In what passes for tradition here at Wickersham’s Conscience, we spend the last week of each year thinking about the year that is ending, and making our wishes for the coming year. This is the final blog post in that annual tradition. Despite the abject failures of his wishes for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and most recently 2020,…
In what passes for tradition here at Wickersham’s Conscience, we spend the last week of each year thinking about the year that is ending, and making our wishes for the coming year. This blog post is firmly in that tradition: a look back at the kidney stone that was 2021 and a look forward to…
In what passes for tradition here at Wickersham’s Conscience, we spend the last week of each year thinking about the year that is ending, and making our wishes for the coming year. This blog post is firmly in that tradition: a look back at the kidney stone that was 2021 and a look forward to…
In what passes for tradition here at Wickersham’s Conscience, we spend the last week of each year thinking about the year that is ending, and making our wishes for the coming year. This blog post is firmly in that tradition: a look back at the kidney stone that was 2021 and a look forward to…
In what passes for tradition here at Wickersham’s Conscience, we spend the last week of each year thinking about the year that is ending, and making our wishes for the coming year. This blog post is firmly in that tradition: a look back at the kidney stone that was 2021 and a look forward to…
In what passes for tradition here at Wickersham’s Conscience, we spend the last week of each year thinking about the year that is ending, and making our wishes for the coming year. This blog post is firmly in that tradition: a look back at the kidney stone that was 2021 and a look forward to…
From WC’s home to yours: all the best of Christmas.
Holiday decorations are nice, a spot of color in a mostly monochromatic winter. But like most aspects of Christmas, they are a strange mix of the very odd, sharply contrasting parts of American culture. It the mostly crassly commercial, most intensively consumeristic of our holidays. Yet it is a holy day. It’s a day celebrating…
WC’s Return of Bird of the Week usually appears on Saturdays. But by the vagaries of the calendar, the next two Saturdays are holidays, with their own special blog posts. Return of Bird of the Week will . . . return . . . on January 8, 2022.
The Sackler family until recently owned Purdue Pharma. Purdue, of course, gave us Oxycontin, a time-release form of a semi-synthetic opiate. Purdue, under the direct management of the Sacklers, sold Oxycontin like Proctor & Gamble’s sells soap: aggressively, with only a passing nod at accuracy, and using every possible marketing channel. The problem is that…
It isn’t often that Fox News coughs up something helpful, and it’s exceptionally rare for Tucker Carlson to be useful, but it has happened and WC is here to report it. Mr. Carlson, on December 14, 2021, managed in a single ten minute television screed to provide real world examples of an amazing number of…
Back in 2017, Emma I. Greig, Eric M. Wood and David N. Bonter co-authored a paper documenting the range expansion of bird species in response to human activity. They chose as their example species Anna’s Hummingbird. They showed that, in response to milder winters, increased urbanization and more supplemental food sources – hummingbird feeders – Anna’s Hummingbirds had…
Harry Badger arrived in Fairbanks, Alaska before it was Fairbanks, when there was little more there than E.T. Barnette’s recently erected trading post, Barnette’s Cache. Newly appointed Territorial Judge James Wickersham described Barnette’s cache: A rough log structure, with spread-eagle wings [that] looked like a disreputable pig sty, but was in fact, Barnette’s trading post,…
(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. The third one was about Fairbanks’ Bill Berry. This one is also close to home.) In 1967 or 1968, WC’s AP…
There are birds that lack one of the definitive characteristics of birds: flight. The Flightless Cormorant is one example, a large cormorant and the only one of the 40 species of cormorant to have evolved away from flight. Many flightless bird species are endemics to remote islands, like the New Zealand Rail and the Falkland…
The results are in. Voting was a bit thin in comparison to prior years. Perhaps hypocrisy exhaustion? Perhaps a kind of malaise for anyone who still manages to care about current events? In the event, total votes were about two-thirds of the average the last three years. Among those who did vote, however, it was…
Okay, WC admits that in the giant scheme of things to be depressed about, the pending lumping together of bird species hardly makes it on the radar of even dedicated birders. But WC laments the discovery of the genetic basis for variation among the three Redpoll species, and the news that the genetic variation among…
From the guy who brought you Trump University (closed after charged with fraud) Trump Plaza (closed after bankruptcy) Trump Airlines (closed after one year) Trump Steaks (withdrawn after 11 months) Trump Mortgage (failed after 7 months) And a wonderful array of additional bankruptcies, product failures and outright frauds, Donald Trump now presents: Trump Media &…
Before we get to today’s blog post, here’s a reminder to vote for the Wickersham’s Conscience 2021 Hypocrite of the Year. In 1969, Dr. Ray Sheldon, in the course of circumnavigating North and South America, sampled the water columns across a vast stretch of the Earth’s oceans. What he discovered was that across all of…
Does anyone besides WC remember “The Deacon’s Masterpiece, or the Wonderful One-Hoss Shay,” written by lawyer and jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes? WC was made to memorize chunks of it by his fifth grade teacher. The poem came out of dead storage in WC’s brain as WC was reading about Governor Dunleavy’s attempts to make a…
This is your chance to hit back. Vote for the Wickersham’s Conscience’s 2021 Hypocrite of the year and help send a message that you are tired of hypocrisy and are calling it out. Remember: the Winner gets a very nearly fancy certificate notifying them of their award. Here’s a cheat sheet summarizing the candidates and…
(All of these photos were taken from a small, open boat, locally called a “panga,” in 2-3 meter seas, with waves reflecting back off the headland where the birds roosted. It was a real challenge just to keep the supertelephoto on on the birds. Low clouds or fog made it pretty dark, so to have…
The IRIS Education and Public Outreach (EPO) program has some very spiffy visualization of earthquake activity that captures the movement of the surface of the earth in the course of an earthquake. Check out this display of ground movement from the Honshu earthquake: Here’s the more recent deep earthquake in Peru: WC understands many readers…
WC invited readers to submit their candidates for the 2021 Wickersham’s Conscience Hypocrite of the Year. There were many nominations. WC summarizes them in a table below. The columns set out the names, the basis for the nomination, and WC’s response. With too many nominees, the ballot becomes unwieldy and the tools WordPress makes available…
Is WC the only one who remembers Harold Stassen? Stassen was the governor of Minnesota 1939-1943. It was the last elective office he held. But that wasn’t for lack of trying. Stassen ran for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in 1940, 1944, 1948, 1952, 1964, 1968, 1980, 1984, 1988, and 1992.…
Alaska decided a long time ago the best way to deal with an oil spill was not to have one. As a result, Alaska, like many – but by no means all – states has a fairly rigorous body of laws and regulations aimed at spill prevention. One important part of those laws is a…
Scott Yenor, an associate professor of political science at Boise State University, has achieved his fifteen minutes of fame by telling the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida last month that women shouldn’t be encouraged to pursue careers, that their role in society is to be wives and mothers. Yenor has also written four books…
The U.S. District for for Colorado had an early Christmas present for another group of Trump lawyers. Gary D. Fielder and Ernest John Walker, two Colorado lawyers, filed a case in December 2020 as a class action on behalf of 160 million American voters, alleging there was a gigantic, multi-state conspiracy involving state governors, election equipment…
(All of these photos were taken from a small, open boat, locally called a “panga,” in 2-3 meter seas, with waves reflecting back off the headland where the birds roosted. It was a real challenge just to keep the supertelephoto on on the birds. Low clouds or fog made it pretty dark, so to have…
Some random neuron in WC’s aging brain fired off recently and the lyrics to the theme to The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp started running through WC’s head. WC can say with certainty that he hasn’t heard the tune in something like 60 years. WC can’t remember for five minutes where he left the…
Wickersham's Conscience 
You must be logged in to post a comment.