book: J. Madeleine Nash’s El Niño: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker. It’s been sitting unread on my shelf since it came out three years ago. It’s good so far, by which I mean she’s a) found a good line to follow through the story, and b) told me things I didn’t already know. …
Various ways to die.
In my own modest search to undestand the zeitgeist of the Inkstain reader, the top gaining search string for December 2005: Jeff “Skunk” Baxter. Big ass remains a perennial favorite (Was that really what they were looking for?), as does “don’t bogart that joint”. Sadly, inflatable turkeys seem to have dropped off the radar after …
Santa gave Kurt Vonnegut’s new book to Nora and me for Christmas, and I finished it this morning. Perhaps when I’ve more time I’ll jot down some ideas about Vonnegut’s significance to me as a writer (or perhaps I already have, though the idea deserves a bit more development than you’ll find there). But for …
stuff I wrote elsewhere: 2005 Duke City’s 6th Hottest Year: Albuquerque is getting warmer. The year ends as one of the wettest and warmest years in history here. The warmth is a trend, while snowless mountains suggest the wet is not. readings: An interesting window into a world I don’t travel in: Teenagers Mix Churches …
book: I’m rereading bits and pieces of Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster’s 1985 book about water and the west. When I read it 20 years ago, I was sympathetic to Worster’s argument that the concentration of power required for great irrigation works defined the social and political structures of the west. Not entirely convinced, but …
While we here in Albuquerque were busy this holiday season setting ourselves alight, the residents of Tokyo appear to have tried a different approach. We had fun here. James suggests the Tokyo version is not worth the bother: This picture really doesn’t do them justice – they were much more boring and inconsequential than they …
Wandering through my newly acquired baseball encyclopedia, I was looking at the records of some of baseball’s greats, and it got me wondering about baseball’s worst. Who, for example, is the worst pitcher in baseball history? It’d be easy to pick on someone like Bill Abernathie, who pitched two innings for the Cleveland Indians back …
weather: Looks like this morning’s overnight low of 40 set a record for Dec. 26 – 5 degrees F warmer than the old record of 35. It got down to 37 at my house, according to my new Christmas weather station. (update 10:19 a.m. – Doh! It’s the 27th, the record’s 40 set in 1923, …
reading: Sedentism and Mobility in a Social Landscape: Mesa Verde and Beyond, by Mark Varien. Varien proposes a model for understanding mobility in archaeological studies at the household level, which makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. Thinking of my Northeast Heights neighborhood as having been “continuously occupied” since its post-World War II construction …