September has gone by for WC in a haze of surgery recovery, painful physical therapy, days chained to a recliner and an icing machine – a wonderful invention – and little more. WC will get back to that, but it’s also time to have a look back at the month just passed, follow up on…
Two different readers have criticized WC for investing so much blog space on David Eastman, the controversial Oath Keepers lifetime member and utterly ineffective legislator who represents the citizens of the Alaska State House District 27. WC believes those readers are failing to recognize just how important the issues surrounding Eastman are. It’s not just…
Yes, there have been a lot of law-focused blog posts lately. That’s because it is the judicial branches of federal and state government are doing the work of protecting our system of government in the face of attacks by Trump and the elements of the Republican Party Trump controls. The protection is imperfect – law…
Jackson Browne wrote “These Days,” a song of aching loss and regret, in 1964, when he was just sixteen years old. There are highly successful songwriters who, in their 80s, still haven’t written anything as good as Browne’s first work as a teenager. “These Days” has been recorded by everyone from Nico to Gregg Allman…
While this nomination could have gone to all four of the members of the Idaho delegation to Congress, one of those members’ hypocrisy was an order of magnitude greater. That would be U.S. Senator Jim Risch (R, Idaho). Idaho is the home of Micron Technology, and Micron is a critical part of Idaho’s economy. Since…
Key Bank recently notified all of its current and recent mortgage loan customers that the customers’ personal data had been stolen. The stolen information included names, mortgage property addresses, mortgage account numbers and information, home insurance policy numbers and information, phone numbers, and the first eight digits of Social Security numbers. That’s pretty serious. Any…
A final thrush before we move on to a different family of birds, and WC has saved one of the best for last. The state bird of Idaho – it’s available as an alternate license plate – as well as Nevada, the Mountain Bluebird’s electric blue coloration is always a delight. Which is probably why…
Ann Brown is WC’s former law partner and the current chair of the Alaska Republican Party. On September 13, the Anchorage Daily News once again gave her space for an opinion column, in which she woodshedded her fellow Republicans for letting a Democrat, Mary Peltola, get elected to Alaska’s sole seat in the House of…
This post continues the 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…
Five months before he died, Terry Pratchett wrote five letters, sealed them in envelopes and locked them in the safe in his office to be opened after his death. This was the one he addressed to me. Wiltshire 4th October 2014 Dear Rob, So. I have gone. There were days when I felt I had already gone…
Yes, WC understands it would take a multi-volume encyclopedia-length effort to sort out Donald Trump’s many crimes, so WC proposes to focus on just the most recent ones, those involving the presence of presidential records and classified documents at Mar-a-lago, Trump’s tasteless offense to architecture in Palm Beach, Florida. Heck, even for the post-presidency criminal…
Most of Alaska, like most Alaskans, originally came from somewhere else. John McPhee, Assembling California WC’s second year geology classes at the University of Oregon – prosaically enough, Geology 201, 202 and 203 – were taught mostly by visiting professors. The second quarter class focused on structural geology, a refreshing change after the tedious and…
In a speech to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this month U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts addressed the collapse of public respect for the U.S. Supreme Court. He said it’s wrong for people to deem the court illegitimate because its decisions are unpopular. “Simply because people disagree with an opinion is…
The second member of the genus Sialia is the Western Bluebird, a very handsome species that ranges in a patchy distribution from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific, but not in much of the Great Basin. Like its cousin bluebird species, it is a cavity nester, and has suffered from loss of useable cavities to…
For a lot of old Boomers, Buddy Holly and the Crickets were one of the seminal roots of rock and roll music. They pioneered not just the music that’s the soundtrack for WC’s generation; they also invented that distinctive band composition: a guitar-vocalist (Buddy Holly), a drummer (Jerry Allison), a bassist (Joe Mauldin) and a…
There is a small plastic vial – a former pill bottle – on the shelf in WC’s living room. Inside is a blob of smelly, tar-like crude oil, most of the volatiles long since evaporated or dissolved. The blob came from a large deposit on Crafton Island, on the westerly side of Prince William Sound.…
WC is more or less chained to his Polar Care Cube, a nifty little machine that circulates ice cold water through a pad on his swollen right knee. Bird photography is presently a goal, not a possibility. So WC is revisiting earlier birding trips. This one was in 2014. Rio Pixiam is one of the…
“Thwaites,” in this instance, is Thwaites Glacier and Ice Shelf, located in Antarctica, west and a little south of the Antarctic Peninsula and Ellsworth Land, it dumps into the Amundsen Sea. “Ribbed” is, well we will get to that in a minute. Thwaites has gotten a lot of press. Rolling Stone, back in 2017, called…
Vic Kohring was a crook. He was a crooked politician, captured on video accepting cash from VECO CEO Bill Allen for his vote on a tax law Allen wanted, and then soliciting still more cash. Yes, the U.S. Department of Justice wrongfully withheld evidence at Kohring’s trial. But there’s still those damning videos from Suite…
Ms. Gail Fenumiai, DirectorDivision of ElectionsCourt Plaza Building240 Main Street, 4th FloorJuneau, AK 99801 Re: Matter of David Eastman Dear Director Fenumiai: Wickersham’s Conscience has long admired your reasoned and principled approach to the sometimes challenging issues of Alaska elections. For example, WC wrote applauding your decisions in Senator Lisa Murkowski’s write-in campaign, decisions that…
Yep, bluebirds are thrushes, members of the genus Sialia, and especially handsome thrushes, in WC’s opinion. The three North American bluebirds – Eastern, Western and Mountain – constitute all of the members of that genus, and we’ll have a look, albeit with sketchy photos in two cases, at each of those three species. The Eastern…
Some Most Memorable Moments last three days. And it should have been four. In this two part post, WC describes his 1995 visit to the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary. WC has reported on parts of the trip before, and a few of the photos have appeared earlier, but many photos are new and this…
Some Most Memorable Moments last three days. And it should have been four. In this two part post, WC describes his 1995 visit to the McNeil River State Game Sanctuary. WC has reported on parts of the trip before, and a few of the photos have appeared earlier, but many photos are new and this…
As you might imagine, WC is immensely pleased that Alaskans selected Mary Peltola to fill the balance of the late Don Young’s term as Alaska’s sole U.S. representative. Representative-elect Peltola is all of the things Sarah Palin is not: thoughtful, articulate, in touch with Alaskans and their views, informed and compassionate. She’s also the first…
In the summer of 1970, a neighbor was kind enough to loan WC his truck and camper. WC and three buddies drove to what was then Mt. McKinley National Park. Back then, the Parks Highway was mostly blueprints; to get to the Park you had to drive down the Richardson Highway to Delta Junction, then…
For this Labor Day, WC offers a re-post of an August 2011 blog post. A book review of a biography of Joe Hill, a martyr of the early days of the labor movement.The first song WC learned to play on the harmonica was “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” the labor organizing anthem…
This post was written pre-surgery. Under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA), commonly known as Superfund, the very worst environmentally contaminated sites are designated for cleanup by a scoring system called the Hazard Ranking System. If they are bad enough, they get on the National Priorities List – a euphemism if WC…
This post was written pre-surgery.) This is a different genus of thrushes than the birds WC has described earlier; these are Myadestes, the solitaires. There are eight species of Solitaire and nine Hawaiian variations (at least one of them likely etinct. Confusingly, there are three other bird species called “Solitaires” in two other genera. Trying…
WC had total knee replacement surgery on his right knee Tuesday. The good news is that in a few months WC should be walking without pain for the first time in two years. The bad news is that the surgery has WC pretty banged up. As a result, WC’s ability to research, write and publish…
The thing about landslides is that they move in slow motion until they don’t. WC has written earlier about the potential landslide-generated tsunami in Barry Arm. This is an update. Barry Arm is a glacial fjord in northwestern Prince William Sound, Alaska. The westerly wall of Barry Arm is badly fractured rock, hanging hundreds of…
Wickersham's Conscience 