Icky
-
Four years ago, I trekked through dense pinyon-juniper forests on behalf of the United States Bureau of Land Management (BLM). We were trying to assess plant community recovery and fire management following three thinning techniques: mulching, controlled burns, and selective removal. They had no control plots, but this isn’t about their shoddy experimental design, or…
-
When it comes to pets, I am of two minds: chronic dog brain and exotic pet enthusiast. Both have innumerable benefits, but the way you interact with a gecko is different from the way you interact with a dog. An animal that only arose on the pet trade in the last 30 years does not…
-
Videodrome is a 1983 science fiction/body horror film directed by David Cronenberg at his most fucked. I love it for all the reasons I love Cronenberg’s other work: the viscera, the artistry of corn syrup and slime, the sexual innuendo of horror, and the vigorous application of latex. It’s a favorite Halloween haunt, but so…
-
I love accidents. I don’t mean that in the morbid “I love the horror of a bunch of people dying,” I assure you. Instead, I love examining the many clockwork fragments of these events, like the terrible PR approach that blew Threemile Island into a public relations nightmare or the numerous regulatory failures that allowed…
-
The first major loss I felt as a child happened in the town of Dinosaur, Colorado in a KOA overlooked by a billboard for McDonald’s that my parents tried desperately to hide from all 3 of their children. I had a small figurine of a coelophysis, a souvenir from a paleontology museum in Fruita. I…
-
I never met my great grandmother Velma, she died some years before I was even born. Based on photos and my mom’s recollections of her to me, she was a short woman with a big personality and an uncanny knack for fiber arts. 20 years after her death, my mom drove our minivan three days…
-
Campi Flegrei, also known as the Phlegrean fields, is a series of 24 volcanic calderas in the ocean outside of Naples, Italy. One of these, the Solfatara crater, was considered the home of the Roman God of Fire Vulcan due to the amount of volcanic activity evident in the area. The caldera itself underlies the…
-
In 2013, the city of Melbourne assigned ID numbers to trees and gave them an email address, allowing the public to report downed branches or disease. Instead, people wrote love letters to their favorite trees. Everyone can write a love letter to a tree in their past. I can. Dear maple tree in my backyard,…
-
In 2022, I was forced to leave the best job I’d ever had for a number of reasons — not the least of which being that I technically was not allowed to have it past graduation in the first place. The pandemic let a lot of things slide. I found an adult job at a…
