The school gymnasium is just as you remember it: The smell of sweat, the smell of fear; the childhood anguish of an evil room where cross-armed coaches and lesbian gym teachers reside, shouting orders and demanding push-ups. An encaged clock rests on the wall near the scoreboard, stopped in time, reading 8:36, just a stone’s [...]
I was reading National Geographic this morning and noticed an ad the featured something called Eco Grain. “What in tarnation is Eco Grain?” the headline said.
Well, according to the ad, it is grown on special farms in Idaho “thanks to a more sustainable farming approach.”
Sounds good to me, I thought, I might get some of [...]
by Bill Cook
Hello caller, you’re on the air.
Hey, it’s me and I’m sorry but I gotta say that your last caller was so out of it. I mean, they obviously just don’t get living here because if they did they’d realize that, well, you know, I mean, I know what’s going on here in the Valley and [...]
One of my college friends was a Deadhead. He had crates of cassette tapes with labels like “Bucknell, 1971”, Stanford 1973”; “Fillmore East 1970.” Of an evening he would navigate through these hundreds of cassettes and pull out “the greatest version” of a given Dead song, “Truckin’”, “Crazy Fingers”, whatever. He’d put the tape in [...]
by Kate Coleman
This winter’s Olympics have seen the usual sentimental media saturation of weepy or aw-shucks back stories on the athletes. Overcoming adversity is often the theme: Canadian figure skater Joannie Rochette soldiered on to win the bronze just days after her mother died of a heart attack. There’s often more than one story of an athlete [...]
by Hank Sims
It’s still hard for some locals to accept that 150 years ago — five generations, a historical blip — Humboldt County was controlled by genocidaires. Our illustrious forefathers, the settlers of this county, were, in large part, twisted, scheming, evil men. They murdered the original people of this place for their own private gain, ruthlessly [...]
I’m sorry, so sorry…. Please accept my apology…
— Brenda Lee, 1960
It’s apology season.
Maybe it’s like the Catholic church, you go and confess, you are absolved and free to sin again. It’s as if no one really cares what these people do, as long as they suffer publicly for it. The Morality Police perhaps [...]
Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. Well, they did it again! Yes folks, Gloria Ross, “The Bishop of Boonville,” and her team of volunteers put on a superb evening last Saturday for The Original Crab Feed that benefits the St. Elizabeth Seton Church It will surely be hard [...]
Three years ago an unusual volume was issued by Crown Books. It was signed by Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines, and titled “Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life).” Presented as a chronicle of how one woman broke through the glass ceiling to attain eminence in her career, [...]
There is a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco a few blocks from my parents’ house. The Garden is indistinguishable from dozens of other Chinese restaurants in Beijing-By-The-Bay: harsh fluorescent lights, black metal chairs that look like they were stolen from a VFW Hall in Fresno, a pair of grubby tanks in which lobsters and fish await the executioner’s pot. A place where rock cod and appetites come to die.
