A READER sends along this accompanying note: From his perch in the high desert of western Nevada, remote control and cup in hand, Chan Laughlin, aka Travis T. Hipp, (“the poor hippie’s Paul Harvey”) pontificated to the world every morning about politics, truth, justice, and modern life. One of the few remaining practitioners of free-form, seat-of-your-pants radio commentary, he worked with few notes and distilled the days events into greater truths that sometimes surprise even himself. Before he died, Chan said he is “still alive and only slightly wounded” in his latest battle with the authorities. They raided his house last year and charged him with felony marijuana trafficking. But all the charges were dropped after the cops failed to produce evidence of any crime.
” “KPIG is expanding slowly and I get a ten bucks a day raise for every new station,” he bragged, “so I am finally making as much as I did at KNEW in 1968, not counting inflation. At this rate my career will take off at 75 years of age, and my fame as the voice of the geriatric revolution will go down in history! Play Politics but keep your powder dry!”

FROM HANK SIMS’ crucial HumCo blog, LostCoastOutpost.com: “The Very Last Chapter of the Reggae War: Dimmick Ranch Under Foreclosure. A legal notice in this morning’s Times-Standard mentions that the Dimmick Ranch — one-time home to ‘Reggae Rising,’ the rogue offshoot in the Late Great SoHum Reggae Wars — is under foreclosure. Redwood Capital Bank is scheduled to auction off the property on the courthouse steps on June 7, after owner Tom Dimmick, who once had hoped to transform his family property into a world-class entertainment venue, defaulted on a $1 million loan. The Reggae Wars broke out in 2006, when Dimmick and concert promoter Carol Bruno attempted to wrest control of the hugely successful ‘Reggae on the River’ festival from its sponsor, the Mateel Community Center. In the legal actions that followed, the Mateel was able to maintain control of the the ‘Reggae on the River’ brand, but Dimmick and Bruno — who had been booking the festival for years — soon announced that they would throw a rival festival, to be known as ‘Reggae Rising.’ The split triggered a civil war within the SoHum hippie community, with longtime Mateelians bitterly lining up behind one faction or the other. Dimmick and Bruno began to put on other types of concerts on the property, which lines the South Fork of the Eel near the Humboldt/Mendocino County line. But Dimmick later acquired full control of the ‘Reggae Rising’ festival from Bruno, and in 2010 he failed to acquire proper permits from the county. Everything went downhill from there. In the meanwhile, the Mateel Community Center’s original ‘Reggae on the River’ festival carries on, though much downsized from its glory days. With the Dimmick Ranch gone under, the final outcome of the Reggae Wars seems pretty conclusive: Everyone lost.”

A MS. JACQUELYN CLARK has been fined $110.50 for having a dog off-leash at Navarro Beach, an infraction. Ms. Clark was cited by State Parks. We bring it up because it’s the first we’ve heard of someone getting a ticket around here for an off-leash dog. And we totally approve.

OSCAR WILDE died in 1900. In February the previous year he had visited his wife’s grave. In a letter to Robert Ross he wrote: “It was very tragic seeing her name carved on a tomb — her surname, my name not mentioned of course… I brought some flowers. I was deeply affected, with a sense also of the uselessness of all regrets. Nothing could have been otherwise and life is a terrible thing.”

Betterly

Church

Chase

AS THE SUMMER OCCUPY PROTESTS commence, so do the frame jobs. Three young guys are looking at highly dubious “terrorist” charges worth 85 years each in prison. The allegations begin with a police assumption that the three are “self-described anarchists.” “Brent Betterly, 24; Jared Chase, 24; and Brian Church, 20 are alleged to have showed up in Chicago for the NATO summit demonstrations with Molotov cocktails to attack Obama’s re-election headquarters and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s house. The three “also discussed using swords, hunting bows and brass-knuckle handles.” (What’s a brass knuckle handle?) The allegations have been formalized as conspiracy to commit terrorism, material support for terrorism and possession of explosives. The undercover cops who set up the arrests cannot be found while everyone who knows the trio say the charges are simply preposterous. The protest, one of the city’s largest in years, was to end at the lakeside convention center hosting the two-day meeting, which is focused on the war in Afghanistan, European missile defense and other international security matters, all of it funded by the everyday people of industrialized countries.

Alvarez-Carrillo

Colberg

22-YEAR-OLD Maricruz Alvarez-Carillo, of Fort Bragg, the mother of an infant present in her vehicle at the time of the mayhem, was sentenced Friday to four years in state prison for an ax attack last year on two persons during a gang fight near the CV Starr Community Center. During the January 28th, 2011 attack, Alvarez-Carillo had pursued 16-year-old Richie Olstad. Olstad eluded Alvarez-Carillo but the ax-wielding young mother attacked Alissa Colberg, Fort Bragg’s self-described “Dominant Female,” when Colberg ran up to help Olstad repel Alvarez-Carillo. The Dominant Female sustained deep cuts to her face and chest during the attack. In addition to two convictions for assault with a deadly weapon, Alvarez-Carillo picked up another felony conviction for witness intimidation in a separate incident, meaning she’s a three-striker who’s looking at 25-to-life if she commits another felony. Alvarez-Carillo is not a documented gang member but hangs out with Sureño gang members. Dominant Female and Olstad are members of a rival gang, a white subset of the Norteños, it seems.

RECOMMENDED READING, three Frisco books, two of the three recommendations accompanied by caveats: Jubilee Hitchiker: the Life and Times of Richard Brautigan by William Hjortsberg. Lots of interesting stuff in here, especially in its recreation of Brautigan’s austere early life in Eugene, Oregon, in a struggling working-class family whose matriarch married a series of marginal men. The book is also good at bringing back the San Francisco of the beatniks, just before everyone else got in on the act as hippies, the difference being that the beatniks were artists; the hippies more a reaction to the multiple suffocations of the suburbs. Brautigan lit out young for San Francisco and never looked back, breaking off what tenuous affection he seemed to have for his family. One of the most interesting passages is Hjortsberg’s encounters with Brautigan’s real father, at least by Brautigan’s mother’s say-so, who said she became pregnant by him and he fled at the accusation of paternity. A crusty old boy who always denied patrimony and hadn’t heard of his famous son when the relentess Hjortsberg tracked him down, makes a very strong case that the crusty retired laborer was indeed the author’s father, not that either the old guy or Brautigan ever seemed interested. Hjortsberg’s research is, as they say, exhaustive. It’s also exhausting. There are pages and pages of Brautigan’s encounters with unpleasant North Beach persons, all of them, of course, with artistic pretensions, among them many poets of dubious abilities who wrote in the minimalist style of Brautigan mostly, one suspects, because their trite observations, arranged vertically on the page, was all they had to say, and as soon as they said it they disappeared. This bio isn’t brief but should be. Whatever you think of Brautigan’s work, he got on and he got off. The book is very heavy, as in heavy weight. It is physically tiring to hold up from the prone position, which is how I do most of my reading. I know this is a silly complaint, but if you read lying down, bring a pillow to prop the thing up on your stomach or, I guess, substitute two hours with it for your daily push-ups. It could have been at least 300 pages shorter, and you wonder if Hjortsberg had an editor. I read it because I liked Brautigan’s Trout Fishing In America, and I liked a couple of his short stories very much. Off this biography I doubt if I would have cared much for the man himself.

THE SECOND RECOMMENDED reading is David Talbot’s Season of the Witch — Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love. As a veteran of that turbulent time and place, I can say Talbot’s book, like the Brautigan bio, is very good at helping us remember what an intoxicating sea change in American consciousness took place at ground zero in the heady months of 1966 and ‘67 before the great fall induced by drugs and murder. A very large number of talented people had appeared in one smallish place at one time — writers and musicians and artists and a solid population of people who appreciated it all. Even the Chronicle was still a lively read, and in magazine journalism there was Hunter Thompson and Warren Hinckle. (I’ve recently re-visited Hinckle’s prescient deconstruction of the hippie movement, and I can still remember the huge discontent it caused, among the libs especially. (http://www.unz.org/Pub/Ramparts-1967mar-00005) Then as now the stoners tended not to read anything. But read it yourself and tell me if Hinckle was wrong.) When hard drugs arrived at street level — accompanied by long debates on whether or not cocaine was a hard drug with the consensus opinion being that it wasn’t until it was obvious it was — and Jim Jones cooked a Frisco mayoral election then took off for Guyana to murder his parish, and Moscone and Milk were assassinated, and the Zebra killers were randomly murdering white people to create slaves in the next world, and Zodiac was doing the same thing, and a lot of hippies took off for Garberville — the City of Love suffered a serious shortage of affection. The SFPD was viewed by large sectors of the population as a kind of badged criminal gang itself. My own interfaces with the lawless Tac Squad at political demonstrations certainly got me sprinting the hell out of the way of them. Talbot says that cabals of cops were plotting to kill their own chief, Charles Gain, whom they viewed simply as one more city official expediting the wholesale conversion of San Francisco into a kind of national weirdo center. That eternal local punching bag, Tim Stoen, is obliquely fingered by Talbot as the guy who engineered the electoral fraud that elected the liberal Moscone mayor over a Sunset District conservative named Barbagelata, whom I recall as sputtering with unhinged rage at what he also insisted was the takeover of the city by hippies, gays and an assortment of radicals allied in a kind of grand conspiracy of degenerates, one of whom attempted to fire bomb Barbagelata’s house. Caveat: Talbot thinks a combination of the steadying maternal hand of Diane Feinstein as mayor succeeding Moscone, and the great 49er football teams of Bill Walsh, were pivotal in pulling the city out of its death spiral. I think it was more the improvement in the national economy combined with the influx of wealthy people, wealthy gays especially, that brought a sedating calm and the artistic blanding to the city that prevails to this day, that and the tardy realization by the forces of reaction that hippies and gays weren’t any more politically radical than Barbagelata was.

THIRD RECOMMENDATION: The Final Leap — Suicide on the Golden Gate Bridge by John Bateson. I defy anyone to read this book and still oppose a suicide barrier. I’m ashamed to say I’d been instinctively, unthinkingly opposed to a barrier because (1) I assumed it would destroy the Bridge’s aesthetic. Yes, I thought, a few annual jumpers did not justify structural modifications certain to change the visual splendor that the genius span presents, a callously ignorant assumption most famously stated by William Faulkner when he said, “….If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ is worth any number of old ladies.” Depends on the old lady, I’d say. I doubt if I’d be tempted to commit matricide even for that poem. Shakespeare’s collected works? Well, if that was the trade-off the old girls might have to go. This kind of thinking is easy in the abstract, but when you learn, as we do in The Final Leap, that survivors of the last jump, with one exception who did finally end her life, say they would never attempt suicide again, and that people seem to be jumping with more frequency, and you listen to the friends and relatives of jumpers, it’s time for a net or a much higher rail, both of which, we learn, can be accomplished with no aesthetic harm.

AS IT IS, going over the side is simply a matter of climbing over a four foot fence and pushing off. Four seconds later and….. Well, the physical consequences are found in this most interesting and persuasive little book which manages, in 250 pages, to thoroughly cover all aspects of the subject, including a roster of the 1200 people known to have died by jumping off the Bridge. There is, of course, a larger number of people suspected of dying in death leaps but their remains simply disappeared, either carried off by the ferocious tides almost three hundred feet down or, their chest cavities ripped open on impact to admit a rush of water that sinks them unseen and irretrievably to the bottom. Why do people commit suicide? According to Bernard Mayes, founder of San Francisco’s suicide hot line, the first suicide hot line in the country, “They have no one to talk to.” Mayes tells this story of a visit he made to the apartment of a recent jumper. “The guy was in his 30s and lived alone. Pretty bare apartment. He’d written a note and left it on his bureau. It said, ‘I’m going to walk to the bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way, I won’t jump’.” Apparently, no one smiled and he jumped. And that statement contains just about all you need to know about the psychic state of our form of social organization, another subject for sure, but suicide in this unwell country is more prevalent than any other place in the world. Jerome Motto, a psychiatrist who works with suicidal patients at UC San Francisco, also gets right to the point. “If people started hanging themselves from the tree in my front yard, I’d have a moral obligation to prevent that from happening….. If an instrument that’s being used to bring about tragic deaths is under your control, you are morally compelled to prevent its misuse.” The instrument most alluring to many suicidal people, and not only suicidal people from the Bay Area but everywhere in the United States and abroad, is the Golden Gate Bridge. It comes with its own built-in fatal attraction. So, why does the Bridge Authority resist? A combination of ignorance and moral callousness, it seems, perhaps best summed up by Mendocino County’s very own Jim Eddie of Potter Valley, a former County supervisor and a long-time Bridge trustee. “In October 2008, when the board voted 14-1 in favor of a safety net, the only ‘no’ vote was cast by James Eddie, the family rancher representing Mendocino County….. Eddie said that the people in his district didn’t think a barrier was needed.” I don’t recall Eddie doing any polls on the subject but he’s probably right. Bridge safety is not a day-to-day Mendo concern. But it should be of concern to everyone given that someone jumps every ten days off an international treasure we all own. Also recommend is the affecting 2006 documentary film by Eric Steel, The Bridge (available via Netflix). Design proposals are being considered (http://www.bridgerail.org/), but the Bridge Authority keeps on dragging its obtuse feet.

MS. LONGORIA is a member of SEIU who is running against incumbent John McCowen of Ukiah for Second District Supervisor.

THE NEXT DAY (Thursday) County Counsel Jeanine Nadel sent out an all-employees memo: “Good Afternoon, Yesterday an email was sent to many of you from a representative of SEIU regarding upcoming election activities.  This is a reminder that any use of county buildings, equipment or resources for election purposes is in violation of state and county laws and ordinances. We therefore request that you disregard the email. Thank you for your cooperation in this regard. — County Counsel JEANINE B. NADEL, County Counsel, Mendocino County Counsel Office, Administration Center. 501 Low Gap Rd., Rm. 1030, Ukiah, CA 95482. Direct line: (707) 463-4449, Main Office Line: (707) 463-4446, Fax: (707) 463-4592. Email: nadelj@co.mendocino.ca.us

GOVERNOR BROWN has appointed Jeanine B. Nadel, 57, and David Riemenschneider, 63, to the Mendocino County Superior Court. The pair replaces Ron Brown and long-time Ten Mile Court judge, Jonathan Lehan. The job pays $178,789 a year, plus an array of fringes. These two seats, in theory, will be up for election in 2014 although our eight Superior Court sinecures are rarely contested. Lehan, himself appointed, was opposed several years ago but easily won countywide re-election. Thanks to Judge Brown, who was presiding judge at the time, Lehan survived a scandal that should have gotten him removed from the bench when a female court clerk formally complained that he wouldn’t stop exposing himself to her. The clerk’s reward for complaining was retaliation from the superior court; she was transferred to a job in Willits, a long commute from her home in Fort Bragg.

NADEL has been functioning as Mendocino County Counsel. Riemenschneider is a private, Ukiah-based attorney. Mendocino County has eight superior court judges and a magistrate “serving” roughly 90,000 County residents, half of them children.

THE JUST RELEASED Grand Jury report reveals that in 2010, the last year statistics were available, the Drug Task Force had seized cash, vehicles, and property valued at $1,184,718.

AND THE GJ SAYS, “At the time of this report, 23.4% of inmates booked into the jail have a history of mental health issues. Psychiatric care for all of the inmates was reduced from 20 hours to 8 hours each week.”

COASTIES ARE PLEASED to see work crews at the Heritage House just south of Mendocino preparing the famous inn for a grand re-opening this summer. A morass of bankruptcies and fraud proceedings had caused the inn to close, and the grounds and buildings soon deteriorated to where only someone or a group of someone’s with large amounts of investment capital could afford to revive the business. The new owners still haven’t been revealed.

DAN GJERDE, assumed to be unopposed for 4th District supervisor, will face some opposition after all. Rex Gressett has announced he will be a write-in candidate for the seat vacated by incumbent Kendall Smith who will not run for re-election after two terms representing the Fort Bragg area. Smith was blasted by successive grand juries for chiseling on her County-paid travel reimbursements and, finally, threatened with prosecution by DA David Eyster if she didn’t pay the money back. She paid, but not before a prolonged and entirely unconvincing campaign saying that she was entitled to the money alienated most voters. GJERDE is a long-time Fort Bragg City councilman who enjoys a reputation for painstaking research of the issues and conscientious decision-making. His write-in opponent, Gressett, has been an advocate for the homeless. In our issue of May 27th of 2009, Bruce McEwen wrote: “Rex Gressett was in court Tuesday morning. Judge Lehan greeted him like an old friend. Gressett pled guilty before he even heard the charge: assault and battery. He explained that he’d put his affairs in order and was ‘fully prepared’ to take the consequences of his offense. Lehan calmed him down enough to read his rights and advisements, and asked Deputy DA Stoen what happened. Stoen said, ‘He slugged the victim in the mouth with his closed fist.’ Lehan asked Gressett what happened. Gressett said he punched the guy petitioning for the clean-up of the old Fort Bragg mill site. Gressett said he had signed the petition and later regretted it, and he’d gone to a lot of trouble to get his name removed, unsuccessfully, he added. He soon encountered the petition circulator at Harvest Market ‘being very aggressive’ with some ‘ladies.’ Gressett gallantly confronted the man on behalf of the allegedly beleagured women and ‘cold-bloodedly’ punched the man in the mouth. Lehan asked Stoen about reserving restitution. Stoen said ‘that under the circumstances, we would move to reduce the charge to fighting in public,’ although the ‘fight’ was a one-way, one-punch assault on another person. Gressett got six months probation, the mandatory $100 assessment to victims of violent crimes (!), $20 security fee and $30 construction fee. The moral? In Mendocino County it costs you $150 to punch someone in the mouth.”

THE COUNTY’S retirement system remains precarious with an unfunded liability of $124.9 million, up from $91.7 million last year with a larger obligation trending upwards of the $124.9 mil. “In reviewing 2011 retiree benefits, it was found that many retirees are receiving almost as much, if not more, in retirement pay than when they were actively employed by the county….. but the County bears the burden of its vested entitlements.” The GJ says “poor record keeping and financial planning by the retirement adminstration and the County, compounded by the market downturn, created a large, unfunded pension liability.” The Jury suggests that the Supervisors should have kept employee benefits within reason while the retirement administration could have been composed of more capable people who fully grasped that if more retirees are making more in pensions and bennies while living longer with their accumulated monies being largely invested in the great crap shoot of the stock market, the whole works can go blooey if the economy goes blooey, which it obviously will continue to do.

COUNTY MENTAL HEALTH is doing what it can to beat back the ever rising tide of local mental illness, but its much reduced staff is not large enough to meet the increasing demand for professional help. The GJ cited the Sheriff’s Department, where the most volatile of Mendocino County’s mentally ill are confined, for doing what they can in circumstances not designed to enhance mental health.

AND WITHOUT MENTIONING by name Dr. Lois Nash and the irresponsible members of the Ukiah School Board who hired her as superintendent and continued to support her when it was evident she was (1) either at her home in Los Angeles (2) en route to her home in Los Angeles (3) incompetent when she was at her desk in Ukiah, the Grand Jury found that Ukiah Unified has not been well-managed. Nash also ran up almost a million dollars in district legal fees, referring even the most routine matters to the bumbling legal consortium based in Santa Rosa that handles all legal matters for all Mendocino County’s school districts in a public-private sweetheart deal which itself ought to be investigated by the Grand Jury.

THIS JUST IN. Varoom! Varoom! Car racing can begin at the Ukiah Fairgrounds. The North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board declared Wednesday: “The soil removal from the Ukiah Fairgrounds has been completed in accordance with the March 8, 2012, directive from our office…. The soil was contaminated with diesel and motor oil and was removed from the fairgrounds (between the dates of April 2 to April 7), and on April 18 and 19, Approximately 5,000 cubic yards of soils were removed and either disposed of at the Redwood Landfill in Novato, or the Recology Hay Road Landfill in Vacaville.” Which was the whole of it. The question remains: Who made the deal to haul it from the Mendocino Transit Authority at the south end of Ukiah to the Speedway at the north end of Ukiah? Removal of the soil to Novato and Vacaville has cost many thousands of dollars, and either the feckless management at MTA or the seemingly bewildered management at the Fairgrounds is responsible.

TWO SAN FRANCISCO abalone poachers were convicted last week after a three-day jury trial. Coast-based Fish and Game Warden Dan Powers, an expert in the many clever forms of poaching that ab-lovers have developed over the years was the sole prosecution witness. Using binoculars Powers observed Hou N. Huang, 47, of San Francisco, diving for abs, coming up with an ab 14 times. He then observed Huang put nine of the biggest and best abs in a dive tube and toss the rest, an illegal tactic known as “high grading.” Huang then swam over to Hong Mei, 39, also of San Francisco, and gave him five of the nine. Then the two swimmers swam behind a rock, emerging a few minutes later with an unidentified woman. The nine abs had magically been divided into three for each poacher (the legal limit if done correctly). When Powers approached the trio back on land, they had three each and tried to pass them off as legal. The pair’s defense lawyers for Huang and Mei argued that Mr. Powers couldn’t have identified them positively from 130 yards with all the other (Asian) poachers ab divers in the area. But the jury didn’t buy the misidentification gambit and convicted both men of poaching. Fort Bragg’s Ten Mile Court Judge Clayton Brennan sentenced Huang to 24 months of court probation, 15 days in jail, court fees, a fine of $2,545, plus forfeiture of his dive gear and the seized abalone. Mei also got 24 months probation, but lower fines and jail time. Their dive gear was also confiscated.

THE DEFENSE argued, basically, that Powers couldn’t tell one Asian from another which, sad to say, is a common assumption among both Asians and pale faces but one that applies so infrequently among individuals of both races as to be untrue as a reliable stereotype. It is, however, a prevalent mis-assumption among the more primitive sectors of the Mendo population that Asians are the most dedicated poachers. I believe the stats show that white poachers still lead the way. In any case, there are simply more people of all races in pursuit of a resource that seems poised to be fished to extinction.

STATE PARKS wants to charge visitors $8 a day for simply parking, far too much for either persons on fixed incomes or those many who live with the wolf permanently at their door, if not sitting down with them to dinner every night. The fee would apply at Mendocino Headlands, Point Cabrillo Light Station, Van Damme State Park MacKerricher State Park, Jughandle State Natural Reserve, Point Cabrillo Light Station, Mendocino Headlands, Big River Beach, Montgomery Woods, Van Damme State Park and Manchester State Park. Parks hopes to install self-pay stations at the County’s beaches and parks by this summer, which they tried to do in Sonoma County in 1990, immediately inspiring large-scale “Free Our Beaches” protests. The parking fee proposal would, however, allow state park districts to keep half of the revenues, a move unlikely to mollify the thousands of people forced to pay $8 for the simple pleasures of gazing upon unspoiled vistas.

STONED DOGS? An odd and perhaps unfounded story in Thursday’s Press Democrat by Glenda Anderson claims local veterinarians are regularly treating dogs for marijuana overdoses. Cats, too, but not as many, have turned up at the vet’s offices seemingly under the influence of mind-altering substances. But cats behave like they’re loaded anyway, as do dogs much of the time, so who can tell for sure? “Animals, mostly dogs,” Glenda writes, “are being brought staggering into veterinary hospitals high on pot, a toxic and potentially lethal condition. Sometimes they’re just sleepy, disoriented and unable to control their bladders. Other times they’re vomiting, having seizures or are comatose. Veterinarians at Mendocino Animal Hospital usually see two or three cases a week but last Friday alone had three, said Dr. Jennifer Bennett.” Reports of dogs loaded on pot are even more numerous in Humboldt County, the report claims, with one woman claiming her dog at Arcata Plaza (HumCo) fell unconscious following a single affectionate pat on the muzzle by one of the grunges who inhabit the Plaza. All this bears further investigation, and I know just who to call: “Pebbles Trippet? Dr. Courtney? White courtesy telephone, please.”

THE WINE PRESS is full of alarmed accounts of a looming grape shortage in a context of growing demand for the sunshine state’s wines as the overall cost of making the stuff steadily increases. Vineyards can’t get enough nursery stock. Same-same in Mendo, from what we can gather.

THE AVA’S SAN FRANCISCO DISPATCH has now gone missing two weeks in a row as the US Postal Service moves ahead with plans to close dozens of mail processing centers, including the one at Petaluma where our papers are routinely lost. We expect them to get lost more often when Petaluma closes and all our papers are sorted at the mammoth East Bay postal center. In February, the Postal Service announced it will move all North Bay mail processing from Petaluma to Oakland, eliminating 228 jobs at Petaluma.

IT’S ALL QUITE farcical unless you’re the deposed racetrack proprietor Aiken or a race fan. The season was supposed to start at the end of March, but then came DirtGate, a still unknown arrangement between Aiken, apparently, and someone or someones at MTA to remove fuel-soaked dirt from an MTA construction project south of town to the racetrack north of town. When it was discovered that the MTA dirt was contaminated, it had to be moved again, this time to distant landfills.

Siegler

Rodriguez

CALL ME JUDGMENTAL, but I don’t think you want to place Ms. Siegler (arrested last Saturday in Ukiah last Saturday for probation violations and drunk in public) in customer relations. Ms. Rodriguez (arrested the same day for probation violation, possession of brass knuckles, and trespassing), on the other hand, is just the gal you want for Saturday night at the Buckhorn in Covelo.

MARILYN MARCHIONE OF AP WRITES: Coffee seems to be good for you. Or at least it’s not bad, say researchers who led the largest-ever study of coffee and health. They found that coffee drinkers seemed a little more likely to live longer than folks who drink no coffee at all. Regular or decaf didn’t matter. That’s reassuring because a few studies in the past suggested coffee might be harmful. Results of the latest study are published in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. Older studies weren’t wrong: Coffee can raise cholesterol and blood pressure in the short term, which in turn can raise the risk of heart disease. But few studies have looked at coffee and the risk of dying of any cause, let alone specific diseases. Some of those that have involved too few deaths to make firm comparisons. This study involved more than 400,000 people and was done by the National Institutes of Health and AARP. Researchers also took into account smoking, drinking alcohol, exercise and other things that can skew results. Coffee didn’t make that much difference, especially in relation to bigger factors such as smoking. Compared with those who drank no coffee, men who had two or three cups a day were 10% less likely to die at any age. For women, it was 13%. A single cup a day lowered risk a tiny bit: 6% in men and 5% in women. The strongest effect was in women who had four or five cups a day — they had a 16% lower risk of death. However, watch the sugar and cream. Extra calories and fat could negate any good from drinking coffee. Doctors also suggest drinking filtered coffee — that removes the compounds that raise LDL or bad cholesterol.

THE CRACKPOT FILES 2 — EXISTENTIAL. (by Jeff Costello). Approached by a scientology guy in Boston, winter of ’68. Walking down the street near the scientology center in Kenmore Square, with holes in my shoes, cold and hungry. Guy walks up and starts talking to me, giving me the pitch. He cares about me, wants to improve my life. Right then we’re passing a burger joint called the Fatted Calf. I said, “You want to help me? Buy me a burger in there and I’ll listen to what you have to say.” Oh no, he says, I can’t do that. I said all right, see ya later. In Boston I had read The Book (On the Taboo Against Knowing Who Are) by Alan Watts. The title alone was a revelation. It was anarchy. It was also a cursory introduction to Zen, and a different way of seeing things. It was the 60s, after all. Zen, so I’d heard, was a form of Buddhism, so when I was approached by a team of tiny Japanese ladies in Times Square, inviting me to come hear about the “real, true Buddhism,” I bit and went along. What can I say, I was a rock & roll guitar player working at the Electric Circus, but there had to be more to life than having sex with Italian girls from Far Rockaway. Didn’t there? I had curiosity about deeper things. The 60s, remember? The tiny Japanese ladies led me and a few others up to an apartment just off Broadway. The place was crowded and soon one of the ladies got up and talked about the Buddha and chanting. The trick, the secret, was to chant Nam Yo Ho Ren-ge Kyo. This would put you in touch with the current of the universe, which you could then manipulate to your wishes. You just had to chant. What I remember next was a guy, a regular American guy like Archie Bunker, getting up in front of the crowd and giving us a blazing testimonial about chanting for refrigerator – and getting one. It was as if the universal current just pooped out a Frigidaire for this guy. That’s when I left. I was an only child, so fate had it that two of my best friends came from huge families. One with nine kids, and another with eleven. Eleven kids! What an impossible mess their house was. Their mother was the most harried woman I’d ever seen, not a moment’s rest. Yet she seemed somehow peaceful in the chaos. One day my dog attacked the milkman. (There used to be guys who delivered fresh milk with the cream on top to your door in glass bottles, which they took back. Later in the 70’s or thereabouts some genius invented recycling). There was broken glass all over the kitchen floor. The dog was bleeding badly from the snout. The only person I knew to call was Mrs. Shortell, the harried mother of eleven kids. And she came right away and drove the dog and me to the vet. I have to mention that the Shortells were not, like many people in the area, Catholic. The Greshes were Catholic but only had nine kids. I think maybe they just ran out of juice after the ninth, the last of three girls. All six brothers had saints’ names as proper Catholic men should. And equally proper was that one of the brothers went into the priesthood. I was their more or less official orphan, and it was decided – without my participation – that I should become a Catholic. So we all piled into the family car, and drove from Unionville CT to visit brother Ted at Maryknoll seminary in Ossining, NY. Maryknoll, I soon learned, was where missionaries were trained, and sent all over the world to convert the savages and prevent them from using birth control, so they could make more Catholics. Just when I wondering why I was there, brother Ted appeared and invited me into the library. And gave me the pitch. You can’t get into heaven if you’re not Catholic, and so on. I wasn’t buying it, but tried to be polite. And then came the heavy artillery, books. Three or four of them appeared before me on the table. Ted asked, would I be willing to read them. Sure, I said, thinking that accepting the books would get me out of there faster. But then, he named a price, he was trying to sell me the books. This was worse than being refused a hamburger, they wanted my money. The truth was, I didn’t have a dollar to my name, and I told him so. So he offered to lend me the money, like he was a real swell guy to be so concerned for my soul. I turned down the loan and once again, money ruled the moment in a religious pitch. Existentialist is a word I first heard from a musician in Boston, 1967. He was playing some free-form stuff on piano and said it was existentialist music. He asked if I knew the term and I said no. He said existentialists were people who “just don’t give a shit.” A week later he crashed a small airplane and died. Years passed and I related this to a friend in Sausalito who said, “Did you give a shit?”

CHRISTINA AANESTAD WRITES: “Many of you know my car was broken into last month and all my radio, video and photo equipment and my laptop was stolen. I lost the last four years of my work, even the back up. My roommates are organizing a raffle to raise funds for the equipment that was lost. And since my birthday is seven days away, I’m asking all of you to help make a birthday wish come true. I’ve blogged about what I’m needing to replace with a paypal link and info on the raffle here: http://mendocinocountry.com/2012/05/16/on-the-rebound/ I’m also willing to trade advertising in The Mendocino Country Independent in exchange for your generosity. — Christina Aanestad, Publisher, Mendocino Country Independent. (707) 468-1660. www.mendocinocountry.com”

TWO SAN FRANCISCO abalone poachers were convicted last week after a three-day jury trial. Coast-based Fish and Game Warden Dan Powers, an expert in the many clever forms of poaching that ab-lovers have developed over the years was the sole prosecution witness. Using binoculars Powers observed Hou N. Huang, 47, of San Francisco, diving for abs, coming up with an ab 14 times. He then observed Huang put nine of the biggest and best abs in a dive tube and toss the rest, an illegal tactic known as “high grading.” Huang then swam over to Hong Mei, 39, also of San Francisco, and gave him five of the nine. Then the two swimmers swam behind a rock, emerging a few minutes later with an unidentified woman. The nine abs had magically been divided into three for each poacher (the legal limit if done correctly). When Powers approached the trio back on land, they had three each and tried to pass them off as legal. The pair’s defense lawyers for Huang and Mei argued that Mr. Powers couldn’t have identified them positively from 130 yards with all the other poachers, er ab divers, in the area. But the jury didn’t buy the misidentification gambit and convicted both men of poaching. Fort Bragg’s Ten Mile Court Judge Clayton Brennan sentenced Huang to 24 months of court probation, 15 days in jail, court fees, a fine of $2,545, plus forfeiture of his dive gear and the seized abalone. Mei also got 24 months probation, but lower fines and jail time. Their dive gear was also confiscated.

I was wrong of course. It turns out one of these classes were a non-negotiable requirement for the graduate program which would afford me the career I have wanted to get into since high school.

All I had to do was enroll and pass with a “C” or higher and I was golden. Sounds easy enough, right? Maybe for you. For me it was my own personal road to psychological Mordor. It was that which I was most reluctant to face. It was something stupid but over the years it had grown large and frightening in my mind. Sounds kindof funny. It was a class, not a warzone. So I did something new. Instead of not trying to get into that program or getting around it somehow I enrolled in the class and then:

I asked for help.

Then universe did that thing where it conspires to make it happen because you have been humble enough to ask. A tutor of great patience and experience was willing to help me. He told me to stop whining about my early-childhood issues with this particular subject and get back to the matter at hand. He was in the ring after every fight (test) offering me water (coffee) and reminding me to keep light on my feet (did you do your homework?).

Why is this story important to you? In my view it is because I could have saved myself literally half a lifetime of stress if I had gotten to this class sooner. The amount of psychological space in my brain dedicated to perseverating in depressed moments about what a dork I was for not implicitly knowing this stuff is absurd. I don’t know where I got the idea you had to know something before you studied it but that was a bunch of crap.

I get wrapped up in fear sometimes. I get so tied up sometimes that I can’t make a choice of my own free will and the universe has to blow me off the fence, to one side or another. When I am on the ground it doesn’t matter what side I am on, just that I am no longer gripping the fencepost with wide fearful eyes. I may not even know it yet, but the world has become my oyster (in a non-manifest destiny, sustainable kind of way).

I am probably not the only one who has some secret they have been running from. I suspect there are more of us out there. I not gonna say everything got hunky dory all of a sudden there is a sense of relief because I worked my way through the woods and found out it wasn’t Mordor after all. It was just a Statistics class.

So go do what you’re afraid of already. We don’t have much time.

Planting sugar snap pea seeds yesterday, I was thrilled to find the raised bed rife with earthworms, young and old. We garden in soil known hereabouts as pygmy, which left to it’s own devices will not grow vegetables or much of anything except bonsai pines and huckleberries and the nefarious Scotch Broom. Thus we have eight raised beds in boxes and four beds in the ground, all requiring manure and compost in addition to the local soil to give us a decent harvest.

This past fall I scored a truckload of rabbit manure and I surmise it is this precious poop that has proven such an elixir to the worms. When I moved here six and a half years ago and set up my above-ground composting bin (and before the bears demolished that flimsy plastic thing) I was dismayed to find nary a worm coming up out of the ground and through the slots in the floor of the bin to gobble the tasty leftovers and give birth to myriad wormlets. In Berkeley where I gardened a small plot for eleven years, my composting bin (a gift from the city to encourage us to do the rot thing), produced gazillions of worms in collaboration with the local ground. But in pure pygmy soil, earthworms are as scarce as pumas, and it took a good three years of feeding massive amounts of worm food to the soil before any sort of worm population took hold.

This rabbit poop is apparently some sort of earthworm Viagra, for now when I turn the soil, the good earth literally dances with hundreds of little wigglers. May they grow large and happy, and may our vegetables and flowers and herbs thrive on their castings.

“Once you are in the midst of delusion, there is no end to delusion.” — Shunryu Suzuki 

One sunny day in my Berkeley garden, about ten years ago, I was enjoying eavesdropping on the conversation raging among three teenaged boys and one seventeen-year-old girl gathered around a table on the deck that jutted out from our house and looked down on my garden, the girl being my de facto daughter Ginger, a beautiful and sociable young woman who attracted males as catnip attracts cats and pineapple sage attracts hummingbirds. As a consequence of Ginger’s charms and sociability, our house was frequently overrun by young men, many of them from good Berkeley homes and heading for college, if they were not already in college. Of these three on the deck that day, one was bound for Harvard, one for Stanford, and the third had recently matriculated at the Berklee College of Music in Boston.

When Ginger sashayed into the house to fetch drinks for the thirsty lads, two of them came to the railing of the deck and peered down at me as I thinned carrot seedlings in ground next to my verdant broccoli.

“Is that…” began Jeremy, the Harvard-bound Physics major, “…um…hey, excuse me. Is that like broccoli in those little bushes?”

“Yes, it is,” I said, smiling up at him.

“Oh my God,” he said, his jaw dropping. “Jason, you gotta come see this. Broccoli is like growing on a little bush right in their garden.”

Soon to be studying politics at Stanford pursuant to becoming a lawyer, Jason joined Jeremy and Raul at the railing. “Where?” he said, looking down on the mass of greenery. “I don’t see anything.”

“There,” said Jeremy, pointing emphatically at a head of broccoli. “Right fucking there, man. I never knew it grew like that.”

“Me neither,” said Jason, shaking his head. “Jesus. Look at all that food. Is that like lettuce?”

“Indeed,” I replied, wondering if perhaps they were spoofing me. “Would you like a garden tour?”

“I would,” said Jeremy, skipping down the stairs, “but those guys are like totally fixated on you-know-who.”

So I gave Jeremy a ten-minute tour of my patch of vegetables and herbs. He pulled a carrot for the first time in his life, washed it in the hose while watering the parsley, took a bite and declared, “God, that is so sweet I never would have known it was a carrot.” Then he smiled beatifically. “I’m blown away. I never knew how any of this stuff got here. What a trip.” Then he frowned and shook his head. “Hey, not to change the subject, but we were just arguing about the Vietnam War. Jason said it was kind of an extension of World War II and was about trying to get their resources, and Raul said, ‘Like what resources?’ and I thought it was like to stop the communists. But was it the Russians or the Chinese we were trying to stop? Or…like…do they have oil in Vietnam? I mean, if they had oil wouldn’t they be like rich today?”

“Buddha was more concerned about how he himself existed in this moment. That was his point. Bread is made from flour. How flour becomes bread when put in the oven was for Buddha the most important thing.” — Shunryu Suzuki

I just returned from the farmers’ market in Mendocino with two vibrant young tomato plants, Sun Golds, orange cherry tomatoes with delicious flavor; cherry tomatoes being the only kind of tomato we can grow in our cool clime without the sheltering warmth of a greenhouse. Buying Sun Golds at the Mendocino farmers’ market has become a tradition for me, five years running now, and though I could easily start my own Sun Golds from seed, I prefer to buy my starts from a grower at the market. I suppose if I had a greenhouse, I would be more likely to start my own tomato plants from seed, but maybe not. I like the tradition of going to market to get plants, and I look forward to hunting for the most promising ones, speaking to the growers as I search, maybe sharing a tomato growing story or two. All of which begs the question: why don’t I have a greenhouse, even just a little one, to enhance my gardening experience?

I have now been a renter for eighteen years following fifteen years as homeowner following ten years as a renter, and for all twenty-eight years of my life as a renter some part of me expected to become a homeowner any day now. When I rented my house in Berkeley for eleven years, I did not plant a lemon tree for the first five years because I was convinced that if I were destined to live in Berkeley for more than a few years, surely I would find a way to buy a place and plant a lemon tree there. And now I have lived for six years in this wonderful house we rent on a piece of paradise a few miles from the village of Mendocino, and though my rational mind knows we may never own a house in this kingdom of expensive houses, I have yet to plant blueberries or grapes or fruit trees, or to build a small greenhouse because of that same expectation of possibly owning a home one day. Of course, what makes my reluctance to build a greenhouse entirely silly is that I could easily build the greenhouse to use in our garden now and take the blessed thing with us should we ever fulfill our dream of owning our own place.

“When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door, and we are purely independent of, and at the same time, dependent upon everything. Without air, we cannot breathe. Each one of us is in the midst of myriads of worlds. We are in the center of the world always, moment after moment. So we are completely dependent and independent.” — Shunryu Suzuki

I vow to be more consciously a swinging door, to do the things I want to do now and with much less care for what may or may not happen in the future. I vow to plant a lemon tree if a place in the ground calls out to me and says, “Hey you with the arms and legs and shovel. We could use a lemon tree right here, whether you stick around after you plant it or not.” I vow to live in this house we rent as if we may never leave here until we die. The moment, as Shunryu Suzuki would say, is what we’ve got. The rest is illusion.

I’ve been here before and made similar vows, which I am just now remembering. Five years ago I was quite ill and wondering if I would be around in this body much longer. I had long been planning to publish my book of short stories Buddha In A Teacup, and I kept saying to Marcia, “I will, I will…after I’m completely well.”

Marcia was wonderfully patient with me through my long ordeal, but one evening she said, “By waiting until you think you are completely well, might you be suggesting to your body and the universe that you don’t entirely believe you will get well? Why not go ahead and publish your book and trust that in doing so you will speed the process of your healing?”

So with great trepidation, I followed her counsel and published my book, and in the process of bringing forth Buddha In A Teacup my health improved and life became rosy again, rosy and suffused with the energy of no longer waiting around for some other moment than this one. And because everything is connected, I have since received a good many letters from people who read Buddha In A Teacup and wanted to thank me for reminding them that when we live in the past or dwell in the future, we aren’t really here; and what fun is that?

Todd’s web site is UnderTheTableBooks.com.

IF CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE HUFFMAN has any friends in Mendocino County, that person might want to let him know that his list of endorsers including Supervisor Smith and Superintendent of Schools Tichinin will cause voters to scream and run directly to another candidate.

GOVERNOR BROWN has proposed a $544 million whack to the courts, meaning, we hope, an end to the construction of new courthouses. Responding to the prospect of a big whack to the robed ones’ budget, Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye predictably, and with maximum delusion, commented, “The proposed cuts to the judicial branch are both devastating and disheartening. They will seriously compromise the public’s access to their courts and our ability to provide equal access to justice throughout the state.” Since when did “the public” have equal access to the courts? If you can pay you can play. Otherwise, go directly to jail. But think of the public good that will come from no new courthouse for Mendocino County, no mammoth eyesore for Ukiah!

AS THE PRESIDENTIAL race heats up, you are certain to hear Mendolib’s herd bulls — Joe Wildman, Rachel Binah, Val Muchowski, Maryann Villwock, and all of Westside Ukiah except for Tommy Wayne Kramer — going on about how Ralph Nader cost the Democrats the 2000 election, and how you’ll be throwing your vote to Romney if you don’t vote for four more years of Obama. (Clearheaded Mendolanders are, of course, supporting Rocky Anderson of Colorado for president.) Ralph Nader did not cost the Democrats the 2000 election; the Democrats did it to themselves by running the uninspiring Gore who couldn’t even carry his own state. And 250,000 registered Democrats in Florida voted for George Bush, as did nine million registered Democrats across the US. Democrats elected Bush, and they’re probably going to elect Plasto-Man this time around, politically a lateral move from Wall Street’s Obama.

THE SUPERVISORS have unanimously approved a ban on disposable plastic shopping bags, joining bans about to be in place in Ukiah and Fort Bragg. Mendocino County’s ordinance requires a second, final vote before its imposed but that’s assumed to be a done deal, with the ordinance to go into effect in six months. Ukiah gave final approval to its ordinance earlier this month while Fort Bragg’s city council was expected to finalize its vote Monday night. Sonoma County is also discussing a countywide ban.

ONE MIGHT WONDER why it’s taken 20 years to “review” and update the Plan. The answer to that one is right there in this week’s agenda. “If there is general community consensus…” the Plan can be amended.

THERE WOULDN’T BE “’CONSENSUS” on a guarantee of eternal life from this gang, but the nut of the prob is “Visitor Serving Facilities.”

VSFs ARE DEFINED as hostels, hotels, inns, b&bs, motels, student/instructor temporary housing (at the Art Center), single unit rentals, and vacation home rentals, which pretty much covers most structures in Mendocino’s pseudo-Victorian theme park. But the County collects bed tax on these little rental money machines so the County has a direct interest in knowing how many of them there are — ka-ching! ka-ching!

BUT, AS WE KNOW, Mendocino Village also contains among its small permanent population an overabundance of pickers of microscopic nits. These people will spend hours on how thick an asphalt patch on a sidewalk should be and what color to paint a window frame, never mind something as daunting as defining a “rental unit.”

SO ASKING THESE PEOPLE to reach “general community consensus” on which units are B&Bs and which are vacation home rentals and which are some petty chiseler’s spare bedroom that he occasionally rents out to touri is like trying to get Bill Clinton to define a sex act.

AN EARNEST YOUNG WOMAN out of the Fort Bragg Planning Office tried to inventory Mendocino’s rentals a few years ago and was roundly denounced by nearly everyone at the first Supes meeting when the poor thing presented the fruit of her labor.

A PROVISION in the 1992 Town Plan says, “The total number of rental units allowable, 234, shall remain fixed until the plan is further reviewed and a plan amendment is approved and certified by the California Coastal Commission.”

SO WHAT do people do who want to rent out their garage or that extra bedroom when the number of rooms has been fixed at 234 since 1992? They rent it anyway but they don’t list it, which means the County gets no bed tax.

THE MENDO Grand Jury wrote the County up back in 2008 for failing to update its Town Plan, the Fort Bragg planner’s valiant attempt to enumerate rentals having gone nowhere. The Grand Jury’s 40-page report was called “Byzantium By The Bay,” that title nicely summarizing the prevailing reality. The GJ went on to say that its investigation had found that “the County of Mendocino has failed, since 2001, to administer licensing of Vacation Home Rentals and Single Unit Rentals in the Town of Mendocino as required by the Mendocino Town Plan.” In other words, a whole lotta people were renting off the books.

THE COUNTY asked the same Fort Bragg planner to respond to the Grand Jury’s criticism, but not being much of a writer, she ended up making things murkier.

NOW A NEW BOARD OF SUPERVISORS has decided to take another whack at the Mendocino Town Plan. We suggest that all of Mendocino Village become a “Visitor Serving Facility” with every third structure designated a visitor serving facility.

ANOTHER OPTION might be to urge the Town of Mendocino to incorporate, thus relieving the rest of us of responsibility for endless discussions of definitions, thereby ensuring in perpetuity an objectively crazy dispute that only the town’s residents enjoy.

MENDOCINO FILM FESTIVAL Kicks Off Take 7 — Celebrate Mendocino Film Festival’s seventh year of bringing independent films to the Mendocino Coast at our Kickoff Party on Wednesday, May 23 from 5 to 8pm at the MacCallum House Restaurant and Bar in Mendocino. We expect festival tickets to sell out and this is your chance to purchase tickets to the Film Festival before the box office opens. We are counting down to the Mendocino Film Festival, June 1 through June 3, in Crown Hall, Arena Theater, and Coast Cinemas. Film Festival board of directors, programmers, and friends want to celebrate the best Festival ever—with you. Join us in the Bar & Cafe for drinks and casual cafe dining or in the dining room for a gourmet dinner — all exquisitely presented and prepared by Executive Chef Alan Kantor. All proceeds benefit the Mendocino Film Festival and help bring films and filmmakers to the coast. For dinner reservations call 937-0289 or visit www.MacCallumHouse.com. Bar opens at 5pm. Dinner is served 5:30 to 8:30pm. For more information about the Mendocino Film Festival selections visit www.MendocinoFilmFestival.org.

]]> http://theava.com/archives/15581/feed 0 http://theava.com/archives/15565 http://theava.com/archives/15565#comments Mon, 14 May 2012 04:47:41 +0000 The AVA http://theava.com/?p=15565 PIXIE WATCH, A READER WRITES: “Driving into Fort Bragg Saturday noon, south end of town, near Hare Creek Bridge, I was shocked to look left and see Ms. Audet calmly strolling along the highway with a large dog. The experience was much like the shock of spotting a celebrity, or an animal in the wild, where the actual siting doesn’t quite match up to the pictures one has seen, where the real thing actually seems a little larger than life (more true for wild animal spottings, less true for celebrities, who often seem smaller than their reputation). The big dog/petite waif visual brought to mind Little Orphan Annie, although Ms. Audet looked neither drunk nor angry but, rather, quite happy and content. This morning I read that she had recently written you from jail, which makes me wonder if she has a twin or doppelganger roaming the area.”

Audet

MISS AUDET wrote from the County Jail early last week where she was, as always, briefly incarcerated for drunk in public: “Dear People of Concern and Interest, God Bless you all! We all live our lives according to what we’ve learned and picked up throughout it all. For me I have a kinda rebellious manner; with the only wish to live off the land and my group of close friends and family, outside of this too populated and corrupt system. If I could share anything of importance to anyone it would be about love and goodness through the Christ and Great Spirit or whatever you may believe in; it is the love and forgiveness that we’ve been given that I’m proud to know in myself and proud to see it throughout this community. I’ve lived here for the winter and living here and experiencing the good and the bad is what I needed to learn and keep myself strong to continue on in my life as I leave and continue on in my journey that God has given me. Many people help me out every day with money or food or even concern. Thank you. I can’t offer the same, but I would love to give you encouragement. I encourage everyone throughout the good and bad. Everything happens for reasons in life and I pray for you to learn and get stronger through these things. Don’t let the world break you down. Thank you Great Spirit for another day to be with you. — Jacqueline Audet (Pixie), Mendocino County Jail, Ukiah”

CALLING the allegations in the recently filed lawsuit to stop the Willits Bypass “misconceptions and misinformation,” Caltrans issued a press release last week to “clarify” things. According to Caltrans District 1 Director Phil Frisbie, the bypass will “relieve congestion, reduce delays, and improve safety for traffic currently passing through Willits.” Well, duh. That’s what bypasses are supposed to do, Phil. Frisbie says the lawsuit filed by Willits-based enviros “has not put the project on hold.” In fact, “this important project,” Frisbie insists, is right on schedule with bids going out this very week on May 14, and a “Mandatory Pre-Bid Meeting” on June 13 “for all contractors who wish to submit bids or participate as sub-contractors.”

FRISBIE says the proposed Bypass has been “thoroughly investigated,” and that Caltrans has conducted “rigorous analysis by traffic engineers,” that the 2006 EIR has been “revalidated and supplemented” and that the entire project has received the blessings of the California Department of Fish and Game; National Marine Fisheries Service; North Coast Regional Water Quality Control Board; US Environmental Protection Agency; US Army Corps of Engineers; and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

WE DON’T DOUBT that Caltrans has its enviro paperwork in order. After all, Big Orange has spent millions of taxpayer dollars on it over several decades. And some of the so-called mitigations — new culverts, wetlands protections, fencing, and so on — are standard for highway projects. But to call their own “clarification” a response to their critics is a stretch. Traffic is down and there’s little likelihood, given the price of fuel and the general decline of the economy, of a significant increase to justify a four-lane bypass upgrade.

IF CALTRANS CARED about local concerns they’d use the money earmarked for possible expansion to four-lanes to reinstate the Highway 20 interchange, which they deleted for budget reasons, effectively routing Coast traffic back through downtown and largely defeating the purpose of the Bypass.

AND CALTRANS still hasn’t addressed the huge issue that the pilings supporting the overhead viaduct will gradually sink into the Little Lake Valley fill, thus destroying the Bypass or damaging it and costing more millions to maintain it.

THE BOARD of Supervisors is taking another crack this week at convincing Caltrans to make the eastbound turn off Highway 20 to Potter Valley, the site of many accidents over the years, less hazardous. According to the meeting agenda summary, “County residents living and traveling in the area where State Highway 20 has a highway at grade intersection, located at the Potter Valley Road turnoff, have experienced horrific and unsafe travel conditions since the reconstruction by the State of this particular roadway. Highway 20 is a major connector between Highway I-5 and Highway 101.

“Most recently, an accident occurred where a local resident was t-boned crossing the intersection that finally led other residents to take serious action, calling attention to the unsafe conditions for all travelers, not only at the intersection, but within the entire stretch of the bypass going east and west. High incident rates of serious accidents have occurred over the last decade. Local residents are asking the Board of Supervisors to assist their effort in advocating to Caltrans the seriousness of this dangerous stretch on Highway 20, and to make the needed changes to guarantee safer travel of this stretch of major roadway. A draft letter will be made available upon discussion of this item at the Board meeting on May 14, 2012.”

FROM THE LONDON EVENING STANDARD: “France’s new Socialist president owns three holiday homes in the Riviera resort of Cannes, it emerged today. Francois Hollande, 57, who ‘dislikes the rich’ and wants to revolutionize his country with high taxes and an onslaught against bankers, is in fact hugely wealthy himself. His assets were published today in the Official Journal, the gazette which contains verified information about France’s government. To the undoubted embarrassment of the most left-wing leader in Europe, and a man who styles himself as ‘Mr Normal,’ they are valued at almost £1 million. It will also reinforce accusations that Hollande is a ‘gauche caviar,’ or ‘Left-wing caviar’ — the Gallic equivalent of a champagne Socialist.” And our limo libs.

Audet

THIS JUST IN from Ms. Audet, presently cooling her troubled heels in the Mendocino County Jail on a drunk in public charge: “Dear People of Concern and Interest, God Bless you all! We all live our lives according to what we’ve learned and picked up throughout it all. For me I have a kinda rebellious manner; with the only wish to live off the land and my group of close friends and family, outside of this too populated and corrupt system. If I could share anything of importance to anyone it would be about love and goodness through the Christ and Great Spirit or whatever you may believe in; it is the love and forgiveness that we’ve been given that I’m proud to know in myself and proud to see it throughout this community. I’ve lived here for the winter and living here and experiencing the good and the bad is what I needed to learn and keep myself strong to continue on in my life as I leave and continue on in my journey that God has given me. Many people help me out every day with money or food or even concern. Thank you. I can’t offer the same, but I would love to give you encouragement. I encourage everyone throughout the good and bad. Everything happens for reasons in life and I pray for you to learn and get stronger through these things. Don’t let the world break you down. Thank you Great Spirit for another day to be with you. — Jacqueline Audet (Pixie), Mendocino County Jail, Ukiah”

GOVERNOR BROWN SAID SATURDAY the state is looking at a $17 billion deficit. The Governor has made a career of talking left, acting right and, true to form, his initiative goes heavy on ordinary Californians, light on the rich.

BROWN SAYS if voters don’t approve his November tax initiative he would take revenge on the children of the state, aka schools, higher education and social services.

THE GOVERNOR CLAIMS he can raise $9 billion by a “temporary” quarter-cent increase of the state’s sales tax and by imposing a tiny tax on incomes of $250,000 or more.

A SECOND initiative led by wealthy LA attorney Molly Munger is a little more fair. It would raise income taxes on a sliding scale for everyone.

IF BOTH INITIATIVES fail or, as expected, are combined into one and still fail, Brown says it would mean the K-12 school year would be cut by several weeks and college tuition fees would be again raised. Public schools, including the state university system, would be cut nearly $5 billion if the tax plans fail. And there would be reduced funding for courts.

WHICH COULD be a good thing for Mendocino County if it puts an end to the palatial new County Courthouse our eight judges and a magistrate yearn for but is fiscally nuts and aesthetically and practically undesired by anybody but them. The state deficit might also result in a whack to the overlarge Mendo judicial contingent itself, which would be another desirable local outcome of cuts to the state’s judicial budget. But Brown’s proposals are mostly bad for everyone except, of course, the One Percent, in whose interests America is run.

OPPONENTS of an expanded rock quarry on the Ridgewood Grade between Ukiah and Willits off Highway 101 have filed suit to prevent it from operating.

THE LAWSUIT brought by neighbors of the quarry maintains that the environmental impact report for the project, approved by the Board of Supervisors last month, is inadequate and that a county zoning change to allow asphalt plants at existing quarries on rangeland is illegal. Opponents contend the expansion would create noise, water and air pollution and create traffic hazards. They say an expanded quarry operation and asphalt batch plant proposal is inconsistent with the County’s General Plan.

AL KUBANIS, attorney for accused Redwood Valley killer Billy Norbury, said last week he’s having trouble getting Norbury’s files from the Public Defender’s office. Norbury, 33, is accused of shooting to death Jamal Andrews, 30, also of Redwood Valley, the night of January 21st. The case has attracted widespread attention because, many friends of the popular Andrews allege, the murder was committed out of Norbury’s racist rage. DA Eyster says there is no evidence that race was a factor in the shooting which, it is believed, arose out of a drug dispute.

NORBURY was initially represented by Public Defender Linda Thompson, whose slovenly record keeping and poor trial preparation is widely assumed in the County Courthouse. Judge Behnke has had to order Thompson to turn over Norbury’s files to private attorney Kubanis.

Thompson

THOMPSON REPLIED to the judge’s order with this whopper: “I just want to make it very clear on the record that this is the first time a private attorney who is substituted in … has indicated that there was a question about whether everything was present in the record.”

NO IT ISN’T. In 2010 Thompson had to be ordered to hand over the files belonging to defendant Glen Sunkett, and later in the year, ordered again to turn files over to Sunkett’s new attorney, David Eyster just before Eyster became District Attorney. Sunkett was eventually convicted of a brutal Fort Bragg home invasion, but while Thompson functioned as his attorney he complained that he was basically unrepresented, and that when Thompson finally gave him his files so he could briefly represent himself, “She just threw them all over the place in a cardboard box,” Sunkett said. “I never did get everything.”

THE POSTAL SERVICE has announced that rural post offices, of which there are many in Mendocino County, will see their hours of operation cut two to six hours a day. When these changes will go into effect has not been revealed. The farflung rural communities of Mendocino County are certain to be dramatically (and negatively) affected, as they double as informal community meeting centers.

REITER SAYS his telephone exchanges with Warrick made him unhappy to the tune of $250,000. Reiter also claims that he is owed another $101,837 because of “refusal of building inspector [Guy Parry] to attend scheduled inspection…” and  “including voice mail left on claimant’s phone, were vulgar and abusive.”

OK, SO NOW WE’RE up around $350,000 for Parry’s alleged non-appearance and the alleged voice mail insults. “Fuck you,” Warrick said, “you city syphilitic. We’re not meeting you, buttface, at your building site today or any other fuckin’ day because we don’t fuckin’ feel like driving over there.”

WE HAVE NO IDEA what Warrick or Parry may actually have said, but we can’t imagine them being anywhere near this abusive, and even if they’d gone temporarily off message, $350,000?

BUT REITER wasn’t finished toting up his injuries. No sir. $350,000 was not enough for the abuse he’d suffered, the insult of the no-show. He says Interim Planning Director Roger Mobley, Warrick and Parry then triple-teamed him by “retaliation by Building Department officials for reporting their previous retaliatory conduct. Threats to cause damage to project, actions that caused damage.”

THIS THIRD ALLEGED assault by Mendocino County Planning and Building is valued at $275,000 because Reiter says he has suffered “monetary loss of project estimated, intentional infliction of emotional distress.”

BY THE TIME Planning and Building was finished verbally abusing him and not showing up to sign off on Villa Candy Ass, Reiter says he’d been insulted and stood up to the tune of $931,938.

McGourty

UKIAH’S SCHOOL BOARD handed off responsibility to an expensive team of edu-talent (sic) scouts to find Ukiah a new superintendent, and you’re excused if you wonder why the Ukiah School Board had to pay someone else to do the job they’re elected to do.

GLEN McGOURTY of the Ukiah school board told the Ukiah Daily Journal that the hiring search he and his fellow trustees had paid someone else to do had been “exhaustive and exhausting.” But, his pudgy little fingers bloodied to the bone at the pure effort of paying someone to find — ta da! – Deb Kubin at Willits Unified, McGourty soldiers on.

PREDICTION: As the Willits School Board now commences its own “national search for educational excellence,” Ms. Kubin will be paid slighty more than the Socrates of Talmage, Paul Tichinin, County Superintendent of Schools. Tichinin will surely now turn to his board of trustees to demand that as Mendocino County’s senior educator he simply can’t endure the niggardly $120,000 he makes a year plus and a free car and fuel to commute back and forth to his Fort Bragg home in.

Kubin

THE UKIAH SCHOOL BOARD hired, at a fee not yet revealed, Jim Brown and Mike Escalante, “consultants” from the “firm” of Leadership Associates to locate ol’ Deb in Willits.

LEADERSHIP ASSOCIATES advertises itself as “Providing the highest quality candidates to meet the needs of your district.” They say they are “California’s premier executive search firm,” which “has assisted school boards in their selection of superintendents in more than 200 California school districts and organizations since 1996.” They go on to talk about their own “integrity” and blah, blah, honkety honk, bleepity bleep.

THE POMPOUS hi-ho’s of the McGourty type get their jive selves elected to Mendocino County school boards where they buy this consultant bushwah for top dollar rather than assume hiring responsibility themselves, dollars that come right out of any hope you might have for a decent education for your kid. And wasn’t it this same consulting firm that inflicted mega-feeb Lois Nash on Ukiah?

Brown

Escalante

EMPHATIC that the Palace’s owner, an eccentric and scattered Marin County woman named Eladia Laines, was doing nothing to either reboot or otherwise properly care for the building, the City of Ukiah has declared the Palace a public nuisance.

THE PUBLIC NUISANCE declaration was, it seemed, a large step towards demolishing the old hotel. But Ms. Laines, to everyone’s astonishment, hired a local contractor, Norman Hudson, to get to work cleaning up the premises, which Hudson has quickly and efficiently been doing, but not, it seems, to the satisfaction of the City of Ukiah, which has now red tagged the building, meaning Hudson must stop work because, the city says, he doesn’t have a permit to work inside the building. That permit must clear bureaucratic hurdles not simply negotiated.

BOTTOM LINE: A typical Mendo snafu. The city wanted something done about the Palace, the owner finally begins to do it, the city says stop.

DIRT GATE. When fuel-contaminated earth from construction of the Mendocino Transit Authority’s lavish new bus barn and office complex at the south end of Ukiah was moved to the Ukiah Speedway on the Ukiah Fairgrounds at the north end of town, it soon developed that somehow MTA and the race track’s proprietor had arranged to move the dirt outside normal processes, and the dirt, at huge expense to whom is still not known, subsequently had to be trucked outtahere to distant landfills licensed to take contaminated materials.

THE UKIAH FAIRGROUNDS is now in a hassle with Blair Aikin, the man who runs the popular racetrack, which remains closed while the dispute between Aikin and the Ukiah Fair Board is sorted out.

FREDDY CHAMPAGNE of the Champagne Racing Team told the Ukiah Daily Journal, “The decision to delay or suspend operations at this track has cost all of us in the community many dollars in preparation of our race season. The promoters are losing money, the fair is losing money, and the racers and sponsors are losing money.”

AIKIN LEARNED that the Fair Board was poised to terminate his lease from the Board’s meeting agenda, prompting him and more than a hundred racing fans and race drivers to show up at the meeting to complain that this was a heckuva underhanded thing to do to Aikin, a long-time NorCal fixture on the stock car circuit and a productive Fairgrounds tenant.

RACING WAS SUPPOSED to start at the end of March, but the whole annual show at the Fairgrounds Speedway is on hold. As Aikin and his supporters point out, before Aikins stepped forward the track at the Fairgrounds had been unused for years. The Ukiah-based entrepreneur created a valuable and popular business where there had been none, but then here comes Dirt Gate and the rug is pulled out from beneath the guy.

AS IT STANDS, Ukiah Fair officials and the feckless management at MTA each claim they didn’t know (1) the dirt was contaminated (2) who authorized it being trucked from one end of town to the other, (3) who’s going to pay for it being trucked from the Fairgrounds to distant landfills? The Fairgrounds people claim they didn’t even know the dirt was being hauled to the racetrack from MTA.

EVERYONE ELSE wonders, so what? Fuel-laden earth packed beneath a racecar track? It’s not like atomic fuel rods had been plunked down in an organic garden.

SO, WHO ARRANGED for the soiled soil to be hauled from MTA to the racetrack at the Ukiah Fairgrounds? Glenna Blake sits on the Ukiah Fair Board and she’s a long-time employee of MTA. Someone might ask her.

THE COMPLICATED plan to prevent the closing of 50 state parks freshly devised by state senators Joe Simitian and Noreen Evans seems unlikely to fly. It would route funds from a federal water quality program, state transportation and another state parks account to provide the millions needed to keep the parks open. A lot depends on the forthcoming state budget Governor Brown presents next week, and the Evans-Simitian plan is on hold anyway pending a vote that may never come. Meanwhile, in Mendocino County, community-based groups, such as the one formed in Anderson Valley to keep the economically essential Hendy Woods up and running, are working on their own plans to spare local state parks.

FROM A CHP Press Release issued May 9, 2012: “The California Highway Patrol will be sending out extra officers targeting DUI drivers during the 16th annual Boonville Beer Festival on Saturday May 12, 2012. The added enforcement, which begins at noon, is part of the California Highway Patrol’s effort to remove drivers from the highway who are impaired from alcoholic beverages and or drugs.”

THERE IS NO question that the evictees, among them a number of small children and a dead woman, are Indians, and that’s where a lot of these terrible arguments, exacerbated by casino money, begin, with claims by dominant tribal councils declaring that this or that Indian cannot legitimately claim membership in this or that tribe because his or her ancestors had not lived in the area.

HISTORICALLY CONSIDERED, Tuesday’s Robinson reservation deracination, you might call it, negates an old agreement that homeless Indians could always claim a home on the new reservations, many of which formed in the fairly recent past. But since the advent of casino income, the question of who belongs and who doesn’t belong to this or that tribe, has been suspiciously arbitrary, often coming down to ancient feuds between families lately expressed in bitter tribal elections.

THE ROBINSON REZ lies astride Highway 20 between Nice and Upper Lake. Reservation housing is located near the casino, both of which are visible from the highway. The casino seems to do a big business.

THE NEWLY HOMELESS at Robinson said they’d first been kicked out of the tribe and now they’ve been removed from their homes of many years. Currently, there are 477 members of the Robinson tribe, of whom 166 live in reservation land.

TONIA RAMOS, speaking for the evicted, among them her mother, said the families had been removed from the rez simply because the present tribal council desires more casino income for themselves and their supporters.

IN ANOTHER TUESDAY catastrophe, the destructive Artesa timber-to-vineyard conversion near Annapolis, the largest in state history, has won state approval. It will convert 324 acres of second-growth forest and meadow to wine grapes and vineyard support structures. Artesa is owned by a Spanish conglomerate called Grupo Codorniu with offices in Napa.

A LARGER, even more destructive wine grape and McMansion project is proposed for the same neighborhood. It’s the work of CalPERS, the state pension fund. Cynically called Preservation Ranch, the CalPERS monstrosity would level 1,769 acres of meadow and forest for vineyard and home development spread over 19,652 acres.

Once upon a time, so many years ago it might have been another lifetime, I got two kittens, a boy and girl, and after much thought and research named them Boy and Girl. Boy was an orange tabby, Girl was a gray tabby, and in the hallowed tradition of kittens, they played and slept and mewed and ate and clawed things and were wonderfully cute.

When they were about four months old, Boy and Girl played a particular game that made me laugh until I cried. No matter how many times I watched them play this game, I laughed until I cried. Sometimes other people would watch with me as the kittens played this particular game, and some of these people laughed, too, and a few of them even laughed until they cried; but there were other people who watched the game and did not laugh at all, which was amazing to me, and troubling. Here is the game the kittens played.

A heavy brown ceramic vase about fourteen-inches high, round at the bottom and narrowing somewhat at the top, stood on a brick terrace. Girl would chase Boy onto the terrace and Boy would jump into the vase. Girl would sit next to the vase, listening to Boy inside, and when Boy would pop his head up out of the vase, Girl would leap up and try to catch him, and Boy would drop back down into the vase. Then Girl would stand on her hind legs and reach into the vase with her forepaws and Boy would shoot his paws up to fight Girl’s paws, or Boy might leap out of the vase and the chase would resume. Or Girl would be inside the vase with Boy outside and the vase would tip over in the midst of their roughhousing and out would spill Girl.

Why were their antics so hilarious to me? Was it because their play was an enactment of the essential mammalian drama of fright and flight and fight—the thrill and danger of the hunt mixed with the suspense and terror of hiding in order to survive? Yes, I think so. But what’s so funny about that?

“Comedy has to be based on truth. You take the truth and you put a little curlicue at the end.” — Sid Caesar

I don’t have many memories of my mother laughing. My brother and I were forever telling jokes, honing our techniques, and our mother usually responded with a droll, “Very funny,” even if everyone else was howling with laughter.

But there was a time, one glorious time, when my mother and I laughed together so hard and for so long that we literally fell out of our seats and went temporarily blind with laughter. I was fourteen when my mother procured tickets for just the two of us to attend the musical Little Me at the Curran Theater in San Francisco, with the Broadway cast starring Sid Caesar in a dizzying number of roles opposite the ravishingly sexy Virginia Martin, with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Carolyn Leigh, a script by Neil Simon, and choreography by Bob Fosse.

As far as I can remember this was the only time in my life my mother took just the two of us to anything. Even more impressive, she splurged on fantastic seats, tenth row, center, which was also highly uncharacteristic of her. What I realize now after almost fifty years was that my mother was giving me the message that though she officially agreed with my father’s opposition to my pursuing a career in music and theater and writing, she unofficially supported my passion for these things.

The success of Little Me depended entirely on the genius of Sid Caesar and his ability to play myriad comedic roles convincingly, not to mention sing well, too. The same play performed with several different actors essaying Sid’s half-dozen parts wouldn’t have worked at all because the point of the play, in a way, is that all these extremely different men are essentially the same guy falling in love with the same woman over and over again. Try as I may, I cannot imagine anyone other than Sid Caesar successfully playing all those parts without becoming tiresome or silly. I knew that was Sid again and again—stumbling off the stage as one character and racing back on as someone else—yet I always believed he was an entirely new character—an astonishing feat. The songs were great, the dancing was fabulous, Virginia Martin was luscious, the chorus girls were gorgeous, the dialogue was snappy and funny, and young Todd was in heaven.

I can still recite whole scenes from the play and sing several of the songs, though I only saw and heard the musical once all those decades ago; but I cannot remember which scene it was that made my mother and I laugh so hard that we fell out of our seats, laughing along with hundreds of other people laughing so uproariously that Sid and his fellow actors froze for a time to let us get through our delirium before they came back to life and carried on with the show. That play and Sid Caesar and Virginia Martin and laughing so stupendously with my mother are burned into my memory more indelibly than almost anything else I have ever experienced.

“Laughter and tears are both responses to frustration and exhaustion. I myself prefer to laugh, since there is less cleaning up to do afterward.” — Kurt Vonnegut

When I saw Little Me with my mother, I was a freshman at Woodside High School attempting to fulfill my father’s wish that I become a medical doctor. To that end, I was slaving away in an accelerated program for scientifically ambitious students, something I most definitely was not. Nevertheless, I had yet to work up the courage to defy my father and so was following the prescribed steps on the path he wanted me to follow. As a consequence, I was one of only four ninth graders in a biology class for upper classmen, and we four sat huddled together in a far corner of the big classroom, though we otherwise had little in common.

There came the day of the big mid-term exam, the results to account for half our grade. Everyone in the class was on edge, we youngsters especially so. Our teacher was not a good one, I was badly prepared, poorly motivated, and certain I would botch the test. As we waited for our teacher to arrive with the tests, the four of us began to free associate, someone saying osmosis, someone replying mitochondria, another adding messenger RNA, and so on until we left science behind and were reeling off the names of pretty girls and sports heroes and anything and everything until one of us said something—the ultimate non sequitur?—that proved to be the verbal straw that broke our collective camel’s back, so that just as our teacher entered the room we four began to laugh hysterically.

Our laughter spread to others in the room, but eventually everyone, save for the four freshmen, regained control and prepared to take the test. But we had gone beyond some line none of us had ever gone beyond before, and we could not stop laughing. Our teacher sent us out into the hallway where we fell to the concrete and laughed until our bellies ached. And finally, one by one, we stopped laughing, caught our breaths, and returned to the classroom. But the moment we entered that place of the test, hysteria caught us again and sent us hurtling back outside, our teacher following us out to threaten and cajole, to no avail.

Because we were thought of as good boys, our temporary insanity was forgiven and we took the test the following day, though we were never allowed to sit en masse again. One of us became a professor of Biology, one a conservative federal judge, one a professor of Art, the fourth a writer and musician and the author of this essay. We were as different as four people could be, yet in that moment of youthful hysterics, the pressures of the world too much for us to bear, we escaped into laughter—together.

Underthetablebooks.com  features Todd’s stories and music and a blog dedicated to his essays for the AVA.

MANCHESTER Elementary School’s website says it serves 56 students grades K-8. Based on its state test results, it has received a “GreatSchools Rating of 3 out of 10,” but “the school community has reviewed this school and given it an average rating of 5 out of 5 stars.” Translation: Not a very good school but its staff and parents think it’s boffo. Manchester Elementary also has its own school board. The school is looking for a 3 in 1 combined superintendent, principal and teacher. There’s also a vacancy on its school board. Superintendent of County Schools, Paul Tichinin, is trying to get one of his preferred citizens, fogbelt old girl Cindy Biaggi, into the superintendent’s job. She may be supremely qualified, but a recommendation from Tichinin should come with a bilingual neon Peligro! and Buyer Beware warnings. A vacant school board slot just might be filled by the persistent critic of the Point Arena schools, Susan Rush, but Tichinin and Co. will of course move both rezes to make sure she isn’t seated. Of course independent, smart people like Mrs. Rush is just what’s needed everywhere in Mendocino County, and especially in Point Arena’s historically troubled schools.

DAVE GURNEY will be in Superior Court, Ukiah, this Friday at 9:30am. “In support,” Gurney explains, “for our lawsuit against the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative (MLPAI) and their private facilitators, for civil rights and Bagley-Keene Open Meeting Law violations back in April, 2010. That’s when I was arrested for legally recording a public meeting of the MLPAI, and for asking a question. It’s for ‘Summary Adjudication.’ I’m not a lawyer, but this means they are trying to get the case thrown out early to avoid the embarrassment of going to trial. The lawyers will be arguing over the phone, and a ruling by the judge is not expected until later.”

AT LAST. Work has begun on the 75,000-square-foot Adventist Hospital in Willits, a $64 million project approved by State hospital regulators just last week. The enterprise will be spread over  33 acres donated by the Handley family beneath their old ranch southeast of town.

Audet

GOLDIE WATCH: Goldilocks and all variations thereof have been retired as per the request of their designee, Ms. Jacqueline Audet of Fort Bragg. From three reported sightings of Ms. Audet last week in the Harvest Market shopping area, she is doing well, although one reporter did encounter her in the hard booze section of Harvest and was compelled to comment, “She wasn’t loaded yet.” Another eyewitness said he thought Ms. Audet “was beginning to show the signs of hard wear and tear from her very unfortunate lifestyle choices.” We remain hopeful that Ms. Audet, now one of the Mendocino Coast’s most remarked upon citizens, will soon consent to an interview.

DAVID GURNEY writing from Glass Beach, Fort Bragg: “This morning’s low tide of -1.6 ft at 6:30 a.m. was one of the lowest of the year. I was up early, and decided to take the dog on a run on at Glass Beach ‘Haul Road’ on the north end of town. When I got there, I was startled to see cars lined up-and-down both sides of Elm Street, all the way from Denny’s to the park entrance. Both sides of the street were packed parked cars. Similarly, the entire parking lot, and the two-square block area of the Stewart Street was packed with cars, on both sides. A quick count gave an estimate of at least three hundred passenger cars and vans. Except for a few locals mixed in, the crowds were almost exclusively people talking excitedly in what appeared to be Chinese – not a word of English was heard. Some vehicles were loading up with what looked like two to six passengers a apiece, climbing in and out of their wetsuits on the street. Loose groups of people, four and five abreast, trudged up and down the beach trail in their wetsuits in lines, dive tubes on their backs. One man I spoke to said he’d gotten his limit, but said observed a group of fifty divers working together in one of the small coves. There was not a single Fish and Game warden, nor a single yellow-clad ‘Abalone Watch’ volunteer in sight. It might be safe to say that there’re aren’t too many legal-sized abalone left within easy reach at Glass Beach right now. With a limit of three abalone per person, and three to four people per car, you could estimate that sat least 2,700 to 3,600 abs were pried from their watery haunts at Glass Beach this morning, by the hungry hoards up from the Bay Area and Sacto. At least legally. It’s a phenomenon unlike any I’ve seen in close to 40 years of living on the NorCoast.”

ROBERT COPPOCK RESPONDED: “Fish and Game and the Ab Watch people were there, but the whole Coast was super busy. I arrived at Van Damme at 6:45am and there were several inflatables each carrying five divers COMING IN with their limits. I checked and all were properly tagging and logging and had legal abs. There were more than 25 people driving away with limits by 7:30, but still there were plenty of people in the water, and more heading in. The locals seemed to be the last ones into the water. Some divers on the rocks south of the beach came in later with limits, along with a bunch of perch and a few urchins. By the way, most of these people seem to be Vietnamese, not Chinese. But they knew the rules. It’s just that there were a lot of them. On Saturday, the Ab Watch people at Glass Beach found only a few who were in some sort of violation, including one undersize. The people who were at Glass Beach on Saturday were mostly at Jughandle on Sunday. But there were lots of other places. You can’t be everywhere. On my way to Van Damme from Albion this morning, I saw ten cars parked along the road at Dark Gulch. Gordon Lane was also packed, I hear. F&G can’t be everywhere, so they pick the spots where there most likely would be real poachers and where they can get good evidence of wrongdoing, such as scuba spotters and one diver collecting for others. In lots of cases, you can’t tell if anything illegal is happening unless you are out there, if then. One reason we are getting more people here this year seems to be because the Fort Ross area is closed. The season has been shortened there.”

RETURNING SOBER to an initial liquid assessment of 2nd District Congressional candidate Stacey Lawson’s startling press release announcing a kind of Mendocino County Kitchen Kabinet, come, take my hand and together let us revisit hasty first impressions, not that they weren’t appropriate, as the mayor of Ukiah might say if she wouldn’t instinctively pronounce them inappropriate on the off chance she occasionally encounters local realities. Anyway, you will recall that Lawson, “a very spiritual” multi-millionaire, selected the following Mendo luminaries to advise and advance her run for Congress:

MARY ANNE LANDIS, Mayor of Ukiah; Mari Rodin, Former Mayor of Ukiah; Bruce Burton, Mayor of Willits; Ron Orenstein, Willits City Council Member; Jim Little, Laytonville Fire Department Chief; Calvin Harwood, Laytonville School Board President; Mike Anderson, Mendocino Farm Bureau President, Fort Bragg; Michael Braught, Mendocino Farm Bureau Vice President and Long Valley Market owner, Laytonville; Jody Cole, Wild Rainbow African Safaris, and Katharine Cole, Victory Campaign Board member, Ukiah; Art Harwood, Triple Bottom Line Solutions, Branscomb; Jim and Barbara Hurst, Business Owners, Fort Bragg; Judith Bailey, Bailey’s Incorporated, Laytonville; Chris Neary, Attorney at Law, Willits; Steve Zuieback, Founder & CEO of Synectics, Ukiah.

ABOUT HALF THESE PEOPLE are Republicans, as are lots of local Democrats, emotionally and for voting purposes, a fact of Northcoast political life confirmed by the corporate Democrats who’ve represented this area for years. But what’s odd about the enthusiasm for Lawson from the above is that acceptably conservative Democrats like Jared Huffman, a sitting Assemblyman, was in the race before Lawson jumped in. Huffman was endorsed early by More Of The Same Democrats like Wes Chesbro and Mike Thompson, and local Demo Party bigwig, Rachel Binah. Most of us assumed the rest of the Northcoast’s middle of the road extremists would fall in behind party stalwart Huffman. But no. A bunch of them, led by Bosco and this group of Mendo wanks, er bipartisan community leaders, are supporting Lawson even though, if the overriding standard is gender, there are also two perfectly acceptable liberal female candidates, Susan Adams, a Marin County supervisor, and Tiffany Renee of the Petaluma City Council. For straight up Fox News types, there are also two Republicans. The enthusiasm for Ms. Lawson is inexplicable given the many options in the race. Heck, we even have a psychiatrist, William Courtney, in the race. He’s running because he thinks this lunatic country could be straightened out by marijuana. And there’s a seaweed harvester in John Lewallen and a purely green guy in Andy Caffrey.

NATCH WE get an unmoored quote in support of Lawson from Ukiah’s unmoored mayor, Mary Anne Landis: “Stacey Lawson is the candidate who can help us make more in Mendocino County. Along with her strong business background and great people skills, she’s energetic and focused on promoting sustainable solutions to issues we face around economic development. She’s just the woman we need to represent us in Washington.”

NOT THAT LONG AGO, Mendocino County had a real economy based on timber, fishing, ranching, and tourism. Outside timber corporations destroyed the timber economy, fishing was lost to a variety of causes, ranching became unsustainable, and tourism, always precarious in a down economy, does not provide the kind of well-paying employment timber and fishing once did. Today’s economy is based on two intoxicants, one illegal, one legal — dope and wine. There are also a large number of Landis-Rodin types dominant in public employment and the local non-profits. The industrial wine industry is wholly dependent on Mexican labor. The quality of our schools and much of our local political leadership is unlikely to attract the environmentally sensitive, high-paying, techno-groove-o businesses the financially secure residents of Westside Ukiah are always going on about. A person with “a strong business background and great people skills” provides exactly what in this context?

FRIENDS OF THE WILLITS LIBRARY presents its annual Memorial Holiday Book Sale on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, May 25, 26 and 27 from 10am-4pm at the Willits Public Library meeting room, 390 East Commercial Street in Willits.

PETER PHILLIPS WRITES: “A recently organized coalition of Sonoma State faculty, students and local Occupy activists is calling for a public demonstration of outrage in response to the announcement that former Citigroup CEO Sanford Weill will receive an honorary degree at SSU’s graduation ceremony this year. People all over the country are invited to the Sonoma State campus for a ‘Day of Shame on Sonoma State University.’ The protest begins at noon on Saturday, May 12, and does not intend in any way to disrupt graduation proceedings. On the contrary, this is an urgent call to defend the integrity of the ceremony and denounce the unacceptable insult that Mr. Weill’s dishonorable doctorate degree represents. Sanford (Sandy) Weill was the driving force in shattering the Glass-Steagall Act, which for decades had prohibited Wall Street investment firms from gambling with their depositors’ money. Its reversal opened the gates for the housing crisis in 2008, the plague of foreclosures devastating our communities and the economic recession that has stolen our children’s future. Mr. Weill thus enabled the merger that created Citigroup, a major player in the criminal banking practices thereby unleashed. Given his unquestioned responsibility in this, Time Magazine recently included Weill’s name in its list of the ‘25 People to Blame for the Financial Crisis.’ A major purveyor of toxic subprime mortgages, Citigroup required $45 billion in government investment and a $300 billion guarantee of its bad assets to avoid bankruptcy; yet Sandy Weill retired an incredibly wealthy man shortly before the ‘banking collapse he helped engineer’ required a taxpayer bail-out. Now Mr. Weill is being rewarded with a degree in Humane Letters for his donation of $12 million of his ill-gotten dollars to complete SSU’s construction of the controversial Green Musical Center. In fact, many of the students in the SSU graduating class this year are leaving school saddled with Citigroup student loans, all part of the trillion dollar student loan debt from which graduates across the nation will be struggling for years to escape. Graduating SSU student Melanie Sanders’ nicely sums up the student perspective: ‘I must now call my grandma and explain that I will be protesting at my graduation ceremony. I am personally offended that he will be at my graduation and receiving a degree.’ The ‘Day of Shame on Sonoma State University’ starts at noon on the SSU campus at 1801 East Cotati Ave, Rohnert Park, on May 12, 2012. Please respect our commitment to non-violent assembly and protect the integrity of this graduation ceremony, deploying your creativity to inform and articulate compassionate resistance, and honoring the dignity of this treasured moment for students and their families by dressing appropriately in black.”

ABSENTEE BALLOTS were mailed out to Mendo voters on Monday. More than half of us in the County now vote absentee, a process hastened by the closing of many outback voting precincts as a cost-saving measure.

A READER comments that at last weekend’s Point Arena Daffodil Festival, “The tweakers were picking the daffs and trying to sell them to the tourists. Closing the Sea Shell Inn over here was like shaking an old wool blanket full of moths, then watching them all fly around without a place to land, looking all blurry-eyed in the daylight.”

CONGRESSIONAL CANDIDATE JARED HUFFMAN might want to re-think his sponge gambit. Huffman is mailing out little sponges emblazoned, “Huffman. Congress. Dip in water. See what happens.” We dipped the one we got and nothing happened. All it did was float. Anyhow, seeing as most Americans already think of their elected reps as sponges, if not leeches, a candidate doesn’t seem well advised to confirm the stereotype.

WE OFTEN HEAR or read back-to-the-land sagas told by the now aged representatives of the flower child diaspora of the late 1960s as young people departed the cities for the more placid areas of the west and east coasts. What you don’t hear much, if at all, is the primary reason for the urban exodus which, in the case of the San Francisco Bay Area to West Sonoma County and north to Trinity County, was the everyday level of street violence in the Bay Area cities, not to mention the world class maniacs like the Zodiac and Zebra Killers. The urbs had become a major bummer, man. It propelled thousands of counterculture types northward. Of course it was also possible to buy logged over land cheap in Mendocino and Humboldt counties, much of it financed by Bob McKee, arguably the pivotal expediter of the Northcoast back to the land movement. Now that the revisionist histories extolling the “Albion Nation” and the like are appearing, I’m looking forward to a new book by David Talbot (bother of Steve) on the “nightmare of violence and divisiveness that followed the dreamy days of peace and love.” Talbot’s book is called “Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love.”

STAN ANDERSON informs us that the Mendocino County Republican Central Committee will meet at Gribaldo’s Restaurant in Willits this Saturday, May 12th from 10 to noon. No hippies, no long guns. Side arms ok so long as they’re holstered.

WE’RE GRATEFUL to all the people who’ve donated ancient AVA’s. Thanks to you, we now have a complete archive, ours having been ransacked by the irresponsible and the untrustworthy. We now require that alleged researchers and writers be accompanied by one of us as they paw through the years of Mendocino County’s true history we now have hidden away, accessible only with an escort. There are also complete archives of America’s last newspaper at UC Davis and the University of Michigan.

WE SUSPECT KEN HURST, but whoever gave us a black arkansas apple tree must know how badly we covet this most delicious and rare fruit. We’ve got it in the ground, and so far it is thriving. Thank you.

QUOTE OF THE DAY from Michael Lewis: “If I were in charge of Occupy I would probably reorganize the movement around a single, achievable goal: a financial boycott of the six ‘too big to fail’ Wall Street firms: Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo. We would encourage people who had deposits in these firms to withdraw them, and put them in smaller, not ‘too big to fail’ banks. We would stigmatize anyone who invested, in any way, in any of these banks. I’d try to organize college students to protest on campuses. Their first goal would be to force the university endowments to divest themselves of shares in these banks.”

BUDGET PROBLEMS KEEP MOUNTING for the City of Ukiah. The General Fund is projected to be $1.8 million in the red for next fiscal year unless drastic cuts are made. Nearly a million of the shortfall comes from the loss of Redevelopment money which the City was using to pay administrative salaries, including a big chunk of the salary and benefits of the City Manager, Assistant City Manager, Finance Director and others. The City has milked the Ukiah Redevelopment Association (RDA) cow this way for years. Normally, when funding for a position goes away, so does the position. Instead, City Manager Jane Chambers is recommending laying off the Sun House Museum Director Sherrie Smith-Ferri and all of her staff, as well as public works line staff and a police officer and fire fighter position. Museum supporters and firefighters turned out in force to support their programs, but no one pointed out the obvious — that the City could get a lot more bang for its layoff buck by offing a couple of high priced administrators instead of essential people doing essential work. The City Council will appoint an ad hoc committee to study the issue and report back.

THE OTHER REDEVELOPMENT SHOE dropped when the California State Department of Finance told the City of Ukiah that some $6 million dollars set aside for the COSTCO project was not an “enforceable obligation,” because contracts to encumber the money had not been signed by last year’s deadline. Without the extensive road improvements that were to be funded by the RDA, the future of the COSTCO project is uncertain. It’s a heckuva note in the first place that a hugely successful private business like CostCo should get a large hunk of public money for site prep.

THE RACE for Second District Supervisor continues to be low key, although incumbent Supervisor John McCowen’s handmade, spray painted signs have begun to appear around Ukiah. The signs have been criticized for not being “professional” enough, but they provide visible proof of McCowen’s frugality, and frugal is always reassuring in profligate times. McCowen’s challenger, County employee and former SEIU bargaining team member Andrea Longoria, is so far pretty much invisible apart from a candidate’s night and a mostly unheard appearance on Norm de Vall’s local radio Access show. Early speculation was that SEIU would pour significant money into the race, but so far all but $50 of the $1,362 raised by Longoria has come from the Pinoleville Pomo Nation, of which Longoria is a member.

McCOWEN HAS THE ADVANTAGE of regular exposure at the Board of Supervisor’s meetings while Longoria has seldom if ever attended Supes meetings, except to complain about the pay cuts the Board was seeking to impose on her and fellow SEIU people last year. Nor has she attended Ukiah City Council meetings where McCowen is also a regular and occasionally weighs in on the issues facing his home town.

FOR YOUR ONLY IN MENDO files: We’ve all heard of sleep walking, but sleep driving? Randall D. Jennings, 43, of Fort Bragg said he was “sleep driving” when he piled head-on into two southbound vehicles containing a total of six tourists, injuring all of them. The three-car pile-up on Highway One north of Cleone near the intersection of Little Valley Road occurred in May of last year. Jennings, represented by Timothy O’Laughlin and prosecuted by DA new hire Jared Kelly, insisted he was driving in his sleep. Jennings took his unique defense all the way to a just-concluded jury trial that quickly found him guilty of two counts of felony reckless driving and four counts of misdemeanor reckless driving. Dr. Richard Miller of Mendocino, psychologist, and host of an equivalently implausible bi-weekly psych hour on KZYX, appeared as a witness for the defense. Jennings will be sentenced on June 18th at Ten Mile Court, Fort Bragg.

RAISING AWARENESS about Gender Diversity and Sexual Orientation — Local production company, Ukiah Aware, presents Out & About, an artistic and educational exploration of gender diversity and sexual orientation on Sunday, May 20, 2-5pm in the Social Hall of the Ukiah United Methodist Church. The production is free (donations are appreciated) and will be translated into Spanish; all are welcome. The Ukiah United Methodist Church and PFLAG North Bay (Parents, Families, and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) are production co-sponsors. For more information, contact Ukiah Aware at (707) 234-7155 or visit www.ukiahaware.com. — Dianne Durham

THE SUPERVISORS, slipping into their hair shirts, will meet at Saint Anthony’s Parish Hall in Mendocino next Tuesday (15 May), not in their lush leather swivel chairs in Ukiah. Beginning in 2006, the Board has annually held several of its regularly scheduled meetings in outlying areas of the county, most of them in the Fourth and Fifth Districts where their free lunches tend to be radically superior to those on offer in the culinarily-challenged areas of the County. The meeting starts at 10:00 a.m., and ends sometime late afternoon.

OCCUPY MENDOCINO Street Fair This Saturday, May 12. Noon To 5, Laurel Street (& Main) Block Party. Occupy Mendocino is hosting a major event to educate and energize support for economic justice, while creating a fun, community-building day: Speakers Platform with local and visiting political leaders, economists, and others sharing important information and ideas on: *How the 1% has gamed the system – while hurting us 99%ers. *How Wall Street deregulation and greed crashed the economy and created the Great Recession. *How the super-wealthy and corporations get special treatment and tax rates at our expense. *How our American democracy is failing. *What you can do to help change things. · Tables and booths of our local non-profit agencies, sharing the good works and services they help our Coast with. · Fun!… Music all afternoon, great Food offerings, Children’s Section, and more. Come join with us and your friends and neighbors – enjoy a great day together – and become a part of “the solution.” ….and pass the word on to others! For up-to-the-minute details, please see: www.occupymendocino.net/fair.html For questions, etc. please call 964-1722 or 937-0334 Our Afternoon’s Speakers: Norman Solomon and five other candidates for U.S. Congress, a representative from Mike Thompson’s office, Rachel Binah, Tom Wodetski, Jim Tarbell, Walt McKeown, Charles Wood, Jessie Van Sant, Rick Childs, Howard Ennes, and others. Tables by our Non-Profit Agencies: Project Sanctuary, The Children’s Fund, The Obama campaign, KZYX, Transition Towns, The Humane Society, Hospice, Ocean Protection Coalition, Move To Amend, Soroptomists, Noyo Food Forest, and others. Music all afternoon by: Gene Parsons, Chris Skyhawk, Steven Bates, The Occupy Songsters, The Children’ Chorus, Peter Black, Michael Coleman, Bob Dease, and others.

SALVADOR SANTANA will perform at The Forest Club in Ukiah on June 6th. His new single “Into The Light” will be released in June accompanied by a video. Salvador Santana is a 28 year old keyboardist, vocalist, composer and songwriter who is set to re-visit his roots when he plays at a number of venues this summer with his new band with Alex Nester (vocals & keyboards,) Jared Meeker (Guitar), Blake Collie (Drums) and Itai Shapira (bass). Salvador Santana is pushed by a need to step out of his comfort zone in a quest for new ideas. Exuding the Bay Area vibe, he began playing drums at age 3, sitting on his father’s lap. But his true love was discovered when he began taking piano lessons at six. He later studied at San Francisco’s heralded School of the Arts before attending Cal Arts in Valencia. His education, passion and lineage have turned Salvador Santana into a monster on the keys.

Piver

THE CITY OF FORT BRAGG has presented the late Vern Piver’s family with a proclamation honoring the universally popular Piver, known and admired thoughout Mendocino County, for his many years of community service. The new flagpole at the high school varsity baseball field features a plaque at its base in memory of Piver, among the finest all-round athletes produced by Mendocino County and, it should be said, a veteran of the Korean War. Additionally, Fort Bragg’s new Little League field will be called the Vern ‘Sonny’ Piver Baseball Field.

THE SACRAMENTO BEE ran a long story by reporter Peter Hecht this weekend entitled “California’s Emerald Triangle Pot Market Is Hitting Bottom” which begins, “The pot market is crashing in California’s legendary Emerald Triangle.”

“The closure of hundreds of marijuana dispensaries across California and a federal crackdown on licensing programs for medical pot cultivation are leaving growers in the North Coast redwoods with harvested stashes many can’t sell.

“Some pot cultivators who sought legitimacy through the medical market are fleeing to the black market. So much cheap weed is getting dumped in the college town of Arcata, some local dispensaries say business is down 75%. Even the region’s itinerant and colorful bud trimmers are going broke.

“By the scores, people have long trekked into the marijuana fields and indoor greenhouses of Humboldt, Mendocino and Trinity counties. Workers used to earn as much as $200 a pound meticulously cutting leaves from marijuana buds, prepping them for display at dispensaries or for sale in a purely illicit market.

“The region’s pot pilgrimage had accelerated in recent years as people were drawn by local cannabis traditions and dreams of cashing in on the medical marijuana market. They planted marijuana in the backwoods and in rewired houses with high-intensity grow lights.

“But the saturation of pot growers set off a price tumble by 2010, as a pound of prime Emerald weed slipped from $5,000 to the $3,000 range for marijuana grown indoors and to the $2,000 range for product grown outdoors. Lately, prices are in free-fall.

“’Last I heard, a pound of marijuana is $800 for outdoor grown,’ said Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman in Ukiah. ‘That’s plummeting. You might do better with tomatoes.’

“The marijuana meltdown could have major regional effects. In Humboldt County [and Mendocino County] — a recent study by a [Humboldt County] banker estimated marijuana accounts for more than a fourth of that county’s $1.6 billion economy.

In recent years, many locals already thought the influx of pot growers exceeded demand in the state’s sanctioned medical pot market. When US authorities in October announced a crackdown on medical marijuana businesses that they contended were profiteering in violation of federal and state laws, it darkened growers’ fears. …

“Pressures on growers intensified after federal Drug Enforcement Administration agents raided a marijuana farm that had been licensed by Mendocino County and was considered a model for establishing local compliance rules for medical cultivation. The raid prompted Mendocino County supervisors in January to rescind a program that allowed the sheriff to enforce a 99-plant limit on pot farms by attaching $50 zip ties to each plant and inspecting the gardens of nearly 100 growers who provided documentation to show they were serving medical pot users.

“The program, which also offered cheaper tags for smaller quantity growers, brought in $630,000 in county fees in two years.

“Sheriff Allman said it allowed his department — which spends 30% of its $23 million budget on pot enforcement — to target major cultivators who he says are illegally growing thousands of plants, diverting water and fouling the environment. After the federal government launched its crackdown, supervisors tabled work on the plan.

“Among the most worried cultivators are the outdoor growers who increasingly struggle to compete with the exotic strains produced in climate-controlled indoor grow rooms. …

“Many worry that the Emerald Triangle will go back to being the hub of California’s illegal marijuana trade. … With a federal crackdown and a shrinking market, Allman said, many out-of-towners may leave and ‘everything is going to go underground’.”

Norbury

BILLY NORBURY, 33, of Redwood Valley was in court again Friday, and again the accused killer of Jamal Andrews, 30, was granted a continuance. Friday’s hearing was supposed be Norbury’s arraignment on a murder charge with a special allegation that he used a gun in the shooting death of Andrews the night of January 24th. Norbury’s attorney, Al Kubanis, said he needed more time to research Norbury’s background, specifically Norbury’s divorce file, where psychological evaluations of Norbury apparently indicate that he may be mentally ill. Judge John Behnke gave Kubanis three more weeks to prepare. Norbury is now scheduled to be arraigned on Friday, May 25th.

A POPULAR REGGAE singer raised in Laytonville, Andrews’ many friends believe that Andrews was shot to death by Norbury because Andrews was black, Norbury a white racist. DA David Eyster says the known facts of the case do not support hate crime allegations. Eyster says “other reasons” for the shooting were in play. Large numbers of Andrews’ friends and supporters have turned out for each of Norbury’s court appearances, although fewer people turned out for Andrews last Friday.

CRIMES OF THE WEEK: A 45-year-old woman identified as Marcia Stockhoff of Ukiah and Kelseyville, was arrested last week (Thursday, April 26th), when she crawled through the drive-up window of the North State Street Taco Bell and began stuffing herself with negative food value items. Ms. Stockhoff had been unsuccessfully panhandling from the seated position beneath the window when, at about 1:45am, she forced it open, dove through it and began helping herself. She got herself in more trouble when she attempted to fight with the officers who’d arrived to cart her off to the psych cells at the Mendocino County Jail.

Driggs

68-YEAR-OLD JOHN DRIGGS was arrested Wednesday night about 10:30 when he was found standing naked outside the Ukiah Valley Medical Center. A nurse, presuming that Driggs was a roaming patient, attempted to cover the nude senior citizen with a blanket. But Driggs, a parolee and a registered sex offender who has been arrested for “numerous” counts of indecent exposure over the last several years, lewdly thrust his pelvis at her and announced he was in the mood for random sexual assaults with her or any other handy female. Driggs had illegally removed his ankle monitor before he went out into the Ukiah night looking for love. He was taken into custody by the Ukiah PD and booked into the County Jail.

JUST IN FROM GIZMOLANDIA: A recent report by political economist and accountant Karel Williams and his research team at the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester looked at the Apple Business Model and its employment effects. They cite a study which found that Chinese workers add $6.50 in value to each iPhone 3, just 3.6% of the phone’s shipping price. In a counterfactual exercise based on the average wage for electronics workers in the US ($21 per hour) and assuming 8 hours labor per phone, the CRESC team shows that Apple could assemble the phone in the US and still make a gross margin of $293 per phone, which is down from its current gross margin of $452, but still an impressive 46.5% margin. Assembling the phone in the US would have added benefits for the US economy in terms of direct job creation and multiplier effects — in contrast to the current business model, which decreases US employment and increases the US trade deficit. But healthy profits are not enough, so Apple continues to make superprofits to the detriment of the US economy. What is good for Apple is not good for the US.

THE PRESS DEMOCRAT’S 2012 “Best of Sonoma County Awards” doesn’t include a Best Bypass category for those of us who’d vote for Highway 101 as Sonoma County’s most appreciated amenity, allowing us to hurry on past the Rose City to more alluring destinations, north and south.

AFTER LIBELING ANGELA PINCHES as under the influence of methamphetamine when Ms. Pinches’ 2-year-old was found wandering half-clad near her Redwood Valley home three weeks ago, the DA said, “Oops. No meth.” But the damage was done. All the papers, including this one, assumed the police report was accurate and published stories repeating what has now turned out to be a false charge. When the DA got the lab test results on Ms. Pinches those results pronounced her clean, but her reputation was irreparably sullied. Meanwhile, John Pinches, 3rd District supervisor, and Angela’s father, is furious.

SUPERVISOR PINCHES makes the point: “They never even would have taken my daughter’s kids if they had known she was not on drugs. Little kids wander away from their house all the time and they don’t take them.”

PINCHES also spoke to the second libel associated with the wandering child affair. The police report quoted Ms. Pinches as saying she’d turned the oven on to warm her house in when she left to run an errand, instructing her 9-year-old to keep an eye on the 2-year-old. Not true, the Supervisor says. “I’ll tell you what happened there,” he said, “and the cops know this. When she got back home and the cops were there, the house was a little bit cold so she turned on the oven. They were all there, her and the cops and everyone. She did not leave the kids alone with an oven on. Anyway, an oven is a lot safer than having a wood stove going. But she never let the kids alone with the oven on. She turned the oven on when she came back when the cops were there. It’s pretty devastating when they accuse you of methamphetamine use and then go to court a week or so later and say, Oh, by the way, that was a mistake. The tests were clean….. I don’t know how they’ll pass it off. But when you make a mistake like that it devastates people’s lives. It’s like accusing somebody of being a rapist. Once it’s out there everybody thinks the worst.”

ONCE CHILDREN are taken by Children’s Protective Services, it’s not easy to get them back. Supervisor Pinches said his daughter “has to go through the whole bureaucratic drill, all of it. She’s been going there every day to get tested. She told them she was not on methamphetamine but she now has to go through this daily testing process to prove it because of this accusation.”

FOR YEARS NOW law enforcement has gossiped about Pinches being a big time pot grower on his ranch in the remote Eel River Canyon, but also for all these years the ranch has not been raided. The Supervisor’s suspicions that his family is getting a lot more attention from law enforcement than other citizens seem well founded. Of course the police would not have been at his daughter’s home three weeks ago if they hadn’t received the call about the lost child. Nevertheless, as Pinches says, “The other day I was in a restaurant and the waitress told me, ‘You know what the cop’s were talking about? What a big pot grower you are.’ And I have to deal with that on a daily basis. I guess it’s if you accuse someone for something long enough then okay, it must be true. I know a lot of people who have ranches and property out in the hills and they are not pot growers. After a while it gets to a point where now all of a sudden they are accusing my family of being involved in methamphetamine. I am not going to take it. I know my daughter. She is not perfect by any means. But I knew she was not on methamphetamine. Then you read that in the paper and you say, Well, you know, I guess she was. There was something I overlooked. I just didn’t see it. And then they did the test. Completely negative. But because her last name is Pinches…”.

ON MAY 1ST, Robert Jason Smith 32, of Mckinleyville, was stopped in Utah for a traffic violation. The Ute cop said he could smell marijuana in Smith’s vehicle, but found none. He said the distinctive odor of devil weed turned out to be wafting up from $215,000 dollars in cash he found in Smith’s SUV. The Utah police called Humboldt County’s narcos and soon a warrant was issued for Smith’s home in Mckinleyville where “officers located a commercial indoor marijuana growing operation” where they “seized 233 growing marijuana plants that ranged in size from 2 feet to 3 feet along with dried processed marijuana from inside of the residence.” They also seized Smith’s love interest, Ms. Tara Diva Fulgenzi, 31. This episode would seem to confirm that if local growers can get their product to buyers in the less marijuana rich areas of the country they can return to the Northcoast with a quarter million cash. But, as experienced dope mules have pointed out, it’s wise to transport the stuff in a rented vehicle, especially on the return trip.

THE SONOMA-MARIN Area Rail Transit District has sold $199 million in bonds to finance construction of the perhaps mythical rail line from Santa Rosa to San Rafael. Optimistic signs along 101 already announce that the train, which is planned to run from the Marin Civic Center to Railroad Square in Santa Rosa, will soon be chugging up and down the tracks no later than early 2016.

A READER writes to correct my comment that the SF Examiner is owned by rightwing nuts based in Colorado: “The Examiner was bought a few months back by some locals, maybe even ‘liberals,’ same folks buying the Guardian, as you noted. So, no more right-wing billionaire guys.” So far, though, the Examiner seems the same as when the crazy guy owned and the Guardian seems, ah, anemic.

HERE’S A STAT that’ll make taxpayers smile

One that’ll get them to Larkspur in style

You can take a choo-choo

If you someday accrue

At least five million dollars a mile

Lawson

A ZILLIONAIRE candidate for Congress in the reconfigured Northcoast Congressional district, Lawson, who has seldom voted and is a follower of an East Indian mumbo jumbo man, has predictably galvanized a kind of Who’s Who of MendoFeeb in her attempt to buy herself a seat in Congress — not the first person to make that attempt, of course , but this screwball has the dough to bring it off. Take a big pile of money, add “spirituality,” and they all come running!

MARY ANNE LANDIS, Mayor of Ukiah; Mari Rodin, Former Mayor of Ukiah; Bruce Burton, Mayor of Willits; Ron Orenstein, Willits City Council Member; Jim Little, Laytonville Fire Department Chief; Calvin Harwood, Laytonville School Board President; Mike Anderson, Mendocino Farm Bureau President, Fort Bragg; Michael Braught, Mendocino Farm Bureau Vice President and Long Valley Market owner, Laytonville; Jody Cole, Wild Rainbow African Safaris, and Katharine Cole, Victory Campaign Board member, Ukiah; Art Harwood, Triple Bottom Line Solutions, Branscomb; Jim and Barbara Hurst, Business Owners, Fort Bragg; Judith Bailey, Bailey’s Incorporated, Laytonville; Chris Neary, Attorney at Law, Willits; Steve Zuieback, Founder & CEO of Synectics, Ukiah

NATCH WE get an unmoored and utterly meaningless quote in support of Lawson from Ukiah’s sagacious mayor, Mary Anne Landis: “Stacey Lawson is the candidate who can help us make more in Mendocino County. Along with her strong business background and great people skills, she’s energetic and focused on promoting sustainable solutions to issues we face around economic development. She’s just the woman we need to represent us in Washington.”

WHAT’S SAD about Landis’s statement, nevermind a candidate for high office dumb enough to share the sentiment, is that “strong business” backgrounds have brought us where we are: broke and millions of Americans squeezed if not doomed. This person is much less qualified than, say, Chesbro and Thompson, who at least understand how utterly corrupt things are and simply play ball to stay in office, aware that in a just world they’d be delivering pizzas.

WHAT WE’RE SEEING here in the Lawson campaign and this fatuous advisory group is an object lesson in how to buy public office. Will Mendocino County voters go for it? Evidence from elections past aside, I don’t think so.

OBAMA on Pot Policy (from last week’s Rolling Stone Magazine Interview):

ROLLING STONE MAGAZINE: “Let me ask you about the War on Drugs. You vowed in 2008, when you were run­ning for election, that you would not ‘use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana.’ Yet we just ran a story that shows your administration is launching more raids on medical pot than the Bush administration did. What’s up with that?”

OBAMA: “Here’s what’s up: What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana — and the reason is, because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, ‘Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books.’ What I can say is, ‘Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage.’ As a consequence, there haven’t been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes. The only tension that’s come up — and this gets hyped up a lot — is a murky area where you have large-scale, commercial operations that may supply medical marijuana users, but in some cases may also be supplying recreational users. In that situation, we put the Justice Department in a very difficult place if we’re telling them, ‘This is supposed to be against the law, but we want you to turn the other way.’ That’s not something we’re going to do. I do think it’s important and useful to have a broader debate about our drug laws. One of the things we’ve done over the past three years was to make a sensible change when it came to the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. We’ve had a discussion about how to focus on treatment, taking a public-health approach to drugs and lessening the overwhelming emphasis on criminal laws as a tool to deal with this issue. I think that’s an appropriate debate that we should have.”

“BULLDOZING a freeway the size of Interstate 5 through precious wetlands would be wasteful and destructive — a four-lane road is just not needed for the traffic volumes through Willits on Highway 101,” said Jeff Miller with the Center for Biological Diversity.

”THIS IS A WAKE-UP CALL for Caltrans, which should be building efficient public transit and maintaining existing roads, rather than wasting our money and resources clinging to outdated visions of new freeways,” said Ellen Drell, board member of the Willits Environmental Center. “Global climate change, threatened ecosystems and the end of cheap oil are warning signs that we need to change course. The change needs to happen in every community, including here in Willits.”

FOR DECADES, Caltrans and the Federal Highway Administration have pursued a bypass on Highway 101 around Willits to ease traffic congestion. The agencies insist on a four-lane freeway and refuse to consider or analyze equally effective two-lane alternatives or in-town solutions. The current project is a six-mile, four-lane freeway bypass, including several bridges over creeks and local roads, a viaduct spanning the regulatory floodway and two interchanges. Construction would damage wildlife habitat and biological resources in Little Lake Valley, including nearly 100 acres of wetlands, and would require the largest wetlands fill permit in Northern California in the past 50 years. It would also affect stream and riparian habitat for chinook and coho salmon and steelhead trout in three streams converging into Outlet Creek, harm state-protected endangered plants (Baker’s meadowfoam) and destroy oak woodlands.

”IN A TIME of devastating budget cuts to health, education, social services and the state park system, Caltrans proposes to spend nearly $200 million on an unnecessary project that will seriously degrade the headwaters of the Eel River,” said Gary Graham Hughes, executive director at EPIC. “This project is completely out of touch with the needs of the natural and human communities on the North Coast.”

”FOR THREE DECADES the Sierra Cub has promoted responsible transportation planning in Mendocino County, but requests to consider a two-lane alternative have been ignored by Caltrans,” said Mary Walsh with the Redwood Chapter of the Sierra Club. “We’re proud to challenge this wasteful and destructive highway project.”

THE LAWSUIT is against Caltrans, the Federal Highway Administration and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for violations of the National Environmental Policy Act and Clean Water Act. It seeks a court order requiring the agencies to prepare a supplemental “environmental impact statement” that considers two-lane alternatives and addresses substantial design changes and new information about traffic volumes and environmental impacts.

BACKGROUND. For more than half a century, Caltrans has promoted turning Highway 101 into a four-lane freeway from San Diego to the Oregon border, with a four-lane freeway bypass around Willits. Caltrans first discussed potential bypass designs and routes through Willits in 1988, but by 1995 had unilaterally discarded all non-freeway or two-lane alternatives. An environmental review for a four-lane freeway was finalized in 2006.

THE CALIFORNIA TRANSPORTATION COMMISSION, the state funding authority, has repeatedly refused to fund a four-lane freeway, so Caltrans proposes to proceed in “phases,” grading for four lanes and constructing two lanes with available funds, then allegedly constructing two additional lanes when additional funding becomes available, a dubious prospect. Yet Caltrans and the Federal Highway Administration did not draft a supplemental “environmental impact statement” to look at impacts of this changed design or consider two-lane alternatives.

A 1998 CALTRANS STUDY found that 70-80% of traffic causing congestion in downtown Willits was local, and Caltrans internally conceded that the volume of traffic projected to use the bypass was not enough to warrant a four-lane freeway. Agency data showed the volume of traffic that would use the bypass did not increase from 1992 to 2005. New information shows actual traffic volumes are below what the agencies projected when they determined only a four-lane freeway will provide the desired level of service, and that a two-lane bypass will provide a better level of service than projected.

PHASE I OF THE PROJECT will discharge fill into more than 86 acres of wetlands and federal jurisdiction waters. Caltrans purchased approximately 2,000 acres of ranchland in Little Lake Valley to “mitigate” for loss of wetlands, but the properties already had established existing wetlands, with no ability for Caltrans to “create” new wetlands. To obtain the required wetlands fill permit under the Clean Water Act, the state and federal agencies submitted a significantly deficient “mitigation and monitoring plan” to the Army Corps to “enhance” wetlands. This plan itself alters existing wetlands and causes significant new impacts to wetlands, endangered species and grazing lands, and makes design changes that were not analyzed or disclosed in the 2006 environmental review. The Corps improperly issued the permit in February 2012.

THE WILLITS BYPASS is the latest in a series of controversial, environmentally damaging, expensive and unnecessary highway projects Caltrans is pursuing while refusing to consider alternatives and ignoring public opposition. Last month, a federal court ordered Caltrans to redo critical aspects of its environmental analysis for a project to widen and realign Highway 101 to promote large-truck travel through the ancient redwoods of Richardson Grove State Park. Caltrans is also proposing a project on Highway 197/199 in Del Norte County that would fell protected ancient redwoods and threaten the pristine Smith River. In January, Caltrans was forced by a lawsuit to rescind project approval and cancel construction of the first phase of an $80 million highway widening “safety” project in Niles Canyon, Alameda County, that Caltrans now admits is not needed.

THE ELEVATED freeway’s just a first phase

But you know they’ll do more than raise

The lanes in the air

Then after much wear and tear

They’ll just sink and cause more delays.