Well, as long as he or she is a smart, effective Democrat. It's one thing to be born into the Church of Latter Day Saints and then stick with it, but it's quite another to convert to Mormonism. Anybody who does that has to be seriously deficient intellectually. Ely, Nevada.

"One recalls the question that was asked by Chinese when the first Christian missionaries made their appearance. If god has revealed himself, how is it that he has allowed so many centuries to elapse before informing the Chinese?"

"If I can definitively prove that the usefulness of religion is in the past, and that its foundational books are transparent fables, and that it is a man-made imposition, and that it has been an enemy of science and inquiry, and that it has subsisted largely on lies and fears, and been the accomplice of ignorance and guilt as well as slavery, genocide, racism, and tyranny, I can most certainly claim that religion is now fully aware of these criticisms. It is also fully aware of the ever-mounting evidence, concerning the origins of the cosmos and the origin of species, which consign it to marginality if not to irrelevance."

A very pastel-looking Black Pine Mountain behind Malta, Idaho.

Pen for outside dogs.

Airstream's got nothing on this rig.

Fragments from the westering experience, probably 150 to 175 years old. The blogger found a ceramic pottery chip and what is likely a broken hinge on a remote stretch of the California Trail, west of the Raft River where that trail and the Oregon Trail split. The California Trail was an emigrants' wagon road in the mid-1800s and an overland route to and from the California gold fields for '49ers.

On the horizon: Black Pine Mountain, southeastern Idaho.