Off the Record 11/15/2024

NO SURPRISES in the Mendo election results, but this libtard was shocked but not surprised that the Orange Monster swept the national board, not only the electoral college but the popular vote. The forces of darkness also have a good shot at the House of Reps, meaning they may be in position to say, “Open wide, America, this is what we'll be shoving down your maws.”

NOT SURPRISED? No. In a country where millions of people are squeezed to keep themselves fed and housed, abortion is not a priority issue, but the Democrat shot callers are so securely swimming in their decaf lattes that they are oblivious to the desperation many of their fellow citizens live with. The desperate got revenge big time with Trump, not that he'll do anything to ease the burdens of average Americans.

AND I'M NOT surprised at the response to the Orange Wave by a swathe of Mendolib, who attribute Trump's victory to “the racism and sexism of American white men.” If you could know the economic position of the people who say stuff like this — mostly unattached women plus a few caponized men — you'd find that the racist-sexist gang is financially secure, safely outside the unemployment lines, the KZYX-Democratic Labor Day Picnic demographic you might say.

THE EARLY MENDO RETURNS —15,265 votes counted out of an estimated 54,000-plus total vote as of Tuesday evening, means some results could change when the final count is in, which will take about a month if history is any guide.

MENDO, the rural home of American delusion, went 2-1 for Bombs Away Harris 10,029; Trump 4782, RFK Jr. 223, Stein 122.

JUNIOR is in line for a “free rein” overseeing America's health according to Trump. One of Junior's priorities is getting fluoride out of drinking water, once a goal of the John Birch Society, circa 1955. Fluoride is proven to help prevent tooth decay, but if Junior is actually installed as Health czar… Well, it's back to voodoo and chicken bones rattling in coffee cans as your health insurance.

STATE ASSEMBLY: Chris Rogers 9764, Michael Greer 5125. Rogers is being installed by the Democrat's cabal dominant on the Northcoast. Rogers: “I was born in this district – it’s my home and where my wife and I are starting our family. I was elected to the [Santa Rosa] City Council in 2016 after nearly a decade of helping to represent the north coast as Senior staff for Senator Mike McGuire and other legislators…”

An on-line commenter notes that the Albion Little River parcel tax requires a two-thirds majority: “Be It Further Resolved, that this ordinance shall take effect immediately upon its confirmation by the voters in the District. Special tax increase must be approved by two-thirds vote of the voters of the Albion-Little River Fire Protection District at the special election held November 5, 2024.”

Agreed, local general tax measures only require simple majorities, special taxes dedicated to specific uses require the higher threshold. So far the Albion/Little River parcel tax is below the two-thirds threshhold.

BEST LINE of the election — Matt Taibbi: “Adam Schiff, on the short list of America’s worst humans, will serve as a U.S. Senator.”

AMID THE FLOOD OF POST-ELECTION COMMENTARY about Harris’s loss to Trump there’s a significant missing piece that I have not seen addressed elsewhere. In 2020 when Biden beat Trump, a lot of people rightly blamed Trump for the US’s lousy response to Ccvid. Take away covid and Trump probably would have beaten Biden in 2020. 2024 is a version of 2020 without covid because Biden-Harris ran the same way against the same deeply flawed opponent. The Dems failed to realize this simple factor. No one should be surprised that Biden-Harris lost. (Mark Scaramella)

MARK SCARAMELLA: 4th District Supervisor, Dan Gjerde announced Tuesday that he has accepted a position with CalTrans District 1 as a transportation planner. He said he expects confirmation of his position “any day now,” so he plans to resign immediately. Gjerde said he has recommended that Governor Newsom appoint Supervisor-Elect Bernie Norvell so he can start this month, a little ahead of his regularly scheduled January start date to fill out the last few weeks of Gjerde’s term. Presumably, Gjerde will become a double-dipper, receiving a nice County pension for his 12 years as a Supervisor based on his latest pay raise on top of whatever professional salary Caltrans pays.

ED NOTE: Isn't CalTrans and planning yer basic self-canceller? With Silent Dan routing traffic for Big Orange better hope your vehicle can swim. But seriously, in a just world Gjerde would be denied his pension on the obvious grounds that he was one-fifth of an ongoing supervisorial disaster, from his implicit support for the rampaging CEO Angelo whose work continues to cost Mendocino County taxpayers lots and lots in legal payouts to his most recent disastrous act in the clearly illegal firing of Auditor Chamise Cubbison. For 12 years of unmitigated irresponsibility, Gjerde will undoubtedly receive a record number of honorary Whereas' on his final day of "service. "Whereas Supervisor Gjerde never failed to reward incompetence; Whereas Supervisor Gjerde…”

I HADN’T KNOWN until John McCurdy told me, that a bunch of the mill workers brought in to break the big strike at the Fort Bragg mill back in 1946 were from Sparks, Louisiana, whose mill had been put out of business by radical over-cutting of nearby pine forests. John worked in the Fort Bragg mill as a kid in the early 1950s before going on to Stanford and big time basketball. Well into his 70s, John, 6'7" and very strong at 215 pounds, still played in men’s leagues around Chicago from where he remembers his Fort Bragg days with great fondness.

THE FISHER FAMILY of San Francisco own lots of things, among them the wrecked Oakland A's baseball franchise, and much of Mendocino County in the form of logged-over forest formerly known as Louisiana-Pacific. They also own the GAP stores and who knows what all. The Fishers call their Mendo holdings Mendocino Redwoods which, as it’s turned out, has been a good thing for redwoods and a very good thing for the eventual return of thousands of acres of blitzed forest to productivity, a productivity that may some day revive Mendocino County’s moribund timber industry. The Fishers, unlike the executives and majority shareholders of L-P, can afford to sit on the land because they don’t need an immediate return on it. But as good as the Fishers have inadvertently been for Mendocino County's redwood forests, which is of course debatable, if those forests were a logger's cooperative Mendocino County rather than a Frisco sun king's private fiefdom, Mendo would be a generally more prosperous county than it is now. But, but, but take it away from the people who own it? Don't you understand free enterprise, you, you, you….communist!

EVER WONDER who buys bad art? The Fishers, for one. Fortunately for San Francisco, when the Fishers tried to build at the Presidio to house their Warhols and Richard Serra’s “Sequence,” 243 tons of whatever, they were shot down. The Fishers had bought the alleged sculpture but were apparently unable to jam it through the front door of one of their several mansions before trying to muscle-bribe their way into the Presidio.

I SUGGESTED that they donate the mammoth Serra eyesore to the city with the stipulation it replaces the giant cornball sculpture by Oldenburg called Cupid’s bow down on the Embarcadero near the ballpark, where it irritates hell outta me every time I go to a ball game.

SERRA'S hunk of shiny brown steel is bigger than a jumbo jet and would go nicely with the pile of concrete down the street called the Vaillancourt Fountain. Pretensions aside, in a lot of ways, Frisco is really just a big collection of rubes who'll buy anything.

Barely amusing the first time, annoying ever since.

This would be perfect in front of the major eyesore of a new County Courthouse being rammed down Mendo's unsuspecting throat by our friends at the Superior Court.

Frisco paid a quarter mil for this baby and surely Mendo could pick it up for a hundred times that, also a perfect fit for the new County Courthouse no one wants.

WE ALL KNOW that in the current thinking “contemporary art” means a “contemporary building” to house it, and “contemporary building” means the SF MOMA with more empty space than art, and the art it does have being heavy on “contemporary” groove-o trendos like the rock exhibit I saw wherein an Englishman had arranged some rocks in the form of a V on the floor of one of the MOMA’s smaller rooms. The V was a hundred or so 20-pound rocks the limey claimed to have hauled out of the Sierra (more likely hauled out of Daly City’s Stone and Monuments). I thought to myself, “Only a furriner could get away with calling a collection of American rocks, art.

I IMAGINED the Englishman spinning out pure Oxbridge bushwah to the black clad art school grad curators, who probably imagined themselves in the cool-est production of Masterpiece Theater ever, agape as they bought everything the Brit con man told them before they wrote him a fat cashier’s check for the “installation of his master work.”

FAR MORE interesting exhibits than you can usually find at the MOMA are only a block away at the California Historical Society near Third and Mission. And at the Jewett room of the main branch of the San Francisco Library there’s always interesting stuff. At the Presidio, in one of its oldest buildings, and worth a visit just to see it, in the old Officer’s Club, there’s a very fine collection of watercolors, all of them rendered by amateurs. As for the deYoung and the Palace of the Legion of Honor, if you only visit them once every five years you won’t have missed anything; they never change. It's possible to find art in the city but you’ve got to look for it.

REGISTRAR OF VOTERS Katrina Bartolomie:

The election results released so far are Election Night Only results; our Final Election Certification won’t happen until December 3rd, 2024 (see AB 3184 for information). We will post weekly updates until we are done. We have a huge amount (maybe 15,000 – 20,000) of ballots that were mailed or dropped off on Election Day to process – the turnout mentioned below is a preliminary number for the ballots that were tabulated by Election night.

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BALLOTS LEFT TO COUNT

November 5, 2024 Presidential General Election

Mendocino County Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder Katrina Bartolomie announced that as with every other election, there are ballots left to be processed and counted as part of the official canvass. Mendocino County has 21,132 Vote By Mail ballots to process and 2,204 Conditional Provisional/Provisional ballots to review and process.

As of today, the outstanding ballots left to count for the “Hot” Municipal contests have the following number of ballots left to count:

City of Ukiah – 3,747

City of Willits – 1,060

City of Fort Bragg – 1,708

City of Point Arena - 116

Supervisorial District Breakdown:

1st Supervisorial District has 5,133 ballots to count

2nd Supervisorial District has 3,745 ballots to count

3rd Supervisorial District has 4,563 ballots to count

4th Supervisorial District has 5,598 ballots to count

5th Supervisorial District has 4,297 ballots to count

According to Assembly Bill (AB) 3184; we will not certify our final election results until December 3, 2024. We will be updating our website on a weekly basis until we certify the Election.

If you have received a letter to cure a mis-matched or missing signature on your ballot envelope, you have until December 1, 2024 (2 days prior to certification) to return your documents to cure your signature. If you have any additional questions, please call our office at (707) 234-6819.

(County Registrar of Voters)

“Alleged Idaho killer’s lawyers argue he could be executed by ‘inhumane’ firing squad if he’s convicted…”

BETTER a firing squad than the midnight needle. Better life without than any kind of state-sanctioned execution because, for starters, the state shouldn't have the authority to kill people.

SOUTH CAROLINA'S AND IDAHO'S policies of execution by firing squads instead of the midnight needle is a step forward in death penalty methods. A firing squad is at least a dignified end for people who largely don't deserve much consideration, but hauling people out of their cells in the middle of the night and dispatching them via tortuous chemicals, that final needle often botched by the authorities and their medical advisors, is grotesque and negates any possible message that committing murder will get the murderer murdered.

WHAT'S THE LESSON supposedly taught to the rest of us by non-public government executions? None, and even if the executions were carried out at Super Bowl half-time, all proceeds to the victims, murderers would continue to murder. Capital punishment is not a deterrent.

TRADITIONALLY, at least in some of the executions of political people, the condemned got to make a little speech and was offered a last cigarette while the firing squad waited patiently to put a bullet in him or, rarely, her.

IN STALINIST RUSSIA you got dispatched via a bullet in the back of the head in some anonymous police basement after being tortured to confess your “crime.” Putin is offering criminals the option of frontline duty in Ukraine where they're often used in suicidal frontal attacks. I wonder how many of our lifers would volunteer for life-threatening options to their lives in small cages?

FIRING SQUADS, incidentally, spare most of the riflemen the specific knowledge that it was their bullet that killed a stranger to them. Only one or two fire live rounds, the rest fire blanks. I think Gary Gilmore of Utah is the last American executed by firing squad, and that was at his request. Gilmore was a low down punk if there ever was one, and certainly had it coming. Norman Mailer's brilliant book on Gilmore, ‘The Executioner's Song’ is highly recommended as a psycho-social portrait of the non-psycho killer as is, of course, Truman Capote's ‘In Cold Blood.’ The last stat I saw claimed at any one time there are a hundred or so serial killers roaming America.

HANGINGS are unpleasant affairs — very popular with the public audiences who used to be allowed to watch them, but, like the midnight needle, they were often botched because the rope was either too short or too long, and the condemned slowly choked to death, or had his head jerked clean off, or didn't die and had to be re-hung per adjusted rope specs.

THE SOLUTION, as all humane people know and agitate for, is life without parole. Vengeance isn't a desirable social encouragement because it rewards violence with violence, nor is giving the government the right to kill, because you just might get a midnight needle yourself.

TRUMP'S sweep, as I've said, shocked but didn't surprise me. I knew Big Lib was totally out of touch with the people they claimed to represent, but I thought for sure Trump was finished when he declared in his debate with Harris, “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there.”

MAGA MAN was obviously straight up nuts. Or senile, the kind term for crazy old people. Even the hardcore Trumpers would abandon him now. Nope, he went on to sweep the board. An earlier Trump declared, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK? It's, like, incredible.”

YES, it is incredible, but also correct. Trump probably could get away with it, just as he's gotten away with a range of crimes, high and low, that would get us mere mortals locked up. Of course, he meant by shooting into a crowd on Fifth Avenue he would only hit liberals, one of the many remarks he's made signalling his and his followers' murderous fantasies about their “enemy within.”

WHICH TRUMP describes as "radical left lunatics." (My people! my people!)

AS ORANGE MAN PUT IT: “I think the bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people. Radical left lunatics,” Trump told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo, “I think it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen.”

WITH MILITARY BRASS generally holding Trump in contempt, it's hard to believe they'd honor a Trump directive to round up us radical left lunatics. Depending on the circumstances, for instance if there's widespread “unrest,” he might give it go.

OLDER radical left lunatics will recall that during the Nixon years some of us fretted that the fascisti would activate the McCarran Act of 1950, also known as the Internal Security Act:

SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITIES Control Board (SACB)

The SACB was established to investigate people suspected of promoting a totalitarian dictatorship or engaging in subversive activities. The attorney general could petition the SACB to order a Communist organization to register with the Justice Department.

SINCE COMMUNISTS and communism are defunct I'm sure the old language could be expanded much more broadly to “radical left lunatics,” of which there are, in the Trumpian definition literal millions.

AS I understand Trump's looming great repatriation, it will begin, and probably end, with presently incarcerated criminals. Beyond them, the logistics and expense of rounding up people who have lived here without papers for years, the bulk of so-called illegals, becomes pretty much impossible. In Mendocino County alone, there are x-number of people who will sab any such round-up however they can, and I seriously doubt our local cops will cooperate with the gestapo-style cruelty required. Americans aren’t Germans, let alone good Germans. Of course the primary consideration, which even Trumpers will concede, expelling so-called illegals would destroy great swathes of food production.

ELECTION ODDITY, among many electoral oddities this landmark election, occurred when San Anselmo overwhelmingly voted down a local rent control measure while next door Fairfax passed a similar measure. I say odd because S.A. was awash in Harris/Walz signs, as was Fairfax, so I'd assumed with so many libs strong for Big Lib the town would logically also be for a humane measure like rent control, especially in a notoriously cruel rental market of a little over three grand a month for a basic one bed, one bath apartment! Nope, wrong again.

ADAM GASKA TAKES DIRECTOR JOB FOR FARM BUREAU:

Recently I was offered and accepted the position of executive director of Mendocino County Farm Bureau.

On Monday, I started a month long process to transition from working for Golden Vineyards to working for MCFB. December 2nd I will be working full time for MCFB. I feel good about my first week. It will be a big change but I am ready for it.

— Adam Gaska, Redwood Valley

FROM 2008: THE COUNTY’S BUILDING DEPARTMENT is getting lots of new grading complaints since the season’s first rains have arrived. Most of the complaints are from neighbors who are worried about the damage that falling sediment or a slope collapse will cause to their own property. The complaints that the Building Department is looking at are violations of the grading rules which are part of the state building code, because Mendo doesn’t have (and will never have) a grading ordinance which covers ag activity or other non-construction. Typically, the new complaints involve sloppy road construction of “driveways” switching back and forth up to a construction site, or sloppy site pad prep and grading, all done without permits or engineering or a geologist’s advice, even though it’s supposed to be done to building code standards. The Building Department is unprepared for this year’s unusually large number of complaints and cannot possibly respond to all of them. But the ones they have responded to (the potential building code violations) typically involve pointing out to the builder or property owner that their grading is obviously substandard and unsafe. Photos taken by Building department staffers show some pretty feeble, after-the-fact attempts at shoring up some fairly steep slopes below various ugly cuts into the hillside, such as little stakes and webbing to hold back the falling dirt, or straw piled onto the sliding material, or grass seeding — none of which will do much good at this late point after the damage has been done.

THE OTHER REPORTS of apparent grading non-construction violations that the Building Department gets are completely unenforceable without a County grading ordinance because they do not accompany construction and are not covered by the Building Code. In those instances, often vineyard prep, neighbor complaints go nowhere, even in fairly egregious cases.

IT’S NOT CLEAR if the property owners where these violations occur simply don’t know about the building code rules or if they were intentionally ignoring them or if they were just stupid about how to do pad and driveway construction. But it is obvious that they are cutting into steep slopes to make roads or construction pads in steeper places that are less and less hospitable to such grading activity. At least two of the situations the Building Department is trying to deal with now are on slopes that are not far above roadways and a slide or dirtfall would not only be a traffic hazard but would require state or county road crews to rush out to clear the road debris.

THESE BUILDING DEPARTMENT staffers also said that they are encountering lots of building code violations in unincorporated areas associated with pot growing. Shoddy construction, electrical hazards, clearcuts of various sizes, fuel tanks and shoddy fuel line plumbing and associated fire hazards. The whole situation is much more than the staff can handle. And with rural pot growers, there’s no grading ordinance to cover the work, and it would be very hard to even know who to cite, even assuming someone can find the time to identify and document the violation and figure out who owns the property.

THE MOST SENSIBLE comment on dog abuse I’ve read comes from Monica Schreiber of Belmont: “Actually, the manner in which Vick’s dogs lived out their days — when they weren’t being fought — is exactly how millions of ‘backyard’ dogs live all over the country, especially in rural and inner-city areas. In most places, it is perfectly legal to chain a dog to a leaky doghouse, or tie it to a tree, or put it in an outdoor cage, and leave it there for months or years on end. In fact, I’d argue that the fighting aspect of Vick’s dogs’ lives was probably less tortuous than their months and years at the end of a heavy logging chain, exposed to all elements, pacing back and forth in mud and feces, giving birth to puppies while chained by the neck. What needs to change are laws against 24/7 chaining.”

FROM A COLLECTION of short stories called “Pick Up On Noon Street” by the great noir writer Raymond Chandler, “Hell with the loose ends,” Cathcart grinned. “Nobody’s getting away with any fix that I can see. That sidekick of yours, Denny, will fade in a hurry and if I ever get my paws on the Dalton frail, I’ll send her to Mendocino for the cure.”

CHANDLER’S reference to Mendocino is to the old Mendocino State Hospital at Talmage, once so well known for its alcohol and drug cures that it even found its way into American literature. But you’ve got to be at least 90 to remember when tough guys called women “frails.”

AN INTERESTING short story by Dominic Stansberry, “The Ancient Rain,” contains a lot of interesting, fact-based stuff about the original beatniks and, like Stansberry’s books often do, touches on Judi Bari-type events of the 1960s, the American left’s last gasp: “…But like it or not, the bastard’s activities in the old days, in the so-called underground, the anti-war movement in the early 70s — pipe bombs under cop cars, bank robberies, all kinds of nonsense — had left a woman dead.”

I READ ‘On the Road’ when I was a little too young to fully get it, but remembered that one of my high school English teachers had recommended against it as she had recommended against most literature written after 1940, so I launched an immediate search for the book, and found Kerouac’s epic among the “communist” lit sequestered in a locked cabinet in my high school library. These dangerously subversive tomes required a permission note from home, which I duly acquired and proceeded to read a lot of vegetarian and pacifist tracts along with some truly great stuff, including ‘Johnny Got His Gun’ (Dalton Trumbo) and Kerouac’s frenetic account of his madcap adventures racing back and forth across the United States, circa 1948, prior to freeways and prior to the homogenization of American life. I’d forgotten what a wonderful writer this seminal beatnik was, and how funny and movingly lyrical he could be:

“It was Sunday. A great heat wave descended; it was a beautiful day, the sun turned red at three. I started up the mountain [Tamalpais] and got to the top at four. All those lovely California cottonwoods and eucalypti brooded on all sides. Near the peak there were no more trees, just rocks and grass. Cattle were grazing on the top of the coast. There was the Pacific, a few more foothills away blue and vast and with a great wall of white advancing from the legendary potato patch where Frisco fogs are born. Another hour it would come streaming through the Golden Gate to shroud the romantic city in white, and a young man would hold his girl by the hand and climb slowly up a long white sidewalk with a bottle of Tokay in his pocket. That was Frisco; and beautiful women standing in white doorways, waiting for their men; and Coit Tower, and the Embarcadero, and Market Street, and the eleven teeming hills.”

“It seemed like a matter of minutes when we began rolling in the foothills before Oakland and suddenly reached a height and saw stretched out ahead of us the fabulous white city of San Francisco on her eleven mystic hills with the blue Pacific and its advancing wall of potato-patch fog beyond, and smoke and goldenness in the late afternoon of time.”

NOT to go all lit-crit on you here, but the separate parts of the above are banal, but while taken as a whole capture the feeling most of us have had about San Francisco and the Bay Area. Kerouac’s genius was to elevate the every day into great art.

OUTDOORSMEN may recall the 1981 large-scale relocation of 203 Angel Island deer to the Mayacama Mountains just east of Ukiah. The deer had bred on the island to the point that their over-population had begun to cause them to die. Too many in too small an area. According to a study by UC Berkeley’s Department of Forestry and Resource Management “87 percent of the re-located deer failed to survive in the Mayacamas,” the lesson perhaps being that re-located elk tend to thrive, re-located deer don’t.

ACCORDING to a study conducted at CalTech in Pasadena, the only difference between expensive wine and cheap wine is the price. LA Times reporter Denise Gellene: “When it comes to wine tasting, pleasure is in the price.” Lots of wine people apparently think quality always accompanies price. “Scientists found people given two identical red wines got more pleasure from tasting the one they were told cost more.” “By manipulating prices,” Ms. Gellene quotes lead researcher Antonio Rangel as saying, “we can change how wine tastes without changing the wine. It’s mind-blowing!” Ms. Gellene then quotes George Loewenstein, “professor of economics and psychology at Carnegie Mellon University,” who pointed out that the CalTech study confirmed what we already know, “People pay high prices for water from Italy, and we know that water tastes about the same wherever it comes from.” A French study done a few years ago concluded that wine tasting experts, in blind tastings, could not distinguish ordinary cheap white table wine with a little red food coloring added from high-priced red wine.

THIS “SCIENTIFIC” OBSERVATION that price is the only real difference between cheap wine and expensive wine is hardly new. Upon my graduation from the enology program at Fresno State in 1967 (before I entered the Air Force) I worked for a few weeks at a large Fresno liquor store. The owner had just obtained two pallet loads of LeJon California Sparkling Wine for a bargain bulk price and decided he’d put it on sale cheap because he didn’t normally sell sparkling wine and because he didn’t really have room for that much of it in his store. So he put a few cases on the sidewalk outside and had a big sign made up that said, “LeJon Sparkling Wine — $1.19 a bottle.” In 1967, as best I recall, champagne sold for around $3 for the stuff that tasted like Alka Seltzer and up to maybe $100 for the stuff the Queen of England drinks. So the $1.19 was a good price. Those of us in the store’s small crew had tasted it and it seemed pretty good to us. A week went by and we sold maybe a dozen bottles. Then the boss, Ron Redekian, decided to raise the price. A new sign was made. “LeJon Fine California Sparkling Wine. Our Best. Special This Month Only. $5.99.” It was gone in a week. (Mark Scaramella)

BTW, On The Road, the manuscript:

Christie”s International Auction House in New York City auctioned off the original manuscript for author Jack Kerouac”s classic novel On The Road. Kerouac, along with Allen Ginsberg (and his poem HOWL) and William S. Burrough’s (and his novel Naked Lunch) began a movement and way of life known as “The Beat Generation.” On The Road was published in 1957, several years after it was completed and in a totally revised form from what was originally written. Jack Kerouac was born in 1922, and was originally known for his athletic abilities carving out an impressive football career at his high school in Lowell, Massachusetts and then by receiving a scholarship to attend Columbia University in 1940. An injury sustained during a game forced him to sit out the season. Two years later Kerouac left college to join the merchant marines and embarked on his famous journey traveling throughout the land.

Kerouac’s On The Road manuscript is a 120-foot long scroll consisting of a series of single-spaced typed twelve-foot long rolls of paper that have been scotch-taped together (estimated to be abut 76,000 words).

Kerouac found this method more conducive to his style of writing. He preferred this instead of having to continuously feed sheets of paper into his typewriter during his famous marathon typing sessions in the first few weeks of April of 1951.

He would have marveled at the modern laptop and all that it can do. These writing sessions were the type of story that has inspired many writers to follow in his footsteps. The manuscript has various pencil markings, cross-outs and lines throughout it. The beginning and end of the scroll is tattered (the end is said to have been ripped off by a dog owned by Kerouac’s friend Lucien Carr). For quite some time, this rarely seen manuscript has been in storage, most recently in the New York City Public Library.

DESPITE a long series of more or less catastrophic misunderstandings arising from get-togethers of one kind and another, people went right ahead thinking they would do good, as when, early in World War II, some genius said a whole lot would be gained if the late H. G. Wells went on an American tour and made personal contact with influential ex-President Herbert Hoover — might be a turning point in Anglo-American relations.

Wells trekked out to Palo Alto where Hoover was, and he sat down opposite Hoover, he had arrived a little early which gave him a little more time, and he talked. In his high voice Wells talked and he talked. Talked about civilization, menaces to it and ways of averting them, necessity for mutual understanding in the face of perils, etc. It was disconcerting, Mr. Wells told me a long time later, because all this time Hoover's rather big face did not show so much as a flicker of interest round the edges. Still, understanding must be achieved, and Wells kept on and on, pulling out all the stops. When he had been talking about the risks of cessation from the society of nations for nearly 25 minutes, Hoover, immobile as a statue all this time, suddenly moved. He took a watch out of his waistcoat pocket and looked at it.

“I'm afraid,” he said, “you'll have to excuse me. I have an appointment at this time with a Mr. H. G. Wells.”

— Claud Cockburn, from “Cancel That Trip Now,” 1956

ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK

[1] “The youth have nothing purposeful to do.”

This makes me ask why the youth in Austria, Germany, Finland can figure out how to sell 2x4s to homebuilders in the forests of Alabama, Florida and Georgia. That's quite a feat. Our leaders and parents should be ashamed of themselves for letting the youth waste their lives on facebook so that they now depend on far away countries to be able to put a roof over their heads.

[2] Perhaps the Dems will realize that women need groceries more often than they need to terminate a pregnancy? And yes I support that in certain circumstances but not as a means of birth control. The Dems had tunnel vision and focused on what THEY thought was important and that’s the problem. They don’t listen.

[3] About this election in and about our county, State, and Country: “The bigger lesson being that America is just too big — and too wild, and too destructive, and rooted in the idea of individual freedom—-for any self styled ‘elite’ to ride the horse for very long, without being thrown off.” By David Samuels published in Unherd, Nov 9, 2024.

Truer words have never been said. We are governed on a pendulum concept, It swings both ways through time. If it gets stuck one way for too long, the American people unstick it and shove it back the other way. That should provide hope for the 60% of Humboldt County citizens walking around today feeling like their world ended for good. We have all been there and done that. God bless America. Peace out.

[41] After I tried to console my son's half-sister, a very sweet girl heavily into every alphabet cause, she went full crybully on me, blaming me for about 20 things, then commanding me to unfriend her and “think about” what I've done. It was ugly looking at her tantrum, like seeing an internal organ exposed. I did not play her game and am curious to see how she recovers or does not recover.

[5] I hated a lot of what Kamala stood for, but voted for her anyway. Because I believed that the damage she would do would be far easier to undo later than the damage he would do. Sad that my choice would come down to that. Sometimes I think the “Vote for Cthulhu, why settle for the lesser of two evils” crowd has it down pat.