by Todd Walton
“Humor is just another defense against the universe.” — Mel Brooks 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 [...]
Chen Guangchen, the Chinese human rights activist, got four separate articles in the New York Times for May 5. Jane Perlez and Michael Wines reported from Beijing on the deal that would get Chen and his family visas to the US, for him to take up a fellowship at NYU. Andrew Jacobs weighed in with [...]
by The AVA
THE CITY OF FORT BRAGG has presented the late Vern Piver’s family with a proclamation honoring the universally popular Piver, known and admired throughout 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 [...]
by The AVA
To Honorable Judge Ellis: I am writing to inform you that I was coerced into signing the plea agreement. This is my motion to withdraw my plea agreement, entered on the 29th of March 2012. I move to have a hearing on the illegal coerced plea. I also move to represent myself and have counsel [...]
If it bleeds it leads. Mendocino County has never been a stranger to senseless bloodletting. In the broader spectrum of history the tragic deaths of Jere Melo and Matthew Coleman last summer were merely another couple of notches in a long line of violence that goes back to Mendocino County’s first years.Subscribe now to access [...]
by Will Parrish
It took until March for a smattering of steelhead to run up flat-bottomed Gibson Creek, a watercourse that flows past the house where I live, in a fastidiously well-manicured section of West Side Ukiah (water-intensive dark-green lawns are perhaps these streets’ definitive artifact), on a descent into the Russian River. The heavy dump of rain [...]
Two things are remarkable about the last 35,000 years of human history: that things have remained so stable, and that so much has changed. If, as Pablo Picasso is said to have remarked, we have learned nothing, based on his assessment of the cave paintings of Lascaux, we have managed quite a lot by way [...]
by The AVA
BRAUTIGAN: WARTS & ALL Editor, Make no mistake about it: I love Richard Brautigan. I really love Richard Brautigan. He was as much a part of my early literary training at the Writing Seminars Department at the Johns Hopkins University as anyone I can think of. Brautigan was out-of-this-world creative — otherworldly, innocent, child-like, fanciful, [...]
by John Wester
Hippie met its ugly death In Buena Vista Park; Buried with the smack and meth With candles in the dark; Vietnam the only trip That had the people in its grip. * * * Organized by the Diggers, residents of Haight-Ashbury marched through the streets in early October, 1967, carrying a coffin to symbolize the [...]
Cypress boughs dangle over the still, mocha-muddy waters of an Oklahoma swamp as a gaggle of drawling Southern country boys walks waist deep through the sleepy current. The men, shirtless and tanned, feel their way with their feet, exploring for stumps or root tangles—and when a foot strikes a submerged structure, the man kneels, almost [...]
