As the swamp in front of my house in Minnesota springs back to life, I think back to the truly odd history of wildlife in New Zealand. Completely isolated for eons of time, New Zealand…
Posts published in “Essays”
Pull back the bedroom curtains, Friday, February 25, 7am. Pouring, howling, blowing rain. Due to leave for Los Angeles at 9am. It’s Oscar time, again, The yearly journey. Pull back the covers. I don’t want…
“In the 21st century, the best anti-poverty program around is a first-class education,” President Obama famously declared in his 2010 State of the Union Address, just as millions of high schoolers across the nation were…
On Tuesday, March 20, I was given a lesson in just how broken the people’s business is in Sacramento. Along with 180 other participants to the 10th Annual “Park Advocacy Day,” I was there to…
It’s hard to believe that Vern Piver is gone, especially with baseball season coming on. He was one of the last links to a now forgotten world on the Mendocino Coast. Vern played ball for…
When I was a kid in Southern California back in the 1970s, I had a pal up the street whose dad taught chemistry at the local university. That’s all I really knew about the man,…
I was the only child of elderly parents. They both died the year before I evolved out of puberty, and I was left in the care of a diminutive maiden aunt. She had absolutely no…