I was snooping around an old uranium mill the other day in southern Utah, taking advantage of an unusually warm January day in the desert to explore washes, ridges, and places where I could hunt for artifacts. You’ll find here glass bottles, metal tags, and pieces of machinery. It was a field mill, looked like […]
I have a friend who is a magician. He performs the occasional stage show with card tricks and coins hidden behind the ear. His work is sleight of hand, a flash of movement deceiving the eye. He’d say it’s science. You experiment and find what actually works. My friend, Angus Stocking, is also a tarot […]
Last Friday night the Boston runway looked like an Arctic landing, bits of tarmac barely visible through sheets of blowing snow. I had a good view of the runway with the plane tipping like a seesaw, coming in on the tail of an explosive cyclogenesis, or bombogenesis, media-shortened to a bomb cyclone. This unusual storm […]
Last night I went out with my kids to see the new Star Wars movie, followed by an hour and a half drive home along rivers and over a Colorado pass late at night. A car or two came by every twenty minutes or so. As my two boys slept in their pillows of jackets, […]
Last Sunday I saw a mountain lion, a full body profile, spotted from a dirt road. Healthy size and age, tail like a rope. By the time we backed up the truck, it was gone, disappeared into a brambly ponderosa forest. I don’t know why, to find tracks, or a scent, I jumped out […]
In caves and rock walls of the southern Utah desert, pictographs have been painted, added to the backs of clamshell-shaped sandstone enclosures. Many are noted to have acoustic properties, meaning these ancient, Indigenous images seem to be correlated with the way sound reflects around them. I’ve spoken in a normal voice back and forth from […]
The two of us moved in together a few weeks ago. With a moving truck, towering boxes of books, and every edible thing she could remove from her previous household, we merged lives. Whose tea strainer should we keep, whose collapsible metal steamer, whose box of African rooibos? When she found a dead silverfish hanging […]
October 16-20 Hello readers of LWON, here’s what kind of mischief we cooked up this week: Helen started off Monday by showing how she will live forever by eating salad. Not just eating it, but stashing her toppings at work for daily salad prep. The life of a modern agriculturalist, and immortality! It’s a big […]