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. …

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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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.”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 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 …

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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. …

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