The Long Trail of Posts

I won’t be voting this time around. And spare me the lecture. You may allow yourself to get cornered into a bad vote between Donald Duck and Porky Pig. I won’t. The same way I won’t sign a loyalty oath …
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One problem with all of this high altitude lying is that us common folk now have a difficult time discerning the truth, in those rare moments when someone is trying tell it. It is somewhere in that miasma—where the truth …
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A couple of years ago, before the plague struck planet earth and accelerated the already impressive pace of batshit crazy behavior here on our little blue ball, I had a fellow who helped me out around the ranch. I’ve written …
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It isn’t much, this fort, and I strain for verisimilitude. It might be the very sad museum, where the most interesting item on display is a woven Clatsop hat. The rest is fraud. Intellectual and physical. Reconstructions of reconstructions. The …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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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 …
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We showed up early because we expected a crowd. We were right. There had been a bird nest over the front door to the Montana Club but in the opening hubbub, not nearly as violent as a Black Friday crush …
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Don’t you love a farce? My fault, I fear I thought that you’d want what I want Sorry my dear But where are the clowns? Send in the clowns Don’t bother They’re here — Stephen Sondheim, Send In The Clowns …
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I won’t bore you with details of 18 hours in delayed flights, an unexpected stay in Denver, or any of the weird third-world adventures accompanying domestic travel that are now routine in modern, robust, and according to President Joe Biden, …
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Been doing a little work for the upcoming 50th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, one of the most significant events in modern American political history. The aftershocks of the botched political espionage operation that ultimately brought down the Nixon presidency …
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