This year three talented musicians playing the fiddle gave concerts in Hood River at the Columbia Arts Center sponsored by the Oak Street Hotel. If your vision is of corncobs, hay seeds and blue bib overalls when you hear the word fiddler you might want to revise your image.

Hanneke Cassel, April Verch and Randal Bays can be found on Amazon and iTunes. Listen to their playing and marvel at their versatility.

Mark your calendar for the first weekend of May 2008. Hood River will be hosting the first Columbia Gorge Fiddle Championship. You will be able to hear fiddlers from under 8 to over 80 years old playing a variety of old-time and Texas-style fiddle tunes to compete for prize money and have the opportunity to jam with other musicians. Acoustic instruments like guitar and mandolin picking will be featured, too.

Do not trespass

What is wrong these days with people and trespassing? A couple of months ago my dog’s shock collar (a collar which keeps him on our property) was removed from his neck. It is nowhere to be found. The other day, my daughter and I went to saddle up her horse, but we noticed something was wrong. Someone had twisted and knotted her mane so badly that we have to cut some of it to get it untangled.

I don’t know who it was or if it was some kids that were bored. All I know is that I am going to have to spend over $60 to replace the collar and hours untangling the mane.

People, young and old, need to respect other people’s property. Please ask the owners before going on their property.

Gambling issues

The proposal to allow Native American tribes to build an off-reservation casino in Cascade Locks is a prime example of the continued increase and reliance on legalized gambling in our state, despite the very evident risks to marriage and families associated with gambling.

Before you support a new casino in our back yard, consider the long-term negative social impacts on people and communities if a casino is allowed in Cascade Locks.

Of the 1,700 gamblers that received publicly funded treatment in Oregon in 2005-06:

• 8.4 percent had alcohol-related problems;

• 23 percent reported committing crimes to obtain gambling money;

• 18 percent had suicidal thoughts and up to 9.8 percent have made attempts;

• 10.7 percent more gamblers were treated in 2005-06 than were treated in the previous year.

It is our responsibility to protect our children, families and communities from the negative effects of expanded gaming. We mustn’t put our children, families, communities and businesses at risk. The federal government should reject the proposal for an off-reservation casino in Cascade Locks.

(Statistics provided by the Oregon Department of Human Services: www.oregon.gov/DHS/addiction/gambling/shtml)

Gas it up

Almost unanimously scientists agree that the climate is warming. The poles are melting. Average yearly temperatures are slowly creeping upward. On Mars. I’ve got a little “Inconvenient Truth” for the likes of Mr. Al Boring. There are no soccer moms driving “gas guzzling” SUVs on Mars. And no rich guys, like Gore, living in giant homes using more energy than several square blocks in Hood River.

A significant and growing number of scientists are pointing to increased solar activity, the same mechanism that ended the last ice age here on Earth. Other factors such as precession eccentricity and obliquity of our Earth’s orbit also affect our climate.

Precession — the change in orientation of the Earth’s rotational axis — alters the orientation of the Earth with respect to perihelion, closest to the sun, and aphelion, farthest from the sun. If a hemisphere is pointed toward the sun at perihelion, that hemisphere will be pointing away at aphelion, and the difference in seasons will be more extreme. Currently, northern summer occurs near perihelion making them hotter.

Serbian astrophysicist Milutin Milankovitch first theorized that precession and two of the earth’s other orbital parameters — eccentricity and obliquity — affected climate. He developed one of the most significant theories relating Earth motions and long-term climate change. Known as the Milankovitch Theory, it states that as the Earth travels through space around the sun, cyclical variations in three elements of Earth-sun geometry combine to produce variations in the amount of solar energy that reaches Earth:

n Variations in the earth’s orbital eccentricity — the shape of the orbit around the sun.

n Changes in obliquity — changes in the angle that Earth’s axis makes with the plane of Earth’s orbit.

n Precession — the change in the direction of the Earth’s axis of rotation, i.e. the axis of rotation behaves like the spin axis of a top that is winding down; hence it traces a circle on the celestial sphere over a period of time.

Together, the periods of these orbital motions have become known as Milankovitch cycles.

One good thing has come out of this “Global Warming” nonsense. More people are driving Go roller skates and Honda hybrids to save gasoline. Gas I need for my 500-horsepower hot rods: Thanks and keep ’er up.