Gratuitous Body Count Pic: At Least It's Not a Tailgate...

One thing you almost never see from me is one of these...

Not that I have anything against guys (or gals) who like to take pics of their limits, it's just not something I generally do (although if I manage to scratch out an Oklahoma quail limit this year you can bet your ass I'm taking a picture of that. Lots of them. But don't hold your breath. See below...).

As a sort of half-assed photographer, I'd much rather try to take an interesting picture of a single bird (feather detail, macro, different angle, whatever) rather than a big pile of perforated birds (as an example, I'm kinda fond of this one ). And it's not like an opening-day limit is some sort of accomplishment or personal milestone for me. I shoot a lot of them. Not a brag, it's just that I live in an area with (most years) a lot of dove. Hell, I'm sure if you gave The Suburban Bushwacker a plane ticket and a shotgun, he'd shoot a limit, too.

**EDIT: Actually, I just realized that technically, this picture is two birds short of a limit. Why? The two collared dove on the end don't count toward the combined mourning dove/whitewing limit, which makes my small victory in the face of today's lousy conditions, and my resulting euphoria (see below) essentially null and void. Sigh. Carry on...

But you know what? I'm posting this gratuitous body count pic, proudly, because damn it, I earned this 15-bird limit. I don't think I've ever been more miserable on an opening-day dove hunt, and I've been on some scorchers.


It's not that it was so terribly hot: it "only" got up to 106. It's not that it was so terribly windy: it was "only" gusting to about 35 mph or so. But the combination of 106 degrees, 35 mph winds and the effects of this (insert any adjective here) drought all combined to form some weird sort of unholy synergy of misery. It felt like someone was standing directly in front of me holding the world's largest hairdryer and a bucket of sand, and all the while the giant klieg light of the sun burning holes in my retinas, even through the sunglasses.

Misery. My only solace was leaning my back against the water-cooled steel of the stock tank and drinking gallons of ice-cold well water (out of the pipe, not the stock tank...) while waiting for the evening flight.

     Unfortunately, the dove were mostly coming in from the west so I had to get up, walk around the pond and go hunker down in the sagebrush, which meant my ass immediately got punctured with dozens of these little bastards...

That's a sandbur, if you're lucky enough to not be familiar with them. And if the abstract concept of pain could take a physical form, this is what it would be. If you ever plan on bird hunting northwest Oklahoma or southwest Kansas, I'd advise you to bring a good pair of hemostats, because you'll be picking these out of everything...

But eventually, after the pain and cursing subsided, I started shooting a few birds, including a pair of these...

The Eurasion collared dove, a non-native transplant which is quickly establishing itself across the region. It's still mostly a bird of towns, suburbs and semi-rural backyards (we've got a couple here at the house) but they're showing up in hunters' bags more frequently. These are the first I've shot. They're considerably larger than a mourning dove and when this pair came flying in like a couple B-52s even I could manage the double.

After limiting out I walked back to the truck just in time to catch the area manager driving by. I hadn't seen him in a while so he stopped to talk and eventually the conversation came around to quail. The news, as expected, was grim. It's going to be a tough year. Really tough.

He told me that according to the trapping results, it looks like the quail on that particular area managed to get off one meager hatch in the middle of August, which isn't a good time to be a quail chick in the best of years, much less the hottest, driest summer in recorded history. There were no other age groups for the young quail, which means all other hatches this year apparently failed.

And judging by the heat and condition of the cover, I'm surprised anything survived at all. It's hard to put into words just how desiccated the landscape in this region truly is. I hadn't been out to this particular WMA since the end of quail season back in February, and in fact hadn't spent much, if any time this summer north of where I live. It was dry in February, but it's powder now.

How anything as fragile and high-strung as those little nine-ounce birds can live through a summer like this is beyond me, but as I was sitting there this evening I heard a few bobs whistling from somewhere out in the sagebrush. But just a few.

I may shoot some quail this fall, or I may not, but I'm guessing this is the last "look-at-my-limit" pic you'll be getting from me for quite some time. And really, that's not a bad thing.

Rivers of Memory and Streams of Schlock...

                            
                               “You know (in supercilious tone), Nietzsche says "From chaos, comes order.”’

                               “Ah, blow it out yer ass, Howard.”

                                                                         From a great scene in a great movie...

And if you’ve read the blog long enough, you know that pretty much sums up how I feel about the majority of flyfishing writing. Insufferably pedantic, overheated, self-important, metaphor-choked twaddle that cranks the gratuitously pensive prose knob to eleven until our brains - unable to take any more - just say fuck it and go all Scanners on us. It's the Vogon poetry of the outdoors literary scene: excruciating to the ear, the tongue and the brain.

Don't believe me? Spend a few hours in the sports section of your local Barnes & Noble (can't very well do it with Borders any more, can we?) perusing the flyfishing titles. I promise you'll end up carrying your exploded noggin home in your favorite literary figure tote bag...

Which makes it such a damn mystery why I continue to love Harry Middleton, who, it could easily be argued, is the very embodiment of all that I loathe about the genre. Prose? Here is an honest-to-gawd random passage from the Middleton book I'm currently reading. I promise you I did not cherry-pick this; I just opened a random  page without looking and placed my finger on a random spot, again, without looking...

"The only break in the day's otherwise olamic tincture of grays was the luteous glow of my room's single 40-watt desk lamp. It had been like that for three days, the island enveloped in a thick, merciless composition of grays: griseous dawns, cinereous afternoons, dismal dingy gray evenings. I imagined that even the wind and the sounds of the sea were some shade of gray, perhaps an oyster-gray mist rising off the pounding lead gray sea."

You know, it must have been a real bitch to play Scrabble against him...

I mentioned this propensity for wordiness when I blogged about "The Bright Country" last year...

As much as I liked it, though, I did have some quibbling little issues with “The Bright Country.” One, it’s pretty obvious the book is at least semi-fictionalized. Middleton described it as “more real than imagined” but many, if not most of the characters, settings, events and dialogue were simply too perfect to the story to be real. Second, Middleton was an incredibly wordy writer. I’ve got a pretty good vocabulary, but some of his words were simply lost on me, to the point where they began distracting a bit from the story.

But I guess the difference between Middleton and many of the others, and the reason I tolerate his excessive wordiness, his bottomless bag of adjectives and his feathering of fact and fiction, is because the pain and the raw emotion he puts (or rather put, since he's dead...) down on the page isn't the droning, affected naval-gazing gibberish of all the single-malted Compleat Morons out there who somehow, inexplicably, scored a book deal. It's real. Long-winded, perhaps, but real nonetheless.

When Middleton writes about depression and pain and longing, about losing everything and having to climb on the back of a garbage truck every night to go to work, about how the wind and the splatter of rain sometimes reminds him of wild rivers he can no longer fish, well, I can relate to that, I can feel that.

But a book-length exploration of your boring-ass upper middle-class twit existential crisis set on a river, or perhaps a formulaically contemplative recounting of your worldwide flyfishing adventures and what it all means in the cosmic sense? Not so much. I'll just stick with the hard-luck hardscrabble angst and leave the rest of that high-falutin' shit to the "Fifty Places" crowd.

Which brings me to the original point of the blog...

I recently picked up a copy of "Rivers of Memory" which was published in 1993, the year of Middleton's death. It's a little book, eight essays, barely a hundred pages long and long out of print. It's a highly-collectable title, I got it for a good price and as such it will go in my meager collection of decent books, but not before being read, of course. And like all of Middleton's books, it gyrates wildly between passages of forlorn darkness and sublime wonder, all in the arc of a single sentence...

Each night as I haul myself onto the back of county garbage truck number two, there is familiar wind, some shred of moonglow or starlight, a splatter of dark rain on my skin, something that stirs my memory, and again, if even for a brief moment, I am on some mountain river, some stretch of bright water, water full of possibilities, including the possibility of trout, perhaps one that, when hooked, will haul me in and out of time, in and out of life's mysterious and frightening, wondrous and incomprehensible continuum, even to the edges of the universe.

Good stuff...  

A Little Maudlin Nostalgia...

A while back I wrote a blog detailing my penchant for collecting old and largely-worthless fishing tackle from the seventies and early eighties, explaining that...

"I have a special interest in vintage tackle and ads from the seventies and eighties because well, that's when I came of age. I'm constantly cruising the pawn shops and little small-town hardware stores for the tackle that time forgot. Old rods, reels, tackle and tackle boxes: it's amazing what's still out there sitting on store shelves. Whether it's pawn shops or some old ramshackle small-town bait store, I'm always on the prowl...old tackle from the seventies is like drinking an ice-cold coke made with real sugar out of a glass bottle with a bunch of salty peanuts in it, a delicious and fleeting evocation of a time and place you can't get back to."

And one of the places I most often frequented back in the age of sideburns and polyester was the venerable and ubiquitous chain of Oklahoma-based auto supply stores known as OTASCO. Like most typical Main Street-based auto parts-hardware-variety stores of yore (think Western Auto, Montgomery Ward's, TG&Y, Sears, etc...) OTASCO carried a full line of sporting goods.

My first bicycle came from OTASCO (a Flying O, remember them?) My first .22 came from OTASCO (a Winchester 190) and in all likelihood my first fishing pole came from OTASCO, though I was far too young to remember. OTASCO sold a surprising variety of fishing and hunting equipment, and the downtown Norman store was, along with the TG&Y just down the street, one of the icons of my childhood. If I had a nickel for every cardboard tube of Daisy BBs I purchased from that store...

But eventually, inevitably, OTASCO went the way of virtually every other sporting-goods retailer of that era. Some, like Sears, stopped selling hunting and fishing gear altogether (every time I walk into a Sears today I want to cry) while others, like TG&Y (damn how I loved that place) and OTASCO slowly closed stores until they disappeared. I can't remember exactly when the central Oklahoma stores closed. I do remember buying shotgun shells at the Noble, Oklahoma OTASCO up until sometime around the mid to late eighties, but by the end of the decade OTASCO was done for.

I hadn't thought about OTASCO in years, but yesterday I was perusing the Fishing For History blog and what did I see as this week's installment of the blog's excellent series "52 Trade Houses in 52 Weeks" but a very interesting history of the Oklahoma Tire and Supply Co., which is, of course, OTASCO.

Cool stuff, and an interesting read if you grew up anywhere near one of OTASCO's 455 stores scattered across 12 states. After reading it I immediately went and rummaged through some of my old junk. A cursory search didn't reveal any OTASCO-branded tackle (though I think I do have some lying around somewhere) or hunting gear (although I'm pretty sure I've got a few old shotgun shell boxes with OTASCO price stickers on them, again, somewhere...) but I did manage to come up with this:

Back in the day (early to mid-eighties, maybe?) that was the largest (1500 count) box of Daisy BBs you could buy (at least that I'm aware) and I went through a ton of them. I almost certainly purchased this box (and another I still have) from the Norman OTASCO when I was in the fourth or fifth grade. I have no idea why I still have it, but I sure wish I still had the old-school, wood-stocked Crosman 760 through which I shot all my BBs back then. Which was bought at...OTASCO.

Ahhh, good times...

Mallard's Infinite Playlist: Song of September...

I am - for the most part - a proud ignoramus when it comes to sports. I never played sports (my youth was given over wholly to fishing, hunting, drinking beer and skipping school to repeat items 1,2 and 3), and I never grew up around anyone who did, so it's not that I've lost interest in sports, it's that I never cared to begin with. I couldn't tell you who won the Super Bowl last year (the Dodgers, right?) or the World Series, or that Stanley Bowl thing. I have no clue what an ERA is and I don't know my AL West from my NL East.

I've heard that my home state now has a professional basketball team, the Thunderclap something or other, but since watching basketball interests me about as much as watching platypuses screw, I know nothing of the team, other than most of us here in Oklahoma pay much more attention to our millionaire ballplayers than we do our low thousandaire public-school teachers (current ranking: 49th! Break out the Andre! OK, OK, I'll stop being a political bore...)

But there is one glaring exception to my disinterest. See, I grew up in Norman, Oklahoma. And when you grow up in Norman, Oklahoma, you are beaten daily as a child until you develop an interest in Sooner football (honest, it's in the city charter). So gradually, even if you're not naturally inclined to do so, your interest in college football grows, along with the scar tissue on your backside, until one day you wake up and realize that you are one of them, a...fan.

Sounds brutal, I know, but at least in Oklahoma it's confined to Norman. I hear that in Nebraska - a state much like Oklahoma in its lack of excitement but with only one state university football program to distract its people from ingesting meth and/or watching crops grow - the required beating is a statewide mandate. That would certainly explain a lot... (I kid, I kid my Nebraska homies).

I mean, let's face it: it's Oklahoma we're talking about. It's not like we have a helluva lot we can point to in this state and say "see, look how good we are at this!" So for the past half-century or so we have placed our collective pride and our sense of shared self-worth in the on-field accomplishments of the University of Oklahoma football team (sorry Aggie fans, but it's true...).

And as much as I hate to admit it, as much as the snobbish too-good-for-sports, shun-the-herd iconoclast in me fervently wants it to be otherwise, when I hear this song I completely understand how emotionally invested someone can get in a hometown sports team.

                        


When I was a student at OU I used to live in a crummy little apartment on the south edge of campus, an area that during WWII had been part of a military base. It's mostly developed now, but back in the mid-90s it was an overgrown, largely forgotten jumble of crumbling old buildings and encroaching wildness.

On Saturday mornings during dove season (and later deer bow)I would throw my shotgun in a dufflebag, hop on the bike, cross the highway south of campus and go hunt the south Canadian riverbottom. But even then, miles away from the stadium, I could still hear the roar of the crowd and the band playing the fight song, and I'd hum along to it, heart swelling with Sooner Pride.

"OK," you ask, "if you're such a fan, what the hell were you doing dove hunting when you should have been there watching the game, supporting your school, your team and watching stalking admiring your future wife?" (who as a member of the Pride of Oklahoma's flag corps spent every fall Saturday marching on Owen Field to that very song)

To which I can only reply, it was dove season, man, and during hunting season being a fan has its limits...

And just to give you an example of that, the Sooners are a consensus pre-season #1 and we're the odds-on favorite to win the national championship, but one of the toughest and most important games of the year is September 17th at sixth-ranked Florida State. Every Sooner fan has had that date circled all year.

Where will I be? Hunting prairie chickens in Kansas. Like I said, being a fan has its limits. But you can bet your ass I'll have a radio...

When Good Arachnids Go Bad...

Damn, the economy must really be in the dumper when you've got superheros knocking over convenience stores...

From this story in the Oklahoman

Police are looking for a man who wore a Spider-Man mask and another masked robber who pointed a gun at a clerk's head during a convenience store robbery. About 8:40 p.m. Aug. 5, police were sent to Fred's Food Mart at 3123 N. Portland Ave., police Master Sgt. Gary Knight said. The store surveillance camera captured video of the robbery. The man who aimed the gun at the clerk was wearing the Spider-Man mask. The other robber can be seen wearing a blue mask in the video.

Maybe he lost a ton of money on the Broadway musical debacle? Or maybe crime-fighting just doesn't pay any more, but I figured if Spider-Man really wanted to steal from the public he'd be smart enough to run for public office instead of this penny-ante stuff. But whaddya expect from a superhero who can't fly and can be killed with a can of Raid? You damn sure wouldn't see Superman robbing the Quickie-Mart...

In other news, apologies for the (continued) lack of activity on the blog, but damn, can you blame me? Who the hell can be motivated to find anything to say in the dead of summer? I sure can't. Can't train dogs. Can't fish. Can't find anything worth saying.

But September is two weeks away. And with apologies to Havilah Babcock, my health (mental and otherwise) starts getting better in September.

Until then, watch out for six-foot spiders...

Hot Enough For 'Ya?

Yesterday my shaded back porch thermometer hit 109, and if anything, it reads a degree or two cool. We're now in something like our fiftieth (a little less, a little more depending on location) day of 100-degree or higher temps for the year. This July has just been officially declared the hottest month ever recorded in the oven formerly known as Oklahoma (quite the accomplishment for a state not known for the gentleness of its climate...) Today, Oklahoma City will likely break its all-time record high temperature. No rain, and no rain in the extended forecast, either.

Meanwhile, far southwest Oklahoma and a huge chunk of Texas is in even worse shape. Think moonscape, throw in the surface temperature of Mercury for good measure and you get a decent idea of what those folks are dealing with. The latest newsletter from the Rolling Plains Quail Research Ranch  reads like, well, an obituary for the coming quail season. And we're just now (just now!) entering what is traditionally the hottest three-week period of the year. Yay.

I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I'm going to have to drive for my bird hunting this year. And I'm beginning to suspect that - despite the fact I now have a boat to duck hunt out of - I will have no water on which to float the damn thing because the area lakes will be too low to launch boats.

And dog training? Fuggetabout it. Don't want to take the chance running the dogs in this heat, and every bit of water around me is either gone or coated with a nasty green sheen of algae, dead fish and beer cans.


A few days ago, in an e-mail to Steve Bodio I jokingly wrote "forecast high tomorrow of 107 and 110 on Tuesday. I used to think it was just bird season that was looking grim. I may have to upgrade that pessimism forecast to include existence itself...

Hyperbole or a wee bit of whistling past the graveyard? I guess we'll see in the next decade or so, but I've got one eye (and a head full of daydreams) trained in the direction of Montana. And I'm not the only one...

You just have to ask yourself what's worse: winter in Montana or summer in Oklahoma? Decisions, decisions...

Assorted Doggerel...

While walking the aisles at the Pheasants Forever Pheasant Fest in Omaha earlier this year, I was delighted to discover a booth for the American Chesapeake Club displaying this cool vintage poster from the now-defunct Storz Brewery.

I had never heard of Storz beer, but I'm told that back in the day it was a fairly popular regional brew up in that part of the world. And even if it tasted about like it sounds, I'm sure I could choke down a few in appreciation of the chessie art.

I started talking to the poster's owners, who, as it turned out, were close friends with the breeder of my male Lewey, and in fact had owned Leweys great-great-great-grandsire on Lewey's dam's side, which was this dog...

  
They had a couple chessies there with them that I, regrettably, completely forgot to take pics of, one of which was (I believe, but I may be wrong...) Bur Oak's Authentic Jessica, who would have been Lewey's grand-dam. Small world. But since I can't remember my own family tree, much less my dogs', I may very well be wrong on that. At any rate, it was an enjoyable visit, if a somewhat bittersweet reminder that at some point I'm going to have to think about a new pup to take Lewey's place.

And on to flying setters...

Just because the mercury's sitting on 103 as I type this, and snow is but a distant memory...

Paging Dr. Dolittle...

Over on the Quail Forever  website I recently blogged about watering my yard during a drought. In short, we're up to our ears in wildlife. Not surprising, considering our backyard is (to put it mildly) of the non-manicured variety (mostly weeds, in fact) and is as wildlife-friendly as I can make it.

But what's really bringing them in is the water. Earlier this year, right before this insane drought/heat wave really cranked up, we had a small sprinkler system installed around our yard and garden. We did it not because we're interested in having a trophy lawn (we're not) but because it's literally the only way to keep any vegetation alive in our sandy soil. I hadn't planned on it becoming an oasis for drought-stricken wildlife, but that's exactly what it's turned into. Between that and the "water garden" (i.e. the bait tank) our little acre or so of greenery is fast becoming like those mid-summer water holes you see on the African documentaries...

I can now say I've finally found a good use for watering the yard. We've had more quail whistling around the house year than we've ever had...

Deer? We've had more than we can count. We've got does with one fawn...

We've got does with two fawns...(eating flowers)

We've got a tom who has, quite literally, moved in with us. He hangs out in the back yard all day long, sleeping in our flowerbed...

And when he gets up to scratch around the bird feeder, there's always a doe hanging around to steal his spot...

Bugger off, birdbrain. This is my bed now...

And we have several regular hens who come in on a daily basis, but a few days ago we had one bring in the family (or what's left of it thanks to the neighborhood feral cats, coons and skunks...)

There were actually three chicken-sized poults tagging along, but I couldn't get them all in frame because not only are the animal enjoying the greenery, the 'hoppers are, too, and these guys were buggin' all over the yard.

I can't really tell how the various hatches have gone off this year. I've seen several groups of poults around the neighborhood this size, as well as several about twice as large, so at least for the turkeys it looks like a decent year, anyway. Not like we really needed any more turkeys...

What we need are quail, and as for Mr. Bob, the jury's still out, I think. I haven't seen any chicks in the yard, although I do have several hens and/or pairs hanging around, and we saw a hen riding herd on a group of chicks on the way to the lake last week. Guess we'll find out in November, if it ever gets here...

In addition, we're plum covered up in leopard frogs eating grasshoppers, ribbon snakes eating leopard frogs and coons eating ribbon snakes and whatever else they can stuff down their throats. We've got sharpies and Cooper's picking off songbirds, cottontails trying to pick off my garden, short-eared owls picking off the rabbits and the turkey vultures getting the last word on everyone. Nothing like epic drought to make things chummy. It's a regular chain 'o life in our back yard this summer. The Disney crowd would be enthralled. Or horrified

In fact, I half expect to wake up some morning and have a pair of mallards swimming around the water garden. And if we don't get any rain - and soon -  it may end up being my go-to duck hunting spot this year...

Re-visiting Some Old Stuff

Too hot to train dogs. Too hot to fish. Too hot to even think about the promise of fall and birds and dogs, so I'm re-reading some old favorites. Because when you're lazy the assurance of the known trumps the promise of the unknown any day...

One old favorite I just pulled from the shelf and dusted off for a read is Okla Hannali by RA Lafferty. Go on, you can admit it: you've never heard of him. Neither has anyone else. Neither had I, until I was compelled to read Okla Hannali for a western history class at OU. Who says college isn't worth it?

Lafferty was an interesting dude. He's no longer in print, but you can find most of his stuff if you look hard enough and are willing to pay. Here's a little backpage obit I wrote for our state magazine back in 2002 when Lafferty died, broken, broke and alone, in a Tulsa nursing home.

It is somehow fitting - however tragically so- that the best Oklahoma book no one has ever read was penned by the best Oklahoma author no one has ever heard of, but if history is rife with examples of literary genius discovered postmortem then perhaps Tulsa’s Raphael Aloysius Lafferty will now finally get his due.



The genre-warping author and self-described “cranky old man from Tulsa” who died in a Broken Arrow nursing home earlier this year at the age of 87, wrote dozens of books and hundreds of short stories in a career that only began in his forties. However, despite his prolific output Lafferty never achieved widespread fame, due in no small part to his eclectic subject matter and absolutely unique writing style.


While Lafferty is generally categorized as a science fiction/fantasy writer, his work has always defied such neat and tidy pigeonholes. In 1972, one year before Lafferty won a Hugo award for his science fiction short story “Eurema’s Dam” he published “Okla Hannali”, a historical novel that chronicles the history of the Choctaw tribe in Oklahoma through its protagonist, Hannali Innominee. That he could do both genres so well - and yet remain so widely unknown – is both a testament to his genius as a writer and a pointed reminder that genius is often unmarketable.


Despite the sci-fi label, Lafferty’s writing - with its peculiar style and structure - has often been compared to that of James Joyce. No matter the subject, Lafferty’s surreal tall tales exhibit a lilting, singsong cadence, an unmistakable stamp that enthralls his hard-core fans but forces some who try to read him to simply give up, hopelessly entangled in Lafferty’s syntactic jungle.


It is that slightly askew, wildly imaginative style that firmly entrenched both Lafferty’s cult status and his obscurity.


Virtually an entire generation of sci-fi writers credits him as an influence, but the vast majority of Lafferty’s work is long out of print and extremely rare, primarily because much of it was originally published in low numbers by small, independent presses.


As such, there is no such thing as a definitive Lafferty bibliography. Some of Lafferty’s work remains alive on the publishing fringes, available from the small indie and underground presses that have always sustained him, but for the most part Lafferty‘s books are now the exclusive domain of book scouts, fans and collectors.


“Okla Hannali” is a notable exception. In 1991 the University of Oklahoma Press resurrected Lafferty’s hypnotic tale of the Choctaw nation, and Oklahoma’s literary landscape is richer for it. Few books - fiction or non-fiction - capture the mood of Indian Territory as completely as Lafferty’s, and his singular style imparts a dreamy, songline-like quality to the tale.


Lafferty’s death barely registered in popular literary circles, but perhaps his passing will rekindle scholarly and the reading public’s interest in his work. Both the University of Tulsa and the University of Iowa maintain Lafferty collections, and, of course, there is that vast, amorphous body of work strewn across the dusty corners of the literary landscape, just waiting to be rediscovered.


Until then, however, R.A. Lafferty’s legacy and his contributions to Oklahoma and world literature will remain much as they always have – unknown.


Good stuff, if you ever come across it...

Blogging Escher-Style...

I can log in to post a blog, but when I try to log in to respond to a comment, or to comment on anyone else's Blogger-based blog, it prompts me for my username/password, and then when I do that, it shows the comment being from "anonymous."

And then, when I try to post the comment, even as "anonymous" it then - in a nice little bit of circularity -  sends me right back to the Google sign-in page to start the whole futile process over again...

Any ideas? Is a wholesale move to say, Wordpress in the future?