Archive of posts filed under the mind category.
When you cross a bridge, look down
When you cross a bridge, Craig Childs said at an American Rivers gathering in Santa Fe Friday evening, stop, and look down. A couple of llamas stared in what I imagine was puzzlement this morning as I dropped my bike and walked out onto the planks bridging one of the irrigation ditches in Albuquerque’s South …
Fishing the ditches
I had a fascinating conversation this morning with the guy in the hat, who was out with his family fishing where the Middle Rio Grand Conservancy District’s Central Wasteway drops water out of the Albuquerque irrigation system, back into the Rio Grande. I’ve been bicycling to this bridge three or four times a week recently, …
Water is For Fighting Over, out in paperback tomorrow
Publishing a book is a weird exercise in time shifting. Last fall, I was finishing Science be Dammed, the new Eric Kuhn-John Fleck book, while simultaneously working on a new afterward afterword to Water is for Fighting Over, out in paperback, well, tomorrow. My friends at Island Press helpfully reminded me this morning that it …
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Batman Meets the Penguin
By John Fleck ~ 1966-67(?) It was a sunny day in Gotham City. But it was very gloomy in an old all(e)y in the heart of town for the Penguin. Then he got an idea. He was going to rob the bank. But first he had to catch Batman and Robin. That was a problem. …
The Last Christmas of Sears
If I was still a newspaper reporter, I would have been begging for this story.
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 …
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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, …
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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. …