The Last Christmas of Sears
If I was still a newspaper reporter, I would have been begging for this story.
Archive of posts filed under the mind category.
20 years and 5,767 posts on, a thank you note to Inkstain readers
Thanks, y’all, for 20 years of stopping by to read stuff here. There’s a game we used to play back in the day called “googlewhack”. It involved searching for a two-word phrase that was unique – that had never before been catalogued in Google’s even-then-vast archive of humanity’s digital use of written language. We’d stick …
Continue reading ‘20 years and 5,767 posts on, a thank you note to Inkstain readers’ »
On the occasion of Inkstain’s 20th birthday, defenestrating the old Town Lodge
.”Defenestration” is the word that stumped me, a linguistic failure that hung over my entire journalistic career. It was a challenge from the late Jim Timmermann, an offhand game in which we’d pick an odd word or phrase and be challenged to get it into the newspaper. A fenestration is, per the Oxford English Dictionary, …
Continue reading ‘On the occasion of Inkstain’s 20th birthday, defenestrating the old Town Lodge’ »
Mill Creek
Mill Creek is a bit of a cipher as it slips through Walla Walla. Flowing out of the Blue Mountains, it is the southeast Washington town’s primary water supply, and its geographic organizing principle. But the “creek” itself, as it flows through the town built on its banks, is confined to a concrete channel, in …
I’m fine, thanks for asking.
Two friends in recent days have kindly asked about my well-being, noting that I haven’t posted anything on the blog since July 5. I’m fine, busy focused on the book Eric Kuhn and I are writing about the history of our hydrologic understanding of the Colorado River, and the interplay between science, politics, and policy. …
In water policy, we often refer to “the Mad Max scenario”
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave
Last week I noted the disturbing analogy of 1976-77 for the Colorado River Basin, a year eerily similar in the early months of snowpack development to 2017-18. In addition to the major drops in reservoir levels, 1976-77 produced four of the eight best-selling albums of all time: Meat Loaf: Bat Out of Hell The Eagles: Greatest Hits …
Continue reading ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave’ »
Merry Christmas
We will not be having a White Christmas this year in Albuquerque
The notion of a White Christmas is at best an inventive fiction, at worst a lie. Jody Rosen, in the wonderful book White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, put it thus: The longing for Christmas snowfall, now keenly felt everywhere from New Hampshire to New Guinea, seems to have originated with Berlin’s song. …
Continue reading ‘We will not be having a White Christmas this year in Albuquerque’ »