I’ve always thought Snopes, the debunking site run by Barbara and David Mikkelson, is a treasure. Fighting the good fight and all. Kinda sad, then, but not surprising, to read this: When reporters interview us about our work, they often ask us to comment on the notion that we’re engaged in a great public service, making …
My interest in water lured me into an interest in real estate, because of the way the West’s housing boom ramped up the demand for water, and the way the bust has scrambled the equation. So I’m looking for new ways of measuring the housing market’s recovery. I’m still scratching my head about this one, …
Continue reading ‘Another New West real estate metric: dog pee’ »
From Sociological Images, how Django Reinhardt survived the Nazi effort to exterminate the Roma by playing jazz: Reinhardt, then, survived because the Nazis loved jazz music, even as Hitler censored the music and, on his orders, people who dared to listen to, dance to, or play it were encamped and members of the groups who …
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found the inability to play billiards on cruise ships to be one of society’s great technological dilemmas. Problem solved: Next up: poor people who have to cook with dung.
Sometime in the mid-1990s, I purchased three pairs of socks at the old Gil’s Runnershoe World on Carlisle and Lomas. The store’s long gone, its building torn down and replaced by a Walgreens. But the socks remain. In 1997, I was wearing a pair of them when I was caught in a storm while hiking …
Really. I wrote a newspaper piece about football (the pointyball kind). The backstory is the recent departure of a chap named Mike Locksley, who had a less than successful record coaching the University of New Mexico’s football team. I took to the front page of the morning paper to be what is almost certainly his …
Weird shit, well lit
I don’t know who “qbertplaya” is, but I am eternally thankful to him or her for this: It’s Patti Smith closing CBGB, the last song played there, a moment in history captured by someone wise and generous enough to hold up some sort of mobile recording device. I was struck by that act when I …
This isn’t the blog post you’ve been looking for.