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 tagged as “essays”
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…
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…
Where there is sugar, yeast will find it — and so we have alcohol. The natural wonder we call fermentation has been discovered and replicated independently in nearly every region of earth, and virtually nowhere…
The man credited with convincing the global consumers that it is worth the effort and money and environmental degradation to condense their music libraries onto a matchbook-sized (or somewhat larger) gadget has announced his retirement.…
March is a month of change. Winter often goes out holding a thunderous grudge. Sometimes the wild weather brings in exotic birds, blown dramatically off migratory course by El Nino-like storms. The “Big Year” record…
“Pleasure is spread through the earth in stray gifts to be claimed by whoever shall find.”— William Wordsworth Long ago in the Santa Cruz of 1972, I was a member of a large commune occupying…
Despite my better judgment and sometimes sensitive stomach, I caught a bit of the latest Republican candidate debate the other evening. The one benefit was that I finally figured out why an obscure old song…