Agricultural Digest
Eastern Idaho farmers were preparing for the worst in early June as their wells were set to be turned off by the state, affecting up to 500,000 acres of agricultural land. A curtailment was issued May 30, by Idaho Department of Water Resources Director Mathew Weaver, ostensibly in order to satisfy the rights of senior water rights holder Twin Falls Canal Company, which was projected to have a shortfall of 74,000 acre-feet of water this season. The penalty for continuing to pump in spite of the curtailment was set to be $300 an acre, which some farmers say would have bankrupted them.
After farmers raised the alarm of what a 500,000 acre shutdown would mean, the two sides appear to have negotiated a solution. But farmers worry the fight isn’t over, only postponed. There’s no question that food security is going to be a 21st century fight, and water rights are obviously going to play a huge role -- …
Waco
The Athens of Billy Joe Shaver
‘You may all go to Hell — I will go to Waco’ – D. Crockett, kinda
Dr. Pepper and a dunk in the geyser will cure what ails you — unless you’re a Baptist
“A little country town lost in the immensity of the Texas prairie” was what the inventor, science-fiction writer, and chicken farmer Milo Hastings once called Waco. For most of my life, that’s how America has seen my hometown, as a byword for small-town parochialism and the televised death-by-government gunfire of David Koresh. But wind the clock back to the 1890s, and you’ll see Waco billed not only as “Six Shooter Junction” but also “The Athens of Texas.”
There is a strange double nature to Waco, at one moment bursting at the seams with cosmopolitan ambition and at another recoiling into isolation. Waco is the great forgotten American city, a stage on which the American Drama has played out for almost 200 years and the Human Drama thousands of years before that. Some nights it’s a tragedy, other nights a comedy.
Fresh off the train following Gettysburg, my great-great-great-grandfather John Sligh …
On Foot: My Pilgrimage
‘How do we begin to see the world?’
A mission to the churches of England by a half-Jew in a djellaba
God made blood cancer and also makes jokes
On the wall of the sitting room in my small, Edwardian villa in the inner-London suburb of Stockwell (think Brixton, then walk back towards the center of town a little), I have hung a panorama of London. Drawn, then engraved and hand-colored, this handsome hybridization of a map and a prospect was produced as a giveaway with the Illustrated London News in the revolutionary year of 1848. It measures about a yard-and-a-half by a foot-and-a-half: a long strip of my natal city, as it appeared some years after my great-great-great-great-grandfather, Adolphus Self, arrived here — quite likely on foot — and established himself at Kennington Cross (about a half-mile from where I now live), in time for the 1831 census.
In the autumn of 2022, aged 60, I was diagnosed with secondary myelofibrosis — a progressive and fatal blood cancer — which had evolved out of a myeloproliferative neoplasm with the rather …
