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played by Bjorn Stabi and Ole Hjorth.

My wife is an enthusiast of this kind of music. She has an on-line reference site. This music for this waltz is #1061 on this web-page.

What could be more appropriate?

Russel Ferster is one heck of a bow shot is all I have to say.

Sporting Classics:

Ferster was hoping to put his archery skills to good use September 11, 2016, but not on a bear, and certainly not in a life-or-death situation. He and his 11-year-old brother, Lane, were elk hunting in Montana’s Crazy Mountains when a black bear responded to their cow call.

“We weren’t even fifteen minutes out of the pickup and I decided to cow call twice,” Ferster told the Billings Gazette.

The bear burst from nearby cover and closed to within 15 yards in an instant. Ferster said it appeared to be after the “elk” and not after he and his brother. Ferster has had this occur before while elk hunting, so he raised his hands and shouted at the bear as he had done in the past.

This bear, however, wasn’t deterred.

The bear began pouncing up and down on its front legs, much like a grizzly does when it presses down on a recently killed animal. Ferster is used to dealing with grizzlies, too, so much so that he has quit hunting in several areas that held the bigger bears. But despite his usual caution, he had failed to bring either a handgun or bear spray with him on this elk hunt.

He drew his bow in readiness for a possible attack, but his movement caused the bear to surge toward him.

“He came at 100 miles an hour,” Ferster said. “I had a split second to aim and hit him in the only place that would stop him in his tracks.”

That place was the eye. His arrow met the bear’s left eye, driving inward and upward through the bear’s head. It dropped the bear almost at Ferster’s feet, the broadhead lodged just inside its skull and the nock touching Ferster’s leg.

Read the whole thing.

James Kirchik takes a 75-Year-Old Harper’s story, “Who Goes Nazi?” and finds that it often applies word-for-word in the current American context.

Written by Dorothy Thompson, the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany, the article presents readers with the aforementioned “macabre parlor game” in which she secretly assesses which guests at a random social function might “go Nazi” given the proper political and social conditions. As Thompson keenly observed from her time in Germany, there was no single demographic “type” of Nazi supporter; workers and businessmen and intellectuals and landed gentry all backed Adolf Hitler’s political movement, just as workers and businessmen and intellectuals and landed gentry opposed it. There were even Jews, Thompson wrote, “who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become “Honorary Aryans and Nazis.” Nazism, Thompson argues, “appeals to a certain type of mind,” not a rigid composite. As such, her article is a timeless analysis of the authoritarian mentality and makes for disturbingly relevant reading today. …

“Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi,” Dorothy Thompson wrote. “Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t—whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi.” … These people are lacking “something in them,” a moral code, and their very large numbers are a troubling indicator of a rot in the American soul.

Read the whole thing.

T.H. White, 1906-1964

A nice bit of reading for hunting season, here.

Hat tip to Steve Bodio. (I read it first in his Anthology.)

Research into human DNA has established that some homo sapiens, long, long ago, interbred with Neanderthals. (Hey! democrats had to come from somewhere.) But more recent research into the DNA of South Pacific islanders had found ancestry from Neanderthals and Denisovians and from a previously unknown third hominid group.

Daily Mail:

Islanders in the Pacific Ocean may be may be carrying traces of a long lost human species locked up in their DNA.

Today, modern humans inherit a small chunk of our genes from Neanderthals, with evidence that some of us carry the genetic remnants of a lesser known sister group, called the Denisovans.

But genetic analysis of people living in modern Melanesia suggests they carry traces of a third, as yet unidentified prehistoric relative distinct from the others.

The island groups of Melanesia – which includes Papua New Guinea, Fiji and the Solomon Islands and others – are geographically cut off by the Pacific Ocean, with their DNA providing a unique window into how human ancestors spread across the region.

The latest research, presented at a meeting of the American Society for Human Genetics in Vancouver, bolsters previous findings that there may be another strand to the story of modern humans, with multiple groups of prehistoric human interbreeding.

Read the whole thing.