Lance Mackey's dog Zorro was injured near the end of the All Alaska Sweepstakes Friday night/early Saturday morning.  He was riding in the sled bag after they left the Safety checkpoint, when a snowmobile operated by an unidentified man ran into the sled, impaling the sled bag on its runners.

"I was flashing them like mad with my
headlamp," Mackey said. "I was shining my headlamp right in his face,
but they kept on coming at me. I jumped aside, and by 30 feet farther
up the trail, there was a snowmachine sitting on the middle of my sled."

The snowmachiner and his partner on another machine helped Lance remove the snowmobile from his sled, then left without identifying themselves.  From Nome, Zorro was flown to Pet Emergency in Anchorage, and then to Seattle for MRI studies on his spine.  Results of the MRI have not been reported.

Lance's website says, "Zorro sustained 3 broken
ribs, some internal bleeding, and spinal injuries. He
is not able to stand or use his back legs."

Nine-year-old Zorro was in Lance's winning team for the 2008 Yukon Quest, sat out the Iditarod, and was to have retired to stud after the All Alaska Sweepstakes.  Most of the dogs in Lance's winning teams, and about half of all the dogs in his Comeback Kennel are descended from Zorro.

Lance Mackey (shown above at 4 months of age) grew up around sled dogs, and his love for them is obvious to anyone who sees him with them or hears him speak of them.  His father and older brother are both Iditarod champions.  Lance is called the Comeback Kid for having survived throat cancer, the loss of his salivary glands, and a finger amputated due to nerve damage... and that's just for starters.  His life story is one of comeback after comeback.
 

Photo by Bob Hallinen, Anchorage Daily News, of Lance saying goodbye to Zorro at White Mountain during the 2007 Iditarod.  Zorro didn't finish that race due to pneumonia, but he came back to win again this year.  We hope he'll come back to the dogyard to sire many more winners.

The story below, told by my great grandfather Cyrus, was witnessed by him during the California gold rush of 1849.  I condensed it.

It is my entry, in 50 words or less, for this very first Weekly Writers Challenge.

---

Horsemen were riding on a twisting mountain trail through a storm.

Thunder and simultaneous lightning momentarily blinded and
deafened them.  Recovering their senses,
they noticed a riderless horse on the trail.

Its rider was dead when they found him.  Coins in his pocket had fused.  His pocketknife was electroplated silver.

The year was 1958.  The album was Frank Sinatra's Only the Lonely.  I had been dumped, and I was wallowing in the angst of it.

   

I just answered this Featured Question, you can answer it too!

Below are some comments received on my recent post, The Difference Between Possible and Doable:

Mitch Seavey was first into Nome last night.  Jeff King and Lance Mackey were not far behind him, and standings show Sonny Lindner and Ed Iten in 4th and 5th places.  The rules say that the win is not certified until 24 hours after the first 3 teams have finished, so sometime in the middle of tonight, the official results will be posted and the winner will get his $100,000.

I don't know who took that photo.  It wasn't me.  I found it on the AASS website.

---

My son Doug has a D&D session scheduled for today, and if the other players fail to show up for it, he'll probably DM a d20 Future game, so I won't be on the computer the rest of the day.  I spent my morning answering messages, looking up things for the wildforaging series and catching up with a few of my subs. 

It just occurred to me, I haven't checked my email in a couple of days... be right back....

Okay, now I can relate some boring facts about my uneventful life while my latest 71 emails download.

Wednesday, Greyfox drove up here with a load of supplies for us.  He had been grumpy about the necessity of doing it so soon after his last trip.  I had forgotten to add cat food to the shopping list the previous trip, and that is one of those things we don't want to run out of and hesitate to pay the exorbitant prices locally.

As things worked out, and as they usually work out for us, his trip was timely and fortuitous, because the clinic had gotten my asthma meds in on that very day, from the patient assistance program.  I rode up to Sunshine with Greyfox and he got the details he needed to know to provide them with all the info they have to have in order to recertify us for the sliding fee scale.

'Scuse me a moment... the email just finished downloading....

Well, that was a loong moment.  There were bills to pay and messages to answer. 

Where was I?  Oh, riding around in Greyfox's Mazda MPV... That reminds me, the time before this one, as soon as I got into his car, the heater blower started to work.  All winter, it has been on the fritz and he has to get the car moving to get any defroster action, which can be hazardous in an Alaskan winter.  The time before that one, it was Doug who "fixed" the heater blower by getting into the car to go for a water run.  The kid's fix didn't last long before Greyfox fritzed it again, but the blower was still working several weeks after I did it.  Greyfox has that UTM (unconscious technical maladept) talent that Niels Bohr and Joe Bltzflk had, being able to screw up mechanical or electronic stuff with his mere presence.  My kid and I have the opposite, UTA, talent.

The Old Fart has a gun show this weekend.  He set up his tables yesterday evening and when he called me last night he was mildly upset because a whole box of his most attractive knives had gone missing.  He thought someone had walked off with them while he was unloading his car.  This morning he found them, in a smaller box than what he had thought they were in, under two other boxes.  *big sigh of relief*

I guess I'm progressing in my recovery from the winter's respiratory crises.  It's an up and down thing.  I was feeling okay, plenty of energy and hadn't needed the nebulizer for a couple of days before Greyfox got here Wednesday.  I carried some bags in from the car, and took that ride up to the clinic with him, then cooked lunch for us, and was breathless before he headed back down the valley.  That night and the one after, I was awake every couple of hours to nebulize.  Today, I'm looking out at the dirty snow and gray skies and thinking about taking the camera out to see if I can find anything worth shooting.  I must be feeling better.  I'm restless.

Wildforaging, or wild foraging, means eating weeds.  Weeds grow just about anywhere, even in cities.  Some weeds are poisonous.  Some weeds are edible but not palatable.  Others taste okay, and are nutritious, but can be difficult or hazardous to gather.  The trick to being a successful forager is knowing all the tricks:  which ones are good, which parts of each are good to eat, how to collect, prepare and store them, what to avoid and why.

There are a number of different ways to learn what you need to know. 

One way is to take a walk around your neighborhood with someone who knows.  Take along a camera and a notebook so you don't need to remember every detail.  If you use this strategy, don't just take one walk, but take several at different times during the growing season.  That's important for several reasons.

• Many edible leaves are only palatable when very young and tender, so you need to find them as soon as they sprout in spring.
• While you are out picking spring greens, you can be scouting for plants that will have edible flowers or fruit later in the season, but that effort will be wasted unless you go back later to gather the flowers and fruit.
• A plant's appearance can change drastically during its life cycle, and successful foraging depends on being able to recognize what you're looking for when you see it.
• There must be more reasons.  If you think of any, let me know.  ...oh, right!  You need the exercise.

Another way to do it in your neighborhood is to acquire a field guide to take on your walks.  I know from experience that walking around that way, examining plants and flipping through the pages of a field guide can earn one a reputation as a klutz.  Be careful.  It can also result in bruises, sprains and broken bones.

If the pickings are slim in your own neighborhood, or if you travel a lot, acquire field guides for other regions you visit.  Regional and specialized field guides for edible species are preferable to more general reference books, mainly because they are small enough to carry.  On a shelf here at my elbow is a copy of Hortus Third, a "concise dictionary" of cultivated plants of North America.  It is over 3 inches thick, bulky and heavy, and any compendium of wild species would be even bigger.

I have spent most of my life in Western North America, and have done most of my foraging in Alaska.  Some of the books that have been most useful to me are:

• Wild, Edible and Poisonous Plants of Alaska from the Cooperative Extension Service, University of Alaska
• Western Edible Wild Plants by H. D. Harrington
• Alaska Wild Berry Guide and Cookbook from Alaska Northwest Books

Medicinal plants are another interest of mine.  The following are books I use and appreciate:

• Alaska's Wilderness Medicines by Eleanor Viereck
• Back to Eden by Jethro Kloss
• A Modern Herbal by M. Grieve

Flickr has an online guide to flowering plants, but no information about edibility, etc.  If you know the name of a plant you'd like to try, and want to find out what it looks like so you can see if it grows in your area, a Google image search should return some pictures.   The weeds you are most likely to find in an urban or suburban setting are the invasive sort, and there is an illustrated invasive plant database at invasive.org.

If you find a plant growing somewhere, but cannot identify it, identification from online sources is possible but more difficult.  In such cases it helps to know botanical jargon such as bract, sessile, cotyledon, achene, ciliate, etc., so you can enter the plant's botanical description in the search box and have some hope of returning an identification.  Some field guides include illustrated glossaries, and I found glossaries (without illustrations) at invasive.org and UCMP.

At this season, I'm not sure what might be sprouting where you are.  The only signs of life outside my windows are pussywillows, and not many of them.  Two of the earliest greens I look for as soon as things start growing here are fireweed and dandelions.

ADDENDUM:
The doable and the possible are below, but when I posted that, I forgot to post the latest All Alaska SweepStakes standings.

Within an hour both ways from midnight last night, the leading three teams passed through the Council checkpoint on the return leg toward Nome:

1. Jeff King at 23:15
2. Mitch Seavey twenty minutes later
3. Lance Mackey fifty-nine minutes after Seavey

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I was tuning up to blog about something completely different.  Then I did my routine morning check of my feedback log and discovered that about 2 AM Alaska time, somebody in Romania accessed an old post of mine.  It wasn't the ever-popular Maidenform bra post or any of the ones that are most often accessed, so I clicked on it to see what it was.

It was ...got it figured out, my exposition on the solution I'd found to a conundrum I had mentioned on the day before that post.  What caught my attention this time was the first line of a lengthy comment:

I don't recall whether I responded to that statement at the time.  I might have let it slide because I didn't want to get into a futile exchange with someone whose mind is made up.

I'm fairly sure that, even overlooking the grammatical issue, I would have perceived it as bullshit at the time, but in the meantime I have acquired more information that makes it easier to refute the bullshit, while at the same time I can perceive an issue here that might mean that in one sense, this is not bullshit at all.

It all depends on semantics.  Defining "empathy" one way, this would be true.  The sense of the word, "empathy," for which that statement would be true is an imaginative state, a voluntary effort to identify with someone else's feelings.  This brand of empathy is even available to sociopaths and pathological narcissists.  In fact, it is an essential tool for such people if they are going to get along in society, avoid being ostracized or murdered, and stay out of jail.

This is not the brand of empathy experienced by the empaths of empaths alike.  That one, the one I am talking about when I discuss empathy, the one that psychologists are talking about when they say that people with narcissistic personality disorder are incapable of empathy, is not a voluntary imaginative state.  I think J.B. Rhine would have categorized it as a type of telepathy.

Coming upon this old post engaged my attention today because of a recent bit of anecdotal information that came  from HappyHeathen, regarding the connection between adrenal insufficiency or exhaustion and empathy/telepathy.  What he told me meshed with what I had previously read about the neurotransmitter acetylcholine's role in telepathy and empathy. 

Andrija Puharich, decades ago, studied shamans, the dancing and drumming they did, and the psychoactive plants they used to attain the paranormal powers of their trance state.  He related how prolonged activity such as dance would first stimulate the adrenals, then exhaust them, leading to the state he called "cholinergia," in which acetylcholine flooded the brain after the adrenals were exhausted.

It is all very interesting to me, but having this knowledge does not make it any easier to communicate about what I think of as "true" empathy and how it differs from imagining oneself in another's shoes, when I'm addressing someone who doesn't believe in the reality of telepathy because his brain chemistry won't allow him to experience it.  It might make it easier for me to help some of the distressed empaths who post on the tribe.net forums, seeking ways to shield themselves from the barrage of other people's emotions, if their belief systems encompassed neurochemistry, but most of them are looking for magickal rituals or talismans. 

In my belief system, in an infinite universe of eternal time, anything is possible, so that part of that extravagant statement above, in a limited sense, is true.  However, whether a thing is doable for a given person or not depends on many factors including, but not limited to, the individual's Will (capitalized because I distinguish between a simple willingness to do something and having the true wholehearted Will for it) and neuroelectrochemistry.  In that sense, people with NPD, sociopaths, and probably the person who wrote that comment, too, are incapable of the kind of empathy we empaths are talking about.

I want to tell the world that, in terms of human emotions, addictions,
and human mental capabilities, the explanation is as simple as ABC:
It is all brain chemistry.  (It is really electrochemistry, but "simple as abe" just lacks something for me.)

I learn a lot because people think I know it all.  To some of my friends here, and to the occasional visitor from another corner of cyberspace, I seem to have become Xanga's resident expert on drugs and addiction, crime and law, outlaw motorcycle gangs, Alaska, dog mushing, the 1950s and '60s.... 

Hey guys, I know quite a bit about metaphysics, psychology, gardening and wildforaging, too, so don't hesitate to ask.  Ask about anything.  If I don't know the answers, I can look for them, and if I find something for you, I learn something for me. 

If I don't find your answers, I'm not ashamed to say I don't know, and I'm not likely to stop looking for the answers, either.  I have many sources and resources.  I have dusty old books I haven't cracked open since I got access to Google.  I even remember where some of them are.

Just ask.

---

The AASS leader board is showing Lance Mackey in first place, with Jim Lanier, Jeff King, and Mitch Seavey tied for second place.  I am not familiar with their method of calculation, and haven't a clue how they derived that tie for second place. 

The times shown are when the team arrives at each checkpoint.  They don't have to check out, so we don't know if they stopped to rest or blew on through, until they check in at the next checkpoint.

Lance and Jim Lanier are the only two mushers shown to have gotten as far as the First Chance checkpoint, with only the Gold Run checkpoint between there and Candle, where they turn around for the return leg to Nome.

Lanier was the oldest musher in this year's Iditarod, and is the only musher in this centennial running of the SweepStakes who also competed in the 75th anniversary race in 1983.  He won the Red Lantern that time.  His team is notable for their color.  He likes white dogs.

I know of two blogs covering the race:  Northern Light Media and Josh Rogers.  There is a map of the trail HERE.

RACE UPDATE:
Noon Thursday:  Jeff King was first into the Gold Run checkpoint, and Lance Mackey is shown in second place, but still not into Gold Run. 

Hugh Neff is out of the race, withdrawn at Haven.

LAST UPDATE FOR TODAY
(probably, because Doug has a scheduled d20 Eberron session today)

Into Gold Run checkpoint:
1.  Jeff King
2.  Lance Mackey 27 minutes after Jeff
3.  Sonny Lindner 2 minutes after Lance
4.  Ed Iten 27 minutes after Sonny
5.  ? Ramy Brooks is shown in standings in 5th place, but not shown into Gold Run; last time for him was at previous checkpoint.
6  Jim Lanier 41 minutes after Ed Iten
7. Mitch Seavey 34 minutes BEFORE Jim Lanier

I cannot explain the discrepancies.

Jeff King really wants to win this thing.  The Sweeps does not have the "Monson Rule" like the Iditarod does.  Mushers can have outside assistance.  Jeff has two Iron Dog snowmachiners and a race strategist accompanying him to help with dog food setup at checkpoints, etc.  Even with help, he has only gained 7 minutes on Lance Mackey since the race start.  The 2 minute intervals of the staggered start gave him a 20 minute lead on Lance out of the chute.

After listening to the story  on NPR about the growing numbers of children in Dallas becoming addicted to cheese heroin, and the problems physicians are having in determining appropriate non-toxic treatments for them, I was feeling a combination of anger and compassion.

The compassion was for the kids and those who care about them.  The anger was at the medicopharmaceutical establishment.

I turned to my son, Doug, as I often do when I want an unbiased view.  He seldom forms opinions, and never without extensive observation and consideration, so I can count on him to inject a little reality when I'm being paranoid or something pushes one of my hot buttons.

I asked him,  "Is it simple ignorance, or a conspiracy?"

He agrees with me that the apparent blind spot of the medical profession in addiction treatment is the result of a conspiracy.  Individual physicians may simply be ignorant, but their ignorance is promoted and perpetuated by a conjunction of established interests as diverse as 12-Step dogmas and the profits of pharmaceutical cartels.

Most of the young addicts are at the mercy of so-called "helpers" who are struggling with questions of the appropriateness of sending a six-year-old to an AA meeting, or trying to determine the correct pediatric dose of Methadone.  Only a very few of them have any hope of receiving the nutritional care that could make their withdrawal easy and painless, relieve them of cravings, and improve their health, brain function, and physical condition, for the rest of their lives.

*sigh*