BERNARD NORVELL
On October 22, 2024 Fort Bragg businessman Bernard (Bernie) Robert Norvell passed away suddenly. Bernard was 85 years old.
He is survived by his wife of 62 years Donna Norvell, his children Evelyn Hautala and son in law Steven Hautala as well as his son Bernie Norvell and daughter in law Michelle Norvell.; His four grandchildren, Tanisha Norvell and Gavin, Lane and Taylor Norvell, Mariah (Hautala) and Tyler Pennington, Ashley (Hautala) and John Thorpe. His great grandchildren Clayton, Waylon, Asher and Reese.
His family would like to thank everyone in the community for all the support and kindness to the family over the last few weeks. Any donations of behalf of Bernard should be made to the Humane Society or any youth sports programs.
The Norvell Family
THE GOOD NEWS is that Americans buy more flowers than Big Macs. The bad news is that the cut flowers we buy are a lot like Big Macs. Unnatural. They’ve mostly had their natural scents removed to make them last longer in the vase, and most of them are now imported from the usual array of unhappy countries where growing them for starvation wages in unhealthy conditions is the norm.
NOT THAT THIS BOOK is a 300-page bummer. How could it be? The subject is flowers. No sir, ‘Flower Confidential — The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful’ by Amy Stewart, who lives and gardens in Eureka, is a book whose fascinating content I nearly neglected to explore because I was put off by its pulsating orange cover.
BOOK COVERS used to be minor works of art — remember the Modern Library editions of the 1940s and 50s? — but these days a book display tends to look more like a popsicle shop than reading material, and the jacket of this one looks like something Oprah could get behind. Which Oprah should, because when I looked inside I was immediately hooked.
FLOWER CONFIDENTIAL contains more information, and so many fascinating anecdotes, including an affecting one about an Arcata eccentric who developed a unique lily, and all of it written in good, clear often funny prose, that I read it straight through.
MASS PRODUCTION of cut flowers, we’re informed, has led to a mass assault on the way flowers are propagated and, as we’ve all noticed but haven’t known why, the disappearance of their natural scents. Of course we flower lovers grow our own, and we always go for the real thing, not these neutered imports, these botanical invasions of the body snatchers, but at one time or another most of us are compelled to resort to a florist for the random bouquet of steel-belted red roses flown in from Colombia or somewhere.
EVEN if you don’t know a rose from a violet, and when’s the last time you got a whiff of a natural violet? you’ll enjoy ‘Flower Confidential.’
IN OTHER LITERARY NOTES, a reader writes: “I, too, read Them Old Cowboy Songs. I was drawn right into it. But, by the end, I regretted the seduction. I think this is my last Annie Proulx story — ever! She creates the most wonderful three-dimensional characters and she makes us care about them. (I loved the vignette about the prospector’s earring.) Then she kills them off, one by one, in the most horrible ways imaginable.
”I'M SURE life in the Territories in the late 19th century was hard, but do we have to have our noses rubbed in it? If you liked this story, you would love the one in Open Range about the rancher’s son who goes back east and is involved in an automobile accident. His brain is damaged, but not his libido. He eventually returns home and begins menacing other ranchers' daughters. The neighbors try to explain the damaged kid's problem to the father, but their complaints fall on deaf ears. So they solve the problem themselves — with a broken beer bottle.
”OF COURSE Proulx doesn’t let the story end there. The boy lives for a while, but becomes horribly infected. That was the penultimate Proulx story I will read. Her novels I can handle just fine. I very much enjoyed ‘That Old Ace in the Hole.’ And I sent you a copy of ‘The Shipping News’ years ago. Perhaps I like the novels better than the short stories because she has to keep her characters alive for future chapters.
”I AM the other way around with T. Coraghessan Boyle. I sometimes enjoy his short stories, but consider his novels a waste of time, especially ‘East is East,’ which was mentioned years ago by an AVA reader as ‘one of the three funniest books’ he had ever read. The other two were ‘Catch 22’ (I agree) and ‘A Confederacy of Dunces’ (I strongly disagree — the author struck me as suicidal, even before I learned that he had, indeed, killed himself shortly after finishing the book.)”
ANNIE PROULX does tend to the dark view, but the dark view has always seemed to me just basic realism, and her fiction conveys more of the reality of frontier America than tons of 19th century histories, few of them managing to convey how tough it and its people really were.
THE FUNNIEST BOOKS I’ve read include Heller’s ‘Catch 22;’ ‘The Magic Christian’ by Terry Southern; ‘The Ginger Man’ by J.P. Donleavy; and everything by Evelyn Waugh. There’s also lots of funny stuff in Ulysses, not that you’d know it from the way the book killers go on about how highbrow it is (and if I’m reading it it’s definitely not highbrow). Much of ‘Dance to the Music of Time’ is hugely comic although an Anglo-Irish writer, educated in the U.K., told me ‘Dance’ was “too Etonian” for him, a criticism irrelevant to an American reader who wouldn’t know Etonian from Devonian, just as if I said to an Englishman that I thought a lot of modern American fiction was “too NPR” or “too Oprah,” which American fiction tends to be, if you get my drift.
’DANCE’ had me laughing throughout, and I recommend it to the max and as a fascinating picture of upper middleclass England between the great wars.
TC Boyle seems to me kinda like a male version of Joyce Carol Oates, another prolific writer who always seems about half there. I kinda liked Oates’ Marilyn,’ the fictionalized life of the tragic and perhaps murdered movie star, just as I kinda liked ‘Tortilla Curtain’ and ‘Budding Prospects’ by Boyle, the only books of Oates and Boyle I could get all the way through. (The marijuana brigades might enjoy ‘Budding Prospects,’ a funny, realistic treatment of marijuana gardening set right here in the Emerald Triangle, and ‘Tortilla Curtain’ is an effectively sympathetic if overdrawn account of the immigrant Mexican experience gone as wrong as it can go.
THERE’S DIM SUM and then there’s the dim sum at the Tong Palace on Clement between 10th and 11th, easily the most comprehensive dim sum selection in all of Frisco. They just keep bringing it on in a copious variety unique in my experience which, to be candid, is not what anyone would call vast. I’m not one for two hour meals and related chi chi excess. Get in, get it down, get out, I say, and on to the next chapter in life’s adventure or whatever it is.
THIS TIRESOME BUSINESS of swishing wine around for an hour prior to the grand presentation of four bite-size lamb chops on a tiny decorated la la plate that looks like it came off the wall of the SFMOMA is not my idea of a night out. Let alone a meal.
BUT THE TONG, with its stained red carpet and aquariums of half-dead fish scrambling to elude ancient crustaceans is a can’t miss dining experience. You hear me? Can’t miss! Ten of us had lunch there a couple of Saturdays ago and, no exaggeration, 30 different dishes! And the Chinese slave girls, as I suspect, were still bringing new edibles out when we finally staggered away from the table.
THAT feast totaled for all ten of us came to $88. Do the math, beat the deal! I hadn’t got a restaurant bargain like that since I was a starving student eating at a place on Jackson in Chinatown where, for less than a dollar, you got three pork chops, half a head of boiled cabbage on a platter of rice and gravy. I used to go for weeks on that one meal a day. Lately, I’ve become a more adventurous diner, which is how I found the Tong when a gourmand friend and I walked in one Saturday not knowing the place even did dim sum, which they don’t except Saturdays and Sundays. I’ve been doing my sums in the Tong’s dim ever since.
JIM GIBBONS IS A NATIONALLY RANKED RUNNER who lived in Willits for a long time before relocating to Hawaii. Jim writes: “Bruce Anderson once accused me of winning the Beer Run that was at the Fairgrounds in '83 or '84, I think, because I was coaching cross country then at Willits High and I seem to remember taking some of my high school runners over in the District station wagon. After we all did the Boontling Classic, we heard there was a Beer Run and everyone encouraged me to do it. Why not?, I thought, without thinking. I finished second, but the winner puked, thereby, according to someone, meant he was disqualified. Which made me the winner, and after a hearty breakfast and several cups of coffee at the Horn of Zeese, I drove my students back to Willits.” (Er, Jim, excuse me, but the beer run was at night.)
TURKEY VULTURES TAKE NOTE. Watch what you eat! According to a recent article in ‘Nature,’ India’s vultures have declined from millions and millions to just tens of thousands and are now considered endangered because they are ingesting trace amounts of a veterinary drug used to reduce fever and treat lameness in the dead farm animals they feed on. Conservationists first thought the deaths of the Indian vultures were caused by a new bird plague, but an international research team found chalky deposits in the birds’ internal organs, showing the birds were dying of kidney failure. After checking livestock pharmaceuticals for those harmful to birds, researchers have placed blame on the drug Diclofenac. Used extensively in Pakistan and India, Diclofenac is “not as popular” with veterinarians in the United States. It is, however, a common treatment in the US for arthritis and pain in humans. The vulture decline is also affecting the health of India’s residents because, until recently, vultures quickly consumed animal carcasses, helping to prevent the spread of anthrax and foot-and-mouth disease. One of the veterinary researchers said he was “increasingly concerned about the vast amount of drugs that end up in the environment one way or another.” … “I think what it actually says is that we really need to look systematically at the use of pharmaceuticals for veterinary purposes. It raises a question of whether we should be looking more closely at the trace chemicals from human use.”
THIS BUMPERSTICKER spotted in Cloverdale neatly sums up the argument: “Would intelligent design have created you?” Of course not, but a kind, if indiscriminate intelligence might have, not there’s much evidence of that.
CHILLING FACTOID claims that San Francisco high rises, old and new, are still anchored to the ground, much of it bay fill, the same old way that destroyed them in ‘06. Worse, the new high rises are often built from inferior, imported steel, which is cheaper but much weaker than the best stuff made right here in the USofA.
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT regularly editorializes about water. “Drying out —Water conservation orders are coming, so start saving now.” But the paper doesn’t dare state the obvious. Which is? Which is that the 101 corridor is tapped out. No more water can be diverted through the hand-dug-by-Chinese-100-year-old tunnel from the Eel River to the upper Russian River at Potter Valley down into Lake Mendocino, which is already depleted this plentiful rainy season because Sonoma County’s wine growers routinely take almost half of the flow released from Lake Mendo into the Russian in the spring to frost-protect their grapes. No sir, the Eel River can’t send anymore water through the decrepit old 1,000-yard long tunnel the size of a tall fat man because the Eel needs the water for its own imperiled fish and its own communities at places like Rio Dell and Fortuna. The Press Democrat doesn’t say that Sonoma County could divert more water to Sonoma County from Lake Sonoma but why should it when Sonoma County already owns most of the water piled up behind Coyote Dam at Lake Mendocino; it’s a lot cheaper to suck up water which you in turn sell to consumers as far south as Sausalito if you already own Lake Mendocino than it is to pipe the water up and down 101 from behind Warm Springs dam along pipes you’d have to spend a lot of public money to build. And the Press Democrat doesn’t say that its wine industry is sucking up a dangerous amount of the Russian River which, as already stated, draws all of its summer flow from Ukiah to Healdsburg from the diverted Eel via Lake Mendocino. Nor, of course, does the Press Democrat ever mention that it’s way past time for an end to the spread of urban Santa Rosa from Cotati to Cloverdale. There isn’t enough water for endless urbanization from the Russian River which, in its natural state before 1904, dried up altogether in the summer months all the way to Windsor.
AS RACHEL OLIVIERI of Willits has pointed out, “Japan mandates that all development retain 80% of all the rainfall in the development area. But today in California there are more than 1200 non-federal dams and 181 large federal dams silting up and evaporating 42 million acre feet of the state’s 74 million acre feet of total runoff sending water to places there isn’t water that’s not caught like it is in Japan. That’s 4.2 million acre feet in evaporation alone that benefits absolutely no one and leave behind heavy salt concentrations that otherwise would be distributed throughout the river system mixed with sediment and organic material to create new soils.”
CREDIT WHERE CREDIT is due, in this case for Therese Brendlin who designed that spectacular, and spectacularly beautiful fence that Doug Johnson has erected on 128 at Navarro, already a local landmark.
ANTHRO INQUIRY. Every so often there’s a flurry of media stories claiming new evidence of human life somewhere in the United States more ancient than previously known. The stories invariably cite the “land bridge from Asia” over which America’s very first settlers traveled to settle from Yakima to Tierra del Fuego. Mendocino County’s Indians — all Indians — presumably originated in Asia, humping it over the frozen Bering Straits and fanning out over the Americas. What I don’t get is why would these presumed waves of Asian settlers keep on heading south, then east? Why would some stop off in the frozen north to become Eskimos when they could have kept on going to become Pomos in a temperate place like Cloverdale? Did these alleged migrations have to keep going south because the more hospitable areas were already occupied? The whole show was accomplished in less than 20,000 years? Isn’t it more likely that the first peoples arrived by some other route, some other means to have become so dispersed, then so entrenched in such advanced settlements?
GAZING out my office window high atop the Farrer Building in central Boonville a few years ago, I watched a middle-age couple of the tourist type, arm-in-arm, as they ambled in the direction of Ledson’s tasting room where they paused in front of the then-closed brewpub. The man had glanced upward. Something had caught his eye. He suddenly bent down, picked up a rock and hurled it at a crow perched on the power line above him. The crow was undisturbed. The couple re-entwined themselves and continued their walk, as if their assault on the crow wasn’t a totally nutso thing to have done.
STEVE TALBOT:
If you like political intrigue, Vatican drama, and fine acting, I recommend "Conclave." It's a movie for adults. A thinking person's thriller. Cloistered and intense. Ralph Fiennes leads a terrific cast. Just give him the Oscar nomination now. P.S. "Conclave" is also one of those rare indie films for grown-ups that actually is selling tickets and making money. Always a welcome occurrence in the movie business. Support your neighborhood movie theater!
GRATIFYING as it is to see the end of Gaetz as chief of the Justice Department, Trump's next pick will also be a Gaetz personality-political type. Ironically, the libs now defending the FBI and the rest of the unjust Justice Department apparatus, don't seem to know that this country, and the legal profession, is teeming with Gaetzes. The FBI, founded by that old cross-dressing, blackmailing nutcase J. Edgar Hoover, has always been a political police force, until now and historically, in pursuit of the left. President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday named Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida, to be U.S. attorney general just hours after his other choice, Matt Gaetz, withdrew his name. — AP
"CONVICTED FELON." Real tired of this one as applied to Orange Man, and I defy anyone reading this to explain, in 500 words or fewer, what exactly the 34 felonies were for and how exactly they were felonious. Trump was prosecutable on inciting the Januaary 6th riot, and he was clearly prosecutable for trying to rig the Georgia election on his behalf. The 34 felonies? A little bookkeeping slight of hand to disguise his tryst with the fetching honeytrap, Stormy Daniels. Anybody else wouldn't have. been prosecuted, let alone prosecuted for felonies. This thing was a soft misdemeanor, if that.
SPEAKING of Orange Man, the speculation about his mental acuity and general health is only half-difficult. Mentally, he seems maybe a step ahead of Biden, demented and more so by the day given his rambling, incoherent appearances. Physically? Hard to tell behind all that makeup and the world's greatest comb-across. Take away that facade I'd suppose he looks his age, the age of any other unfit 78-year-old.
BIDEN? Funny how media continues to pretend he's a functioning president when it's evident he was out of it even before he was elected, and totally out of it now while an unelected cadre of whomevers runs “our democracy.”
FORMER MENDO DA Joe Allen has been disbarred. Don't know the whys but it must have been something terribly egregious given the prevalent ethical standards of the profession. Eyster better start looking over his shoulder over his manufactured prosecution of Ms. Cubbison, which is certainly about as egregious as egregious can be.
I'M NOT the only local with fond memories of the City Bakery on Ukiah's South State Street, less than a block from the County Courthouse. Mrytle Schindler presided at the counter while her husband Karl, and then her son, Karl Jr., did the baking. The Schindlers were in business at that address from 1949 until 1984 when they retired. They made the best brownies ever, I'd say, and Myrtle, despite her formidable old fashioned, cloth coat Republican facade, was very amusing and surprisingly liberal in her political opinions. The bakery offered a range of goods, all of them delicious, and I always enjoyed stopping there when I was in Ukiah for a sandwich, a brownie, a cup of coffee, and a chat with Myrtle. The place reminded me of the lunch counters of my youth, and had obviously remained unchanged from the day it opened in 1949 to the day it closed in 1984, a tiny island of calm stability in a sea of stormy change. Myrtle died at age 90, and with her went the last piece of old Ukiah.
A KID asked Mr. Wizard why gasoline was still cheap in Mexico. Because the Mexican government owns the resource from the ground to the gas station, that's why, not that nationalization would ever happen here even if the country comes to a complete halt instead of the slo-mo stop now underway.
SPEAKING OF OIL, a reader sent me an interesting documentary film called “A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash.” It's pretty convincing, and shocking. I hadn't realized, and I know someone will correct me if I heard wrong, but all the energy alternatives presently out there won't, even taken as a whole, give us ten percent of the energy fossil fuel now provides. Even if we supplemented solar, wind, restaurant grease and the rest of them with ten thousand nuclear facilities it still wouldn't be enough, and since oil production has peaked and is now on a downhill slope of unknown decline – some say it's precipitous, some say less precipitous – industrial civ can count its days.
THE 20 JUNE, 1908 edition of the Mendocino Beacon reported that “Peter Carlson, the contractor and builder of Greenwood (Elk), has the contract to build a $2,000 residence for G.C. Clow near Philo on the Elk Road. … Hop Flat school will close Friday; James Hurley has been wielding the rod there and has had a very successful term. He is well liked and will have the school again after July.” … And from the Beacon of June 9, 1883 we learn that “J.C. Cox, who lives at Gualala, but who owns the Cox copper mine about five miles west of Yorkville, was a Santa Rosa visitor on Thursday. He brought down quite a large number of specimens which assay from 12 to 80 percent copper. He is running two tunnels into the mine — one northwest, which have struck the lode, which Mr. Cox thinks is about fifty feet wide.”
THE COX COPPER MINE, by my crude directional calculations, was either on what is now the late Guido Pronsolino's Copper Queen Ranch near Yorkville, or to the east behind the Y Ranch near the headwaters of Feliz Creek at the very end of McNab Ranch Road. Also at the headwaters of Feliz Creek is the largest “spirit rock” in the county, a spirit rock being an ancient message board on which Indians, over thousands of years, carved mysterious (to us) messages.
HOP FLAT was a thriving little mill town west of present-day Navarro, complete with a hotel, a tannery, a telephone exchange, a train stop, and a teacher named Hurley, a rod-wielding pedagogue. Hop Flat was busy from early in the 20th century until just after World War Two with a lively community of woodsmen's families locally famous for their weekend dances. All trace of this lively little community a stone's throw off 128 not far from Navarro has disappeared as if it never existed.
MIKE GENIELLA:
RIP, MARGIE HANDLEY. Our paths occasionally crossed over the last four decades. While we differed politically, I count myself among the many who recognized Handley's devotion to the Willits community and Mendocino County in general. She was old school, from an era when the local timber economy provided profits, jobs, and stability. Handley cared for her town and its well-being. I was pleasantly surprised earlier this year when Handley, a Reagan devotee, spoke out against Trump and his crowd. My personal admiration deepened. I salute Handley. She was among people across the political spectrum who truly made America great.
(Mike Geniella)
PS. Handley's Letter earlier this year to The Press Democrat:
Editor:
Donald Trump has single-handedly destroyed the Republican Party of Ronald Reagan, who would turn over in his grave to hear the vitriolic words out of Trump’s mouth calling people vermin and telling Vladimir Putin to “do whatever the hell he wants.”
He is not the same man that I voted for twice. He is so full of revenge and retribution that he thinks of nothing other than how to get even for an election he full well knows he lost, but just can’t live with the results.
If you listen to his rhetoric, he repeats his lies over and over and over until people actually believe him. He uses the tactics of a cult leader, as Jim Jones did, to keep the MAGA group engaged. Even Republicans in Congress are drinking the Kool-Aid.”
I cannot vote for a morally corrupt man who thinks he is on the same plane as Alexei Navalny and Jesus.
Please vote for Nikki Haley on Tuesday. I look forward to the day I can turn on the TV and not hear the name Donald Trump mentioned. The man is a threat to our democracy.
Margie Handley, Willits
YOU'RE EITHER on the bus or off the bus, as Ken Kesey once summed up the diff between the witting and the unwitting. One rare day in San Francisco when it was too hot to ride the Muni, which is twice as hellish in the heat, I still wanted to venture out to see the Chihuly exhibit at the DeYoung, so off I went on the 44, a bus, and ordinarily a benign, uneventful ride maybe a mile and a half from my starting point on California Street, but often less benign in the summer months when our nation's future is away from the books they'll never read and looking for excitement whether it's piped into their empty heads through their ubiquitous earphones or whatever excitement they can make happen in front of their precociously sated, jaded faces.
BUT in the heat of that day, with the winos turning purple and the prevalent bad feeling common to public transportation torqued upwards in sync with the rising temperatures, I wish I'd walked, or at least had the sense to get off the bus on what turned out to be the nightmarish return trip from my outing to the DeYoung, the first half of the trip being uneventful.
THE RETURN TRIP was yet to be savored. At the DeYoung, just as I was about to enjoy the glassworks by an artist who clearly benefited from the hallucinogens of the 1960s, the emergency alarms went off. All us culture vultures looked at each other, the mob of us, knowing that emergencies these days can mean anything from a suicidal Mohammedan to roving bands of vandals, neither of which one ever expects in a museum, but in the age of the unexpected who could know?
THE DeYOUNG'S STAFF, resplendent and competent-looking in their crisp blazers, directed us in opposite directions. When the mob moved towards the signs that said “exit,” staff herded us in the opposite direction where there were no exit signs. We milled around groaning like cattle as museum staff yelled at us to go this way and that, before we were finally driven into long tunnels behind obscure service doors that led us somewhere beneath the museum's cavernous underground parking lot.
THE EMERGENCY BUZZERS were so ear-splittingly insistent people plugged their ears with their forefingers. “Gawd! We get it! Turn those things off!” a woman yelled. Naturally, no one in a position to know had any idea what the emergency was. It occurred to me that we might be some kind of living art project, a DeYoung-funded art experiment staffed by snooty young people of the smirking, black-clad type one sees these days wherever there is art, real or imagined, that one of them would suddenly appear to thank us for our “participation” and invite us all to come back in a month to watch endless loops of ourselves walking down endless corridors, the elderly stumbling painfully forward with the rest of us.
EMERGING into 100 degree heat we were again ordered not to go here, there or anywhere by an officious fat kid in the inevitable museum blazer. It was hot, very hot, but we wanted to get back in to see what we'd come to see, LSD Glass, whole rooms of it, giant pinks and purples in fantastic glass gardens of improbably gargantuan blooms.
THE EXCRUCIATING emergency buzzer blasted us again, this time exactly twice. An old guy declared, “I'm not going any goddamn where. One emergency is enough.” We never did find out what the emergency was, if any.
FINALLY BACK OUTSIDE in the heat after the psychedelic glass displays, I walked over to Irving for lunch at a Chinese place that makes their own noodles. You know a Chinese restaurant is good if there are Chinese lined up to get in. I was early and the only Round Eye in a large, pre-lunch crowd.
THE SAN TUNG is very good, I mean real good, as you can taste for yourself at 1031 Irving between 11th and 12th, and they get it out there fast, too, with the supreme indifference only a Chinese waiter can manage, natural geniuses at making you disappear before your own eyes.
FROM THERE, I trudged back up to 9th to the 44 stop, walking past overflowing garbage cans through filthy streets, cursing the mayor and wondering what kind of civic official can conscientiously collect his pay in a city whose public spaces are a squalid disgrace. Easy, no conscience, less sense of responsibility for anything, and San Francisco in a heat wave is awful even in its few undefiled spots, not that leadership is ever seen outside their air conditioners on those days that the town is on low boil and the murder rate jumps before the calming fog reappears.
ON THE 44 for the return trip across the park, and as noted the bus is a big mistake in hot weather, we'd gone exactly one block with only a couple of feral growls from a kid sporting a $200 pink mohawk and two ten-year-old diabetics who were licking the empty wrappers of the negative food value items they constantly produced from their tent-like garments before throwing the wrappers out the window into the oncoming traffic, delightedly bumping fists if it looked like the wrappers might obscure the vision of passing motorists — so far, a generic Muni experience.
THE KID in the mohawk suddenly began to bark like a dog, an elderly woman cackled. No one else was amused. An obese white man in a wheelchair yelled, “Lemme off here!” The driver continued down the block to the bus stop at Lincoln Way. “I said I wanted to get off back there,” the guy in the wheelchair declared. The driver, a middle-aged black guy, explained the obvious, which was that he's supposed to disembark passengers only at bus stops. “But I'm handicapped,” the wheelchair guy said. “Drivers always let me off where I want.” Which had to be a lie because I rode the buses all the time and I'd never seen anybody off-loaded any place but at a legal stop.
THE DRIVER ignored the cripple as he maneuvered the bus as close to the curb as he could get it before letting the hydraulic stair down. This Get The Wheelchair To The Sidewalk process takes whole minutes. The heat in the bus was becoming fully unbearable as the wheelchair oaf, headed for the front door, plowed through a grove of old growth standees, running over the toes of a seated woman who merely emitted a conversational, “Ouch.”
THE WHEELCHAIR PATIENT advised his casualty to pull her feet “outta the aisle next time and I won't run over you.” With the lift finally all the way to the sidewalk, the wheelchair guy announced, “Changed my mind. Next stop.” We're jammed in there, standing room only, sweating through our Right Guard Super Protection, the nut in the mohawk howling like a backyard dope dog.
AT THE NEXT STOP, in the park, same drill. The driver got as close as he could to the curb, lowered the lift, the wheelchair guy again announced, “Nope. Next stop.” What? Dump this bastard and end our misery. This guy's playing us.
THE PINK MOHAWK continued to howl and the two premature heart patients were still throwing empty pork rind bags out the window. We did these aborted wheelchair stops all the way to Clement where the driver emphatically informed the cripple, “You're getting off here, my friend.” The cripple said, “Well, gee, you don't have to make a racial issue out of it.” The bus driver laughed. “Have a nice day,” he said,
A READER WRITES: “’Reefer Madness has taken over Mendo’.” Why, or how, is that news? Did you know there is a demographic of men for whom smoking pot is the only thing that keeps them from violent behavior? I had a couple as neighbors in Sausalito who were fine as long he stayed stoned. When he ran out of weed he beat her up. Not that pot suppresses this tendency universally, but in some cases it does, and that’s enough for a prescription if you ask me. The greatest sin of most stoners is that they are crashing bores. An apropos haiku by John Stephens:
morning in Bolinas
would-be poets
lean on their ballpoint pens
A MISTAKE to argue with them but it still comes up all these years later, and if you’re trapped by a nut re this particular non-conspiracy, as gently as you can (they can be volatile) point out that a conclusive study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found, basically, that Building 7’s steel burned so thoroughly that its crucial underpinnings collapsed.
NOT that the Building 7 nuts were deterred. They still claim that September 11th was the work of Bush and Cheney, the whole show, right down to fake Arabs flying fake airliners into the World Trade Center. They say the buildings were blown up by, well, Cheney. Mike Berger of 9/11 Truth, predictably denounced the government’s Building 7 findings: “Their explanation simply isn’t sufficient. We’re being lied to.”
HUMAN REMAINS FOUND IN PIERCY AREA IN 2012 IDENTIFIED
On October 30, 2012 at 0700 hours during the morning shift briefing, Mendocino County Sheriff's Office Dispatch advised then Sergeant Matt Kendall that human remains had been discovered, buried in a shallow grave in the Piercy area.
Detectives with the Mendocino County Sheriff's Investigations Bureau responded to the 83000 block of Highway 271 in Piercy, and were provided with a plastic bag containing human foot bones. Photographs taken by the reporting party were also provided to investigators at this time.
Sheriff’s Detectives utilized kayaks and paddled approximately 1/4 mile to the location, where the remains had been discovered.
Forensic Anthropologists from California State University in Chico were requested for the excavation/preservation of the buried skeletal remains.
At the conclusion of the excavation, the Forensic Anthropology team unearthed human skeletal remains, which were absent the head. It appeared the remains located within the shallow grave had been there for an extended time, and the partial articles of clothing collected suggested 1980’s styles.
Due to the surrounding circumstances this investigation was labeled as a “John Doe” homicide.
An investigation was launched, and multiple attempts to identify the remains of the buried skeletal remains were made, but ultimately unsuccessful.
In Spring 2024, the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office sent forensic evidence to Othram in The Woodlands, Texas. At Othram's laboratory, scientists successfully developed a DNA extract from the forensic evidence and used Forensic-Grade Genome Sequencing® to build a comprehensive DNA profile for the unknown man. Othram’s in-house forensic genetic genealogy team then used this profile to conduct genealogy research, ultimately providing new investigative leads to law enforcement. The investigative leads presented genealogical findings for a Warren David Hawkins.
After receiving this information, Investigators learned that “Warren Hawkins” had been reported missing by his sister (Paula Hawkins) to the Cowlitz County Sheriff’s Office in Washington state. Paula Hawkins provided a DNA reference sample to the Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office, which was provided to Othram Technology and later used for his identification. An additional DNA sample was obtained from Paula in 2024 by the Gresham Police Department in Oregon.
The last reported sighting of Hawkins was in July of 1986 when his now deceased mother dropped off 21-year-old Hawkins and another unknown male at a bus station.
Because of the hard work and dedication of the above listed agencies, the remains of Warren David Hawkins can now be returned to his family.
This is still an active and ongoing homicide investigation with the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office and anyone with information related to this case is requested to call the Sheriff's Office Dispatch Center at 707-463-4086.
The Mendocino County Sheriff's Office would like to thank the following agencies for their assistance during this investigation:
Othram Technology
California State University - Chico Anthropology Department
NamUs (National Missing and Unidentified Persons System)
Cowlitz County Sheriff's Office in Washington
Gresham Police Department in Oregon
WE WERE PLEASED to hear that Mendo drug court may return to some semblance of functionality soon now that Prop 36 has passed. The presumption is that more low-level criminals will enter some kind of court-mandated treatment once they realize they face jail for what used to be “minor, non-violent crimes,” which were effectively decriminalized by the Prop 47 catch & release provision that was corrected by Prop 36. We shall see.
(Mark Scaramella)
ON MONDAY, JULY 14th, 1958, the Ukiah Daily Journal reported: “Coyote Dam Clearing Underway. Though the beginning was slow and complicated by difficulties of one kind or another, the drive to clear the Coyote Valley dam basin of brush and debris was underway today and work crews who can muster a few minutes or hours each evening and days on weekends are asked to report to the Coyote Dam entrance on old Highway 20. Unavailability of a bulldozer until late Saturday night slowed the first day’s efforts. Doing the first work in clearing the basin and coming back tonight for more are Walter Heady and his eldest son, Bruce…”
Sonoma County put up most of the money to get the dam built so, in perpetuity, most of the water stored at Lake Mendocino belongs to Sonoma County. The late Joe Scaramella was the only supervisor who voted against the deal.
WALTER HEADY, some of you will recall, was the John Birch Society’s man in Mendocino County. He erected the famous landmark signs on the west side of 101 north and south of Ukiah urging “US Out of the UN.” Mr. and Mrs. Heady, already elderly, used to show up at liberal demos in 1990s Ukiah where, of course, they were subjected to torrents of abuse from people who would otherwise characterize verbal assaults on the elderly as “ageism.”
ANOTHER clip from even further back, this one from the Fort Bragg Advocate of June 30, 1934, illustrates how different the routes of travel used to be in vast Mendocino County. “Coast Line Stages will inaugurate a passenger bus service between Fort Bragg and Duncan Mills in Sonoma County, to become effective July 1st. This service will connect with the regular Pickwick service, giving a direct bus line to Sausalito.” Coast travelers, then, proceeded directly south to West Sonoma County. Some still do if they're traveling by MTA bus, but most Coast residents these days head east for 101 then south.
OLD, OLD TIMERS will correct me, but I believe at or near Duncan Mills in the 1930s one could get on a train to continue one’s journey south to Sausalito then from Sausalito by ferry to San Francisco. Farther back, circa 1910, the aforementioned Joe Scaramella remembered when the mail, wending its way north by horse-drawn stage from Cazadero announced its arrival in Point Arena by a blast from the trumpet carried for that purpose by the stagecoach driver.
A LOCAL OLD TIMER remembers taking the train from Guerneville to Duncan Mills. At Duncan Mills there was a turnaround on which the train reversed direction for the trip back to Guerneville and points east where southbound travelers, at Santa Rosa, caught the old Northwestern Pacific for San Francisco and, if they were northbound, the Northwestern Pacific for Eureka. West Sonoma County, like the East Bay, was served by rail through the 1940s. The Northwestern Pacific ran two trains a day north and south and, briefly, it was possible to get from Fort Bragg to Willits on the Skunk, transfer to the Northwestern Pacific, and get to San Francisco by early evening.
A READER WRITES: “Your comment about the rest of us subsidizing junk mail reminds me of a letter I sent to my local paper… You rail against the Press Democrat. But you haven’t experienced Fairfield’s Daily Republic — or, as it is variously known by locals, the Daily Repulsive or the Daily Repugnant. I’m almost ashamed to have my name appear therein. A quarter of a century ago, after they published a 32-point hed on the second section, “Pet Burial Cite Selected,” I sent off a rather caustic letter asking if a community of 120,000 (then) didn’t deserve better… Two days later I got a very hot call at work from a Senior Editor. ‘Haven’t you ever made a mistake? What qualifies you to criticize our efforts? Have you ever worked in the newspaper business? I replied that, as a matter of fact, I have worked in the newspaper business, the Pasadena Star News. Then I hastily changed the subject before she could ask about my position at the Star News (Paper Boy.) The Daily Republic: the local paper you love to hate! No, I have never subscribed. But my landlady passes me portions of her copies twice a week for Maureen Dowd.”
TOM HOMAN, Trump's la migra man: “If you’re in the country illegally and you got an order for removal, or even if you don’t have one, if you’re in the country, leave on your own. Because when you leave on your own, there’s no penalties. But if we actually have to deport you with a formal order for deportation, there’s a 20-year ban. That means you can’t get a visit visa, you can’t get a tourist visa. If you have a U.S. citizen child that lives here, he can’t petition for you. So, it’s better to leave on your own rather than getting a formal order of removal.”
THIS is not the face of a man who often drinks from the fount of human kindness, but he, like his blustering boss, is lying because, as an INS veteran of many years, Homan knows that the only unpapered people he can easily get to are either prisoners or people already known to the authorities, the many millions more are beyond the capabilities of government to deport because of the cost of even attempting it and the logistics of even attempting to do it are prohibitive, especially at a time the U.S. is funding two wars, one of them a genocide, far, far away.
NEVERTHELESS, us Mendo lib-labs better prepare to do what we can to protect our friends and neighbors, especially in areas like the Ukiah and Anderson valleys where there are lots and lots of Homan-vulnerable people. Homan, btw, has warned us papered persons not to interfere with "these operations," added incentive to get in the way.
DO PEOPLE presently get deported from Mendocino County? Yes, regularly, from the County Jail.
THE UKIAH DISPATCH-DEMOCRAT of September 11th 1908, carried this notice:
“Bear Flag Hero. At the Admission Day celebration in old Sonoma last Wednesday, Henry Beeson, of Boonville, this county, was the lion of the occasion, and hauled up the bear flag to start up the celebration. He is now the sole survivor of the famous bear flag raising over old Sonoma proclaiming California free from Spanish rule. Henry Beeson came to California in 1846 and was only 17 years old at the time of his arrival. He is now nearly 80 years old and likes to talk about the old times. He went down [to Sonoma] especially to take part in the celebration. He still has his home in Anderson Valley and is held in high esteem by all.”
BEESON'S BOONVILLE RANCH was on the wagon track to Cloverdale about where the Boonville CDF station is today. Beeson home-crafted saddles at his ranch for many years, such fine saddles that horsemen from all over California came to Boonville to buy them.
MY GRANDCHILDREN are deep into youth sports, and Marin is a hugely youth sports-oriented place. Even the most obscure games — water polo, archery — are heavily invested. The junior competitions can be intense, with plenty of psycho-parents more childish than their children torquing upwards the pressure on their children to win, win, win! (Sonoma County has had to reschedule high school football games because so many refs, sick of abuse from fans, including death threats, have quit that there's a shortage of officials.
SO, my granddaughter plays softball, volleyball, and basketball. The other day an aggressive basketball teammate, disappointed in a loss, declared to my 10-year-old heiress, “I won't be passing the ball to you anymore because I've lost confidence in you.” Granddaughter was quite upset. “I only made one mistake,” she lamented. The coach had to explain to the perfectionist that basketball is a team sport. All is now well.
CRIME docs on NetFlix include one on the Menendez brothers who shotgunned their parents to death, and the Jon Benet Ramsay murder by a person or persons still unknown. The Menendez brothers murdered their parents because they claimed they were still afraid of their father who'd allegedly molested them. These two yobbos, imo, not only murdered their parents then, distraught, went on a Rolex shopping spree, libeling their dead mom and dad ever after. Do men molest their children? No. Case closed.
FROM what I knew of the Jon Benet murder derived from the police accounts dominant in the news. I assumed it was an in-house job, cemented in my cursory opinion by the fact of the child's life as a participant in child beauty pageants. Jeez, what kind of parents would compel their five-year-old into that weird world? Anything might happen in that context. I assumed with the cops that mom did it and dad helped cover up mom's crime, but the new documentary on the case makes it clearer than clear that the parents didn't do it, that the case may yet be solved by a re-analysis of DNA. Both sordid matters, in their different ways, serve perfectly as metaphors for how far off the psycho-social rails this country has gone.
SPORTS FANS will have long ago noted that baseball players often bump fists these days rather than exchange open-handed grasps with celebrating teammates. Davy Johnson, former major league player and manager, says congratulatory fist bumps have become the norm because years ago Moises Alou would urinate on his hands to, he said, strengthen them. Alou's teammates were naturally loath to shake with him, hence the fist bumps, which quickly caught on everywhere in baseball as de rigueur.
Mark Scaramella: I watched a pretty good documentary about the Jon Benet Ramsey case a few years ago that contened that the most likely killer of little Miss Ramsey was her high-strung older brother who, allegedly, angrily smacked his sister with a large kitchen utensil in the face when the girl tried to snatch some of the boy’s sliced pineapples and ended up accidentally killing the girl. The brother, now an adult, denies any role in Jon Benet’s death. The parents, worried that they’d lose their son, after having already lost their precious daughter, then covered up for their son by trying to make it look like an intruder had snuck into the house and garroted the girl. They then wrote a very odd, and strangely specific, four page ransom note which, the documentary argued convincingly, was written by Jon Benet’s mother. The documentary also pointed out that a Boulder, Colorado Grand Jury had recommended charging the parents with covering up for their son and being some kind of accessory but the DA at the time refused to file any indictment and the Grand Jury report remained sealed. The case continues to fascinate the public and documentarians because of all the theories that have been put forth and the lack of hard evidence proving what really happened. Jon Benet’s doting mother passed away years ago from cancer.
STILL WAITING for CEO Antle’s Measure B report…
In late October, (former?) Supervisor Dan Gjerde, referring to the Board’s decision last year to “borrow” about $8 million from the Measure B fund to cover the jail expansion overrun, said:
“Now is not the time to request that [the state] pay for the jail project. Now is the time to request reimbursement for Measure B funds. Which may be politically more appealing, you know, because members of the public don't want to see Measure B funds spent on the jail. Honestly, with the County's budget situation, I mean -- I know it's a loan. But really is there a guarantee that it's going to be paid back? If the County doesn't have the money, it can't pay back Measure B bonds. Having heard that Assemblymember Wood thought there was a pathway there, I hope that there will be one or two people in the executive office who are going to follow up on that.”
Since then, the County Auditor Sara Pierce has reported discovering about $13 million in previously unreported unspent funds, making the Measure B funding picture even more confusing.
County CEO Darcie Antle replied:
“Those conversations are ongoing. On my behalf most recently with Senator McGuire yesterday roughly about this time I had him personally on the phone discussing options. So it is something we are all actively working on. I know the Sheriff is working through his association to get to the state as well. Nobody has dropped the ball on this. Your fiscal team with your Auditor-Controller are working their very best to figure out how to get those Measure B dollars back to Measure B because we certainly do not want to incur interest on those ongoing expenses. More to come on that. Hopefully by November 6.”
November 6 came and went. Nothing more was to come, of course.
This week, the Board’s agenda for the last meeting of the year on December 2 was posted and again nothing about Measure B. (But there’s an item about raising County fees again, obviously the staff’s much greater priority.)
Despite “actively working on” the subject and “hoping” that there would be something to report, it’s now another month later and there’s still no report on the status of the Measure B funds.
(Mark Scaramella)
YOU KNOW what I've been doing? Going through my address book and crossing out the dead people. It gives you a feeling of power, of superiority, to have outlasted another old friend.
— George Carlin
WELCOME TO WYOMING
But he knew all about the place, the fiery column of the Cave Gulch flare-off in its vast junkyard field, refineries, disturbed land, uranium mines, coal mines, trona mines, pump jacks and drilling rigs, clear-cuts, tank farms, contaminated rivers, pipelines, methanol-processing plants, ruinous dams, the Amoco mess, railroads, all disguised by the deceptively empty landscape. It wasn't his first trip. He knew about the state's lie-back-and-take-it income from federal mineral royalties, severance and ad valorem taxes, the old ranches bought up by country music stars and assorted billionaires acting roles in some imaginary cowboy revue, the bleed-out of brains and talent, and for common people no jobs and a tough life in a trailer house. It was a 97,000-square -mile dog's breakfast of outside exploiters. Republican ranchers and scenery. The ranchers couldn't see their game was over…
— Annie Proulx
GETTING OLDER IS GREAT. It's a great time of life. You get to take advantage of people, and you're not responsible for anything. You can get the family together and pretend you have Alzheimer's. You say, “Who are these people? Where's my horse?” Nobody bats an eye.
— George Carlin
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] Are there even any bands anymore? I grew up loving the likes of country music legends Alabama and the Oak Ridge Boys. Rock bands like Bon Jovi, Van Halen and Aerosmith. Where are the bands? The new entertainers usually can't even play an instrument and need auto tune software to carry a tune. Totally fake. Totally unreal. Offensive.
[2] Nothing foolish about the nomination of Gaetz at all…
Genius level Trump diplomacy…
Lots of bad press was surrounding Gaetz…
Trump abhors bad press…
So Trump effectively cleaned up that mess, while outwardly appearing to promote Gaetz…
That Gaetz remains loyal, just means it was just all the more masterul of a highly skilled political maneuver by Trump…
It’s not a difficult concept…
Very predictable outcome.
Never underestimate your opponent. And it made a lot of his other appointments seem less bad.
[3] Today, Nov. 23, 1963, 61 years ago, JFK was assassinated. Terrible tragedy.
President Trump said he would open up the JFK files. Let's see if Mr. Trump can keep his word. Let's see if he CAN do it, and if "they" let him do it.
That should be a pretty easy, non-partisan issue.
[4] I got a letter from PG&E that said my bill this year was going to be higher than last year’s. They go on to say factors like heavy appliance use or household guests might have contributed. Funny they didn’t mention their PRICE increases as being the reason for the bill being higher since I was using less gas and electricity than last year.
[5] Remember the old joke about Ayn Rand going into a bar for a drink and 2 hours later dies of poisoning.
No regulations.
Did you read about the recent tourists in Laos dying from drinks laced with methanol?
Think we should get rid of the FDA?
Trump is going to do all these things but has yet come up with any plans to implement them.
Let’s see how many campaign promises he keeps. He made about 99 last I heard.
[6] Someone I know was ranting about Trump's nominations last week when I pointed out that "Joe Biden" had earlier in the week taken the clock even closer to midnight. He hadn't noticed. When I pointed out that green lighting landmines was particularly evil he went off on Putin's "evil". I'm still angry at this level of wilful myopia and general stupidity. A headline of an op-ed piece in the ghastly Guardian today tries to claim this escalation is not the West's doing. There must be some way out of here…
[7] Nobody wants to destroy the world, but we’re in an escalatory spiral now. Some things move beyond the control of the lunatics who believe nothing bad CAN happen. We aren’t doing this for the same reasons Russia is doing this. So we don’t know exactly where their actual red lines are. We’re just blundering in that direction. It takes a lot of skill to play nuclear chicken, but we don’t even have anyone officially in charge of this.
So the odds of a cascading failure, misunderstanding or accident is very high and getting higher all the time.
Nobody wants this thing, but it’s already taken on a mind of its own.
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