As Readers of this Blog know, this Blogger’s father was a Trotskyite; in practical terms that meant he had this Isaac Babel/Pol Pot syndrome that field sweat cured intellectual elitism, so he made sure all of his sons had to work in the fields one summer. This Blogger had to spend time on a cattle ranch in the Oklahoma Panhandle, near Guymon, sorting out various forms of cow dung. Every year, in my youth, recruiters would come down from the Connecticut River Valley to recruit Brooklyn boys to work in the tobacco fields of Connecticut, harvesting Connecticut Shade Tobacco. One year, my brother, doing his Trotskyite duty, went off to the John Steinbeck fields to curb his intellectuality. “ Connecticut  shade tobacco is a tobacco grown under shade in the Connecticut River valley of the U.S. states of Connecticut, Massachusetts, and southernmost Vermont, and is used primarily for binder and wrapper for premium cigars.” Since his brother’s Steinbeck sojourn, this Blogger has

Deep within a cave, deep within the jungle of Borneo, Indonesia, scientists have dated a cave painting; it is 40,000 years old.  The painting is figurative art; it is the oldest discovered figurative art in the world. Its discovery adds to the mystery of THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD. Its discovery adds weight to the belief that the mystery of the Great Leap Forward can only be solved by a scientific acknowledgement of a Creator. “On the wall of a cave deep in the jungles of Borneo, there is an image of a thick-bodied, spindly-legged animal, drawn in reddish ocher. It may be a crude image. But it also is more than 40,000 years old, scientists reported on Wednesday, making it the oldest figurative art in the world. Until now, the oldest known human-made figures were ivory sculptures found in Germany. Scientists have estimated that those figurines — of horses, birds and people — were at most 40,000 years old. Researchers have found older man-made images, but these were abs