This post is dedicated to the late Dr. Vera Alexander, marine scientist, equestrian, musician, philanthropist and much more. It was WC’s privilege to serve as a marine technician on the R/V Acona in 1967 on a cruise where Dr. Alexander, a newly minted PhD, did some of the original research on the relationship between Harbor…
In the NPR’s obituary of Gordon Lightfoot, they played parts of “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” WC doesn’t think “Edmund Fitzgerald” is Lightfoot’s best song, but it’s certainly his best known. What makes the song remarkable to WC is that, consciously or unconsciously, Lightfoot adopted a rhyming pattern, a mode of epic poetry in…
For WC, art least, the tradition of political satire lyrics set to pop music tunes started with Tom Lehrer. A professor of mathematics and musical theater, he taught at Harvard, M.I.T. and the University of California, Santa Cruz, while for a total of 109 live performances and a dozen or so albums, had a side…
Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, has died. By all accounts, he was a very nice person and an astonishingly generous charitable donor, But Moore is probably best known for Moore’s Law, which isn’t a law at all but a prediction. Moore predicted, in the late 1950s, that the number of transistors on an integrated chip…
If you are a serious photographer, you’ve spent some time at DP Review. Love it or hate it, trust it or distrust it, DPReview has for more than 20 years been the best on-line source for reviews and recommendations of all things photographic. Camera and lens reviews, side-by-side comparisons, recommendations by intended use, price and…
David Lindley, multi-instrumentalist extraordinaire, peerless sideman and astonishing live act, died March 3. He may not have been well known to the general public, but among musicians he was regarded as a brilliant sideman. Between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, he recorded with an amazing number and variety of artists, performing pretty much…
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…
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 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…
One of the weirdest things about American politics is the virtual canonization of crooked politicians when they die. America did it with Dick Nixon. If you listened to the eulogies at Nixon’s funeral, you’d never have guessed he resigned in disgrace, and avoided a long prison sentence only by accepting a blanket pardon from President…
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.…
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…
Bill Allen has died. Good riddance. The King of Corruption, Betrayer of Friends, the Prince of Disastrous Deals, he made most of his money off one of Alaska’s biggest disasters and he earns one of WC’s rare Do Not Rest in Peace obituaries. Bill Allen bought Wayne Veltri’s Veltri Co. from from Veltri in 1970.…
WC first met Jim Hayes on a basketball court. Hayes was the starting center for the Lathrop Malemutes; WC was a very skinny Junior Varsity player, just a few weeks away from washing out of even the JV team, and gave away some 60-70 pounds and six inches to Hayes, who was a mass of…
Ninety percent of what I made went to women, whiskey, drugs and cars. I guess I just wasted the other 10 percent. Ronnie Hawkins, “Last of the Good Ol’ Boys,” 1989 The Hawk is dead. Ronnie Hawkins, Arkansas native and Canadian transplant died May 29 after a long illness. The epitome of rockabilly music, he…
In Don Young’s 26 separate campaigns for U.S. Congress, WC never, not once, voted for Don Young. Indeed, WC gave substantial sums of money to many of the folks who ran against Young. Alaskans kept electing him to Congress anyway, despite Young’s appalling ethical, moral and legal lapses. Now, in the time-honored tradition of Americans…
It started as a meta joke. In The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the character Eddie, who later serves as the main course for supper, was played by Marvin Lee Aday. Aday, better known by his stage name, Meat Loaf, inspired the character Columbia’s complaint about the entrée, “Meat Loaf again?” That line usually gets used…
It isn’t very often WC writes an obituary for a star, especially a red supergiant star. In fact, this is the very first time. Because it is the first time astronomers have watched the final days of a red supergiant star and observed as it exploded into a Type II Supernova. The star in question…
WC doesn’t believe in omens, but if you do, you’ll have to hope it’s not a bad omen to start the new year’s blog posts with an obituary. In 1965, WC was casting about for a science fair project. WC’s high school chemistry teacher, Barbara Page, had challenged WC to come up with something different,…
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…
Here’s a rock and roll trivia question for you: who opened for The Beatles at their first American concert in 1964? The answer: Jay and the Americans, fronted (in their second and best known iteration) by Jay Black, neé David Blatt. As his former bandmate, Sandy Yaguda, tells the story, when Jay and the Americans…
John E. Havelock wasn’t one of the founding fathers of Alaska Statehood. But he was one of individuals who set about the business of making Alaska function as a state. WC admired John Havelock for WC’s entire legal career; he had a gift for finding a way to a compromise that served his clients’ interests…
WC can’t add much to the excellent tributes and obituaries from Rolling Stone and the New York Times. The guy had a voice like an angel, and despite heavy drinking, drugs and decades of smoking, he never lost that pitch-perfect sound. Or the skills that created those amazing parallel thirds harmonies with his brother, Phil.…
Some blog posts are harder to write than others. WC has a clear memory of seeing and hearing Nanci Griffith at The Quiet Knight in Chicago in early 1975 (she started singing in clubs when she was 12 years old). Somehow, WC had gotten a seat down close to the stage. A law school classmate…
WC attended exactly one (1) National Hockey League game while at law school in Chicago. It was a long, long bus ride out to Chicago Stadium, where the Blackhawks played, the game didn’t start until 8 PM and the ride back across the west side was . . . gnarly. And even back then a…
We’ve lost most of the folks in this poster. WC kept it because it included his friend Ken Philip. But it’s also served as a kind of snapshot of the University of Alaska Fairbanks’ astonishing depth of scientific talent in the 1980s. The most recent loss doesn’t appear on this poster but could: Neal Brown,…
WC was among the many people who really didn’t like Mike Gravel. In fact, WC actively campaigned in support of Clark Gruening’s effort to oust Gravel from the U.S. Senate, an effort that was successful but, in classic Mike Gravel fashion, only made the situation worse. But WC is once again starting his story in…
We knew her as Earl. It can be very difficult to identify the gender of a Great Gray Owl. Earl lived with WC and Mrs. WC in a deluxe mew – the technical name for a bird cage – fifty feet from our house. WC’s duties included cleaning Earl’s mew; it’s not a task for…
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…
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