It was probably okay to complain about the weather in the first month of 2023. To use a technical term, it sucked. Not that it did or will make any difference. Whatever the weather, it’s time for the monthly look back at stuff WC has written about, not written about or failed to notice earlier.…
U.S. District Judge Donald Middlebrooks, a judge for the Southern District of Florida, last year threw out Donald Trump’s idiot lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and a dozen other defendants. Last week, he entered a sanctions order against Trump and his attorney for a total of $938,000. That’s less impressive than it sounds, because Trump is…
WC has struggled with a memorial to David Crosby, former member of the Mugwumps, the Byrds, Crosby, Stills & Nash (and Young), and half a dozen or more ephemeral one-offs. And a solo artist, after he had pissed off everyone he had worked with earlier. He was an exceptionally talented musician and songwriter, who was…
As promised last week, this is the much less well known cousin of the Black-legged Kittiwake, the Red-legged Kittiwake, a near-endemic to Alaska (a small population breeds in the Commander Islands, the Russian end of the Aleutian Islands). It only breeds on St. George and St. Paul Islands, a very few of the Aleutian Islands…
WC likes much of David Brin’s writing, both his science fiction and his non-fiction. But sometimes even the best author produces a clunker. This is a review WC wrote for Amazon back in 2012.1 WC offers this review because, as a reader who stumbled on it points out, it’s a decent example of WC’s approach…
This blog post is dedicated to CMK, WC’s legal secretary at the time. In the two years she worked for WC, she had to learn three different word processing systems, two different accounting systems and still answer the phone. WC’s belated thanks, CMK. Despite what revisionist computer historians may say, the Apple Macintosh wasn’t the…
You probably think of sand dunes as a desert phenomenon. But you can get sand dunes wherever you have (1) a decent supply of coarse-grained sand, (2) an area where there is enough topography to create a trap for the sand, and (3) relatively equal distribution of the winds, or at least no prevailing single…
For more than 15 years, Rob Wilkins worked as the late Sir Terry Pratchett’s personal assistant. Outside of Pratchett’s immediate family, no one knew Sir Terry better. More than seven years after Pratchett’s death in 2015, Wilkins has finished the autobiography that Pratchett started and didn’t or couldn’t complete. The last hundred pages are wrenching,…
Trump promised the American people he would appoint “the best people.” That turned out to be a lie, too. What we got was continuous turnover in staff and senior positions, dozens of indictments and multiple guilty pleas. WC recognizes that it can be hard to keep track of the criminal convictions so, as a service…
About 56 million years ago, the Earth experienced something called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM). The Earth’s atmosphere warmed by about 6.5° C, and sea surface temperatures by about 5° C. There was serious ocean acidification, which is associated with very high CO2 levels in the atmosphere. It’s too long after the Dinosaur Killer’s cataclysmic…
In August 1999, WC was lucky enough to enjoy a sea kayaking trip on the west side of Prince William Sound, Alaska. Near the southern end of our trip, on the cliff of Nassau Fjord, near the snout of the massive Chenega Glacier, there was a Black-legged Kittiwake colony of several thousand birds. When disturbed,…
One of the more troubling aspects of the political right’s recent actions is its war against citizens. WC will draw on three specific examples from his former home state of Alaska, but the same case can be shown for other states where the political right has control of the government. The Two Rivers Fire DistrictAs…
Idaho voters selected Raúl Labrador as the next state attorney general. Labrador, a singularly ineffective former Congressman and failed gubernatorial candidate, ran for state attorney general as a stepping stone for another run at the governorship. Or maybe he’s just polishing his resumé. In his campaign, he spoke only in generalities, although he wears his…
Chasing, in WC’s birding circles, usually means going out of your way to see a bird that is rare for an area. Some people drive hours some people hop on planes, and some folks never do it at all. In this instance, it would have been pretty lazy to not chase the Broad-winged Hawk that’s…
WC has written about TANSTAAFL before. The acronym stands for “There Ain’t No Such Thing As a Free Lunch,” and is a reference to the bars and taverns that used to offer a “free lunch,” where, for the cost of two over-priced beers, you could have an over-salted, thirst-inducing lunch. The price of the lunch,…
WC has read two lay geology books recently, and the contrast in their approaches to the rocky science is itself instructive. Both are fine examples of cogent, readable explanation of geology, in this case the geology of the Great Basin. The first is Frank DeCourten’s The Great Basin Seafloor, which is a geologic history of…
In a sad, sick way, George Santos is understandable. He’s an abject failure as a human being, a former call center employee for the Dish Network, former employee of a Ponzi scheme operator, living in his mother’s basement, a college drop out and a deadbeat. So Santos invented an imaginary version of himself, a guy…
If you need another reminder from WC that you shouldn’t call them “seagulls,” consider this: the out of focus background in this photo is the Wickersham Wall, the 17,000 foot cliff that is the northerly side of Denali, the highest point in North America. This gull was nesting in the tree in which it is…
The idea that Friday the 13th is bad luck has waxed and waned through American culture. Before the cult horror movie franchise, the superstitious worried about it. Jason’s homicidal fantasies have diverted that, and today it often passes without notice among the hundreds of competing memes demanding our attention. But on this Friday the 13th…
It’s been a while since WC wallowed in some technogeekery here at Wickersham’s Conscience. Let’s start the New Year right with a case study of when capitalism and multinationalism meet the expectation of privacy. A few years ago, after a birding trip to the Snake River west of Boise, WC saw a series of hops…
Probably forty years ago now, WC was defending a permafrost house case. (Notes for nor non-Alaskans: permafrost is permanently frozen soils, often laced with lenses of ice. When the permafrost melts, anything built on it is likely to collapse. If a house is built on permafrost, the results are often catastrophic. Because it can take…
You know, we really shouldn’t need to have a Save the Eagles Day. We ought to do it without any special reminder or ceremonial day. To borrow a Robert Heinlein phrase, eagles are like pretty girls and butterflies: sufficient unto themselves and need no excuse. But in this modern world, today two-thirds of the eagle…
You’ll never catch a rainbowBut love may come to youHold it close, don’t let it fadeYou’re a loser if you do “Loving Sound,” Ian and Sylvia Tyson WC saw Ian and Sylvia twice. At a bar on 13th Street near the University of Oregon campus, name long since forgotten, in 1970 or so, and at…
In the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, there was a mighty struggle in the nascent science of geology. Biblical literalism had insisted on a young earth, created less than 10,000 year earlier, and a literal, world-spanning Noachian flood. As the evidence for a much older earth accumulated, and the evidence against a global flood…
If you want to provoke an argument among gull specialists, ask them how many species of Herring Gull there are. Depending on the ornithologist, you’ll be told one, three of five. Among American ornithologists, at least, there’s a fuzzy consensus that there is just one, and five to nine subspecies. Among Europeans, on the other…
A reader asked why some of the gulls currently being featured in recent Return of Bird of the Week series have a red spot on their bill. More recently, Mrs. WC reminded WC of a classic avian behavioral study closely related to the reader’s question. So, what’s up with the red spot? It’s not blood,…
The media was shocked – shocked! – to learn that pretty much everything about Representative-elect George Santos was a lie. But WC thinks that George Santos is merely the logical extension of a Republican Party increasingly removed from reality. Let’s consider the record. We had a Republican U.S. President who, according to the Washington Post’s…
Clear back in June 2012, WC posted a partial review of an edited collection of Harry Kessler’s diaries, translated from the German by Laird Easton, the author of a 2002 Kessler biography. Easton assembled and translated a large selection of those diaries to English, titling them Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry…
Usually the Return of Bird of the Week post goes up on Saturday, but this month it was pushed back by the end of the year features. WC apologizes for any confusion. This is the palest of the large North American white-headed gulls; only the Ivory Gull is paler and it is much smaller. The…
December is done. 2022 is done. It’s time to pick through the rubble and snowdrifts to see at least part of what WC may have missed. As always the Magpie Principle applies and absolutely no journalism has been committed in writing this blog post. WC has written earlier about Juli Mazi, who was indicted by…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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