1. The word
Anasazi is no longer kosher among those in the archeological community. Though I've always understood the Navajo word to mean "ancient ones" apparently a small change in inflection can change it's meaning to "ancient enemy" and there is now fear that it was originally meant as a slur not as a simple description. The new term sweeping the National Park Service is "ancestral puebloans" which to my ear sounds sadly clinical. Whatever.
2.
McDonald's, those dirty sons-of-bitches, have started serving a pretty decent
cup of coffee.
3. A
petroglyph is an image
carved into rock. A
pictograph is an image
painted onto rock. Either can depict visitations by
ancient alien astronauts.
4. The Colorado Plateau is a vast elevated area composing much of the southwest. It was, over thirty million years or so, thrust upward from sea level to around seven to eight thousand feet by angry tectonic plates. It is the second largest such plateau in the world. Only Tibet's plates are angrier.
5. My old high school, Laguna-Acoma Jr-Sr High School, has shut down and is overgrown with weeds. I hated that place while an inmate but it's downfall brings me no joy. Go Hawks.
6. When on a 2360-mile road trip you must do all you can not to get into a fight with your girlfriend.
7.
Kokopelli was once an important and revered fertility deity to the peublo people. He was associated with birth, crops, rain and spring. He also was a trickster god who would hide his detachable kokopenis in rivers waiting for supple young maidens to come bathe. My mom has told me that he also had a practical use as a scape-goat for otherwise unexplainable pregnancies. These days all that old timey stuff has tumbleweeded away into the dusty past.
Kokopelli has found modern-day employment as a deity of cheap commerce, now associated with mugs, lawn ornaments, hideous plush dolls in American flag colors, throw rugs, automobile air fresheners, t-shirts, stickers, hats, figurines, windchimes, baby bibs, carabiner-equiped Nalgene bottles, pajamas, et al. Think of any object in the universe. There is most likely a Kokopelli-branded version of it for sale somewhere in the southwest. My girlfriend and I have had a longstanding game of Kokopelli-punching, wherein the first one to spot a kokopelli is entitled to punch the other. On our recent trip through the southwest, however, we had to ammend those rules or neither of us would have survived the beating.
8. The actual 4-corners of the 4-corners area is a three-dollar waste of time.
9. You just cannot find decent fry-bread anymore. I know it was originally fried in lard, though I'm not certain that's the taste that my reptile brain is craving. Maybe the dough is different? I'm not sure what has changed. Oh well.
