thus protecting it from the development of ski-in ski-out condos that adjoin golf courses in the summer).

In the West, we are always squabbling over water (thank you, Marc Reiser).Without it, we would have nothing, and the Colorado River doesn't even flow to the sea any more, and Phoenix lives on recycled water, the worst-tasting stuff you've ever wanted to not drink. It's a resource of such scarcity that can't be imagined for people Back East, where the drinking fountains called bubblers in Wisconsin parks run continously as long as the temperature is above freezing and Manhattanites have -never- paid for their water piped in from the Catskills.

So I kept reading fuckedcompany, watching utility.com go down, and saw that my princeling had also gotten involved in what used to be called a company-incubator in Pasadena

another one of those enterprises that collapsed after taking tons of investor money, the people at the top (like my princeling, I guess) having looted it, the entity itself having done nothing useful, and it having become the object of tons of lawsuits. So I was looking at all this, and thinking about my princeling, and thinking about his connection with the crown prince of the people who build dams, and do electricity, and his connection with heir-apparent of agribusiness, which is reliant on water, and the energy to pump the water more than anything else --- or to make vast amounts of money by selling the agricultural water-rights to developers who want to build subdivisions.