Valley People 6/20/24

Re: SNWMF cancellation. That wasn’t on my BINGO card. Since the announcement says nothing about refunds, I’m guessing that there won’t be any. Musicians, vendors, the fair, local businesses, law enforcement, etc. will likely take financial hits as well. On top of that, downtown will be left entirely to the pastel clad tourons this weekend. Despite the inconveniences and the crappy management, this has been one of my favorite events and I will miss it. (Bob Abeles)

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This weekend would have been the festival's 30th anniversary. Until it was canceled.

BOONVILLE’S OLDE TIME 4TH OF JULY EVENT!
Don’t miss The Olde Time 4th of July event at the Boonville Fairgrounds on July 4 from
12 - 4:00. It is coming up soon! This delightful community gathering has a parade for young children, games, food, a chicken clucking contest, a cake auction with cakes from the best bakers in the valley and so much more! We need volunteers to help sell food, take tickets, paint faces, and assist with the parade! Please call Donna at 707 684-0325 if you can help!

CHERISSA JOHNSON

My Husband was pretty surprised to see this little seagull visiting Anderson Valley Way today. He said he’s never seen one here in the 40 plus years of living in the Valley!. Have you ever seen one?

SENIOR CENTER GIANTS TICKETS RAFFLE
We have Giants Tickets up for raffle. Get your tickets at the Senior Center. Game day is Monday, June 24 at 6:45 pm. Note these are digital tickets and you must have an email and the ability to download them on the MLB app.

This redwood is in a hidden spot near Ukiah. We climbed to the top to take some drought stress data. 370' to the top. I made it to about 350'.

AT WEDNESDAY’S MEETING of the Anderson Valley Community Services District Budget Committee we learned that electric vehicles pose a whole new set of challenges to first responders because of their unique elecric batteries. These challengers are only now starting to be addressed by the “firefighting community.” The AV Fire Department has acquired a special electric vehicle fire smothering blanket because in some cases motor/hood fires need to be squelched before conventional firefighting can begin. The Department now also has a unique “extinguishing unit” that slides under a car to inject water directly at the underside of the battery to cool it and extinguish flames. And they have a device to make sure the car isn’t “running” because often the firefighters don’t know for sure what mode the vehicle is in, meaning it could drive itself off without warning. Needless to say this all costs money.
SPEAKING OF MONEY, the County is still dragging its feet in distributing the Measure P money to local emergency services organizations. At last check most local departments have finally received one-quarter’s worth of the funds (about $43k in Anderson Valley’s case), albeit more than a year since the sales tax revenues began to accumulate. There is now more than a year’s worth of proceeds backed up and due local fire districts and the Fire Safe Council and the Chief’s Association. At last check the Chief’s Association which was supposed to get one quarter of the proceeds after the 10% off the top for the Fire Safe Council has yet to receive a penny of the Measure P funds. Apparently the County is requiring a contract, a contract with silly provisions that are changing almost monthly, for each quarter of the distributions. So the first quarter contracts are now in place and money has started to trickle out, but the remainder of the contracts are still being haggled over by the County Counsel’s office. For example, the County Counsel’s office wanted a special provision that required each district to agree to return any unspent money, rather than just letting districts keep their fair share and use it to accumulate funds for (frequently expensive) equipment purchases! Other “rules” have been proposed which, of course, some of which, like the above, have been unacceptable to the local fire districts. When the public voted for this tax (albeit with a narrow margin of 52-48) they were not told that the County would attached petty strings and conditions to the disbursements. As local fire departments attempt to finalize their budgets and equipment acquisition plans (including the expensive new electric vehicle equipment) for this year (ending at the end of this month) and next year (July 2024 to June 2025) they are unable to complete their budgets because of all this folderol that the County Counsel’s office is injecting into the process. We await a Supervisor’s intervention because this is creating some serious political liability for the Supervisors.
(Mark Scaramella)

FROM A BENCH IN SAN ANSELMO

NO AND DOUBLE NO! To the lady who wonders if she's the only one who has watched Con Creek ebb and flow off and on, she might be reassured by my observation that I've also seen it stop and go. That said, I've never before seen the fine little year-round creek in a state anything less than vigorous, even in the dry months, as it flows down out of Peachland into what's left of Anderson Creek. When I was physically whole, I always checked Con Creek's health as I strode aerobically over the CCC-constructed bridge above it.

SOME EVENINGS the little creek that could and always has was running fast and clear, and some evenings it was down to a trickle. Or not running at all. As for who or what is periodically intercepting it upstream, maybe an Upper Peachland Person can let us know the name of the perp.

I REMEMBER watching steelhead and salmon run up Con Creek as late as 1978, but I haven't seen so much as a minnow since, and because it's widely believed that fish need water to live, any human interference with their habitat is your basic crime against nature. Viva, Con Creek!

VOICELESS and on the shelf, I have time to rummage through a box of fragments I had forgotten about. Here's a few:

FAINT FEMALE voice on the telephone says, “Hello, my name is Turtle. I'm calling from the Earth First! Journal in Tucson. I want permission to re-print something from your paper that Darryl Cherney told me about.”

TURTLE? Land or Sea?, I demanded. Does it matter?, she asked. I don't suppose, I said, but I draw the line at Cherney. She laughed. Even Earth First! draws the line at Cherney, it seems.

I FEEL kinda awkward calling a human “Turtle,” I said. Can I call you Ann or maybe Fawn? Fawn's still in the animal kingdom.

I REALLY PREFER Turtle, she said. That's my name. If your name was Giraffe, I'd call you Giraffe.

RAFF, I said. I like Raff. Would you call me Raff if my name was Giraffe?

TURTLE sighed, Whatever. So it's ok if we print it?, she asked. Yes, it's ok with me, I said. I'm glad you have a shell to protect yourself from these people.

A GUY asked me the other night, “Gee, aren't you an environmentalist?” I've always wanted to be but I'm not short enough.

THE WORLD’S LARGEST SALMON BBQ
Saturday, July 6, 2024. South Noyo Harbor, Fort Bragg

The World’s Largest Salmon Barbecue is held each year on the first Saturday of July, with great food, live music and all proceeds going to the Salmon Restoration Association to improve salmon populations along the Mendocino County coast. The meal features grilled wild caught salmon, fresh corn on the cob, salad, and local bread from Fort Bragg Bakery. Coffee is provided by Thanksgiving Coffee. A variety of craft brews from North Coast Brewery can also be purchased.
Saturday, July 6, 2023 from 11:00 AM to 6:00 PM

CHAY PETERSON (facebook): I just got word that our wonderful valley elder Barbara Lamb will be undergoing surgery tomorrow morning in Pasadena and her family is hoping for some prayers and loving well wishes. PM me if you’d like her # to call or text.

FROM E-BAY AN UNUSUAL BOONVILLE POSTCARD, circa 1908

(I have some doubts, but the card is postmarked Boonville. — Marshall Newman)

THE LATE ARLINE DAY, a Point Arena-Boonville old timer, aptly described summer fogs as “hot fogs,” meaning that the inland heat seems to overpower them before they can cool us off here in Anderson Valley.

FRISCO old timers call the fog, Karl? Never heard that before, and I landed in San Francisco in 1942.

DENIS JOHNSON, no longer with us, is a well-known writer who lived in Boonville and Point Arena long enough to be so horrified by Ukiah that he wrote a play set in the Mendocino County seat. It's called “Shoppers Carried By Escalators Into the Flames” and, according to the review blurb in the New Yorker, it's “faux Shepard meets low-rent O'Neill and the results aren't pretty. A blue collar family, some hangers-on, and a barking Chihuahua gather for a revelatory night at the home of the dad, Oliver Wendell Homes Cassandra, in Ukiah, California.”

SPEAKING of our beloved county seat, is there still a plaque at the Courthouse's west entrance inscribed, “The Mendocino County Superior Court is an active member of the California Chamber of Commerce, June - December 2002”?

FRED EHNOW: Beware, there is a porch pirate swiping packages in the deep end (Navarro).

Friday around 12:30pm this car pulled into my driveway (Hwy 128 between Guntley and Gschwend) and took a package that had just been delivered by FedEx about 5 minutes earlier (which makes me think they were probably stalking the FedEx van). Unfortunately my camera only got a partial shot of the car, and it cuts off right at the bottom of the license plate. I'm pretty sure this is an older model Jeep Grand Cherokee, silver or gray or whiteish, probably from the late 90's or early 2000's. That cargo carrier (probably used to haul all of the loot they steal) is pretty distinctive looking, does anybody recognize the car with this carrier?

THE FOURTH IN MENDOCINO
Get Ready! It’s that time again! The 4th of July parade in Mendocino, takes place on Thursday, July 4 from noon until around 1pm. If you are interested in participating in the parade, you can get a parade entry form on the Chamber of Commerce's website home page at www.mendocinocoast.com . Tell all your friends,too!. We hope to make this even bigger than last year!

BE HUMANE… to all! That’s this year’s theme. For questions call 707-961-6300.

1966 AV vs Pt. Arena - definitely the “good old days”. No comments about the hairdo please. Check out the purses

WHY IT'S CALLED JIVE JUICE, and why I delight in re-posting this timeless deconstruction of the industrial wine industry by Adam Sage, now thirty years old: “Drinkers have long suspected it, but now French researchers have finally proved it: wine ‘experts’ know no more than the rest of us,” reports Sage. “Their rituals as they pronounce judgment have been revealed as little more than self-delusion by an award winning French study. They base their views as much on color and labels as upon a wine's bouquet and flavor.”

“The truth is that you cannot define taste objectively,” declared Fredéric Brochet, a researcher at the Amorim Academy in Bordeaux, France, whose study won an award from the academy. “The opinions of the so-called connoisseurs are no better and perhaps worse than that of the occasional drinker,” he said. “The greater the expertise, the greater the cultural baggage that prevents you from perceiving the actual taste in your mouth.”

Mr. Brochet carried out two rather obvious studies to prove his point.

In the first, he invited 54 of Bordeaux's most eminent wine experts to sample different bottles, including a white wine to which he had added an odorless, flavorless substance that gave it a red color. Not a single expert noticed. “It is a well known psychological phenomenon,” said Brochet. “You taste what you are expecting to taste. They were expecting to taste a red wine, and so they did. Similar experiments elsewhere had come up with similar results.”

According to Brochet, only about 2-3% of people (a number so small as to be equivalent to no one) can detect the white wine flavor, but invariably that tiny number has little experience of wine culture. Self-described “wine connoisseurs” tend to fail to detect any difference. Conclusion: The more training you have, the more mistakes you make because you cannot avoid being influenced by the color of the wine.
In his second test, Brochet gave 57 “experts” the same ho-hum bottle of Bordeaux two separate times. The first time the vin ordinaire was labeled as a high-prestige grand cru, and the second time it was labeled as a cheap table wine. When the “experts” thought it was a grand cru, they described it with such terms as “agreeable, woody, complex, balanced and rounded.” When they thought it was box-wine, they said it was “weak, short, light, flat, faulty” and came with a low-end booze sting. Forty of the experts said the wine was good when they thought it was expensive, but only 12 liked it when it was cheap.

Mr. Brochet adds, “This is why wine frauds are virtually never detected on taste alone, but because someone tips off the police who look at the paperwork.” (In pseudo-socialist France, government inspectors actually check the wine paperwork now and then. It rarely, if ever, happens here in Mike Thompson-landia. You can put pretty much write whatever you want on your wine paperwork here in wine country, and that's exactly what everyone will say is happening. Wine shysters routinely re-route the cheaper grapes to their “second label” which is almost as expensive as the first, but without the first label’s “appellation” and therefore made with much cheaper grapes.

Mr. Brochet also pointed out that the molecule that gives what is described as the taste of black currants, red currants or raspberries in red wine is chemically identical to that which gives an apricot or peach taste to white wine. The description of the “connoisseurs” changes only because the color is different.

In other words the difference between a wine “expert” and a wine “drinker” is the price you pay. And if you buy (or sell) an expensive bottle of wine, you’re living proof that you don’t know Boone's Apple Farm from syrah.

BACK IN THE 1960s, I worked at a liquor store in Fresno that had just received a palletload of a cheap knockoff brand of bulk-fermented champagne called LeJon. (Bulk fermented champagne gets its second fermentation in a large vat; then the lees are filtered off from one tank to another through a nitrogen pressurized plumbing/filtration system. It’s a much cheaper fermentation process than the one used at, say, Roederer here in Anderson Valley, where each bottle is individually fermented and the dead culture removed by “riddling and disgorging” — tipping the bottle in a rack and jiggling it in the classic French manner until the lees accumulate in the bottleneck. Then they freeze the neck, after which the bottle is gently warmed slightly and the neck’s contents are carefully splurped out before the bottle is recapped while still cold. I understand Roederer’s brilliantly innovative Michel Salgues has mechanized this process, however.) The store owner where I worked got the cases of cheap champagne from a wholesaler who was offloading unsold bulk inventory. He displayed the champagne initially for $1.29 a bottle. Very little was sold. After a couple weeks, he told me, “Watch this,” and jacked the price up to $5.99 a bottle. It sold out immediately. — ms

HARD TO BELIEVE that rich saps are paying as much as $1,800 for “colonics” sold at Fort Bragg's Todd Farm House. A bunch of suckers assembled Monday evening at Todd Farm to listen to pitches for what amount to hippie enemas that the weirdos of yesteryear happily administered absolutely free to anybody who'd bend over. But these days the weirdos are charging the equivalent of first and last month's rent for custom made, hand-delivered emetics. Buyer beware: there are folks who've submitted to these so-called “colonics” who are said to have become seriously ill from them — kidney-failure-ill in one rumored case. (Coffee-flavored colonics are called “crappacinnos.”)

THE ARTICLE'S pull quote, however, was this provocative statement: “It's women's unique feminine nature and their nurturing qualities that leave them better prepared to make great wine. To put it another way, if you need to get a square peg in a round hole you might want to get a man for that job. However, if you need to coax the very best out of a living thing, turning it into a unique reflection of its origin, then I think you want the nurturing, patient, intuitive qualities women seem to have in great supply.”

HOLD IT RIGHT THERE, MILLA. The only difference between men and women — apart from their repro equipment — is upper body strength, and a lot of men have even lost that over-rated edge. As for one sex having an innate lock on the superior sensitivities franchise in certain of the more vaporous qualities, I'd say it was a wash between the square pegs and the round ones.