September 24-28, 2018 This week, Sally lets us in on some tech news: 2018 is the Cambrian Explosion of Steganography. Messages can be hidden in a variety of media, and it’s very hard for law enforcement to find. “Jpgs, gifs, pngs, mp3s –all of these have loads of storage space just begging for stowaways. They just […]
Month: September 2018
This piece originally ran a year ago, Sept 22, 2018. Right now I’m in the bowels of the Grand Canyon, sending up a flare of a redux. I often think back to this story, especially when violence swells in the world. This is one small antidote. I was with a group kayaking and camping on […]
I don’t know when I first saw Cisco, Utah. My early memory of it is imprecise, gathered from a series of impressions over years into one blurry composite. A crumbling edifice of corner store, covered in a mural of eagle and mountains that is in turn covered in black scrawls of graffiti. Dead cars. Piles […]
This is an image of a deluge, an absolute inundation, a drainage basin filled to the brim, a coast whose cup runneth over, total saturation, a scene that would make Noah cringe. This is, as my friend pointed out, a f*@kload of water. This image shows how the land changed after Hurricane Florence was done, […]
When’s the last time you tried a new fruit? The last time I did, I think I was probably in a tropical country, or eating something grown in a tropical country. But on Sunday I tried a new fruit from right here in the temperate latitudes. The pawpaw is the largest native fruit in North […]
This is a picture of an old timey cash register, and thanks to the weirdness of tech and the weirdness of money, there could be actual money in it. Literal money that you can take out of the picture and spend. Thanks to an app launched last month, you can now furtively smuggle money inside […]
For years I’ve been reading about mass shootings. School shootings. Campus shootings. Shootings in bars. Shootings at concerts. Las Vegas. Orlando. Virginia Tech. Sandy Hook. Parkland. The stories keep coming, and each new one elicits horror. We can’t help but be dumbstruck by the senseless carnage. But there’s also some small measure of relief. Not […]
I wrote this earlier in the year, when there was a proliferation of assholes along the border. Since then, I had a chance to peruse the area. Yup, they’re all still there. Non-native species get a lousy rap. Now don’t get me wrong, often they deserve it. Between the nutrias, peacock bass, eucalyptus trees, and lionfish of […]