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DRY AND WARMER weather is expected today and Friday. A series of warm frontal systems will bring a chance for rain this weekend into early next week. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A fresh .35" brings my February total to 9.94" & YTD to 39.43". Dry skies are forecast until Saturday night then rain again on Monday, small amounts for both. Perhaps a dry spell after that, we'll see?
PANTHER CHEER TEAM BAKESALE
We invite you to support the AV cheer team by participating in our upcoming bake sale where we will be raising funds for one of our team cheerleaders, Yeanette.
All proceeds will go towards Yeanette and Her Family!
Below is the GoFund me page if you would like to make an online donation! Thank you for all your support: https://gofund.me/e61ee8f8
BOONT TRIBE COMMUNITY SCHOOL:
Okay Anderson Valley…now that we can see clearly after Valentine’s Day and the White Wine Festival….let make fun plans for ourselves this weekend!!! Delicious food, delectable wine, and a truly fun and educational painting experience!!!
Our Paint and Sip nights are fundraiser for a local nonprofit! We are a “two room school house”. An alternative to both homeschool and public school. Your ticket helps a student come to school! All proceeds go toward our scholarship fund! For the first time in a couple years, we were able to give all families a scholarship who applied! Thanks to nights like these and community members like you!
This event is this Saturday night!! February 22nd at 6pm. Dinner is a seafood (calamari, salmon and shrimp) and mixed veggie rice bowl. For dessert there will be a variety of tea cakes in a jar. This delicious dinner will be paired with Weatherborne’s Chenin Blanc and Pinot Noir. Once were all done with dinner, we will paint a pixelated masterpiece, either on canvas or glass. Using something as simple as squares of color to create an image will be a lesson in color mixing and depth perception! Come learn and enjoy art!!
Tickets are $75 and that includes everything!! Wine, food and art supplies!!! Contact Seasha at boonttribe@gmailil.com if you would like to attend! We still have some tickets available!
A BOONVILLE READER WRITES: It’s back!
And not a minute too soon!
NEED HELP? CALL IVAN.
My name is Ivan Manzo and I have worked as a maintenance man for the Stanford Inn. I'm now starting to take on additional jobs on the Mendocino Coast and possibly inland depending on your location.
Below are some of the types of work that I'm able to do. I have my own tools, truck, trailer, riding mower, etc. I’m a responsible and dependable worker with local references.
Weed-eating, Gardening, Pruning, Yard clean-up, Light carpentry, Simpler plumbing, Sheet rock work, Vinyl floor installation, Painting, Fencing, Mowing, Dump Runs, Wood stove cleaning
If you need my help, please contact me at 707/272-5830 (phone, text) or you can email me at: edgarmanzo1@outlook.com
Thank you,
Ivan Manzo
MENDOCINO COUNTY was officially honored as the American Wine Region of the Year at @WineEnthusiast magazine’s Wine Star Awards ceremony on January 27 in San Francisco.
The award was accepted by Bonnie Butcher, Executive Director of @MendocinoWinegrowers Inc. Beloved Anderson Valley winemakers Arnaud Weyrich and Jeffrey Jindra were also present!
Mendocino was recognized for its commitment to sustainable practices and the vibrant community that defines the region. As one of California’s most eco-conscious wine regions, Mendocino has earned its reputation as the state’s “greenest AVA,” with 25% of its planted vineyards certified organic – a remarkable distinction that accounts for one-third of all organic vineyards in California.
Congratulations to all of our counties farmers and wineries on this well-deserved recognition!
ED NOTES
A FEW weeks ago, the cops and a platoon of rescuers were called out to look for an older woman who'd managed to get lost in Jackson State Forest while mushroom hunting. She was out overnight. Not to be too harsh about it, but anybody, local or not, who manages to get lost in Jackson State, should not be allowed to go anywhere unattended. It's not possible drunk or sober to get lost in Jackson State because you're never more than a mile from a road, or the sight or sound of your fellow human-type beings. Another person managed to become completely befuddled last weekend in the vicinity of “1.25 Ten Mile Road.” Yo! Lost people! The moss always grows on the north side of the tree, which would be to your left. No, no. Your other left.
20-20 HAD called me, of all people, to drive to Fort Bragg to comment on a famous murder case wherein the vic had shot the chomo. I said No. That's all Fort Bragg needs is me on national television spouting off about a case I know very little about. I did talk with the producer for quite a while after I nominated Lindy Peters to talk about Fort Bragg on the show. Lindy would be great, I said. He's photogenic, he can talk and he knows everybody and everything about the place. I told the producer that I, and my hard-hitting writers, had done lots of Fort Bragg stories over the years but I live an hour away, and anyway I didn't have anything special to offer. To me, I said, Fort Bragg, much as I love the place, is kind of like that old tv show, Twin Peaks, always odd and faintly menacing, with a strong under-current of violence. “Oh!” the producer gasped, “That's perfect! Won't you reconsider?”
THE WAY IT IS. I was trucking back from the ballpark one night about ten, part of the mass of jubilant baseball fans singing their way home along the Embarcadero where the crowd thins, and finally disappears at the Ferry Building, siphoned off into parking lots and street cars along the way. I walked on to the foot of Clay Street to get the 1 California bus to my place on 7th Avenue at the time. That night, a properly brought up young woman at the pedestrian crossing at the Ferry Building asked, “Excuse me, sir. Will you walk with me across the park?” The park is an unlit forty yards to the north of the Vaillancourt sculpture, that jumble of unsightly concrete that looks like a Caltrans rock pile. The brief wooded area is a shortcut from the Ferry Building to the bus stop. There's always a gauntlet of murk-lurks to be run in that unlit space and even, ah, large, relatively fit men like myself are aware that hand-to-hand combat might be necessary to successfully get from the Ferry Building to the bus at the foot of Clay Street. Sure enough, there was an animated crazy guy pacing around muttering to himself, a half dozen winos engaged in a sing-along, and a couple of bums asleep on the benches. No menace except, perhaps, the crazy guy, who glared at us as we passed. And that was it. We arrived safely at the bus stop. “I would have walked up Market and then over to Sacramento to get the bus if you weren't there,” the young woman said, as I simultaneously felt gallant as all heck and aware that if I didn't look like an aged but ambulatory Gabby Hayes she would have considered me as also one more urban menace.
TOMMY WAYNE KRAMER once asked a series of chin-first questions in his weekly column beginning with: “Have you ever visited the Yolla Bolly Wilderness Area? Know anyone who has? Would you go if offered a free trip? For a thousand dollars cash? Do you think anybody in their right mind would go?”
I TRY to get over there for a day hike at least once a year. Whether or not I'm often in my right mind can be debated, but I love the Yollas. For a thousand dollars I'd leave for the Yollas this very minute. I'm happy no one but me and my friends Don and Merril Morris used to go there, careful as we were to stay on the trails to elude the summer drug cartels rumored to have moved in. Fort Bragg and Covelo are my favorite towns, and the Yollas? Well, if you really enjoy getting so far away from contemporary life that you're beyond even its industrial hum, the Yollas are for you, and they come complete with well-kept trails, two little lakes teeming with trout, the untamed stretches of the Eel, and miles and miles of trees, and silence.
A READER sends along an article from an Iowa newspaper describing that state's swine drives of the late 19th century, which reminded me of the stories the late Wayne McGimsey told me of similar drives from Anderson Valley over the hill to Ukiah where the hogs were herded onto southbound trains for the Frisco slaughterhouses, then located in Butcher Town, now Hunter's Point. In the old days, hog and cattle drives from The Valley to the Ukiah rail connection were a common annual occurrence. You are also probably aware that a scant sixty years ago you could get on a train in Fort Bragg and get off a train late the same night in Southern Marin, from where you rode a ferry to the bright lights of San Francisco.
MENDOCINO COUNTY FIRE SAFE COUNCIL’S MICRO-GRANTS IMPROVE COMMUNITY FIRE RESILIENCE
Micro-Grants Now Available From Mendocino County Fire Safe Council
One of the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council (MCFSC)’s proudest accomplishments is its Micro-Grant program, which takes community needs and expertise, mixed with a helping of local volunteer power, and leavens it with small grant funding support to produce inspirational, well-baked, community-safety enhancements throughout Mendocino County.
In just three years, MCFSC’s Micro-Grants have helped dozens of communities become more defensible from wildfire. The window to apply for funding in this fourth year of the program is now just around the corner. From March 1—31, local fire departments, Neighborhood Fire Safe Councils and Firewise Communities can request up to $12,500 for projects they think will be the right fit for their needs.
The program started in 2022 with $50,000 that the Fire Safe Council awarded to 11 local organizations. In 2023, the PG&E Corporation Foundation contributed $50,000 in matching funds, which allowed the total award to increase to $104,000. To date, MCFSC has awarded a total of $287,000 for water tanks, wildfire-safety home assessments, reflective signs, and much more. The PG&E Corporation Foundation continues to provide $50,000 each year, and the funds are supplemented by tax revenue from Measure P, a ten-year quarter-cent sales tax that voters approved in 2022.
MCFSC’s Outreach Coordinator Eva King reports, “We’ve been able to fund 45 different grantees” since then, including 19 local fire departments and 26 Neighborhood Fire Safe Councils (NFSCs).” There are over 70 NFSCs in the county, with needs as unique as their neighborhoods and the people who live in them.
There are some common denominators among settlements in heavily wooded areas, often located a long distance from a fire department, along narrow, winding roads with more than a few potholes. King says that some examples of past projects included developing emergency water sources and communications systems for areas where cell phone service is spotty under the best conditions.
“We’ve also funded prescribed-burn initiatives and home-hardening and defensible-space assessments,” she recalls. “We’ve done bulk ordering of reflective address signs; we helped purchase a fire engine. So you can really get very creative with these grants—they’re meant to support communities in whatever they think is best.” Reflective address signs may seem like a minor detail, but they can make the difference between first responders passing an unseen address in the turmoil of an emergency, or knowing how to find their way to where help is needed.
For more information about how to apply for Micro-Grants, contact Eva King at king@firesafemendocino.org. Applications and guidelines are now available on the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council’s website at https://www.firesafemendocino.org/micro-grants
(Sarah Reith)
UKIAH LIBRARY NEWS & EVENTS
LOBA Poetry Series
Monthly Poet Features & Open Mic
Join Ukiah Branch Library staff as we host poetry events in-person on the third Saturdays of each month at 3 p.m. This free event is open to both teens and adults. All are invited to share poems in any form or style or just listen to others. This month, LOBA will take place on the 4th Saturday, February 22. The Library will welcome the Lake County Poet Laureate, Brenda Marie Yeager.
Yeager writes from the meeting point of the ancestral lands of the Northern Pomo, Lake Miwok, and Wappo overlooking Big Canyon. Her poetry has won several honors, been published online, and in print. She co-hosts a monthly online poetry conversation, New Darlings, and is passionate about teaching poetry to middle and high school students. Currently, she is deep in the search for Lake County’s first Youth Poet Laureate.
Please contact the Ukiah Branch Library at 707-463-4490 or carrm@mendocinocounty.gov for more information.
Haiku Walk
Free and Open to the Public
Celebrate National Haiku Writing Month with a guided haiku walk (gingko) with Ukiah Branch Library. We will meet at the library entrance and walk/roll/stroll around downtown Ukiah on Saturday, March 8 at 2 p.m. The walk will be led by Melissa Eleftherion Carr. We will make poems based on visual and aural observations of our surroundings and play with meter, rhythm, and cadence to discover where the syllables take us.
Eleftherion Carr is a writer, librarian, and visual artist. They are the author of the full-length poetry collections, “field guide to autobiography” (The Operating System, 2018), and “gutter rainbows” (Querencia Press, 2024), as well as 12 chapbooks including “abject sutures” (above/ground press, 2024). Eleftherion Carr lives in Northern California where she manages the Ukiah Branch Library, curates the LOBA Reading Series, and serves as Poet Laureate Emeritus of the City of Ukiah.
This free event is open to all ages and sponsored by the Friends of the Ukiah Valley Library and Mendocino County Library. Please contact the Ukiah Branch Library at 707-463-4490 to sign up.
Scam Awareness Workshop
Get A Step Ahead of Scam Attackers
The Ukiah Branch Library invites the community to become scam-savvy on Thursday, March 13 at 10 a.m. Learn how to protect yourself from identity theft, banking and government scams, and “phishing” scams – phone calls pretending to be someone you trust or emails or texts asking you to click on a link.
In our digital world, scammers are using ever-creative methods designed to catch you off guard. Perhaps you got a pop-up on your computer saying you’ve been compromised and to call a number immediately, a text about an overdue toll with a link to pay, or an email from your bank instructing you to click a link to verify your information. Just one click on an innocuous-looking link could be all it takes to give a hacker access to all the data on your phone or device!
A presentation will be given by Legal Services of Northern California on common scams and tactics used to pressure you into giving your sensitive information to nefarious attackers poised to steal your money.
This workshop will help you identify potential scams, offer tips to stay ahead of the game, and outline some resources available if you’ve already been scammed. Please call 707-463-4490 to sign up.
For more information, please visit www.mendolibrary.org or contact the Ukiah Branch at 707-463-4490.
ELIZABETH KNIGHT: Old-time news clips of Mendocino County. There are clips of Casper, Navarro By the Sea, Mendocino, and Fort Bragg and other Northern California logging towns: https://youtu.be/RfXDPGULGNs?si=AWsRlTM1gskHn4l5
CATCH OF THE DAY, Wednesday, February 19, 2025
EDUARDO AGUILAR-VITAL, 39, Clearlake Oaks/Ukiah. Parole violation.
GINI BETTS, 54, Fortuna/Piercy. DUI.
MICHAEL DEJONG, 41, Ukiah. Vandalism.
CHRISTOPHER GONZALEZ, 22, Ukiah. Paraphernalia, failure to appear, probation revocation.
MOISES GRAJALES-JIMENEZ, 21, Fort Bragg. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
SKYLER HOLDEN, 34, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
MICHAEL LANGLEY, 35, Ukiah. Probation revocation, resisting. (Frequent flyer.)
ANTHONY LOPES, 54, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
NICHOLAS SCARBERRY, 46, Willits. Domestic violence court order violation.
AUGUST SCHINDEL, 46, Willits. Domestic violence court order violation.
BRUCE MCEWEN
A Simile: Emphysema is like having a python around your chest and when you go to sleep the snake rears it’s head and stares in your face and flicks its tongue under your nose to measure how shallow your breath has become since the night before… this does not go on forever.
IRS 1040s
Muin Daly: Is there anyone else who has yet to receive their 1040 Tax Forms – How can I file if I haven’t even received my 1040 ? ! “It's not the load that breaks you down. It's the way you carry it.” — Lena Horne
Marco McClean: Marco here. Go to https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs-search?search=1040
Choose the variation you like and the instructions, open them and print them.
Or choose from any of several online tax prep services, such as Turbo Tax, which is supposed to be free but it was so complicated to get it free I gave up. Cash App is uncomplicatedly free and does both fed and state in one quick pass. I'm thinking about switching away from it this time, but I've been using it a few years without trouble.
“It ain't the miles, it's the pebble in your shoe.”
“When a man leaves the womb he leaves it. When a woman leaves the womb she takes it with her.” -Biff Rose
WE'RE NOT SHORT OF MOVEMENTS proclaiming that a different world is possible, but unless we can coordinate them into an international movement, capitalism just laughs at all these little organisations.
— Jose Saramago
It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.
P.G. Wodehouse, ‘The Man Upstairs and Other Stories’
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
I’m on the Left.
I believe taxes should be slashed for working class people and should instead be borne by the wealthy.
I also believe the revenue should be spent in ways that relieve financial pressures on the working class.
Child care/after-school care, tuition-free college/job training, single-payer healthcare, etc. would relieve working-class people of huge financial burdens.
“IF YOU FEEL SAFE in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
— David Bowie
BREAKING THROUGH NETFLIX
by Paul Modic
From last February to September, seven months, I experienced only six nights of insomnia, then from September through December it increased to seventeen nights of full blown and twelve more of partial insomnia. I tried to figure out why, what had changed?
I made two lists of all things which had changed in the fall, one of possibles and another of long shots. On the first list were lots of smart TV watching, new ethernet wires around the living room, hip replacement in late August with a month of painkillers and sleeping in a different position, and election and generalized anxiety.
The long shots were the Independent folded and I lost my weekly column and inspiration, loneliness and isolation, two much weed-smoking (albeit only twice a week), too much exercise as I was walking with my new hip sometimes a hundred minutes a day, including twenty-seven minutes up to the top of the mountain, and reading serious news stories for an hour at night just before bed. (I ran the lists past my neighbor who poo poo’d my woo woo.)
The cable/internet company said last summer that I had to switch over to streaming HDTV (high definition television), and I would have a lot more choices and pay a little more. They rented me a box for five bucks a month that made my TV smart, I hooked an ethernet cable up to the TV from the wifi modem, and I was in business. I hadn’t planned on getting Netflix, wanting to keep my outsider status, but it was right there on the fancy new remote they gave me so I joined the flock and became a happy Netflix sheep, whoopie, for an ad-free sixteen dollars a month.
The smart TV was my main suspect so I moved my chair about ten feet away from the powerful HDTV, then after the election stopped watching all news, most sports talk shows and only watched Netflix. (I had also been watching lots of pre-election coverage as well as a political roundtable discussion every evening.) The insomnia continued to get worse though I almost always caught up after being awake two to three hours in the middle of the night, my sleep average still seven hours a night.
What could I do next? It was December and when I awoke after one of those distressing nights I was uninspired, not on the top of my game, often depressed, and not inspired to write much. (I was then averaging one night of insomnia a week, not bad really, and was letting it flow through me without causing added anxiety.)
Next I limited myself to less than an hour of Netflix a day, stopping by noon, and also started drinking just one cuppa coffee in the morning instead of my usual two. My sleep got better and in January I had my first insomnia-free week since August.
The final change was to stop drinking any liquids four hours before bedtime, instead of the two to three hours I had been doing. I was rarely waking up in the middle of the night to get up to pee, just once last week, and now I’m on a roll, sometimes sleeping straight through for a great night’s sleep, and just went a month with no insomnia.
I feel happy and inspired these days after a glorious night’s sleep, this is my life now, trying everything I’ve read about to sleep better without meds. We’ll see, I kept restarting this story over the last few months as my sleep experience changed: I claim victory, then go back to bad sleep, and on and on, but this time it feels like it might take.
(There’s some entertaining stuff on Netflix. I’ve watched some funny comedy series like The Mandlelorian, Derry Girls, Fisk, Kim Convenience, Love, After Life, and finally got very hooked on a binge-worthy one called Sex Education. It had a delicious mix of outrageous comedy and drama, becoming a daily delight for a month of thirty-two episodes, binge-watched for four hours on Thanksgiving and didn’t regret it.
I also listened to many hour-long standup comedy specials while prepping food in the kitchen (then while cleaning up after), funny, raunchy, rude, and politically incorrect comedy concerts including Ronny Chieng, Michelle Wolf, Adrienne Iapalucci, Ricky Gervais, Mo Amer, Ali Wong, Chris Rock, Tom Segura, Jim Jeffries, Anthony Jeselnik, Hanna Berner, Neal Brennen, Nate Bargatze, Ralph Barbosa, Cristela Alonzo, Jim Norton and many more I haven’t watched yet.
A documentary of gay comics called “Outstanding,” was very fun as well as the commemoration of Kevin Hart when he got the Mark Twain Prize. The Roast of Tom Brady was hilariously mean, and now I’m enjoying Between Two Ferns: The Movie, featuring the very entertaining Zack Galifianakis.)
CALIFORNIA TAKES STEPS TOWARD OFFICIALLY RECOGNIZING BIGFOOT
‘A lot of people believe it exists…’
by Matt LaFever
California may soon have an official mythical creature — and naturally, it’s Bigfoot. Assemblymember Chris Rogers, who represents a stretch of the North Coast that has long been considered Sasquatch territory, introduced Assembly Bill 666 on Feb. 14, 2025. The bill aims to designate Bigfoot as the state’s official cryptid, a term for creatures that some people believe to exist despite a lack of proof. Rogers’ district spans Del Norte, Humboldt, Mendocino, Sonoma and Trinity counties, a region known as the epicenter of Bigfoot lore.
Matt Moneymaker, a longtime Bigfoot researcher and former star of the Animal Planet series “Finding Bigfoot,” has spent decades studying the elusive creature. As president of the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization, he’s been fascinated by the legend since the 1980s.
When Moneymaker first heard about Assembly Bill 666, he told SFGate he was skeptical. “I first thought it was a joke,” he said. “It sounded like it was a parody of states having official all sorts of things. So I thought it was supposed to be a spoof on that.”
But once he realized the bill was serious, his perspective shifted. “Apparently, a state can have an official cryptid. So why not?” he said. “And obviously, Bigfoot’s the biggest one of all among cryptids, and California is where the term Bigfoot was popularized, so it makes sense.”
Moneymaker’s research suggests that Bigfoot isn’t just a lone, mythical creature but a widespread species. “It’s a population of animals,” he claimed, adding that they inhabit “many parts of California.” Sightings, he said, are most common from Mendocino County north along the coast and through the mountain ranges surrounding the northern Central Valley, extending down the Sierra Nevada and even into Southern California’s Transverse Ranges.
After nearly 40 years of research, Moneymaker says he’s had several close encounters with multiple Sasquatches. “I’ve gotten close to them several times,” he said. One encounter left no doubt in his mind. “I had a face-to-face encounter one time, after which I was absolutely sure they existed because I had one about 20 feet in front of me, growling at me.”
Eric Nelson, 58, volunteers at the China Flat Museum & Bigfoot Collection in the Humboldt County community of Willow Creek — the heart of Northern California’s Bigfoot Country. In this town, he told SFGate, Bigfoot isn’t just a cryptid. “A lot of people believe it exists.”
Willow Creek fully embraces its legendary resident. “There’s a Bigfoot restaurant, a Bigfoot burger. A Bigfoot golf course. You get the picture,” Nelson said. “It’s been in the zeitgeist, or in the community, since basically 1958.”
When he heard about Assembly Bill 666, which would recognize Bigfoot as California’s official cryptid, he saw an opportunity. “In terms of bringing notoriety and tourism, it’d be great for us in Willow Creek.”
Nelson recounted how California’s most famous legend got its name — one that would go on to capture imaginations worldwide.
“In 1958, there was a road crew from Willow Creek,” Nelson said. The crew had been sent deep into the Bluff Creek region, a dense Douglas fir forest, to carve out new logging roads. But as they worked, they kept stumbling upon something strange — massive, humanlike footprints unlike anything they had ever seen.
Jerry Crew, the road supervisor, was baffled. “He was telling people, but they didn’t believe him,” Nelson explained. Determined to prove he wasn’t imagining things, Crew turned to taxidermist Bob Titmus for advice. Titmus suggested using plaster of Paris to capture the mysterious tracks.
“That’s what Jerry Crew did on Oct. 5, 1958,” Nelson said. Armed with a plaster cast, Crew drove straight to the Humboldt Times and met with editor Andrew Genzoli.
In that moment, a legend was born. “They named it Bigfoot,” Nelson said. “Up until then, there were regional names for a hairy beast — Native American names — but they named it Bigfoot.”
The story took off. “It went out on the AP wire and became a worldwide sensation,” Nelson said. “It went around the world.”
After Ray Wallace, a logger who helped popularize the Bigfoot story, died, his family went public and told a Los Angeles Times reporter that their father was “up in heaven laughing” after faking the entire Bigfoot Bluff Creek saga.
Legends of a hair-covered, bipedal creature have circulated for centuries, predating the Bigfoot moniker. A 2012 research paper highlighted a roughly 1,000-year-old petroglyph on Central California’s Tule River Indian Reservation that bears a striking resemblance to modern Bigfoot depictions.
Assemblyman Rogers’ Assembly Bill 666 is still in its early stages. According to the California Legislative Information website, the bill’s title has been read aloud in the state Assembly and is now being printed and distributed to committee members for review. If it clears committee, it must then pass the Assembly and Senate before reaching the governor’s desk to be signed into law.
Moneymaker, considered by some the leading Bigfoot researcher of the modern era, is eager to witness history. “If there’s going to be a date, an occasion when they’re voting on whether or not to make it the official cryptid, I would love to be up there in Sacramento,” he said. “I would gladly pay my way to be there when that happens.”
(SFGate.com)
ON MARIANNE FAITHFULL
by Lavinia Greenlaw
For British music, 1978 was a year of hesitation. Pop began to admit that it didn’t know what to do with itself as punk evolved into New Wave, which was suddenly on Top of the Pops most weeks. Those who had been shocked by punk now just found it annoying. The bands that were still together had learned how to put on a show. They were slicker and more predictable, and we went to see them in town halls, theatres and cinemas rather than backstreet clubs. What next? We had been so busy jettisoning the past and claiming the future that we’d overlooked the present. Who were we going to listen to and argue about now?
This was also the year that Marianne Faithfull recorded what was to become her most celebrated album, Broken English. Her music career wasn’t one of solid output and solid progress. She didn’t gather substance, let alone increase the scale of her productions (other acts moved on to their concept album, their triple album, their triple-concept album). She continued to respond to ideas and encounters, and to work with collaborators. Born in 1946, she was only seventeen when she had a hit with ‘As Tears Go By’. It was written by the Rolling Stones, who later recorded their own version. She used to say that Mick and Keith didn’t write the song for her, but also that they did. Her voice on this debut is compelling, guarded and moves in straight lines – no trills or frills.
I want to use the same adjectives to describe her voice on Broken English. Yes, it had darkened and deepened and cracked (which the media relished, as though the damage done by substance abuse and itinerancy, getting lost and growing older, were an aesthetic enhancement), but her sense of measurement is the same, as is her ability to convey something complicated in what appears to be a straightforward melody. She doesn’t go in for embellishment or theatrics, and yet what we hear, the way it makes us feel, is complex in ways we recognize but can’t articulate. Isn’t that what songs are for?
If teenagers knew anything about Marianne Faithfull in the late 1970s, it was that she had been Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. Some of our parents used to play ‘As Tears Go By’: it was the kind of song you heard at weddings and funerals, and we were old enough now to be going to those. We knew that Faithfull had been arrested naked and wrapped in a fur rug in a mansion owned by one of the Rolling Stones – or was it in one of those vast townhouses owned by that generation of pop stars who used to drive Rolls-Royces into swimming pools and now spent a year at a time recording in the Caribbean? We were glad to know that pop stars met our expectations with their fur rugs and mansions and pools, but we were fed up of hearing about their lifestyle because it wasn’t ours. The Stones spent 1979 recording their fifteenth album, Emotional Rescue, in Nassau, Paris and New York. It was all a long way from Dartford, where Mick Jagger met Keith Richards at primary school. Faithfull grew up mostly in Reading, but her father had been in MI6 and then became a professor of Italian literature, while her mother, who was descended from Austrian aristocracy (her great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was the author of Venus in Furs, published in 1870 and later the subject of a Velvet Underground song), had danced with the Max Reinhardt company. Perhaps Mick Jagger found her hard to impress.
In 1978, I went to see the Vibrators at the Marquee Club. My friend hated it and sat on the floor in a corridor reading Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. A punk staggered past and vomited on the book. We were outraged but also impressed. I thought this was a separate world from the hippy 1960s that I worked so hard to push away. I had no idea that Faithfull would soon marry someone who had been in the Vibrators. She was also cast as Sid Vicious’s mother in the never-made Sex Pistols film ‘Who Killed Bambi?’
Punk was far more about cover versions and name-checking and musical heritage than most of us understood. It removed the anxiety about originality and borrowed cheekily, carelessly, blatantly. New Wave brought back tunes and gave us something easier, albeit less exciting, to dance to. In 1979 disco still dominated the charts, though Donna Summer was handing over to the Sugarhill Gang and ‘Rapper’s Delight’. It became cool to listen to jazz, but not to rock. Not yet. I relished the depth and scale of Public Image Ltd (PiL) and the Pop Group, the way they simultaneously pursued and pushed away what was taking shape. One of the year’s big hits was Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall’. I wouldn’t have sought it out, but its lumbering tempo and corrosive repetitiveness suited the general mood. By the end of 1979, hesitation had given way to dread. We fully expected to be facing the end of the world. Margaret Thatcher had been elected; Russia invaded Afghanistan; Reagan announced he was running for president. We needed someone with a big presence, a big story, and there was Marianne Faithfull. Broken English was finally released in November 1979.
‘I had reluctantly come to the conclusion,’ she said later, ‘that if I was ever to obliterate my past I’d have to create my own Frankenstein, and then become that creature as well.’ This casually complex observation gives a sense of how open-minded she was during the making of Broken English. She had been touring with a band that included Ben Brierly (the member of the Vibrators she married) and Barry Reynolds. They worked together on a cover of John Lennon’s ‘Working Class Hero’ and a wild setting of the poet Heathcote Williams’s ‘Why D’Ya Do It’, which was so full of expletives that the pressing plant and distributors initially refused to handle it. It was that track, and the title song, that got her the record deal.
Faithfull seems to have been a natural collaborator, open to sharing influences and ideas. She was clearly relaxed about artistic control – or conditioned or compelled to share it. The best songs on Broken English are the ones she co-wrote. The original mix was less spacious, more of itself, less of the time and more of her times. It has greater force, more of a rock propulsion, and doesn’t direct you to pay her voice extra attention. She was said to prefer it, but it was set aside in favor of something more self-conscious.
The album opens with the title track, about the Baader-Meinhof Group. The first thing you hear is a squiggle of synth. Reynolds brought in Steve Winwood – whose musical career stretches from the Spencer Davis Group and Traffic in the 1960s to the hit ‘Higher Love’ in the 1980s – to garnish it with electronics, in a nod to New Wave. These additions are restrained but insistent. They stand apart like an extrovert accessory that would suit someone more fun.
Faithfull’s voice doesn’t hide the effort of singing. It is clear and precise, but never relaxed or spontaneous. It’s too easy to read into the sound her years of addiction and illness. Her phrasing is strong and there is no sign of the industry’s default American accent (listen to Mick). Her instinct seems to be to perform the material as cleanly as she can, using a staccato delivery on the line ‘What are you fighting for?’ without staging the question.
Both the punk and hippy worlds needed to feel opposed, and resistant rather than reactive. Broken English puts together Dr. Hook’s ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’ (hers is by far the better version) and the Beatles with arrangements and dynamics that had come out of punk and New Wave. This was the time of the uncomfortable tempo and its equally uncomfortable dance style: spasmodic, jerky, rigid and regimented – the mechanical inexorable. You can hear this on the record and hear how well it suits Faithfull’s direct approach to the sung line, a lack of give along with a refusal to emote or enact. ‘Witches’ Song’ holds our attention with a muted, narrow performance that doesn’t relax even when she gets to the la la las. It doesn’t drag or dwell, but marches to the beat. There is no breathing out or moving softly away, but no abruptness either.
Her record company advised her not to perform live and instead commissioned a short film by Derek Jarman as a promo. John Peel played tracks from the album alongside Joy Division, which made sense to me. Broken English doesn’t cohere, but neither did Marianne Faithfull. She once described herself as ‘somebody who not only can’t even sing but doesn’t really write or anything, just something you can make into something. I was just cheesecake really, terribly depressing.’ That may have been true in 1964, but by 1979 she was singing and writing to such powerful effect that she produced this album: indefinable, compelling, elusive and immediate, contradictory and straightforward, moving and puzzling, a vulnerable force.
(Lavinia Greenlaw has published six collections of poetry, including, most recently, The Built Moment, and three novels as well as two volumes of memoir, The Importance of Music to Girls and Some Answers without Questions. She is a professor of creative writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. London Review of Books)
THE STORY YOU’VE BEEN TOLD ABOUT RECYCLING IS A LIE
by Alexander Clapp
In the closing years of the Cold War, something strange started to happen.
Much of the West’s trash stopped heading to the nearest landfill and instead started crossing national borders and traversing oceans. The stuff people tossed away and probably never thought about again — dirty yogurt cups, old Coke bottles — became some of the most redistributed objects on the planet, typically winding up thousands of miles away. It was a bewildering process, one that began with the export of toxic industrial waste. By the late 1980s, thousands of tons of hazardous chemicals had left the United States and Europe for the ravines of Africa, the beaches of the Caribbean and the swamps of Latin America.
In return for this cascade of toxins, developing countries were offered large sums of cash or promised hospitals and schools. The result everywhere was much the same. Many countries that had broken from Western imperialism in the 1960s found that they were being turned into graveyards for Western industrialization in the 1980s, an injustice that Daniel arap Moi, then the president of Kenya, referred to as “garbage imperialism.” Outraged, dozens of developing nations banded together to end waste export. The resulting treaty — the Basel Convention, entered into force in 1992 and ratified by nearly every nation in the world but not the United States — made it illegal to export toxic waste from developed to developing countries.
If only the story had ended there. Despite that legislative success, the poorer nations of the world have never stopped being receptacles for the West’s ever-proliferating rubbish. The situation now is, in many respects, worse than it was in the 1980s. Then, there was widespread recognition that waste export was immoral. Today, most waste travels under the guise of being recyclable, cloaked in the language of planetary salvation. For the past two years I’ve been traveling the globe — from the plains of Romania to the slums of Tanzania — in an attempt to understand the world trash is making. What I saw was terrifying.
I started in Accra, the capital of Ghana, where millions of faltering electronics have been “donated“ by Western companies and universities since the 2000s. There I met communities of “burner boys,” young migrants from the country’s desert fringes who make cents an hour torching American cellphone chargers and television remotes once they stop working. They told me about coughing up blood at night. It’s no surprise: The section of Accra they inhabit, a squalid estuary known as Agbogbloshie, regularly ranks among Earth’s most poisoned places. Anyone who eats an egg in Agbogbloshie, according to the World Health Organization, will absorb 220 times the tolerable daily intake of chlorinated dioxins, a toxic byproduct of electronic waste.
It’s not just your old DVD player getting shipped to West Africa. Today’s waste trade is an opportunistic bonanza, an escape valve of environmental responsibility that profits off routing detritus of every conceivable variety to places that are in no position to take it. Your discarded clothes? They may go to a desert in Chile. The last cruise ship you boarded? Hacked to pieces in Bangladesh. Your depleted car battery? Stacked in a warehouse in Mexico. Is some of it run by organized crime? Of course. “For us,” a Naples mafioso boasted in 2008, “rubbish is gold.” But much of it doesn’t have to be. Waste export remains scandalously underregulated and unmonitored. Practically anyone can give it a go.
Nowhere does today’s waste trade reach more boggling dimensions than with plastic. The time scales alone are dizzying. Bottles or takeaway cartons that you own for moments embark on arduous, monthslong, carbon-spewing journeys from one end of Earth to another. Upon arrival in villages in Vietnam or the Philippines, for example, some of these objects get chemically reduced — an energy-intensive task that unleashes innumerable toxins and microplastics into local ecosystems. The process’s ability to produce new plastic is at best dubious, but the environmental and health cost is cataclysmic. Plastic waste in the developing world — clogging waterways, exacerbating air pollution, infiltrating human brain tissue — is now linked to the death of hundreds of thousands every year.
The fate of much other plastic waste that gets sent to the global south is more rudimentary: It gets incinerated in a cement factory or dumped in a field. In Turkey, I met marine biologists who fly drones along the Mediterranean coast to search for stray piles of European plastic waste, which enters the country at the rate of one dump truck roughly every 15 minutes. In Kenya, a country that outlawed plastic bags in 2017 only for the American petrochemical sector to conspire to turn it into Africa’s next waste frontier, more than half the cattle that wander urban areas have been found to possess plastic in their stomach linings, while a shocking 69 percent of discarded plastic is believed to enter a water system of one form or another.
That still pales in comparison to what I witnessed in Indonesia. Across the country’s 17,000-odd islands, domestically consumed plastic is so mishandled that 365 tons of it are believed to enter the sea every hour. And yet, deep in the highlands of Java, there are hellscapes of imported Western waste — toothpaste tubes from California, shopping bags from the Netherlands, deodorant sticks from Australia — stacked knee-high as far as the eye can see. Too voluminous to even attempt to recycle, it is used as fuel in scores of bakeries that supply Java’s street markets with tofu, a culinary staple. The result is some of the most lethal cuisine imaginable, with poisons from incinerated Western plastic ingested hourly by great numbers of Indonesians.
Can the waste trade ever be legislated into oblivion? As with drug trafficking, it may be that there’s too much money going around to fix the problem. Traveling trash, after all, has many advantages. Rich countries lose a liability, and garbage producers are let off the hook. The need to find a place to put all our rubbish has never been more dire: A recent United Nations study found that one out of every 20 objects moving through global supply chains is now some form of plastic — amounting to a trillion-dollar annual industry worth more than the global arms, timber and wheat trades combined.
Most crucially, it’s hard for Western consumers to recognize the extent of the crisis — that the story they’ve been told about recycling often isn’t true — when it is continually rendered invisible, relocated thousands of miles away. Yeo Bee Yin, the former environmental minister of Malaysia, may have put it to me best: The only way to really stop waste from entering her country, she told me, would be to close Malaysia’s ports entirely.
We might at the very least be honest with ourselves about what we are doing. We ship our waste to the other side of the planet not only because we produce far too much of it but also because we insist on an environment exorcised of our own material footprints. Everything you’ve ever thrown away in your life: There’s a good chance a lot of it is still out there, somewhere, be it headphones torched for their copper wiring in Ghana or a sliver of a Solo Cup bobbing across the Pacific Ocean.
Here the adage doesn’t ring true. Rare is the trash that becomes anyone’s treasure.
(Alexander Clapp is a journalist and the author of “Waste Wars: The Wild Life of Your Trash,” from which this essay is adapted.)
I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am.
— Cormac McCarthy, ‘All the Pretty Horses’
ANYONE WHO WANTS THE UKRAINE WAR To Continue Is A Monster
by Caitlin Johnstone
Everyone from Rachel Maddow to Bernie Sanders is freaking out about the Trump administration’s moves toward ending the war in Ukraine. David Hogg, now the vice chair of the DNC, said on Twitter that “If we abandon Ukraine — Poland is next. You know what’s going to be a lot more expensive than finishing this war and forcing Putin out of Ukraine? A third world war and a second Marshall plan.”
These histrionics are as depraved as they are ridiculous. Obviously the war in Ukraine needs to end. Polls say Ukrainians themselves want the war to end. If you want Ukrainians to keep dying in this war against the will of the Ukrainians themselves while you sit safe at home eating snacks and posting on the internet, you’re a monster.
But saying this really doesn’t go far enough. We should all be raging at everyone who pushed things to this point, especially at the leaders of the western empire we live under. These psychopaths knowingly provoked an unwinnable war of unfathomable horror by first backing a regime change operation in 2014 and then amassing a proxy military threat on Russia’s border in ways the US would never permit on its own border, then refusing off-ramp after off-ramp both before and after Russia invaded. Everyone who paved the way to this nightmare belongs in a cage.
And that includes Trump. The sitting president is on social media right now trying to pin this whole thing on Zelensky, when Trump himself helped pave the way to this horror by becoming the first president to start openly pouring weapons into Ukraine while ramping up cold war tensions and shredding treaties with Russia. Trump, Obama, Biden, Boris Johnson, and all of NATO helped throw Ukraine into the meat grinder while countless western experts and analysts warned urgently that their actions would result in Ukraine’s destruction. They should all suffer immense consequences.
But of course we all know they won’t. None of the government officials, empire managers, career politicians, pundits and think tank swamp monsters who helped steer Ukraine into the inferno will suffer any consequences of any kind for their atrocities. Nobody will even lose their career.
And what’s worse is knowing that most of them will re-emerge like zombies from the grave to help manufacture support for the next imperial bloodbath. Many of the same people who drummed up support for the war in Ukraine were responsible for helping to destroy Iraq, when they should have been languishing in a prison cell at The Hague this entire time.
We are ruled by the worst among us. Our world will never know peace as long as these freaks are at the steering wheel.
(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)
A JOB FOR MANGIONE BUT HE'S PRESENTLY UNAVAILABLE.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
There’s blatant corruption on both sides. You have to admit nothing in Gaza would have changed with Kamala. I doubt she would back the whole “let’s build a resort” thing, but still. When Bush and Haliburton stole money it was ignored. Biden was neck deep in the Ukraine before the war! Or Pelosi the biggest insider trader in government? Or Newsom sees his homeless plan working since he bought a new $9 million house. Oh the money disappeared out of the “homeless fund” before he purchased his new home.
LEAD STORIES, THURSDAY'S NYT
As Tourists Swarm Erupting Mount Etna, Italian Authorities Warn Them Away
Trump Flips the Script on the Ukraine War, Blaming Zelensky Not Putin
Bucha Has a Question: Does Trump Remember the Russian Massacre?
Trump Administration Moves to End New York’s Congestion Pricing Tolls
‘Long Live the King’: Trump Likens Himself to Royalty on Truth Social
Nearly One in 10 U.S. Adults Identifies as L.G.B.T.Q.
Hamas Hands Bodies of 4 Hostages Back to Israel
Migrants, Deported to Panama Under Trump Plan, Detained in Remote Jungle Camp
Delta Offers $30,000 to Passengers on Plane That Crashed in Toronto
“Maybe there is no Heaven. Or maybe this is all pure gibberish—a product of the demented imagination of a lazy drunken hillbilly with a heart full of hate who has found a way to live out where the real winds blow—to sleep late, have fun, get wild, drink whiskey, and drive fast on empty streets with nothing in mind except falling in love and not getting arrested…”
— Hunter S. Thompson
MICROSOFT SAYS IT HAS CREATED A NEW STATE OF MATTER to Power Quantum Computers
by Cade Metz
Anyone who has sat through a third-grade science class knows there are three primary states of matter: solid, liquid and gas.
Microsoft now says it has created a new state of matter in its quest to make a powerful machine, called a quantum computer, that could accelerate the development of everything from batteries to medicines to artificial intelligence.
On Wednesday, Microsoft’s scientists said they had built what is known as a “topological qubit” based on this new phase of physical existence, which could be harnessed to solve mathematical, scientific and technological problems.
With the development, Microsoft is raising the stakes in what is set to be the next big technological contest, beyond today’s race over artificial intelligence. Scientists have chased the dream of a quantum computer — a machine that could exploit the strange and exceedingly powerful behavior of subatomic particles or very cold objects — since the 1980s.
The push heated up in December when Google unveiled an experimental quantum computer that needed just five minutes to complete a calculation that most supercomputers could not finish in 10 septillion years — longer than the age of the known universe.
Microsoft’s quantum technology could leapfrog the methods under development at Google. As part of its research, the company built multiple topological qubits inside a new kind of computer chip that combines the strengths of the semiconductors that power classical computers with the superconductors that are typically used to build a quantum computer.…
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/19/technology/microsoft-quantum-computing-topological-qubit.html
To The AVA
I’m down to stems and seeds
Women, weed and glorious misdeeds
Each week I hesitate to submit
Then at the last minute I just can’t quit
These self-referential rants may fill a niche
As Flynn has disappeared without a quip
Did you borrow the first line from Billy C. Farlow and George Frayne’s “Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues”?
The Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness is worth the effort to get to. From inland Mendocino County the main access is through Covelo and on up to Indian Dick Station across Balm of Gilead Creek to Upper Glade. For the very hearty continue on to Frying Pan Meadow, the actual headwaters of the Eel River. An easier access point but longer drive is to go out to the valley to Corning turn back west to Paskenta and take the Forest Service road to the Square Lake trailhead. It’s only about a mile and a half to Square Lake where the feel is that of the High Sierra, on the edge of Mt Linn the highest point in the Yolla Bolly, over 8,000 feet. A couple miles farther is Long Lake and connecting trails to the Middle Eel River. Another entry point is to go north to Ruth Lake and then take the Forest Service road south to North Yolla Bolly Lake. This area is over 250,000 acres of remote undeveloped wilderness. You might not see anyone for days, at least that’s the way it was some years ago.
A few years back I piled my family into the van and headed out to the Yolla Bollies. Our destination was Balm of Gillead Creek recommended by a friend.
We were heading up the M1 around dusk through a scorched landscape with the occasional burnt out vehicle when my wife turns to me and says nervously, “this is where all the murderers dump the bodies.”
We barreled on in the dark up the ridge about nine miles until they’d had enough of the bumps and the dust. I parked the van at a wide spot and hopped out with the dog to enjoy the stars and a beer. My wife promptly locked the door with her and the girls inside.
Woke up the next morning and, amazingly enough, we were at a (maybe the) trailhead. Hiked two miles down to the creek and found a small but lovely swimming hole. The missus and the girls packed as many slate rocks as they could as we hiked back up the ridge. Never found Balm of Gilead.
Spent one more night on a mosquito infested and warm ridge sipping champagne and eating snacks. Rolled out the next day hearing noises from the engine. Water pump broke in Ukiah. Called a friend and got a ride home. Great trip!
Also did another trip about 20 years ago with some high school friends. Never saw so many rattlesnakes in such a short hike ever. Interesting place!
The drive from the new pillsbury River up to the yolla Bollys is a great one. Also in that neighborhood is a hike up snow mountain which overlooks the yolla Bolly wilderness area, easy parking off m10 where Tom griffin maintains the trails.
IRS 1040s
IRS stopped mailing the forms several years back. The downloads are pdf copies of the forms and instructions. The pdf forms have “interactive form fields”, where you type in the numbers or text. I prefer the downloaded pdf files and instructions to the old paper forms. No handwriting is involved, excepting the signature and date. If you make an error, just type the corrected information into the form field. Works for me, since my handwriting sucks these days. You can save the file on the computer, just like any other pdf file.
Thank You, Paul
“…Down to stems and seeds
Women, weed and glorious misdeeds…”
It’s Paul again, we read him still,
For his words give a thrill.
Our own sins forgot
As we see what Paul wrought.
We hear wild tales galore
And of fine folks to adore.
Down roads of glory and sin,
Next day he does it again.
So, bless you, Dear Sir,
For your fables that stir.
And tell them you must—
Help us leave Elon Musk!
Ah, a worthy eulogy
(But you should see what I put on Doug Holland’s blog,
check out “Anything Goes Fridays”…)
Thanks…
Not to be to picky but Butchertown in San Francisco is not the same as Hunters Point. Butchertown was centered on what is today Evans Avenue. In those days it was Fifth Avenue South. There is a giant postal center there.
My Great Great Grandfather, John Bayle who immigranted from Pau, France owned two businesses there. Bayle-La Costa sold tripe and sweet breads ( organ meat) to the many French restaurants in the City. His big money maker was the California Fertilizer Company that rendered the carcasses the meat packing plants didn’t want. The remaining bones he crushed and made fertilizer. He died from an asthma attack in 1910 and the company fell apart with the advent of nitrogen based fertilizer. There is nothing left there to indicate that Butchertown ever existed.
Fun fact, legendary ballplayer Left O’Doul was born and raised in Butchertown.
Thong and Bra
Sometimes it’s not so easy to let your freak flag fly, even your friends who are supposedly open or liberal or ex-hippies, or whatever, are uptight:
We were going up to the Woodrose for breakfast and I got dressed up a little: hat, tie, vest, jacket and decided to pop a purple thong around my neck which an ex-lover had left. Please don’t wear that, one friend pleaded, so I didn’t.
Then another time those friends and I were going uptown for a drink and I was feeling festive so I popped the thong, as well as a little black bra a trimmer girl left, around my neck. The friend who had driven us said please don’t wear that. Well, I said, just tell me exactly why you don’t want me to wear it and I won’t. He had nothing, refused to articulate exactly why that made him uncomfortable (I guess it’s so obvious I’m supposed to know?), but I sure made him happy when I took them off and put them in my pocket.
As we walked up to the bar I said, “I like to wear these to feel fearless, but now you’ve taken my power away.”
(Anyway, those were the good old days, circa 2018, Cecil’s has long since closed…)
Your friends are wiser than you, Paul. Good for you for taking their sound advice, despite your regrets–Remember these words: “Please don’t wear that.”
You know you’re on a health kick when you say (like I just did), “Gee, I think I’ll take a day off kale.”
Kale kale kale, might as well be doing yoga.
So yeah after hearing all about the kale kale kale I finally started growing kale, big beautiful healthy kale plants, purple too you bet.
I didn’t eat any of it, maybe one bite just to think why am I growing all this kale?
So about ten years ago I had a cook who would put some in the salad, okay, disguise it with thirteen other veggies, cheese, salad dressing, hmm, not bad, I’m eating kale, I know because I saw her putting it in…
Then about four years ago I started growing kale again and that stuff grows year round, along with arugula and lettuce too sometimes.
So kale in the salads, kale (mixed with arugula and lettuce) on the tostada, when I’m heating up a turkey or chicken soup I’ll sauteed a little kale and arugula in the pan first.
So look at me now, Mister Fucking Kale, it’s medicine baby.
Next, broccoli tales…
✨to brighten your day, and night, Mc
‘Why did Dracula go see the pulmonologist?
He couldn’t stop coffin.
Pulmonologist: How long have you had trouble breathing?
Patient: It’s a lung story.
Nurse: There’s a patient in room 12 who says he can’t breathe, and feels invisible.
Pulmonologist: Tell him I can’t see him right now.”
Why don’t pulmonologists trust x-ray technicians?
They can see right through them.
Pulmonologists often get asked about the causes of lung cancer.
They answer asbestos they can.
What did the pulmonologist say to the gorgeous woman?
You’re breathtaking.
What is a pulmonologist’s favorite type of math?
Lung division.
What did the pulmonologist say to the patient with bird flu?
It’s tweetable.
What part of New York do pulmonologists love the most?
The Bronchs.
A pulmonologist was very angry but finally calmed down.
He just needed to vent.’
•btw………The proper way to say “good-bye” to Python is to enter quit() at the interactive chevron >>> prompt😝
Thanks, TooLoose, I needed that. My pulmonologist at the VA, Dr Jasmine Shah, being of Persian extraction (the people our emperor feels have it in for him), and the Algerian x-ray tech, and my primary care physician, Dr Tina Luo, a Chinese American— I say, these medicos could all be on the streets by now or deported…. And I won’t go back until the political earthquake subsides and I can see what’s left of the VA.
Your coverage allow for having non VA providers?
During this difficult time.
I checked in yesterday with two close friends, a couple working psychiatric services at Travis AFB (a psychologist and a RN). Their jobs are deemed critical and are safe but their bosses may lose their jobs or have to do client/patient care.
Tooloose, Kudos for knowing at least enough Python to properly exit at the prompt. I contribute to the CircuitPython project. If you haven’t tried it, give it a whirl. It’s a blast.
This post reminds of the cartoon from a few days ago where the old gent leaning on his cane and his ancient wife are standing in front of an officiously bland maître d’ asking, “Do we look like we made reservations on line?”
Having spent a frustrating morning getting my spouse set up on Substack— I now, as I often do when navigating the techy marvels of our awesome modern world, feel like a Luddite with a prehistoric stone hand axe trying to resist the mad temptation to smash this costly iPhone to smither-eens!
And so I prefer feeding the metaphorical python what’s left of my mortal coil to harvesting the technological Python’s blessings.
But you meant well and I thank you for it, Bob.
As a youth of but 4 days of age, Apollo pursued the Python to the oracular shrine at Delphi where he slew him with an arrow. The Delphic Pythia takes her title from the place name Pythos, itself named for the rotting remains of the serpent. Although the description you offer of your ailment as a python squeezing and flicking its tongue is apt, you may want to also consider the similarity your suffering bears to the methods of the Sphinx. Her way was to strangle, hence the derivation of her name from the Greek sphingein. Perhaps you may imitate Oedipus by answering her riddle and thereby find a measure of relief.
I have a miniature statue of the Sphinx at Thebes and I know the riddle well enough as I have two daughters. Antigone and Ismene are not their names, but the dynamics of the relationship is identical.
So as to the riddle, “What goes on four legs, then on two legs, then on three legs?” I guess that would be me, as first I crawled, then (like grandma said, “if you want to be a man you have to stand up and walk on your own two feet”), but I was lazy and my infantile regression insisted I be carried so I went from first my stroller (4 wheels) to my bicycle (2 wheels) and from thence to (eventually) one of those snazzy new motorized e-trikes (3 wheels) for disabled seniors.
All that aside, this is the year of the snake and since I am a rabbit in the oriental horoscope I shudder to ponder the bottomless depths of where this mythology is all going…!
I can be insufferably tedious as we all know so staunching the flow of tears shouldn’t soak too many sleeves when my breath runs out and so I’ll leave the overtaxed readership with one of Grandpa McEwen’s gems:
“We must all develop our bad side as well as the good, our faults, shortcomings, pretensions, penchants and perversions—otherwise our friends and family would grieve overly much when we die; better to leave ‘em with a sigh of relief than choking on sobs.”
Standing in front of a guest computer at the MLK Public Library in Washington, D.C., digesting the food from Whole Foods, and now about to go into the library cafe for coffee. The D.C. Peace Vigil will soon move back to its original location, directly across the street from the White House. Just in time for the spring offensive! Not the body, not the mind, Immortal Self I am! Bliss Divine.
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone: (202) 832-8317
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
February 20, 2025 A.D.
God bless Donald Trump for actively negotiating (in what ever form it takes) to stop the killing in Ukraine and also Gaza. The Ukrainian War really should be called Zelensky’s War. When Putin, heavy handed asshole that he is, finally had enough of Ukrainian bad behavior (such as allowing in American bio-weapons labs, continual attacks on indigenous ethnic Russians in areas of Ukraine, and disallowing Russian access to ocean ports) he rolled tanks into Kiev and demanded Zelensky step down. Zelensky refused.
Now maybe you think Zelensky is a hero legitimately elected into office by the Ukrainian people or maybe you think he is a corrupt puppet installed by the CIA/deep state. Doesn’t really matter. The people of Ukraine tried to vote with their feet by fleeing from Ukraine. People sat in their cars in traffic for days waiting to cross the border out of Ukraine. Zelensky ordered that men were not allowed to leave, they had to stay and fight. The result is over a million dead and a country with horrific war damage, plus Biden spending $250 Billion hard earned American tax dollars (you know, dollars that could have gone to senior center lunch programs) just so Zelensky could keep his throne.
And now he can’t account for half the money, oops, gone. But he’s spoiled and arrogant enough that he thinks he can treat Trump the way he played Biden! This is going to be fun and the war will come to an end this year.Thank God indeed.
This is the equivalent of saying “she deserved it.”
Perfect response to the above crap.