A logical first stop for snowbirds returning from Arizona to the Upper Midwest is Tucumcari, New Mexico, a little town big enough for a McDonald’s but too small for a Walmart.
Having put on 608 miles across the back roads of New Mexico, I was plenty tired. I was ready to take whatever hotel room I [...]
by Dick Meister
Like most daily newspapers these days, the San Francisco Chronicle is hustling to increase declining profit margins. But let me offer some advice to my former employer: Quit gouging grieving readers as part of your profit chasing. I mean those who pay the Chronicle for running their loved ones’ death notices on the paper’s obituary [...]
by Steve Heilig
By Buddy, as told by Steve Heilig.
Yes, I am a dog — a purebred one, if you must know. That’s actually a handicap. I am here to confess that for a time I “practiced medicine” — or healing, at least — without a license. I do have a dog license, of course, but my training [...]
All right, maybe I exaggerated a little bit. There were a few weeks of spring before summer hit with full superheated force. As I was to learn (and re-learn, year after year), freezing weather can and probably will put in at least a token appearance any time up until late May. For that matter, by [...]
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 [...]
Due to plentiful winter rains, the desert southwest is planning for a bombastic display of desert flowers sometime in early April.
A full desert bloom only happens once every few years. But when it does, the hills, mountainsides and desert floor explode with color.
Some hills, such as those in the Poppy Preserve in California, turn brilliant [...]
by Doug Dowd
Bologna, Italy — As most who read this will know, Howard Zinn died on January 27. Like all who knew and worked with him, I called him Howie. As I do so now, I cannot help but smile as, at the same time, tears begin to fall.
I had the good fortune to work politically with [...]
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 [...]
by Todd Walton
Repeat after me. Pacific Gas and Electric is not a public utility. They would like us to think they are a public utility, but they are not. PG&E is a huge amoral corporation owned by an even larger amoral multinational corporation with one goal transcendent over all others: to make obscene profits through the maintenance [...]
