Mendocino County Today: Friday, Jan. 27, 2023

Cooling | Seastacks | Creekside Exodus | MEC Event | Hendy Open | Cecelia Pardini | Noyo 1866 | Free Concert | Abandoned Mill | Ed Notes | Wendling 1911 | Not Endorsed | Silver Poets | Jeff Vestal | Seaweed Exhibit | Eureka Shop | Willits Art | Chinese Dinner | Charging Sites | Yesterday's Catch | Bambi Dunagan | Attach Not | Miracle Ministry | Movie Guide | Reese Bars | Chinese Labor | Golden Gate | Firecracker Biden | Despair | Ukraine | Amber Vision | Astronomical Clock

DRY CONDITIONS will persist through Saturday. Temperatures will begin a cooling trend as a a pair of low pressure systems will drop southward over the West Coast this weekend. A slight chance of light rain and some mountain snow possible Saturday night into Sunday morning. Cooler airmass will bring below normal temperatures early next week. (NWS)

CREEKSIDE UPDATE: Medical Emergency Occurs; Deadline Passes, Residents Of Creekside Cabins Block Bridge, Traffic Backs Up On 101…

by Kym Kemp

As CHP officers call for backup, residents of the embattled Creekside Cabins block the bridge that provides the only entrance and exit to the area located off Hwy 101 north of Willits. The temporary bridge was scheduled to be closed at 5 p.m. after being installed yesterday morning and removed at 8 a.m. tomorrow. Any resident still on the property after 5 p.m. would be guilty of a misdemeanor.

A woman with a dog was standing in front of the caterpillar tractor on the bridge and other residents are beginning to gather, our reporter on the scene, Sarah Reith, tells us. There are nine people and a dog including multiple Sheriff’s deputies and CHP. The caterpillar has moved and allowed several vehicles carry residents’ belongings to exit going south as 5:30 p.m.

The California Highway Patrol has issued a CODE 33 alert which means that officers should restrict radio use because of an emergency situation.

There are three CHP officers and a Cal Fire vehicle on scene as well as four or five MCSO deputies.

Traffic is backing up along Hwy 101 in both directions.

According to Reith, residents have told her that they need more time to exit. One man had spent all day getting his trailer registered in order to legally move it. He had succeeded but not been able to cross the bridge in time.

“One guy is waiting on a duly to come haul his trailer,” she explained. Other residents are still scrambling to collect years of items and pack them before leaving the property. “They want out,” Reith said. But they want more time before they leave.

UPDATE 6:10 p.m.: An ambulance from Willits has showed up at the scene for a medical emergency. We are unable to confirm what the exact situations is.

UPDATE 8:05 p.m.: The incident is still ongoing. Below are images from the scene brought out by Matt LaFever.

(Courtesy, KymKemp.com)

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DOUGLAS KENYON IS A RESIDENT OF CREEKSIDE. He writes: 

They had only one guy there for the past 2 days to move all the trailers. The reason they got mad tonight is because they were waiting for the one person that was allowed to move trailers cause they wouldn’t let anyone tow they’re own trailers out, anyway the guy was late it got to be 5:00pm. Then he just said that was it and said they reached the deadline and no one else would be allowed to leave time up. It wasn’t right so they blocked them from blocking the bridge with the escalator. They only gave us 16hrs. To actually get out via the bridge, they blocked the bridge from 5pm. To 8am. And we weren’t allowed to even walk over the bridge. We were not allowed to bring trucks into the park to load up our belongings. If we would’ve had access to the bridge the full 2 days more people would’ve been out. There were so many people that had to leave everything behind. Kids crying cause piles of there toys were left behind. it was very sad to watch! Why can’t they leave it at least through the weekend give these people a chance to get all there stuff out it would be less to clean up around the place and it’s only the right thing to do. How many of you could move everything you own out of a place within 2 days and not have a truck to load it in until Thursday at 9:30 am. Not to many. Then have the cops there to write tickets to them after 5:00 for some misd. Violation. HAPPY NEW YEAR!

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CREEKSIDE CABINS SINKHOLE FAQs #2

(County Presser)

The County of Mendocino has received numerous questions and concerns about the conditions at Creekside Cabins and will attempt to answer the most frequently asked questions (FAQs) below:

Question: Are the residents of Creekside Cabins being evicted?

Answer: The County of Mendocino does not have the authority to evict residents from the property. Evictions are the jurisdiction of HCD and the property owner. The installation of the bridge was an evacuation measure only. This evacuation is similar to an order of evacuation for a fire or other emergency. 

Question: Will residents who choose to stay face punitive measures?

Answer: Any resident or member of the public with specific enforcement related questions may contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office.

Question: There has been conflicting information on the property line boundaries at Creekside, what happened?

Answer: On January 12, County staff noticed discrepancies in the boundary lines of the park and State property. On January 13, the County reached out to Caltrans to request boundary line clarifications. Caltrans subsequently sent out a surveyor to evaluate the boundary lines, and the results of this evaluation were provided to the County yesterday, January 25. Pursuant to these survey results, it was discovered that a portion of the RV park has encroached onto State property. For further information please contact Caltrans.

Question: Is there any difference between the portions of the RV Park on State and private property for the purposes of the evacuation order?

Answer: No. 

Question: What is the status of the drinking water at the site?

Answer: The County has not received any new information from the State Water Resources Control Board subsequent to the Boil Water Notice. Any new information will be shared when it is received. 

Question: How many residents were evacuated, where will they go?

Answer: As of 4:30 Thursday, of the 27 households at the park: 13 households have been issued vouchers to an alternate RV Park, 5 households have checked in to their sites. 2 households were issued hotel vouchers and are checked in to their rooms. 3 households stated they had a moving plan, one of these are confirmed, but the remaining two are unverified. 8 households have not provided any information to the County and have not requested services.

* * *

SUPERVISOR MULHEREN (facebook post): Wednesday night I was following a post on the 5th District group that was discussing this issue. This FAQ clarifies some of the things the County is faced with in trying to help the residents of Creekside. It’s never fun to have to vacate a property especially when housing resources are so slim in Mendocino County but we can not turn a blind eye to the conditions in the park. It’s interesting to read the reviews online of the park and compare them to the testimony heard at the Board and what I’ve read on social media. For some people this was a blissful oasis in the woods, for others it was one step above being on the streets. I hope that it opens the eyes of our elected leaders throughout the County including the Cities that we need more, not less, housing options of all varieties including livable RV parks. Resources from Social Services and NCO through United Disaster Relief are available to residents of the park, please seek those resources to find an alternative living arrangements. If the property owner is able to work successfully with Caltrans to install a new culvert and mitigate the code violations there is potential the campgrounds could be open in the late summer but that will be up to the property owner. 

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‘IT’S NOT RIGHT’: The Government-Ordered Exodus of the Creekside Cabins Displaces Dozens of Residents

by Sarah Reith

Residents at Creekside Cabins, an RV park just north of Willits, have been ordered to be off the premises today, due to a public health emergency. An order ratified this week by the Board of Supervisors says anyone on the premises after 5:00 pm Wednesday will face misdemeanor charges. But many residents have nowhere to go, and their vehicles aren’t in any shape to get them there if they did.

mendofever.com/2023/01/26/its-not-right-the-government-ordered-exodus-of-the-creekside-cabins-displaces-dozens-of-residents/

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

RE THE CREEKSIDE EVICTION: Mendocino County should be ashamed! Spending a quarter million dollars to beat up poor people?! In times of tragedy and extreme weather we come together to help each other out. But we shouldn’t have to bond together to protect each other from our own county government!! They are not “helping out” anybody here!

* * *

COUNTRY MUSIC LEGEND KRIS KRISTOFFERSON Owns a Parcel of Land Next Door to the Contentious Creekside Cabins

mendofever.com/2023/01/26/country-music-legend-kris-kristofferson-owns-a-parcel-of-land-next-door-to-the-contentious-creekside-cabins/

* * *

KH WRITES: After reading Danila Sand’s latest updates on Creekside – and all the comments – and listening to the board of supervisors meeting today, my opinion of the landlord hasn’t changed. The buck stops with the woman collecting 20,000 dollars per month in rent. She owns multiple trailer parks, she has been in the business a long time, and doesn’t hesitate to increase rents up to 100% if she can. Be that as it may, she is serving a segment of the population that cannot pay market rates for housing. I dont think she is doing community service or anything, but the county has not addressed rent control or Airbnbs and this is the predictable result. Increasingly poor and unsafe housing for those who are not well off.

One thing that IS changing is my opinion of the county crisis response.

I do not think it is the county’s responsibility to solve this for the landowner. But 50 or more people are about to be involuntarily evicted from a condemned property, and that is in the county’s purview. While I appreciate that 25 days is quick for a bureaucratic organization to act, their response has been less than ideal.

The rushed nature of all this – the temporary bridge, the two days for residents who have lived there for 20 years to move, spending 125,000 per two days of work – really brings up some serious issues about our county’s preparedness for emergencies, both the predictable and unpredictable types. In addition to the very real and continuing threat of fires, the state is constantly encouraging citizens to be prepared for a big earthquake. Yet our county apparently has no Bailey bridges in storage for such an event? Our county and state agencies have no authority to do an emergency repair on a culvert after a disaster without expensive permits, environmental reviews, and the like? What does this say about our preparedness in a big earthquake or fire?

The County of Mendocino has authority over many parks and recreation sites. If they are going to force 50 people out of their homes because of the irresponsibility of the landlord, it is incumbent on them to arrange temporary housing or put the trailers on a temporary site until tenants can find a more permanent solution.

We do not need 50 more campers and RVs that cannot run sitting on city and county streets and creating issues for 50 different neighborhoods. We do not need more panhandlers, beggars, homeless veterans, disabled people in wheelchairs with nowhere to go, or unhoused children unable to go to school.

If this is the county response to one broken culvert, how in the world are they ever going to deal with a widespread, countywide emergency that affects multiple roads, cities and communities?

Good luck to the citizens of Hopland, Mendocino, Ukiah, Talmage, Potter Valley, Fort Bragg, Elk, Gualala, Manchester, Little River, Willits, Ukiah and Laytonville. Every citizen who lives in a community with an important bridge is going to have to fend for themselves if this is the county response what we can expect after a major earthquake or fire.

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MARK SCARAMELLA COMMENTS: The Creekside situation reminds of that old line attributed to Captain Ahab: “Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves.”

ED NOTE: John McCowen and Friends version of a Ghost Dance, a reintroduction of fraud and massive scams as per the original MEC.

HENDY WOODS RE-OPENS

Happy to report that Hendy Woods is open again for both Day Use and Camping. Please be cautious when visiting, particularly if it’s windy.

— Hendy Woods Community

CECILIA PARDINI

Cecilia Lee Pardini passed away peacefully in her home in Boonville, California, Sunday September 25, 2022. Cecilia was born February 14, 1941, in Long Beach, California and loved telling stories about her childhood while living there. Cecilia and her family then moved to Santa Rosa and eventually to Boonville in 1954, where Cecilia finished high school and met her husband Robert Pardini. They were married July 22, 1959. 

Cecilia was the helpful, friendly face in the office at the Mendocino County Fair where she worked for over 40 years as the Business Assistant. After retiring she served on the Board and helped out wherever needed. Cecilia received the Blue Ribbon award from the fair for all her service and dedication to the fair. She also managed all the books for their family businesses. 

Cecilia loved the ocean and would never turn down a trip to the coast. She loved riding her horses, taking them to shows and gymkhanas, where she earned many awards. She also had a passion for music and would play the piano and organ. She even taught herself the guitar and Banjo. Cecilia played the piano for many of the local graduations.

Cecilia is survived by her sisters Cathy and Mary, her husband Robert, as well her 3 children Cindy, Danny, and Eddie (Gina), and 5 grandchildren Nathan, Daniel, Aaron, Sarah (Branden), and Rhett. 

Services will be held at a later time

FREE SYMPHONY ENTRANCE FOR YOUTH UNDER 18 AND THEIR GUARDIAN

In an effort to encourage our costal children to experience more orchestral music live, Symphony of the Redwoods has a long term policy of free admission for youth 18 years and younger. At this weekend's concerts, their guardian will also get a complementary ticket.

This information is not on our website at present time, however, the box office is informed. Simply let them know you are there with a youngster.

Symphony of the Redwoods launches into 2023 with a concert on Saturday, January 28 at 7:30 pm and Sunday, January 29 at 2:00 pm at Cotton Auditorium in Fort Bragg. This concert will feature auditioning conductor, Ryan Murray. Mr. Murray will present a preconcert lecture prior to the concerts at 6:30 PM on Saturday and 1 PM on Sunday. The program opens with Ballade in A Minor, Opus 33 by Samuel Coleridge Taylor. The piece is a romantic example of the composer’s early style. Next is the Concerto in E Minor by Edward Elgar featuring Adelle-Akiko Kearns on the cello. Ms. Kearns is a highly in demand performer who exhibits “beautifully sensuous cello playing.” The concert finishes with Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 43 by Jean Sibelius. Full of grand, heroic melodies, the Symphony paints magnificent pictures of the rugged Finnish landscape.

Tickets are available at Out of this World in Mendocino, Harvest Market in Fort Bragg, Brown Paper Tickets (www.brownpapertickets.com/event/5592569) and at the door.

TWO VIEWS of an abandoned mill on the Mendocino coast, taken by Dorothea Lange in 1938.

Who can identify this location?

ED NOTES

POSTAL RATES for paper-papers like the mighty AVA keep going up. The PO just hit us again, and we now pay well over $300 a week to get the print version to you at a losing rate of 95 cents per week per paper for out of state papers; 80 cents per week per paper for in-state but out of county papers. We pay about 30 cents per paper per week to get them delivered hither and yon inside Mendocino County. Conclusion: Like the failed capitalists we are, we can go on going slowly broke until, as Hemingway said, we're there, broke. We are tempted to move the whole show on-line, abandoning paper-papers forever, which I do not want to do. But something's gotta give so you out of county print subscribers brace yourselves for a mammoth rise in subscription prices. We have to at least break even to sustain this thing.

MY LATE COMRADE, Alexander Cockburn, always said Gerald Ford was his favorite president because “he didn't do anything.” No wars, no internal disasters except the ongoing ones, just ol' Jer puffing peacefully away at his pipe.

THE MENDOCINO COUNTY SUPERVISORS could learn from Ford. It's better for all of us, Supervisors, if you simply draw your undeserved pay and stay home until your terms are up. The nut of the prob with our five elected local leaders is that they've stepped into a situation that badly needs a strong, capable CEO, and I'm not suggesting a return to Mommy Dearest who had the strong, goodness knows, but not the rest of it that should go with the job. The Supervisors step in it every time they meet because there's no one to tell them how to avoid stepping in it. 

YEARS PAST we've also had weak Supervisors, person-for-person weaker than the present quintet. But those weak boards had the benefit of effective CEO's, Al Beltrami and Mike Scannell, to name two. They let the Supervisors pretend they were running the County while everyone who paid attention knew Al and Mike were the true shot callers.

MS ANTLE, the present CEO, is a consensus Nice Person. She was installed by Mommy Dee based on whatever subterranean motives Mom had as she departed — personal friendship, it seems. But if the ship is sinking do you want Nice or do you want Ahab? The gratuitously cruel handling of the Creekside property never would have happened under Mike or Al, and we wouldn't have suffered any of the serial disasters we've suffered under Mom and the Nice Lady who has succeeded her with either Al or Mike. The County ship of state is headed for the rocks with nobody at the wheel. 

GIVEN THE ARMIES of estranged citizens in this country, and given the easy access they have to guns, it's surprising there aren't more mass shootings than there are. My mother always talked about a man in her little hometown of Hillsboro, Illinois, circa 1915. For months this guy had grumbled to acquaintances that “one of these days I'm going to blow up this goddam town.” And darned if one morning he didn't dynamite about a third of the main street. Miraculously, the perp was the only person killed. Most of us know highly aggrieved people who probably dream of mass revenge, and when they go off we shrug and say, “Well, it was only a matter of time.” I knew a cop the other cops called “Tok,” as in Tick Tok, as in time bomb. He's still out there somewhere, permanently aggrieved, and heavily armed.

THE FORT BRAGG FOOD BANK has announced that “due to the egg shortage we are distributing half dozen eggs to clients. Thank you for your patience as we navigate rising costs and rationing from vendors.”

NOW YOU TELL ME: Most Americans who get their bivalent booster vaccine are not protected against falling sick with Covid. A report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has found the updated shots were just 48% effective at stopping symptomatic infection caused by the XBB.1.5 subvariant for up to three months. The CDC highlighted that the main purpose of the vaccines is to prevent hospitalization and death rather than transmission, and they are still expected to give high protection against severe illness. But the findings mean the bivalent shots — which the US Government paid $5 billion for last autumn — fall short of the World Health Organization's 50% efficacy threshold for an effective vaccine. When the original Pfizer and Moderna vaccines were developed in 2020, clinical trials indicated they could reduce rates of symptomatic infection by 95%. The shot slowly lost effectiveness as the virus continued to mutate, though.

FORT BRAGG SCHOOLS DISAVOW NAME CHANGE ESSAY CONTEST

To our Families, Staff Members, and Community: Fort Bragg Unified School District does not endorse the essay contest sponsored by the Change Our Name-Fort Bragg organization.

We are not affiliated with this group in any way.

Thank you. 

Joseph Aldridge, Superintendent, FBUSD

JEFF BURROUGHS: 

Back in the 1890's, when the horse and wagon were king and the roads were more like widened deer trails, my great great grandfather, Jeff Vestal, was headed home after a couple of days out on Mountain View Road cutting firewood for the hotel they owned in Boonville, when he met a traveling salesman on his horse and wagon. They were at a turn in the road called the horseshoe turn, narrow, rocky and steep. Now Jeff was never known for his patience but on that day he was tired and dirty and just wanted to get home, which made him even more impatient. It was kind of an unwritten law that the wagon headed up should be the one who backs up out of the way of the wagon traveling down the hill, but Jeff wasn't goin' anywhere and after some heated banter, Jeff got off his wagon and began setting up his camp, right there in the middle of the road. The salesman just frumped and fussed and said "I can wait, besides, you aint gonna make camp, youre just bullshittin "... then Jeff built a fire....The salesman, who was now nervously looking at his watch and at the sun getting low in the horizon, adamantly stood his ground, right up till the coffee started bubbling, then it was all over. Cussing and working the horses back up the hill for close to an hour, the salesman finally reached a point in the road where Jeff and his wagon could get past and so my great great grandfather Jeff Vestal, doused the fire out with the coffee, tied up his bedroll and snapped the leather reins of the horse team and he slowly lumbered up the hill. As he passed by the salesman, Jeff politely tipped down the brim of his dusty old hat, gave the salesman a winking nod and he said, "I tried to tell you, locals ALWAYS have the right away around here" Now THAT'S how it was done back in the good old days ! HAHA!

PORTALS TO THE OCEAN REALM: New exhibit on seaweed melds art and science

by Roberta Werdinger

The Curious World of Seaweed, Grace Hudson Museum's new exhibit, opens on Jan. 28 and will run through April 30. An opening reception will take place on Friday, Feb. 3, from 5 to 8 p.m. Along with refreshments and live music, seaweed artist, advocate, and author Josie Iselin will be available at the reception for signing her book, also called /The Curious World of Seaweed. /Published by Heyday in 2019, this award-winning book provides the basis for the exhibit, which Iselin created in collaboration with Exhibit Envoy.

"Seaweed and kelp are some of the greatest eco-engineers of our planet," says Iselin. "They are photosynthesizing powerhouses, growing rapidly in cold waters, creating the base of the vast ocean food chain. Kelp and seaweed provide crucial habitat for countless other organisms, both tiny and large. They sink carbon and oxygenate their near-shore waters...Their stories are compelling and deserve to be told, with more than words."

The area known to scientists as the Eastern Pacific Coast extends for thousands of miles, from the tip of Baja California to the Aleutian Islands of western Alaska. This is one of the most abundant seaweed habitats in the world, fostering bull kelp, surfgrass, nori, and many other species. Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera) and bull kelp (Nereocystis luetkenana) can each grow up to heights of 100 feet, employing a holdfast system that roots them to submerged rocks. These algae are able to thrive in only two percent of the ocean floor, a kind of "Goldilocks zone" where the right combination of sunlight, nutrients, and a solid ocean floor is available. Covering 71 percent of the earth's surface, much of the ocean is mysterious and inaccessible to us; Iselin sees the intertidal zones and beaches, where seaweed can be discovered, as "portals to the ocean realm."

Several other events will provide a deeper dive into seaweed's fascinating biology and enduring importance, including a family-friendly program with Sue Coulter from the Noyo Center for Marine Science on March 5; a presentation on seaweed ecology by Josie Iselin on March 19; and a Pomo Perspectives on Seaweed panel on April 15.

Admission to this and all other First Fridays is free. /The Curious World of Seaweed/ can also be viewed during the Museum's open hours: Wed. through Sat. from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m.

The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 South Main St. in Ukiah. For more information and regular fees call (707) 467-2836 or visit www.gracehudsonmuseum.org.

The Curious World of Seaweed, Grace Hudson Museum's new exhibit, opens on Jan. 28 and will run through April 30. An opening reception will take place on Friday, Feb. 3, from 5 to 8 p.m. Along with refreshments and live music, seaweed artist, advocate, and author Josie Iselin will be available at the reception for signing her book, also called /The Curious World of Seaweed. /Published by Heyday in 2019, this award-winning book provides the basis for the exhibit, which Iselin created in collaboration with Exhibit Envoy.

Admission to this and all other First Fridays is free. The Curious World of Seaweed can also be viewed during the Museum's open hours: Wed. through Sat. from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m.

The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 South Main St. in Ukiah. For more information and regular fees call (707) 467-2836 or visit www.gracehudsonmuseum.org.

ART IN WILLITS

The Willits Center for the Arts is pleased to announce its February show featuring Nancy New’s ceramics and paintings by Victor Palomino, opening, Feb. 4th through 26th.

Victor Palomino is an artist born in Bogota Colombia in 1974. He attended film school and graduated in 1998. He moved to the United States in 1999 and established residency in North Carolina in 2001, currently living in Ukiah, CA. Over the years, Palomino has worked with different mediums including video, Photography, and music. He also produces Art Waves for KZYX, a monthly radio show about the arts sector in Mendocino County.

Victor told us, “My work is the result of life experiences, curiosity, color, and imagination. I'm influenced by pre-Columbian art, aboriginal designs, and western contemporary art. I found inspiration in the intersection between cultures, beliefs, technology, and humanity.” “This show is a selection of my work for the past six months of living in Mendocino. Is a combination of abstract and neo-expressionist paintings including part of a series of paintings based on my road trip from K.Y. to C.A. and a series of small paintings of musicians.”

Nancy New, a Willits resident, has honed her skills as a potter for over 50 years. ”I’ve been making pottery my whole life. The process of transforming wet clay into every imaginable shape, painting it with “liquid glass,” subjecting it to extreme heat, and turning it into glazed stone I find amusing and intriguing.” After making “Monet’s Pond,” going up the stairs here at the Art Center I longed to make colorful wildflowers, to remind everyone that spring is coming!

I enjoy copying the female forms in pottery of the Cucuteni-Trypillian people who lived in Ukraine and Romania from 5000 B.C.E. to 3800 B.C.E. As long as the rain keeps washing away mountaintops and filling rivers and valleys with clay there will be plenty for potters to pursue and fulfill their dreams for many years to come.”

The show will open on February 4th from 6:30 until 9 pm. You can meet the artists at this time. Gallery hours are Friday-Sunday, 11 am until 5 pm.

The Willits Center for the Arts is located at 71 East Commercial St. Willits, CA 95490. For more information visit www.willitscenterforthearts.org or call 707-459-1726

MCOG INVITES COMMUNITY INPUT on Electric Vehicle Charging Station Locations from Redwood Valley to Hopland

The Mendocino Council of Governments (MCOG) is partnering with ChargePoint, a recipient of a “Rural Electric Vehicle” grant from the California Energy Commission, in soliciting community input on preferred electric vehicle (EV) charging sites to be installed in the greater Ukiah/Redwood Valley/Hopland area.

The project includes installation of 25 EV chargers dispersed at five separate sites, including a fast charging hub in central Ukiah, plus four additional sites to be located in the project area. Each of the five charging sites will include approximately five chargers.

MCOG is seeking input from countywide residents on where these chargers should be placed, since many households work, shop, or attend school in the greater Ukiah area. To kick off the public outreach process, community members are invited to participate in a virtual workshop on Thursday, February 16 at 5:30 p.m. in which representatives from MCOG and ChargePoint will review the project’s goals and invite community input. To attend this workshop, please visit the MCOG website at <http://www.mendocinocog.org> www.mendocinocog.org and click on the Zoom meeting link which will be posted by February 9, 2023. The website will also include information on how to attend a separate virtual stakeholder workshop to be held on Wednesday, February 22 at 9:00 a.m.

Additional opportunities for public input will be available beginning February 15, 2023 through an interactive survey and map on MCOG’s website, where individuals may pin their preferred charging location and provide comment. Comments may also be mailed to the MCOG office at 525 S. Main Street, Suite G; Ukiah, CA 95482, or emailed to lellard@dbcteam.net.

For further information, contact Loretta Ellard at lellard@dbcteam.net or 707-234-3434.

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, January 26, 2023

JESUS DELGADO JR., Fort Bragg. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

ROBERT FULLER, Fort Bragg. Domestic battery, witness intimidation by threat or force, suspended license causing injury accident, no license, unlawful display of registration, probation revocation.

LATEEFAH GLOVER, Ukiah. Resisting.

ALEJANDRO GRIJALBA, Fort Bragg. Ammo possession by prohibited person, suspended license.

EDUARDO LEON, Willits. DUI while on probation, reckless driving, probation revocation.

RENEE MORGAN, Willits. Battery, vandalism.

JESUS NAVA-SANDOVAL, Ukiah. DUI.

NICOLE SANDERSON, Branscomb. Failure to appear.

SETH SMART, Willits. Concealed dirk-dagger.

LEWIS WILLIAMS, Albion. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

YOU'RE A NATCH FOR MENDO, CRAIG. PLEASE STAY.

Do not be attached to anything at all!

Warmest spiritual greetings, It has been the most incomprehensible eleven months since being given a bed at the Building Bridges homeless shelter in Ukiah, California. Aside from the fact that it has been impossible to make any sense of why exactly I am even in a homeless shelter in Ukiah, California, the months of walking all around Ukiah, in order just to do something to fill up the time, is impossible to make any sense of. The fact is that I do not have any socially relevant reason to be in Mendocino county presently, (after being put out of the place that I was living at in Redwood Valley for over a year, by the marijuana trimmers who did not want an intentional community environment or anything activist oriented there). Frankly, if I now get a subsidized apartment, I will move in. But if I don't, it is not a serious problem, because I have no reason to be living in Mendocino County. 

During the past eleven months, it has been difficult physically, because my energy level is not sustainable. This is due to the fact that it is ridiculous to attempt to be motivated in order to do nothing. So, I drag the body-mind complex from coffee place to matcha tea place to ginseng place, in order to keep from getting too wobbly while walking, because there is no rational motivation to keep going. 

After morning ablutions at the homeless shelter today, I went as usual to the Plowshares Peace & Justice Center for a nutritious free meal, because the body needs to eat and the $143.27 in the Savings Bank of Mendocino County checking account has to last until the $829.07 monthly social security benefit comes in, in addition to this being the last month of receiving both the regular and federal food stamps. I mean, following 50 years on the frontlines of radical environmental and peace & justice activism since graduating from the University of Arizona, and writing about it all, I now often sit on a bench at the Alex R. Thomas Plaza in downtown Ukiah, looking at the trees while watching the mind attempt to make any sense of the situation.

And then it dawns. The final spiritual lesson is to not be attached to anything at all! Amidst the ongoing meltdown of this earthly civilization, this is the only conclusion which makes any sense. Seriously, I am now ready to move on. ☺

Craig Louis Stehr

HE WAS THE NORTH BAY’S INDISPENSABLE MOVIE GUIDE. TODAY IS HIS LAST DAY

by G Allen Johnson

Ever since Disney’s animated “The Lion King,” Quentin Tarantino’s breakthrough film “Pulp Fiction” and Jim Carrey’s blockbuster “Dumb and Dumber” were on their original box-office runs in 1994, thousands of Bay Area moviegoers have relied on one person to help plan their trips to the cinema.

First with SonomaMovies.com and then with NorthBayMovies.com, software engineer and tech consultant Bert Towle has meticulously listed every movie and showtime playing north of the Golden Gate Bridge. Until now.

After more than 28 years, Towle is retiring the free sites, which at its peak had a combined 100,000 page views a week and never lost it spartan charm: The simple, nearly graphics-free design was a throwback to the early days of the World Wide Web.

“Everybody was getting pretty lousy Internet service back then. So much of it was dial-up,” Towle laughed during a chat with The Chronicle days before the end of his tenure.

He never accepted advertising. As he says on the sites, “I’ve tried to keep it simple and productive.” And that he did.

Towle’s last day is Thursday, Jan. 26. To mark the occasion, Towle, a Chicago native who lives in Petaluma with his wife, Fran, agreed to a good-natured exit interview.

“I’m not a guy who has ever been particularly interested in publicity,” Towle said. “So it’s kind of striking, at the end of the website, that someone wants to talk about it with me.”

Q: We feel a responsibility because in a way, The Chronicle was a reason for you launching the websites in the first place, right?

A: No kidding! We moved up to Petaluma in ’93 and I discovered when I got here that I couldn’t turn to The Chronicle and find Sonoma County movie times. So I decided to do something about it.

I only did Sonoma County at first, then within six months I started getting requests from people who lived in Marin County (eventually the site would cover Napa, Lake and Mendocino counties as well). That’s how it turned into NorthBayMovies.com.

Q: You’re obviously a movie fan. How often do you go to the movies? Has that habit changed since the pandemic?

A: I used to go to movies a lot. They just came out with the Academy Award nominations and I haven’t seen any of them. Not one. I only went to the movies, I think, three times last year. I do more streaming, like so many other people are.

Q: What are some your movie memories growing up as a kid near Chicago?

A: I lived in a town that didn’t have a movie theater, so it was always a trip to go see a movie somewhere. Then when I got old enough to drive all of my friends and all of our dates and everybody else, we all liked to go to downtown Chicago so that we could be in the big theaters, on the scale of the Paramount in Oakland.

I like movie history. When I got married and we were on our honeymoon, I made a point of going to the parts of Switzerland where the James Bond car chase had been (filmed) in “Goldfinger.” So, yeah, I have pictures of the place where James Bond (Sean Connery) stood when he got shot at by (actress Tania Mallet).

Q: Do you have a favorite movie?

A: I tend to like more obscure stuff. Like “Blow-Up” (1966, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni). It was really interesting because it was all the pop culture stuff of the time, the London of the time, but it was a mystery and a puzzle and you didn’t really know what was happening. At the end you weren’t quite sure that it really did happen.

I also like action films from that era. I fell in love with San Francisco when I saw “Bullitt” in Chicago. In fact, when we first moved out here, we had so many visitors who came from the Midwest and other places who wanted to see San Francisco. I used to take them on a not-high-speed “Bullitt” tour of the city.

Q: What are you going to miss the most about about running your site?

A: I think the “thank you” notes have always been delightful to me. I didn’t do it for any reason other than to put the thing together as a service. So I’ll miss people who appreciate that more than anything else.

But really, Google and all of the major search engines now have movie times available and you can run through it pretty quickly by zip code. And most of the theaters have better quality websites than they used to.

Q: What was your web traffic like?

A: I was just looking at the stats this past week and it appears that my peak was about 2017 and I was doing about 100,000 page views a week. In 2019 it was down to about three-quarters of what the peak had been. And then, of course, in 2020 (the first year of the pandemic) it fell to less than 25% of what it had been, and it still hasn’t recovered. It’s now at about 40% of 2017 (about 40,000 page views a week).

That reflects the same issues that the theaters are having with attendance. Theaters are back about 40-45% of what they had been. So I feel bad for the people who are struggling with that, especially the little guys (independent theaters). I did my website so the little guys could get some publicity.

(SF Chronicle)

WITHOUT CHINESE LABOR, NAPA NEVER WOULD HAVE BECOME A WORLD-CLASS WINE REGION

by Han Li

When John McCormick randomly learned that Chinese immigrants helped significantly in building California’s early wineries, the fifth-generation Napa Valley native was deeply surprised and disturbed.

“It was just mind-blowing,” McCormick said. “These stories need to be told.”

After two years of research and writing, he published a book this month trying to sunshine the erased history, titled Chinese in Napa Valley: The Forgotten Community That Built Wine Country. This project is also the thesis for his master’s degree in history at Harvard University.

According to McCormick, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Chinese immigrant laborers were the region’s “backbone,” powering Wine Country’s infrastructure and early economic development, including general construction, farming, quicksilver mining, leather tanning and the like. 

Perhaps more importantly, they helped build the vineyards by plowing the soil, planting grapevines and even excavating the wine caves.

The book noted that the Chinese community flourished in the valley, with Chinese American-owned businesses, Chinese festival celebrations and at least three vibrant Chinatowns.

Then came anti-Chinese racism, culminating in the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.

“For telling this story and to understand how important it is, we also see the rise in anti-Asian hate during the pandemic,” McCormick said.

The immigrant laborers soon sparked anti-Chinese sentiment, not only from the local residents, but a broader federal-level discrimination against Chinese immigrants. Napa’s Chinese community was pushed away, local Chinatowns were razed and the legacy was buried.

On the dedication page of the book, McCormick also wrote that “You worked so hard, and we should have treated you much better.”

Sheli Smith, the executive director of the Napa County Historical Society, praised the book for helping to build a more holistic, nuanced history of Napa, especially for those often-forgotten stories.

McCormick’s work “enriches the tapestry of Napa Valley history,” Smith said, “and forever changes the heritage we celebrate.”

The historical society hosted a book talk featuring McCormick and Jack Jue Jr. a descendant of Napa Valley Chinese laborers on Thursday night. Napa city Mayor Scott Sedgley also presented certificates honoring Paul Gee, the first Chinese American vintner in Napa, and Jack Ding, a Chinese immigrant who’s now serving at Sonoma City Council.

McCormick hoped the book would raise awareness of Chinese laborers’ contribution and that the local schools will integrate this history into their curriculum.

Some of the history recovered by the book also hinted at a slice of the once-vivid Chinese lifestyle in Napa. In the chapter of “Chinese Holidays and Festivals,” McCormick wrote that there was the “Feast of Hungry Ghosts” tradition in local Chinatowns, a summer festival with firecrackers and lion dancing.

“It is a holiday to feed the lost souls that have no family to placate them,” he wrote.

(SFstandard.com)

BIDEN CLUELESSLY JOKED, “No firecrackers tonight!” While hosting a lunar new year event at the White House turned heads Thursday following two recent mass shootings of mostly Asian-American victims in California.

The president made the remark in a light-hearted tone after speaking about the murder of 11 people in Monterey Park, Calif., on Jan. 21, followed by the murder of seven people in Half Moon Bay, Calif., on Monday.

“It’s a time of renewal and reflection, hope and possibilities — for good over evil, for sharing meals, for celebrating firec — no firecrackers tonight!” Biden said, apparently improvising an edit to prepared teleprompter remarks.

“Fire — no, I’m serious. I was thinking about that, you know. If things hadn’t been like they’d been the past couple years, we should have fireworks outside.”

Biden, appearing to return to his script, said, “But you know, celebrating with firecrackers and dance — we got dance.”

(New York Post)

UKRAINE, THURSDAY, 26TH JANUARY

From Washington to Berlin to Kyiv, a Western decision to send battle tanks to Ukraine was hailed enthusiastically. Moscow first shrugged it off — and later launched another barrage of attacks.

The Kremlin has previously warned that such tank deliveries would be a dangerous escalation of the conflict in Ukraine, and it has strongly denounced the watershed move by Germany and the United States to send the heavy weaponry to its foe.

But it insists the new armor won’t stop Russia from achieving its goals in Ukraine.

“The potential it gives to the Ukrainian armed forces is clearly exaggerated,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “Those tanks will burn just like any others.”

Moscow played down the move right after the announcement in an apparent attempt to save face as the West raised the stakes in Ukraine. Some Russian experts also emphasized that the supply of the deadly armor will be relatively limited and could take months to reach the front.

— AP

JORGE LUIS BORGES: THE VISION OF AMBER 

Written by Manuel Vicent, Translated by Louis S. Bedrock 

Being blind and a poet is half way to Homer. If in addition, the blind poet is Argentinian, the path can't be very long. It isn't necessary to sail treacherous seas, nor follow chalky trails under a blue Argolid sun among pointy-eared goats. Anyone who calls himself Borges will find Homer on some corner of the Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, enjoying a cup of tea in a candy store. 

But it's not clear that Borges was really blind. Although his paternal grandmother died blind, his great grandfather died blind, and his father also wound up blind, it's possible that the blindness of the writer was merely the most famous of his metaphors. In any case, Borges confessed that his favorite color was amber-yellow, the only color that appeared on an imaginary horizon; the same color that shimmers above the infinite sands of the desert.

At a crossroads, Borges invoked chance, threw the amber dice onto the sand, and one of them offered him its seventh face. In it there were superimposed images of labyrinths, mirrors, tigers, and knives, all inescapable; an accumulation of metaphors: time as a river, life as fiction, death as a dream, and he himself as "the other". With this material, fate forced him to be Borges, a writer condemned to write fables without morals. 

Blake had said that nothing existed if it had not been imagined. 

His earliest memories were images of a saber that he used in the desert, of a cistern, of the old house, of the whistle of a night owl on the path. He was a sickly child dressed as a girl whom his mother never let out of her placenta. 

Ever since his father took the adolescent Borges to a brothel in Geneva to become a man for the first time, he experienced love as a hypothetical entity that was always frustrated: "I, who have been all men, have not been the one in whose embrace Mechthild Ulbach fainted." 

Although this woman was the heroine of a cheap novel, her name symbolizes the names of all the women that Borges, in love, could not win or only partially possessed. He realized, with some sadness, that he had spent his life thinking about one woman or another and they all led him to commit the greatest sin of all: He had not been happy. 

Aside from that, Borges sailed all the seas, crossed all the deserts, traveled through all the cities while stranded on a sofa in the lobby of countless hotels with his hands resting on his cane, and his watery corneas directed to an indeterminate point on the wall in front of him where all the maps were concentrated. 

At the summit of his creativity, Jorge Luis Borges had carved poems in ebony, had written books of sand, stories of infamy, fables that had rotted along with the paper that bore them; he had lost himself in the mist of the Norwegian sagas, had played the lottery of Babylon where the prize was always a stab in the back by a friend, or had gone down to the basement of the Library of Alexandria to share enigmas with the guardian. At that time, he was only read semi-clandestinely by a few initiates. 

Fame arrived for the writer at the threshold of old age and was only due to the toxic malice and paradoxes that came out of his mouth in sinister interviews with journalists from the culture section. 

At times, he masqueraded as a reactionary but he was merely a conservative—a moderate liberal, whose hatred of Perón, a man who had condemned him to be a poultry inspector instead of a librarian, led him to cheer the arrival of the Argentinian military. 

He believed that democracy was merely a statistic, although he boasted about having damned Hitler and Mussolini in their time while others were silent, and he ended up accepting a medal from Pinochet, an action that cost him the Nobel Prize. 

One starts off by saying a mean-spirited thing as a joke and ends up falling into a ravine. From that moment on, Borges became the writer who was not awarded the Nobel Prize. 

Perhaps he believed in God, perhaps not, because for Borges theology was a masterpiece of science fiction. Apart from that, although he boasted of having taken mescaline and cocaine in his youth, his persistent drug of choice was mint candy. His favorite dish was boiled hake. 

When his mother died, he began to travel when he was already blind, just to smell the countries. He smelled Machu Picchu, he got to know Japan in his mind, he allowed himself to explore the streets of Paris, Texas, New York, and offered in return only his steps and the tapping of his cane. 

In hotels, he allowed himself to be led by the elbow to the bathroom to give of himself, before returning to the sofa in the lobby to become the clairvoyant surrounded by yellow shadows before admirers and reporters. 

In every city, there was always a woman to act as a screen between him and objects. He would have preferred to devote himself to the pleasures of metaphysics or linguistics, but in the end he gave it all up for a feminine whisper in his ear that offered a certain promise—enough to feed his imagination. 

Borges lived gallant adventures through an interposed figure in the person of Bioy Casares, a devourer of women, the king of burlesque. With his friend, he shared dinner every night for thirty years with cultural gossip of high and low domain. Both men were nurtured by the great Victoria Ocampo, lord and mistress of the magazine Sur, where the fashionable intellectuals of Europe brought by her to Argentina at a high price were sheltered. 

At the age of 80, he was bored of being Borges and wished to learn the dark secret of the greatest mystery of men. But at the last moment a mild doubt would surface: Why should I die if I have never done it before? 

It was as if he had been told he were going to be a diver or a trainer of animals. Ultimately, he believed that his death was not permitted. He was not sure if God needed his immortality for His purposes. 

But Jorge Luis Borges would die. He did so knowingly on June 14, 1986 and is buried in the cemetery of notables of Plainpalais, in Geneva, the city where he had first experienced sexual pleasure with a woman in a brothel. The ultimate metaphor. 

He was afraid to continue being Borges. What does death matter if it has happened to an individual named Borges who lived in Buenos Aires in the twentieth century, so long ago? What does it matter if he were unhappy or happy if he has already been forgotten? 

We are all running towards anonymity. It's just that mediocre writers reach the finish line a little earlier, he had said.