You don’t see them at the mall because you only go to certain malls, if you go to malls at all. You don’t see them at work, if you go to work, because you do a certain kind of work. You don’t see them at the restaurants, at least not…
He was all but done for the day when we pulled into the gas station just outside of Spearfish, South Dakota, his "Trump Shop" bus all closed up for the night. Written on the bus were the words "not affiliated with the campaign." Some sort of backdoor PAC-based way to…
When I was twelve I saw Close Encounters of the Third Kind in a theater and I was amazed by the spaceships and by the musical tones and light display at the end. I was amazed as well afterward when I discovered that weird rocky tower where the aliens meet…
Apple updated my Safari browser today with a feature that not only blocks trackers--the software from companies that, invisible to you, monitor your activity on the web, following you as you move from site to site--but also tells which sites have which trackers. I tried a few government agencies. I…
When we came down out of the mountains in July of 2004 we had no real idea of where we were. This was before the iPhone and navigation systems in cars. We were traveling across country, moving from the Washington, D.C. area to California, my wife and our two grade-school-age…
It's possible to have too many books, especially art books. I've got shelves full of them, piles on the floor crowding the furniture. Every so often I swear I'm going to stop buying art books then I do and then I don't. I do--I'll go a month or two without…
One family went all out and each of them, dad, mom, and two kids, wore full on industrial painting masks, black rubber face part with two large filter cartridges, looking like something from Word War I. They wore these as they walked the boardwalks around the geyser basins. You could only see their eyes and the parents' eyes looked out wide open, terrified.
It could be worse. A few thousand years ago lava splashed and bubbled up out of the ground in what is now Idaho and spread out over six hundred and eighteen square miles. One single lava flow running about thirty miles long.
I pull off at an overlook in the mountains of northern Wyoming, my wife and youngest daughter in my FJ Cruiser, my oldest daughter and her boyfriend pulling in ahead of me in their Honda Element. As we are standing, stretching, starting to move toward the overlook and toward the…
A first visit to the John Day Fossil Beds, in the dried-out hills in eastern Oregon, is a surprise, the hills of banded red and yellow and black, pulp science fiction book covers made real. But another surprise awaits in these hills. The area is heavy with fossils and a…