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bike ride bijou

Occupational hazards abound for the writer. Sitting at a desk all day, incessant use of reading glasses, fighting off the flurry of notifications our digital overlords have embedded on our phones, iPads, and desktop computers.   Exercise patterns have changed, there is now a daily bike ride to account for. I’m averaging 100 miles a week, […]

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Microchipped Pet Geolocation Giveaway

We all know about the Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Department of Homeland Security and of then the more familiar Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation. Reading today’s Financial Times the sage reporting of Ed Luce by way of a feature story Lunch with the FT-Christo Grozev spills the spy craft beans. […]

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barbie goes BAZILLION—

For my money Dunkirk is Christopher Nolan’s apex directorial moment. His impulsiveness reminds me of the challenges Robin Williams presented when trying to contain the great performers tendency to be let loose and run unbridled.  Nolan isn’t as frenetic; he doesn’t fly off on some stream of consciousness riff, his challenge is the same as […]

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script coverage

See you on the other side of Independence Day, we can get to work on the campaign to oust the gay haters who have lied their way onto our nation’s highest court—

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60 Word pitch

Flatiron’s two best pilots are both Black American women, both skilled pilots, there is Major Emma Bezel and Lieutenant Colonel Dovey Doverspike.

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finish the line

Revisions to the screenplay continue at a measured pace. I unpacked a lengthy exchange between two characters, that helped with flow. I’m still miserable about trying to hide a few key facts without bringing the narrative to a grinding halt. The manuscript is in Word on my computer and iPad, I can read while I’m […]

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Sausage Along the Potomac

Principled people can disagree about a lot of things, casting a vote not to raise the debt ceiling is not one of them. I don’t like the deal, but I don’t like defaulting on the national debt worse. Bernie, Warren and AOC are not on the same principled page over the debt and think they’ve […]

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Let’s Talk City Buildouts—

If Phoenix is a hot mess of a beast, Gilbert is the sizzling distant unknown reptile nobody has ever heard of. I’d come in from the south, drove through Coolidge, then finally the long straight boulevard into downtown, the very beating heart of this anonymous gargantuan valley town.. Three lanes in each direction for 20 […]

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Nine Arizona Touchstones

Nearing late afternoon in Tempe, late April touching 91 degrees F, waiting to pickup Eileen coming in from Denver. Crow, a street performing friend lives in Tucson. After blueberry pancakes this morning drove to his place for coffee before heading north. Married to a Korean wife, she’s visiting family and is away, when she returns […]

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Casey’s Gift

Rivers that originate in Arizona are few, the Verde River begins its journey up in the mountains in northwest corner of Yavapai County. Once upon a time the river’s water was counted as one of the tributaries to the Colorado River. In modern times every drop remains here in the state and is relied upon […]

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Collecting Surprise

Traveling can be inconvenient. Entering Arizona was a longer jump, followed by a series of shorter jumps from town to town. Arriving at each place there is a setting, a building, people and their things. This is a picture of just one object in a home filled with thousands upon thousands of carefully collected objects […]

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House on the Verde River

First time I came out from San Francisco for Casey’s 60th birthday. I had not ever been to a desert home built on the banks of a river. The home is surrounded by a is a mix of mesquite, cottonwoods and sycamore trees. Last night I saw a scarlet tanager. Morning we drank coffee watching […]

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On Choosing Mudflap’s—

The Kid’s Super Special Guy flew south, he had come this way to get a 1995 Toyota pickup truck and deliver it to Seattle. Never mind the arctic blast, the closed highways, the barely open chains only interstate, he’d hole up in a motel and wait for the all clear signal, his goal was simple […]

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Proletariat’s Rejuvenation—

The global proletariat thrill meter is pegged at infinite— I told you so.  Tesla’s stock has fallen from $384 a share to a close of $156 per today. It turns out the richest man in the world is no longer the richest man in the world. Trolling is misunderstood. Behaving like a privileged, adolescent, juvenile, white supremacist isn’t […]

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Emergency on the Wasatch

The Salt Lake City Tribune posted a water story (see it here) that straightened my back and got my attention. The story is well researched, we learn there are 10,000 family hay-growing operations in Utah, that the crop market value is $500 million, and one-third of the crop is sent overseas.  Profits in Utah’s alfalfa […]

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Johnson’s Johnson

n terms of how many Johnsons away from tragedy, and let’s be generous now, on average say there are two Johnson’s for every foot of water, we are just 276 Johnson’s away from a climate catastrophe of a kind the modern world has never experienced.

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Can Kicking Over— Hard Part is Here

Half-truth tellers, braggarts, and exaggerators are stealing water from Americans. Take the executive director of this outfit called the Agribusiness and Water Council of Arizona. With millions of acres farmed in Arizona less than half is dedicated to the food that ends up directly on our dinner plate while a whole lot more of the […]

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Tight as a Tick Dry as a Bone

If you are living in San Francisco, don’t have a car, rent an apartment, don’t have a garden, haven’t got out on a road trip, then it is likely the 20-year drought gripping the American West may well have gone unnoticed. If on the other hand you are Max Gomberg the Director over at the […]

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Dusty Days on the Klamath

North of Yreka the Klamath River passes beneath Interstate 5 while flowing west through the Siskiyou’s to the Pacific Ocean. Over the last two decades the megadrought has pummeled the region. For 13 of the last 20 years the governors of Oregon have declared a drought emergency east of where I am standing in the […]

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Call for a General Strike

The ruins of Chaco Canyon give us a glimpse into the life of one of America’s earliest civilizations. There is evidence the first people prevailed as a culture and economy for 1000 years, the tribes of the desert southwest of Arizona and New Mexico thrived here. After years of abundant rain our first people were […]

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Vet Showmen Pay Lip Service

Trip to Kona has been a bit of a tale. A carrying cart failed just before coming over to the islands resulting in a propane tank landing square on my big toe. That kind of changed the last two weeks. An urgent care doctor glued the gash back together slapped me on the butt and […]

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The Garden Bench

Cork oak trees come from the Iberian Peninsula (so does the loyal but obstinate donkey); it is estimated that there are perhaps as many as 5000 cork oaks in California.

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Northwest Natural Wine Night

As dinner party’s go this one turned out to be out of this world. The mix of characters worked swell, the invited included both curveballs and straight shooters— this the odd woven with the even. There was even an expectational tardy arrival of our party’s Hickey Boggs from The Iceman Cometh along with his second […]

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Seattle’s Wet Spring

Needing a dose of the kid I hopped a flight on Southwest from Oakland to Seattle for the weekend. Here’s her new condo on Capitol Hill. Never done but always organized. This is not something she got from her dad. Last night we ate at Blotto. Lucky for me they had vegan pizza. Joint was […]

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Gratitude Sails South

Sailing vessel Gratitude was underway with three crew by fifteen hundred hours on March 25th. In the first hours the Hylas 46 motored westbound with the ebbing tide toward the Golden Gate Bridge. An overcast sky began to open up and beyond on the Pacific Ocean there appeared the telling detail of a faint blue […]

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