1. I am committed to continue this week to make sure that my posts do not concern or name the President who loves inflation. So, in spite of all the temptation, I am not thinking about that president at all. I have to concentrate on other things.

We have watched the first four episodes of a Netflix series titled Untamed. It is pretty good so far – a mystery of how a young woman fell or was pushed off the top of El Capitan in Yosemite Park. This is not a review of that series, but I am mentioning it only to tell you something that I learned watching. I can’t really call it a tidbit or a factoid because it’s is larger than what those words conjure up, and I can’t call it an interesting piece of trivia, because it is far from trivial. Here it is:

Do you know that Yosemite Park and the State of Rhode Island are just about the same size? Rhode Island is about 1,214 square miles and Yosemite is about 1169 square miles (corroborating source: Google AI). I have never been to Yosemite, and very little of Yosemite is available for the general public to see, but it never occurred to me that it was that large. Even though Rhode Island is small, as we know.

Digression: This is perhaps an unimportant and completely unnecessary digression (in fact, you can strike the word “perhaps”), but do you know that the name of Rhode Island was not Rhode Island until sometime in 2020? Before that the name of Rhode Island was Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. It took a constitutional amendment to shorten the name. End of digression.

But enough about Rhode Island. Let’s talk about Yosemite. Having realized how large Yosemite is, I went to a list of National Parks and discovered that Yosemite is not the largest (I never thought it was, but I never thought it was as large as it was). In fact, the United States has 15 National Parks larger than Yosemite. The largest (one which I guarantee you have never set foot in) is Wrangell-St. Elias National Park. which is about 13,000 square miles, or the size of ten Rhode Islands. And Gates of the Arctic National Park (never heard of that one either, huh?) is almost the same size.

Of the 15 largest National Parks, 7 are in Alaska. Of the others, Joshua Tree in California and Big Bend in Texas are only slightly larger than Yosemite, and Olympic in Washington, Glacier in Montana, and Grand Canyon in Arizona somewhat larger than those. But by the time you get to the Everglades, you have significantly exceeded the size of Rhode Island, and when you get to Yellowstone, you have doubled the size of the State of Rhode Island. Death Valley National Park is the size of four Rhode Islands.

Yellowstone and Death Valley are, in fact bigger than not only Rhode Island, but bigger than Delaware or Connecticut. And Wrangell-St. Elias National Park is larger than eight states.

By the way, the source I used for the National Parks used kilometers squared, while the source for the States used square miles, so I had to convert them all to square miles, and there is a reason I am not a mathematician. So, don’t quote me without doing your own research.

I find these statistics as interesting as I find thinking about the President who is attacking Iran in self defense because they are not negotiating fast enough during a ceasefire. But, of course, I am nothing thinking about that President at all.

2. I guess this post is long enough as-is, but I had a second subject I was going to write about. The very mysterious death of author/activist/monk Thomas Merton in 1968. He was 53, in Thailand to give a speech, and found dead in his hotel room. While I am not sure that he was naked, he had just showered, had a severe wound in the back of his head which had bled a lot, and had a large fan across his body, still spinning. The story given was that he fell bringing the fan down with him, hitting his head and being electrocuted by a faulty wire. The death report says he had a heart attack. There was no autopsy because the US Embassy would not allow it before flying the body back to his monastery in Kentucky. There were persistent rumors that he was murdered, either by a Belgian bishop who disappeared on the day Merton died, or by CIA operatives. Nobody knows.

If that doesn’t clear your mind of 47, nothing will.