This week, I had the pleasure of writing a story about a good deed. The construction manager of a major project here in Sisters, Oregon, rescued a family that had run off the road in the Cascades and ended up in their wrecked truck, upside down in the North Santiam River. You can read the full story here. The key […]
Time To Shake These Doomsayer Blues
It’s the same old story Tell me where will it end I got the same old blues, same old blues again — J.J. Cale * I’m gonna lay down these Doomsayer Blues. The fourth National Climate Assessment under the U.S. Global Change Research program was released on the Friday of Thanksgiving weekend — the traditional […]
‘You’ve Got To Play On’
Decided to go with something a little lighter and more uplifting than usual for this week’s Running Iron Report column. If you can call broken bones and a torn scrotum “light and uplifting.” Blame Rullman and my brother John. * Last Sunday, Craig and Pete Rathbun and I sat down at the Figure 8 to record a podcast on “Stories […]
Badgers And Blood Oranges
They came upon a circle of nomads Camped far from the lights of the town Blue men with scars and malarial eyes And teeth that were pointed… filed down He said: “These are the people I’ve been searching for, This is more than I ever could have hoped!” As they threw him down on a blanket And tied […]
A Proclamation Of Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving has long been an American tradition, famously dating back to the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth Colony. The observance was celebrated at different times and in different places, and the tradition was strongest in New England. It wasn’t until the Civil War that it was established as a fixed national holiday. In the darkest depths […]
Guns, Germs & Gravy On Everything
It would be hard to overstate how much I love Thanksgiving. An autumn family feast day with underpinnings of historical remembrance seems purpose‐built to trip my trigger — and it always does. It is even more important to me now that it means trekking across the Cascades to retrieve daughter Ceili from university. The drive is […]
November 11, 1918‐November 11, 2018
Washington, Monday, Nov. 11, 2:48 A.M.–The armistice between Germany, on the one hand, and the allied Governments and the United States, on the other, has been signed. The State Department announced at 2:45 o’clock this morning that Germany had signed. The department’s announcement simply said: “The armistice has been signed.” The world war will end this […]
An End To War, An End To Peace
Take some time this Sunday, November 11, to reflect upon a moment that occurred exactly 100 years ago. It made the world we live in. In November 1918, at the 11th hour* of the 11th day of the 11th month, an Armistice went into effect between the Allied powers of France, Great Britain and the United States […]
‘Blueprint For Armageddon’
We are fast approaching the 100th anniversary of the Armistice that ended World War I — known then as The Great War. It was the most cataclysmic conflict in human history up to that time, and it is almost inconceivable that it would be superseded in a mere 30 years by an even more horrific one. Americans […]
One Drop Of Blood
The recent kerfuffle over politician Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test proving that she has Native American blood (a degree denoting a likely ancestor dating back from the early 19th Century) is a fine illustration of the continuity and persistence of the American fixation on race. I will leave it to others to parse the implications of the unseemly […]
Beware The Outrage Trolls
“A tongue can accuse and carry bad news The seeds of distrust it will sow But unless you’ve made no mistakes in your life Be careful of stones that you throw… — Hank Williams, “Be Careful Of Stones That You Throw” * This is how this rolls: Somebody, somewhere, with an ax to grind digs […]
Talk Sexy To Me, Alexa!
“This is the kind of surveillance that people can actually like. There’s satellites up there not only to spy on us, but to help us lead better lives.” — Marcel Salathé, head of the Digital Epidemiology Lab at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne on using satellite photographs to correlate obesity and environment. Oh, fuck […]
