We may never know what Santa Fe County Commissioner Kathy Holian was smoking when, at an April 13 Board of County Com-missioners meeting, she suddenly proposed a moratorium on development. It was probably a potent blend of do-gooder liberalism and the mistaken belief that one’s close advisors make up a populist bloc. Certainly her drug of choice was laced with a helping of economic blindness.

Every once in a while, I find myself in a grocery store bright and early in the morning. As a rule, I don’t shop before I’m alert enough to defend myself. So, if I’m in a grocery store before noon, it’s for some kind of morning emergency purchase, such as Advil or coffee or toilet paper.

Santa Fe’s Theater Grottesco recently returned from teaching at the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá. At an open salon in its rehearsal space, Grottesco invited the public to discuss ideas and questions that had been raised in Colombia, including: Have contemporary politics and marketing corrupted the English language?

Last Sunday, I laid my big, beautiful rooster down on a tree stump and cut off his head with a hatchet.

Let me tell you, that felt good.

Last week I touted the Rail Runner’s free WiMax internet service, and noted that East Coast commuters and people in other train-centric communities have better public transportation connectivity and less bias toward government spending on trains than New Mexicans.

Early in the morning on May 5, while dawn was still having second thoughts about even cracking, the New Mexico Beef Council’s semiannual Gate to Plate tour kicked off. Journalists, ranchers, legislators and industry insiders were pressed back in their chairs as our bus, the size of a rock band’s, tore out of Albuquerque and headed for Clovis.

Noah Hoffman is an independent scholar and former private art dealer. After uncovering evidence that suggested a previously unknown 1938 trip to the southwest by the artists Milton Avery and Mark Rothko, Hoffman initiated an investigative project called “Rothko with Reservations.”

May 8 is National Train Day. It’s a coast-to-coast celebration of America’s love of trains. Or at least, that’s what the front of my ticket book for the “Hiawatha” train between Chicago and Milwaukee says it is. New Mexicans, still suspicious about the Rail Runner, may not even notice the passing of National Train Day. Here, as in most places in the US, “America” and “love of trains” don’t really go together.

When oil recently spread like a cruel bloom through the Gulf of Mexico it was a graphic and horrible reminder of our dependency on fossil fuels. That’s why it felt so liberating to sit down to a literally farm-fresh meal in the warm spring sunshine on Saturday, April 24 at the Camino de Paz Farm and School.

Parents whose concerns with the current political and economic climate are less tangled up in vague pseudo-patriotic rhetoric and more grounded in practical matters? Them, I’d be scared of.