Mendocino County Today: Monday 2/24/2025

Showers | Canada Geese | Dusk Planets | Missing Dave | AVUSD News | Boys Volleyball | Two-Basin Deal | Chair Yoga | KMUD Future | ALRFA Fundraiser | Ed Notes | 1960 Panthers | Helping Guitarman | Charles Littlefield | Yesterday's Catch | Reading Glasses | Shea Farewell | Same Paragraph | Petro Media | 1906 Earthquake | Prevent Fires | World Genius | $5K Refund | The Dude | Itinerant Eater | Lead Stories | Industrial Way | Distraction Trap | Irritated Dems | DEI Purpose | Sociopathic Dystopia | Musk Subsidies | Afghanistan Failure | Guess Which | Artificial Cryosphere | Deep Thinker

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STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A meager .05" collected this Monday morning on the coast under cloudy skies & a warm 51F. Showers this morning then clearing by this evening. Generally dry after that until the weekend when more light rain is in the offing, but more on that later this week.

A STRENGTHENING CYCLONE will brush Northern California Monday. The cyclone and associated cold front will deliver strong to damaging southerly winds and light to moderate rainfall with some thunderstorms.

Here is the updated wind gust forecast for Monday. A High Wind Warning is now in effect from 6AM to 4PM Monday for coastal Del Norte County where gusts up to 60 mph is expected. A Wind Advisory remain in effect for interior Del Norte and Humboldt Counties where gusts between 45 to 55 mph is expected, with the strongest winds over the higher terrain.

(NWS)

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PLANETARY PARADE FEBRUARY 2025: WHEN, WHERE AND HOW TO SEE IT

by Joe Rao

Throughout February, a striking gathering of the five brightest planets — Venus, Jupiter, Mars, Mercury, and Saturn — along with the more elusive Uranus and Neptune, will be the main celestial attraction in the evening sky. Later in the month, anyone with a clear, unobstructed view of the horizon may be able to see all five bright planets stretching across the sky. Two of these planets, Mercury and Saturn, will appear especially close together on Monday, Feb. 24 — the highlight of this month-long planetary display.

While this planetary alignment isn't particularly rare, it is relatively uncommon. Spotting two, three, or even four bright planets at once is not unusual, but the chance to see all five together doesn't come around often. Looking ahead, a similar alignment will occur in late October 2028, though that event will take place before sunrise, requiring early risers to catch the view.

For February 2025, however, all you need to do is step outside at dusk — an especially convenient viewing time.…

https://www.space.com/stargazing/planetary-parade-february-2025-when-where-and-how-to-see-it

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WHERE’S DAVE TAYLOR?

Community members are searching for an elderly man who has gone missing in the Southern Humboldt area. David “Dave” Taylor, believed to be between 80 and 82 years old, was maybe last seen on Sunday, February 16, at the Whitethorn Post Office. He is described as being about 6 feet 2 inches tall with long white hair and a white beard.

Taylor, who lives alone in Whale Gulch, was reportedly taken to the hospital on February 5 for a medical emergency. A friend later picked him up from the hospital and dropped him off at the Whitethorn Post Office, where his vehicle—a silver or grey early 1990s Nissan Pathfinder, possibly a two-door—was located. This may have been the last time he was seen. Details are still being sorted out.

Aurora Studebaker, Briceland Volunteer Fire Department’s fire chief, said neighbors who regularly check on Taylor noticed he was not home. “He lives in Whale Gulch, so we assume he would have headed back there, but at this point, we don’t know,” she said, emphasizing concerns over his medical condition.

Diana Totten, a well-known search coordinator in Southern Humboldt, told us that it is believed that a missing person report has been filed with the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department. However, she noted that because it is the weekend, details remain difficult to confirm.

Anyone who has seen Taylor or has information about his whereabouts is urged to contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Department (707) 463-4411 or can just email mskymkemp@gmail.com and we’ll make sure the information is passed on to Chief Studebaker or Diana Totten.

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AVUSD NEWS

Dear Anderson Valley Community,


We had a great 4-day week! Thank you to all the parents, students, and staff who attended Thursday night’s DELAC meeting. It was wonderful to enjoy a pizza meal and to talk and work together.


District Updates…

DELAC 

Students, staff, parents, and community members joined us Thursday night at AVES to learn about AVUSD’s programs and supports for all students and to provide input.  Additionally, supports pertaining to immigration enforcement and student privacy were shared and discussed.

A highlight of the meeting was a spirited discussion about the ways AVUSD supports students when they struggle with academics, behavior or social-emotional needs. Students and parents shared thoughts and ideas; we are excited to integrate this input into our plans, going forward. We are deeply grateful for the authentic collaboration, much of which was inspired by the thoughtful input of high school students Cinthia Garcia-Parra, Lupe Arias-Pena, and Joanna perez-Medina, who attended the meeting. Many thanks, also, to Cora Hubbert, Deleh Mayne, Nat Corey-Moran, Dave Ramalia, and Heath McNerney for taking part in this event. 

Stay tuned!  Exciting things are coming, including enhanced academic, behavioral, and social-emotional supports to help all our students succeed.

CONSTRUCTION

It has been a while since I shared a construction update!  Here is a snapshot of what’s happening on our campuses with construction:

• The main wing of AVHS has been completed and students are enjoying the new library and classrooms.

• The science rooms at AV Jr/Sr High are in progress; construction has been delayed by the need for additional moisture testing. The rooms will be completed shortly after Spring Break. We will be doing a ribbon cutting for the main wing and science rooms when everything has been completed.  Stay tuned!

• The Jr/Sr High School Gym is still under consideration by OPSC for funding for either replacement or renovation. The district is hoping for full funding and should have information from OPSC about the total amount of funding soon.

• The Jr/Sr High School Track Project will be going back out to bid soon, after the scope has been adjusted.  We are hopeful that the bids will come in under budget this time!

• The AV Elementary School Kitchen will be renovated during the summer and the early fall. We are excited about new kitchen facilities!



We Value ALL Our Families: Immigration Support and Updates

Please find  links to additional information for families below:
• Mendocino County Office of Education: Immigration Resource Page

• Immigration and California Families: State Immigration Website

• National Immigration Law Center: “Know Your Rights”


If you would like to be more involved at school, please contact your school’s principal, Mr. Ramalia at AVES or Mr. McNerney at AV Jr/Sr High, or our district superintendent, Kristin Larson Balliet. We are deeply grateful for our AVUSD families. 


With respect,

Kristin Larson Balliet
Superintendent
Anderson Valley Unified School District 
klarson@avpanthers.org 

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PANTHERS SHOW GRIT IN FULL DAY OF VOLLEYBALL!

Panther Athletics never rests, fresh off an exciting basketball season, our first ever boys volleyball team put in a strong effort at an opening scrimmage Saturday, competing for nearly three hours with just six players! We took a couple of sets off Ukiah, battled hard against a very strong Kelseyville team, and dominated against Lower Lake without dropping a set. The improvement from morning to afternoon was clear, and it was a successful day of volleyball for our squad. Great job boys!

(John Toohey)

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HISTORIC NORTH COAST WATER DEAL TAKES SHAPE

A two-basin solution is promising, but still faces hurdles.

There’s a lot to like about the historic agreement to manage water in the Russian and Eel rivers.

For farmers and city dwellers in Sonoma and Mendocino counties, preserving diversions into the Russian River is nothing short of a lifeline.

For conservation and fishery groups, a commitment to restore flows on the Eel is a milestone in a decades-long campaign to revitalize a historic salmon stream.

For the Indigenous people of Round Valley, the deal includes valuable Eel River water rights that promise a degree of economic security.

“This is what is possible when people do the hard work to find ways to support each other instead of fight each other,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, who convened the “two-basin” talks in 2017.

But, as promising as it is, the water-sharing agreement — at least the details made public this month — still must clear some big hurdles.

First is removal of Cape Horn Dam and Scott Dam on the Eel River. PG&E owns the dams, which are part of a money-losing hydropower project the utility wants to abandon. After failing to find a buyer, PG&E is seeking approval from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to remove the dams, beginning as soon as 2028.

If the dams are breached, Russian River water users will need about $50 million to build new diversion facilities to replace Cape Horn Dam, which draws water from the Eel to spin electricity-generating turbines and then releases the water into the Russian. Without the diversion, the upper Russian River could go dry during the summer, threatening water supplies from Ukiah to Marin County.

Beyond the new plumbing, there would be ongoing costs of $1 million a year or more to the Round Valley tribes and for Eel River restoration.

Because the two-basin agreement restricts diversions to wet winter months, there could be still more costs to add new storage facilities in the Russian River basin.

Scott Dam, a dozen miles upstream from Cape Horn, stores water for the hydro project, in turn creating Lake Pillsbury, a popular Lake County recreation area. County officials and lakeside landowners oppose removal of the dam. They haven’t been able to block PG&E’s plan to remove the dam, but they might find a sympathetic ear in Washington, given President Donald Trump’s persistent, if ill-informed attacks on California policies that protect water quality and endangered species, including salmon, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

Without the dams, the Eel would be the longest-free flowing river in California — a cherished goal for conservation groups, Indigenous tribes and Humboldt County, where the Eel drains into the ocean. They envision economic and environmental benefits from restoring flows and repairing damage to what state Fish and Game director Chuck Bonham aptly describes as a “fabled” salmon stream.

To help close the deal, the state pledged $18 million — half for new diversion facilities and half for river restoration.

In California, few subjects are as fraught or complicated as water, and the stakes of this deal for North Coast residents are exceedingly high.

But the two-basin agreement, if the final details are sorted out and the obstacles cleared, promises to keep water flowing into the Russian River for as much as 50 years, while bringing new life to the Eel River. We’ll drink to that.

(Santa Rosa Press Democrat Editorial)

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KMUD FACES FEDERAL SCRUTINY AND FUNDING UNCERTAINTY

by Daniel Mintz

Concerned about threats to independent media under the Trump administration, the Humboldt Progressive Democrats invited KMUD General Manager Kara Randolph to their Wednesday meeting to discuss new federal pressures on public radio.

Chartered by the Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee, Humboldt Progressive Democrats strives to “work toward restoration of citizen ownership of our democracy,” according to its website.

And the group sees democracy under pressure with the new federal administration of President Donald Trump.

Publicly-funded media is increasingly targeted and Randolph was at the Feb. 19 Progressive Democrats meeting to talk about how community radio is meeting new challenges.

New Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations are affecting public media, she said, adding that “it is worrisome.”

Randolph talked about the perils of hostile federal oversight, as Trump’s pick to head the FCC is Brendan Carr, who wrote the Project 2025 chapter on the agency.

“Within that Project 2025 agenda, they did make it clear that they would like to get rid of public media,” said Randolph.

She noted the recent investigations into NPR and PBS related to underwriting content, with the FCC “looking for any tiny violations of underwriting, which is how we support our business.”

KMUD doesn’t have advertising and the sponsors supporting the station are occasionally mentioned on air.

“So they’re going with a very fine tooth comb to make sure that all of the language is appropriate and there’s a lot of really minute details that are really easy to be considered in violation,” Randolph said.

On funding, Randolph said 25 percent of KMUD’s operating budget is from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), which last year provided $135,000 of a $556,000 operating budget.

She said KMUD has received two-thirds of this year’s CPB grant and 2025 will likely be funded but “I don’t know what the future will look like.”

With the feds eyeing public media content, KMUD and other sources are balancing the need to inform their audiences against the risks of being investigated.

Randolph referred to the FCC’s recent investigation into San Francisco-based radio station KCBS for reporting on where undercover ICE operations were being carried out.

Prior to the legalization of marijuana, KMUD reported on the presence of federal law enforcement caravans en route to grow sites, which was criticized by the law enforcers.

The station will consider future coverage carefully.

“It’s been a little tricky navigating how we can support our community and stay free from investigation,” Randolph said. “We’re allowed to post pretty much whatever we want online as the rules don’t apply to websites and social media but anything on the air is up for investigation – so we’ve had to play it a little more cautious with what we say on air but we’re trying to still use other tools to get messages out.”

She added that “on the positive side,” the CPB recently announced a new grant for rural radio stations and KMUD is applying.

Randolph also talked about the aspects of community radio that make its value bipartisan.

“In rural communities there’s very few news outlets that can provide immediate up-to-date information in the face of emergencies that’s where we’ve really shined and been able to really be important,” she said. “One of the ways to be a really important community asset is during tsunami warnings and earthquakes and in the wildfire season and storms with road closures.”

KMUD is on-air round-the-clock while “most radio stations don’t have live DJs on the weekends or at nights and sometimes even during the day,” she continued.

With future CPB funding uncertain, community donations will be more important than ever.

“We really depend on our members and community sponsors for continued financial support,” said Randolph. “And I think we’re gonna have to depend on that a little more than we have in the past because I’m imagining that funding will shift.

“We’re really hoping to be able to continue getting funding through a lot of emergency news sources and keep on trucking,” she continued. “I’ve only been at KMUD for about four months so it’s new to me being in KMUD and then with this situation, I don’t think any of us really saw it coming, we have other ways of getting some funds but this is a big dip, for sure.”

Members of Progressive Democrats and those who called in to the meeting expressed appreciation for KMUD and so did Randolph – she said she came from a background of local commercial radio and “being part of a community station really aligns with my politics and community activism a lot more.”

(Courtesy, KymKemp.com)

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ED NOTES

IT WAS THE WEEKEND before the Arab uprisings in 2011, six weeks before Mother Nature swallowed Japan. On Clement Street in San Francisco food prices for staples like coconut milk and rice had just about doubled over the past six months and gasoline was more expensive every week. More things than usual seemed to be flying apart, although nothing like things are flying apart in 2025. I headed for the ballpark where the Giants were throwing an open house. In anticipation of extraordinary Saturday morning demand by Giant’s fans, Muni of course was running fewer and shorter trains, meaning most of the city would have to take a bus downtown and then walk a mile or so to the ballpark. On the normally uneventful 1 California, an attractive, nicely dressed Chinese woman of about forty moons handed me her business card, which identified her as an accountant and an acupuncturist. “Call me,” she said in immigrant English, “I do your taxes.” And puncture my last illusions for free? When attractive women strike up conversations with you on the bus, and young attractive women smile at you on the sidewalks, you are officially harmless, that from then on it will be walking sticks and dentu-cream until the Neptune Society’s final furnace renders you to the contents of a small brown takeout box in exchange for a swipe of your descendant’s Visa card. Intimations of mortality aside, it was a nice day for an open house at the ballpark. Frisco is mostly nice days, cool but sunny, and even in the foggy summer months there’s always warm weather in the neighborhoods to the east. The ballpark mob stretched halfway to the Ferry Building, and soon I was walking past a very long line, one of the longest lines I’ve ever seen. “What’s this line for,” I asked a young couple. “Autographs,” the young man replied. “Whose autographs?” I wondered, assuming they’d be after Lincecum or Buster Posey, like most fans. “We don’t care. Anybody’s,” the young man laughed. Reminding myself not to be judgmental because I, too, was on a version of the same pointless quest, I plodded on towards the Willie Mays statue at the main gate where I joined a relatively short line which, in a half hour or so, would funnel us rabble into the park. A contemporary togged out in the full Giant regalia, declared, “I saw Dave Righetti pitch in the World Series,” he said. “Oh yeah?” I replied, “I saw Dave Righetti’s father, Leo, play shortstop at Seals Stadium.” Inside, there were more autograph lines, and when Pablo was introduced to a huge approving roar we could all see that he was definitely slimmer. Pablo said he was “Berry berry hoppy” to all the questions he was asked, and so was I because at 280 Pablo had definitely been having probs picking up ground balls at third. Reassured, I left the world champs to their autograph books and headed north up Third Street past mysterious businesses called Coalesce and Gallery 16 and Urban Digital Color, marveling at the diversity of free enterprise but thinking of the superior relevance of Mendocino County and how I wouldn’t trade any of this gizmo-based nebulousness for Doug Mosel and Boonville’s small farm movement. Popping in at the California Historical Society, consistently more interesting than the trend-o-groove-o displays a block away at SF MOMA, one of the glass exhibit cases contained AB 3317 proposed in 1911: “If you are an illegal possessor or user of narcotics, or a prostitute, pimp, panhandler or sexual pervert and are here for illegal purposes, please leave,” which would exclude just about everyone in San Francisco’s present population from ever eating out. I walked on north to North Beach to see how the AVA was doing at City Lights. It was either sold out or hadn’t arrived, and it was on to Washington Square and then back to Chinatown for a three dollar lunch of Mongolian beef on Jackson, then south through the Stockton Tunnel where, at all times of the day or night for 50 years now there’s at least one person yelling or honking his horn to test his echo. I walked around Union Square admiring the greatest show on earth. Finally, I took the 14 up Mission to 18th and Mission, hoping to get the 33 that goes up 18th, over the hill, finally coming to rest on the lower slopes of Pacific Heights. At 18th and Mission I waited. And waited. A very old and very tiny and very bent-over gnome-like little man shuffled up to me in tiny tired steps. It seemed to take him an hour to traverse maybe thirty feet. “Can I stand next to you, chief? It’s dangerous out here,” he said. I was flattered that he thought I represented sanctuary in the urban jungle. “What happened to that place out at the beach where they had the laughing lady?” he wanted to know. “I used to go there. I was born in Sinaloa. I jumped the fence and came here. I live here for years already.” An old timer myself, this kind of free association never throws me. Playland is long gone, I said, but Laughing Sal, or at least one version of her, is down at Fisherman’s Wharf. She’s still laughing, I said. “That’s good,” the old man said, and now he had two assurances, my harmless bulk and Laughing Sal. “I live on Dolores with my girlfriend,” he said. Girlfriend? I felt like shaking his ancient hand. “I come down to Mission to buy my bread from the Chinaman,” he explained, pointing at the four loaves of Wonder Wheat he was carrying. “The Chinaman makes good bread. Every Saturday I come here. I’m going home now. It gets dark and I get robbed.” The 33 finally rolled up. It was jammed because it had been nearly an hour since the last one. The driver let the lift down for the old guy, as much younger people, no respecters of age or anything else probably, streamed around him and onto the bus. At Dolores we had to yell at the driver to let the old guy off, a debarkation that took several minutes and elicited exasperated sighs from several passengers. At Castro, the driver suddenly announced, “This is as far as I’m going. Everyone off.” Which made no sense, and was totally unanticipated by the 60 or so riders who’d already waited 45 minutes or longer to get on the 33, hoping at last to get up and over the hill to the Haight-Ashbury and points north. A man yelled, “You coulda told us that when we got on.” Yes, the driver could have forewarned us, and probably would have on any other public transportation here or any other place in the world, but he worked for Muni. I looked back down 18th. I could see all the way to Oakland. Not another 33 in sight. Up and over the hill on foot, but I finally caught a 33 at Frederick, and in ten minutes I was getting off at Arguello and Stanyan, six blocks to home, secure in the glorious knowledge that the Giants already looked good and the Muni hadn’t changed in the 50 years I’d been riding it.

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1960 PANTHER VARSITY BASKETBALL TEAM

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A RANDOM ACT OF KINDNESS

by Tommy Wayne Kramer

Back in the 1980s came a bumpersticker that advised us to “Practice Random Acts of Kindness.”

It was early virtue signaling, meant less to instruct others in proper behavior, more to cast the car’s driver in a quiet, glowing aura, as if she’d turned some evolutionary corner: Be Like Me. Do as I Do.

I recall few instances of anyone patiently, persistently practicing kindness with neither hope nor expectation of being repaid or benefiting in any plausible way.

But here’s one.

No one knew where Guitarman came from nor how he materialized on the streets of Ukiah in the early 1990s. But there he was in a black hat, black cape and black leather jacket. And a guitar.

He stood on street corners and in doorways, and if rainy he took shelter under canopies and awnings. And he played his guitar in hopes you or your friend might flip a quarter or dime into his upturned slouchy hat on the sidewalk.

Business must have been good, because Guitarman kept at it, long and hard, for months merging into years, and with no other obvious ways to maintain his modest lifestyle.

One of the places he played daily was outside the County Public Defender’s office, aka the Feibusch Building at South School and West Church.

Had you never experienced Guitarman working his guitar, you might imagine it would be a welcome musical addition to your day as you went to and from the courthouse. Or at least theoretically possible that you’d enjoy Guitarman strumming those notes or strings or chords or whatever it was that Guitarman was unable to play.

We’ve all heard worse, but probably not multiple times a day. And frankly Guitarman’s between-song patter was rarely polite, never elevated.

Into this setting came a Deputy Public Defender named Barry Melton who was among the sparse parade of lawyers going back and forth to the courthouse. Barry was a cheerful supporter of Guitarman’s street performances, bordering on enthusiastic. When Melton walked past he would offer words of encouragement to Guitarman, assuring him the music he was playing at the moment sounded like the intro to a Ted Nugent song or an Aerosmith riff.

A little history: Barry Melton had once been a legitimate rock star, an electric guitar front man with the infamous Country Joe & The Fish band. Barry was The Fish himself and his group played Woodstock, starred in the movie, released six or eight top selling albums, always popular on nationwide tours.

When Melton slowed down heading back to the office he would sometimes pause to give Guitarman advice or tutoring.

“OK,” Barry would say. “Try it this way” while standing alongside and a little behind Guitarman. “These fingers here, and then this one like this.” Guitarman would strum once, twice, half a dozen times.

“You got it!” Barry would smile, clap Guitarman on the back and head inside the Public Defender’s office. A day or two later Barry would suggest a new chord, a new series of strums that would approximate a Keith Richards solo. “No, seriously, man!”

It would strain the imagination to think Barry Melton benefited from any of these instructional lessons in a traditional sense. He didn’t need a new player in the band he was heading in those days, and surely could not have expected payment.

It was like Willie Mays playing stickball with kids on the streets of New York, or Ken Edmonds on his daily morning rounds at Todd Grove Park picking up litter. Or local writer Dan Hibshman visiting Mendocino County’s jail to teach reading and writing to inmates inside.

Willie, Ken and Dan took advantage of opportunities to do nice things; Barry Melton had a similar gift, mingled with the rare kindness to pause and help a random guy learn a little more and feel a little better about his life and work.

NOTE: Two or more years following all this, Guitarman was kidnapped off the sidewalk at South State and Gobbi Streets. He was taken out north of town, beaten and murdered; they left behind his guitar, but kept his bloodied black leather jacket.

The two guys, later convicted, said they became annoyed with Guitarman when he entered the old 711 Club one night, and played his guitar for spare change.

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CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, February 23, 2025

TYLER CALES, 27, Willits. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, county parole violation.

DEVIN KESTER-TYLER, 32, Ukiah. Petty theft with two or more priors.

DYLAN LANDIS, 39, Laytonville. Hit&run with property damage.

BROOKE LEWIS, 44, Laytonville. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, disobeying court order.

NATALIA LOPEZ-LUNA, 31, Ukiah. DUI.

SOPHIA PICENO, 43, Ukiah. Unlawful camping, storage of camping paraphernalia on public property.

GABRIELLA PINOLA, 30, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

BRAYAN SUAREZ-MAGALLON, 28, Ukiah. Domestic battery, vandalism.

JALAHN TRAVIS, 25, Ukiah. Probation violation, unspecified offense. (Frequent flyer.)

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AFTER 28 YEARS, A CHRONICLE FIXTURE ON MLB COVERAGE SAYS FAREWELL

by John Shea

I never imagined writing a farewell column.

Then again, I never imagined a quarter century of bylines in the Sporting Green.

It has been a fairy tale, a blur and a pleasure.

After a combined 28 years at the Chronicle and old Examiner, where I landed in 1998 before the newspapers merged following the 2000 Major League Baseball season, I’ve decided to step aside for another gig at the San Francisco Standard.

It’s all good. I’m leaving the Chronicle on positive terms, on my terms, and thrilled about moving to a relatively new outlet and continuing to cover baseball in this beautiful area where I’ve spent most of my life.

Reflecting on my life-changing Chronicle run, I can’t say it was a dream come true because I guess it had never dawned on me to be a realistic dream. In my youth, the Chronicle was the paper of Bob Stevens and Art Rosenbaum and Bruce Jenkins and Ron Fimrite and Glenn Dickey along with Herb Caen and Art Hoppe and Charles McCabe and Stanton Delaplane and so many other influential journalists, writers and columnists along the way.

I remember my early high school days, a kid from Mill Valley, arriving on campus in the morning and heading straight to the library where I met up with some buddies to pore over the Green Sheet and discuss the day in sports. I entered the ball-writing business in San Diego in the 1980s, and when I returned to the Bay Area late in the decade, the aim was to beat the Chronicle — the Yankees, Dodgers and U.S. Steel all rolled into one — not necessarily join the Chronicle.

But 28 years ago this month, sports editor Glenn Schwarz hired me away from the Oakland Tribune to cover the Giants and continue writing a Sunday column for the Examiner. After the merger, Glenn became Chronicle sports editor and promoted me to national baseball writer, a position that allowed me to step back from the grind and minutiae and dive into more creative, in-depth and big-picture storytelling, a role that I absolutely love and will maintain at the Standard.

At the Chronicle, I covered more events, games and story lines than I can remember, but quite a few stand out.

In 2002, when the Giants faced the Angels in the World Series, I was honored to join a traveling all-star cast in Anaheim, including Jenkins, Scott Ostler, Ray Ratto, Gwen Knapp, Henry Schulman, Susan Slusser, Ron Kroichick and, of course, Schwarz, my longtime mentor. Along with the great photographer Carlos Avila Gonzalez. Somehow I got an upgrade to a suite at the Fullerton Marriott, so I had no choice but to play host to a marvelous group of ball scribes well into the night. The Giants didn’t win, but if memory serves, we did.

I covered every step of the glorious Barry Bonds home run chases along with the inglorious BALCO scandal, including following up on any leads shared by Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, who helped uncover baseball’s dirty little steroid secret. I still maintain Bonds, before he became a national story for all the wrong reasons, was baseball’s best interview in the ‘90s (along with Tony Gwynn, my favorite all-time guy to cover) because of how he eloquently broke down hitting and the finer points of the game.

In the 2000s, I covered multiple postseasons on both sides of the bay and three World Series championship teams and will remain forever impressed by Bruce Bochy’s historic October successes in 2010, 2012 and 2014 while convinced the 1962 and 1993 teams were superior, reaffirming the importance in the modern game of putting it all together at the right time.

I covered the genesis of Moneyball in Oakland, which enabled the A’s to do more with less, and saw analytics transform the entire game and eventually infiltrate the Giants’ front office, especially with the arrival of Farhan Zaidi. His data-driven strategies worked wonders in 2021 but not so much any other year, which led to an outcry from fans and a new administration featuring franchise icon Buster Posey.

I covered the A’s seemingly neverending ballpark search saga from San Jose to Fremont to Laney College to Howard Terminal — and who knows how many others — while John Fisher overlooked the most sensible and central site of all, the Coliseum. If different people were in charge, perhaps the A’s would have had a thriving ballpark village by now at 7000 Coliseum Way. Instead, Fisher must fly in and out of Sacramento, and perhaps one day Las Vegas, to watch his vagabond team.

My favorite bylined story was about my mother, Ann Byrne Shea, who grew up in Chicago and in October 2016 was experiencing the Cubs in the World Series for the first time since her college days in 1945. The Cubs were down three games to one by the time the story was published. “Never give up hope. What do they say? Persistence will win out. They never lost their faith or hope for the Cubs,” I quoted her as saying of Chicagoans, and I credited her with the Cubs rallying to beat Cleveland for their first World Series title in her lifetime.

I had the privilege of building relationships with (and sharing stories of) stars from my youth including Willie McCovey, Felipe Alou, Bobby Bonds, Orlando Cepeda, Vida Blue and Reggie Jackson. And, of course, the great Willie Mays, who allowed me into his inner circle to chronicle his important and lasting messages in the pages of the Chronicle and the book we co-authored, “24: Life Stories and Lessons from the Say Hey Kid.”

It was the project of a lifetime, and I was honored that Mays gave me full access into his world, allowing me to learn about baseball and life from the greatest who ever played the game. I took the knowledge he shared and produced an extensive Road to Rickwood series that ran in the Chronicle in the months leading up to June’s Giants-Cardinals game in Birmingham, Ala., one of MLB’s greatest accomplishments, played two days after Willie died. I also served as content supervisor for the Chronicle’s Mays tribute book that was published in November.

We lost both Mays and Cepeda in June and Rickey Henderson in December — another icon with whom I worked on a book project — a tremendous blow to the Bay Area and baseball landscape. Their spirit and legacies will live on, three of the most extraordinary and fascinating ballplayers in the history of sport. Two are honored with statues in front of Oracle Park, and the third needs his own statue somewhere in Oakland and wherever the A’s wind up.

Aside from G. Allen Johnson, I was the last holdover from the Examiner sports staff and, I believe, the only scribe in the country to write a Sunday baseball column every season since 1986, a couple of feats that give me great pride. I also take pride in challenging the baseball industry over the relocation of the A’s, diversity issues in the game and common-sense rule-change discussions — and always being available to help young writers find their way in a business that has dramatically changed in 28 years, like the game I cover.

I’ve tried my best to change with the times, and I’ll continue with that progression moving forward while always relishing my time at the Chronicle. Through it all, I never minimize what I absorbed from widely respected folks in the game including the many managers I covered during my Chronicle years, especially Dusty Baker, Alou, Bochy and Bob Melvin. Pre-Chronicle, the list would start with Roger Craig and Tony La Russa.

Finally, I want to thank my many wonderful colleagues and friends along with the athletes and, especially, the readers. The interaction with folks who read my copy through the years has been nothing short of exhilarating. Your input, suggestions, compliments, criticisms (and, yes, even corrections) were invaluable, whether they came via email, social media or letters delivered to the office.

It’s all appreciated, and I’m filled with gratitude. See you soon.

(SF Chronicle)

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2025 UPDATE: BIG OIL SPONSORS DINNERS AND AWARDS RECEPTIONS FOR JOURNALISTS

by Dan Bacher

One of the biggest and most censored stories of the past few years is the increasingly cozy relationship between the oil industry and journalists and media organizations in California.

This relationship has increasing relevance in light of the climate change-induced wildfires that have raged through Los Angeles and San Diego counties this year as the Trump administration, under the grip of Big Oil and Big Ag, spreads disinformation about the fires and California water.

In 2023 and 2024, the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA), the largest and most powerful corporate lobbying group in California and the West, sponsored several dinners and awards receptions for journalists. This article will review those efforts by the oil industry to curry favor with journalists, as well as examples of collaboration between Big Media and Big Oil in previous years.…

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/5/2295249/-Update-Big-Oil-sponsors-dinners-and-awards-receptions-for-journalists

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WILLIAM JAMES ON THE SAN FRANCISCO 1906 QUAKE

https://loa-shared.s3.amazonaws.com/static/pdf/James_California.pdf

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THE GENIUS OF THE WORLD

by Bruce McEwen

Every time I see Elon Musk in the news I get this uncanny remembrance of a book I read when I was 14, The Mastermind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. A story about an earthling who goes to Mars, the plot concerns a fabulously wealthy and powerful emperor /scientist who has made himself immortal by having his brain transplanted into newer, younger bodies as the old one ages and wears out. The book is full of the kind of action and characters an adolescent boy can get into.

Of course, rereading the book (to satisfy my curiosity as to why Elon Musk always makes me think of him as being somehow a part of it) as an old man has its amusements and I recently heard Elon’s mother say, “He’s the genius of the world.” She said it as though it was a foregone conclusion and I can imagine her saying it when Elon was only 14 as well as now, so here’s an excerpt from the Mastermind of Mars— the genius of another world— and a hint at why Elon is fascinated with space travel:

We followed him from the ship onto the deck of the landing stage and close under the side of the Vosar opposite that from which the watchman must approach the ship and enter it. Then, bidding us good luck, Bal Zak departed.

From the summit of the landing tower I had my first view of a Martian city. Several hundred feet below me lay spread the broad, well-lighted avenues of Toonol, many of which were crowded with people. Here and there, in this central district, a building was raised high upon its supporting, cylindrical metal shaft; while further out, where the residences predominated, the city took on the appearance of a colossal and grotesque forest. Among the larger palaces only an occasional suite of rooms was thus raised high above the level of the others, these being the sleeping apartments of the owners, their servants or their guests; but the smaller homes were raised in their entirety, a precaution necessitated by the constant activities of the followers of Gor Hajus’ ancient profession that permitted no man to be free from the constant menace of assassination. Throughout the central district the sky was pierced by the lofty towers of several other landing stages; but, as I was later to learn, these were comparatively few in number. Toonol is in no sense a flying nation, supporting no such enormous fleets of merchant ships and vessels of war as, for example, the twin cities of Helium or the great capital of Ptarth.

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ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Rejoice in the possibility that we all receive a paltry $5K “refund” for this fraud and grift. It will be taxable income as well. And nobody responsible will be held to account or punished. This kind of pandering appeals to brokies and mouth breathers who can’t make good financial decisions. They’ll blow it on neck flame tattoos, big screen TVs, drugs, and booze (probably). And where will that $5K per household come from? The Fed will create it out of thin air with an algorithm and a few keystrokes.

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“When I was offered the part of ‘The Dude’ in ‘The Big Lebowski’ (1998), I went through a big thing in my head worrying if this was going to be a bad example for my girls. The guy was kind of an anti-hero, a pot-smoking, slacker kind of guy, and I was really racking my brain about it. I always want to feel free to play any role, a despicable guy or a good guy — the full range of human experience. But this one was really giving me problems. So I assembled the family and told them my problem. After a long pause, my middle girl said, ‘Dad, you’re an actor. We know that it’s all pretend what you do. We know that when you kiss some lady on the screen that you still love Mom. We know you’re an actor.’ So I had their permission, their blessing, to go play a character like The Dude. That was great that they understood that. And I count on the audiences to understand that what I do in my personal life and what I do on the screen are not some kind of example for them to base their lives on. Hopefully, when people see a movie, they know it’s a movie.”

Jeff Bridges claimed The Dude was pretty much who he’d been in the 1970s. But unlike the character of Walter for John Goodman, the Coens did not have anyone particular in mind for The Dude while they were writing the script. Once Bridges’s name came up, the casting seemed unavoidable. But the actor often takes a lot of time before committing to a project. “He danced around it a while,” Joel Coen claimed in a 2001 interview, and the brothers tackled “Fargo” (1996) after “The Hudsucker Proxy” (1994) primarily because they were waiting for Bridges’s schedule to clear.

The Dude’s line, “The Dude abides,” is a reference to Ecclesiastes 1:4, “One generation passes away, and another generation comes: but the Earth abides forever.” It is a reference to how the Dude, much like the Earth, can weather change and chaos around him, but still remain the same. (IMDb)

Happy Birthday, Jeff Bridges!

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“Clearly, I like what I do. I like working. I like staying in motion. I think what I always do is looking at the country from the vantage point of an eater. Meaning I will be sitting down with hopefully interesting people, sharing their food and listening to what their lives are like.”

– Anthony Bourdain

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LEAD STORIES, MONDAY'S NYT

A New Soap Opera Looks to Rekindle the Past While Breaking New Ground

Republicans Face Angry Voters at Town Halls, Hinting at Broader Backlash

Some Trump Officials Push Back Against Musk’s Ultimatum to Workers

DOGE’s Only Public Ledger Is Riddled With Mistakes

5 Takeaways From Germany’s Election

Pope Francis Suffering From Kidney Failure in Addition to Pneumonia

Human Therapists Prepare for Battle Against A.I. Pretenders

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THE INDUSTRIAL WAY OF LIFE leads to the industrial way of death. From Shiloh to Dachau, from Antietam to Stalingrad, from Hiroshima to Vietnam and Afghanistan, the great specialty of industry and technology has been the mass production of human corpses.

— Edward Abbey, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness (1990)

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DEMOCRATS IRRITATED BY VOTERS WHO ELECTED THEM NEED AN ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT

by Norman Solomon

The Capitol’s phone lines have been overwhelmed this month, and some Democrats are complaining about the deluge of calls from voters who implore them to fight the Trump administration. Too often the responses to the calls have amounted to passing the buck rightward.

“It's been a constant theme of us saying, ‘Please call the Republicans,’" Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer explained. Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.) is offended by what he’s hearing from constituents. “I reject and resent the implication that congressional Democrats are simply standing by passively,” he said.

Such reactions are political copouts. Those two congressmembers represent deep-blue districts, and both of their states are represented by Democratic senators. Responding to outraged constituents by telling them to “call the Republicans” is a way of dodging responsibility and accountability.

It's easy enough for Torres, Beyer and others in the Democratic caucus to gripe about the volume of irate calls to their offices. And at first glance, telling constituents to contact Republicans instead might seem logical. But that’s actually a way of telling an angry Democratic base not to be a nuisance to Democratic lawmakers.

What’s more, as a practical matter, their constituents often have no way to message GOP members of Congress. The congressional email system doesn’t allow non-constituents to send a message to a representative or senator. And the first thing that a staffer wants to confirm on the phone is whether the caller is in fact a constituent.

Fully half of the nation’s citizens -- and a large majority of Democrats -- live in states with two Democratic senators. And so, routinely, when Democratic officeholders say that their agitated constituents should leave them alone and “call the Republicans,” it amounts to a brushoff that can be translated from politician-talk as “Stop bugging us already.”

But in primaries next year, some are liable to be held accountable. Few serving Democrats with blue electorates will face tight races in the 2026 general election -- but if they’re perceived as wimps who failed to really put up a fight against President Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk, incumbents risk facing primary challenges propelled by grassroots anger.

The anger might seem overheated inside Capitol Hill bubbles. But it’s real for millions of engaged activists -- the ones who volunteer in droves and can get behind insurgency campaigns with plenty of fundraising, canvassing power and social-media impacts.

Mere shrugs from Democrats that they’re in the minority won’t wash. “The rules of the Senate are designed to protect the rights of the minority, and Democrats have tools to grind Senate business to a halt to delay and defy the Trump-Musk coup,” the activist group Indivisible points out. “The three biggest weapons? Blanket opposition, quorum calls, and blocking unanimous consent -- parliamentary guerrilla tactics that can slow, stall, and obstruct at every turn.”

The needed opposition goes way beyond procedural maneuvers. The tenor and vehemence of public statements every day, from the hundreds of Democrats in the House and Senate, set a tone and convey messages beyond mere words on paper and screens.

The week after Trump’s return to the Oval Office, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) traveled to California and met with donor powerhouses in Silicon Valley, where he reportedly “said Democrats were reaching toward the center, while Trump will swing harder right.” Here we have the prospective next House speaker pledging to move in the direction of a president whom Gen. Mark Milley has described as “fascist to the core.”

Jeffries’ goal of hugging “the center” may play well with rich tech executives, but it shows notable indifference to the large bulk of Democratic voters. Early this month, CBS News reported that its polling shows “the nation's rank-and-file Democrats are increasingly looking for more opposition to President Trump from their congressional delegation.” The trend has been emphatic. Only 35 percent want Democrats in Congress to “try to find common ground with Trump,” while 65 percent want them to “oppose Trump as much as possible.”

A rally last Thursday at Jeffries’ central Brooklyn office drew hundreds of protesters. One of them, Molly Ornati, an activist with the group 350 Brooklyn Water, said: “He’s acting as though this is a normal part of the political process, when this is a completely never before seen violation of the Constitution, of federal laws, separation of power, democratic principle -- all of the key American values. He’s not standing up with the level of outrage that people meant to see, that Democrats want to see.”

The next day, on his latest California trip, Jeffries spoke in the Bay Area and generated headlines like “Hundreds Protest Outside Event With House Minority Leader” and “Oakland to Hakeem Jeffries: Do Your Job!” One of the local TV news reports summed up a theme of the demonstration this way: “Democratic Party has been paying lip service to the working class.”

To most registered Democrats, there’s nothing more important for lawmakers with a “D” after their names to do than battle tooth-and-nail against the Trump-Musk agenda for gutting the government while enriching the wealthy at everyone else’s expense. While Trump’s forces are setting fire to the basic structures of American democracy, Democrats in Congress are widely perceived to be wielding squirt guns. That’s no way to prevent tyranny or win the next elections.

(Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, "War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine," includes an afterword about the Gaza war.)

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WHEN THERE’S NO MONEY IN THE PURSUIT OF THE GOOD And No Goodness In The Pursuit Of Money

Our systems reward and elevate sociopathy, which is why we now find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

by Caitlin Johnstone

The trouble is that there’s no money in the pursuit of the good, and there’s no goodness in the pursuit of money.

If you want to devote your life to doing good, then you will likely need to consign yourself to a life of far less material comfort than if you had not. Teaching. Nursing. Social work. Environmental work. The vocations which are typically sought out by people who feel called to dedicate their lives to helping are also notoriously low-paying for how stressful they can be and how much education is required to get into them. Many important callings like peace activism, environmental activism and community volunteer work don’t pay anything at all.

People who devote themselves to the pursuit of money wind up looking in the exact opposite direction. Think of all the surest ways to get extremely wealthy and you will find exploitation, ecocide and abuse at every turn. Extracting profits from the toil of the working class. Investing in surefire sources of profit like defense contractors and fossil fuels. Offloading the costs of industry onto the ecosystem and the developing world. War profiteering. Scams (both the legal and illegal varieties). Monopolistic practices which crush smaller businesses and lay waste to entire communities. The countless depraved manipulations that go into selling medicine for profit.

The Sackler family amassed a fortune by creating an epidemic of opiate addiction. The Walton family got rich by deliberately destroying the local economies of small towns so that everyone would work and shop at the local Walmart. Elon Musk is a Pentagon contractor who’s helping US intelligence construct a planetary surveillance network. Jeff Bezos got rich with the help of contracts with the CIA and Pentagon, and Amazon’s aggressive campaign to control the underlying infrastructure of the economy is destroying whole industries and creating immense suffering for workers. Larry Ellison’s Oracle is intertwined with the US intelligence cartel and the Israeli genocide machine, as is Peter Theil’s Palantir.

These are just a few examples of how depraved you have to be to amass immense amounts of wealth; beyond that there are all the ugly manipulations people engage in to protect the status quo upon which their wealth is premised. The extremely wealthy buy up narrative control in the form of media, think tanks and Silicon Valley platforms in order to influence public political opinion to their benefit. They influence the government through legalized bribery in the form of campaign contributions and lobbying. Sometimes they even hop right in to the actual government itself like Donald Trump and Elon Musk. All to ensure the continuation of the unjust systems which allow them to amass wealth while destroying the biosphere and making everyone else poorer, busier, sicker, more exhausted, and more propagandized.

These are the kinds of people who rise to the top in our current system: the absolute worst among us. The more ruthless and underhanded you are willing to be, the easier it is for you to become obscenely wealthy and powerful. Our systems reward and elevate sociopathy, which is why we now find ourselves ruled by sociopaths.

And meanwhile the best among us toil in obscurity, swimming against the current of this sociopathic dystopia their entire lives before dying with nothing to their names but the love that they shared. These should be the people running the world and charting the course for our species, and instead they live and die unknown and unrecognized, because our system does not elevate such beings. Instead it elevates narcissistic plutocrats, vapid celebrity artists, and groveling pundits and politicians.

This is what you get when you have a system in place where mass-scale human behavior is determined by what is profitable instead of by what is right. This is what that looks like.

Is it working?

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

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THE PRICE OF AMERICAN ‘SAFETY’

by Suzy Hansen

A number of new books recount the horror America created and then left in Afghanistan. Can anyone grasp the realities of occupation and the “war on terror” if they haven’t been on their receiving end?

The first time the Taliban asked Omari to place a bomb beneath a convoy of American soldiers, he was happy the detonator used a motorcycle battery rather than a cell phone battery because the latter often blew up in people’s faces. He buried the bomb in the sand moments before four American Humvees passed over it, and hiding in tall grass he watched as a door flew over his head and American bodies fell to the ground. It was 2011, he was sixteen, and he had been seeing Americans for seven years of what was then a ten-year occupation. The first time he saw them, they were friendly in their silly gear and armadillo backpacks, openly peeing on the side of the road; the next time, rounding up old men in black-and-white turbans, forcing them to kneel, and hitting them with the butts of their rifles; another time, pulling off the headscarf of an old woman who was begging to know why the Americans had detained her son.

But it was the buzzing of drones flying overhead that finally drove him to look for a way to join the Taliban and defeat the invaders. The drones left him “unable to sleep” and “foretold of night raids, of foreign soldiers who descended on ropes from the dark night sky,” dragging people away to one of the twenty-five detention sites in the country. Those people “quivered like children” when they came back, if they returned. Near the end of Sune Engel Rasmussen’s devastating book Twenty Years: Hope, War, and the Betrayal of an Afghan Generation, Omari, now in his twenties, is so traumatized by the American occupation and war that his brain periodically freezes. He can’t remember the words he wants to say.

Rasmussen learns these details of a young Talib’s experience because of his attention and precision but also because of the techniques of immersion journalism. This type of reporting requires journalists either to constantly shadow their subjects or to reconstruct their stories through long interviews and the obsessive accumulation of facts. It is a form viewed by many journalists as the pinnacle of the craft, one that elevates mere reportage to literature.

The major American works of immersion journalism—such as J. Anthony Lukas’s Common Ground or Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family—often center on pressing social issues like race or poverty or immigration, which means that the authors’ subjects are vulnerable people, ones the journalist knows society ignores or misunderstands. Foreign correspondents have similar instincts. They long to humanize—a word criticized as much as it is used—the people they have lived among and gotten to know, especially when those people are victims of an occupation or war. For many, there is perhaps a deeper hope: that the humanization of these foreigners will somehow make war against them less likely.

Rasmussen, a Danish-born correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, is now based in London covering European security. Before that he spent some ten years reporting from Kabul during the United States’ twenty-year war in Afghanistan. His Twenty Years joins an ever-growing body of work on the occupation, alongside Craig Whitlock’s The Afghanistan Papers, Carlotta Gall’s The Wrong Enemy, Carter Malkasian’s The American War in Afghanistan, Andrew North’s War and Peace and War, and Vanessa Gezari’s The Tender Soldier. This isn’t an unwelcome glut; America’s many failures in Afghanistan mean there is still so much to learn.

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ARTIFICIAL CRYOSPHERE

by Bee Wilson

Fridges are boxes in which we put food and forget about it. That is both their wonder and their defect. The Italian sociologist Girolamo Sineri claimed that the act of preserving food is “anxiety in its purest form.” The domestic refrigerator allows us to shed much of that anxiety or to transform it into the guilt that comes from scraping yet another bag of slimy, uneaten lettuce into the compost, because we outsourced our worries about preserving food to that chilly box in the corner of the kitchen.

Not all countries are entirely reliant on refrigeration. In the stalls of the souks in Marrakech, fridges seem to be used only for Coca-Cola and water, while everything from haunches of meat to giant pyramids of olives is sold at room temperature. There is a sense of urgency about the selling of food. Pomegranate juice is squeezed on the spot and served warm, because the vendors don’t have ice. Men sell oysters from carts, shucking them one by one in the winter sun. Others gut shiny fish at stalls whose only refrigeration is a dwindling pile of crushed ice. In Jemaa el-Fnaa, the main square, herb stalls sell multiple varieties of mint, sage, verbena: a fraction of the price and double the quality of the same herbs in Britain, and incomparably more fragrant.

In Marrakech, when food or drink is fresh, it is really fresh; but when it isn’t fresh, it is rotten. Or dried. The herb sellers can turn their unsold wares into giant bags of dried mint and verbena, intended for tea. Women sit in front of piles of round flat loaves which must be sold today, before they go stale. The fruit and vegetable sellers need to sell their stock fresh, or it is wasted. I saw many bunches of blackened bananas, wrinkled grapes that were turning into accidental raisins and wilting salad greens. Moroccan newspapers regularly report the seizure by the authorities of large consignments of spoiled food, from eggs to dates.

This semi-refrigerated way of life – which is common in middle-income countries – has long vanished from the UK, though many of us remember the warm-blood smell of the butcher’s shop, the sometimes rancid taste of butter, the cheesy aroma of bottles of school milk during break-time in summer. Do you recall the days in the 1980s when British ice-cream cones were rectangular rather than round, because the only way to fit ice cream into a tiny domestic freezer compartment was for it to be oblong-shaped, designed for slicing rather than scooping? These blocks – known unappetisingly as “cutting bricks” – came in the standard flavors of the postwar decades: “Neapolitan,” synthetic “vanilla” and so on. If you had to pick one, raspberry ripple was the winner: the jammy swirls of fake raspberry goo distracted from the oily dullness of the ice cream itself. In 1948, more than half of Americans but only 2% of British households owned a fridge. By 1970, fridge ownership in the UK had increased to 60%, but the only freezer most people had was a compartment at the top of the fridge, furred with sleety crystals and scarcely big enough for a bag of frozen peas and a small ice-cube tray.

In Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves, Nicola Twilley argues that at each stage of its development, modern refrigeration has driven us to eat and behave in ways we wouldn’t have chosen if we could design the system from scratch. To take just one example, she explains that refrigeration is the main reason that so many commercial tomatoes are flavorless. It isn’t just that the volatile aromas in a ripe tomato are killed by the cold, or that the ripeness may be generated by ethylene rather than the sun, but that most of the tomatoes grown commercially don’t have the “genetic capacity” to be delicious, as the plant breeder Harry Klee told Twilley. Tomatoes, she writes, are bred for “the sturdiness to be shipped and stored under refrigeration.” The important thing is that, at the moment of purchase, a consumer should deem the tomato red and perfect, even if it is left to spoil after it reaches the salad drawer at home.

One way to measure economic development is to look at the way people use their fridges (if they have them). Twilley interviewed a London portfolio manager called Tassos Stassopoulos who researches consumer behavior around fridges as a way of spotting investment opportunities in emerging markets. Stassopoulos told Twilley that he realized “the fridge could tell me how people would behave once they had some extra money – before they even know it themselves.” When a poor family buy their first fridge, it is mostly used to increase efficiency, to store leftovers and ingredients for cooking. As people enter the middle classes, the fridge fills up with indulgences such as beer, ice cream and soft drinks. When households become more affluent still, the shelves contain items marketed as healthy – probiotic yoghurts, for example – and foods from other cultures. In the final stage of affluence, the fridge is full of ingredients that signal virtue: organic vegetables and fair-trade products in reusable packaging. “This is where the Nordics are,” according to Stassopoulos, while “India is mostly in the efficiency stage, China is at the indulgence stage, and Brazil is already on the healthy stage.’

You might think that fridges and freezers have enabled us to eat more of the foods that we always wanted to eat, and made them available more of the time. But it would be equally true to say that refrigeration has dictated and shaped most of what is consumed in the developed world. Once a person gets a fridge, as Twilley writes, they feel an urge to fill it with stuff, some of which they have never eaten or drunk before: frozen orange juice (first marketed in the US in 1946), fish sticks (1953), cartons of sweetened yogurt (1963), bags of mixed salad (1989). When someone gets a bigger fridge, they don’t just fill it with more stuff, but start to shop and cook (or not cook) in a different way, relying more on large or online supermarkets and less on markets and independent shops. In the 1950s, Twilley writes, the average British housewife made seven trips to the grocer and three trips to the butcher every week. But Britain now depends on a vast and mostly invisible “cold chain”: many of the “fresh” products we consume have travelled across the world as refrigerated cargo and then spent weeks or months in colossal cold storage facilities before reaching us.

The “artificial cryosphere” – Twilley’s name for this system of chilled and frozen warehouse space – is vast and still growing: it increased globally by nearly 20% between 2018 and 2020. Twilley spent a week working in a refrigerated warehouse in California owned by Americold, a company that globally “maintains 1.5 billion cubic feet of cold, storing everything from ground beef destined for school lunch programs to frozen lobsters on their way to upscale restaurant chains.” She saw pallets of Argentinian peanut butter paste intended for M&Ms; barrels of frozen guava juice for smoothies; a forty-foot tower of Asian shrimp and imitation crab meat; boxes containing bull pizzles, hearts and livers to be transformed into burger meat; and “entire lamb carcasses from New Zealand, wrapped in canvas and nestled together nose to tail on the wooden pallet, as if sharing a bunk bed.”

What goes on in these refrigerated units is even further from most of our minds than what really happens on a farm. As one of Twilley’s fellow workers said, “You see the guys in the store filling the shelves, but how did it get to them? No one ever thinks about that.” On the upside, the facility manager claims that his workers look unusually youthful, their skin preserved by the ice. But some of them get so cold they have icicles on their moustaches and Twilley is told that “freezer flu” is an occupational hazard of working at sub-zero temperatures, along with getting injured because of slower reaction times while handling heavy machinery in the cold. Another downer is the smell, which one worker described to her as “cardboard, wood, foam insulation, oil, and what I always just think of as the smell of cold.” Before reading Twilley’s book, I had imagined that these places wouldn’t smell of anything much. But apparently some frozen foods are surprisingly pungent and can transfer flavors if they’re not carefully handled: ice cream can’t be stored in the same room as pizza, for example, lest it absorb the garlicky pong.

These cold warehouses and the refrigerated trucks that disperse their produce are what Twilley calls the “missing middle” in the modern food system. It’s impossible fully to understand either the production or consumption of food without them. Twilley says that she got interested in refrigeration around 15 years ago while thinking about the “farm-to-table” movement, an idea associated with American chefs including Alice Waters and Dan Barber and food writers such as Michael Pollan. “I got stuck on the conjunction,” Twilley writes. “What about the to?” The farm-to-tablers drew attention to the disconnect between eaters and farmers. Twilley’s well-researched project is subtly and importantly different. She shows that modern eaters are ignorant not just of farming but of the vast and wintry logistics that bring farm produce to our plates and determine the form and content of much of our diets.

The impact of refrigeration isn’t limited to chilled and frozen foods. Bananas are the most popular fruit in the world – they were America’s favorite fruit as early as the 1920s. Even though we store them in fruit bowls at room temperature, the banana’s rise could never have happened without refrigerated transport. Bananas are harvested green and take a couple of weeks at room temperature to ripen. Before the advent of refrigerated steamships in the early 1900s, most of the bananas that made the journey from South to North America arrived brown or rotten. Refrigeration allowed a cargo of green bananas to travel from Costa Rica to New Orleans without a hint of yellowing. The refrigeration on the early “banana boats” had already been used in the meat industry, one of the first parts of the food system to be transformed by refrigeration. In 1880, two-thirds of the meat sold at Smithfield was raised in the UK and most of the rest arrived in the form of live animals from Europe. But a flood of frozen carcasses shipped from South America, New Zealand and Australia meant that, by 1910, nearly half of the meat consumed in Britain was imported and many sheep farmers were driven out of business or chose to emigrate.

There is nothing new about trying to delay the rotting of food: salting and smoking, drying and fermenting are among the oldest food preparation techniques. There is evidence of dried meat (jerky avant la lettre) from as long ago as 12,000 BCE in the Middle East; salted fish goes back to the Sumerians; fruit was preserved in honey by the Greeks. But modern refrigeration aims to preserve food not in a transformed state – like a plum compared with a prune or milk with cheese – but as if harvest-fresh. In the 1920s, some Cambridge scientists at a new unit called the Low Temperature Research Station tried to figure out how cold storage could prolong the life of fruit. Among other annoyances with long-stored fruit, they set out to address “woolliness,” “brown heart” and “bladderiness.” After many experiments, they found that by chilling apples to 46°F and fiddling with the levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen, they could retrieve apples from storage in March that were as juicy and firm as when they were first picked in October.

The tricks of artificial cold were once regarded with suspicion and awe. Twilley describes the world’s first cold-storage banquet, staged in Chicago in October of 1911 by the Poultry, Butter and Egg Association to allay consumer fears that refrigerated food wasn’t safe to eat. The autumn luncheon included butter churned in the summer, eggs laid in the spring and turkey that had been in cold storage for the best part of a year.

More than 400 guests sat down amid the drapery and gilt of the Hotel Sherman’s Louis XVI room, unfolded their white linen napkins, and, over the course of two hours of what the Egg Reporter later described as “unalloyed pleasure,” consumed a five-course meal in which everything except for the olives in their dry martinis had spent between six months and a year in the refrigerated rooms of local cold-storage companies.

More than a hundred years on, the ingredients for this banquet can be obtained from any supermarket and we do not stop to ask when our butter was churned or whether eggs have a season.

During the ten years she was working on this book, people used to ask Twilley whether she thought they should get rid of their fridges. To which her answer was: of course not. And yet, for every virtue, refrigeration has a corresponding vice. On the plus side is the astonishing abundance of fresh and nutritious produce now available to us. The negative is that none of it is quite as nutritious as it seems. Spinach loses three-quarters of its vitamin C after a week spent stored in plastic in the fridge. It may still look and smell OK – which is a marvel in itself – but it is not fresh in the sense that newly picked spinach is. By the same token, fridges both prevent food waste and contribute to it. Before the cold chain existed, it was normal to lose at least a third of all fruits and vegetables because they perished en route from the field to the eater. Now, a similar percentage of fresh food is wasted, but by eaters in our own homes.

There had better be alternatives to this vast network of artificial cold, Twilley writes, given that refrigeration plays such a significant role in climate change. The rise of the artificial cryosphere has gone hand in hand with the shrinking of the natural cryosphere: the thawing of glaciers and permafrost. More than 2 per cent of global emissions are caused by the chemicals and energy used to refrigerate food. And yet large swathes of the world still lack refrigeration. The average Chinese person has access to five cubic feet of cold storage space, compared with more than three times as much for the average person in the US, where the vogue is for ever more gargantuan domestic fridges, some of them with French doors, a design launched in 2001 and known in France as the “réfrigerateur américain”: a two-doored fridge so vast that it is pretty much guaranteed to make its owner buy too much food and then chuck it.

Economists teach us that everything is a trade-off. The environment would be better off without the cold chain, but living without refrigeration has obvious drawbacks. Twilley travelled to Rwanda, where farmers suffer crippling losses from fresh produce rotting before it reaches the market. There is only one forced-air chiller in the whole country for pre-cooling produce after it is picked, and it is hardly ever used because of the energy costs. Live chickens are still transported on bicycles and slaughtered at home. The plucked, jointed, pre-packaged chicken pieces we are accustomed to cannot exist without the cold chain. A food industry consultant called Mike Moriarty told Twilley that when American companies began shipping chicken parts such as frozen feet to China, the lack of refrigerated storage was a problem: “We’d bring these things in, they’re perfect, and three days later, we find out they’re in a room temperature warehouse somewhere with a wet rag thrown over them to keep them ‘fresh’.”

The question is whether Rwanda – where almost half the population are small-scale farmers – can bring in a form of refrigeration that is less wasteful and harmful than the American or European version. In Rwanda, Twilley saw a lightweight electric truck called the OX, which can get produce to market much faster than the traditional men on bicycles. Some of these OX trucks have solar-powered refrigeration units and so might be able to help small farmers get fragile produce such as green beans to buyers before they spoil. It remains to be seen whether consumers in Rwanda would accept refrigerated food. Just as in the US and UK a century or more ago, cold food is regarded with suspicion. There is a recognition among Rwandan shoppers that refrigerated food is never really fresh. When traders sell consignments of refrigerated food in local markets, they often warm it up in the sun first, to make it more appetizing. Rwandans still know something we have long since forgotten: in performing the miracle of preservation – and it really is a miracle – fridges make almost everything taste slightly worse.

(London Review of Books)

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