Running Iron Report

I like to think of Vin as a kind of ancient bard telling the story of Ulysses around a campfire. He was a master scene-builder, and could seduce a listener into the story of a young pitcher, just called up from the minors, making his debut. He would make that story something like your own, epic and inspiring and familiar, … Read More

I don’t raise bees anymore but I’m still working on my Theory of Everything. In physics, the big TOE is meant to unify general relativity (all the big stuff) with quantum theory (all the little stuff) to create a grand unifying theory of the whole enchilada. Mine probably isn’t as ambitious, and I realize I’m running out of time to … Read More

Every once in a while, I’m in the mood for some over-the-top mad-science/military-horror mayhem. When the mood is upon me, I turn to Jonathan Maberry’s Joe Ledger series. They’re a hoot. Here’s the very first caper — Patient Zero: When you have to kill the same terrorist twice in one week there’s either something wrong with your world or something … Read More

On June 17, 1859, an otherworldly blast of hot wind blew into Santa Barbara, California, from the northwest. Within minutes the temperature rose to 133°. Cattle fell over, birds dropped from the sky, and old men toppled over in their adobe doorways, dead right there. Or so the legend goes. It’s an interesting story, this sudden simoom, even if the … Read More

And so it was that shortly after breakfast, on an otherwise bluebird morning, that Rosa had started up an accusatory harangue at Wayne, Jake, and Francisco. Francisco had once raised chickens in Mexico until an avian flu wiped out his birds to the last rooster and, post bankruptcy, his wife ran off with a tour guide who specialized in Aztec … Read More

Yesterday I woke up in the dark to a sound like jet airplanes directly above the house. It wasn’t airplanes. It was a sudden, heavy, and sustained gust of wind through the dark ponderosas. Then came flashes of lightning that lit up the room, like some scene from a horror movie, and then basso-profundo rolls of thunder that vibrated the … Read More

There is a family of mountain bluebirds that nest in a birdhouse in our yard every year. They come in spring, take up residence just long enough to raise other mountain bluebirds to flight, and then they are gone. They leave about the same time the blue-green swallows arrive, with their manic and dazzling flights. This year the bluebirds came … Read More

Some of you might remember Jean-Marie Colombani’s heartfelt headline and editorial in Le Monde, on September 12, 2001: Nous Somme Tous Américains (We Are All Americans). Later, in an interview with NPR, Colombani was asked how conscious he was of the American reaction to that headline. “I don’t know,” he said. “I wasn’t aware of nothing. I was just conscious that … Read More

While out delivering The Nugget recently, I listened to an episode of the American Spy Museum’s Spycast podcast, featuring Ric Prado. Enrique Prado was a covert CIA operative in Central America in the 1980s, as the Reagan Administration sought to build an insurgency to overthrow the Communist Sandinista regime, which had come to power in a revolution against the brutal … Read More

When the poet John Berryman leapt off a bridge in Minneapolis he was sober. He’d been largely drunk up until that morning but he was scarred forever by his own father’s suicide and probably every tall building looked something like a hell-hole. … Read More