CRAWDAD NELSON WRITES: “I understand how easy it is to want to do something violent to an unknown perpetrator; I also get how easy it is to decide who the perpetrator is by some sort of magical thinking and begin making invasion plans; I even understand the desire to sit in Virginia playing war with drones, while real people die somewhere else. Like anyone else, I feel empathy for the victims of the Boston bombing, and wish there was a satisfactory way to use that rather hopeless sense that we are all under attack by unknown but hostile forces to build trust and confidence around the world. Sadly for all of us, I anticipate nothing of the kind. At least, there is no precedent for it. But, until someone can show who committed the act, I'm withholding blame.”
AND EVEN BEFORE we knew who did it the electronic lynch mob had incorrectly identified several other dark-skinned young men as the likely perps, promiscuously throwing their names and photos into the cyber grinder. And when the guilty brothers were identified a national braying for revenge outside all the usual presumptions of innocence and related procedures began.
BIKED OVER TO HIPPIE HILL Sunday afternoon to watch the 4-20 festivities. From what I've only recently learned, April 20 at 4:20pm America's stoners all light up at once in mass celebration of the love drug. (See Steve Heilig's account on page one.) I expected something like a few hundred ancient flower children shaking their cadaverous booties with maybe lame-o Wavy Gravy gumming some peace and love platitudes, but what I found was, well, put it this way — the hippies of '67 look positively wholesome put alongside this crew. If it had been advertised as Thug Fest 2013 we would have had truth in advertising. Lots of gangstas and no hippies of the traditional tie-dyed doofi type, only acres of tough guys and women very unlike the ones who married dear old dad. The entire area between Hippie Hill and the Children's Playground was wall-to-wall criminal intent. A cloud of pot and grill smoke hung over the park. No cops anywhere. Every other person seemed to have an apparatus that boomed out the mayhem recommendations of rap. “You lost, Pops?” a kid asked me, and it belatedly occurred to me that in my khakis and button down blue shirt I was definitely odd man out. The scene was, for sure, more than mildly disconcerting, and when I saw a large white guy, maybe 40, shirtless, obviously a veteran of many hours on a prison weight pile, his skin festooned with jail tats and a big White Pride announcement, when I saw this guy wade into the multi-ethnic gang-banging mopes with a maniacal grin on his face, I knew bad things were about to happen in Golden Gate Park, our sylvan retreat, our urban respite of forest and meadow, our natural solace amidst the din and clamor of city life, and I made my way to my bike and pedaled home. Two days later, the Chron's comment line was mostly a lot of huffing and puffing about “hippies” having left The City with a huge clean-up bill for a trashed park, and just like the hypocrites to talk about how much they love Mother Earth then leave tons of trash in the trampled park. But this thing was not a hippie event, and Marx himself never could have foreseen how many and how fearsome the lumpen have become.
ACCORDING TO the District Attorney’s statistics, 21 people have been sentenced to serve their prison time in the local jail under “realignment” some for multiple offenses. The 21 include people convicted are for grand theft, “possession of a destructive device in a certain place,” possession of a controlled substance in jail, possession of marijuana for sale, possession of methamphetamine for sale, carrying a loaded firearm in public, fraudulent use of prescription to obtain prescription drugs, possession of cocaine/heroin, vehicle theft, receiving stolen property, elder abuse, parole violation, and multiple DUIs. To our untrained eye, the number is pretty low. So far.
THE MARIJUANA LAWS, proposed and actual, change so often it's hard to keep up. But a useful bill introduced last week by Congressman Rohrabacher, R-Orange County, is aimed at resolving the conflict between the fed's total ban and state laws that permit medical or recreational use. (Recreational drug use, as Troll Brandon has memorably pointed out, “Is smoking a joint while water skiing.”)
ROHRABACHER'S initiative has three Republicans and three Democrats as sponsors. It would require that the feds respect state pot laws.
THE BILL would also amend the Controlled Substances Act to exempt from federal prosecution businesses and individuals, including marijuana dispensaries, so long as they comply with state law.
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT reported last week that an unidentified Healdsburg woman thought she might have seen a mountain lion, the story confirming long held suspicions that there is no longer intelligent life at the Rose City Daily.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY having to do with the inability of millions of people to function without their cell phones: “On the psych ward where I work, we confiscate and lock up the cell phones of all our patients (because some in the past have used them to take pics of other patients, and put them on FaceSchnook pages, which is a repulsive violation of those other patients' rights to not have the whole world informed they have mental problems.) When we do that, the cell phone-owning patients are utterly at a loss to get in touch with anyone, because they can't remember a single phone number. (Our ward has a phone we let patients use for free, unless they're calling 9-1-1 repeatedly to claim they're being held captive against their will. You would not believe how much 9-1-1 operators' time is wasted on crackpot calls.) We nurses will generally let patients grab their phones, write the vital numbers down on paper — what a concept, eh? — and use our ward phone to call. But the lack of non-technology-dependent information retrieval is just one of the many ways that the techno generation's life will collapse when the infosystems go down. They are completely at the mercy of their gadgets, and they don't even know it.”
IT WAS EXACTLY ten on a recent Wednesday morning. I was on the south side of California Street waiting to board the 44, which would carry me across the park to the N Judah line. The N stops directly in front of that day's destination, the ballpark. I heard a man yelling just as I saw him nearly collide with two little Chinese kids, a girl about ten who was holding the hand of a small boy of 6 or 7, her brother presumably. The screaming tableau was playing out in front of the liquor store at 6th and California. For an awful instant I thought the man was attacking them. “How do you like it?” he screamed at nobody in particular, as the little girl and her tiny brother swerved around him without so much as an upward glance at the ultimate boogeyman who'd loomed up before them. The two of them simply walked purposefully on as if the crazy man was simply one more sidewalk obstruction. The crazy man was still screaming “How do you like it?” when he suddenly charged across California at us, a half-dozen senior citizens, Asian except for me and one tiny old lady, a very old old lady, bent nearly in half from ancient scoliosis. I'd noticed that the crazy guy had looked both ways before he'd made his shrieking plunge across California, so he wasn't quite as unhinged as he seemed to be. When the publicly insane are all the way gone, they run straight into the traffic without a look. We've all seen that. On his first run at us the crazy guy pointed an accusing finger and screamed “How do you like it?” And then, looking both ways, he ran back across California where, hopping up and down, he continued to scream, “How do you like it?” before he ran at us again. I angled my unintimidating bulk so he would have to get past me if he was psyching himself up for real mayhem. As the largest person present by a hundred pounds, I was the default go-to guy. Of course all I wanted to do was make it to the ball game without pausing to grapple with a street psycho, but these days merely stepping out one's front door can be like prehistoric man emerging from the safety of his cave. The crazy guy was dragging a blanket, his shirt was ripped, his gray trousers, which looked like they been suit pants in better times, were stained and dirty, his dress shoes untied. Assessing the guy, I'd say he was 35, maybe 6'2". He had good teeth and generally appeared, through his grimy dishevelment, like someone had put a lot of time and money into raising this suburban Josh or Jason only to see all their hopes disintegrate into this screaming wreck. “Relax,” I said, “we don't like it either.” He stared at me, apparently considering my idiot conciliation. The bus rolled up, and the crazy guy ran back across the street, dragging his blanket. He resumed screaming. “Better call the cops,” I said to the old lady, who peered up at me from her bent back. “I already did,” she said. We've gotten used to the streets as open air psych wards, grown hardened to the public fact that people can suffer like this without even the possibility of safe remedy.
AFTER BALL GAMES, the N Judah is jammed but quickly unjams at the Embarcadero stop as all the East Bay people get off to catch BART back across the Bay. That day, after the N had unjammed, a black street guy was spread across two seats, him in layers of clothes and an overstuffed garbage bag next to him. A Chinese woman of about 50 gets on at Powell. She points at the guy taking up two seats. “I sit there, preeze?” He looked back at her, smiling like he didn't understand. Two black guys sitting opposite glared at the guy. The Chinese woman again said, “I sit there, preeze?” The street guy smiled at her. I rationalized not intervening because I was standing six or so feet away and anyway this seemed a matter for intra-ethnic resolution. Sure enough. One of the black guys sitting opposite the street guy suddenly told the bum, “Man, move your shit and let this lady sit down.” The bum immediately moved his stuff onto his lap, the lady sat down, and we all rode on in peace, the bum getting off at VanNess.
THE LAST LITTLE DRAMA of the day occurred as I and another older man boarded the 44 at 9th and Irving for the trip back across the park. A tweeker dude pushed past us and sprayed us with several — oh well, never mind what he said. When's the last time you were creatively insulted by a stranger?
ALEXANDER COCKBURN responds to a 911 crackpot on C-SPAN: “I called you all nuts before, so I apologize to all you non-nuts out there. I now call you conspiracists. You are always very mad at me for calling you nuts. I got a thousand e-mails and letters, all of them more or less identical expressing anger and outrage and calling me various rude names. I don't see the argument about President Bush being whisked out of the classroom meaning very much. I actually thought it was to his credit that he didn't want to upset the children. This clip is always presented with the impression that he seems to be a moron or he shows a delay in moral reaction or whatever. My fundamental premise about 9/11, and you asked me one little question, I know there are 9,000 little questions that each person who believes in the 9/11 conspiracy or insider job stuff believes in. I just don't buy it. I think that the evidence we marshal through Manual Garcia on Counterpunch and others discredits the theory. But I don't want to get into that because we could spend the rest of C-SPAN's time and a thousand times more wrestling to and fro over the points in all these various arguments. My fundamental view is that 9/11 people tend to believe in the perfect plan. And you [the caller] seem to be implying that indeed there was a perfect bill of theater that was laid out carefully for purposes that I cannot quite fathom, in the same way that everything else worked exactly perfectly with clockwork precision. First of all, is it likely that Dick Cheney and George Bush sat down one day and said, We want to organize a pretext for a war on terror. A great idea! Let's have these people fly into the towers? And the subset of this is that they were done by remote control. And there are sub-subsets that it wasn't a plane that hit the Pentagon, even though many people saw the plane, it was a rocket because there is one picture which shows a hole. I can guarantee you that every conspiracist in the country now is kicking the television screen as I speak. But it seems to me that the idea that they would do this, this mad course, knowing that it would have shot off a rapid impeachment and the Republican Party would cease to exist… The conspiracy— when you add up the number of people that have to be involved is supposed to involve 10,000 people? 15,000 people? None of whom have been on their deathbed saying, I have something on my mind. I would like to say that I was part of the 9/11 conspiracy and I planted a demolition charge on the 85th floor of the World Trade Center. None of that has ever happened. You are meant to presuppose that the military — Mr. Griffin is the high priest of all of this nonsense (David Ray Griffin), he is billed as a theologian as if that is any particular credential for talking about 9/11; he says that between the time the plane disappeared from the FAA radar to the time that it hit the tower which was 8:44 I think, 8:11 to 8:44 or 8:06, I can't remember exactly… In that time everything should have worked — unless there was a plot by clockwork precision, that suddenly the FAA would have immediately got onto NORAD, NORAD would have gotten to the base commanders, and a guy would not have been in Target trying to buy his wife some dog food, a new kind of dog food, and they would've rushed back and gotten into the plane, and shot up into the air, located the flight, whichever flight it was, and shot it down over Union City, New Jersey. I mean, give me a break! Any history of any event of this nature shows multiple foul-ups, multiple multiple foul-ups. Including the pilot who would ask, You want me to shoot down that plane right over the Hudson River? What are we talking about? The whole probability from the reason for doing it, to the mode of execution, to the analysis of data, to the reason for the collapse of the buildings — seems to me to nullify the conspiracy theory. I don't believe it. I think the evidence is against it. I think some of the people who are pushing it are indeed nutty. Other people are well-meaning but are misled by evidence, other people at some point cannot listen to any other point of view. We have published all these endless scientific inspections and when I offer them to people, or when Manuel Garcia does, or Jeffrey St. Clair does, I don't think they ever read it. They are already convinced. There is a strain in America that needs a plot, that three grand masons somehow… that needs — And the other thing is rather racist. They say, Arabs could not have done it. They say, Can this have been done by Arabs living in caves? That is saying that the only people who could do it are we — we must have done it to ourselves, that no one else is capable of doing it. That seems to me a rather racist conclusion.”
BUILDING 7. I, too, finally understand. How could I have been so blind? Of course! I see it all now. A bunch of government people, supervised late at night by Bush and Cheney, over a period of months, planted explosives in Building 7 without anyone noticing and, finally, as part of the 911 plot also masterminded by Bush and Cheney, took that sucker down. Funny that none of those many bomb-planting people have come forward to tell us about it, but of course they were well paid to keep quiet, and if they didn’t keep their mouths shut, Obama, who’s also in on it as a government guy and 33-degree Mason and Club of Rome inductee, would have them killed. Or exiled to the Mendocino List Serve.
AND SO ON into an implausibility so vast only a person desperate to believe that the American government is so evil it’s now, as a matter of policy, murdering its own citizens. I don’t get it. Isn’t plain old multi-war imperialism bad enough? You need complicated internal plots to convince yourself that our ruling circles have taken us in unhealthy directions?
ALEX JONES and the rest of them, several million apparently, are simply more evidence that the internet is very bad for the credulous, and that our educational system has truly collapsed.
PERV SWEEP: On April 15th and 16th, the Mendocino County Sexual Assault Felony Enforcement (SAFE) Task Force, (comprised of law enforcement officers from the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office, Ukiah Police Department, Mendocino County Probation Department, California State Parole, and Napa County Sheriff's Department), conducted a two day operation focused on sex registrant compliance checks throughout Ukiah, Willits and the surrounding unincorporated areas of Mendocino County. The sweep conducted by SAFE was carried out as part of an intermittent series of operations to enforce registration, residential and parole requirements of registered sex offenders in the county of Mendocino. The operation verified 87 registered sex offender addresses and found four were out of compliance with their registration requirements. Of the 87 registrants, six are transients and one is a “Sexually Violent Predator.” There are 45 registered sex offenders within the city limits of Ukiah and 15 within the Willits city limits. There are a total of 297 registered sex offenders in Mendocino County.
THE PERV ANNOUNCEMENT goes on to say that the Megan's Law website “allows citizens to search for registered sex offenders by geographic location and by name.” However, in our limited experience with that site it includes people who are not pervs in the sense that most of us think of pervs. Most of us want sexual predators suppressed, but lots of people on Megan's List have been convicted of non-predatory sexual crimes that shouldn't even be considered crimes. We know a guy who's been on the list for years for sleeping with his 16-year-old girl friend when he was 20. That got him a statutory rape conviction at the insistence of the girl's parents. Then there are your weenie waggers, the screwballs who get a big charge out of exposing themselves to passersby. They often appear on Megan's List. It's not as if these types of registered sex offenders present the same menace as rapists and playground lurks.
SAN FRANCISCO'S Department of Public Health has restored “Healthy Penis” to its arsenal of clap-fighting strategies. The six-foot penis costumes are donned by health department staff when they sally forth to public events to encourage gay men to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases.
(MUST LOOK kinda funny on a resume — “2009 to 2013 I dressed up as a penis for the City of San Francisco.”)
FRISCO'S Health Department says HIV is declining, but gonorrhea, syphilis and chlamydia are on the rise because “many men choose to have sex with people of the same HIV status as themselves to forgo using condoms. It means they’re not protecting themselves against a host of other STDs.”
MARTIN REIGN KATZ, 24, lately of Willits where he was among the tree sitters protesting the Willits Bypass, has pleaded guilty to a single felony count of “threatening or forcibly resisting four California Highway Patrol officers.” Katz was released from custody last Wednesday on his own recognizance but with a strict felony condition of interim probation. He's due back in court at the end of May for sentencing.
MENDO DA EYSTER said he'd folded three misdemeanors into the single felony allegation against the tree sitter. Katz had been in custody since April 2nd when he was pulled from his perch by three CHP officers. At some point in that struggle, Katz dumped a bag of feces on one or more of the officers trying to extract him from his pine-top nest. A fourth officer fired several “bean bag” rounds at Katz to help subdue him. “This sends a message to Mr. Katz,” DA Eyster said Wednesday, “and to other people who claim to be non-violent protesters. Mr. Katz crossed a very bright line.”
NO CHARGES have been filed against any of the several other persons arrested during the Bypass protests. Katz's bail had been set at $60,000 until Eyster, apparently after getting the OK from the CHP officers who'd grappled with Katz in his pine tree aerie, that the partial disposition of the Katz matter was acceptable to them. The felony probation release for Katz was approved by Judge Ann Moorman and Katz was freed by Moorman last Wednesday pending a probation report and a formal sentencing on May 29th. Until his sentencing, Katz is prohibited from appearing within a hundred yards of Bypass construction.
GENEVIEVE KATHRYN ALEXANDER, 30, of Fort Bragg, has been missing since 3:30pm, April 4, when she walked away from her residence at Pomo RV and Campground, located south of Fort Bragg. Following tips, deputies, the Coast Guard and a Search and Rescue team have searched the bluffs, beaches and ocean in the area of Sunset Way, Belinda Point, Schoefer Lane and Pacific Way, to no avail. “During the search it was learned that a resident who lived adjacent to the Mendocino Coast Botanical Gardens (18220 N. Highway 1) had contacted a person trespassing on their property on April 4 at 4pm,” a Sheriff's report said, noting the trespasser matched Alexander's description. A Sheriff's Search and Rescue bloodhound followed a scent down a trail to the water near the Botanical Gardens.
“While conducting a search of the beach, a pair of pants was found floating in the ocean a short distance out,” the report said. “When the pants were recovered, they were identified as being the pants Alexander was wearing at the time of her disappearance.” She was also wearing a maroon fleece jacket.
Alexander is 5'6” tall, 115 lbs., with brown hair, blue eyes. Anyone with any information relating to Alexander's disappearance or whereabouts is urged to call the Fort Bragg Sheriff's Office at (707) 961-2421, the Sheriff's dispatch center, (707) 463-4086, or 911. More information can be found on Facebook at Genevieve Alexander Missing, or at www.GenevieveMissing.org.
ANOTHER CRACKPOT mentions that we’re the newspaper recommending military service to young people. That’s right, and here’s why for the umpty tumpty-teenth time: Let’s assume you’re not a person of relative privilege, that you’re not a person with options, that you're not a person blessed with an ambitious set of parents who’ve saved up, or can simply afford to send you to college and on into a comfortable life much like the one they've enjoyed. You're not, in other words, Mendolib. You’re more like the average American high school graduate, bound by birth to the world of hard work, if you can find it, at wages no longer sufficient to get a lot of stuff you've been brainwashed into thinking you need to be happy. You’ve attended Boonville High School for four years, emerging after all those hours of seat time with zero skills. You can't read very well, can't write at all, can't do the simplest math without electronic assistance. You’re already half-crippled from getting stoned a lot, and you’ve picked up a lot of bad habits generally. You're even physically weak for your age because you sit around playing video games and watching television. You’re undisciplined and you can’t do anything that will make you employable because there are no longer any jobs for the unskilled. But you’re only 18. The Army? The Navy? The Air Force? (Don't join the Marines unless you really, really think you can handle it.) But why not the other three branches? “Because,” you say, “at Boonville High School they told us that America does all these bad things around the world and if we join we’re helping the Evil Empire. And we can get killed.” America is an empire and America does do bad things around the world to keep that empire. So? We're talking about you, not the Big Picture. You are just as likely to get killed staying home, driving drunk some night and piling into a redwood. Even if the Army happens to send you some place where you get shot at, you probably won’t get killed. Or even hurt. The odds are against it. You join the military because you’re looking out for yourself, and the Army is a situation where you can get some experience, learn a few things, save a little money, get yourself fit, get yourself together for the rest of your life. You’ll be making a pretty good wage while you’re learning to get up in the morning and do something, and when you get out in four years you can go to college free or get yourself free training to learn a trade. The alternative is hanging around Mendo, maybe catching on with the dope trade, rotating in and out of the County Jail, and doing nothing but wasting away. A kid with no prospects can do a lot worse than the military.
COMMENT OF THE DAY from Dave Lindorff: “The real terrorists in our midst are not men with knapsacks and white baseball caps who plant homemade bombs. They are not swarthy terrorists from the Middle East. Rather, they are the mostly white men (and women) in business suits on Wall Street and Main Street who callously use their wealth to subvert the political system to their short-term advantage, causing common-sense safety and health precautions to be ignored, or getting those laws watered down or outright cancelled. Of course, a classic terrorist is trying to kill while the corporate executive is often “just” putting concerns about profits ahead of concerns about the safety of workers and people who live nearby, but in the final analysis, the victim of a terrorist’s bomb. The difference is that we won’t see the FBI or the local police tracking down and arresting the killers and maimers in the case of a fertilizer plant explosion. The people responsible for that type of outrage typically just collect their insurance payments (maybe paying some token fine), rebuild, and go on making their dangerous product as before — usually in the same location.”
THE HIGHWAY PATROL seeks witnesses to an apparent hit and run that occurred late Friday night on North State Street near Ukiah that left Jesse Ray Pieri, 26, of Ukiah unconscious in the middle of the frontage road off Highway 101 with serious head injuries and a broken leg. The incident occurred about 11:50pm. Mr. Pieri was found lying in the middle of the 5000 block of North State Street south of Agnes Lane, about five miles north of downtown Ukiah. Pieri was flown by medical helicopter to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital where, as of Saturday, he was listed in critical condition. Anyone with information about the incident or the hit and run vehicle/driver is urged to call the California Highway Patrol at 467-4000.
THE GOLDEN SHORE, by David Helvarg is subtitled “California's Love Affair with the Sea.” This is an informal and informative history of the state examined from its shoreline development. If a large slice of Mendo residents think the Willits Bypass is a bad idea, Helvarg reminds us that CalTrans had “megaplans for the shoreline region” which “included a series of four-line freeways or ‘laterals,’ that were supposed to connect 101 to an expanded four-lane Route 1 on the coast and facilitate its development. Water would be piped in from dams on the Mattole, Eel, Trinity, Klamath, and Smith rivers of Northern California, and cheap abundant power provided by a ‘super system’ of dozens of coastal nuclear power plants according to PG&E company projections.”
THE LUNATICS of CalTrans and PG&E thought four-lane freeways connected to a four-lane Highway One was a swell idea as late as 1962. Helvarg's book is chock-a-block with fascinating historical reminders like this one.
MAJOR PROSE PROBS with the first installment of this year's grand jury report, as in, “This lack of transparency indicates to the GJ, reluctance by some or all county administrative management to elevate and legitimize workplace sustainability into an actionable priority.”
THE GJ IS TALKING about Human Resources, formerly known as Personnel. You know, the people who do the hiring for the County, which can be mysterious indeed, especially at the higher pay levels of local government.
BUT THIS THING rumbles on in endless management clichés that don't say anything at all:
“Recommendations:
R1. The CEO and BOS allocate budget and staff to design and implement recruiting and training/staff development functions within the HR department. Summaries of progress should be reported to the BOS in the CEO’s report.
R2. The CEO and BOS create a line item in the budget and fund the initiation of the leadership development and succession planning program.
R3. The CEO and BOS officially request in next year’s budget instructions that training budgets across the County be zero based and non- fungible.
R4. The CEO issue a letter of instruction to the new HR department head to initiate a feasibility study on streamlining the two recruiting systems into a single compliant system.”
PATHETIC. If their other reports on other departments are written like this the affected departments will ignore the whole works. Which is what they do anyway most years because the judges who appoint the grand jury don't put any muscle into these things in the way of next-step subpoenas and indictments, neither of which have ever occurred in Mendocino County, at least in the modern period. It took three successive grand juries fully documenting the sad fact that supervisors Smith and Colfax were stealing, but nothing was done until Eyster finally told Smith (Colfax had already retired) she'd be prosecuted if she didn't pay the money back.
RECOMMENDED READING: “The Inventor and the Tycoon” by Edward Ball, “a gilded age murder and the birth of moving pictures.” Some of you may recognize Mr. Ball, a Southerner, as the author of the fascinating “Slaves in the Family,” an account of his slave-holding ancestors and his present-day black relatives, relatives who understandably were often less than welcoming when Ball came looking for them. In “The Inventor and the Tycoon,” Ball describes the unique career trajectories and subsequent friendship of Leland Stanford and Eadweard Muybridge, as improbable a friendship as one could imagine. It was pegged to Stanford's odd obsession that wondered if all four hooves of a galloping horse left the ground at the same time. Stanford recruited Muybridge to find out. Muybridge invented moving pictures, but most of us know him from his photographs of early San Francisco. What many of us didn't know, me anyway, is that Muybridge murdered a man, his wife's lover. She was much younger than Mr. M, who was an ascetic and all-round eccentric, and not much fun at all for a young woman with roundheel tendencies. But he was a prosperous eccentric and money, then and now, is known for its cosmetic miracles. When Muybridge learned that his wife enjoyed a relationship with a much more age-appropriate man, a relationship which produced a male child, Muybridge tracked the young man to the hills above Napa and shot him to death. That event and its ensuing trial are alone worth the price of admission. The book is also quite interesting as a portrait of Northern California in the years between 1860 and the Great Earthquake of 1906.
THE GREAT MENDOCINO COUNTY distance runner, Jim Gibbons, didn't know of any Mendo runners in this year's catastrophic Boston Marathon, but he does remember the most famous one before the terrible events of Monday: “Yes, I ran it back in 1980, the year Rosie Ruiz jumped in around the 25 mile mark and “finished” in 2:30-something...when I finished (2:52) she was up on a platform next to the male winner, Bill Rodgers, both with the traditional olive wreath on their heads, while other runners were saying, “Who the hell is Rosie Ruiz?” No one had heard of her, and as one runner said to me, “She's got cellulite on her thighs, there's no way she ran all 26.2 miles!” A reporter asked her if she did intervals and she replied, “What are intervals?” A Canadian named Jackie Gareau was the real female winner. I wrote about it years ago and would have to look into my files for more info, but up until this year's horrific bombing, 1980 was the Boston runners always remember.”
IT'S NOT TOO LATE TO REGISTER!
C.V. STARR's ART CLASS “Starr's Open Art Studio” (SPRING, Part 2) will be taking new Registrations today [Sunday] from noon until closing, Monday all day, and Tuesday April 23, which is our first day of class, until closing! You will be working with beginners along with veterans, and the instructor studied with David Hockney, Fairfield Porter, and Nathan Oliveira. We meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 1:30PM to 3:30pm, Class begins this Tuesday, April 23 through Thursday, May 30. Ages 18 and up - but will consider younger students who are ready. Tuition $50.00 [just $4.17 per class!] Instructor: Linn Bottorf, BFA, MFA Our class is a fun visual exploration into your individual skills and artistic expression. Each student will receive individual help and lively discussion; we also share new ideas with each other along with Linn. You will receive instructions on use of your materials and mediums as well as gaining insight to your evolving process of discovery and statement in your own work! Linn taught art classes at College of the Redwoods here from 1985 until 1996, and in various schools both in the USA and Canada. He was Exhibits Chairman at Fort Bragg Center for the Arts from 1991 to1996. Please bring your materials with which to work on the first day of class. We do have a small supply of paper and drawing tools - and a few acrylic and watercolor paints. Please bring your own newspapers to put on tables! Thank you! For more info please call Linn [i.n.a. pls lv message] or send email: linn@mcn.org
THURSDAY NIGHT. Despite vows from the White House, Homeland Security and the Bruins back-up goalie that the United States will not be held hostage by terrorism, all of Boston is on lock down as the manhunt continues for either a 19-year-old Chechen from Kyrgyzstan or a 20-something Brown University student. Invading the very heart of Red Sox Nation are ten thousand police, National Guards snipers, jungle warfare commandos, ATF mortar units, Weather Channel Apache gunships, and CNN’s shadowy Threat Intelligence Torpedo Squad and Asymmetrical Adventure Scrum (i.e., TITS-N-ASS, but known to Foggy Bottom insiders as Wolf Blitzer’s Breathless Bouncy Babe Brigade).
IN THIS ELECTRONIC AGE of instant access to propaganda and disinformation, an app called TUNE-IN lets anyone anywhere in the world to listen in as Boston emergency service crews try to apprehend the perpetrator(s). A policeman on his walkie-talkie identifies two suspects, one a Brown University student of Hindu descent who’s been missing since March, and another chap with a name that can only be described as Not American, and therefore suspicious and likely guilty. Around midnight Pacific time my iPhone crackles with constant police activity: 20 square Watertown blocks have been cordoned off, but the suspect has shot another armed responder, this one from the Massachusetts Transit Authority. It’s puzzling that an officer who protects trains, subways and freeways is still involved after an MIT policeman and the first suspect were killed earlier in the evening. Next comes this alarming voice: “Can you please have the SWAT team identify itself?” Uh, we have thousands of justifiably nervous policemen and troops searching for this lunatic, and they can’t tell each apart?
AT THIS CRITICAL JUNCTURE my iPhone app goes dead, and it occurs to me that if I can listen to what the cops are saying, perhaps the police have realized that the bombers can too. It’s been 12 years since 9/11 and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, and still there are no clear protocols on situations like this? Shouldn’t our most advanced search and destroy units have secret radio channels that prevent the entire world from eavesdropping on tactics and progress? (One imagines a cadre of big-hatted North Korean generals tip-toeing up to their Illustrious Leader with the heroic news: the $25 million tech spy project called Operation Yankee Panky has been a success. They download the scanner app from the Apple Store, and Kim Jong Un smiles as his new MacBook Air stutters out a conversation between two Somerville firemen: the Supreme Warrior from Ancestor Mountain is happy, and asks how the $50 million project called the People’s Republic of YouTube is progressing. And a bold general replies, “By next week you will be able to watch all of Justin Timberlake’s music videos.” The Great Illustrious Supreme Leader, who is nothing if not Wise, Great and Illustrious, reveals his cunning by asking: “And anytime I want?” “Yes, Great Leader. At a click of the mouse, you will have access to Timberlake, the week’s best hockey fights, and Mrs. Obama baking white chocolate brownies with Tony Blair.”)
MEANWHILE, back at SF Command Central, cunning guerrillas have severed the TUNE-IN uplink. But a childhood spent watching Petticoat Junction and Hogan’s Heroes has prepared me from such devious tactics, and I switch to Ustream, another free service that broadcasts Boston military scanners in real time. The police inform the dispatcher (and millions around the world) that they have secured the perimeter, and will wait for daylight to search door to door. I finally nod off, comfortable in the knowledge that the Brown student and his suspiciously named co-villain have been stopped.
BUT WITH THE DAWN comes a new development: not only does the suspect remain at large, he is also not the East Indian student from Brown. Rather it is a Chechen immigrant who even attended his high school prom. As is the case, those who know the new suspect said he was a quiet and polite person who loved soccer, pot and rap music. Hello, Janet Napolitano! Shouldn’t those traits have raised a red flag in your new Monsanto-Google Freedom for Liberty SuperComputer Database? What’s that? You need more drones? More security checkpoints? A program to watch Justin Timberlake videos from 2001? Well, it’s your lucky day…
NEW TERMS learned from Boston police scanner chat:
• “Proned out” — e.g., “The Boston PD has a man 'proned out' at 40 Dexter Street.”
• “Dead Switch” (aka, “Dead Man’s Switch”) — a bomb that automatically detonates when the human operator becomes incapacitated, such as through death or loss of consciousness.
As in, the only thing keeping the explosive from going off is the bomber’s finger pressing down the switch. When the bomber is shot, killed or tickled, his finger relaxes and boom! • “Shelter in Place” — An order to civilians to stay put, don’t move, lock your doors, don’t even think about ordering Domino’s (unless you’re really, really stoned and out of nutella and crackers).
OVERHEARD in the city on April 20th, National Stoner Day: “What the f*ck do you care if it's 4/20? You're gonna do the same shit you do everyday!”
AND FROM A FRIEND who survived two harrowing months at Pizza Hut: “Say a special prayer for all the fast food delivery people today. I’ve been there, man. And 4/20 is a f*cking war zone.” (Z)
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