Want Peace? Elect Scrawny Men.

Breaking news:


1. Among men, there seems to be a link between physical strength and aggressiveness. (You may have noticed that NFL linebackers seem eager to engage in violent collisions with other large, strong men. Likewise, your average boxer seems overjoyed to have knocked an opponent unconscious in the ring. )

2. Exceptionally beautiful women can be, at times, a little... well... high-maintenance. (Enough said.)


As always, Home Range provides clear-eyed analysis of the latest science. According to Tom Jacobs at Miller-McCune:





"The power of [Vladimir] Putin's symbolism [expressed in recent photos showing his physicue] is explained by a provocative paper just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Authors Sell, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, link physical strength in men with both a propensity to anger easily and a favorable attitude toward the use of force to settle political disputes.


"'If governmental decision-makers are like other humans, then their musculature may be playing a role, unconnected from rational evaluation, in their decisions to go to war,"'they write. It's a bold statement, but one based on a somewhat startling premise: Brawniness, they contend, is next to thuggishness."

Jacobs quotes psychologist Aaron Sell:

"This model of behavior, in Sell's words, 'predicts that individuals with enhanced abilities to inflict costs or to confer benefits will anger more easily, for two related reasons. First, their greater ability to withdraw benefits or inflict costs translates into greater leverage in bargaining over conflicts of interest, meaning that anger is more likely to be successful for them. ... Second, their greater leverage leads them to expect that others will place greater weight on their welfare.'"

The researchers tested their hypothesis by measuring upper body strength of university students and subjecting them to questions designed to measure their temper, history of conflict, and general hawkishness. Not surprisingly, the stronger students seemed to have shorter fuses and placed greater importance on national defense than did their less-brawny counterparts.

I accept their results, but I'm not buying their broader interpretation.

Early in my rather short and unremarkable college football career I noticed, like most of the other freshmen athletes, that the biggest assholes, the ones most likely to start a fight, were nearly always marginal upperclassmen who felt threatened by more talented underclassmen. The most physically imposing players, though they were extremely violent on the playing field, were more likely to be humble and easy-going off the field. Sure, some were thugs, but most weren't. The strongest man on the team, a guard who could bench press well over 500 pounds, had a reputation for being especially kind and helpful toward freshmen.

Perhaps strong men fought more during their playground and locker room years simply because they believed they had a good chance of defending themselves whereas weaker boys and young men chose to flee or put up with abuse rather than risk a beating. Please understand that I'm not excusing or minimizing the misery inflicted by sadistic jocks and other large thugs. Nearly every group has its sadists and violent, capricious, paranoid kooks. I suspect that bullies tend to be physically strong only because strong young men have an easier time bullying. Are we to assume that violent fantasies and tendencies are extremely rare among weaklings?

During my years in the engineering world, I noticed no connection between physical stature and belligerence. In fact, the most notorious corporate bullies and guerrilla warriors - the ones I had the poor fortune to work with, anyway - were physically unremarkable. I assume that their apparent arrogance and pugnacity stemmed from inborn temperament and the cognitive ability that allowed them to dominate their high-tech work environment.

Admittedly, mine isn't a scientific survey, but I stand by it. When I was young, I loved to hit people on the football field. I'll even go so far as to say that I enjoyed the unavoidable pain that comes with any good collision. I never felt a moment's remorse about the separated shoulders, cracked ribs, and at least one concussion that I caused. I had my share of off-the-field brawls, though I never started one, and I've always hated bullies. And I damn sure understood the difference between behind-the-bowling alley fisticuffs and a military invasion. I don't think I'm unique in that regard.

Fresh out of college, I reported to my first engineering job along with about a dozen other young engineers and scientists. Compared to today's collegiate football players, I was a little fart, but I was far and away the biggest guy in my group of new-hires, and the only ex-jock. During that first week, our boss, a very skinny middle-aged engineer, called each of us in separately to discuss company policy. After covering vacation, sick days, and various acts that could get me fired, he said, "...and if you ever shove or punch anyone, you're out the door."

During lunchtime discussions, I learned that I was the only one of the group to receive that warning.

Naturally, I wanted to storm into my boss's office and knock his head right off of his skinny neck.

Okay, seriously, my new boss didn't know me at all. He made a quick judgement based on my appearance or perhaps my Kentucky drawl. (You know us hicks. We're always going around killing things. )Perhaps he thought, "This guy is a lot bigger than me, and he talks like a redneck. He might hit somebody. I had better warn him." His comment didn't bother me at all; it merely seemed odd. I knew that I was harmless and couldn't imagine that anyone could suspect otherwise.

Nevertheless, I try to keep that experience in mind.

A thought: President Obama is slender but fit, and, I suspect, quite strong for his age and weight. It's likely that he's every bit as strong as the equally fit George W. Bush. I seriously doubt that Senator John McCain, even in his prime and adjusting for his long mistreatment by his North Vietnamese captors, was much if any stronger than the current president. Gerald Ford, probably the best athlete to ever serve as President, is often remembered for his even temper and conciliatory tendencies.

As for data that suggest a positive relationship between feminine beauty and sense of entitlement ... well ... I'll defer to the experts.

Book News

Working Dogs of Texas should be out late next month.

Wyman and I have started work on Under One Fence, a photostudy of the giant Waggoner Ranch. It should be out Fall 2010. If you liked 6666: Portrait of a Texas Ranch, you'll like this one too.

In June, I signed a contract with Texas Tech University Press to write Right of Capture: The Looming Water Crisis in Texas. A publication date hasn't been set, but I expect the book will come out in late 2011.

I'm trying not to panic. I'll finish wearing out my pickup doing the research.

Why I Love The Onion

Advocacy Group Decries PETA's Inhumane Treatment Of Women

A Highly Satisfying Moment

I just emailed the last few corrections to the publisher and tossed the galley proofs of Working Dogs of Texas into the tattered cardboard file box full of manuscript drafts, notebooks, interviews, correspondence, clippings, and magazine articles dating back to 2003, when Wyman Meinzer and I first started talking about collaborating on a book about working dogs.

If you've ever written a book, you know the feeling.

Working Dogs will be out this fall.

I have plenty of other work to do today, but I'm in a celebratory mood. I'll probably just put the lid on the box and go for a nice, long walk.

Self-Sufficiency Percentage

Matt Mullenix raised an interesting figure in his comment to my last post, "Endangered Agribusiness."

"Just think how large a cow Big Ag would have if the average American provided even as little as 10% his food needs through gardening and hunting?"

Have any of you ever put pencil to paper to calculate how big your garden would have to be or how much fish and game you'd have to put away for you and your family to achieve a certain level of self-sufficiency?

I like Matt's figure of 10 percent self-sufficient. It seems reasonable, though I'm afraid I'd be shocked at just how much gardening, hunting, and fishing I would have to do to achieve it - even for just Jane and me.

Any thoughts? Suggestions for making such a calculation?

Endangered Agribusiness

Matt and all of my other fellow organic gardeners out there, we've got it all wrong, as this letter helpfully points out.

Is somebody feeling a little insecure?

Patrick Deneen and the folks at Front Porch Republic are all over it.

The Intermittent Gardener

I can either garden responsibly or travel. I can't seem to do both during growing season. After being away for only a few days, I returned to find that my little garden had nearly gotten away from me.

It seemed my radishes had exploded.

And my container tomatoes, which had looked great when I left, are showing signs of nitrogen deficiency.

Still, things are coming along. The little peppers are Cubanelle. I need to do something about the uneven, over-crowded, unruly carrots.

I gave the container tomatoes a shot of liquid fish. They ought to look better in few days, and they are making fruit.

These are Bush Early Girls.

These are Better Bush, another indeterminate variety that does very well in containers.

My Anaheim peppers are doing well in a container. They aren't the nitrogen hogs that tomatoes are. My daughter Sarah and her boyfriend were eyeing them today. They both love hot, spicy things. I warned them. I expect missing peppers any day now.

Some thinning in the raised bed yielded this little bunch of radishes - cherry bell and white icicle.

Then, there's the embarrassing Left Bed. Note the paltry pole beans and ridiculous, lonesome pepper plant. Evidently, when I switched from engineering to full-time writing I lost the ability to count. That extra pepper plant had to go somewhere.

The poor beans - Kentucky Wonders, which grow well nearly everywhere - got off to a very late start, thanks to your intermittent and distracted gardener who happened to be struggling with an article deadline. Then, evidently believing that the Intermittent Gardener had sown the beans at an insufficient depth, a certain elderly beagle belonging to a certain inattentive daughter tromped them in a good bit deeper.

Worse yet, I broke an ancient taboo and sowed onions close to the beans. I thought I could get away with it. After all, I left a generous buffer area, and besides, I had never heard or read a scientific explanation of why one oughtn't plant onions close to beans. My parents' explanation, "Beans and onions aren't good neighbors," wasn't sufficient. Who really knew? Dad and Mom, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and others who planted and tended our family garden had never tried planting the two close together because everyone knew that you just didn't do that. Was it a matter of taste or did the plants not grow well together? Nobody seemed to know.

(Why oh why didn't I pay more attention to these dear folks, watch them more closely instead of mindlessly doing what I was told? They knew how to garden. I never ate store-bought vegetables until I went away to college. Now they've all passed on, and I don't remember how Dad built his tomato ladders.)

Anyway, I broke the taboo. Of course my onions did poorly and my beans developed some kind of nasty rust and stopped growing. Sure, the unusually wet spring could have been the culprit, but I felt the wrath of my ancestors. I ripped out the stunted onions and the worst of the beans. A dose of compost tea, followed by a helping of liquid fish and seaweed a couple of weeks later seems to have revived the remaining beans. I worked in an inch of compost where the onions had been. After another week's rest, I'll sow some more beans. We have plenty of growing season left. We'll see.

Thank goodness Jane rarely checks this blog. If she knew I had been out back photographing our little kitchen garden, I'd never hear the end of it.

East Texas Forests

In case you're interested, my article on the history and status of the East Texas Forests just appeared in the June 2009 Issue of Texas Parks & Wildlife. You can check out the online version here.

Beautiful color photos as well as archival photos from the old logging days accompany the print version. Here are a few snapshots I took back in early February at Boykin Springs, one of the last and best places in Texas to see nice stands of longleaf pine.

Note the blackened boles and open open, grassy woods. Fire is a critical component in the longleaf forest.

Another National Treasure

Since reading "An American National Treasure," Mark's post on Bill Mallonee, I've wanted to say something about one of my own favorite singer-songwriters, Buddy Miller. Of course when I speak of Buddy Miller, I'm really thinking of Buddy and his wife, Julie, who, nowadays, does most of the writing.

Like all novelists, I daydream about movie adaptations of my novels, and whenever I think of a movie based on The Callings, I always imagine music written and performed by the Millers.


Until a few years ago, I had always thought about Buddy Miller in terms of his long association with Emmylou Harris. Then one day while I was browsing in a bookstore, a song jumped out of the background music, and I dropped whatever book or magazine I was considering and hustled back to the music department to ask what was playing. The sales clerk walked over to the "Americana" section and pulled out Midnight and Lonesome. I've been a Buddy and Julie fan ever since.



Here's Buddy talking about his new CD:





Here's one of my favorites, "Worry too Much," from Universal United House of Prayer. I'd call it a protest song.





Like Bill Mallonee, Buddy and Julie Miller are often regarded as Christian artists, and some of their best songs reflect their faith. But you certainly don't have to be religious to enjoy their music, and I doubt that their songs get much (if any) play on Christian stations. They get lots of airtime on the Alt-Country stations here in Texas.


Here's one from Written in Chalk. I believe it's called "Chalk."





And a nice segment with Buddy and one of his favorite guitars:



Sure, some of Buddy and Julie Miller's songs are very simple, earnest, even sentimental. Twenty years ago, I probably would have rolled my eyes. Nowadays, it doesn't take me long to get my fill of nihilism and irony. More and more, a Buddy and Julie song is exactly what I need to hear.

Sure-Enough Cowdogs

Leo, Randy Walker's Catahoula Cur. They don't come any tougher. How 'bout them eyes?

Helping the boss catch a horse or is Bubba just limbering up for a day's work?

Several weeks back, I spent a couple days at Ranger Creek Ranch, on the Rolling Plains near Seymour, Texas. I wrote about the visit in a short travel piece for Texas Highways. Of course I did all of the standard travel writer things, but what I enjoyed most was watching Randy Walker work his cowdogs, Leo, a Catahoula Cur, and Buster and Bubba, a pair of Catahoula-border collie mixes. Randy likes the Catahoula's grit and cow sense and the border collie's brains, class, and trainability. The crossings are working very well. He runs a cow-calf operation, which calls for gritty dogs - dogs that probably would be way too rough for sheep.

On the second morning, I watched Randy and the dogs work a small group of yearlings that weren't dog-broke. My snapshots don't do the dogs justice. Fortunately, Wyman Meinzer and I are putting the finishing touches on Working Dogs of Texas. Believe me; Wyman's photos do working dogs justice, and Randy's dogs will be in the book.

For now, though, you'll have to make due with my amateur shots.

Randy and the boys.

Getting Started

Don't Mess with Leo

Somebody gets a bright idea...

...and pays the price.

More Lazy Blogging

In case any of my fellow dog lovers are interested, I've uploaded my March and May Texas Wildlife working dog columns and a Texas Wildlife feature article on small game hunting to my website. You can check them out here: http://www.byhenrychappell.com/_i_texas_wildlife__i__68129.htm.

Enjoy!

A Man I'd Like to Know

Here's a man who knows how to thrive in a recession. (Hat tip to CW)