This post continues a new semi-regular series, Most Memorable Moments, featuring some of the most memorable natural history experiences that WC has been lucky enough to enjoy. Sometimes nature can be magical and memorable, and, yes, it’s still magical even when you know how and why it works. Links to prior Most Memorable Moments are…
Alaskana / Commentary / Law
The full quote, of course, is “An attorney who represents himself has a fool for a client.” It’s a cautionary aphorism that every law student learns. It’s also true for non-lawyers. And WC offers as an example of that truth Sutton, Alaska resident Mark N. Wayson. Mr. Wayson is a former Fairbanks city police officer…
WC isn’t talking about Willis Alan Ramsey’s odious song, although WC will really have to do a blog post about Ramsey some day, and his (in)famous second album. “Muskrat Love,” originally “Muskrat Candlelight,” was covered by a lot of folks but made a hit by The Captain and Tensile back in 1976. Ars non disputanden…
WC recognizes that long blog posts about mining law aren’t exactly light reading, and that, rightly or wrongly, most readers aren’t all that interested in the arcana. But Center for Biological Diversity v. Davis might be one of the most important mining law decisions in the last half century, and merits at least a brief…
Commentary / Idaho / Science
Some humans ain’t human, some people ain’t kind You open up their hearts, and here’s what you’ll find A few frozen pizzas, some ice cubes with hair A broken popsicle, you don’t wanna go there — John Prine, “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” Fair and Square, 2005 WC admits to an occasional fascination with some appallingly…
WC doesn’t have very good photos of Veery, another of the Catharus thrushes. In fact, WC has only seen the species three times: twice on High Island, Texas, immediately after the birds had flown non-stop across the Gulf of Mexico, and once, at considerable distance, in the community of Sea-Tac, Washington. And WC has never…
Oh people, look around you The signs are everywhereYou’ve left it for somebody other than youTo be the one to careYou’re lost inside your housesThere’s no time to find you nowYour walls are burning and your towers are turningI’m going to leave you here and try to get down to the sea somehow Jackson Brown, “Rock…
In 2017, Wasilla resident Angela Lincoln was chosen as Alaska Department of Corrections Employee of the Year. In August 2021, she was sentenced to two years in a federal penitentiary after pleading guilty to charges of bribery and conspiracy to provide contraband to prisoners at Alaska’s Goose Creek Correctional Facility. She admitted to the charges…
WC has praised Randall Munroe‘s excellent XKCD web comic before. But just for giggles, let’s parse a random cartoon and see why WC has such a high opinion of Munroe’s work. (Spoiler Alert: It’s not his artwork.) Here’s his 2650th cartoon, which went up a couple of weeks ago. If you mouse over the original…
(This is a part of a sometime series on artists WC has known and doesn’t want forgotten. The first post in this series was on Steve Goodman. The second was on Sir Terry Pratchett. WC has also written about Bill Berry, Jo Ann Wold and Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. Here’s another wonderful artist WC doesn’t…
A Freudian slip, also called parapraxis, is a communications mistake that is believed to be linked to the unconscious mind. The theory – backed by some decent science – is that this kind of gaffe reveals secret thoughts and feelings that people hold. About 45 minutes into the July 21 testimony of former Trump White…
“Dirt,” in this case, is the fabulous Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who gave us a lovely two hour show at Boise’s Egyptian Theater last Thursday night. It’s pretty wonderful to go to a live concert again, even if WC and Mrs. WC were members of the maybe half a percent wearing face masks. The Nitty…
Another spot-breasted thrush, the Hermit Thrush has WC’s very favorite summer song of all the Alaska passerines. Andrew Spencer recorded this lovely song on Kodiak Island: Mrs. WC used to wake WC up in the middle of the night to listen to the first of the year Hermit Thrush song in our yard. It was…
Neil Gaiman is one of WC’s favorite writers, partly because you never, ever know what Gaiman’s next book or creative effort is going to be about. In a long interview (paywalled) of Gaiman in the New York Times on August 1, David Marchese asked him about fan expectations after Gaiman’s hugely popular, hugely influential Sandman…
South Georgia Island is a surviving fragment from the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent. Located in the far South Atlantic Ocean, at latitude 54° South, about 1,200 miles east of the tip of South America, it’s a long ways from anywhere, but it’s absolutely worth the effort and expense of getting there. The western side…
“Megaptera” is Latin for “big-winged” and “novaeangliae” means “New England.” The name is nearly nonsensical. Whales don’t have “wings,” although these do have the largest pectoral fins of all cetaceans, and while they may or may not have first been seen in New England, in fact the species’ fourteen diverse population segments (“DPS”) are scattered around…
While WC recently answered readers’ questions, in that effort WC held one question out to address is a separate blog post. You’ll see why. Why do you write about geology so often?When WC was in undergraduate school, in the late Pleistocene, he took a minor (sorry) in Geology. One of the classes was on plate…
It’s been weeks without a geology post. How did that happen? Some background. WC, semi-immobilized by a bad knee and huddled by his air-conditioning vent to escape the current heat wave, has been sorting through slides from the days before digital photography. A recent batch of scanned slides from WC’s 2002 trip to the Galápagos…
WC had summer afternoons in Junior High School last longer than July 2022. Of course, that was partly because time always goes by too fast when you are having fun, and July had some fun trips. Never mind that the end of July was baking hot. Fun or not, hot or not, it’s time for…
This is another Catharus thrush, wintering in South America and breeding in the taiga and low Arctic shrub thickets from Newfoundland to the Seward Peninsula in Alaska. It has an unusual migration route; all the birds, even those breeding in far western Alaska and eastern Siberia, move through the eastern half of the Lower 48.…
All of the Southern Ocean’s South Georgia Island is spectacular, but Gold Harbor, near the southeastern end of the 106-mile long sub-Antarctic Island is a stunner. With the hanging icefall of Bertrab Glacier looming over the long arc of the gravel-shored bay, Gold Harbor teems with wildlife. Southern Fur Seals, like those in the foreground…
In response to less than two seconds of video played by the January 6 Committee at its July 21, 2022 meeting, no less than six different readers have suggested an additional candidate for the Wickersham’s Conscience 2022 Hypocrite of the Year. The video, of course, is of a U.S. Senator sprinting away from an approaching…
WC is huddled by an air conditioning vent, working through an endless list of busted software and failed data transfers attendant to upgrading to a new computer and a modern Mac operating system. It’s put WC in just the right mood to sort through the stockpile of email questions from kind readers, ignorant critics and…
There has been an endless stream of musicians who were supposed to be “the next B.B. King” or “the next Stevie Ray Vaughn.” Well, this time, they are right. Christone “Kingfish” Ingram is an immensely gifted, immensely talented kid who, at age 23 – that’s not a typo – is already one of the very…
Getting there was just a little . . . hairy. We flew in a small, twin engine commercial aircraft, refueling in Deadhorse, Alaska before flying east on the arctic coast to the Iñupiaq village of Kaktovik. There was pretty dense ground fog at Kaktovik, and it took three passes to find the end of the…
For WC and, WC suspects, most of his readers, these are not happy times. Between the lunatics running the asylum, the baking hot consequences of climate change, Putin’s vanity war in Ukraine and the latest surge of the pandemic, it might just be time to escape into a good book. WC has some recommendations, none…
From late spring to mid-summer across much of mainland Alaska, into the late twilight, you can listen to the upward-spiraling song of the Swainson’s Thrush, another haunting melody of the boreal forest. Other birds may sleep at night, or at least go silent; not the Swainson’s Thrush, which sings, seemingly, all night. Unlike most of…
Lunatic, Lunacy: late 13th century, “affected with periodic insanity dependent on the changes of the moon,” from Old French lunatique “insane,” or directly from Late Latin lunaticus “moon-struck,” from Latin luna “moon” Etymology Online It is a remarkable coincidence that the new Chair of the Idaho Republican Party, elected on the occasion of the most recent supermoon, is named Dorothy…
An essay by David James, of Fairbanks, Alaska, that is dead on. Morality is not simple. It’s easy to hold absolute positions in the abstract, but when human realities intrude, what seems straightforward becomes complex. For instance, the Ten Commandments state, “Thou shalt not kill.” No exceptions. Yet the Bible is littered with exceptions, because…
Imagine running one of the great American marathons. Or, if you are in the kind of shape I am in, imagine jogging, then walking, and in the end possibly crawling to the finish line of an American marathon. Whatever your condition, by the time you reach the finish line you’d be in dire need of…
During the Pleistocene, as recently as 12,000 years ago, central Oregon had a number of large lakes. One of them, Fossil Lake, located in south-central Oregon, in northern Lek County, was, at peak, about 30 miles wide and perhaps 250 feet deep. It’s vanished now. The last two ponds evaporated about 1877. But during the…
WARNING: Serious technogeekery ahead. Readers may recall WC is attempting to inventory the number of bird species he has photographed. Progress has been slow but steady. Some background: WC has been forced to abandon the software used to manage bird photos since 2005. That software, a product called Aperture from Apple, was “EOLed” – “End…
7,700 years go, give or take 1.5%, the 12,000 foot high stratovolcano Mt. Mazama catastrophically erupted, blasting so much ash and molten rock from its magma chamber that the whole edifice collapsed, creating an oblong caldera six miles long on the longer axis, four and a half on the shorter one, and nearly a mile…
WC has exhausted his even marginally decent photos of Central American and South American thrushes. Let’s have a look now at the North American thrushes, starting with the Varied Thrush. The Varied Thrush is very much a bird of the west, and mostly a bird of the northern Boreal forests. Its beautiful, haunting song, a…
Idaho is a thoroughly Republican state. Both U.S. Senators, both U.S. Representatives, a supermajority in both houses of the state legislature, the Governor, Lieutenant Governor and nearly every elected ministerial office. Those elected officials seemingly vie with each other to see who can be the most conservative. But they aren’t conservative enough for Mike Lindell,…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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