RICHARD YATES: Vehicles stranded on Highway 128?
Per scanner 128 is closed. Multiple parties stranded due to flooding.
Anderson Valley Fire Chief Andres Avila Confirms:
Yes, we were dispatched Sunday for a water rescue at MM 9.5 (Navarro area). CHP arrived to find three stranded vehicles, none with injuries. A CHP SUV was able to successfully push one vehicle out, one was able to drive out with water induced engine problems, and the other was towed out. With the rapid rise of the North Fork of the Navarro, CalTrans closed the Hwy at Flynn Creek Rd and Hwy 1 (roughly 10 miles of Highway) around 11:00am.
NORCAL JESS
As many of you may be aware, my brother Jake Waggoner passed away on December 23, surrounded by family. I wanted to inform everyone that we will be holding a Celebration of Life in January, although the exact date has yet to be determined. I will ensure that everyone is notified as soon as the details are finalized, so that you can all join us in honoring his memory. I would also like to express my gratitude for the kind messages and condolences that have been extended to our family.
FRANK VAINE’S CAR FOUND & RETURNED
Update on our stolen car: WE GOT IT BACK! It was found abandoned in Covelo early this morning, and it was actually in pretty good shape. There was documented evidence that they tried to sell it, and they actually had it pretty clean inside and out. Feeling wonderful. So two things: 1.Buyer please beware if you are interested in a car that they claim the Title was “lost.” Feeling wonderful. And Thank You for all that were so supporr from your positve facebook reactions and comments and help! Feeling wonderful.
PUNCTUALITY being the Editor's sole remaining virtue he is right on time for Christmas dinner, waiting for the rest of his clan. The thing on his throat disguises a freshly dug opening to the tropical winds of his chest cavity, and the lapel pin memorializes the last Palestinian. Happy New Year everyone.
ANOTHER BALLPARK ADVENTURE
I always go for a seat at the very top of the stadium. Between pitches I can look out on the bay and the east hills, one of the grandest vistas anywhere, and I can stand up whenever I feel like it without blocking anyone else's view of the field of play.
Which is a major consideration when a guy's trying to watch the on-field action as the junk food pack trains move constantly up and down the aisles down below, from the concession stands far from the twenty dollar seats high on the perimeter.
If you're here for the game and not the diabetes, the beer and pizza pack trains are a major irritant, hence my devotion to the unimpeded vistas offered by row 18, seat 34, View section.
The sociology up there in the cheap seats is heavily working class Hispanic and baseball savvy, although ballplayers themselves say St. Louis fans are the most knowledgeable fans there are, way ahead of Frisco’s.
Anyway, one early evening I’m up there in row 18 watching the Giants lose to the Cardinals as Mount Diablo fades to night in the east bay mists when suddenly, about thirty feet to my right, a woman yells, “Hey! I'm downwind of you guys!” Then she gives me and the five Mexican dudes seated in front of me a death glare, but we couldn't help knowing that we were upwind so how could it be us somehow downwinding her?
We looked at each other. Whatever she thought she smelled, it wasn't us. Everyone else had left. A couple of fly balls later, she yelled again. “I said I'm downwind!” Our mystification was compounded. A third out and damned if she wasn't lumbering toward us, a great angry she-bear. “I know what you guys are doing and I don't appreciate it because I'm downwind.”
It finally occurred to me that she assumed we were smoking dope. But we weren't. She-Bear stood there glaring at us, an old fashioned battle ax in her Giant's hat, triple XL Giants warm-up jacket over a muumuu, waiting for us to fess up and promise to stop violating her air space, her scent shed, I guess you could say.
“Excuse me, ma'am,” I began, “but we…” She cut me off. “Who are you?” She-Bear demanded. I said I was the king of the View section, Bruce of the 18th Row, and if we're doing credentials, who the hell are you?
Why don't you relax, I suggested, and leave us alone because we aren't smoking marijuana or anything else. “That's right, lady. We aren't smoking,” one of the Mexican kids chipped in.
“I know what you're doing,” She-Bear insisted, “and I think it's very inconsiderate of you. I'm downwind and you don't care!” She harrumphed back to her seat and plopped heavily down beside her male companion, another round mound of indignation, both of them glowering over at us.
The youngest Mexican kid said, “Hey! Is this racism?”
I USED to have, and probably still do somewhere, a copy of a locally produced film called “Mommy, Daddy, Wait For Me: Teen Parents Talk About The Struggles Of Parenthood,” nicely produced by Heidi Knott and Mitch Mendoza, both local people, the former a professional filmmaker, the latter now retired but formerly a teacher at Anderson Valley Elementary.
THE FILM centers on local teenage girls and their stunned boyfriends who discover that their intimacy has resulted in life sentences, the life sentence having appeared in the form of a tiny creature demanding round-the-clock attendance who will continue to make demands on you well past your lost dentures.
THE TEEN PARENTS interviewed had no idea of the long-term obligations represented by new life, and here they were living forever with unintended consequences, namely a human being.
ONE UNWITTING PARENT complains about the high cost of diapers, another that she can't afford a new iPod. Another that her figure is no longer fit for a bikini. The wages of sin! Most look and sound like they've been hit over the head with baseball bats. They're simply at a loss, and now there's this energetic little thing, this Wanna-Wanna creature running around the house pulling the curtains down and throwing food on the floor.
BUT IF THE FILM was intended as a series of cautionary tales, I don't think it gets there. A doctor named Chu expresses the quaint opinion that it would be wise for young people to marry before they become parents. Yeah, and it would be helpful if we weren't born with reproductive apparatuses and overpowering instincts.
NO ONE in the film, as I recall, comes out strong for abstinence. Birth control devices and methods get short shrift, abortion is mentioned only as Not An Option, and adoption is not mentioned at all.
OF COURSE I looked all this from the Old Fogy perspective. If it were up to me I think I'd airlift every young woman in Mendocino County outtahere until she was clear of her high school years. Every year I see a real smart young woman who should have gone on to college, or at least a few years of independent life, hanging on to some doomed, low-expectation lunkhead certain to drag her down with him.
WHAT I FOUND particularly frustrating about the film is the resigned attitude of the adult professionals depicted. “They're gonna do it anyway; we just have to get them to do it so they don't have kids.” That was the attitude. But it's not as if Young Lust is a new phenomena, so maybe it's time to revisit such old strategies as school uniforms and perhaps even single sex education for the adolescent years, especially in the sex-drenched society we've got going here.
THE CATHOLICS are way ahead of the rest of us in libido-quenching battle plans, which is one big reason their high schools are so popular with the, ah, more sensible parents. But the present situation, with young boys placed in the constant proximity of young women dressed in erotic fashions simply not allowed prior to 1967? Then wrap these irresistible visuals in booze, dope, boff tunes, absent parents, and a paucity of adult role models… Well, hell, why not just convert the high schools to maternity wards and be done with it?
AS A CALLOW YOUTH of 20 or so, on my way to full adult callowness, I remember being mildly shocked when I read that the May Pole dance began, way back in the pagan mists, as a tribute to phallic optimism. But at my elementary school, which was the very model of propriety, we went all out for an annual May Pole event, with hours of rehearsal and all the moms, the night prior, stringing garlands of flowers for the big day. It certainly didn't occur to me that my as yet unawakened little appendage was being celebrated, and I'm certain it hadn't occurred to my teachers either. If it had occurred to the authorities that they were celebrating phallic fecundity when even childish jokes about weenies on cafeteria hot dog days could get you an interview with the principal if not banishment to a Catholic school, there definitely would have been no May Pole dance. A scant thirty years after I'd innocently gamboled in my schoolyard among the flowers and what I recall as a modified telephone pole, the penis was politically denounced as an instrument of oppression, torture even.
DOES A WEEK go by that a large circulation paper doesn't feature a pufferoo on the Anderson Valley? We get big color photos of mesmerized yups holding glasses of wine up to the sun with the accompanying text reading something like, “Grab a quick taste of Anderson Valley,” as Anderson Valley is presented as a kind of gastro-endurance contest in a pretty setting.
AN ENTHUSIASTIC lady from the Redwood Credit Union called to say, “I want Boonville people to know that we have just opened a branch in Cloverdale and we also have branches in Ukiah and Point Arena.” I asked the credit union lady from Cloverdale, “Can you please open a Redwood branch in Boonville? We need basic banking services here.” With more instant boosterism than even George F. Babbitt himself might have mustered, I continued my pitch. “Heck, lady, there's probably more dough in Philo alone than there is in all of Cloverdale, and you can throw in Geyserville!” Sensing that she'd unknowingly dialed a lunatic, the poor thing was audibly anxious to bring our telephonic interface to a close. “It was nice talking with you Mr…” But I continued my sales pitch. “We used to have a bank here, the First National of Boonville. It always made money, but when WestAmerica bought it out the blow-dried boys said our little bank wasn't making enough money so they closed it down. We also used to have a pharmacy. It made money, too, and then it closed when the owner passed away and nobody picked up the pestle and that was the end of our pharmacy. And we had whole herds of sheep and acres of apples and everyone knew everyone else, and what's happening to us? But we need a credit union, Miss, which, as you know because you work for one, are a lot safer for people than banks because credit unions are owned by their depositors not the crooks we read about every day that the government prints money to bail out. “I really must get back to work, Mr. Anderson,” she said,” but I'll pass along your request.”
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