water politics: Looks like Sophie and the guy with the steely set in his jaw are going to stop Caesar’s evil plot to steal groundwater to build subdivisions. water politics II: Looks like Sophie and the guy with the steely set in his jaw may need to head over to Arizona next. water politics III: …
reading: Tired of printing out PDF’s, I’m placing my order today for the IPCC Working Group I report paper of the day: “A Method of Approximating Rainfall over Long Periods and Some Results of its Application,” A.E. Douglass, Science, Jan. 3, 1913. Sorry, nothing to link here, you’ll just have to take my word for …
Back in the summer of ’78, my friend John Colton visited me in L.A. It was his first visit, and while we were there, he made sure we drove around Beverly Hills, looking for jockeys on rick people’s lawns. Dweezil and the gang played Uncle Reemus at last night’s Zappa Plays Zappa Plays Zappa gig …
Continue reading ‘I’m Jimmy Carl Black, the Indian of the Group’ »
birds: For the first time I can remember, two hummingbirds in an uncomfortable detente, sharing our front porch feeder. A third hovered in the distance, out by the daylilies. Why can’t we all just get along? paper of the day: For reasons that will eventually become clear – Holocene Vegetation in Chaco Canyon, by a …
Quiet MorningOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It’s quiet Saturday morning in Albuquerque, the sort of quiet you get when a light blanket of snow dampens the sound and keeps everyone inside, including the dogs. We’re going to be in trouble today when the mailman comes. There’ll be no dogs out to protect us. music: Django (the …
I was on thin ice with the story the other day about John Coltrane’s mouthpiece. I mean, I think I really heard it, but I don’t have it tagged in my memory as to when or where, so when I wrote it I figured it was possible that it was either apocryphal or imagined. I …
paper of the day: When and where might climate change be detectable in UK river flows?: “Even where climate driven changes may already be underway, losses in deployable resources will have to be factored into long-term water plans long before they are statistically detectable. Rather than an excuse for inaction, such insights should inform more …
cool new paper: Hainzl et al. show how rain can trigger earthquakes. stuff I wrote elsewhere: Wave in Alaska busts up iceberg off Antarctica (no big scoop here, every science writer with an angle has been doing this story, ’cause it’s so insanely cool) music: One of my favorite classic rock songs is Jim Hendrix’s …
My colleague Amy Miller had a hilarious (infuriating?) story in Saturday’s paper about young Zac Cornfield, a first-grader at Montezuma Elementary School who was not allowed to attend school with spiked blue hair. Zac said he doesn’t understand what all the fuss was about. He only wanted to look like the punk rockers he idolizes. …
A weird musical moment: I’m listening to this old scratchy bad Charlie Parker album I bought on a discount rack, and I realize I’m listening to the theme from Star Trek. It’s a song called “Out of Nowhere.” The CD box doesn’t say when it was recorded, but Charlie Parker died in 1955, so I’m …