Category: The Grab Bag

Some things are so intrinsically American they have helped define the way we understand ourselves. The B-17 Flying Fortress is one of them. Though there are only about 15 of them still airworthy today, for a few years in the last century the B-17, and the men who flew them, did enough of the hardest ...

Recently, thousands of people, and even a few penguins at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, turned out to protest against the politicization of science.  The protestors insist that policy making in government circles should be evidence based, and that heavyweight decisions on issues such as climate change should be made by reference to scientific fact, rather ...

Here on the Figure 8, our humble rancho in the ponderosas, we have inadvertently created an interpretive center. That it also happens to be housed in the entryway “half-bath” is merely a side-note. It is, in my humblest estimation, everything that a museum hosted in a water closet should be. In the “Custer Bathroom”, as ...

One of the more reliable signs of spring is the return of the redwinged blackbirds. No matter what the calendar says, it’s only when I see them down in the meadow below our place, the males singing on a fenceline, or ganging up on ravens to chase them off the nesting territory, that I’m ready ...

I’m not a builder. I have no professional training of any kind, though as a kid I helped my step-dad built a gigantic barn. I was mostly useful as an extra hand to drive nails, fetch this tool or that, or to hold the end of a tape-measure. As I got older my pursuits went ...

Much of last week was dedicated to moving manure. I should be more precise: it was dedicated to breaking up fields of ice-manure, 8 or 10 inches deep, by hand, with a pick, then coming along behind with the tractor to pick up the delightful mess and move it away from the barn. It was ...

This year I intend to garden—or farm, as I prefer to think of it—as if our lives depend on it. I’ve set a high bar for this summer’s haul: 500 lbs. I want to harvest 500 lbs of vegetables, eat them, preserve them, and give some of those pounds of food away to kith and ...

Last summer, while lounging around the Munich Airport waiting for a flight to Reykjavik, I bought a book: “The Silk Roads, A New History of the World”, by Peter Frankopan. Frankopan is a senior fellow at Oxford University, and has written a convincing reassessment of world history. It is also a poignant, and incredibly well-considered ...

this post originally appeared in The Nugget News, February 28, 2017 Multiple news outlets have reported that President Donald Trump does not read books. If these reports can be believed, which is a large-style “if” these days, His Excellency eschews the written word altogether, preferring, one supposes, the background noise of flattering network coverage and ...

this post originally appeared in The Nugget News, February 21, 2017 This morning I woke up at 4 am. This is earlier than usual but I was prompted by the insistent wet-nose poking of our oldest dog, Buddy, who is nearly blind, mostly deaf, and recovering from a nearly fatal injury to his elbow that ...