Why I Blog

By: | May 24, 2012

Monday, we marked LWON’s second anniversary. I was not one of the original contributors to this blog, but a year ago this week, Tom Hayden invited me to contribute my first post. Since becoming an official LWON contributor last June, I’ve written almost 30 posts, about one every 12 days. For this work, I’ve received exactly zero dollars, zero prizes and zero resume-worthy rewards.

If you’d asked me a couple of years ago whether I’d ever blog without compensation, I’d have scoffed. I have a strict policy of never writing for free. Writers who give their work away to commercial outlets piss me off, because they cheapen our profession and train publishers to expect writers to work without pay.

LWON is a worthy exception to my rule, because this labor of love exists solely on the voluntary efforts of LaWonians. None of us make any money from this site, and we are not beholden to commercial interests or outside influences. This place belongs to us.

And I can honestly say that LWON is the best thing that’s happened in my writing life during the past year. When I ponder why that’s so, I think of something Kurt Vonnegut said at a reading I attended many years ago. Go home and write a poem on a scrap of paper, he said. Then tear it into pieces and scatter it where no one will find it. It took me a while to fully understand his point. Continue reading →

Morel Madness

By: | May 23, 2012

My parents own roughly 100 acres of land smack dab in the heart of Wisconsin’s driftless area, a portion of the state left largely untouched by glaciers. When I was in high school, we built a cabin on that land. I remember weekends spent sawing two-by-fours and pouring cement. And when we couldn’t stand to drive another nail, we tromped the old logging roads, exploring the deep ravine that cleaves the property in two. And this is how we discovered that our land holds a precious secret. Morels. Continue reading →

Why the eclipse mattered.

By: | May 22, 2012

I have been hearing about Sunday’s annular eclipse for weeks. Earlier this month, I visited my parents in Albuquerque, and the eclipse was all my dad could talk about. Dad, known to the rest of the world as Dee Friesen, is President of the Albuquerque Astronomical Society (TAAS) and when I arrived at his house the other day, he was wearing a t-shirt with the words “Astronomy (not astrology)” written across the chest in big letters.

During the course of my four day visit, Dad managed to get me pretty excited about the eclipse. Albuquerque was inside the zone where the eclipse was visible in its entirety, and it was also about 90% visible in western Colorado, where I watched it from my front yard.

After it was all over, I called Dad with some questions. Continue reading →

Happy Birthday to Us Yay

By: | May 21, 2012

Happy Birthday to us, we’ve just turned two.  We’re bigger: we’ve added three new Persons of LWON.  And we’ve matured, that is, we stopped looking so much at our own bellybutton and are more aware of the intelligent, thoughtful Commenters of LWON.  So for our birthday celebration, we’ll look back at the year and not at at each other, but at you.   Continue reading →

The Last Word

By: | May 19, 2012

May 14 to May 18

“Most people in counterintelligence are unlikely.” Read Ann’s story of Harry Baig IMMEDIATELY or I will come to your house, tie you to a chair and read it aloud to you. (This sounded a lot more threatening before I typed it out loud…)

Heather laid down some capital-S science to prove once again that dogs are effing awesome and always have been. I dare you to read her revelation that a 25,00- year-old mourner tucked a bone into a dead dog’s mouth and keep both eyes dry.

Ginny explained neuron-sucking robots! With music! And animation!

Guest poster Geoff Brumfiel pondered the art of the tweet.

And Cassie and her husband rounded out the week with a mini-flamewar in the comments under Richard’s answer to the long-standing question: How do we know the laws of physics are universal?

See you next week!

No Exceptions! None! Nowhere! Never! (Or not.)

By: | May 18, 2012

Cassandra, for Richard:

How do we know the laws of physics are universal? Why can’t there be a far-off galaxy where our laws of physics don’t apply? (Is that a really stupid question?)

Richard, for Cassandra:

We don’t. There can. (It’s not.)

Such was Cassie’s contribution to LWON’s first anniversary post last May. As part of the celebration, each member of the masthead asked one of the other members a question that would serve as the topic of a future post. Now that LWON’s second anniversary is nigh—the new challenge will appear Monday—I figure I’d better answer her questions. (If we were asking one another questions again this year—alas, we’re not—mine would go to Cassie: How come you got to ask me two? [Actually, three?])

First question:  How do we know the laws of physics are universal?

Continue reading →

Turning Wolves into Hounds

By: | May 17, 2012

The morning begins. I’ve been awake a good hour but I’m not really, truly awake until I reach the woods with my husband and our dog Max. In the dappled light of late spring, with soft green leafdom almost enveloping us, we slip him loose from the leash. Max lifts his head. He catches a whiff of something interesting and disappears around a bend. Ahead, maybe a third of a mile or so, a few scraps of take-out lie on the forest floor. Max, a four-year-old Labrador retriever, tracks them down effortlessly, expertly, among the blackberry canes and the maples, scouring for the last crumbs as we catch up to him. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Do I Write? Or Do I Tweet?

By: | May 16, 2012

“Listening to a entrepreneurial physicist talking about how to get rich!” Apparently, that was my first tweet. I’ve got no idea who the physicist was, and the get-rich advice must not have been very good—I’m still in journalism. Yet for all my forgetfulness, Twitter remembers the exact moment I came into its life: March 17, 2009 at 13:13:37. Continue reading →