Salt City Sinner

  (Titled with  apologies to Max Cannon ) Stand just about anywhere in the Salt Lake Valley and cast your gaze up at the Wasatch Mountains. You will be greeted by a series of sedimentary shelves that mark the feet of the mountains like rings in a bathtub, or the shadow left on the concrete by a puddle when it dries. When the light hits the Wasatch at just the right angle it’s a beautiful sight, a rich layer cake of color and texture. The Wasatch Mountains are only one of the innumerable natural wonders of my home state.

Photo by Briana Scroggins, Utah Investigative Journalism Project,  posted on 7/14/2019 by the Salt City Sinner Perhaps you always hurt the one you love , and conservatives really do love the great outdoors. More likely, this professed love is simply a conveniently outdated one, like the perennial reminder given us that the Republican Party is the “party of Lincoln.” Maybe, right-wing rapport with nature is just an outright lie, and always has been. In any case, this summer brought a fresh example of a folksy, sagebrush-lovin’ maverick who wrought destruction that would make the oil monster from Ferngully jealous. It seems that Bert Smith, one of the founders of Smith and Edwards, sold an old building he owned to Ogden city in the years before his death. After he expired in 2016, the city got their first close look at what they had purchased – what Bert, as it turned out, had been stashing there since the 1960s. The Salt Lake Tribune has the incredible story , whic...

Posted on 6/13/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Here in Salt City, temperatures are on the rise, and the sun is aggressively radiant - so much so that driving East in the morning or West in the evening is an exercise in driving blind. Things are popping up everywhere (both in terms of greenery and continued political discontent )! Not long ago, I posted about my plot in Sugar House Community Gardens. When I planted and added my first soil amendment (coconut husks, which absorb and re-release water in an almost magical way), my plot looked like this: Well, brothers and sisters, feast your eyes: Thai basil, radishes, beets, onions, bok choi, mystery beans, peppers, Swiss chard, amaranth - you name it, I'm growing it. My bok choi, which I have had to pinch five or six generations of flowers off of to encourage leafy growth, is going NUTS (as are my onions): I even have one winter squash plant that I might have to trellis eventually. I also have the mystery bean...

posted on 5/1/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Walking the young master this morning, I was struck by how beautiful this spring has been. Plenty of rain, mild temperatures, and so forth. I was also struck by the dual (but inseparable) nature of May Day, the first of May by the post-Julian calendar. Back when dinosaurs ruled the Earth and Orrin Hatch was running for his first Senate term, May Day was a complicated springtime celebration of fertility and rebirth , and for good reason. Check out the awesome new growth surrounding a tree stump I encountered on the aforementioned excursion with my little dog: On the other hand, May Day has also been celebrated as  International Worker's Day since the 19th century, in part in memory of the Haymarket Massacre . On May the fourth, 1886, a dynamite bombing (long the traditional caliber of anarchist radicals) was followed by a full-on, "open fire" retaliation by the police. The Haymarket Affair led to one ...

posted on 4/15/2012 by the Salt City Sinner Spring! Spring is here, and it's time to plant cold weather crops . I garden for a living (more on that some other time), and this time of year I eat, sleep, breathe and dream gardening. In addition to refugee gardens at eight community garden sites throughout the Salt Lake City area - with our most far-flung garden located in the misty, legendary Kingdom of Magna - I have my own plot at the newly minted Sugar House Community Gardens , near my parents' place, located on what used to be a decrepit tennis court near Fairmont Park. Yes sir, I am Loyal to my Soil: That's after a light watering and a turning of the first six inches of topsoil. Despite what some garden guides say, and what some gardeners believe, I have heard frequently enough from enough Master Gardeners (yes, that's a technical title you have to earn) that only the top six inches of soil needs serious cultivation / tampering. That soil right ...

Kudos to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, scourge of Governor Herbert's most fevered, sweat-drenched dreams. The BLM sent Herbert a love letter , and listen to Herbert whine and sputter: "This nonsensical, bass-ackwards, peekaboo policy is nothing more than political posturing by overreaching federal bureaucrats. With no science and no data [Oh, really, Governer? - Ed.], and with a wave of their federal bureaucratic magic wand, they can just take the bulk of the acreage off the market, stifle innovation, and demonstrate, yet again, that this administration is patently hostile toward even the possible development of much-needed resources." I've included that gem in its entirety for two reasons: first, it amuses me when a shovel-faced, colorless goblin like Herbert loses his temper, because it's invariably both quite a sight and prompted by the oddest things. Is Utah faced with an epidemic of sick kids due to air pollution by Rio Tinto? Herbert probably hums...

Fear and curiosity are so intricately interwoven in my poor rattletrap psyche that sometimes it's hard for me to separate them at all. When faced with uncertainty, the unusual, or the unexpected, who hasn't experienced that odd combination of repulsion and fascination? All of us live our lives in a flow of sorts.When something happens that jars us, that forces us out of our routine, it resets our perception in a way. Hereby hangs a tale. I'm a juvenile-onset diabetic  (meaning I have diabetes mellitus type 1). That's the diabetes you get from having a treacherous autoimmune system and an unlucky gene, not the type you get from being old, obese, or sick (that would be diabetes mellitus type 2 ). I was diagnosed when I was a toddler, which is very early for someone with type 1 diabetes - it usually manifests itself like the lamest X-man power imaginable around age 11 or so. I have spent a goodly portion of my decades as a diabetic here in Utah. Many of th...

From The Terrifying Science Desk I am opposed to " fracking " (hydraulic fracturing) for a variety of reasons, ranging from the aesthetic to the common-sense environmental to the economic. That said, I've heard some people on the periphery of the green movement mutter darkly about a possible connection between hydraulic fracturing and earthquakes, and that made me a bit skeptical. The "frack-quake" scare tactic always struck me as more  Dr. Weird  than  Dr. Science . I may very well have been wrong . Still hopping mad that even one yokel bought that "Climategate" nonsense God help us all, it turns out there may be some hard science to back it up (it's still developing). Here's the BBC  (emphasis added): ...Six protesters from the campaign group Frack Off climbed a drilling rig at one of [energy firm] Cuadrilla's test drilling sites in Hesketh Bank, near Southport [in the U.K.], ahead of the [newly released] report. The...

Things Man Hath In Common With The Lofty Squid #39b In A Continuing Series "No foreplay, no tender caresses, no fond farewells until the next union, just a desperate drive to reproduce followed by a glancing quickie and an early death. "And that's when things go well." (Thank you, Raw Story , for today's edifying entry.)