Sunday, January 11, 2009 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
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Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, January 9, 2009
Will I ever catch up
I'm still trying to catch up with my internet backlog from the Verizon Broadband Access outage here at the park and now the main circuit breaker in the rig overheated and died. Now today I'll have to pack up and go into town for a new breaker.
Will it never end with all these maintenance issues I've been dealing with ever since I bought this rig? It's been as bad as buying a 20 year old house - everything is wearing out at the same time. Ah well, once I get through it LD should be good to go for another 15 - 20 years. I sure hope so.
Night camp
Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.