Category Archives: Commentary

Gas Attack

Two weeks ago, I wrote about the Shell oil rig Kulluk, which was then beached on an uninhabited island off Alaska’s south coast.  Shell has since refloated the rig and it’s now in a sheltered harbor being inspected.  This is not the end of Shell’s troubles. Shell’s incompetence with equipment (see here for a longer, […]

Where the Mental Health Thing Comes In

James Yeager, the CEO of Tactical Response, a Tennessee company that specializes in firearms training, posted – and then unposted – a 32-second video of himself swearing into the camera (swearing in both the sense of cursing and making a promise) that if guns are regulated, he will start killing people. I hardly know where […]

Empty Shell

Happy New Year.  The snow here is two feet deep and the temperature is in single digits, sometimes above and sometimes below zero.  Winter in Vermont as it should be and as it too rarely seems to be anymore. Global warming is the cause, of course, and while we seem to be enjoying a respite […]

Status Report

I’ve shoveled three times today, so far.  Big flakes are supposed to keep falling from the sky for the next two days.  I checked my neighbors’ house – they’re out of state for the holidays and now trapped in the Midwest – to make sure their pipes don’t freeze.  So far, so good.  So far […]

Christmas in Prison

I suppose you want to hear a Christmas story.  “It was Christmas in prison and the food was real good, we had turkey and pistols carved out of wood… ”  That John Prine song will be 40 in the New Year. Twenty years ago this month I wandered through parts of the Midwest humming that […]

Winter’s Tale

The long nights of the year are upon us and the diversity-celebrating, non-denominational holiday lights of Burlington wink on in the late afternoon as the sun sets not far from where it rises, off in the mountains to the south (first Green, then Adirondack). The kitchen is the warmest room in the house, with the […]

Things in My Shed

With this post, my New Year’s resolution is complete.  (Just in time to start working on a new one.)  I promised myself in January that I’d pay more attention to the world immediately around me this year and would dedicate my first commentary of each month to that topic. Although most of these comments have […]