The hottest June in Boise history is behind us. An even hotter July looms. Even sizzling, record heat and the science know-nothings in Idaho still deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Suicidal. But hot or not, criminal stupidity or not, it’s time for WC’s monthly look back at followups to stuff WC did write…
As usual, Sir Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman got it exactly right. Crowley, a demon,1 actually read the fine print warranty that came with his personal computer: Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisement said, 3) electrocuted the immediate…
You’re right. There were only going to be two parts in this series. But Mrs. WC, an enthusiastic paddleboarder, brought back photos from parts of Sugarloaf Point that are only accessible by water. The geology she captured in those photos is so remarkable that it deserves a blog post. The thing to remember about the…
The U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops made headlines recently by stating its intention to deny communion to church members who support abortion. The target of their fatwah, of course, was President Joe Biden, a devout Catholic and arguably our most religious president since Jimmy Carter. And a long time defender of a woman’s right to…
The last woodpecker for the time being, and a colorful one as the finale. In the eastern half of the United States, and particularly on the coastal plains, one of the most common woodpeckers is the Red-bellied. A cousin to the Lewis’s Woodpecker and the Acorn Woodpecker, it’s one of the 23 members of the…
This is the second part of a two part post on Idaho’s Long Valley. The northern third of Long Valley was glaciated during the Pleistocene, leaving the usual glacial debris: moraines, steep-walled valley walls and a few kettle lakes. That glacial debris was carried south, down the valley, by the North Fork of the Payette…
Long Valley is a north-south trending valley in the south central Idaho Batholith, probably developed by block faulting,1 drained southerly by the North Fork of the Payette River. The fault itself is an expression of the structural weakness of the Salmon River Suture Zone, that area where the oceanic and volcanic rocks of the Wallowa/Seven…
If Wasilla, Alaska didn’t have enough problems already, it turns out the community also had a pill mill doctor operating there. In his plea agreement to a single count of unlawful distribution of a controlled substance, Dr. Chisholm admitted he had [I]llegally prescribed his patients thousands of pills of highly addictive controlled substances, including oxycodone,…
It’s the wrong kind of mine, in the wrong kind of rock, in the wrong place. Really in the wrong place. WC is talking about the proposed Pebble Mine, of course, an incipient disaster area in the world’s most productive salmon habitat. And WC is absolutely delighted to catalog all of the blows that Pebble…
WC apologizes for the somewhat sexist hook for this blog post. But the analogy works too well to not use it. At Northwestern University School of Law, in the only downtown dorm cafeteria, if you wanted ice cream for desert you scooped it out yourself from a large chest freezer. The five pound tubs were…
As President Joseph Biden works to undo and repair the damage done by Donald Trump and his cronies, and the ex-President himself sulks and fumes among his gold-plated bathroom fixtures in Florida, the question of what to do about Trump’s behavior needs an answer. No President lied more, no president committed more crimes before and…
This is the penultimate woodpecker in the seemingly endless series of woodpeckers WC has discussed – thirty, if anyone is counting. And this one is a far western specialty. In the Intermountain West, the White-headed Woodpecker is closely associated with Ponderosa Pines, the dominant low- and mid-elevation tree in the West. And Idaho is at…
There was another modest victory for Greater Sage Grouse via the federal courts last week. Readers may recall that the Trump Administration had repudiated the painfully negotiated multi-state, multi-agency Greater Sage Grouse Management Plan and proceeded with a series of oil and gas leases in critical sage grouse habitat across the Intermountain West. It was…
For ten weeks, WC engaged in a treasure hunt. WC strove to find and photograph as many different state license plates as he could find in Boise, Idaho’s North End. Bounded on the east by Hill Road, on the west by State Street, on the north by 31st Street and the south by 6th Street,…
It’s just a little over-hyped. Rome, Oregon – a country store in southeastern Oregon – is probably best known as a launch point for raft trips down the main stem of the Owyhee River. The place was named by William F. Stine for the nearby hoodoo formations that suggested to him the ruins of Rome, Italy. It’s a…
John Baumgartner was a gold miner with three proven-up claims along the South Fork of the Boise River, about nine miles east of Featherville, Idaho. Unusually for a gold miner, Baumgartner in 1935 deeded his claims to the United States for a park. He retained a life estate and lived there until his death in…
WC has written about the Dunning-Kruger Effect several times before. The thesis is simple: If you are dumb enough, you don’t know how dumb you are. The implications are not simple, and if you live in a democracy, the implications are pretty concerning. Benjamin Lyons et al. have taken the implications one step further and…
J. Wellington Wimpy – Wimpy to his acquaintances – was a sidekick of Popeye in the original newspaper cartoon. A cad, a coward, a mooch and a bum, he is famous for promising, “I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.” Of course, he never paid; he was (in)famous for it. Alaska Governor…
It’s North America’s only brown and white woodpecker. Its range just barely extends into the United States: the extreme southeast corner of Arizona and the extreme southwestern corner New Mexico. Almost all of its fairly extensive range is in Mexico; the name Arizona Woodpecker is pretty much wrong. It might be the most secretive of…
The Capitol Steps didn’t invent musical political satire. But in the tradition of Tom Lehrer and Mark Russell, they popularized it, maybe more successfully than anyone else. The Capitol Steps were founded by a group of Washington, D.C. staffers to perform in December, 1981 as entertainment for Senator Charles Percy’s Christmas party.1 It turned out…
Pacific Walrus, the largest member of the Pinniped (“fin-foot”) family of sea mammals, is in serious trouble. The species depends upon Arctic sea ice as a platform for foraging, resting, breeding, pup-raising and transport to new foraging ground. As Arctic sea ice vanishes, the jeopardy to Pacific Walrus increases. The risk isn’t new: the species…
Long-time readers of this blog may recall that WC has written about the Yakutat Terrane before. The terrane, one of the smallish variety sometimes called a “microplate,” is the most recent terrane to plow into the southern belly of Alaska. It has been hugely influential on the climate, hydrography and topography of the 49th state.…
DESI is the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument. It’s the most sophisticated attempt yet to understand Dark Energy, the label given to the mysterious and very poorly understood force that is accelerating the expansion of the universe. At the risk of oversimplifying, DESI is the world’s most sophisticated spectroscope attached to the 4-meter Mayall Telescope at…
A reader working back through the years of posts here at Wickersham’s Conscience stumbled across a photo from WC’s 1995 trip to McNeil Falls Bear Sanctuary. The 2014 post was on the ongoing idiocy of Alaska’s Board of Game Hunting and its economic malpractice. The photo was kind of a throwaway, reminding readers that humankind…
They aren’t a cricket. So far as WC knows, they aren’t Mormons. But the Mormon Crickets are swarming in Idaho’s Owyhee Mountains. Driving the back roads last week, the car wheels generated a sound a lot like a bowl of Rice Crispies™ , as Mormon Crickets got squashed under tire tread. You know, “Snap, crackle,…
The Gila Woodpecker doesn’t quite have to have Saguaro Cactus to survive – an “obligate” relationship – but it’s the species’ preferred habitat. Nest cavities in the big cacti are preferred; saguaro fruit are a favored food, and there’s some suggestion that the saguaro are themselves dependent on Gila Woodpeckers for pollination and to disperse…
WC’s last post of every calendar year since at least 2010 has been an itemized list of wishes for the coming year. Dominating that list for those eleven-plus years has been WC’s concerns about overpopulation, and the danger that our seemingly ever-increasing world population has been and is imposing an insupportable burden on our planet.…
WC was recently asked what was the rarest bird he had photographed. That’s hard to say; so little is known about so many New World species that it’s hard to know what species are rare, let alone the rarest. But a candidate, certainly, would be the Jocotoco Antpitta.1 WC has written about this species before,…
gaslighting (v) To manipulate (a person) by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity. Etymology: The title of George Cukor’s 1944 film Gaslight (a remake of Thorold Dickinson’s 1940 version, in turn based on a play by Patrick Hamilton, first performed in 1938), in which a man psychologically manipulates his wife into believing that she…
Cottonwood Creek is one of the ephemeral streams that drain the westerly slopes of the Boise Front, flowing out behind the state capitol. Like all of those ephemeral streams, it is a deeply carved, steep-sided valley in lake bed sediments of vanished Lake Idaho. It’s mostly sagebrush, with a narrow ribbon of riparian habitat along…
Wickersham's Conscience 
You must be logged in to post a comment.