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Real Picture

That picture of Cary Grant on the previous page may fool some of the people some of the time. Then again, it may not. I hope the rest of you see it as an example about truth and fiction on the Internet *. Cary Grant, for those of you under 30, was a movie star famous for wit, charm and an impeccable wardrobe. You've just seen an example of my wit. The only charm I have is on a keychain and my wardrobe, as you can see, is peccable.

I have given up smoking, though.

* Laugh if you will. There are gullible people on the Internet who have copied genealogy data as specious as the previous picture. They have men and women who married at the age of 8, women who gave birth at age 8 and at age 80, men who fathered five children from the grave and men who were born in 1789 who managed to serve in the American Revolution. Be careful. Things are not always as they seem.

Man in Peru with a black-chested eagle-buzzard on his hat.

This, by contrast, really is what is seems - a picture of me, in Peru in 2008, with a black-chested eagle-buzzard on my hat. It isn't a wild bird; the gentleman who owns it makes a simple living by renting his eagle out to tourists who want to have a picture of themselves with an eagle on their hat.

He has a stand across the street from a clean bathroom where the tour busses stop, in the Colca Canyon. He charges one nuevo sole (about 35 cents US, when we were there) per person. On a good day he can collect 20 - 40 soles. By comparison, our daughter's host father earned 10 nuevo soles a day as a farm laborer. He works from sunup to about 1 pm.

Our daughter was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Peru.

"Sole" is pronounced "soh-lay".