Off the Record
by The AVA
This week: deVall & the 5th District Supes race, the Rural Legal Club, Mendo Branch, Tichinin’s “Day of Action” and much more…
Category archives for:
Opinion
Perils In Plastics?
by Steve Heilig
Poor Marge Simpson. In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” the insecure cartoon housewife made the mistake of using nonstick cookware and offering plastic cups with No. 7 stamped on them. The other mothers at her party grabbed their children and ran as if a bomb had gone off. Another party ruined, and Bart was [...]
March 17, 2010 | Posted in Essays | Read More »
Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?
Driving down the broad avenues of Cleveland, Ohio, was like flipping through the pages of a picture book about the rise and fall of our industrial empire. Where demolitions had not removed things — a lot was gone — stood the residue of a society so different from ours that you felt momentarily transported to [...]
March 17, 2010 | Posted in Opinion | Read More »
Spring Break Cocktails
Patches of snow cling to the muddy earth in the city’s picturesque 19th-century cemetery just to our north. Down in the gorge immediately to our south the creek builds momentum every hour as the thaw proceeds.
Just beyond the graveyard the fraternity brothers will soon emerge from their beer-soaked dens to bask in the spring sunshine [...]
March 17, 2010 | Posted in Essays | Read More »
Gene
by John Wester
Rednecks fear that hidden gene
That’s in somebody’s blood
That interferes with lean and mean
And Mississippi mud —
Or puts the lean and mean in chicks
And has men suck each other’s dicks.
* * *
Gene is my father-in-all. He’s from Oklahoma. His name is actually Homer Eugene and he’s a homophobe. And he talks like the rhyme. Gene and [...]
March 17, 2010 | Posted in Essays | Read More »
An Idiot Wind
Given my choice of movies, the execrable Michael Jackson puff piece/pseudo-documentary *This Is It* would have remained near the bottom of my list, but on a long airplane journey over a cloud-obscured ocean, having read all my back issues of the Anderson Valley Advertiser, there wasn’t anything else to distract me from getting out the [...]
March!
The soggy agony of March!
The lone ray of cheer in the last dreary week was when the swans settled on the pond in front of the house.
Ma and Pa swan seem to be getting along. They bob their heads and perform their silly mating rituals on their private dance floor, a circle of slushy ice.
A [...]
March 17, 2010 | Posted in Essays | Read More »
Westlands
For a dozen years I periodically hauled horses in and out of the Harris Ranch down in the Westlands Irrigation District in the San Joaquin Valley. Famous to grocery shoppers for their brand of beef, and to commuters along I-5 for their massive feedlot filled with cattle and, a few miles upwind, their luxurious resort [...]
March 17, 2010 | Posted in Essays | Read More »
A Day in the Life: Notes From a San Francisco Paramedic
I am remembering now a call of a few months ago. Some calls linger in my mind while others fade away gradually. It’s random, but this one I remember well. It was the first call of the day — no time for coffee — it was for shortness of breath, but on the way it [...]
March 17, 2010 | Posted in Essays | Read More »
Letters to the Editor
AN ATHEIST’S REPLY
Editor:
I always enjoy reading the letters of Lee Simon from Far’N’Away Farm in Virginia.
His letter in the February 24 AVA was on the mark. His criticism of religion in general, and the Catholic Church in particular, echoed my comments in a series of e-mails I recently exchanged with my friend and running partner, [...]
March 11, 2010 | Posted in Letters to the Editor | Read More »
