Traditionally here at Wickersham’s Conscience we wrap up the calendar year with the Hypocrite of the Year contest and WC’s Year in Review series. But before we turn to December, we need to take a look back at a month that, if you will forgive the phrase, was a real turkey. As ever, the Magpie…
Today marks the 14th birthday of this blog. In celebration, WC will offer some statistics and a few thoughts. At this date, there are 4,975 published blog posts. All but seven of them written by WC. That’s a lot of words. In fact, at an average length of about 750 words, that’s over 3.7 million…
One of WC’s readers noted that while WC has heavily and frequently criticized Alaska’s fossil fuel-driven economy, there has been no suggestion of an alternative. WC, the reader suggests, should offer some constructive criticism for once. Okay. Here’s a 20 year plan to rebuild Alaska’s economy. It’s not going to please everybody – it likely…
Naomi Orestes is a professor at Harvard, and writes a monthly column for Scientific American. In a recent column, she noted that climatologists have consistently under-predicted the rate of climate change in the Arctic. In fact, it seems to be warming about four times as fast as most models have predicted. Some reports have it…
It’s a remarkably handsome gull, with a white head and a delicate light gray neck and chest, shading to a darker gray on the wings and back. The tail is slate gray, with a narrow white terminal band. A red bill, with a black tip, graced by a tiny bit of yellow on the very…
Alaska has brought off its first, full general election using the ranked voting system adopted by citizen initiative back in 2020. WC has some thoughts. For good and sufficient reasons, WC doesn’t write much about The Quitter, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. But WC will make a small exception here and note that Palin has…
Since he was just a pup, about 30-45 minutes after wolfing down a Thanksgiving turkey dinner, WC would be asleep on the couch. In the late 1970′s, a physiologist who was WC’s Thanksgiving guest explained it as a reaction to all of the tryptophan in turkey meat. Just before he dropped off to sleep. As…
You can make the case that some Wasillians shouldn’t be entrusted with private property. The Alaska Supreme Court’s decision last week in Evertson v. Sibley et al. would be a pretty compelling bit of evidence. Karin Eriksson,1 a mother allegedly suffering from declining mental faculties, had two children, a son named Krister and a daughter…
Motmots, the fourteen species of the family Momotidae, are colorful, long-tailed birds of Central and South America. Like Kingfishers, they nest in long tunnel-like burrows in dirt banks, but they are not closely related to Kingfishers. For such a colorful, charismatic bird, they are remarkably poorly studied. As just one example of the challenges presented…
They call it “Ransomware-as-a-Service” (“RaaS”). But it’s really a franchise. A criminal franchise, but a franchise nonetheless. It works like this: the Franchisor develops a suite of tools to hack into a victim’s computer systems, steal by downloading all of the data and then encrypt all of the data found there. The victim can no…
In amazing abuse of America’s nonprofit laws, there’s a “charity” called “America’s Frontline Doctors” that consists of quacks, a small number of physicians and health care workers who are represent the very worst in American medicine. They spread false information about COVID, advocate for dangerous and discredited treatments, engage in fearmongering about vaccines, and attempt to influence…
Few birds have presented as many challenges and difficulties to ornithologists as the Iceland Gull. Today the species is a lump – a taxonomic consolidation – of the Thayer’s Gull and the Iceland Gull – but it could be as many as three different species. The field marks for this species extend across such a…
This post is dedicated to the late Hal Horton, because it is his fault. When WC was a shiny new attorney, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was being built, and the outrageous amounts of money involved had attracted all sorts of folks to WC’s quiet little hometown, Fairbanks, Alaska. Some of those folks were determined to provide…
WC bows to no one in his love of technogeekery, but the whole cryptocurrency industry seems to be an absolute disaster area, a technology that serves to useful purpose. Maybe it’s just WC getting old and cranky, yelling at clouds, but here are a few data points that illustrate WC’s opinion. Exhibit A: James Zhong…
Earthsea is the world invented by the late Ursula K. LeGuin. Across five decades, five novels and a volume of short stories and essays, she created one of the most memorable, self-consistent and vivid imaginary universes in literature. LeGuin, in her lifetime, earned eight Hugos, six Nebulas, and twenty-two Locus Awards, and in 2003 became the second woman…
Readers may remember the ongoing BUCIP – WC’s term for a Big, Ugly, Complicated, Intractable Problem – involving road access between the Alaska communities of King Cove and Cold Bay. It takes a thousand words just to provide an oversimplified summary of the long-running dispute. Readers who are curious should take a refresher course in…
The oldest complete written sentence has been identified. It’s written in the Canaanite language, about 1,700 years ago. There are earlier writings, but they are simply names or sometimes the owner of the object. This artifact was found at Tel Lachish in Israel, once a major Canaanite city-state in the second millennium BCE. The artifact…
The song was a big hit for the late Johnny Mercer in 1944, and has been covered by a long, long list of other musicians since, ranging from The Andrews Sisters to Dave Van Ronk. Mercer is responsible for the lyrics; the melody is by Harold Arlen. It’s one of those hopelessly optimistic, bouncy tunes that…
The is a handsome and interesting species. Gray-hooded Gulls have an unusual distribution; they are found in South America and in Africa. In South America, they are on the Pacific Coast of Ecuador and Peru, and on the Atlantic Coast in Argentina and, outside of breeding season, in southeastern Brazil. In Africa, They are found…
WC has shoveled out the email box and recently found his list of questions posed in comments to earlier posts. As the year and our republic stumble through Dark Times, WC will answer a few of the many readers’ questions. Before we do the, WC invites you to celebrate Veteran’s Day, our annual acknowledgment of…
At times the sheer, perverse, pig-headed stupidity of Americans threatens to overwhelm WC. It’s self-destructive, appalling and likely to be fatal soon if we cannot find a way to overcome it. You think WC is exaggerating? You think this claim is hyperbolic? WC offers three examples – there could as easily be dozens – to…
WARNING: Still more geeky geology ahead. And, WC acknowledges, some pretty serious oversimplifications of complex stuff. WC has written about seismic topography before, the evolving technology that uses the seismic waves from earthquakes to analyze subsurface geologic features. The technology has even been used on Mars to study xenogeology, albeit in a more simplified form.…
Get out and vote today, if you haven’t already. If you don’t, you are giving the 40-50% of voters who do vote in mid-term elections an out-sized amount of influence. Don’t argue that your vote won’t make a difference; races are sometimes decided by a mere handful of votes. Don’t be intimidated by firearm-packing “poll…
WARNING! Seriously geeky geology ahead. Most folks who were exposed to even a little bit of geology in school understand vaguely the idea of plate tectonics. They get the basic idea that big chunks of the surface of the earth are somehow moving around. But there are lots of non-obvious parts of the science of…
When WC was a first year law student, our Civil Procedure professor took us on a field trip to the Cook County Courthouse.1 Even fifty years later, three parts of that experience are still vivid in WC’s memory. First, we watched as a geezer stuck his head out of the closed courtroom doors and asked…
WC lacks several species of South American Gull; as this review of Larids ambles irregularly northwards, the next species WC has been able to photograph are Laughing Gulls, Leucophaeus atricila.1 While Laughing Gulls breed on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of North America, and in the Gulf of California, many winter in South America, as…
Any experienced private attorney will tell you there are clients who are too dangerous to represent. At best, they will damage your professional reputation and stiff you for all or part of your fees; at worst, they will drag you down with them. As WC’s Legal Ethics professor told us back in law school, we…
In Alaska, the pumpkin vandals were large and mostly impossible to deal with. If a specimen of Alces alces americanus – moose, the largest member of the deer family – acquired a taste for the largest member of the squash family, there wasn’t much you could do. When we relocated to Idaho in 2015, we…
Two of Nashville’s best singers shared the stage last week in a two hour long concert at the College of Idaho in Caldwell. Two long-time friends and collaborators, Kathy Mattea and Suzy Bogguss, are touring together, sharing the stage. They opened the show with a lovely interpretation of the Carter Family’s 1937 song “Hello Stranger,”…
As WC struggles with a sugar-induced, post-Hallowe’en hangover, it’s time to have a look back at the spooky events of the last thirty-one days. As ever: (1) the Magpie Principle strictly applies, and (2) no journalism has been committed in this blog post. Wasilla’s neo-Nazi legislator, David Eastman, faces trial on his (dis)qualification for the…
WC received an advance copy of Matthew Cobb’s As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, to be published November 15, 2022. It seems an especially good book to review on Hallowe’en. WC does do book reviews: it says so right on the Wickersham’s Conscience home page. But it has been a while. The…
You won’t find Lime, Oregon on a map; at least not one published in the last forty years. Lime isn’t even a ghost town; it’s obliterated, along with the cement plant that was Lime’s reason for existence. Today, Lime is a wide spot in a side road off Interstate 84, not too far from Baker…
This is a unique and fascinating species, and WC would like to have much better photos of it. It’s an argument for a return trip to the Galápagos Islands. Swallow-tailed Gulls are a near-endemic to the Galapagos, 99% of the population breeds there. Outside of breeding season this is a pelagic species, sometimes found 500…
Long-time readers will recall WC, asked the seemingly simple question of how many different bird species he had photographed, has been struggling for the last four years to provide an answer. WC, as recently as July of this year, had the illusion he was making progress. Then the American Ornithological Society released the latest update…
While the State of Idaho has many fine points, it does not have glaciers worthy of the name. It has had them in the past, and they did some dramatic alteration of the terrain, but those glaciers are long gone. While the ice may have all melted, the geologic signatures of glaciers are everywhere. Among…
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