Why, yes, yes I am jazzed. Whyever do you ask??
Some stuff I hope to work in: Dust bunnies and the Crescent terrane (but briefly of course). The Cordilleran ice sheet and the SLU mammoth. Vomiting volcanoes and prodigious progradation. The Green, White and Black. The bright side of our PCB ppbs. Why this picture keeps me up at night:
It’s going to be so radical.
When Lewis and Clark were setting off on their expedition, amateur paleontologist and Enemy of Freedom Thomas Jefferson asked them to keep their eyes peeled for any extant Megalonyx, the giant ground sloth that once called North America home. They obviously didn’t find any; the Clovis or a comet got there first. But, God, is it fun to imagine if they had…
If I ever tricked a Dino De Laurentiis type into spotting me the cash for a big budget Hollywood film, I’m pitching a period piece where the Lewis and Clark expedition traverses a heartland crawling with megafauna. Toussaint Charbonneau is introduced taking down a mammoth; Charles Floyd is stalked and killed by a Smilodon. This stuff writes itself!
In local news, my father noticed this hole in a pipe near Pixie Falls.
Looks pretty gross— iron, oxidizing from the inside of the pipe, dumping right into Whatcom Creek? The same Whatcom Creek that people fish beneath Dupont and C Street? I guess that the Olympic Pipeline disaster didn’t stop them to begin with, but, again— pretty gross.
In global news, pretty disturbing to come home to news of poor Poland’s terrible tragedy. The extent of the experience lost alone is devastating— looking at the list of people who died and thinking about the psychohistorical significance of the place it occurred, it’s akin to Barack and Michelle, Hillary Clinton and two of her deputies, Rahm Emmanuel, Mike Mullen, all of the Joint Chiefs, the head of the NSA, a famous actor in his seventies (Robert Redford?), multiple famous historians (Ken Burns? The Team of Rivals guy?) and a group of Bataan Death March survivors and their relatives all dying in a plane crash flying into the Philippines to attend a commemoration. Only, really, the analogy breaks down at the psychohistorical point; I can’t think of anything like Katyn as close to our own borders and involving a neighbor with whom we have as complicated a relationship as the Warsaw-Pact-plus-things-like-Katyn-and-Solidarity Poland-Russia cagematch. Very sad day— cross your fingers that it was “just” a plane crash and not something that lends itself to conspiracy in the least.
Sam and Devin dot com 