Mendocino County Today: Friday 9/6/2024

By AVA News Service on September 6, 2024

Fog approaching South of Blues Beach (Jeff Goll)

YESTERDAY'S HIGHS: Ukiah 102°, Yorkville 102°, Laytonville 101°, Covelo 101°, Boonville 97°, Fort Bragg 62°, Point Arena 61°, Mendocino 59°

ABOVE NORMAL TEMPERATURES continue today across the interior, but cooling down to near-normal is expected this weekend. A pattern change is possible mid week, potentially bringing a return of wet weather. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A foggy 55F this Friday morning on the coast. Patchy fog is our forecast well into next week. How much sun we will see daily is the question. No mention of rain next week now.

COPS RAID SAM EDER’S BIG GROW IN LAYTONVILLE

On Thursday, August 22, 2024, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office received a community complaint regarding an illegal marijuana cultivation operation where the suspect was possibly diverting water from a neighboring parcel in the area of the 1200 block of Deer Trail Drive near Laytonville. During the investigation it was discovered that a water diversion was indeed occurring, and the water was being used to cultivate a large marijuana grow in the immediate vicinity. Deputies verified with the County of Mendocino that there were no cannabis cultivation permits for the property, and confirmed with the California Bureau of Cannabis Control that there were no permits on file for the grow at the state level.

After further investigation into the marijuana cultivation operation, a Mendocino County Superior County Court Judge signed a search warrant for the parcel.

On Wednesday, September 4, 2024, representatives from the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office served the search warrant with the assistance of Wardens from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife and environmental biologists. During the service of the search warrant, three male subjects were contacted and detained. The male subjects were identified as Samuel Eder, 40 of Laytonville, Fernando Reyes Jordan, 50, of Ukiah, and an additional male subject who was not responsible for the growing operation.

During the service of the search warrant, 909 total growing marijuana plants were located in 2 different outdoor grows and 8 hoop houses, along with 143 pounds of untrimmed bud marijuana. An unregistered 9-millimeter handgun was located and seized from a residence at the location. There were a total of six Fish & Wildlife violations observed during the service of the search warrant that included water diversion and water pollution in concert with the illegal marijuana cultivation.

Samuel Eder was arrested for an unrelated out-of-county arrest warrant from Humboldt County and booked into the Mendocino County Jail where he was held in lieu of $5,000. bail. Jordan and the other male subject were released at the scene with charges to be filed with the Mendocino County District Attorney’s Office against Eder and Jordan for the illegal cultivation in concert with the Fish and Wildlife violations. Additional charges will likely be requested with the District Attorney's Office after the environmental biologists from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife prepare their formal report.

REDWOOD VALLEY WATER BOARD BLASTS PG&E FOR DRASTIC FLOW CUTS TO LAKE MENDOCINO

by Monica Huettl

At the August 15, 2024 meeting of the Redwood Valley County Water District Board, General Manager Jared Walker reported a sharp drop in water flows into Lake Mendocino after PG&E received permission from FERC to reduce the flow to 5 cubic feet per second. The City of Ukiah and the Ukiah Valley Water Authority have protested this drastic cut, arguing it creates an artificial drought and harms the Russian River. The Board also reviewed recent water use, consolidation with Ukiah, and upcoming audits at their latest meeting.…

mendofever.com/2024/09/06/redwood-valley-water-board-blasts-pge-for-drastic-flow-cuts-to-lake-mendocino/

UKIAH OFFICIALS ‘DISSATISFIED’ WITH LACK OF PROGRESS ON PALACE HOTEL

by Justine Frederiksen

The Palace Hotel as it looked in January 2024. (Ukiah Daily Journal file photo – Karen Rifkin)

City officials reported being displeased with the progress, or rather lack thereof, being made regarding downtown Ukiah’s most talked-about building for decades, the Palace Hotel.

“We have continued to reach out to the owners and agents of the building, and continue to be dissatisfied with the lack of progress,” Deputy City Manager Shannon Riley told the Ukiah City Council Wednesday during its latest regular meeting. “So, there is no formal change in the status or anything else at this time, however, we will be discussing further in closed session this evening.”

When asked after the meeting if she could share any more details regarding what was discussed, Riley said she “could not discuss closed session items,” adding only that “Jitu Ishwar is still the owner and we still have a demolition permit pending additional information.”

As for updates on active construction in the city, Public Works Director Tim Eriksen told the City Council changes had been made after the significant traffic impacts experienced earlier in the week.

“If you were lucky enough to be downtown (Tuesday or Wednesday), you know that traffic was not amazing on either Perkins or Gobbi streets,” Eriksen said, telling the City Council that staff were “working with Ghilotti to fix that, and it should be much better, honestly, as this week continues. One of the problems was they had the intersection of (East Gobbi Street and South Orchard Avenue) closed, so that required people coming down (Gobbi) to go back into town, so it just kind of siphoned this disaster, (but) we fixed that (Wednesday), and traffic was much better this morning.

“So we appreciate everyone’s patience with this,” Eriksen continued, urging residents to stay away from construction areas as much as possible, and reminding them that: “Less than a year from now, we’ll have all new streets in all three of those places, and all new utilities, and so it will be a very nice (final) product, but it is painful as they are doing it right now.”

Some of that construction was described in a city press release as “work to replace the sewer lines, beginning this week on East Gobbi Street, starting at South Orchard Avenue and moving west to State Street. East Gobbi will have one-lane closures on blocks with active construction; in those areas, traffic will be allowed westbound only. This will, at times, impact MTA’s ability to access the Northbound Local 9 bus stops: Co-op, Autumn Leaves, the Ukiah Post Office, Social Security and Big Lots. MTA will need to reroute the Northbound Local 9 during the hours of construction for affected areas; other traffic will be detoured as well. Thus, neighborhoods in the areas of Waugh Lane, Cooper Lane, Betty Street and Marlene Street should anticipate additional traffic during construction hours.”

Q. What are the construction hours? A. Monday-Friday, 7 a.m. – 5 p.m.
Q. Where will lane closures occur? Lane closures will only occur on blocks where there is active construction. The first area will be between Orchard Avenue and Leslie Street. From there, construction will move west toward State Street. At this time, it is unknown how much time will be spent on each section.
Q. Will any traffic be allowed in the construction areas? A. Yes, but only westbound in those areas.
Q. What about emergency and delivery vehicles? A. Construction crews will always allow emergency and delivery vehicles through. Residents will also have access at all times.
Q. Why westbound only? A. The sewer lines are on the south side of the street. Unfortunately, Gobbi Street isn’t wide enough to accommodate active construction plus two lanes of traffic.
Q. Will Gobbi Street be repaved after this? A. Yes. Once the utility and concrete work is complete, Gobbi will be reconstructed.
Q. What about Main Street? Gobbi, Main and Perkins are all part of one large project called the Urban Core Rehabilitation and Transportation project. Main Street is also having utilities replaced and then will be completely reconstructed. Perkins Street will have storm drains added and be repaved. For more info about this project, see www.cityofukiah.com/ucrt

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

ATTENTION WHEEZERS & GEEZERS

Anderson Valley Senior Services Assessment

The AV Health Center is doing a survey of community members over 50 to assess Senior Services available in Anderson Valley. There is a digital link at the top of the survey that will allow you to do the survey online, or feel free to print a hard copy of the survey or pick one up at the Senior Center or at the Clinic and fill it out.

AVHC Survey

AV ATHLETICS

Anderson Valley Soccer will take on Del Norte in the Cougar cup soccer tournament this Saturday!

The regional pools of this tournament were played earlier this season against Middletown and Credo. The Panthers defeated Credo but dropped the game against Middletown. Game 1 will be a Upper Lake at 9am. Game 2 will be played a Clear Lake High school at either noon or 1:30pm.

SIGN AT THE MILO ANIMAL RESCUE OFFICE IN WILLITS
(photo by Elif Ritchie, via Bruce McEwen)

COUNTY NOTES

by Mark Scaramella

“…there are some who promise many more things than they deliver, and some who threaten much and perform least.”

— Romulus (Fifth Century AD)

Scaramella’s corollary: “…there are some who want to be paid for many more things than they deliver, and some who are paid much and perform least.”

After their seven-week “August Recess” (right after giving themselves a big raise) the Board of Supervisors posted their long awaited agenda for their Tuesday, September 10 meeting.

After all that time, what did they deliver?

First: A proposal to rubberstamp an agreement forming a joint powers agency to negotiate with PG&E for the “Surrender and Transfer the Potter Valley Project” with the goal of continuing the diversion of water from the Eel River into Mendo and, mostly, points south.

Do the Supervisors get any credit for this? Maybe a little, if credit is the right word for taking years to do the obvious for their wine industry constituency. But to our knowledge most of the credit goes to Adam Gaska who chairs the Redwood Valley Water District board, one of the key parties to the agreement. (We will probably see specifically how much credit goes where in time.) Again, this is not an agreement with PG&E or anything big, just an agreement between the County, the Inland Power & Water Commission, the Redwood Valley Water District, the Potter Valley Irrigation District, and the Russian River Flood Control District.

Whoopee!

Following that there’s a grant application for $200k worth of disaster repairs that the Board will approve.

There’s the leftover and unchanged pre-“recess” proposal to formalize the loan of $7 million of Measure B money to cover part of the jail expansion overrun and pay it back over eight years at 2.5% starting in September of 2025. We don’t even remember why they didn’t approve it two months ago. There’s still some question as to whether it will be needed because the final cost of the jail expansion has not been finalized and there’s a chance that the County will get a $ 9 million state grant for the PHF which might muddy the loan picture if the County meets its construction timeline and the grant is awarded. If…, if…

There’s a proposed pot cultivation “density” rule modification.

There are a few proposed inland zoning code modifications.

And there’s another closed session discussion involving “complaints against two county officials.” (Apparently in the dubious opinion of the County Counsel these “complaints” might morph into a lawsuit, hence a secretive “closed session.”)

In other words, seven weeks and back to no-serious-business as usual.

A warmed over JPA along with some routine rubberstampings plus an extensive accumulation of routine consent calendar items.

Nothing about County finances, funds, disbursements, departmental status updates, revenue deficits, and tax collection and tax lien sales.

To top off the routine nature of this long-awaited but nearly empty agenda we find Consent Calendar Item 3ab which conveniently comes on the heels of a going-nowhere draft proposal a few months ago to competitively bid the County’s various mental health services contracts:

Item 3ab: “Approve retroactive [sic] second amendment to Agreement No. BOS-23-137 with Redwood Quality Management Company DBA Anchor Health Management, Inc., [aka the Schraeders] in the amount of $20,000, for a new total of $2,220,142, to provide care coordination, data management, and transition for the delivery of Specialty Mental Health Services in Mendocino County, effective July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024.”

After all of Supervisor Ted Williams’ complaints about no-bid contract add-ons and retroactive dispensings of contracts, and the first agenda following the “recess” proposes yet another one retractive no-bid award. In your face, Supervisor Williams.

For pure blatancy, the consent calendar also includes the final rubberstamping of their self-awarded pay raise buried way down on the long list of consent calendar items:

Consent Item 3al (the 38th item on the consent calendar): “Adopt Ordinance of the Board of Supervisors of the County of Mendocino amending section 3.04.071 of the Mendocino County Code increasing the base salary for members of the Board of Supervisors” … “to increase the base salary for each member of the Board of Supervisors from $95,302 to $110,715, over two fiscal years. The Board of Supervisors has not seen an annual salary increase since 2018 except for COLA’s received in years 2019 through 2021.”

How will this big raise be paid for?

“Source Of Funding: Departmental Budget.

“Current F/Y Cost: FY 24/25 $476,510 (with benefits $810,067)

(Yes, that’s over $800k in pay and benefits for five nearly comatose elected officials. Throw in the CEO’s pay and benefits of over $400k and those six people alone cost Mendo taxpayers over $1.2 million a year.)

“Budget Clarification: Executive Office budget team will continue to explore all funding options available to cover additional expense, including reducing expenditures in other departmental budget line items.

“Annual Recurring Cost: FY 24/25 increase $38,532 approximate and FY 25/26 increase $38,532 approximate.

“Budgeted In Current F/Y (if no, please describe): No.” (There was no further “description” besides the note above saying that the CEO’s “budget team” is “exploring” where to get the money for the board member raises.)

Translation: The Supervisors’ raise is not only unjustified it was not even budgeted by the Board that claims to be presiding over a broke county and the raise will have to be paid for by raiding the budgets of other unspecified departments.

JIM ARMSTRONG

There are few things better than a good rumor and a great one is that the Six Point Ranch (formerly the Matthews Ranch) at the end of Burris Lane has been bought by Buster Posey. No need to tell who he is. Anyone confirm or deny?

ED NOTE: True.

A READER WRITES: Driving home from Ukiah to the Coast on Thursday I stopped in at the Farmhouse Mercantile store in Boonville to look around. They always have interesting items, many of them hand-made or local or both. While I was outside I saw a sight I have not seen around here in decades: a young woman with perfect posture. Not snooty or aloof, but comfortable and confident. Her strolling to wherever she was going gave the impression that she had the proverbial book balanced on her head. She was attractive, of course. But her posture and casual, upright stride made her stand out. I think she may work for one of those store fronts in the area. Not sure. For a moment I thought I had time-traveled back to the 50s in San Francisco when most women walked like that. I had to wonder how such a young woman could find herself walking around downtown Boonville looking so striking in the 21st century.

PAUL BUNYAN PARADE Ends Summer Season in Fort Bragg, Launches City Council Election Season

by Frank Hartzell

With 1980s tunes blaring and two dancers who looked like Hall and Oates but rocked more like Van Halen and Bon Jovi gyrating on a Skunk Train float, the Paul Bunyan Days parade celebrated its 80s theme on a perfect sunny day to crowds that packed the curbs on Main Street and Franklin Street. The parade itself moved much slower than usual, with large gaps between floats. As usual, the parade started with a convoy of firetrucks and ended with the traditional wacky performance by the Cal Poly Humboldt Marching lumberjacks.…

mendofever.com/2024/09/05/paul-bunyan-parade-ends-summer-season-in-fort-bragg-launches-city-council-election-season/

RE-ELECT MR. FORT BRAGG, LINDY PETERS!

LOCAL FARM STANDS

Velma's Farm Stand at Filigreen Farm

Now open on Sundays!

Friday 2-5pm and Saturday-Sunday 11-4pm

For fresh produce this week: pluots (Flavor Queen, Flavor King, Dapple Dandy), french prune plums, apples, melons, watermelons, summer squash, eggplant, tomatoes (heirlooms, cherry tomatoes, new girls), sweet peppers, hot peppers, cucumbers, sprouting broccoli, chinese cauliflower, green cabbage, hakurei turnips, new potatoes, celery, spring onions, arugula, spinach, lettuce mix, beets, carrots, kale, chard, basil and flowers. We will also have dried fruit, tea blends, olive oil, everlasting bouquets and wreaths available. Plus some delicious flavors of Wilder Kombucha!

All produce is certified biodynamic and organic.

Follow us on Instagram for updates @filigreenfarm or email annie@filigreenfarm.com with any questions. We accept cash, credit card, check, and EBT/SNAP (with Market Match)!

Petit Teton Farm

Petit Teton Farm is open Mon-Sat 9-4:30, Sun 12-4:30. Right now we have sungold and heirloom tomatoes along with the large inventory of jams, pickles, soups, hot sauces, apple sauces, and drink mixers made from everything we grow. We sell frozen USDA beef and pork from our perfectly raised pigs and cows, as well as stewing hens and eggs. Squab is also available at times. Contact us for what's in stock at 707.684.4146 or farmer@petitteton.com. Nikki and Steve

Blue Meadow Farm

Open Tuesday - Sunday

10 AM - 7 PM

Closed Monday

Holmes Ranch Rd & Hwy 128, Philo, CA 95466

(707) 895-2071

Brock Farms

M-T-W closed

Thursday-Sunday, open 10-6

Right now, I have potatoes, onions, some tomatoes, basil, cabbage, shishito peppers, and cabbage.

Sherwood Valley Casino, Willits (Jeff Goll)

MENDOCINO THEATRE COMPANY PRESENTS ‘HURRICANE DIANE’

by Madeleine George

Directed by Willo Hausman

Mendocino Theatre Company proudly presents the uproarious comedy Hurricane Diane by acclaimed playwright Madeleine George. Directed by New York's talented Willo Hausman, this engaging production promises a blend of humor, wit, and insight, captivating audiences from Thursday through Sunday, September 19 to October 13. The performances will be held at MTC’s Helen Schoeni Theatre located at 45200 Little Lake St in Mendocino, CA. (at the corner of Little Lake and Kasten streets).

About The Play

We meet Diane, played by the indomitable Ricci Dedola, a permaculture butch gardener who possesses supernatural abilities owing to her true identity—the Greek god Dionysus. Diane has changed form to return to the contemporary world to gather mortal followers in order to restore the Earth to its natural state. Hilariously, Diane lands in a New Jersey suburban cul-de-sac where she recruits four ordinary housewives as her disciples. “In this Obie-winning comedy with a twist, Pulitzer Prize finalist Madeleine George pens a hilarious evisceration of the blind eye we all turn to climate change and the bacchanalian catharsis that awaits us, even in our own backyards.” — Kendall Weinrecke, Vassar College

Alongside Ricci Dedola is a stellar cast of local actors including Pamela W. Allen, Terilynn Epperson, Nikki Traber and Bryn Glassey, as the quartet of unsuspecting New Jerzey housewives. Director Willo Hausman (MTC’s popular Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) adds a visionary touch which infuses George's witty script with energy, creativity, and a fresh perspective, ensuring a memorable theatrical experience for all attendees. Hurricane Diane’s imaginative scenery is co-designed by veteran MTC designer, Diane Larson, and newcomer H. Gealey. The stage is awash with a spacious painted background which conjures the mystical world of the play. The housewives float in and out of time and place, entering and exiting through lacy French doors that lead inside to a single kitchen island that represents the cookie cutter architecture of their suburban homes. All this is illuminated by the brilliant lighting design of Steve Greenwood and a contemporary soundscape by Ken Krauss. The women’s clever costumes are designed by San Francisco Bay Area designer, Morganne Newson, in her first design for MTC.

Don't miss out on this exceptional and unique theatrical experience brought to life by a talented local cast and crew. Hurricane Diane is sponsored by Mendocino Cookie Company.

For ticket information and showtimes, please visit www.mendocinotheatre.org or contact the box office at (707) 973-4477.

For press inquiries, interviews, or additional information, please contact: Amanda Cruise , Marketing and Outreach Specialist, marketing@mendocinotheatre.org.

About Mendocino Theatre Company:

Mendocino Theatre Company is a renowned local theater group dedicated to bringing quality theatrical productions to the Mendocino community. With a commitment to artistic excellence and cultural enrichment, Mendocino Theatre Company continues to delight audiences with diverse performances that inspire, entertain, and provoke thought.

Dates: September 19 - October 13

Days & Times: Thursday, Friday, Saturday at 7:30 PM; Sundays at 2:00PM

Where: Helen Schoeni Theatre, 42500 Little Lake Street, Mendocino, CA 95460

Director: Willo Hausman

Cast: Ricci Dedola, Pamela W. Allen, Bryn Glassey, Niki Traber and Terilynn Epperson

Ticket prices $15-$30; $50 for Gala wine and food Opening night.

Contact: Amanda Cruise by Email at: marketing@mendocinotheatre.org

GRACE HUDSON MUSEUM/SUN HOUSE & WILD GARDENS:

“Toronado” was featured in the 1996 Grace Hudson Museum show “Color, Clay & Cambodia: Liden, Magruder & Knight.” Mac Magruder represented the clay portion of the exhibit with his fantastical ceramic creations, many of which reflect his work on the family ranch.

Although Mac has always loved clay, he has also been frustrated by the fragility and the bottom heaviness of ceramic sculpture. In order to help his pieces become less base-oriented, he began using armatures and other frameworks. A metal rod inside this piece provides structural support.

Mac has always loved clay’s versatility and often incorporated other materials into his pieces. He has also always wanted to sculpt more with metal and other media. Now, in our upcoming show, “30 Years On: Liden, Magruder & Knight,” opening September 11, Mac has achieved this. The results are whimsical creations that explore deeper issues.

TEACH-IN ON PALESTINE SEPT 20 & 21

Mendocino For Palestine is hosting a teach-in

Films, Workshops, Panels, Speakers

Sept. 20th - 21st

Caspar Community Center, Caspar, CA

(Tom Wodetski)

CITY OF UKIAH CLIMATE ACTION COMMUNITY WORKSHOP TO BE HELD ON 9/26/24

The City of Ukiah is pleased to announce an interactive and bilingual community workshop to take place on Thursday, September 26th, at the Ukiah Valley Conference Center (UVCC) to aid the City in its development of a Climate Action Plan (CAP) and enhance community awareness.

The purpose of the September 26th workshop is to solicit feedback from the community regarding recommendations for future climate action strategies. Whether this means expanding local incentives for electric vehicles and solar power, planting more trees, and/or phasing out natural gas-run appliances, the City wants to hear from residents regarding what strategies the City should prioritize for future action.

"In 2022, our community asked the Ukiah City Council to adopt a climate emergency declaration here in Ukiah and now, just two years later, the City is working to develop strategies for urgent climate action. I commend the City's efforts to engage in a meaningful way with the community and I encourage everyone who desires a habitable planet for our descendants to come out on September 26th and participate," said Crispin Hollinshead, Ukiah resident and environmental advocate.

Event: Climate Action Community Workshop

Date & Time: September 26th, 2024, 05:00 PM - 6:30 PM

Location: Ukiah Valley Conference Center, 200 South School Street

Details: Light Refreshments, Spanish Translation, and On-Site Childcare Services to Be Provided

Ukiah residents are encouraged to participate. This workshop will be hosted in-person.

Please visit the City's website at https://cityofukiah.com/climate-resilience/ to learn more about the City's ongoing efforts to address the climate emergency, and follow the City of Ukiah's Facebook page to stay informed of future events and developments: https://www.facebook.com/cityofukiah

For more information, please contact: Blake Adams, Chief Resilience Officer, City of Ukiah at badams@cityofukiah.com

CALTRANS & THE ALBION BRIDGE REPLACEMENT

Editor,

I encourage people to participate in the Caltrans public comment period for its plans to replace the historic Albion River Bridge. I have heard from many people who would like to see a new bridge and many more who would like to save the old bridge. Our electeds have been silent and none have appeared at the two public meetings on this. What’s being lost sight of is that the community in arguing over yes or no has not been negotiating for the best outcome. If the bridge is replaced as planned, it will be the focal point of the community for at least a century Caltrans has changed its approach during the 17 years I have been following this. They are no longer negotiating, but that could change if people ask them to, or if electeds get involved at some point. Fort Bragg activists defeated Caltrans twice and forced more to grant a sidewalk for public access and better railings. But if you don’t comment during the legal comment period don’t expect anything. That’s what happened in the Willits Bypass project. The protest came mostly AFTER the public comment period ended and thus had much less legal standing. Some people have questions about the duration of the Jack Peters Creek Bridge upgrade. But Caltrans did pretty much what the public asked during the public comment period and a Zoom meeting The public asked for very little. We didn’t argue for a one-year schedule, so it's two years. Sidewalks all the way to Mendo would have been a reasonable request, but nobody asked. It is also appropriate to comment on the combined impact of replacing both the Salmon Creek and Albion River Bridge over the next decade or decades. If you don't ask questions and lobby for what you want for your community, be it the new bridge they are offering, a better bridge, or keeping the historic wooden bridge during the legal comment period, you can’t really cry about it later.

The documents to comment on are at the official state website: www.albionriverbridgeproject.com

Also read the Albion River Stewards site, with reports by experts that contradict Caltrans: https://savehighway1.org/

Here are my comments I sent to Caltrans:

My name is Frank Hartzell. I am a freelance writer who lives in Cleone, CA.

As a reporter, I don’t normally comment on environmental documents myself, leaving that to the parties. But the Albion Bridge documents here lack the specifics I need to do a report. Caltrans does not seem to be negotiating in any way with the community or offering them any chance to input or to negotiate for public access to the beach, longer sidewalks or detailed mitigations of environmental and economic impacts. I ask questions about these matters. I will not get into the question of whether the bridge should be replaced or not, just areas that the massive 2500-plus pages of documents seemed to have paved over with generalities and boilerplate material.

I would like to follow all these questions through the process and be able to find where they were read and answered or deemed irrelevant or whatever. How do I do that? I think an explanation of how those of us who have given input can follow our questions can be put in the executive summary. Can Caltrans do this?

Will Caltrans extend the sidewalks to Albion Ridge Road up to the post office and down to the river from there? Why is Caltrans not creating a sidewalk on at least one side of the Road from the new road at Albion River Inn up to Albion Post Office, then also all the way down to Salmon Creek Bridge and up the other side to Navarro Ridge Road? Then people could walk all the way through this village that Caltrans will be giving two new bridges at the end of the most massive bridge replacement project in local history and in much of the state- two giant bridges being replaced at once.

How many years total will construction be going on with the replacement of Albion and Salmon Creek Bridges happening one after another?

Has Caltrans ever considered an inland bypass for both of these bridges? If so can you provide details?

Will Caltrans please provide comparative National Bridge Inventory numbers or other ratings comparing all the bridges of the Mendocino Coast from Navarro to Ten Mile? I would like to read the ratings of the entire structure, deck, superstructure, and the rest that these ratings normally provide.

From a reader- Will Caltrans commit to working with the unions to be employed to ensure a local hiring percentage?

From a reader- Would Caltrans consider tearing down and reconstructing the bridge for pedestrian use in another location if one could be found? Perhaps for use as a pedestrian bridge like the Pudding Creek trestle?

What changed? Caltrans negotiated with the community and presented a much wider range of bridges and talked about Reusing or refurbishing the old bridge, then suddenly, all discussion was off and Caltrans was basically offering the community nothing, no more public access as previously discussed, no inputs on colors of the bridge even, much less styles, no real upgrades to surrounding roads, no sidewalks beyond the bridge? Please explain what changed?

We’d like to see the bridge models for Albion Bridge before the community decides. Can that be done?

How much money does Caltrans have for bridge replacement on Highway 1 in its current budget cycle? Can Caltrans provide a list of bridges identified as needing to be replaced on Highway 1 from Mexico to Oregon? This would give the community and the media a perspective.

Is there a time limit on the funding for replacing the bridge? If so, please detail.

Public access- Caltrans will take the campground for 3 years but says it is unable to increase public access to the beach and river. I got the following answer from Manny Machado as to this question.

“There was a feasibility study completed in 2023 related to public access at the project location. The finding in the feasibility study was that “The Albion River Bridge project would not impact the existing access to Albion River if a new bridge were to be constructed. It is not practical to construct new public access routes and/or facilities to Albion River within the existing and proposed State right of way as part of the replacement bridge project.”

If this is the answer it seems Caltrans is in violation of the Coastal Commission's demand that any development increases public access, especially one like this with such a huge environmental impact. Will Caltrans go back and look at doing more for public access?

The public meeting that was held was strictly scheduled for 1.5 hours and Caltrans talked half the time. Their talking was mostly to give general information. Caltrans had an excellent panel of experts to answer questions, but they, like the public got almost no time to talk. When the meeting ended only a dozen people had asked questions and more than 30 hands were up.

There is a video to review.

Does Caltrans maintain now this was a sufficient opportunity to take public input? Would Caltrans consider scheduling a second meeting with the public in a larger place, with more time, and when the state has actual specifics to offer the public? Could you do this after you have chosen the alternative?

It was difficult to envision the bridge from the online-only presentation of it. This will be the anchor for this small community for a century. What will it look like?. In the past models have been shown and large drawings on paper presented. The computer rendition didn't allow me to see much of anything specific, like how much sun a wider bridge will look from the narrow beach below. Or even anything different to envision. To me, this bridge is being chosen in the dark by Caltrans with pretty much zero community input. Will you go back and involve the community more? Can we see the model of your alternatives in person? Can we be shown what the bridge will look like from the beach?

Caltrans did promise to consider both replacing and renovating. I would agree with Norbert Dahl that the environmental documents need to include a full look that you must have done, not simply the summary appendix. This info must have been gathered beyond what we have. Will Caltrans add it in?

Caltrans' statements about eelgrass at the meeting were quite surprising. Caltrans should review the video. Eel grass was described as being important to “fish”. I have been following extensive research about eelgrass over the past few years. I have included eel grass mapping that shows the Albion River has a much better eel grass resource than the Noyo or Big River. Will Caltrans present a better description of what it will do to mitigate eel grass damage? Perhaps doing outside that river to other rivers?

Will Caltrans provide an estimate of the cost of removing the old bridge to a dump? By that I mean proof that Caltrans has checked with a disposal facility that will accept this much wood and the type of wood shown. Can Caltrans provide a dollar estimate of the disposal cost and proof that it can be disposed of/ Such as a letter from a disposal facility?

If this wood is accepted anywhere pretty much, and as I was told it is low-grade toxic waste, will Caltrans consider reusing or recycling the bridge as a local museum or a smaller bridge? Being the last wooden highway bridge the community might wish for an opportunity to have something like London Bridge in Arizona. Will you ask them and help if desired?

If not, will Caltrans consider doing something more for the historic status as the state demands you do? The measures in the enviro documents seem very slim and much less than was offered in the past. For example, local people would love to have that wood and perhaps Caltrans could hello create a museum. If it is the type of wood the EIR describes (basically copper-treated wood like I have in my fence out back) will it use some of the proven technologies (according to studies I have read) to remediate the toxic on-site or somewhere for community use?

With no motels or other accommodations in Albion, will Caltrans do something to provide accommodations for its work crews? As this will happen in the summer, hotels and motels in Mendo and Fort Bragg are already full. Since Caltrans will have workers on the two bridge sites for ?? 10 ?? years will Caltrans contribute to a housing effort, such as a city effort for workforce housing, perhaps in exchange for a block of motel rooms?

How toxic is the wood? The documents don't give enough detail, apparently because Caltrans is not considering anything but taking the bridge to the dump. But this is a historic bridge and the wood could be reused if Caltrans could resent more on the toxicity. One would guess that most of the toxins have leached out in 84 years of sun. True? Can you find out under your obligations to deal with historic structures? Or if more toxic than we have been led to believe, what risks does the wood present to workers and the environment? Can you provide more detail?

Why is Caltrans saying there are 5 options when the DEIR and other docs Caltrans has offered clearly negate the bridge being in the spot where the existing bridge is?

Would Caltrans consider going back to proposed bridges from the 2011-2016 time frame and using some of the more specific and less boilerplate environmental and economic documents presented at that time? It seems the community and myself as a reporter have very little to go in these documents despite their length.

The Albion Bridge Stewards have more than 10 comment templates for people who want to comment about a certain concern, such as the noise the project will provide. The template gives the writer a start on the issue chosen. Each one does focus on saving the historic bridge.

I, Frank Hartzell am happy to be ccd on any and all comments sent to Caltrans, for the files and future stories. frankhartzell@gmail.com If you google my name and Albion River Bridge you will see several articles in the MendoVoice with more info.

Submit Your Comments to Caltrans

Send comments via postal mail to:

Liza Walker, Eureka Office Chief

Caltrans North Regional Environmental

1656 Union Street

Eureka, California 95501

Submit comments via email to: albionbridge@dot.ca.gov

Frank Hartzell

Fort Bragg

ONE OF THE HARDEST RESTAURANTS TO REACH IN CALIFORNIA; ALSO WORLD FAMOUS.

by Anh-Minh Le

After miles of no cell reception and few other vehicles on the road, a row of parked cars confirmed our arrival at Harbor House, the two-star Michelin restaurant in the tiny town of Elk.

Approximately three hours north of San Francisco, Harbor House — which dates back to 1916 and has 11 guest quarters — is perched on a bluff overlooking the Mendocino coast, with access to a private cove. Much of its identity is rooted in the environs, enticing diners, as well as staffers who have made a life for themselves in this remote corner of California. It is not always easy. Sourcing ingredients can be tricky. When things break, repairs may take months. And harsh weather can cause power outages. But for the small group who keeps it running, seclusion is preferred, even sought out.

Prior to landing at Harbor House three years ago, sous chef Sam Miller-Hicok had relocated from Chicago to another remote place with a famed fine dining establishment: Lummi Island, Washington. He was enamored by the idyllic locale but, unfortunately, not the restaurant that had brought him there.

Miller-Hicok left the restaurant and took a job at a pizza joint — the only other real dining spot on Lummi. As he contemplated his next career move, a friend who was a beverage director at Harbor House suggested that Miller-Hicok check it out.

“I really loved Washington,” he recalled. “I came down here, and it was the same kind of feeling. It was beautiful — the redwoods, the forest, the ocean.”

Today, Miller-Hicok resides in a cabin amid redwood trees. “When I lived in Chicago, I’d fall asleep to sirens and noise,” he said. “Now, the quiet is really nice. And there’s no light pollution, so you can see the moon and the stars.”

Professionally, it has been a good fit, too. “There aren’t many restaurants in places like this, out in the middle of nowhere, doing the kind of food that I like to cook,” he said, pointing to the local and sustainable products and tasting menu.

“I think we’re providing an experience that a lot of other restaurants don’t want to or can’t do,” he continued.

A ‘Magical’ Place

In addition to herbs and edible flowers that are cultivated onsite, about 20 miles south, Harbor House has its own farm, allowing for variety and quality control of its produce. And proximity to the Pacific accounts for two distinct ingredients: seawater and sea vegetables.

In the kitchen, buckets labeled “ocean” hold seawater collected to make salt. Proffering a tray of white crystalline flakes, executive chef Matthew Kammerer declared, “No one else is doing that.” Indeed, it is a unique undertaking. “Our remote location provides pristine waters, free of city pollution or runoff that could add unwanted tastes or flavors,” he explained.

Neighboring coves are also foraged for sea vegetables — such as feather boa, kombu, wakame, nori and rainbow leaf — which are cleaned, dried and incorporated into sourdough, butter and more.

Last November, Mario Lopez, a former assistant general manager with Chicago’s Alinea Group, came in for dinner. At the time, he was planning a relocation — likely to the East Coast.

“The trip out was pretty magical,” he said. “After spending nine years in Chicago, which is a beautiful city, I was ready to find something more connected to nature.”

A few weeks later, he returned to stage at Harbor House. In January, he moved to the area. And in February, he started his job as captain in the 20-seat restaurant, where he especially enjoys the camaraderie of working on a small team that includes eight on the service side and seven cooks.

“Here, there is a level of needing to wear many hats and always being on your toes,” Lopez said. “Everything from setup to breakdown becomes a group effort, where everyone’s participation is key.”

On a recent afternoon, Miller-Hicok discussed squash blossoms with Harbor House farmer Amy Smith, who joined the team in 2021. A few hours later, I savored a delicious new dish featuring the flowers, filled with halibut mousse.

After dining and staying at Harbor House last fall and then returning in July, I’m lobbying my husband to make this our special occasion restaurant (it isn’t a tough sell). Sure, places near our home in the Bay Area have more stars and are way more convenient, but Harbor House offers a singular experience that goes beyond the “excellent cooking” that two Michelin stars signify.

Its ever-changing scenery and $325 tasting menu are dictated by nature, so each visit captures a moment in time. And since there is only one seating per night, the table is yours for the entire evening — unlike other esteemed restaurants where service can feel rote and rushed. That can leave a bad taste, no matter how exquisite the food.

Growing Star Power

Harbor House is the vision of Kammerer, 35, who oversees the restaurant, hotel and farm. A decade ago, he began outlining his ambitions in a journal. “I wanted a small inn, somewhere remote, near the ocean, where I can grow food,” he said.

His wish list drew on past stints — restaurants in Australia that harvested from their gardens and the coast, plus a restaurant in remote Belgium with a handful of guest rooms. More recently, he was executive sous chef of Saison in San Francisco, which had three Michelin stars during his tenure.

After exploring Washington, Oregon and California, Kammerer targeted Mendocino for his own venture. Back then, Harbor House was in the midst of a four-year renovation.

Its main Craftsman-style building, which contains the restaurant and six guest rooms, was constructed in 1916 by Goodyear Redwood Company to show off the beauty of its wood. It later became a private residence, and in the 1950s, it was converted into an inn, with rates including breakfast and dinner. Five standalone cottages offer additional accommodations.

When Kammerer first heard about Harbor House, it was shut down and fenced off. He sent a cold email and got a reply an hour later. He met with Edmund Jin — who purchased the property with his wife, Eva Lu, in 2005 — and shared his ideas. Without ever cooking a meal for the owners, Kammerer was brought on board.

Harbor House reopened in May 2018. In leaving San Francisco, Kammerer figured he was done with stars. But in 2019, the Michelin Guide expanded to the entire state.

That year, Harbor House earned one star. Kammerer was also a James Beard semifinalist for best chef in the West and named one of 2019’s best new chefs by Food & Wine magazine.

The next year, the restaurant garnered a Michelin green star for its eco-friendly practices. In 2021, it was elevated to two Michelin stars. With this year’s introduction of hotel ratings, the inn was recognized with one Michelin key. The buzz just keeps growing.

In fact, diners share a common sentiment, expressed nightly to Kammerer and his team: Why doesn’t Harbor House have three Michelin stars? I wondered this myself. It is arguably the most exciting splurge-worthy restaurant in California that many folks have never heard of. (In 2023, Kammerer was once again a James Beard best chef semifinalist).

Nature Gives — And Sometimes Takes Away

In Point Arena, at the 320-acre Harbor House Ranch, Smith farms one acre. Most of the land is leased to others, including WildHeart Farm, which relies on regenerative agriculture and supplies beef and chicken to the restaurant.

Smith spent six years at St. Helena’s three-Michelin-starred Restaurant at Meadowood before coming to Harbor House. (She also did a summer stint at the U.S. Antarctic research station, so is no stranger to secluded living.) Everything she grows appears on the menu. A kohlrabi dish was presented alongside a glorious example of the vegetable, its large leafy stalks sprouting from a softball-sized bulb.

Kammerer “tends to work around what is available, which lends a certain freedom I can build into the crop plan,” Smith said.

She grew midnight black fava beans specifically to dry on the stalk, where they turn a deep purple. “The exciting thing is I’ve never encountered this,” Kammerer said, pulling up a photo of the almost-black beans on his phone. “I showed it to my team in the kitchen. I’m like, ‘Let’s start to think about what we can do with this.’”

The amount of produce derived elsewhere varies seasonally. Currently, citrus and maitake mushrooms are purchased.

While Kammerer tries to source nearby, quality and sustainability are also priorities. Sometimes, supply is a hurdle (Mendocino lacks a meat-processing plant). He gets pork from Stemple Creek Ranch and squab from Devil’s Gulch Ranch, both in Marin.

Most of the seafood comes from a fisher in Fort Bragg, though the restaurant has had a relationship with Monterey Abalone Company since day one. In July, Kammerer began working with Fort Bragg’s Pacific Rim Seafood to buy purple sea urchins, which devour kelp that is essential to the ecosystem.

“At the end of the day, this is a community project for me,” he said.

Hence, tableware ceramics by Cliff Glover in Albion and steak knives by neighbor and blacksmith Chris Shook. Atop tables fabricated with wood from a naturally felled local tree, chopsticks rest on fragments of abalone shell from the cove below.

While there is undoubtedly a romance to it all, of course there are challenges and inconveniences, too. For Lopez, it’s not unheard of to drive two hours for a haircut. Miller-Hicok sorted out how to fix his washing machine himself, as scheduling a swift repair was not happening. The Harbor House generator has been broken for a year, and Kammerer’s service calls have gone unanswered.

Winter is marked by violent storms and power outages. Since Smith’s greenhouse requires power for the water pump, she always has watering cans and buckets on hand.

In February, storms resulted in a loss of power and closure. The top priority was safely evacuating guests, including making sure their routes weren’t flooded. Thanks to a community center with a generator, Harbor House was able to contact reservation holders to cancel or rebook. Perishable food was shuffled to another site with refrigeration.

“Having to educate your staff on disaster preparedness is something I never thought I’d have to do — whether that’s wildfires, floods or power outages,” Kammerer said.

It comes with the territory, literally. “You have to let go and realize that the weather and nature are in control,” he added. “If it rains for two weeks straight and guests cancel or you struggle to find products, you just need to keep going and learn how to pivot.”

(SFgate.com)

HARBOR HOUSE IN THE NEWS

Leonor Heller (Coast Chatline): sfgate.com/food/article/michelin-starred-calif-restaurant-thriving-19667021.php

Marco here.

I looked up the Harbor House Inn. Here, from their website: "Our In-Room dinner, $150 per person + tax and gratuity. Lunch, $135 per person + tax and gratuity." So, close to $400 for one dinner for two.

I looked at the pictures of the food. I'm sure it's nice, but I prefer the even more famous Jenny's Giant Burger in Fort Bragg, just north of the Church of the Immaculate Bowling Ball, where the same money /counting and including/ a fair tip is a whole year's worth of monthly dinners for two: two Giant Burgers w/cheese and lettuce and onions and everything, incl. extra pickles, two deals of fries (all the ketchup you need, right there), and milkshakes. You can visit what's left of Glass Beach, take a walk on the haul road and the beach past it, and sit down and eat a big perfect hamburger at a table out in the best air on Earth. And if it's raining or blowing your hair into your eyes you can sit inside.

Marco McClean

FORT BRAGG GARDEN CLUB invites one and all to the Fall Garden Fair on Saturday, October 5, 10 am to 3 pm at the First Presbyterian Church parking lot at 367 South Sanderson Way in Fort Bragg. Plants for sale will include native perennials, fall and winter vegetable starts, and succulents. Enjoy great deals on gently used garden tools, pots, and books. Learn about fall and winter gardening tips while sipping a cup of hot cider. Visit the craft table and take home a packet of wildflower seeds. Raffle prizes that appeal to gardeners will be available, and all proceeds will support the Garden Club’s community fund.

ED NOTES

‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is the single most moronic film I’ve seen since “Bill and Coo,” an epic I was dragged to as a child, circa 1950. Bill and Coo were talking parakeets, ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ is talking cretins, but still recommended by enviros of the dimmer sort.

The subject is global warning, kind of, which results in an overnight quick freeze of the northern hemisphere. As New York City is simultaneously hit by serial tsunamis, overnight millions of people become multi-ethnic ice cubes, all of it reported by Fox News whose logo appears constantly on screen in all kinds of contexts because Rupert Murdoch owns the Fox Network and the movie, basically a story about a cast of imbeciles who set out to save us from ourselves.

But it’s too late.

Gringolandia is now subject to such severe weather it is rendered uninhabitable, not that there are not enough freeze-dried or parboiled survivors left to make a go of the climatically volatile America. If the sudden freezes don’t get our citizens, the high tides and the tornadoes will. (The Day After Tomorrow was probably very popular outside the United States.)

The sole opportunity for something interesting to happen in the movie occurs near the end when our president freezes to death trying to get out of popsicle-ized White House, and his successor, made up to resemble Dick Cheney, orders Americans to haul ass south for the border.

In real life, millions of our fellow citizens fleeing apocalyptic climate change would have been turned back at San Ysidro by the Mexican Army. “Tough tamales, gringos. You bastards think you’re going to get into the warm weather after what you’ve done to us all these years?” But in this thing, the Mexicans are happy as hell to take on two hundred and fifty million of US as President Cheney advises Americans to hit the road for Mexico and points south for “what we used to call the Third World.”

Nice bit of racism in that line, but it’s read off by the Cheney figure without so much as a hint of irony. 'What we used to call the Third World!' The gringos have arrived so you folks just got promoted to the First World!

If you’re thinking of watching The Day After Tomorrow, I hope I've ruined it for you. But if you're determined, here’s the story line: Dennis Quaid and a Scotsman are the only two scientists in the world who understand why LA is suddenly besieged by serial tornadoes. Nobody will listen to the only two guys who know that the deep freeze is next. Quaid’s son and the kid’s love interest, both of whom are beyond vapid, are first stranded by tidal waves sweeping clean over the Big Apple and, when the high tides freeze over in 15 minutes, the love bugs hole up in the New York Public Library with exactly one black street person, the street guy’s dog, and a bunch of generically presentable white people. (More racism, but who’s counting at this point?)

When the kid gets real cold, sweetie pie saves him from hypothermia via, you guessed it! a prolonged round of rubbsies, solemnly explaining that as a high school honor student she’d learned in her advanced placement physiology class that a freezing man can quickly be thawed out if a naked 19-year-old girl with large breasts and bee stung lips dry humps him in front of a roaring fire.

Everyone outside the library had frozen to death early on, and not for lack of nymphets either. It was real cold, colder than it had ever been anywhere on earth, even way the hell up north at Santa’s workshop. The New Yorkers who’d frozen to death had been too damn dumb to retreat to the top floor of the library when the water rose above their armpits. Darwin got ‘em.

When the big waves froze and every living thing died outside the library except a pack of wolves, Quaid’s kid and a couple of his underwear ad buddies fight them off, while botox lips and the nice white people inside the library feed their life-saving fire in the library’s huge, decorative fireplace with rare books. The black street guy and his dog, incidentally, never get close to the fire; they stand watch at the door, reporting on the latest catastrophe outside, like when an ocean liner becomes part of an iceberg on the front steps.

A skinny, effete-looking guy with big glasses — The Liberal Librarian — gives a speech about how he’ll freeze to death before he tosses the Gutenberg Bible into the fire. Who else besides skinny, effete guys with glasses read books or cares what happens to them? Obese football fans, that’s who, but no complications, no ironies were allowed into this filmic extravaganza.

Because the librarian is a librarian, he’s responsible for Western Civ’s key artifacts, and he draws the line at destroying he Gutenberg. (This movie is a lot more representative of Western Civ’s net accomplishment than the printing press, but there’s probably some dissent on the question, the issue being relative value in a value-free epoch.)

Meanwhile, Cheney-Quaid sets out on foot in sub-Arctic conditions to check on his son fighting the wolf pack. Dad says he wants to forgive the lad for flunking a high school math test. Most parents, of course, would settle for their kids not flunking drug and drunk driving tests, but we’re talking Nice People here, so these people are not only very nice people, so are their kids. “I’ve walked farther than this in the snow,” Quaid vows, as he sets out from on foot for a family values hike to Manhattan.

Mrs. Quaid is a doctor, occasionally assisted by an Asian woman whose hackneyed lines are leavened with timely references to Native American prophecies. My fellow movie goers I am here to tell you that no major ethnic group goes unrepresented! Mrs. Quaid, MD, looks very, very concerned and very, very compassionate. I could tell because her eyes got bigger and wetter the colder it got and the longer she was left behind in a frigid hospital ward with an 8-year-old leukemia patient while everyone else got into their LL Beans and highballed it for Ensenada and Sao Paolo.

Mrs. Q. and the bald kid are presented for no other reason than to demonstrate that the Quaids are double nice people, and Mrs. Q is triple nice. The emphasis throughout was on The Tragic Effect On Nice White People Caught Up In A Cataclysmic Event. I felt like laughing out loud a whole lot of times, especially when LA got wiped out, but I was in a mall theater surrounded by solemn viewers who seemed to think they were watching a documentary. Audible laughter while the end of the world was under consideration might have been severely misunderstood.

The only pertinent remark throughout occurred in an on-screen blurb at the end that said our fatso-watso ways of living were killing the planet, a statement of the obvious to everyone in the world except the Maga Cult. I was so upset by The Day After Tomorrow, as apocalyptic a viewing experience as I’ve ever had, that I walked briskly from the theater, pushed my way through the ambling double-wides thronging the mall, and strode directly to a shop specializing in negative food value items where I ordered myself a double bubble mayonnaised banana split.

MARSHAL CURATOLO of the fine Oakland book store, Walden Pond, writes: “We printed up a lot of Edna Sanders’ ‘Bahl Gorms in Boont’ (not the entire book) and gave them out to AVA regulars. Much glee and appreciation from them. Wouldn’t be surprised if the Chamber of Commerce receives some orders at 1976 prices.”

MR. CURATOLO’S REFERENCE is fleshed out by the National Observer of January 1976, whose piece on Mrs. Sanders recipe book begins, “O Frabjous Day! A Boontling tells how to bake doolsies by Daniel Henninger. Back about 1890, a group of young Californians living around Boonville in Mendocino County developed a language of their own called ‘Boontling.’ At first Boontling wasn’t much more than teenage slang, but it survived and develop into a private form of communication for about 500 people in the area. Recently, a retired California schoolteacher named Edna Sanders compiled a charming little cookbook using the Boontling language. ‘Before a meal could be prepared,’ Mrs. Sanders writes, ‘a huge jeffer (big fire) was built in the stove. This was bahl (good) on a frigid dee (cold day), but nonche (bad) when Old Sol (the sun) was high. Dames (women) would sprinkle dumplin’ dust (flour) in the oven. If it turned black the oven was too hot, when only slightly brown the oven was too cool, but if it turned a golden brown rather quickly, the oven was just right for the baking.’ The following Boontling recipes are from Mrs. Sanders’ cookbook,

Bahl Gorms In Boont (good eating in Boonville).

Broadie Pot Roast (beef):

4 or 5 lb pot roast of brodie (beef)

1 large onion, chopped

6 large carrots, sliced

2 turnips, sliced

4 boos halved (potatoes)

1 cup ruddy nebs (water)

1 bay leaf

Salt and pepper

1/2 cup celery, sliced

3/4 cup of fratti (wine)

Dust broadie with dumplin’ dust (flour). Sear carefully in melted suet.

Place in Dutch oven, salt and pepper, simmer gently on the stove until nearly done. Add the rest of the ingredients and more ruddy neds if needed. Cook until done.”

And on to Christmas doolsies (cookies) and ganos (apple) pudding…

ALL GOOD THINGS MUST END

by Carol Dominy

[John and Elizabeth Carlson, proprietors of the City Hotel, raised their twin daughters and son in the hotel along with John Kupp, Elizabeth’s son from her first marriage. As the children grew, they helped out with the hotel’s operation.]

Daughters Elizabeth (Bessie) and Catherine (Katie) managed the hotel dining room but that did not interrupt their educations at the Convent of Notre Dame in San Jose, nor the many parties with their friends during vacations. On their [17th] birthdays in April 1877, the editor of the Weekly West Coast Star ran this account: "Talk about your sociables, but didn't they, young and old, have a sociable time at the Misses Katie and Bessie Carlson's birthday party last Monday evening. There were 25 ladies in attendance and about double the number of gentlemen. All enjoyed themselves in the highest degree. A luncheon was served about 11 o'clock, during which time a pleasant hour was passed, and then dancing was resumed. It was near 2 o'clock when all dispersed, all well pleased, and all wishing the young ladies many happy birthdays.”

In 1882 the young women were married to two prominent young Mendocino men. Bessie married Captain Henry Nelson, and Katie married James Nichols. Nelson purchased the Wilson Hotel property on Main Street in 1888, and James Nichols was the partner in the general merchandise business of Jarvis and Nichols at the time of his marriage. Four years later, in March, 1886, John Edwin “Eddie” Carlson married Elizabeth Riordan. John Kupp, Elizabeth Kupp Carlson's son, had married Helen Green on July 13, 1873. He was several years older than his Carlson half-sisters and half-brother.

The City Hotel water tower still stands at the west end of Main Street. (Photographer: Robert Dominy)

In the Beacon of September 9, 1882 a small notice announces the senior Carlson's retirement: "J. E. Carlson has left hotel keeping, leased (the) City Hotel and stables and sold the stock to his son Eddie and Mr. Kupp.”

The new lessees continued the reputation of the hotel dining room, as this notice attests: "The Carlson Hotel also known as the City Hotel reported that on July 4th, 1884, 350 guests were served and 150 horses were stabled. Curried lamb stew will be served every Sunday.”

The elder Carlson was 57 years old now and a widower; Mrs. Carlson had died in November of 1880 after being plagued with rheumatism during her last years. His daughters had left home after their marriages, and only Eddie was left to manage the hotel with his half-brother John Kupp.

[The hotel thrived under John and Eddie’s management, but J. E. Carlson once again became the innkeeper following John Kupp’s death in 1887 and Eddie’s decision to move to San Francisco. In 1890, Carlson again leased out the property, but the hotel never recovered. In 1894, the Bank of Mendocino foreclosed on the property, which was later purchased by William Heeser.

J. E. Carlson died at the San Francisco home of his son on April 16, 1899 and was buried in Mendocino's Evergreen cemetery. The Reverend John S. Ross officiated at the burial service.]

Raymond Rasmussen took care of the hotel property after the Carlsons relinquished it. It is reported that in its final active days the hotel was adapted into apartments. Miles Paoli remembers that his father, Rafaello Paoli, told him that in 1905 the family lived in the Carlson Hotel for three or four months.

And finally in the Mendocino Beacon was the account on February 3, 1917: "The old City Hotel building which recently came into the possession of the Mendocino Lumber Co. through an exchange of property between the Company and A. A. Heeser is being dismantled by the Company.”

Only the water tower stands as a memorial to this once imposing edifice.

Part 3 of 3; excerpted and annotated from “Mendocino’s Hotels & Saloons,” by Dorothy Bear and Beth Stebbins. Mendocino Historical Review, June, 1980. Part 1; Part 2.

(kelleyhousemuseum.org)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, September 5, 2024

MATTHEW FOSTER, Willits. Attermpt to record false or forged documents, perjury.

BRIGETTE GRIBI, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

LAMONST JONES JR., Ukiah. Paraphernalia, unspecified offense.

DONALD MADRIGAL, Ukiah. Domestic battery.

MICHAEL MORELAND, Woodland/Ukiah. DUI.

JOSHUA NEESE, Ukiah. Under influence, county parole violation.

LACEE ROSS, Clearlake/Ukiah. Stolen property.

FATHER CHARGED:

The father of the 14-year-old accused of killing four people at his Georgia high school was arrested and charged on Thursday with two counts of second-degree murder in connection with the attack, the state’s Bureau of Investigation said.

The father, Colin Gray, 54, was also charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and eight counts of cruelty to children, officials said at a news conference on Thursday night.

The charges against Mr. Gray are “directly connected with the actions of his son and allowing him to possess a weapon,” Chris Hosey, the bureau director, said at the news conference. He declined to provide details, including what evidence had given the authorities probable cause to charge Mr. Gray in the attack at Apalachee High School in Winder, Ga.

— NYT

NUMBER OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS in the US by year…

2024: 45
2023: 82
2022: 79
2021: 73
2020: 22 (Pandemic school closures)
2019: 52
2018: 44
2017: 42
2016: 51
2015: 37
2014: 36
2013: 26
2012: 13
2011: 15
2010: 13
2009: 22
2008: 18

STATES with the highest per capita school shootings since 2008

Louisiana: 32 shootings; 0.69 shootings per 100,000 people
Maryland: 32 shootings; 0.52 shootings per 100,000 people
Alabama: 25 shootings; 0.50 shootings per 100,000 people
Tennessee: 33 shootings; 0.48 shootings per 100,000 people
Mississippi: 13 shootings; 0.44 shootings per 100,000 people
Arkansas: 13 shootings; 0.43 shootings per 100,000 people
North Carolina: 41 shootings; 0.41 shootings per 100,000 people
Georgia: 41 shootings; 0.38 shootings per 100,000 people

19 year old SP4 David Webster MacLurg. KIA September 27, 1970

REHAB UPDATE

by Paul Modic

Wow, two weeks since the hip replacement operation, and each day a delicious lunch is brought to me sitting in the recliner in front of the TV. I’ve been retrained to do the rest: make breakfast, cereal or eggs, and dinner, usually hummus and toast, sometimes with muesli and yogurt dessert. (I’ve also starting putting on the ice packs, doing the dishes, and taking little walks out into the yard to gaze at my two little budding pot plants, talking with admiration at them.)

I have been bombarded with sugar these last two weeks, starting when my ride down to the hospital brought me an espresso milkshake, the sort of thing I’ve been vaguely depriving myself of for years, and at first I had a taste or two, then half of it, then put the big cup in the freezer. (Within an hour I was slopping the rest of it all over the big brownie I’d bought uptown earlier when getting into the surgery spirit.)

Then at the hospital I ate dessert everyday, even after breakfast, and here at home recovering, my “coach” has made apple crisp twice, at my request, but also every day or so drops a cookie or pastry off on the counter, a muffin other days, and in the freezer I discovered an organic ice cream sandwich.

I feel bad about all the sugar, my next test results are going to be haywire, and I’m in no position to exercise it off for the next few months, now slowly making the rounds through the house with walker, grabber, and dressing tool. (I am helpless to resist whichever fancy cookie she puts out for me.)

I’m really not used to all this unnecessary sugar but what to do? I am weak, like the general population which couldn’t resist corn whiskey in the 1800’s and corn products today, as obesity became rampant during the last forty years of the “super-size me” generation.

Yes, I’m reading, actually listening to, The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, all about how corn farming changed in the last century when agribusiness replaced the family farm, a very disheartening, albeit eye-opening, look at farming, economics, and fast food culture, with some mad cow disease mixed in. (Do you know the story of corn in our country? Fascinating and depressing, a wonder plant with hundreds of industrial uses developed in labs, including hundreds of processed foods.)

The cable switchover happened yesterday, I was content to abandon my usual TV diet and lose a lot of my regular channels (mind pabulum) because I didn’t want to pay $60 more a month, jettisoning cable news and sports and Comedy Central. But they all showed up anyway on the most basic cable, the cheapest way to watch the 49ers on Sunday.

I also ordered HBO for Bill Maher (no I don’t agree with everything he says, the guys got such a hard-on for Israel) and as entertainment background for when prepping or eating food. When I checked out the multiple HBO channels I found just shows that have been repeating for months, which I had no interest in even as filler for a few minutes, and decided to cancel and replace it with Netflix. (It took an hour or two to get the Netflix working and now I’m asking for suggestions from anyone who has favorites they want to share.)

I did it, had a glass of wine with lunch, and now I feel like a new man, oh yeah. I know, I quit drinking nearly two years ago, had six or seven drinks since then, learned that alcohol was actually not good for you, but as I’ve been off the oxycodone for nearly a week, and as the “coach” just brought me this delicious turkey pot pie, I figured why not, why not a glass of cheap red from Frey?

It was good, can you tell, I’m trying to channel this sweet little high to you right now, this high celebrating two weeks since my hip replacement, two weeks of ice and leg squeezers and exercises twice a day, oops, not gonna be twice today! (Yes I have been in party mode, smoked weed three out of the last four nights and am riding high.)

Before my coach, helper, care-giver left today, she bought me a load of all the boring healthy food I usually eat, hmm, might just eat some soup from the freezer first, before I launch myself back into my usual routine.

These days I’m supposed to move very slowly with little steps, no quick turns, no twisting, and always with the walker, the idea being always keep the new hip nestled peacefully in it’s bed of flesh, which will grow gradually into the metal (plastic?) ball joint until merged to totality.

The coach has been rather a killjoy trying repeatedly to get me to do everything correctly and a few days ago when she wasn’t looking I wandered away from my walker repeatedly. My walking started feeling lumpy and lopsided so I’m scared straight now, convinced it’s not just for safety but part of the healing process.

They have all these rules at the orthopedic department at the hospital, like don’t cross your legs at the ankle, or anywhere. I try it anyway and it feels so good, but I quickly uncross them. Even the steps have rules: going down it’s bad leg first, going back up it’s good leg first. (I call the hospital nurses desk every few days to get advice.)

I’m on my own now, first time in two weeks, not supposed to drive for two months, but if there was an emergency I could probably do it, shovel myself in there, it is an automatic.

THUNDER AND WOLVES: A short film by Eric Clow (2002)

In the early 2000's Eric Clow, a student at Middletown High School, entered a National History Day competition with a Short Film on the clash of three civilizations in Lake County -- The Natives, The Spanish and the Americans -- “Thunder and Wolves”.

It was a 2002 California History Society Multimedia Award winner.

It’s only ten minutes long, but it covers the whole sweep of early Lake County History.

Imagine you were in your family's tule house with your parents, siblings, cousins, uncles, aunts and grandparents. And a year later you were the only one left.

— Betsy Cawn, Lake County

MORE TREACHERY FROM THE PUC

Editor:

California utility companies, along with the California Public Utilities Commission, have systematically weakened rooftop solar owners’ ability to sell their excess energy back to the grid. A few years ago, many people financed their solar through that sell-back process. Now the utilities, in lockstep with the commission, have priced rooftop solar out of reach of most.

Yet a member of the CPUC wrote a letter to all the stakeholders, people who regularly criticize the commission for their disastrous anti-rooftop-solar rulings. She was wondering if the stakeholders knew why 13 California solar companies have gone out of business. I guess she forgot it was the commission’s fault.

She might have asked why 17,000 have lost their jobs, jobs that paid good salaries and, until the past couple years, helped make California a model for rooftop solar. But then again, I guess she forgot it was the commission’s fault.

I’m sure she also didn’t like hearing that she and her fellow commissioners have helped put 17,000 workers out of a job.

Jane Bender

Santa Rosa

THIS NEW LABEL IS MAKING WINE FOR ‘WHINY BABIES.’ WILL GEN Z DRINK IT?

by Esther Mobley

Notoriously, Generation Z — at least the segment of legal drinking age — is not that into wine. But maybe the twentysomethings would be, if wine came with friendship bracelets, peelable sticker labels and sassy merch.

That’s part of the premise behind Whiny Baby, the first wine brand I’ve encountered that markets explicitly to Gen Z, the group born between 1997-2012. Whiny Baby’s brightly colored, chaotic packaging is so unconventional, with crown caps on still wines and front-label descriptors like “tastes like fruit punch!”, that it almost feels as if it’s trolling the wine industry establishment.

“Whiny Baby offers a first impression with wine that the wine industry has failed to do,” said the brand’s founder, Jess Druey, who, at 27, is a Gen Z elder. Most wine feels intimidating to her cohort, she said, and she wants Whiny Baby to convey a more approachable message: “I’m not scary, I’m fun, I’m easy.”

Druey was working in video production for Red Bull’s marketing division in 2020 when she had a revelation in the Whole Foods wine aisle. She was about to go on a first date, and the guy had asked her to bring a bottle. “I had no clue what to buy. I had no idea what a varietal is,” said Druey. “I walked out that day like, ‘There’s a need in the industry.’”

A Google search for “how to create a wine company” yielded no helpful information, so Druey started calling around. Through a broker, she ended up finding some bulk wine from Gilroy. She bought it and repackaged it in 2022 under Whiny Baby, a name meant to poke fun at her generation’s reputation as attention-seeking “whiny babies.”

Making no claims to be a winemaker or a sommelier, Druey was more focused on the branding and business building than on what was in the bottle, especially at first. “I launched with a Cab and a Chardonnay, which is not exactly what Gen Z drinks,” Druey said. Even though the wine “was not the best quality,” she ended up “going viral on TikTok” and sold out quickly. That proved to her that “the need for this was apparent, even if the wine wasn’t there yet.”

She didn’t have to wait long for her big break. The McBride Sisters, an established and fast-growing wine company headquartered in Oakland, invested in Druey’s nascent venture and became co-owners of Whiny Baby. They connected Druey with their winemaker in Paso Robles, Amy Butler, who created the three inaugural Whiny Baby blends, which launched last September.

It’s been an eventful year. This spring, Druey competed on “Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars,” a reality show for food and drink entrepreneurs — and won. Not only did she take home a $250,000 prize, but the exposure also helped expand Whiny Baby’s distribution. Before it aired, Druey’s wines were sold in four states; now, they’re on shelves at BevMo!, Total Wine, Target and other stores in 27 states.

Those three wines ($17.99) are all sweet, light-bodied and tremendously fruity. Unwind White Blend (“tastes like fruity cocktail,” the label says) is Riesling, Chenin Blanc and Viognier. Obsessed Red Blend (“tastes like fruit punch”) is mostly Zinfandel and Merlot. OMG!?! Fizzy Rosé (“tastes like fruity fizz”) is Riesling, Muscat and Merlot, and very lightly carbonated.

Did I mention they’re sweet? To me, the wines taste cloying. But Druey argues they’re compelling gateways for new drinkers. When she holds informal focus groups in college towns, “with girls or guys who are kind of tastemakers in their community,” she said that “for a lot of them, it’s their first time doing a wine tasting.” (She’ll pair the wines with “girl dinner,” she said, like Hot Cheetos.)

“A lot of them say, ‘It’s my first time ever trying red wine,’ or ‘I thought I didn’t like red wine,’ until they try our red wine,” Druey said.

Whiny Baby seems to represent the gamification of the wine drinking experience. Underneath each bottle cap is one of 300 conversation prompts, which range from the innocuous (What’s your favorite holiday?) to the racy (What’s the weirdest place you’ve ever done the deed?). It’s as if a Snapple bottle were playing truth or dare.

Plastered all over the bottles, the website and the oversize t-shirts that Whiny Baby sells is a phone number that you’re encouraged to text or call. “Hey whiny baby, thank you for calling us and not your ex,” the outgoing message announces, inviting you to leave a voicemail. Druey said she gets hilarious memos every day.

Next up for Whiny Baby is an orange wine, made from Russian River Valley Gewurztraminer and Chenin Blanc. “It tastes like grapefruit juice,” Druey said. She’s created some graphics to educate her consumer base about what orange wine actually is. “When I started making wine, I thought that skin contact meant the winemaker was having skin contact,” she said. “A lot of my friends genuinely thought it came from oranges.”

Druey, who earned her level 1 certification from the Wine & Spirit Education Trust, said she still has a lot to learn about her industry. But she also maintains that her peers need someone like her to introduce them to such an opaque subject as wine. “I’m still not confident in the different styles and regions,” she said, “but what I think I am is a really good translator.”

The longer-term question: As Gen Z gains more wine fluency, will they eventually move beyond gateway wines — something that tastes less like fruit punch, and more like actual fruit?

Druey, in fact, may be getting to that point herself. “I love our wines. I drink them all the time,” she said. “But even my palate has started to develop and grow.”

WHY YOUR TEAM SUCKS 2024: SAN FRANCISCO 49ERS

by Drew Magary

Your team: San Francisco 49ers. And if you’ll indulge for just a moment, may I say … YOINK!

Your 2023 record: 12-5. NFC champs. Again. Super Bowl entrants. Again. Took a 10-point lead on Patrick Mahomes in the Super Bowl. Again. Blew that lead. Again. Again and again and again and again and again. This team was once a dynasty; now it’s a treadmill. The details change from year to year, but the end is always the same.

As for the 2023 details: These Niners spent the bulk of the regular season beating up on a parade of nobodies, some obvious (the Giants) and some eager to reveal themselves (Eagles, Cowboys). They suffered an uncharacteristic three-game losing streak in October to Cleveland, Minnesota and Cincinnati. Their Hall of Fame LT was hobbled for that Browns game and then inactive for the subsequent two, highlighting how fragile this supposed juggernaut really is.

But that tackle healed up, enough for San Francisco to win all but one meaningful game on the back half of the slate, and then to stage comeback victories against Green Bay and Detroit to win the NFC. They rolled into the Super Bowl as slight favorites over Kansas City, took their usual double-digit lead, and then …

The game ended right there. Yes, there was still drama on the back end, with the Niners taking the lead within the final two minutes, only for Mahomes & Co. to tie it right back up at the gun. San Francisco even got the ball first in overtime, mostly because they failed to remember that the NFL changed the playoff overtime format in 2022:

“Multiple San Francisco players said after the game that they were not aware that the overtime rules are different in the playoffs than they are in the regular season, and strategy discussions over how to handle the overtime period did not occur as a team. Defensive lineman Arik Armstead said he learned the details of the postseason rule when it was shown on the Allegiant Stadium jumbotron during a TV timeout after regulation.”

But these Niners were good enough, in theory, to overcome that brain fart. In fact, they drove all the way to the Kansas City 9-yard line on their opening possession of the extra period. That drive stalled out and ended in a field goal. Everyone knew what would happen next, and so it did:

For good measure, your best LB snapped his Achilles in that game while jogging out onto the field. It’s almost as if God doesn’t like you, 49ers. I wonder why that might be …

Your coach: Ah yes. Him.

That’s Kyle Shanahan, seen here doing his best impression of a man too old to be on TikTok. There is no Super Bowl lead that this man cannot relinquish, and yet he still reigns as not merely the best head coach in the NFC, but also the most influential one. The NFC really needs higher standards. Oh, and the man is a BRUTAL shadow GM. He still hasn’t been punished nearly enough for drafting Trey Lance, who became the James Wiseman of football. He just extended RB Christian McCaffrey at the exact wrong age (28) to give a back any job, let alone a highly paid one. And he pulled a Scott Pioli by installing cameras all over team headquarters, so that he can watch everyone in the building and, more important, so that they know they’re being watched. From our old friend Kalyn Kahler:

“Kyle has taken a lot from his dad’s career and applied it to his own, including watching over his players and coaches from a perch high atop the organization. … In 2020, COVID protocols forced teams to update their video technology and make every meeting virtually accessible. When players and coaches were allowed to meet in person again, Kyle kept using the Zoom feature. Now, he can speak in a meeting room from his own office simply by unmuting himself. If he’s not physically in the room, he can be listening in — and he pays close attention to the quarterbacks.”

Not creepy at all. I sure know that I like to work in a place where my boss is always watching me, potentially even if I’m jerking off in the disabled stall. Bill Belichick ran his little fiefdom in New England similarly. The difference there is that Belichick won things. Kyle hasn’t.

Of course, it’s not Kyle’s fault the Niners have turned into the definitive chokers of the 21st century, with seven NFC title game appearances in the past 13 years and zero titles to show for it. All of those high-profile f—kups were someone else’s fault. Super Bowl 47? Hey man, Kyle wasn’t even the coach then. 54? Kyle needed a REAL QB for that game, not Jimmy Pizza Boy Garoppolo. And this last Super Bowl? That one you can blame on a defense that was really good until they absolutely, positively needed to be. You can’t pin that on Kyle either. He’s the QB guy. That was all defensive coordinator Steve Wilks’ fault, for getting a little too reckless with his playcalls.

That means Wilks, who by some awful twist of fate has become a perennially useful scapegoat for the white men failing above him, is now gone. Your new DC is Nick Sorensen, and your new assistant head coach is this world-renowned success story:

Yep, it’s Brandon Staley. You guys are f—ked.

Your quarterback: Brock Purdy, who will remain one of the greatest underdog stories in NFL history right up until the moment San Francisco pays him. Purdy became an MVP candidate last season, which is the type of thing that makes you lose a bit of respect for the NFL in general. Nevertheless, Purdy is extremely good at his job, which is to execute Shanny’s offense the way that Shanny explicitly wants it executed: with short throws to open windows, so that the skill players can pile up infinite YAC. I don’t like the term “system quarterback” (no one does), but there’s bountiful evidence that Purdy’s greatest skill is taking what his coach gives him, with this stat serving as Exhibit A:

No, neither the comeback against the Packers nor the one against Lions broke this streak. Knock these guys down, and they don’t get back up.

Behind Purdy are Brandon Allen and Passtronaut Josh Dobbs. Keep those names in mind as we go into the regular season, because Purdy is small and because Shanny has a fetish for getting his own players hurt. He started Purdy in a preseason game this year with a backup O-line, so that the Saints’ first-team defense could tee off on him. He got Purdy destroyed in the 2022 NFC title game by having a backup TE block his blindside. And he ran Trey Lance on a QB power, only for Lance’s ankle to break apart like a Kit Kat. Iron breaking iron.

What’s new that sucks: Perhaps worried they’d have to overpay their wideout room, the Niners grabbed Ricky Pearsall in the first round of the draft, only for Pearsall to get shot in a robbery attempt this past weekend. When DE Nick Bosa learned that downtown San Francisco was the scene of that crime, he texted, “Told you so,” to everyone he knows.

Meanwhile, cap hell awaits. The Niners extended both CMC, LT Trent Williams, and WR Brandon Aiyuk recently, but they’ll still have to extend (or sever ties with) foundational pieces like LB Dre Greenlaw, CB Charvarius Ward, WR Deebo Samuel, TE George Kittle and Purdy down the line. The roster is already bleeding, with DT Arik Armstead, S Tashaun Gipson, rental EDGE Chase Young and DT Javon Kinlaw all bolting in the offseason. Those losses were survivable, given that San Francisco brought in a grab bag of free agents — DT Maliek Collins foremost among them — to keep the front seven big and mean. But you can hear the clock ticking, and it’s only fair to wonder if the Niners should’ve won it all sometime before 11:58.

The O-line is ranked 24th by PFF metrics, and that’s after Williams reports back to the team. I see reason to panic.

What has always sucked: The Niners have played in their All-Clad pan of a stadium for a tidy decade now, and you should go ahead and cleave this franchise’s history in two from that moment. The San Francisco 49ers played in a windswept ashtray and won Super Bowls like they were nothing at all. The Santa Clara 49ers are a political concern (the team packed a legion of sycophants into city hall so that it can hoover up local funds with impunity) that, as a side gig, doubles as Marv Levy’s Bills without the tragic aspects. Every time they have greatness in their hands, it gets YOINKED away. They win nothing because they deserve nothing.

And if you’re a younger fan of this team, you too deserve nothing. I’m sorry you never got to watch Joe Montana, or Jerry Rice, or Steve Young, or Terrell Owens before he became Football Patrick Beverley. But that’s not on us, crybaby. That’s on your power-mad coach, your spiritual Gruden of a GM, and your shrunken head of an owner. They sold you on a team that has long since expired. You should’ve read the fine print, but you didn’t. Tough s—t, f—karoos. Enjoy watching Brock Purdy get paid $75M AAV to be the second coming of Matt Cassel.

What might not suck: They’re the Super Bowl favorites according to the FTN almanac. Then again, what year aren’t they?

On Line Responses

Michael:

How the f—k do you not know the overtime rules for the Super Bowl?

Gordon:

I miss Jim Tomsula. He’s in a better place (Germany).

John:

Nothing we can do at this point except tip our hat and call Mahomes our daddy.

Matt:

Forgoing the Shanahan Experience (TM) is adding years back to my liver.

Tim:

The f—king nerve of this team to be this talented and to choke so extensively.

Dave:

TSA Clear, skip-the-line passes at amusement parks and ski resorts, not paying taxes, and the San Francisco 49ers: all things that give the wealthy yet one more opportunity to look down at the rest of us.

Colin:

The 2020s Niners are shaping up to be the 1990s Bills, and frankly Northern California deserves it.

Pascal:

Our offensive line consists of 36-year-old Trent Williams and four guys who are afraid to touch other people. I haven’t seen someone this into choking since Sasha Grey retired.

Kyle (not Shanahan):

Coming out of the 2-minute warning, 3rd and 5, with a game tied at 16-all. I was pleading with our head coach to do anything except call a straight forward quick pass. Instead, what happens? The most obvious all-slants pass pattern ever, a pass breakup, the clock stops, and Mahomes is given way too much time to do his Mahomes things.

Steve:

Steve Wilks has the situational awareness of a f—king cicada. What makes the loss even worse is that the winning touchdown went to a guy the Chiefs got off the Ross clearance rack, and the play was probably named after some deli meat Andy Reid shoves into his fat face twice a week.

Katie:

Look, I get it. People are going to want to punch me in the face for complaining about this team. I understand. I want to punch me in the face, too! But hooooly f—k, could we just finish for once? NOT somehow step on a rake in the last strides of the race? Come on. I don’t even have balls but they are more blue than that stupid Australian dog.

Patrick (not Mahomes):

I have no recollection of specific plays from the Super Bowl. All I can picture is Taylor Swift celebrating in her suite. It haunts me, like I’m Rambo having a Vietnam flashback.

Nick:

There is nothing more depressing than Kyle Shanahan calling a timeout — in overtime of the super bowl! — to stop Steve Wilks from running a prevent defense against Patrck Mahomes, all while Trent Williams was successfully predicting Andy Reid’s plays from the bench.

George Kittle was too busy telling jokes during the biggest game of his life to recover a fumble. F—k Trent Baalke forever.

Christian:

The 49ers will go 12-5 in 2024 and lose the Super Bowl because nobody bothered to call holding on the Chiefs while Nick Bosa’s head is chopped off at the neck by some s—tty-assed, 94th-ranked PFF guard. Jettison Mahomes and the Super Bowl officiating crews into the fiery depths of the sun.

Cindy:

If the 49ers stay with Purdy, I’m sure the team will make it to the playoffs for several more seasons. But I don’t think this team is actually winning any Super Bowls.

RR:

We’ve lived in San Francisco for decades. We have an old home with some windows from the 1930s that were cracked and wouldn’t open, so we recently decided to replace them. By city ordinance, we had to get custom wooden windows. Then they found “dry rot” near the windows which had to be repaired. So we spent literally the equivalent of a down payment for a brand new home for no change at all in our living conditions. We mortgaged our future for the same 1930s floor plan, the same old bathrooms and kitchen, and the same old janky electrical outlets. It feels nice to have some structural integrity, but what we were really left with after spending that ungodly sum of money are some windows that can open and a new coat of paint.

Not unlike the 49ers. It’s really all just window dressing.

Bob:

Many seasons of WYTS ago, a rather savvy Seahawks fan wrote in to say, “I won’t trust Pete Carroll until I see him holding the Lombardi Trophy.” Substitute “Kyle Shanahan” and you’ll have a keen understanding of 49ers fans.

Jeremy:

Levi’s Stadium is the perfect home for a Kyle Shanahan outfit. Overpriced, humorless, more debilitating than the surface of the sun, completely lacking in joy, and ready to bleed every last ounce of hope from you, while simultaneously draining your wallet. If there indeed are dignity wraiths, the 49ers are mine. I hate this f—king team almost as much as I hate myself for loving them. I wanted to believe during the Super Bowl. I really did. I wanted to think our defense was good enough to give us a chance against Mahomes. But I was lying to myself. I knew we had no shot. The defensive coordinator was s—t all year and had the whole unit out of sync, and so we were going to rely on Purdy to outdo Mahomes? After Shanahan apparently didn’t teach his team the overtime rules? I am convinced Shanahan is 90% responsible for the rehabilitation of Andy Reid’s reputation. Deebo Samuel can’t stay healthy. George Kittle does ads for Chubbies. I am excited though for us to finally get an answer to the question of whether Brock Purdy is actually any good or just benefiting from having all-pros around him. (I say he’s not, but don’t listen to me because I once got into an intense argument with a drunk fan at Candlestick about the merits of Gio Carmazzi). F—k Vernon Davis. F—k me for eyeing that Brock Purdy jersey on Fanatics.

Bruiser:

F—k Jed York with a Muni-decommissioned Candlestick Express articulated bus.

AN INSPIRATION TO INMATES, COUNTRY SINGER JELLY ROLL PERFORMS AT OREGON PRISON

Country singer Jelly Roll took a break from touring arenas to play a concert for inmates at an Oregon prison

Salem, Ore. — Country singer Jelly Roll has been playing sold-out shows across the U.S. as part of his “Beautifully Broken” tour. But earlier this week, his venue wasn't a massive arena: it was the Oregon State Penitentiary.

The award-winning artist posted a video and photos of his visit to the Salem prison on Instagram, showing him singing a cover of Johnny Cash's “Folsom Prison Blues” and signing autographs for people incarcerated at the prison.

According to Jelly Roll, it was the first live music in the prison yard in 20 years.

“I am a firm believer that if we commit crimes we should do our time and be held accountable for our actions, but I also believe that every human deserves love no matter how bad of a decision they have made,” the 39-year-old wrote on Instagram.

Jelly Roll, who was incarcerated in his youth, said he wrote his first song while behind bars.

“It never feels better than to come back behind a wall and sing a song for y’all,” he told the crowd.

His lyrics often touch on his troubled past and issues of addiction, and in his video from the prison, one man speaks about how Jelly Roll's music changed his life.

“I heard ‘Save Me’ on the radio, and I got clean that day,” the man said, referring to a song on Jelly Roll’s most recent album.

Jelly Roll, whose real name is Jason DeFord, began his musical career as a rapper before becoming an acclaimed country artist. In 2023, he won New Artist of the Year at the Country Music Association Awards.

“I remember being in a dark place and no one ever coming through and showing us any hope of changing the path of our lives,” he said. “It felt so good bringing a little light to such a dark place.”

(AP)

FOIA FILES: AT OUTSET OF PANDEMIC, ACADEMICS SCOFF AT ‘DOING THE MATH’

A "digital literacy" professor lauded for warning the public away from "critical thinking" blasts the public's "addiction" to skepticism

by Matt Taibbi

On March 10, 2010, in the peak-panic moment of the Covid-19 pandemic, “digital literacy” expert Michael Caulfield of the University of Washington wrote an email to colleagues explaining his “favorite search right now,” which was coronavirus and “do the math”: “One of the things I notice,” he wrote, “is a sort of Dunning-Kruger effect where people who know one thing (exponential growth, denominators in mortality rates) come to believe this gives them some special insight that is somehow not known by public health experts.”

The email is part of an 836-page FOIA production Racket received last month. Among other things, they’re packed with exchanges denouncing the practice of doing one’s own research. In the extant case, Caulfield questions the basic premise of college. Should we really be teaching young people to think for themselves, he wonders, when a simpler idea might work better?

Caulfield explains that this Dunning-Kruger phenomenon, in which people think they can do their own math, “ties into people’s addiction to epistemologies that appear to them to not require trust,” e.g. “You can verify this yourself.” This is a no-no, he decides, coming to the aforementioned remarkable conclusion about education…

racket.news/p/foia-files-at-outset-of-pandemic

A READER SEZ, WATCH THIS!

Do you watch Owen Jones? If not, watch this segment on these monsters during their podcast. Surprised even me. Kyle Kulinski also covered it but more briefly.

'ERASE All Palestinians' - Popular Israeli Podcasters Claim Most Share Their Genocidal Fantasy

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER. GAZA WAR SUPPORTERS DON’T WANT STUDENTS TO HAVE BOTH.

by Norman Solomon

With nearly 18 million students on U.S. college campuses this fall, defenders of the war on Gaza don’t want to hear any backtalk. Silence is complicity, and that’s the way Israel’s allies like it. For them, the new academic term restarts a threat to the status quo. But for supporters of human rights, it’s a renewed opportunity to turn higher education into something more than a comfort zone.

In the United States, the extent and arrogance of the emerging collegiate repression is, quite literally, breathtaking. Every day, people are dying due to their transgression of breathing while Palestinian.

The Gaza death toll adds up to more than one Kristallnacht per day — for upwards of 333 days and counting, with no end in sight. The shattering of a society’s entire infrastructure has been horrendous. Months ago, citing data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, ABC News reported that “25,000 buildings have been destroyed, 32 hospitals forced out of service, and three churches, 341 mosques and 100 universities and schools destroyed.

Not that this should disturb the tranquility of campuses in the country whose taxpayers and elected leaders make it all possible. Top college officials wax eloquent about the sanctity of higher learning and academic freedom while they suppress protests against policies that have destroyed scores of universities in Palestine.

A key rationale for quashing dissent is that anti-Israel protests make some Jewish students uncomfortable. But the purposes of college education shouldn’t include always making people feel comfortable. How comfortable should students be in a nation enabling mass murder in Gaza?

What would we say about claims that students in the North with southern accents should not have been made uncomfortable by on-campus civil rights protests and denunciations of Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s? Or white students from South Africa, studying in the United States, made uncomfortable by anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s?

A bedrock for the edifice of speech suppression and virtual thought-policing is the old standby of equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Likewise, the ideology of Zionism that tries to justify Israeli policies is supposed to get a pass no matter what — while opponents, including many Jews, are liable to be denounced as antisemites.

But polling shows that more younger Americans are supportive of Palestinians than they are of Israelis. The ongoing atrocities by the Israel “Defense” Forces in Gaza, killing a daily average of more than 100 people — mostly children and women — have galvanized many young people to take action in the United States.

“Protests rocked American campuses toward the end of the last academic year,” a front-page New York Times story reported in late August, adding: “Many administrators remain shaken by the closing weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with the police helped lead to thousands of arrests across the country.” (Overall, the phrase “clashes with the police” served as a euphemism for police violently attacking nonviolent protesters.)

From the hazy ivory towers and corporate suites inhabited by so many college presidents and boards of trustees, Palestinian people are scarcely more than abstractions compared to far more real priorities. An understated sentence from the Times sheds a bit of light: “The strategies that are coming into public view suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is perilous, and that a harder line may be the best option — or perhaps just the one least likely to invite blowback from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.”

Much more clarity is available from a new Mondoweiss article by activist Carrie Zaremba, a researcher with training in anthropology. “University administrators across the United States have declared an indefinite state of emergency on college campuses,” she wrote. “Schools are rolling out policies in preparation for quashing pro-Palestine student activism this fall semester, and reshaping regulations and even campuses in the process to suit this new normal.

“Many of these policies being instituted share a common formula: more militarization, more law enforcement, more criminalization, and more consolidation of institutional power. But where do these policies originate and why are they so similar across all campuses? The answer lies in the fact that they have been provided by the ‘risk and crisis management’ consulting industries, with the tacit support of trustees, Zionist advocacy groups, and federal agencies. Together, they deploy the language of safety to disguise a deeper logic of control and securitization.”

Countering such top-down moves will require intensive grassroots organizing. Sustained pushback against campus repression will be essential, to continually assert the right to speak out and protest as guaranteed by the First Amendment.

Insistence on acquiring knowledge while gaining power for progressive forces will be vital. That’s why the national Teach-In Network was launched this week by the RootsAction Education Fund (which I help lead), under the banner “Knowledge Is Power — and Our Grassroots Movements Need Both.”

The elites that were appalled by the moral uprising on college campuses against Israel’s slaughter in Gaza are now doing all they can to prevent a resurgence of that uprising. But the mass murder continues, subsidized by the U.S. government. When students insist that true knowledge and ethical action need each other, they can help make history and not just study it.

(Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. His latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, was published in paperback this month with a new afterword about the Gaza war.)

THERE’S NO GOOD NEWS In The Unfolding Of Armageddon

by Caitlin Johnstone

The decay of western civilization is unfolding in real time right in front of our eyes.

Israel has ramped up its assault on the West Bank with an incursion the likes of which has not been seen since 2002, at the same time we learn that the Biden administration has been scrambling to increase its weapons shipments to Israel. Haaretz reports that August has been the second-busiest month for weapons shipments from the US to Israel’s Nevatim Airbase, second only to October 2023.

This is the same Biden administration that Americans have been assured is working “tirelessly” and “around the clock” for a ceasefire in Gaza. They’re committing genocide and lying about it while laughing and grinning and celebrating the “joy” of the Kamala Harris campaign.

Meanwhile in the UK the government is going insane arresting critics of Israel’s western-backed atrocities for speech crimes. Prominent pro-Palestinian voices Richard Medhurst, Sarah Wilkinson and Richard Barnardhave all been targeted by counter-terrorism police in recent days under the British Terrorism Act on the allegation that they have been too supportive of forbidden groups in their expression of political opinion about recent events in the middle east. They join British journalist Kit Klarenberg and former British ambassador Craig Murray, who came under attack for speech crimes under the same law last year.

Something similar is happening in Australia, where high-profile journalist Mary Kostakidis faces charges of violating the Racial Discrimination Act for two retweets about Israel and Hezbollah which offended the Zionist Federation of Australia. This move came shortly after the Australian government appointed its first “anti-semitism envoy”, a move many feared would lead to crackdowns on speech that is critical of Israel.

And in France President Emmanuel Macron has refused to honor the results of an election, which saw the left-wing New Popular Front alliance win a plurality in July, by appointing a new prime minister. Many have accused the president of orchestrating a coup, and Macron’s actions are being widely cited as proof that the so-called “centrists” of western liberalism will always side with fascists to stop any movement toward socialism. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who leads the largest party in New Popular Front, recently vowed to recognize Palestine “as quickly as possible”.

While all this is happening, the Russians are warning of a third world war as the western empire’s proxy war in Ukraine continues to escalate. Zelenskyites have been citing the Ukrainian invasion of Kursk as evidence that Moscow has been bluffing about all its red lines, saying the largest invasion of Russia since the second world war proves that the only real danger is NATO’s unwillingness to escalate further with more attacks deeper into Russian territory.

Sure, throw all caution to the wind and keep on ramping up brinkmanship with a nuclear superpower. What’s the worst that could possibly happen?

So what’s the good news?

There is none.

There is no good news to be found in the unfolding of dystopia and armageddon. Expecting otherwise would not be reasonable.

This doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be happy about, or that there’s no joy or beauty to be found in our world. Joy and beauty can be found everywhere you look. You’re just not going to be made happy by reading the real news stories about the times we are living in.

We live in an unfathomably beautiful world, and happiness is the default position of human consciousness underneath all the madness and egocentricity we’ve heaped on top of it. All it takes is a little inner work and inner clarity and you can experience as much happiness and beauty as you can stand in any moment of your waking life.

There is stunning beauty to be found on the crest of the wave of the apocalypse. The seagulls and crows fighting over the fast food garbage on the road. The rising smoke from the factories. The smell of the exhaust fumes and the frenzied din of traffic and capitalism. It is all so beautiful.

We’ve each been blessed with the gift of human life, and every human lifetime is an opportunity to experience more enjoyment than we ever would have dreamed possible if we can just learn to pierce through the illusions of ego and duality and start perceiving life as it’s actually showing up in each moment. All it takes is some sincere looking and curiosity about the true nature of mind, the true nature of self, and the true nature of perception.

And if we can open our eyes in this way, as an added bonus we can come to recognize that things aren’t hopeless for humanity after all. That while all the systems of our society are completely locked down to prevent health and change in every meaningful way right now, we all have within us a vast potentiality that we had previously never accounted for. That the human brain can actually transcend the unwholesome relationship with mental narrative which has allowed it to be propagandized and psychologically enslaved to the status quo this entire time, and begin moving with real freedom within our world.

All of humanity has the potential to awaken from its deluded propensity toward imbuing mental narrative with the power of belief. If it can happen to an individual human (and it most assuredly can), then it can happen to humanity as a collective. This potential sleeps within us all, waiting to be awakened.

Every species eventually hits an adaptation-or-extinction juncture at some point, where it must adapt to changing conditions on this planet or vanish into the fossil records. Humanity is arriving at such a juncture today. We’ll either awaken the potential which rests dormant within all of us to become a truly conscious species, or we will go the way of the dinosaur. We have the freedom to go either direction.

In the meantime, life is beautiful, and life is joyful, even on the precipice of the existential abyss. All we need to do is wake up enough to enjoy this fact.

Cary Grant, Peter Lorre, and Sophia Loren (1957)

A SUNSET

The sky tonight on the top of the ridge
Was bruise-colored, a yellow-brown
That is one definition of the word “sordid,”
Which, I think, used to describe
That color, carries neither a moral
Nor an aesthetic judgment. The sky
At dusk was sordid and then brightened
And softened to a glowing peach
Of brief but astonishing beauty,
If you happened to be paying attention.
I could take a hard right here
To the angry adolescent boy in Texas
Who shot and killed nineteen children
With a high-powered weapon my culture
Put into his hands. How to enter
The hive of that mind and undo what
The imagination had done there?
He wore a flak jacket, bought two rifles
At a local store, one of which fires forty rounds
A minute. He had it specifically in mind
To kill children of that age, the lithe-
Bodied young in their end-of-term clothing.
The connective tissue in this veering
Is the idea that it is the experience of beauty,
Not rules, not fear of consequences
Or reverence for authority, that informs
Our moral sense. This may be where
John Ashbery would introduce a non sequitur,
Not from aversion to responsibility
But from a sense he no doubt had
That there was a kind of self-importance
In the introduction of morality to poetry
And that one might, therefore, be better off
Practicing one’s art in more or less
The spirit of the poor juggler in the story
Of Christmas who, having no gift to bring
To the infant god, crept into the church
In the night and faced the crèche and juggled.

Play, beauty, the impulse to reproduce it,
The impulse to evoke and bring to rage
And then to stillness the violence
In our natures. One does not,
The argument is, watch “Lear” and then
Go out and kill someone. The next veering,
Undertaken without cynicism but
In a spirit of frankness (leaving aside
Plato’s originary arguments), would be
To introduce the collection of records
They found in Adolf Hitler’s bunker.
There were more than a hundred
Of them: Wagner, of course, the operas
Especially, but also Mussorgsky,
Rachmaninoff. He must have turned,
To rest his mind, from reports on the success
Of Zyklon B to the concertos of Rachmaninoff.
Monet might be the counter-argument.
I’ve read that, in his distress at hearing
Descriptions of the violence of the earlier war,
The mud and excrement and rotting bodies
And barbed wire, poison gas, the rows
On rows of young men hurled by their officers
At one another’s cannons and machine guns,
He rose one morning, walked down to his studio
By the pond at Giverny, and began
To paint the water lilies and kept painting them
As long as his hand could hold a brush.

It’s late. I need to return to the subject
Of that boy’s mind and the art we practice.
And the sunset—peach to dull gold which faded
To what felt, for just a second, for less
Than a second, a blessed and arriving silence,
And then a pale green at the skyline,
And then dark. And it was Monday night.

Plato’s idea, I think, was that beauty
Was an ordering of elements the world offered
And that the harmonies in that order
Taught the soul the good. A later culture
Would say that boy was taken by a demon
And study ways to exorcise it. The devil
Had a name: it was the love of evil.
And us? Is there a practice of the arts
That would install, inform, would
Deeply root a culture that would form
A mind or heart in which those young bodies
On the classroom floor had become
Unimaginable, from a love of the good
As ordinary as the children’s tennis shoes?
Probably not. Do we need to be able
To touch that mind? At that age?
It could have come from being laughed at.
Once. Or perhaps there was a sexual thrill
In putting on the costume, carrying
The rifle, saying I Am Doom as he strode
Across the parking lot. Is there a way
To undo the stew of computer games
And horror films and superhero fantasies
That gave a language to the moral injury
He wanted to inflict? Or the culture
Of resentment and fear that put the weapon
In his hands? Those people run governments.
Here’s another hard right turn. Think
Of how Walt Whitman loved this country,
Loved the President who died. Imagined
Himself as a hand brushing a fly from the brow
Of a sleeping child. In the dark
I thought of a radiant ordinariness
That burned, that burned and burned.

— Robert Hass (The New Yorker)

36 Comments

MAGA Marmon September 6, 2024

RE: CATCH OF THE DAY

It’s nice to see that Lacee is still alive and well.

Lacee Ross sentenced to five years in prison for setting fire to John’s Place in Willits
(August 23, 2018)

https://www.ukiahdailyjournal.com/2016/01/22/lacee-ross-sentenced-to-five-years-in-prison-for-setting-fire-to-johns-place-in-willits/

MAGA Marmon

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- Karen Christopherson September 6, 2024
  
  Wa
  
  Reply
- MAGA Marmon September 6, 2024
  
  I also remember when sweet Lacee attempted to toss her infant baby from one second floor Motel balcony to another, unfortunately she missed. Luckily however, the child only suffered minor injuries.
  
  MAGA Marmon
  
  Reply
  - MAGA Marmon September 6, 2024
    
    Lacee is not mentally ill, she is a psychopath
    
    MAGA Marmon
    
    Reply
Katy Tahja September 6, 2024

Great list of questions by Frank Hartzell about the Albion Bridge…wonder if we will EVER get answers to them…

Reply
- George Dorner September 6, 2024
  
  I moved back to Willits just as the bypass began. As a neutral observer, I came to one conclusion concerning CalTrans: They have no regard for truth.
  
  Reply
  - Lazarus September 6, 2024
    
    I was there shortly after when the overpass on the south end collapsed, due to poor engineering calculations of the overly wet concrete used that day. Ask around…
    Have a nice day,
    Laz
    
    Reply
    - MAGA Marmon September 6, 2024
      
      A friend of mine was seriously injured in that collapse, he was pouring concrete. He got serious burns from the mix. My brother Steve was laboring on the bi-pass at that time but was away from the incident location.
      
      Willits Bypass: 150 foot bypass span collapses
      
      https://www.willitsnews.com/2015/01/29/willits-bypass-150-foot-bypass-span-collapses/
      
      The heat produced by concrete during curing is called heat of hydration. This exothermic reaction occurs when water and cement react. The amount of heat produced during the reaction is largely related to the composition and fineness of the cement.
      
      MAGA Marmon
      
      Reply
    - MAGA Marmon September 6, 2024
      
      if anyone knows anything about concrete they were pouring a very hot mix
      
      MAGA Marmon
      
      Reply
      - Lazarus September 6, 2024
        
        The mud was too wet and too rich, straight up…Every batch was (supposed) to be checked before the pour…Men ran for their lives, it was pure luck that many were not killed that day.
        Be well,
        Laz
        
        Reply
        
        peter boudoures September 6, 2024
        
        Sounds like the main issue was the forms collapsing, the concrete being too wet would affect its long term strength but the collapse wouldn’t be from wet concrete? Framing undersized?
        
        Reply
        
        Lazarus September 6, 2024
        
        Water adds weight, eight pounds per gallon. With a pour of that size, it could calculate to many tons.
        Laz
        
        Reply
        
        Mark Scaramella September 6, 2024
        
        In July of 2015, some six months after the collapse, PD Reporter Kevin McCallum quoted from the CAl-OSHA report which lead to large fines levied on Caltrans and the two contractors involved:
        
        “The determination after several months of investigations was that the falsework [the wood framing for the concrete pour] was not property designed, was not erected as per the design plans, was missing components, and deficiencies were not identified when inspected and signed off on by the project engineer for the company erecting it,” the Cal-OSHA report found.
        
        Reply
        
        Lazarus September 8, 2024
        
        Yeah, to support the extra weight of the WATER!
        Laz
        
        Reply
Jacob September 6, 2024

Re: RE-ELECT MR. FORT BRAGG, LINDY PETERS!

No Thanks

Reply
- pca67 September 6, 2024
  
  You could actually do something productive like run for city Council, but it’s easier to stir up shit on the sidelines.
  
  Reply
Harvey Reading September 6, 2024

REDWOOD VALLEY WATER BOARD BLASTS PG&E FOR DRASTIC FLOW CUTS TO LAKE MENDOCINO

Isn’t that water stolen from the Eel? Who’s whining? A bunch of wine farmers?

Reply
- Jim Armstrong September 6, 2024
  
  A more interesting question is why the RV water folks keep making this claim (5 CFS) when the flow has not gone under 50 CFS for the period.
  
  Reply
  - Adam Gaska September 6, 2024
    
    50 cfs where?
    
    PG&E is still delivering PVID their water but above that, they don’t want to.
    
    Reply
    - Jim Armstrong September 7, 2024
      
      Through the tunnel.
      
      Reply
      - Adam Gaska September 7, 2024
        
        45 CFS is for PVID. 5 is for a margin of error. So basically nothing going into Lake Mendocino. It costs PG&E nothing to send us at least some water. The variance they filed for and received is what happens in a drought year where they need to cut flows to keep water in Pilsbury to r3lease in fall for fish.
        
        It doesn’t make sense to me that the take the dams down crowd also wants all the water while the fams are still standing “for the fish”.
        
        Reply
Adam Gaska September 6, 2024

I can’t take much credit for IWPC. For better or worse, that distinction goes to Janet Pauli.

I can say I have helped improve RVCWD’s financial situation by developing a better relationship with RRFC to procure surplus water and work toward the annexation into flood controls district with the hopes of securing a water contract. RVCWD is in a better position to financially contribute to IWPC’s efforts to continue some level of water diversion because of our improved financial outlook.

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Mike J September 6, 2024

Re: movie Day After Tomorrow discussed by Editor
The movie is based on a nonfiction/fiction book co written by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber. Bell did the research on the climate history and weather dynamics and Strieber wrote fictíonal scenes. Summary:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Global_Superstorm

I am the only open or no border voter in America. I love teasing closed border advocates by suggesting someday, due to climate change, there will be us gringos urgently attempting to migrate south.

The above is very possible, imo.

Altogether I don’t see a sustainable future for nation-states. Maybe governance mutates to a basis of city-state regions linked by global agreements.

In any event, we are likely to become, someday, a part of a galactic milieu consisting of a collection of civilizations from other solar systems.

Enjoy your borders and get your passports while they still exist.

Note: my no border stance is based on genetics. I am the great great great great grandson of Thomas Corwin. Look him up. I’m proud of gramps.

Reply
- Brian Wood September 6, 2024
  
  “In any event, we are likely to become, someday, a part of a galactic milieu consisting of a collection of civilizations from other solar systems”.
  
  There is simply no way to calculate any such probability. There is no other known life in the universe. Until, and if, it’s discovered there is, your assertion is like a religious belief. I’m betting that this is it, we’re the only ones! It actually makes our pending self-extinction even more tragic. Think, what if this is all there is? Your space buddies come from your mind. There’s no help out there!
  
  Reply
  - Mike J September 6, 2024
    
    Not only is there obviously advanced civilizations out there, many are present here. We have overwhelming evidence of that and that includes even corroborating physical evidence (which I don’t cover in linked paper here) that’s in the public domain. (Landing physical traces, medical impacts, removed implants with strange features—the latter now even confirmed on many news outlets from the DOD/IC insider for the last couple of weeks.)
    Here are the databases for anecdotes, not including physical evidence:
    https://www.et-cultures.com/post/a-briefing-glimpses-of-uap-related-non-human-intelligences-and-their-activities
    
    Next week, Congress will address the UAP Disclosure Act introduced by Senators Chuck Schumer and Mike Rounds. They reference over 2 dozen times the recovery of non human intelligences’ craft and bodies. That’s based on revelations from special access programs participants, working in programs outside oversight of elected officials. There’s great resistance within the Pentagon from fundamentalists (mostly) with others pushing to open it up. If it gets exposed, hopefully the practical and psych impacts aren’t too bad.
    
    (The Senate Select Cmt on Intel staffers and key members have taken testimony from SAP participants in SCIFs.)
    
    They don’t intervene….as you suggest with the idea of help. There are encounters and interaction, though. Our rich biological resources are somewhat valuable and used in a variety of creative projects.
    
    Reply
    - Harvey Reading September 7, 2024
      
      Your beliefs are as nonsensical as those of the religious wishful thinkers. Lying politicians love the likes of you for spreading their propaganda…with the sole purpose of further increasing their control over us. Schumer should retire…actually should have years ago. ET wouldn’t bother with a gutted, overpopulated planet like earth.
      
      Reply
  - Mike J September 6, 2024
    
    Lue Elizondo ‘s Imminent is #1 on the NY Times non fiction list.
    
    Reply
    - Harvey Reading September 7, 2024
      
      Should be on the Bad Fiction and Wishful Thinking lists…
      
      Reply
Harvey Reading September 6, 2024

“In any event, we are likely to become, someday, a part of a galactic milieu consisting of a collection of civilizations from other solar systems.”

LOL. More likely we’ll be extinct. And, ET will never even know we existed, because the fossil record will have been made molten by too many nuclear explosions happening at once, fragmenting the entire gutted planet; just a far-flung bunch of asteroid-like chunks floating around the galaxy, at the whim of gravity.

Reply
Zanzibar to Andalusia September 6, 2024

Women walked differently in the 50s?

Reply
Mike J September 6, 2024

Craig Stehr post at his blog:
Friday, September 6, 2024
Craig Stehr UPDATE Washington, D.C. September 6th @ 2:10 p.m.
Warmest spiritual greetings, Please know that I am in Washington, D.C. at Adam’s Place shelter in the northeast section, separated from my luggage which is at a D.C. Peace Vigil friend’s apartment near Dupont Circle. Am surviving at the shelter at this time, and have an assigned bed, and soon a locker and lock. Still have some money in a Chase checking account. The move from California was necessitated due to the realization that I no longer had any reason to be living in California. Preferring to remain socio-politically active in this world, I have returned to D.C. for the 16th time. It is as simple as that. I am continuing with spiritual practices and being centered, letting the Divine Absolute work through this body-mind complex without interference. I am accepting all cooperation to get suitably situated. If this message is appreciated, please help. In solidarity, Craig Louis Stehr Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com 6.IX.’24

Reply
- Jim Armstrong September 7, 2024
  
  I still think of air travel as a luxury.
  
  Reply
  - Harvey Reading September 7, 2024
    
    Me, too. Plus, knowing we live under kaputalism, run by robber barons who love to cut corners to make a few more bucks, I fear getting onto one of the flying contraptions. Last time was ’96.
    
    Reply
  - Mike J September 7, 2024
    
    He didn’t post for a week. Likely he took the bus. I did that to DC in 1992: took 3 plus days.
    
    Reply
- Lazarus September 7, 2024
  
  I suppose my concern was unwarranted. As I believe I posted, Craig would/has landed on his feet and has let the powers that be, tend to his needs.
  Be well Craig,
  Laz
  
  Reply
Chuck Dunbar September 7, 2024

Yes, good to know Craig is safe and has shelter. I’m sure we’ll hear more from him and that is good. Peace, Craig, and thanks for letting us know where you are.

Reply

Mendocino County Today: Friday 9/6/2024

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