My friend Jaime Dispenza, a triathlon coach, was out for a training run recently, when… I’ll let him describe it: After my second of four intervals I approached the river and there standing in ankle deep water was a couple holding hands. OK, no biggie I have seen this before. Then I noticed there was …
I had a really scary dream this morning. My memory is vague, but I was somehow involved in making decisions about how to allocate the water in a big river among various users. But we didn’t have good data on how much water the river actually held. Terrifying.
On my way home from a bike ride this afternoon, I stopped by the vendor selling sweet Moriarty corn out of her pickup truck on old Route 66 just west of Tijeras Canyon: I could only fit three in my shirt pockets, which will not be enough to get my family through the winter.
Now that I get to be an occasional columnist in the newspaper, it’s remarkable how much of the work that seems appropriate in that new (for me) form builds off of something that started here, as a simple riff. To the extent that I’m getting my legs beneath myself as a columnist, it’s pretty clear …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: The Great Banana Peel Sticker War’ »
One of the things I love about language is its staggering combinatorial possibilities. I revel in a Google game – picking a seemingly ordinary phrase and doing a search to see how many times it has appeared in the vast body of language indexed by the search engine. It is amazing how relatively few times …
Continue reading ‘On borrowing and the richness of language’ »
I got the scratches when I sorta got lost in the woods. Not really lost lost. But that’s a story for another day.
Headed out on my bike ride this morning, I spotted our neighbor, Farmer John, in the front yard working on his food patch, and rolled up on the sidewalk to chat. It’s a lovely little garden – big robust tomatoes, some melons and a couple of rows of big, healthy-looking corn. Lissa and I have …
Continue reading ‘Water in the desert, urban agriculture edition’ »
Update: I was just waving my arms here, but a commenter who actually knows what s/he is talking about has stepped in with some valuable assistance. So skip my post below and just read this: The data you’re looking for can be found here, at the county level: http://www.ers.usda.gov/briefing/ruraldevelopment/developments.htm Like any data set, it’s open …
I get that Frank Lloyd Wright is one of America’s great artists. His works are magnificent, a thing to behold. But to count as one of America’s great architects, too, don’t his buildings have to actually work as buildings? Like, to not fall down and stuff? At more than 6,000 square feet, Wright’s Mayan-influenced design …
In honor of today’s Los Angeles Carmageddon, my new favorite giant scissors: Pat Brown and friends dedicate a section of the Santa Monica Freeway, courtesy KCET’s LA As Subject