A Summer Lake Sampler


WC has written about the amazing geology of Summer Lake, and promised photos of the birds that migrate through and breed in the area. Here’s that bird photo sampler. Please don’t call them “seagulls.” This handsome fellow was more than 200 miles from the nearest seawater. All the rails, including Virginia Rail, are famously difficult…

Trouble with the Hubble (In)Constant


There was, for example, the theory that A’Tuin had come from nowhere and would continue at. uniform crawl, or steady gait, into nowhere, for all time. This theory was popular among academics. An alternative, favored by those of a religious persuasion, was that A’Tuin was crawling from the Birthplace to the Time of Mating, as…

Summer Lake: It Starts with the Geology


WC recently spent a few delightful days birding in Summer Lake Wildlife Refuge, in southcentral Oregon. Because it all starts with geology, WC will start there, too. Multiple geology theses, a few books and hundreds of geology papers have been written on Summer Lake and its ancestor, Chewaucan (chee-WAU-can) Lake. WC is necessarily going to…

Nice Economy You’ve Got Here . . .


The technical, linguistic term for it is a Gricean Implicature.1 You know, the Mafia thug walks into the store and says, “Nice place you’ve got here. Be a shame if something bad happened to it.” Or, if you prefer, U.S. House Speaker Kevin “You’ve Sold Out” McCarthy2 looks around at the U.S. economy and says,…

How ‘Bout Those Phillies?


There was a lawyer WC knew back in the day. When you asked her a difficult question she didn’t want to answer, she’d respond, “How ’bout those Phillies?” It’s an evasion and a not very clever way of ducking an issue, attempting to change the subject. It’s now the Republican Party’s go-to solution to the…

Donald Trump answers a question about hospitals and frontline healthcare workers reporting shortages of masks and coronavirus tests. Photograph: Yuri Gripas/Reuters

Trump Loses Another One


On September 18, 2018, the New York Times ran a long article titled, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Scheme as He Reaped Riches from His Father.” The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for its reporting. Donald Trump, outraged that his niece had cooperated with the Times reporters and provided documents to them, sued the Times.…

WC’s Advice to Ron DeSantis: Settle Immediately


Florida Governor Ron “Pander” DeSantis has picked a fight with the Disney Company. As Jimmy Buffet noted many years ago, “You don’t mess with the mouse in Orlando,” although he was putting words in the mouth of the fictional Skip Wylie at the time. The Disney Company employs 75,000 people in Florida, brings some 50…

Gordon Lightfoot and His Band, Egyptian Theater, Boise, June 10

R.I.P. Gordon Lightfoot, 1938-2023


In the NPR’s obituary of Gordon Lightfoot, they played parts of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” WC doesn’t think “Edmund Fitzgerald” is Lightfoot’s best song, but it’s certainly his best known. What makes the song remarkable to WC is that, consciously or unconsciously, Lightfoot adopted a rhyming pattern, a mode of epic poetry in…

Despite DeSantis


As WC has recently written, this spring included a trip to the Dry Tortugas, the westerly end of the coral ridge that includes the better known Key West. Of course, to get to the Dry Tortugas you have to go to Florida, currently governed – for a loose definition of “governed” – by the reprehensible…

Doing the Monster MASH


Long-time readers know WC gets twitchy if there isn’t a geology post for a while. The geology and geomorphology of Florida, where WC was most recently, is frankly boring. Missouri, WC’s other recent destination, was all about the ages of layers and layers of limestone. Boring.1 So WC will reach back to his trips into…

WC Dons a Coat and Tie


WC wore a coat and tie most of his professional career. Perhaps in an over-reaction to that long costuming requirement, WC mostly wears shorts and a hoody these days. But occasionally Mrs. WC can persuade WC to put on slacks, a dress shirt, one of his elderly tacky ties and a blazer and pretend to…

A 60th Anniversary


In 1963, when WC was a surly teenager, and his Dad was feeling unusually prosperous, we took a late spring vacation from Fairbanks to visit the relatives in central California. For five of the ten days, WC and his brother were parked with their Aunt Helen, WC’s dad’s sister, while the parents went to Vegas.…

Fort Jefferson and Its History


Fort Jefferson, the 16 million brick white elephant of a fort built on Garden Key, Dry Tortugas, was constructed mostly with slave labor. Mis-engineered from the start, chasing military technology but never catching up and, in fact, never completed, it’s a fascinating case study. The federal government had several motives for building Fort Jefferson, but…