Off the Record (May 23, 2024)

THE COUNTY MUSEUM is located in Willits where artifacts of our unreal history are stored and displayed, including that tribute not all that long ago to hippies with no mention of Flower Child-ism’s downside

HIPPIES, broadly considered, were a net negative. Fortunately, they’re extinct, except for certain areas of Albion, Beth Bosk’s imagination, and deep, deep Spy Rock. But their unfortunate legacy lingers, however, more or less benignly in the county’s public institutions, much less benignly in the national drug culture.

IN THEIR FULL MOON BOOGIE days, hippies created a suicidal tolerance for aberrant behavior that did a lot of human damage. Of course if you think crank is a socially useful mood elevator, and that Jim Jones, Charles Manson, Tree Frog Johnson, Kenneth Parnell, and Leonard Lake were guilty of nothing more than doing their own thing, well, you probably also think the hippies were (and are) politically progressive and Democrats are the way forward.

‘GENOCIDE AND VENDETTA,’ the book. Without it there would be no true history of early Mendocino County. xerox copies of the book have been in circulation for years, but the book itself, when you can find it, goes for at least five hundred bucks. The problem is that the University of Oklahoma only published one edition of about 3,000 copies before the authors were sued. The suit? A Covelo man sued over unauthorized use of a diary compiled by, I believe, his grandfather. The suit prevented subsequent editions of a fascinating account of what the county was like, circa 1850. Let’s say it wasn’t a happy place for Native Americans and leave it at that.

THE HELD-POAGE LIBRARY in Ukiah has a wonderful archive of local history, including some riveting genealogies. However, much of the county’s, ahem, more sensitive episodes and interludes are found only in old court records deep in the bowels of the County Courthouse.

MIKE GENIELLA:

On behalf of local news media, I have taken the liberty of formally filing a Public Records Act request with Sage Sangiacomo and Shannon Riley today after being informed they had no intention of voluntarily providing a copy.

“I ask again what government code provision you are using to delay the release of this document. What benefit is it to the City of Ukiah to choose this course of action regarding a high-profile subject of community interest? You repeatedly claim it is a private property matter, but when you issued the public safety order last November, it became a significant public issue. Please respond accordingly.”

A READER WRITES:

Darcie Antle began her Mendocino work life as a receptionist. Then Adventist Health financial person. Wine bar owner. She lacks the qualifications to be CEO, and she is abusing her position by hiring toadies and friends, surrounding herself with sycophants, and getting rid of anyone who questions her. For example, her buddy Angle Slater was hired as Extra Help during COVID. Slater is a nurse, but had zero experience in government or Public Health, yet she suddenly turns up in a position of authority in Public Health. Slater admitted to everyone that she had no prior experience, yet she reports directly to the CEO which is very unusual. Why? Darcie is protecting her, despite several examples of Angle’s behavior that would have gotten any other employee marched out the door. Promoting her buddy Madeline Cline at work. Asking employees to sign a “loyality oath” so Jenine Miller could get a promotion and a raise. Employees are afraid to speak out, because they fear retaliation and need the job.

LAST TIME I CHECKED, Ukiah City Manager Sage Sangiacomo was raking in $246,000 in salary and benefits. He also has Shannon Riley as an assistant at something like $160,000. Sangiacomo sends Riley out on those rare occasions when someone from the pesky public asks a question. This management team's work product? A small town of 16,000 people that looks like a back street in a semi-abandoned industrial area of L.A.

WILLITS, FORT BRAGG, tiny Point Arena, Mendocino County's other incorporated towns, have their probs, but they are well-managed with effective councils and city managers, all of whom regularly discuss the state of their towns and how to improve their civic functioning.

NOT UKIAH. Its management takes more public money relative to its size while the town's public areas look like open air drug and alcohol festivals, and what other town could screw-up an offer from a person with the means and the ability to re-birth the Palace Hotel as a civic jewel? And continue to screw up the Palace while keeping the present status of the property hidden from the public?

UKIAH'S OTHER ARCHITECTURAL TRIUMPH is its silent approval of a new County Courthouse three long blocks east of the present County Courthouse.

THIS LURKING FIASCO has its origins in the mysterious acquisition of the railroad property near the foot of West Perkins by the Democratic Party of the Northcoast, former congressman Doug Bosco proprietor. It pains me to say it because I liked the guy, the late Dave Nelson was the point man for the Ukiah end of this murkey deal, with an assist from local pol, John McCowen.

THE NEW COUNTY COURTHOUSE is designed to house only the judges and their gofers, the whole slo-mo fiasco unchallenged by Ukiah, although it will deal yet another blow to what's left of downtown Ukiah.

THERE IS no planning for the County Courthouse transition, no planning for the present County Courthouse when it's mostly abandoned except, har de har, for the DA's office, a nest of Magas, while the judges' new courthouse rises adjacent to Perkins and 101, already a hellish, unplanned nexus of service stations and fast food emporiums.

MIKE GENIELLA has had to file a freedom of information act request to find out what is happening with the Palace Hotel, an ongoing fiasco Sangiacomo has presided over his entire tenure in office — we won't mention the millions paid out to citizens abused by the Ukiah Police Department — all the while Sangiacomo is smiled upon and given regular raises by a series of city councils staffed by irresponsible people, one of whom has been elevated to the board of supervisors where she has contributed mightily to screwing up the entire county.

SANGIACOMO should be sent down the road. He's probably a millionaire off the saps of Ukiah who don't demand that the government they pay mightily for can't make their town presentable, and safe from the ever increasing number of free-range psychotics upon whom the county's non-profit gentry feeds on, which isn't exactly the City of Ukiah's fault but one would think Sangiacomo and his captive city council might at least occasionally ask, "What the hell?"

A READER WRITES: Current cyber AVA has the only sane, rational, accurate, historically relevant analysis of the Israeli/Palestinian tragedy that's worsening by the day. How do you 'splain that?

A READER WRITES: “The Board of Supervisors could at least acknowledge that by balancing the current budget using reserves, people like Carmel Angelo and John Pinches should be thanked. Angelo took the job when the County had no such reserves, no such tricks to pull out of a hat. She and Pinches had the moxy to actually take on Sheriff Allman to balance the budget and they made him sweat and probably contributed to his eventual heart attack. The current group has done nothing but throw Angelo under the bus, all of them. At least with Pinches they just pretend like the guy never existed. They have taken a lot of flack for it, but the solutions being used today are Angelo and Pinches' legacy the current Board now uses to cover their ass while making not one single hard decision.”

MARK SCARAMELLA NOTES: The reader is correct that Angelo and Pinches (and to some extent John McCowen) took on the task of making budget cuts department by department excluding none of them to balance the budget back in 2009 and 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession. We wrote about this last November including a summary of our coverage of the budget cut meetings at the time.

https://theava.com/archives/233174

It’s also true that Sheriff Allman didn’t like it and threatened to sue the County. But he never did because the Supervisors do have authority to set the Sheriff’s budget, just not to tell him how to spend it. (Theoretically, the Supervisors are liable to suffer politically if they cut too much and undermine public safety to the point that they lose political support.) We would dispute the claim that the Board is using Angelo’ and Pinches’ “legacy” to balance the budget because 1. Angelo and Pinches didn’t have one-time covid money and PG&E settlement money with which to postpone the inevitable. And 2. During the Angelo-Pinches tenure there was a reasonably well functioning tax collector’s office. Angelo’s meat ax approach, which included across the board budget cuts, (semi-)voluntary time off followed by mandatory time off, office hour and office day reductions, salary reductions, hard hiring freezes, and a few other drastic decrees, was effective in balancing the budget while pissing off several department heads and quite a few members of the affected public. As an elected official, Pinches in particular took the budget personally and was strong-minded and politically popular enough to absorb the predictable pushback. But this board has declared that they have no idea what to do to close the budget gap nor any intention of cutting law enforcement budgets or “revenue generating positions,” while granting salary increases without knowing the budget impact, thus painting themselves into a corner which could translate into even more drastic cuts in the remaining departments. None of the drastic Angelo options have been even mentioned by this board, much less proposed, probably because none of them were around when that last budget crunch hit. Or perhaps because they are too inexperienced and wimpy to even bring them up. Instead, as the reader says, they have not made “one single hard decision.” And each day they don’t, the budget gap increases.

THE ARREST OF GREG COX in the aftermath of a likely drug-addled melee in Leggett — and what other kind of robbery could there be in Leggett? — took me back to his several years as a 49er in the early 90's, one of which was a Super Bowl team with Steve Young at quarterback. Cox was a special teams demon, a human rocket downfield ahead of everyone else, a special teams guy who fans still remember for his thrilling open field tackles.

IN MATT LAFEVER'S otherwise accurate account of Cox's unhappy post-football life, Feve writes, “We have learned that after an unsubstantiated rape charge ended his NFL career, Cox has a documented trail of alleged criminal exploits over the last two decades the most recent of which happened in Mendocino County.”

COX was found innocent of that charge; his release by the Niners was purely football-related.

DURING his Leggett adventure, it was apparently Cox's girlfriend who's accused of shooting the vic in the hand, but Cox has been around trouble ever since his days as just about the most exciting special teams player in the NFL. The guy's now 59. You'd think his outlaw days would be behind him, not that we have anything like a clear idea of what really happened up there at Confusion Hill and the Drive-Thru Redwood.

A GUY NAMED DON EMBLEM was once named Sonoma County’s poet laureate, but for my money the best poet down there was and is Brian Boldt, whose wonderful book, “One Never Knows, Do One?” I read in a gulp, and went back and read it in another gulp, and I say this as a guy who reads a lot of poetry, most of which just doesn’t grab me. Too academic, too much about nothing much at all, too precious, too effete, too insincere, I’d say. I do like like Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, some of Merrill, a guy named Edward Hirsch, Ferlinghetti, early Corso, some of Ginsburg, some of Snyder, some of Hirschman, some of Sharon Doubiago, some of Leonard Cirino, some of Steve Kessler, Bill Bradd, Kate Dougherty, and even an occasional line of Gordy Black’s. (Gordy's gone, and I wish I'd told him he got better and better as a poet, and near his end was quite good.) But spare me Ashberry, Miloz, Hahn, and the rest of the Library of Congress gang. Brian Boldt, who I hope is still with us, is as good a poet as there is anywhere, and of all the poetry journals to come and go in the last forty years his Green Fuse is the only one I really miss.

WHILE we’re on lit crit, I laughed out loud the other day when I spotted “A Beginner’s Guide to Charles Bukowski.” Something to puzzle out there?

IT ALMOST GOES WITHOUT SAYING, that here in Mendocino County, magically viewed by the rest of the country as some kind of progressive shangri-la, the social worker-judicial nexus is a sinkhole of offhand cruelty and gross self-interest. Dependent children, for instance, are funneled into a Sonoma County-based non-profit called TLC prior to being consigned to the foster home system. TLC, for allegedly training foster parents and offering them nebulous “professional” back-up services, takes a nice piece of the monthly stipend paid to foster parents. In other words, another layer of parasites gets its acquisitive hands into the dependent child funding, and every one of those dependent funding units a sad, defenseless victim of class warfare.

THERE’S A PERENNIAL shortage of foster homes because many prospective foster parents rightly prefer not to subject themselves to unreasonable layers of helping bureaucracies and to the intrusive presence in their lives of people who, in my experience, tended not to be persons of understanding. Judges have the authority to place dependent children directly into suitable homes but, at least as the non-system works here in Mendocino County, the judges seem to consider the helping bureaucracies as extensions of their good offices.

I'VE SEEN MANY “professionally” rendered assessments of families and their children that were so poorly done, so generally implausible, that any self-respecting officer of the court, not to mention a judge, would refuse to accept them into the record. Judicial rejection of a social service or probation recommendation has never happened in Mendocino County, so far as I’m aware.

SAN ANSELMO just might be America's dog capitol. Pedestrians without a dog seem in the minority. This dog mania seems one more consequence of affluence, of more dollars than cents in the country where excess is a way of life. As a kid, I don't remember many dogs in my neighborhood, and I don't recall ever seeing a dog in a car. Now they're everywhere.

ONE DOG is enough. Two dogs is pushing it, three dogs indicates a need for mental health counseling, four or more and you and the dogs ought to be carted off. In San Francisco the dog people are so far out of control that the authorities have to negotiate with them to keep them and their beasts out of the re-seeded areas of the Presidio!

IN SAN ANSELMO, dog people and their “fur babies” (gag me) are all over children's playgrounds. Fortunately, for San Anselmo, the town is light on pit bulls and the larger, more dangerous breeds. The Hub City's dogs run heavily to small, white and fluffy, kind of like their owners, come to think of it.

IN SF, I never walked past Hippie Hill in Golden Gate Park without keeping a wary eye on a least one unleashed pit bull roaming among the drug and alcohol casualties flaked out on the park’s grass.

PLEASE DON'T misunderstand me. I get it. Dogs are fun, more tolerable companions than most people. I owned a dog once that I became very fond of, although he was dumb even by dog standards, having twice flunked obedience school.. He also took an occasional nip at me at no provocation. And he was a terrible racist, lunging at passing black and brown people who probably assumed that I, a liberal and I can prove it!, was another closet Klan case. But really, how about some proportion, even here in the country of no limits? Hasn't this dog mania gotten way outta hand?

THE GRAND JURY SAID: “…there are talented, dedicated people who work at FCS and who attempt to provide quality services to the children and families of Mendocino County.”

This may be true, but they’re outnumbered by those who range from marginally qualified to incompetent.

Then there are the child stealers who are motivated by their own insecurities and failures in life OR by a deep seated animus against single parents, parents with a history of drug use, or you name it. Too often the goal is NOT family reunification, but permanently severing parental ties, aided and abetted by “helping professionals” and judges who are not qualified to make such critical decisions.

JIM ARMSTRONG: Looks like Willits Online ISP is folding very soon. Their phone is out and no information is posted on their website. From my several year experience, this let down is not a surprise. Getting switched to another ISP and email service may be a problem. Ukiah Wireless has an offer they are sending to those of us affected. Good or bad experiences with them?

LAZARUS (Willits): Pacific Internet Ukiah is owned by the same company as Willits Online. When I checked this morning, Pacific is still open for business. But who knows, my dental office just left Willits. They have an office in Ukiah, but now, if I want to continue with them, I get to drive to Ukiah. And so it goes.

FROM THE MAY MENDOCINO COUNTY CEO REPORT

Auditor Controller’s Office since January 1, 2024

• Recorded 888 deposit receipts into Munis totaling over $183,505,000.
• Processed 165 contracts
• Audited and posted over 1,460 journal entries
• Audited over 1,090 accounts payable batches
• Printed over 7,000 checks and processed over 330 e-payable transactions

MS Notes: No info on whether these numbers are good or bad, high or low, routine or important, relevant or irrelevant.

A READER WRITES:

RE: CEO lacks qualifications to be CEO

I agree with everything this reader says except the part about Darcie’s qualifications. Yes, her work life began as a receptionist. Most people do start at the bottom, or at least they should. Then she had kids, went back to school and earned her bachelor’s and masters degrees, and worked her way up the ranks at Adventist Health. She owned a wine bar on the side. I am not defending the job she is doing as CEO but I do respect her background.

---

A READER WRITES:

Why? Darcie is protecting her, despite several examples of Angle’s behavior that would have gotten any other employee marched out the door. Promoting her buddy Madeline Cline at work. Asking employees to sign a “loyality oath” so Jenine Miller could get a promotion and a raise. Employees are afraid to speak out, because they fear retaliation and need the job.

Right out of the Carmel Angelo’s play book. Since Antle was hand picked by Carmel and BOS approved without question, why would anyone expect anything different?

TO ALL WHO CARE ABOUT WHAT OUR COUNTY ANIMAL CARE SERVICES IS DOING FOR OUR LOST, ABANDONED AND SURRENDERED ANIMALS IN MENDOCINO COUNTY.

Animal Care Services will host a Community Meeting on Thursday, May 30th, from 4-5 pm at the Mendocino County Board Chambers and on Zoom. This meeting aims to provide insights into departmental operations, including animal rescue and shelter management, and to gather feedback and suggestions to enhance our service to the community.

(Carol Lillis)

TRUMP says Biden ought to take a drug test before their upcoming debates. Trump could stand some basic testing himself, but Biden did seem oddly animated for his state of the union address as he barked out a reality visible only to him and his Democrat doo wop chorus who lept to their feet for standing o's at every fantasy. Remember Doctor Feelgood who shot up celebrities with an invigorating potion of vitamins and amphetamine? Old guy like Biden can't do a whole lotta speed, but on special occasions when his handlers can't hide him…

WELL, the Biden-Trump debates, if they come off, are another measure of the radical rhetorical drop off from the Lincoln-Douglas arguments about slavery. Lincoln wanted to keep slavery from spreading to the new states, Douglas was for it, and to think that they wrote their own speeches.

THIS PROVOCATIVE REMARK wafted out of cyberspace the other day: “Old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting has been replaced by fake people who’ve never set foot in any of the neighborhoods they write about — because they don’t have feet.”

MARK SCARAMELLA of the beloved Boonville weekly has both feet and he gets over the hill to Ukiah every Friday, although he hasn't stopped in the supervisors or their hard-hitting administration lately because the on-line video is already about as much of them as he can stand. He still walks to many local Community Services District meetings however.

THE LOCAL JOURNALO-IRONY is that the average Mendo person is probably better informed these days, at least about his own neighborhood, than when he depended entirely on paper newspapers, television and radio, what with all the local blogs and other on-line bulletin boards. Thirty years ago, information on purely local Mendo affairs was available only through cringing community-based newspapers.

HOW WELL-INFORMED are locals about Mendo government? Not very, unless they're reading the ava. The grim media fact is that most people, here, there and everywhere get most of their information about the world beyond their living rooms from television, resulting, ultimately, in Trump vs. Biden.

A READER WRITES: “There's always at least one letter in each AVA that causes the darker ink to spill down the page and into the next column, although now that the ava is on-line you seem out of ed replies. I hope someone else gets it, but you're really being stubborn these days (or maybe I just noticed). It comes through clearly that you just don’t like the left as it is comprised around your locale. Don’t you have goofy right-wing people who believe goofy things who not only live there but run the place and publish the newspapers? Aren’t we all goofy? We Americans may be the most insular people who ever lived. We have too much time and money. Our bad choices don’t really hurt us all that much. We can be unemployed and still drink beer and watch football. We watch way too much TV. I think all of this contributes to a low national IQ and a country full of half wits. Why you focus on the goofiness of the left is interesting to me. Is it that you hold them to a higher sanity standard? It really just sounds like a personal grudge.”

ED REPLY: First off, there isn't a left here or anywhere in the United States in any organized sense of the much abused term, these days promiscuously applied to conservative Democrats and honest liberals alike by the nascent fascist movement represented by Trump. I do hold libs to a higher standard simply because they claim to represent the high ground and more often than not, don't, but your characterization of our fellow citizens as a bunch of slobs and half-wits too stupified by their own sloth and television to distinguish truth from untruth is not only untrue it belongs on the political right, not the left. As the American jury system should have demonstrated to all of us years ago, any group of random citizens is almost always able to sift the facts and arrive at the truth. It's grim out there, though, with rolling, unaddressed catastrophes gaining momentum, and the political choice is Biden-Trump, twin disasters, while the local libs, as they have since McGovern, gear up for Genocide Joe because Trump represents “the end of democracy,” as if it hasn't ended in a system where Bezos and Musk get a million votes and we have one to cast for No Choice but more of the same.

MARK SCARAMELLA ADDS: In addition, most, if not all, Mendocino County officials consider themselves to be “liberal” and therefore, as public officials, they and their supporters should be subject to greater scrutiny and criticism. It is nearly impossible these days in Mendocino County to get elected as any kind of conservative. (Remember Wendy Roberts, a registered Democrat who lived on the Coast who ran against Dan Hamburg? Even as a liberal woman, she lost because she wasn’t “liberal” enough for the Fifth District.) We have heard that Supervisor-elect Madeline Cline is a registered Republican, not that her politics came up during her election. I would challenge the reader to name one “liberal” thing that all these liberal local officials have done for the greater good of Mendocino County besides pro forma proclamations and self-serving statements. As the Editor has said the only liberal who tried to propose liberal things was the late Ukiah City Council Phil Baldwin and he seldom got the support of his fellow Ukiah liberals for his proposals. PS. Name one local liberal who has openly advocated for the California Medicare For All bill that recently failed to even make it out of committee in the liberal state senate.

OUR RESIDENT GRUMP, Harv Reading, wrote: “What’s the big deal about [Bill] Maher? He was a mildly humorous TV show host who got boring very quickly as I recall. I’m soooooo glad I canceled pay TV, back in 2011, when the satellite outfit tried to force me to go back to paying for junk I had trimmed out just a few months before. No more of the crap for me!”

I DON'T THINK MAHER was ever funny, and was surprised that Maureen Dowd came out so strong for a guy who is simply stating the political obvious. Of course compared to the other unfunny little ironists pounding on Trump every night, Maher is a virtual tower of truth, but like much of popular culture, I just don't understand his popularity.

THE LAST TIME I was in Lakeport, I'd hoped the used book store on the main drag was still open. It wasn’t. Next stop, the Standard Station. I asked the young woman behind the inside counter where I could find the road over the hill to Hopland. All my years here and I'd never driven it from the east. The clerk appeared to be in her early twenties. “I don’t know,” she said. If you don’t mind me asking, Miss, how long have you lived in Lakeport? “All my life,” she replied, smiling. “I’ve never been to Hopland.” Oh, my dear, what splendors await you! I said. She laughed. “I hardly ever go anywhere,” she explained. I wanted to ask her why she never went anywhere but two people were in line behind me. The Hopland road was about a mile from where we spoke.

LASAGNA LOVE FOR GAZA

The most exasperating issue of the day is the starving masses in Gaza. And while there may not be much we can do to dull the sharp-toothed hunger there, we can do something about it locally. A global movement called Lasagna Love has come to the Bay Area and volunteers want to expand the project to include Rossmoor in the East Bay.

"The aim of the global movement is to impact communities positively by connecting neighbors through gestures of kindness and support. Not only to help the incredible rise in food insecurity among families, but also to provide a simple act of love and kindness when it is needed most. Lasagna Love's mission to feed families, spread kindness, strengthen communities, seems particularly appropriate in today's global and local political turmoil.

(Bruce McEwen)

WELCOME TO THE NEW NORMAL.

In this parallel reality, Jews who oppose Israel’s genocide in Gaza and America’s complicity in it are antisemites. The House has passed a bill that, among other things, defines antisemitism as “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.” This must offer little comfort to Holocaust survivors like 87-year-old Stephen Kapos, who has stated:

What distinguishes the Jewish Holocaust is its industrial scale and industrial methods being applied. And what has been happening in Gaza is similar in that the scale of the bombing and in the indiscriminate nature of the bombing, the complete lack of care about women and children being the majority of the victims amounts to industrial-scale genocide. The painting of the Palestinian people as worthless, almost “animal-like” by the description of some of the leaders of that dehumanization enables the population of Israel to tolerate what’s going on. The way that Palestinian people who were arrested and treated, having to take their clothes off and parading them … it’s part of the humiliation. In the West Bank, the way the checkpoints are organized, the way you are forced to wait for hours for no reason in order to go to school or to go to work, etc. All this amounted to humiliation similar to what we experienced. The sort of determination and consistency with which they are setting about to destroy the whole of Gaza is very similar to the kind of cruelty and determination of the fascist regimes. Some of the actions of the Nazi state in dehumanizing and completely cruel large-scale killings, etc., if it is repeated, I don’t see why you couldn’t make the parallel. It can only be helpful in understanding what’s going on to make the parallel. I don’t think there should be any taboo about that.

(John G. Russell)

I USED TO BUY goldfish at Walmart, but the purchase was always such a hassle for the clerk stuck with trying to net them as they fled around the tank I quit WalMar fish just as I belatedly learned that Jennifer at Farm Supply also sold fish, tougher fish. The WalMart fish didn't outlast Boonville winters in their otherwise trauma-free horse trough while Jennifer's grew to small-trout size. One day, I stopped in at WalMart for goldfish where a clerk said she couldn't sell gold fish on Thursdays. “Fish trauma,” she explained. Fish trauma? How can you tell? “I dunno,” she replied, “but someone told us the fish need a day off from people dipping into their tanks every five minutes and scaring them.” I've wondered ever since if she was putting me on.

BOOK CHAT. A reader writes: “I didn’t like Orwell's Down and Out in London and Paris. I consider it a fraud. He spends his last money on some milk. A fly drowns in it. He throws the milk away. How fastidious! If he was REALLY hungry, he’d fish the damn fly out and drink the milk; I would. I have. One has as much respectability and fastidiousness as one can afford.”

RECOMMENDED READING always must include the highly entertaining “Kitchen Confidential” by the late Anthony Bourdain. If you’re like me, wholly ignorant of the world of high-end eating, you’ll learn a lot and laugh a lot reading this very funny account of what goes on in the kitchens of fancy-schmancy restaurants.

ALSO RECOMMENDED, especially for teachers struggling for the frazzled attentions of high school and college students, “The Greatest Story Never Told, A People’s History of the American Empire, 1945-1999” by Michael K. Smith. I zipped through its lively 431 big-print pages over the weekend. Arrayed in historically-accurate, Dos Passos-like vignettes, Smith covers the key events and personalities of the post-War period in a way that reads like a very good novel. Example: “1961: Washington. An Interesting, unhealthy Idea. A century after the Civil War, the abolition movement stirs anew. The Brown decision, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the sit-in movement fuel hope throughout the South. A new generation of college students discovers Gandhi and Thoreau, setting its sights on the abolition of Jim Crow. James Farmer, national director of the Congress on Racial Equality, pays a visit to his dying father in Freedman’s Hospital, telling him that there is going to be a ‘Freedom Ride,’ that blacks and whites are going to leave Washington D.C. on Greyhound and Trailways, deliberately violating the segregated seating rules on the buses and the segregated use of restrooms at stops throughout the Deep South. In the final stage of terminal cancer, his father tells him the plan is interesting and he hopes his son survives it.”

I SEEM TO RECOMMEND Marshall Frady’s truly excellent mini-bio of Martin Luther King, Jr. published by Penguin about every six months; I like it that much. MLK achieved iconic status as soon as he was safely gone, but most people, especially people who have arrived since, have no idea what an interesting man he was, and certainly don’t know that King represented the strongest American voice for democratic socialism since the great Gene Debs. Martin Luther King put a lot more fear into the ruling class than the tough guys with the guns and the leather jackets ever did. If you don’t have the time or the inclination to plow through the real long (and real good) two-volume bio of King called America in the King Years by Taylor Branch, Frady’s little Penguin is the bio you want.

SO THE KANSAS CITY CHIEF'S kicker, a conservative Catholic, gives a speech to a Catholic women's college wherein he recommends that the ladies embrace traditional roles as mothers and homemakers. And the Woke battalions rush in guns blazing, demanding that Harrison Butker not only be fired by KC but kicked out of the NFL! Which is what actually happened to Colin Kaepernick for taking a knee for Black Lives Matter, but Kaepernick's collusive blackballing by the Maga owners of the NFL didn't rouse nearly as much animus from the pure of heart as Butker's retro recommendations to young women. Why Butker thinks he's in a position to pass out advice on any subject other than football is a mystery almost as big as why the women's college invited him as, of all things, a commencement speaker. (And Shakespeare thought his times were “out of joint…”

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] I recall a Sgt. Bilko episode from back in the ‘50’s wherein Bilko gets what’s-his-name, Muldoon, from Car 54, on the $64,000 Question ( which was very hot then). Of course, Bilko being Bilko, tries to fix the game so his person couldn’t help but win. He inserted a tiny device in Muldoon’s ear so Bilko’s team, armed with encyclopedias, could feed his guy all the answers. Remember, this was in the 1950’s.

I bring this up because it’s a little scary that Biden is being allowed to debate Trump. Biden has no mind, so why would the Dems ok this? Unless they have another plan. Something’s up. Well, we’ll see.

[2] I have a motto: Never, ever let the world do you in emotionally. Of course there’s ups and downs. We’re all human. But stay strong. Just the fact you’re talking about it is a good sign.

It’s very nice to feel happy. But you know what? The world doesn’t owe us any happiness. Therefore it’s up to ourselves. You don’t believe in God? No problem. God won’t hold that against you if you’re a good person. Just think of the upside. You die and wake up In another environment. What a pleasant surprise!

Of course, we can’t prove it. That’s why we’ve been blessed with the ability to have faith.

It’s not all about us. Those who’ve had the most rewarding lives are those who’ve helped others.

When I say this, I can’t help thinking about Jimmy Carter. He made a lousy president. But he grew in spirit. After his presidency he devoted his life helping others. He’s not a perfect man, but he’s done a lot of good.

[3] It should be clear to everyone with a triple digit IQ that the time for talk is over. The time for voting (i.e. the ballot box) has been over for years. And, the time for the jury box is over (Ask Trump or the J6 people).

Does anyone know what time it is?

[4] It’s so hard to admit how proud you are of being America when we’ve got scummy mfers like this in our country making these kind of claims and statements about people. I don’t think America is ever going to become a nation independent of supporting that side of the world…

That’s what bothers me…. And whenever you work, you pay taxes. Your money goes toward all the stuff this country does that you don’t agree with or support. But you have no choice in the matter…If only I knew of a better place to live out my life without worrying that I’m funding shitty people and what they do with the money I earn…I would have left a long time ago. Hell the country already feels like a cross between Mexico and the Middle East as it is. Within a few more years they might as well change the name of the country to something else.

[5] On the debates, I don’t think that Trump should allow Biden to dictate the conditions. If Jake Tapper on CNN, then Hannity on Fox news. Trump bellows that he’ll debate Biden anywhere, anyplace, anytime. The Democrats adroitly counter with their terms, putting Trump in a box. Trump could actually lose, after Biden is given his “state of the union cocktail.” Fox news poll says it’s Trump at 49%, Biden at 48%, whatever polls are worth. Truly boggles the mind that it’s so close after all that’s happened.

[6] These two photos, which I took in Albany near Berkeley, just about sum up where we are now as a nation.

But it makes me wonder if the gun guy has ever read a book. And if he had, would he still display this on his truck? I grew up with guns and still have an over and under Savage Shotgun/22rifle. I also have a 38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, mostly because that is what all the guys in movies carried.

I doubt that this "America gun guy" even owns a gun. All hat and no cattle as we used to say.

[7] And I recall in early March 2020, Fauci stated publicly, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask.”

I had been reading about the Wuhan virus and stocking up on supplies for two months by that time, so I already wasn’t expecting much truth.

What made it completely clear to me though was when the CDC put out its list of things to do to stay safe. Not one of them was traditional centuries (or at least decades)-old common sense human knowledge on general health. No mention of Vitamins C and D3, sunlight, fresh air, exercise, healthy diet, or socialization. Only masks, stay away from other people, stay inside, take your shots (when they became available), order in your meals, and stay home if you have a cold (the only reasonable one in the list).