VARIETY SHOW 2025 THIS FRIDAY & SATURDAY
Tickets on sale NOW at Anderson Valley Market and Lemons Market in Philo! $15 adults, $5 kiddos. Cash, check, & Venmo taken at the door!
PETIT TETON FARM
Free: organic asparagus starts, organic Seascape strawberry starts.
Fresh now: chard, kale, broccolini, herbs, mizuna mustard All the preserved foods from jams to pickles, soups to hot sauces, made from everything we grow. We sell frozen USDA beef and pork from perfectly raised pigs and cows. Stewing hens and Squab are also available at times. Contact us for what’s available at 707.684.4146 or farmer@petitteton.com.
PHILO FLORA PLANT STARTS COMING SOON
Hello fellow gardeners! Just an update about the plant starts coming soon… from my greenhouse to your garden. This year I will again be offering many varieties of summer favorites- peppers, eggplant, summer squash, basil, herbs, greens, cucumbers, winter squash, melons, onions and more. If you got something you liked last year, you can get it again! I will not be taking special orders, but all my plants will be available at Boont Berry in Boonville, and I will probably have a Boonville “pop up” weekend in mid-late April with extra stock of everything available on that date. Plants will be available from mid April-early or mid May and I will update you all here when they become ready to transplant.
Thanks! From Misha Vega - Philo Flora
EASILY THE MOST ANNOYING and constantly recurring are cloying versions of wine stories called something like “Anderson Valley Grows Up,” a two-page provocation that once ran in the Chron, complete with color photos of a portly sybarite called Burt Williams, a wine bigwig relocated from Sonoma County to Boontling country. Another pair of newcomer Sybs, Peter Knez and Anton Filiberti, were also pictured, as was an almost wholly obscured Mexican toting a load of grapes, the last visual saying all you need to know about the industry. The thing rambled on for a thousand clunking words haphazardly strung together by Jon Bonné, accent mark over the ‘e’ of course, and was all about how these really cool wine people having arrived in Anderson Valley to grow us up. Bonné writes, “Ever more vineyards are being sold to those who live afar.” Afar? Blonk clonk gronk. “Anderson Valley was once California’s little secret, a remote Mendocino nook protected from the sea but still drawing in the coastal chill.” Nook? Cronk stronk fronk. Not a word anywhere in all this bushwah that so much as hints at how a clear majority Valley residents really feel about the wine invaders which, I daresay, ranges from skepticism to outspoken hostility. Forty tasting rooms and counting? Vineyards on precipitous runoff hillsides? Industrial scale application of dangerous chemicals? Wholesale raids on the finite waters of The Valley’s battered streams? Importation and exploitation of immigrants to do all the field work? Is there something to celebrate in all this, this, this….. disproportion?
WITH THE ORANGE PLAGUE poised to kill the federal Department of Education, I recalled my ancient opinion that the fed’s educational functions are as vague as those of the Mendocino County Office of Education. “The U.S. Department of Education oversees research on most aspects of education; collects data on trends; and gathers information to help identify best practices in education, including teaching techniques that work.”
RIGHT THERE we have solid grounds for elimination. If both, the national and the local make-work seraglio out at Talmage disappeared tomorrow, and responsibility for the education of the young was returned to local communities, well, what the hell, would there be any noticeable difference in the basic knowledge and skill sets of yer basic Americano?
TAKE ME, for instance. (Must we? Hey! Nobody’s forcing you to read this.) I spent 16 years sitting in classrooms, but I can honestly say, and there are millions like me, what real education I have I got for myself in libraries and bookstores. If I’d been thrown into the world of work after the sixth grade I had the basic tools to educate myself and survive in the free enterprise jungle, and I’ll be eternally grateful to those elementary school teachers who instilled my ability to read, and to Miss Hall, my neighborhood librarian who went out of her way to point me to books I might profit from.
BEYOND those first six years, school for me was a waste of time. The rest of my learning, such as it is, I did myself as an autodidact, just like millions of my fellow citizens have done.
OF COURSE if I’d had an aptitude for math and the sciences, which I emphatically did not, staying in school would have been necessary to master one of the truly learned professions like medicine or research scientists or any number of jobs occupied by people who have to know what they’re doing or they might kill us, which the math-science people, at the direction of the Trumps of the world, seem to be doing. Liberal arts grads like me wouldn’t know how.
LOOKING BACK on my life’s odd trajectory, I wish after the sixth grade I would have been apprenticed to a carpenter, or a plumber, or a small scale farmer, to learn real skills, but I staggered on through college where I had exactly one history professor, M.E. Smith at Cal Poly, I learned stuff from, enough stuff, and general inspiration to read a lot more history on my own.
A LOTTA GOOD it did me. Knowledge increaseth sorrow, as some wise person observed, but all knowledge did for me, and I don’t have all that much, is get me into trouble. So, at last getting to the point of these estranged opinions, the loss of the Department of Education doesn’t seem to me like a loss because its existence has nothing to do with education, complicates it, in fact, cf the look-say reading method that led to millions of people not being able to read with anything like understanding. And new math, another national disaster.
WHICH isn’t to defend the sadistic way that Trump and his Rasputin are going about firing federal workers, but the upside of Trump’s cruelty is the creation of what’s shaping up as a huge backlash, huge enough to soon sweep them out of office.
THE BOONVILLE SCHOOLS, staying with the general theme of today’s big-think, aren’t much different, pedagogically, than public schools anywhere in the land. The racial composition is different than the other Mendo school districts in that about 85% of the Boonville student body are Mexican immigrants, or the sons and daughters of recent immigrants. Boonville’s sociology is also different from more ethnically chromatic communities, especially in the large number of wealthy people who live here full and part-time, a minority of whom are quite generous in their financial support of the schools. Few communities, for instance, enjoy an educational foundation created to send its high school graduates to college. We do.
LOOKED at superficially, one could conclude that by the fallen standards of American education — these days somewhere near the doomed countries of the world in the international rankings — the Boonville schools are pretty good. Relatively considered, the Boonville schools are just as good as the Willits, Point Arena, Mendocino schools, and the Covelo schools, but it remains a rare grad of any of this county’s schools who can read with understanding or write a coherent paragraph.
THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS do a good job right up through the sixth grade. They teach most of our little savages to read and to do the basic calculations. Edu-collapse coincides with adolescence. Which is also when our brutal and stupid popular culture kicks in, overwhelming young people by basting them in stupidity and wrong-think. The public schools, rather than resist, too often capitulate.
HOW TO IMPROVE general ed in a time of social implosion? Single sex classes after the 6th grade as the Catholics do? When the hormones kick in it’s best to separate the herd, especially now in our sex-drenched society. I see girls on their way to school dressed like they’re on the way to auditions as pole dancers. School uniforms are long overdue, and should it even have to be said that high school teachers should dress in a way that distinguishes them from their students?
NATURALLY, there should be absolute bans on electronic gizmos and popular music during school hours. Why is there even an argument about that?
MY FIRST AWARENESS that vaccination was up for debate occurred years ago when Alicia Borcich wrote in to the ava: “I was wondering if you have a section listing upcoming events. If so, could you include the following? 'Join writer/researcher Kate Birch at a lecture discussing vaccines and how homeopathy can be used to stimulate your child's immune system at a lecture called ‘Vaccines and Alternatives’ on October 1st from 2-4.30 pm at the Mendocino Rec Center, 998 School Street in Mendocino. Contact Alicia Abuliak for more information at alicia.abuliak@gmail.com or 937-6276 or visit http://vaccinefree.wordpress.com Thank you! Maybe someone would like to cover this as a story as well. Let me know, Alicia Borcich.”
I WROTE BACK: “Dear Ms. Borcich: This isn't a lecture encouraging parents to avoid vaccination, is it? I'm sorry but we consider the anti-vaccination movement beyond irresponsible. Please clarify. Thank you, Bruce Anderson, ed.”
TO WHICH MS. BORCICH responded: “Dear Bruce, This lecture is not encouraging parents to avoid vaccination, but rather will examine a responsible alternative for parents who choose not to vaccinate. The research in this particular line of study indicates that using homeopathic nosodes to immunize your child results in antibody development like allopathic vaccinations. Using blood titer draws on children that have used this alternate immunization method, studies have found that these children are also protected. The primary difference is that these nosodes are non-toxic. On a public health level, in a community where 40% of parents choose not to vaccinate, another method that could protect our our community from epidemics of whooping cough, measles, etc. seems like a worthy topic for further investigation. Thank you for your consideration, Alicia.”
IF THE FORTY PERCENT figure is even half true, it means that not only are the children of the fools who don't vaccinate their own children at extreme risk, the children of everyone else are also at risk. The schools are not supposed to admit children without proof of vaccination, but who knows how diligent the schools are at screening the kids who appear for registration? Not very diligent in Boonville until the remarkable Louise Simson appeared as district superintendent.
WHEN Ms. Simson arrived she discovered that roughly forty percent of students at Boonville Elementary were unvaccinated, or hadn't produced proof of vaccination. The superintendent and the school nurse called the errant families to tell them their childr`en could not attend classes until they were vaccinated. In the meantime, the unvaccinated had to get their schooling on-line, also organized by the superintendent. Annual audits of the schools are supposed to check vaccination records, but these audits are random, probably meaning they miss a lot.
Be First to Comment