with the burning of Old Man Gloom before a crowd of 25,000.

Zozobra centers around the ritual burning in effigy of Old Man Gloom, or Zozobra, to dispel the hardships and travails of the past year. …

The effigy is a giant animated wooden and cloth marionette that waves its arms and growls ominously at the approach of its fate. A major highlight of the pageant is the fire spirit dancer, dressed in a flowing red costume, who appears at the top of the stage to drive away the white-sheeted “glooms” from the base of the giant Zozobra. …

Zozobra is a well crafted framework of preplanned and pre-cut sticks, covered with chicken wire and yards of muslin. It is stuffed with bushels of shredded paper, which traditionally includes obsolete police reports, paid off mortgage papers, and even personal divorce papers.

— The Burning of Zozobra - Official Site

NewMexiKen deposited his gloomy thoughts in writing in the gloom box and I feel much better now that they’ve been burned along with the Zozobra. (It’s cheaper than a shrink, and probably as effective.)

This was the 84th burning of the Zozobra. The marionette was about 50-feet tall.

That’s an easy one

I saw an ad on the internets a little while ago. It asked “What would you say to the next president.”

I’d say “Aloha.”

My take

The parent team — or at least its player-manager — could see their chances of making the playoffs diminish, so they called up the kid from A ball.

And in her first at bat, before a home town crowd, she knocked it out of the park. Got to give the rookie credit. (Some argue it was only a ground rule double.)

But I suggest we withhold judgement until she faces a major league curve ball on the road playing every day.

September 4

L.A. was founded on this date in 1781. They didn’t call it L.A. then. They called it El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porziuncola).¹

The Edsel was introduced by the Ford Motor Company 51 years ago today.

Paul Harvey is 90 today, and that’s the rest of the story.

Tom Watson (59) and Raymond Floyd (66) share this birthday.

Beyonce Knowles is 27.

Richard Wright was born 100 years ago today.

Wright spent ten years in Chicago, working as a ditch-digger, delivery boy, hospital worker, and a postal clerk. He began to write short stories and his first book was the collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). Two years later, he published his masterpiece Native Son (1940), the story of a black man named “Bigger Thomas” who gets a job as a driver for a beautiful, young white woman and then accidentally kills her. Wright based the character on every bully, rebel, and outlaw he’d ever known.

The Book-of-the-Month-Club demanded that he delete some of the more explicitly sexual scenes from the novel, and publishers worried that even the edited version would be too shocking for most readers. But Native Son sold 215,000 copies in three weeks and went on to become the first bestselling novel by an African American writer. The unedited text of the novel was finally published in 1991.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

¹ The Spanish mission at the Pecos Pueblo had a similar name: Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de Porciúncula de los Pecos. Porciúncula or Porziuncola is the name of a small chapel near Assisi, Italy, where St. Francis established the Franciscan Order in the early 13th century.

The only bad thing about retirement

There’s no coffee club. You have to make the coffee AND clean the pot every day.

San Luis Valley and Great Sand Dunes National Park

This was first published here five years ago today.

The San Luis Valley is said to be the largest mountain valley in the world. It runs north-south for 125 miles between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountain ranges in south central Colorado. Both of these ranges have numerous peaks above 14,000 feet (4300m).

Just south of Poncha Pass, the narrower northern end of the San Luis Valley is an extraordinarily picturesque landscape — even this week without snow on the mountains. Further south the distance between the ranges widens to 65 miles and the Valley becomes broad and flat — and less picturesque. The altitude of the Valley averages near 7,500 feet.

The Rio Grande del Norte rises in the San Juan Mountains and flows generally eastward into the San Luis Valley. East of Alamosa the “Great River of the North” bends south toward New Mexico. Through centuries the river deposited sand and silt from the San Juan Mountains along its meandering, changing course across the Valley. The prevailing wind blew these deposits eastward toward the Sangre de Cristos, where they were trapped at the foot of the mountains. Today the resulting sand pile is known as the Great Sand Dunes National Monument and Preserve.

The dunes tower as high as 750 feet (230m) and cover nearly 40 square miles. They are the tallest dunes in North America. Sufficient rain and snow fall to keep the dunes stable, though the surface dries quickly and the winds sculpt and restructure the surface continuously. Here the expression “leave nothing but footprints” has little meaning as footprints will soon be gone.

Hiking in the dunes is encouraged (with the usual caveats about heat, water, lightning and not getting lost). Showers and changing rooms are provided near the parking lot — just as at a beach. Walking across the broad, sandy space between the parking lot and the first dunes and then up into the dunes I was surprised by the amount of sand stowing away in my socks and shoes. The sand makes walking more strenuous than on more solid surfaces. It also makes sliding and rolling appealing.

The Sangre de Cristos loom more than a mile above the dunes, curving around them from the north to the southeast. The Valley land to the west is being acquired by the National Park Service to prevent the mining of ground water from under the dunes. Once the acquisition is complete, the Monument will be come the 57th National Park.

And it did become a national park on September 13, 2004, though the 58th not the 57th.

Geronimo

Geronimo and Naiche (son of Cochise) surrendered to Gen. Nelson Miles on this date in 1886 at Skeleton Canyon, near the Arizona-New Mexico line just north of the border with Mexico. It was the fourth time Geronimo had surrendered — and the last. With them were 16 men, 14 women and six children. The band was taken to Fort Bowie and by the 8th were on a train to Florida as prisoners of war.

Click image for larger version of this photograph (above) taken at a rest stop along the route to San Antonio. Naiche is third from left, Geronimo third from right (with the straw hat) in the front row. He was probably in his late 50s.

Geronimo and the others were moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894. Geronimo eventually became a marketable celebrity, paid to appear at expositions and fairs. He died at Fort Sill in 1909, about age 80.

Also pictured are Geronimo at his third surrender in March 1886 and Geronimo on exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. (Click each for larger version.)