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, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023,…
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 fifth blog post in that annual tradition. The 2020s have been quite the decade so far. No matter what insanity…
A breath of poetry in the cold clammy stream of year end posts. And a double post as a result. e e cummings, for whom punctuation and capitalization were optional, died in 1962, but his poetry still resonates today. WC doesn’t want to be buried, but if he was, the headstone would say, “may my…
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 fourth blog post in that annual tradition. This year’s Wickersham’s Conscience Person of the Year will be controversial. WC has…
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 political kidney stone that was 2025 and a shuddering look…
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 2025 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 yet another kidney stone of a year and a look forward…
From our house to yours, Merry Christmas. May your holidays be bright.
While Harrison Boulevard, here in Boise’s North End, is justly famed for its Hallowe’en yard decorations, the Christmas yard decorations are pretty impressive, too. While most of them are inflatables, a few are not. Those folks must rent a storage unit – and not a small one, either – to hold their seasonal yard decorations.…
WC is an artificial intelligence (AI) skeptic. In those areas where WC has a modicum of expertise, AI products are worthless or even dangerous. “Hallucinations” – lies – in legal pleadings, gross errors in geologic analyses, pure nonsense in environmental impact statements; AI is oversold and in many cases appalling wrong. What WC has read…
The late Chuck Kramer wrote this and read it on NPR’s Morning Edition for something like 20 years. He updated the free verse poem from time to time – this is the 2011 version – but the message never changed. As we approach Christmas, it remains an amazing, appalling litany of exactly what we have…
Alaska is addicted to crude oil. Alaska is a junkie for crude. Each barrel of crude produced in Alaska is destined to create another half ton of greenhouse gases. Those greenhouse gases are going to further injure Alaska, its natural resources and its citizens. Alaskans know the addiction is hurting them, but can’t or won’t…
A distinctive, long-tailed parakeet of the upper elevations in the Andes, this species is distinctive for the long, golden-colored band under the eye ending in the short golden plume that gives the species its common name. It’s the only species of the genus Leptosittaca and is found from Colombia to northern Peru, generally between 2,400…
We’re at that time of the calendar year when everyone is picking things “for the year.” Among those annual things, is the “Word of the Year,” and it looks like there’s not agreement among the various American dictionaries as to what the Word of the Year should be. Maybe it’s yet another example of the…
If this were a contest, there would probably be a tie. Which is stupider? There’s Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s folly in Texas v. Johnson & Johnson, where Paxton sought to force Johnson & Johnson and Kenvue to stop selling Tylenol™, based upon the Felon’s and U.S. Secretary of Health & Social Services Robert Kennedy,…
There are only two species of shrike in North America: Northern Shrike and Loggerhead Shrike. Central and South America have no shrikes at all. But the Old World picks up the slack, offering 40-some Laniidae species spread across four genera. East Africa alone has 13-14 species of shrike. Not all shrikes are called “Shrikes.” For…
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy continued his disastrous string of appointees to roles in his administration. And his seeming inability to perform meaningful background checks. The latest debacle was appointing Dr. Ryan McDonough to the Alaska State Medical Board the past August. Ryan McDonough was a cardiologist at Mat-Su Regional Medical Center and Mat-Su Medical Group…
Mostly, WC has to be in the right mood to enjoy the poetry of Rainer Marta Rilke. But this poem is good in any mood. I Want a Lot — Rainer Marta Rilke You see, I want a lot.Maybe I want it all:the darkness of each endless fall,the shimmering light of each assent. So many…
There was a time when the publication most often cited in published scientific articles was The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, written by a science historian named Thomas Kuhn. His thesis was a challenge to the view of science as a smooth, continuous line of progress, where one scientist built upon the work of another. Instead,…
A small, handsome parrot, found in Venezuela, Colombia and eastern Panama. You have to be a little imaginative to see the blue around the eyes the male as a “spectacle;” the female is all green, although the green on the head is a little more vivid than the male’s. Like many parrot species, the green…
There’s a well-known playbook used by corporations caught marketing dangerous and deadly products. In fact, there’s quite a good book, Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Orestes and Erik Conway. The book tracks the tactics used by big business when science has revealed dangerous products: tobacco, leaded gasoline, DDT, acid rain, anthropogenic climate change and more.…
Here’s another family of birds you’ve never heard of: the Bushshrikes, the Malaconotidae. shrike-like birds that are endemic to sub-Saharan Africa. Some of the common names – Brubru, Boubou and Tchagra, for example – sound like some ornithologist’s idea of a joke. Bushshrikes, like the more familiar North American shrikes, are predators. All have evolved…
The Felon’s recent tweet storms have brought a whole new batch of words and phrases from President Felon that require translation or explication. Newer additions to this work in progress appear at the top of the list. Our First Felon uses language in strange and unusual ways. Notably, he often uses the same words or…
Alaska has an amazing inability to deal with two related crises: climate change and fossil fuel production. WC has written about it – perhaps repetitively – over the years and can report that those passionate, fact-based blog posts have been utterly ineffective. But perhaps Alaska can learn from the experience of others; maybe seeing the…
Tali – properly, Tallulah Blue – takes WC for a walk each morning. Most are 2 – 3 miles, some are on Boise’s flat valley floor, some up in the foothills. WC is hardly the only North Ender with the habit; Tali and WC see lots of other dogs taking their owners for walks, as…
Mannheim Steamroller was founded by Chip Davis back in 1974. Davis, together with his buddy, William Fries, had earlier created “C.W. McCall,” a fictional country-western singer probably best known for his novelty song, “Convoy.” Steamroller performed a kind fusion of light jazz and classical music across a series of Fresh Aire albums. Those did all…
We are continuing with parrots, the Psittacidae. There are at least 183 species so this 18th blog post on this family of birds marks the one-tenth point. Spoiler Alert: we won’t get to the two-tenths point. The White-crowed Parrot is another New World species, found in Central America from southern Mexico to western Panama, and…
Aline Habba is one of too many disastrously bad appointments made by the Felon, who nominated her to be U.S. Attorney for New Jersey. It’s a job for which Habba had no qualifications; she had no experience at all in criminal law. However, her earlier, unquestioning loyalty to the Felon in his frivolous challenges to…
Most geological processes are slow, imperceptible in the time scale of human lives. The spreading center at the center of the Pacific Ocean, the East Pacific Rise, is among the fastest moving on the planet, some 60 millimeters per year. In WC’s lifetime, that amounts to . . . about 15 feet. Sure, over a…
WC attended law school at Northwestern University. It was then and is now the largest private college in Illinois. The professional schools – law, medicine, dental and business – are just north of the Loop in downtown Chicago; the main campus is north of Chicago in the suburb of Evanston. Since graduating more than 50…
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