Mendocino County Today: Friday 3/28/2025

By AVA News Service on March 28, 2025

RAIN will gradually decrease through the day with a brief break in the weather Saturday. Rainy and moderately gusty conditions will return Sunday and then continue through most of next week. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Scattered showers with 49F this Friday morning on the coast. After being mostly sunny all day yesterday I have .49" collected today. Today could be similar as we have small rainfall amounts forecast. Dry skies Saturday then a bigger batch of rain begins on Sunday & well into next week.

NOTE TO OUR READERS: Our email provider at pacific.net was down yesterday and remains down this morning, which accounts for many items from several of our contributors going unposted.

DEAD BODY DISCOVERED ON LOW GAP ROAD IDENTIFIED

Previously:

On Saturday, March 22, 2025 at approximately 9:52 A.M., Deputies from the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched to the 1800 block of Low Gap Road in Ukiah regarding found human remains. Upon arrival, Deputies contacted members of a local non-profit group who were conducting trash cleanup in the area. Deputies were advised that while cleaning up trash, one of the non-profit group members located what was believed to be human remains. Deputies conducted a further search of the area and located what they confirmed to be adult human remains. Investigators from both the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office and the Ukiah Police Department responded and processed the scene. Investigators are researching active missing persons cases in an attempt to assist with identifying the human remains. … At this point the coroner’s case is still actively being investigated, but foul play is not suspected.

Update:

As a part of this coroner’s investigation, an autopsy was conducted on Monday, March 24, 2025. Medical records were obtained for a known missing person in the Ukiah area and utilized for comparison when conducting the autopsy. The decedent from this investigation was positively identified as Angel Murguia-Martinez, a 25-year-old male from Ukiah. The legal next of kin for Murguia-Martinez were notified of this coroner’s investigation and the identification of the decedent. Murguia-Martinez was reported as a missing person to the Ukiah Police Department in February of 2024. The official cause and manner of death will be determined by a forensic pathologist and released when all forensic examination reports and tests have been completed. Anyone with information regarding this investigation is requested to contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office at 707-463-4086 (option 1). Information can also be provided anonymously by calling the non-emergency tip-line at 707-234-2100/

MISSING MAN FOUND DEAD OFF USAL ROAD

On February 18, 2025 at approximately 11:17 A.M., the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office was informed of a possible missing person in the Whitethorn area. The missing person was identified as 84-year-old David Taylor who was last seen on February 6, 2025. Taylor resided at a residence in the 77000 block of Usal Road in Whitethorn.

The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office learned that Taylor had been transported to a hospital in Humboldt County on February 5, 2025 and later brought back to Whitethorn on February 6, 2025. Taylor was last seen in his vehicle at the Whitethorn Post Office on February 6, 2025. Sheriff’s Office Deputies took a report for Taylor being missing and coordinated with multiple first-responder organizations to assist in searching for Taylor. Search efforts were conducted by numerous local fire agencies, the Southern Humboldt Technical Rescue Team, California Highway Patrol, Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office, Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office, and Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office Search and Rescue.

After multiple search deployments, no clues or evidence were located regarding Taylor’s possible whereabouts.

On March 25, 2025, a deceased male subject was found in an overturned vehicle in Humboldt County on Beaver Slide Lane in Briceland (Humboldt County). An autopsy of the subject was completed by the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office.

During the autopsy, the decedent was positively identified as David Taylor, 84, of Whitethorn. Taylor died within minutes of the motor vehicle collision of a cervical spine fracture.

The Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office and the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office would both like to thank the many agencies and personnel for their efforts and assistance in searching for Taylor.

Anyone with information regarding this investigation is requested to contact the Mendocino County Sheriff’s Office at 707-463-4086 (option 1). Information can also be provided anonymously by calling the non-emergency tip-line at 707-234-2100.

NORTHCOAST FOOD BANK PAUSE

As part of a nationwide stall from the U.S. Department of Agriculture of shipments, valued at over $500 million, food pantries in Sonoma and Marin counties are feeling the pinch. The pantry for Napa County is monitoring the situation.

by Susan Wood

Seven truckloads of food valued at up to $750,000 destined this spring for the Redwood Empire Food Bank may never arrive, leaving the region’s largest hunger relief organization having to figure out how to make up the difference.

That’s because the U.S. Department of Agriculture has halted $500 million in deliveries to food banks nationwide.

The allocations were previously set aside by the Biden administration for fiscal year 2025, through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, Politico first reported. The program is run by the Agriculture Department and backed by the Commodity Credit Corporation, a federal fund.

It’s unknown whether the halting of emergency food assistance program shipments is temporary or permanent, as the USDA failed to address the question in multiple inquiries.

Vince Hall, the head of government relations for Feeding America, a nationwide network of food banks and meal programs, told The New York Times the USDA is reviewing the funding.

In addition, Congress is considering whittling away at the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which benefits millions of low-income households, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has reported.

“We’re trying not to use the word canceled,” Redwood Empire Food Bank CEO Allison Goodwin said.

At about 155,000 pounds, the truckloads earmarked for the needy into April are intended to cover six weeks. Milk, eggs, dried fruit, along with frozen and canned protein were part of the orders. If the food pantry were to go out and buy the food, the value of the shipments would be much more.

“We haven’t even costed that out because we can’t afford to do so,” Goodwin said. “Ultimately, we have to start seeing what provisions look like. We do rely on the federal government to round out the funding.”

With inflation and egg shortages resulting in food bills 20% higher than five years ago, the math is stacked against food banks and their recipients.

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, called the cuts “outrageous and devastating” and represent “another sad example” of the Trump administration’s slashing of programs of critical need to “hardworking Americans” to offset tax cuts for the ultrarich.

“These cuts to emergency food funding are coming on the heels of cuts to important food sharing programs between our local farmers, food banks and schools,” he said.

Still, the USDA stated in an email to the Business Journal it remains “focused on its core mission — strengthening food security, supporting agricultural markets and ensuring access to nutritious food.”

The agency said the Biden administration “created unsustainable programming and expectations using the Commodity Credit Corporation.” The funding has been “repurposed.” The USDA added it recently purchased over $300 million in various poultry, fish, fruits, vegetables and tree nuts under the program.

Meanwhile, the loss weighs heavily on Redwood Empire Food Bank, with an annual operating budget of $22 million.

The food pantry has seen a 5% growth year over year in the number of household recipients in Sonoma, Mendocino, Lake, Humboldt and Del Norte counties.

In 2022, more than 45,000 allotments were given out per month. The following year the nonprofit aided 56,000 households a month. Just this February, that tally climbed to about 64,000.

The immense need has prompted people to arrive earlier than the allotted time set aside for food distribution. The early arrivals could be problematic for the food bank, as its insurance coverage accounts for up to 90 minutes per food distribution session — not the whole day.

People arriving early has also caused growing irritation among those in line due to an escalating worry about food insecurity, pantry management said.

Heather Mejia, 60, approaches the food bank from both sides — receiving food assistance and volunteering at the Petaluma Fairgrounds location. She’s received it for about a year and volunteered for about three months.

“It took a lot for me to do this,” she said, meaning receiving food. “I felt I didn’t deserve it, then I started helping others do it.”

Mejia said she gains “satisfaction” from giving back and knowing how important the allotments are to many people.

“This might be the only source for getting eggs for the week,” she said.

She’s not surprised to see so many retirees, families and others on fixed incomes because, especially in California, it’s getting tougher to live.

“This could be really challenging to continue to meet the need, if this is the new normal,” said food bank board Chairman David Berry, a partner with Berry & Babb Law in Santa Rosa.

“If these truckloads are forever gone, we’re nimble, and we’ll respond. We have to be resilient,” he said. “I just don’t know what it means for the long term.”

“We’ve been fortunate enough to have such a great community partner, but this is significant,” he said. “The community expects us to be there. It’s a food security issue for children and people on fixed incomes. This is a tough time.”

United Way of the Wine Country President Lisa Carreno agreed with Berry that it is not a good time for the already-strapped system to face new challenges.

Carreno manages a touchpoint study every two years that measures the success of area households to meet and pay for their basic needs. Already, the “real cost measure” showed that at least one-fourth of Sonoma County residents cannot meet their household’s basic needs. An update to the study is due out later this spring.

“This is more worrying for our region because Redwood Empire Food Bank covers multiple counties,” she said. “When I think about millions (of dollars possibly) being terminated, I think our local community is generous, but that pales in comparison to the need.”

As for other regions, Community Action of Napa Valley, which oversees the organization’s food bank, places its orders six months in advance.

“We’ve yet to put in another during this time. We caught word they’re cutting back, so we’ve had warning something might be coming down. But we’re seen zero impact — for now,” Executive Director Drene Johnson said.

The San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is monitoring changes to USDA programs.

First, it experienced a reduction of 680,000 pounds of food in the last few weeks, and it will cost $300,000 to replace through the end of June.

“We are (also) experiencing an impact to two programs. The USDA (also) announced it will not continue the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program (LFPA) after July 2026,” food bank spokesman Michael McAlpin said.

USDA officials confirmed McAlpin’s statement.

This program helps under-resourced farms supply produce to food banks. The loss amounts to $1.6 million in contracts for farmers and 234,000 pounds of items provided to the food bank.

Like Berry and Goodwin, McAlpin emphasized the food bank remains committed to serving the needs of the hungry.

“We encourage our supporters and partners to join us in advocating to prevent cuts to the nation’s anti-hunger and social safety net programs,” he said. “It is obvious the need for their help is more critical than ever.”

(pressdemocrat.com)

BUDGET BUNGLING, ER, BALANCING

by Mark Scaramella

Out of the clear blue, during his Supervisor’s Report on Tuesday, Supervisor and Board Chair John Haschak casually told his colleagues: “The Budget Plan. We heard from the CEO that we don’t have a balanced budget [for next fiscal year, July 2025-June 2026]. Last time I think it was said that we were $28 million in the hole, but maybe that’s, um, closer to $15 million after the, kinda, the wish-list stuff is taken out. And we still have a lot of work to do to get our budget to a point where we can balance it. And of course we will have a balanced budget in June. But we have this workshop April 8 in Willits and that’s coming up in two weeks. What I would like to see is us bringing forward ideas to balance the budget because we can say all day long that we want money for this and that but really the idea is we gotta get a balanced budget so any ideas that are forthcoming will be appreciated.”

What ideas might be “forthcoming” from Haschak’s flummoxed, unprepared colleagues? Did anyone suggest cutting their own salaries and those of the highest paid officials, especially those involved in the very costly Get Cubbison fiasco? Did anyone ask for a list of the highest paid employees? Did anyone ask the department heads to submit suggested cuts? Did anyone ask how much they are paying for liability insurance? Did anyone ask for a list of the most expensive contracts? …

Of course, you know the answer to those questions.

The only Supervisor to respond to Haschak’s off-hand request was, of course, the Board’s gadfly, Supervisor Ted Williams. Williams asked for a list of all County “transactions.” Williams The Omniscient said if he could get such a list he could go through it “with a red pencil” and strike out all the unnecessary spending and voila! Budget balanced! DOGE could learn a thing or two from Williams. Don’t even bother to ask the departments anything — just strike out any unnecessary “transactions.” Poof! Gone! Problem solved!

Instead of pointing out how ridiculous that was, CEO Darcie Antle tried to clarify what Williams wanted, suggesting that maybe what he wanted was already in the “budget book.” Williams said that wasn’t detailed enough. Williams wanted “every line item, every invoice.” County Counsel Charlotte Scott noted that some invoice information in Social Services might be confidential and would have to be gone over and redacted. CEO Antle said that she would “send a message to my team.” Scott added that her office was already dealing with a similar Public Records Act request and they’ve been working on it for months. After a few more minutes of confusion, Haschak suggested asking for copies of the budget requests submitted by a few selected departments — say facilities, transportation, social services, maybe?

Haschak: “Each of us should be thinking about where cuts can come from. I’m trying to figure out how to balance the budget.” Right. Haschak suggested that maybe the miniscule Municipal Advisory Councils be defunded or maybe the Board’s travel budget. Maybe there are “other funding sources.” Maybe they could get a look at all the contracts for next year. “We need an analysis of opportunities for savings,” insisted Haschak.

The other three Supervisors had nothing to say on the subject, no ideas, no objections, no questions, no corrections of Haschak’s $15 million shortfall, or is it $28 million…?

It was truly pathetic. As if these five overpaid bumblers — each of whom cost the County about $150k a year now including benefits — know anything about the departmental budgets and what could be cut.

Remember, most of the budget is salaries, not “line items,” not “transactions,” not “invoices,” not even contracts. Almost two-thirds of the General Fund goes to Law Enforcement which the Supervisors have previously said is not only exempt from cuts but is expected to go up by as much as $10 million next year, just in the Sheriff’s office.

As usual, it was left kinda vague. Maybe they’ll get a few random departmental budget requests for next year in time for the April 8 “workshop.” But the idea that these Supervisors can review departmental budgets for what can be cut is absurd on its face. They have no idea; they never ask questions about departmental budgets.

The simplest approach would be to identify and apply any one-time funds available for next year, calculate the remaining shortfall and give each department an allocation reflecting their share of what’s left and telling them to submit a list of cuts to get there.

But even that crude approach is obviously beyond their very limited abilities.

MENDOCINO COUNTY RELEASES DRAFT DROUGHT RESILIENCE PLAN FOR PUBLIC COMMENT

On March 26, 2025, the Mendocino County Water Agency (MCWA) released a comprehensive draft Drought Resilience Plan for public comment. Mendocino County’s Drought Resilience Plan is a stand-alone document that will be implemented along other state, County, and local planning documents.

The Drought Resilience Plan finds that 84% of domestic wells and 93% of state small water systems are at high risk of being impacted by water shortages and droughts, underscoring the importance of preparing for drought in Mendocino County.

For normal and wetter than normal water years, the plan identifies long-term mitigation actions to prepare for future droughts. The DRP also outlines a range of emergency response actions that would be triggered either Countywide or regionally (coastal and inland) at moderate and severe stages of drought.

The Drought Resilience Plan is being developed in fulfillment of the County’s obligations under Senate Bill 552 (SB 552).

SB 552 Overview

SB 552 requires state and local governments to share responsibility in planning and responding to water shortage events, particularly for state small water systems and communities supplied by domestic wells. This legislation requires all Counties in California to develop a DRP and establish a standing County Drought and Water Shortage Task Force Group (Drought Task Force).

Since 2021, when Governor Newsom signed SB 552 into law amid the historic 2020-2022 drought, Mendocino County has actively held regular Drought Task Force meetings to address water scarcity. In June 2024, MCWA hired EKI Environment & Water, Inc., as a technical lead and commenced development of the DRP.

DRP Development

At the State’s direction, the DRP was developed in four main sections: data collection, vulnerability/risk assessment, identification of short-term response actions and long-term mitigation strategies, and plan implementation. All four sections have now been completed, culminating in a draft DRP that is open for public comment from March 26 until April 25, 2025.

To incorporate public discussion and input into the development process, DRP agenda items were presented at the Drought Task Force meetings under the General Government Standing Committee (GGSC) meetings. Additionally, the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) has held two public workshops during development of the draft DRP.

After the commenting period closes on April 25 and comments are reviewed and addressed, a resolution will be brought to the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors on May 20, 2025, to authorize County staff to upload the final DRP to the DWR portal.

Why Comment?

Public participation is vital to the success of the DRP. By contributing your insights, experiences, and feedback, you will help shape both immediate and long-term strategies for addressing drought and water shortages. We seek participation from key community stakeholders, including domestic well owners, residents relying on local small water systems, tribes, and public water suppliers.

To submit a comment, please complete the General Commenting Form on the County DRP webpage. To allow County staff time to review and respond to comments, all comments must be submitted by April 25, 2025.

For updates and further information about the DRP process, please visit the County Drought Portal and DRP website, and sign up for email updates.

The draft DRP is available on the Mendocino County Drought Resilience Plan webpage: https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/departments/water-agency/drought-water-conservation/drought-resilience-plan

Submit a public comment via our online form: https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/departments/water-agency/drought-water-conservation/drought-resilience-plan/drp-general-commenting-form

Drought resources for community members are available on our Drought Portal, which was revamped in tandem with DRP development: https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/government/mendocino-county-water-agency/drought-water-conservation

Sign up for DRP updates: https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/departments/water-agency/drought-water-conservation/drought-resilience-plan/get-drp-email-updates

12-year-old April Atkins carries her entire family on her back on Santa Monica's "Muscle Beach" in 1954.

ANON:

Hey all! Wondering if anyone knows the owner of the old Rookie To gallery? Over the last week I’ve noticed the front door has been open all day and night. My concern is that it’s been broken into. I think I heard at one point it was an Airbnb. Anyway I think maybe the owner should be notified or if someone is living there maybe they need a welfare check.

SAKE AND OYSTERS

At Mendocino Art Center 5-7p.m. Saturday March 29. Supports Mendocino Sister City's annual exchange of Japanese middle school students. Three samples of Sake or a handmade ceramic Sake tasting cup and 3 tastings fresh oysters for an additional fee. Taiko Drumming too. Support a good cause!

(From local historian Katy Tahja, who has been to Japan on a student exchange decades ago)

AV BREWING: We’re excited to announce a new chapter in Anderson Valley Brewing Company’s life, with a change in ownership to local entrepreneur Jason McConnell. Jason takes the helm with decades of experience in the wine industry, and a passion for local events and high-quality drinks. This will be an era of innovation and rejuvenation, while remaining true to the amazing brews you’ve come to know and love over the years! We can’t wait to see you at Beer Fest – and if you’re passing through, swing in to Beer Park and say hi!

STRING CREEK EXPLORES HOW TO GRADUATE FROM FIRE SAFE TO FIREWISE — AND WHY

by Sarah Reith

Spring is short, and fire season is long, in the highly combustible landscape of rural Mendocino County. Neighborhood Fire Safe Councils are a great way to prevent disaster by sharing information and resources, organizing workdays, and providing many other ways to help homes withstand wildfire. Communities can take their efforts even further - and receive substantial benefits - by becoming designated as Firewise USA® Communities by the National Fire Protection Association.

Firewise Communities are safer because they write up Risk Assessments and Action Plans, and then act on them. They also have access to the latest scientific findings such as preventing ember ignition of homes, and they increase their chances of getting grants for wildfire-safety projects. Significantly, as home-insurance costs skyrocket, recent State ‘Safer from Wildfires’ regulations require insurance companies to offer discounts on premiums to homeowners in Firewise Communities.

After some initial work, the Firewise commitment is not much more than organizing workdays and contact trees, which your neighborhood may already be doing. A board or committee of volunteers (such as a Neighborhood Fire Safe Council) needs to work with a qualified organization (such as the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council) to conduct a neighborhood Risk Assessment and prepare a 3-year Action Plan.

Then you collectively get to work on your Action Plan to address the risks you’ve identified, for instance clearing access roads, removing hazard trees, or doing home-hardening and defensible space around homes - all of which have an impact on the overall safety of the neighborhood. And you need to keep track of volunteer hours and money spent on wildfire-safety equipment or improvements.

The Mendocino County Fire Safe Council (MCFSC) is happy to help communities advance to Firewise status, and can provide free hands-on guidance and tools to simplify the process.

One sunny Saturday afternoon in early March, Mendocino County Fire Safe Council Executive Director Scott Cratty and Community Outreach Coordinator Eva King joined the String Creek/Tartar Canyon Fire Safe Council (ST/TC FSC) as they took their first steps toward becoming the county’s 14th Firewise Community. (Less than a year ago, there were only 4 Firewise Communities in Mendocino County!)

String Creek is a small settlement of about 70 people, northeast of Willits, including a few dozen homes, often at the end of a long, steep, narrow driveway, and mostly occupied by one or two people who are no longer young.

For Joanne Moore, a founding member of ST/TC FSC, the moment of reckoning came late one night in June 2020, when her neighbor’s house caught on fire. ‘We were very, very lucky,’ she recalled. ‘It could have been the beginning of a terrible fire’ if it had spread to other homes or engulfed the road, which is the only access in or out of the neighborhood. After it was over, she began to think about how to make sure the next fire didn’t devastate her community either.

For one thing, it was difficult for emergency responders to find people’s houses due to a lack of signage. ‘We’ve gotta grow up,’ she realized. ‘We have to get road signs.’ That led to a decision to buy low-cost reflective address signs from the Mendocino County Fire Safe Council. One thing led to another, and soon a Neighborhood Fire Safe Council grew out of their local road association.

String Creek Fire Safe Council member Windy Stephens with friend Daisy

‘We’ve accomplished quite a few things,’ added Windy Stephens, a ST/TC FSC member who has lived all her life in the house that her father built on String Creek. The group has gotten grants (including MCFSC’s annual Micro-Grants) for water storage and fuel-reduction projects along the road, as well as in a large, centrally located meadow. The meadow is an ideal spot for picnics, bocce ball, and sheltering in place if it ever becomes impossible to flee the area. But now they’re ready to do more.

‘A lot of people around here don’t know where to begin,’ Windy acknowledged. ‘There’s so much to do,’ from installing 1/8-inch mesh on all their vents, building skirting around their decks, and keeping roofs free of debris. ‘A lot of folks around here are low-income. They don’t have that much money to put into their homes. This is a good time for us to educate them about resources that are available to us.’

Those resources include MCFSC’s DSAFIE (Defensible Space Assistance for Income Eligible seniors and people with disabilities) program, which provides fuel-reduction work at no cost. The work is done around the home and main access routes including some of their steep driveways, which, Joanne noted, ‘contribute to how difficult it is to be fire-safe.’

The community Risk Assessment, which is the first step toward drafting a Firewise Action Plan, includes assessing a sample of homes for safety features such as non-combustible building materials, deck skirting, and fire-resistant landscaping within 100 feet of any structure. To be Firewise, communities need to make a plan that addresses the main shortfalls, and then make demonstrable progress each year toward increasing their neighborhood safety.

Joanne Moore feels she benefited from SC/TC FSC’s community assessment. ‘There is a lot to learn, and it’s actually interesting,’ she reflected, especially about the silent devastation of tiny embers, which can slip in through vents or kindle a full-scale blaze in debris-littered roof corners. ‘It’s all about how those embers get in there,’ she realized.

The community will probably start small, with educational campaigns, strategic placement and protection of outbuildings, and maybe incorporating grazing into their fuel management. Coming up with an effective means of communicating during a disaster, and creating a map of water resources and high-risk areas for firefighters, are a few other priorities that will be organized in order of importance and feasibility.

Overall, they were pleased with their initial foray into heightening the safety of their neighborhood. ‘I feel really happy that our community is mobilizing in this way,’ concluded Windy Stephens. ‘We have fun at our meetings, and we’re productive. I feel really proud of the work that we’ve done, and I love our little community up here on String Creek. We work really well together. We all really care about each other, and we care about making this place better because we all love living out here and we don’t want to live anywhere else.’

For more information on creating a Firewise Community, visit MCFSC’s webpage at https://www.firesafemendocino.org/firewise-usa. If you are a low-income senior or person with disabilities, free DSAFIE assistance information is available at https://www.firesafemendocino.org/defensible-space-assistance-program.

FORMER AV SCHOOL SUPERINTENDENT LOUISE SIMSON, always looking for creative ways to get kids interested in education, writes:

‘Sexy’ Red Dye Number 2 Wins Over Math, Reading Achievement?

I am an old lady and have been around the education block a few times. I came out of retirement to help a struggling school system decimated by lack of funding and systemic generational poverty. But at a lobbying appointment this past week, I heard it all. When I advocated for the restructuring of highly restricted ELOP (aka Expanded Learning Opportunities Program) funding to be used for math and reading intervention and core academic skills, I was told by an Assemblymember it wasn’t ‘sexy’ and was instead placated with a pablum of an initiative the representative had moved forward for the restriction of Red Dye Number 2. Really? Granted, I’m old and not too wound up in the environmental swirl, but when I have only one in ten kids that can do math at grade level and only one in four that can read, I am not too overwhelmed about a red Starburst or a brightly colored Skittle. My thought: get a clue Assemblymember; you are a little out of touch with rural districts.

My leadership class and some staff members signed it.

This legislative member flatly told me that reading and math achievement is not ‘sexy.’ What? Achievement is ‘sexy.’ Getting kids prepared for college and other career path learning is ‘sexy.’ I feel every day like I am in a ‘Saturday Night Live’ skit. Can we get real here? What the heck is going on?

I entreat you, Assembly members: get out to rural systems…take a look at the needs and the kids…don’t worry about your upscale voters…worry about your workforce of tomorrow.

It’s important: speak up folks. It’s time for focusing back to basics; reading, math, writing; being a good and kind person. Sacramento’s out of touch, but you can demand they get back to baselines.

Do you remember the story about the Emperor with no clothes? Speak truth to power. It should not come down to choosing between Red Dye Number 2 or can our kids read. Please help us advocate for a choice that is good for kids. Join our parents and staff in a CALL TO ACTION.

Please consider sending a message like the one below to our representatives:

On behalf of Mark Twain Union Elementary School District, the ELOP funding needs to be UNRESTRICTED to allow for academic remediation within the school day: not restricted to only before and/or after-school funding. Rural districts have the challenge of long bus routes, lack of staffing, and need to be able to offer remediation within the school day for math and reading.

Help us, help the kids! It is judicious and imperative for RURAL EQUITY to allow local control of those funds for rural small districts to provide core math and reading instruction.

It’s not ‘sexy,’ but it’s fundamental to success. I want to thank you again for your partnership. Be relentless, be bold, be expectant, and never forget that our kids deserve it.

Below are the email addresses to send your email communications along with phone numbers:

California District 9 Assembly Member Heath Flora, representing areas in Amador, Calaveras, Sacramento, San Joaquin, Stanislaus counties. Main office: (916) 319-2009; Email: assemblymember.flora@assembly.ca.gov

California District 8 Assemblymember David Tangipa, representing areas in Calaveras, Fresno, Inyo, Madera, Mariposa, Mono and Tuolumne counties. Main office: (916) 319-2008; Email: assemblymember.tangipa@assembly.ca.gov

California 4th Senate District Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil. Main office: (916) 651-4004; Email: Senator.Alvarado-Gil@senate.ca.gov.

Governor Gavin Newsom. Main office (916) 445-2841; Email: gavin.newsom@gov.ca.gov.

THIS TINY WILD WEST SALOON RESHAPED CALIFORNIA. NOW IT’S FOR SALE.

by Matt LaFever

The building that once housed California’s first brewpub, Mendocino Brewing Company, is for sale in Hopland, Calif.

Few places embody the history of Hopland quite like the town’s historic pub. Long before it became the birthplace of California’s first brewpub, this property reflected the town’s changing identity — from a rough-and-tumble Wild West saloon to a bustling butcher shop, to a post office, the site eventually became the home of Mendocino Brewing Company, a pioneer in the craft beer movement. Through every chapter, it remained a gathering place, a landmark on Highway 101 where locals and travelers alike came together. Now, the space that once poured the legendary Red Tail Ale is for sale, offering a rare chance to own a piece of Hopland’s living history.

A storied past: From Wild West saloon to craft beer landmark

Centuries before western settlement, the Sanel Valley was home to the Sho-Ka-Wah people, a band of Central Pomo people, whose primary village housed an estimated population of 1,500. The first settlers came via a Spanish land grant, as described in the 1880 historical tome ‘History of Mendocino County, California.’

John Fetzer, a well-known Mendocino County vintner and mover and shaker in Hopland, a small town less than 1,000 people north of the Sonoma County line, is 81 years old and owns 13351 Highway 101, which is now listed for $1.85 million. Fetzer estimates that the building was built in 1880, making it one of the older structures in the Sanel Valley.

One of the early iterations of the property was the Hop Vine Saloon, which had a Wild West past fitting for any old-time brewpub.

In an August 1915 edition of the Ukiah Daily Journal, the Hop Vine Saloon was the site of an unusual attraction — a baby lynx caught by a local named James Harrington. The paper described the animal as ‘a little bunch of ferocity’ with more fight ‘than a gunboat.’ Harrington put the lynx on display at the saloon, drawing curious onlookers.

A 1913 article from the Mendocino Beacon detailed a more illicit event: A man named David Bennet, labeled a ‘thieving hobo’ by the press, broke into the saloon at night, stealing $7. Authorities tracked him down after he suspiciously ordered ‘ham and eggs in liberal quantities’ at a hotel south of Hopland. He fled into the hills but was arrested later that day.

The building went through several other iterations before finding its true identity as the home of Mendocino Brewing Company.

A historical photo from the early 1980s of the building that housed the Hopland Brewery at the time. Courtesy image from Ron Parker

The rise and fall of Mendocino Brewing Company

Mendocino Brewing Company made history in 1983 as California’s first brewpub, pouring craft beer at its Hopland location. Founded by homebrewers Michael Laybourn and Norman Franks, the brewery revived the pioneering spirit of New Albion Brewing, using its equipment and expertise.

In a March 1992 interview, Laybourn, longtime president of the Mendocino Brewing Company, told the Ukiah Daily Journal, ‘When California passed the law saying that you could attach a pub to a brewery, and sell retail, and that was an idea the state had that small breweries could start and make a living — which was the correct thing to do — we were the first one in California, the second one in the country, and now just in California there’s over 60 of the small breweries.’

Its flagship Red Tail Ale — named for its bold amber hue and a local folk hymn — set the stage for a lineup of bird-themed beers that became icons in the craft beer scene. Expansion to a Ukiah facility in 1997 cemented its place in the industry, turning a small-town brewpub into a national name.

Mendocino Brewing took a wild gamble in 1994, going public by stuffing stock offering flyers into six-packs. The bet at first paid off — until Indian tycoon Vijay Mallya took control in 1997, shifting the focus to mass production, including Kingfisher beer for the U.S. Despite its unionized workforce and cult following, the brewery couldn’t outrun financial woes, shutting down in 2018. A brief revival in 2019 brought back Red Tail Ale, but the brand soon faded, leaving behind a legacy of innovation, risk-taking and California craft beer history.

John Fetzer: A visionary’s influence on Hopland

For decades, John Fetzer has been a defining force in Mendocino County’s wine industry, but his connection to Hopland runs deeper than vineyards. As the eldest son of Barney and Kathleen Fetzer, he grew up working the land at the family’s 1,000-acre home ranch in Redwood Valley. When his father passed in 1981, John took the reins of Fetzer Vineyards at just 35 years old, guiding it to national prominence before its sale in 1992.

Fetzer has long been a steward of Hopland’s evolution. In an interview with SFGATE, Fetzer explained how he has owned the brewpub property for nearly 40 years, leasing it to different operators and watching it shift identities over time. For him, the space is more than just another parcel of real estate — it’s part of the town’s fabric, a cornerstone of its community spirit.

‘Hopland is one of the very few small villages left along 101 in Northern California,’ Fetzer reflected. ‘Every time you drop into the Hopland valley, crossing the Russian River, you just feel something different. It’s cozy and comfortable.’

The interior of the building that once housed California’s first brewpub, Mendocino Brewing Company. The building in Hopland, Calif., is for sale. Sotheby’s International

During its heyday, the brewpub wasn’t just a watering hole — it was the heart of Hopland, a place where travelers and locals mingled over pints of Red Tail Ale. Fetzer envisions a return to that energy, one where the space remains true to its roots.

‘It’s very, very important to me to keep it a local hangout for local people,’ he emphasized.

Beyond the beer, he’s seen Hopland’s agricultural story unfold firsthand. ‘Hops went out, pears came in. Pears went out, grapes came in. Now even grapes are struggling a little,’ he mused. ‘The valley’s history just keeps cycling through.’

Now, as the brewpub property seeks its next caretaker, Fetzer hopes whoever steps in understands its essence — not just as a business opportunity, but as a place with deep history and an even deeper sense of home.

The property’s next chapter

Real estate agent Kevin McDonald, who grew up in Hopland, remembers the brewpub’s heyday in the 1980s. ‘It was a lively scene — great food, great music. People loved it. If someone brought that energy back, it would be huge for Hopland,’ he told SFGATE.

He continued, ‘But it was a lively scene when it was owned by the original guys who started Red Tail Ale in the brewing company, and it was a fun place that had, like, great food, great music. Obviously, I wasn’t enjoying the beer back then, but it seemed like everybody else was.’

McDonald sees Hopland’s potential as a Highway 101 destination and believes the right owner could revitalize the space: ’The biggest mistake people make is trying to do too much. The places that work are the ones that keep it simple, stay open consistently and focus on quality.’

He pointed to past businesses that thrived on straightforward concepts, like a local barbecue joint that was packed every night.

Speaking to Hopland’s history of business cycles, McDonald said, ‘Hopland seems to have the legs as far as the 101 corridor goes in Mendocino County and sort of having the most potential for growth as a tourist attraction. And it’s always — it’s gone through these renaissances.’

A piece of California craft beer history for sale

Now on the market, the property offers more than just a chance to own a piece of California’s craft beer history — it’s an opportunity to revive a space that was once the heart of Hopland. More than a bar, it was a gathering place, a roadside refuge where locals and travelers alike came together over good food, good music, and a well-poured pint. Its next chapter could be written by a brewer with a passion for tradition, a chef with a bold vision, or simply someone who understands what made this place special in the first place.

As Kevin McDonald put it, the brewpub ‘wasn’t trying to be a Michelin-star restaurant. It was just good food, good atmosphere. If someone did that here, they’d kill it.’

(SFGate)

HONORING SOCIAL WORKERS DEDICATION AND IMPACT

March is Social Work Appreciation Month, a time to recognize the dedication and impact of social workers who support individuals and families in need. Social workers play a vital role in strengthening communities, advocating for vulnerable populations, and fostering positive change.

Jorden began her career as a court clerk with the Mendocino County Superior Court’s dependency and juvenile probation units. In this role, she found herself privy to the most vulnerable aspects of families’ lives. ‘I was hearing about these people’s struggles but wasn’t able to help because I was a court clerk,’ she recalls. Over the course of more than three years, her desire to make a meaningful difference evolved into a clear career path.

Holding a bachelor’s degree in communications, Jorden applied for and secured a position as a social worker with the Mendocino County Department of Social Services, Family & Children’s Services (FCS) division. ‘I really wanted to help people and build relationships. Seeing what these kids and parents were going through, I knew I wanted to be part of helping them rebuild their lives.’

Jorden’s first role with FCS was in the Emergency Response unit, which receives reports of suspected child abuse 24/7. Social workers in this unit assess the reports, determine the appropriate level of intervention, and decide whether a child can remain safely in the home with supports or must be removed for protection. Though this role provided valuable experience, Jorden sought a position where she could foster long-term change.

‘I wanted to help families progress and reunite with their children. I’ve now been in the Continuing Unit for seven years, and this is where I am happiest.’ With support from her supervisor, Jorden transitioned into this unit, where she could build lasting relationships with families as they navigate the child welfare system and work toward reunification.

In the Continuing Unit, Jorden has worked with some families for two to three years, witnessing their growth as they utilize available resources to heal and thrive. ‘My favorite part of my job is seeing parents reunify with their children. I love to see them succeed!’

Within a couple of years of becoming a social worker, Jorden, with the encouragement of her colleagues, pursued her Master of Social Work through Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt) using the Title IV-E Education Program. ‘The program was intimidating at first, but it turned out to be very manageable. I still had debt from my bachelor’s degree and wouldn’t have made the leap without the financial support.’ Since graduating in 2022, Jorden has fulfilled her required service time with Mendocino County and reflects on how quickly the commitment passed.

Today, Jorden continues to work with families and children involved in the child welfare system, including Family Dependency Drug Court. She has supported many families from the start of their case through reunification. ‘I’ve seen our clients at their lowest points, struggling with addiction, and I’ve witnessed their transformation as they heal and get their children back.’

The dedication of social workers like Jorden helps create healthier, more self-sufficient families, contributing to a stronger and more stable Mendocino County community.

For more information on the California Title IV-E Education Program, visit UC Davis Human Services Title IV-E Program.

If you are interested in learning more about social work with the Mendocino County Department of Social Services, please call (707) 468-7080 or email staffresources@mendocinocounty.gov.

TWO CLEVER WOMEN

by Carol Dominy

As Women’s History Month ends, local author Molly Dwyer’s words from 2017 still ring true — ‘Discovering women’s history is no easy matter … one must scour multiple sources to discover a sentence or, with luck, a paragraph acknowledging them.’ Thanks to a small paragraph in an 1884 Mendocino Beacon article, we know a little more about two quick-thinking women: Theresa Murray and Susie Murray Whaley Taft. Enjoy this excerpt about them from Dwyer’s book, From Maidens to Mavericks: Mendocino’s Women, Mendocino Historical Review Volume XXIX.

Theresa Murray, date unknown. Kelley House photo.

Theresa Flanagan Murray and her daughter, Susie, are featured in an October 11, 1884, Mendocino Beacon article describing a stagecoach robbery outside of Boonville. Robbers accosted the stage on its regular run from Cloverdale to Mendocino and the Murray women acted in concert to outwit the robbers. When the bandits demanded she turn over her riches, Susie told them she had no money and directed them to her mother, saying: ‘Overcome your scruples, Mama. Give them your purse.’ Mrs. Murray couldn’t find her purse. ‘Don’t you have it?’ she asked. ‘Why no, Mama,’ Susie replied, ‘but do find it, and give it to them before they kill us.’ The robbers argued over what to do, apparently reticent to insist they disembark. After a few minutes of indecision, the bandits fled.

Theresa was a native of County Cork, Ireland. Her husband, John Murray, ran one of the oldest businesses in Mendocino, a two-story pharmacy and general merchandizing store [directly west of Out of this World on Main Street; this building was demolished in 1935]. A good Irish Catholic, John had made his way from Boston in 1850 to try his hand in the gold fields, but in 1858 he came north, established his store, and married Theresa, whom he’d most likely met in Boston. Susan was their eldest child; she had four younger brothers, one of whom died before turning three. The room above their Main Street shop was home to all sorts of gatherings, including dances, theatre, Christmas events, and political meetings. It even served as a courtroom.

The Murray family valued education. Mr. Murray sat on the school board and donated to the school building fund. He’s described as ‘truly a self-made man’ who used his wealth to see that his children had ‘extra educational advantages abroad.’ Theresa took over her husband’s pharmacy after he died in 1893. Mrs. J.D. Murray & Company carried ‘a complete line of drugs, chemicals, sundries, cigars and general merchandise.’

Susan Ellen Murray had a fine reputation as a piano teacher. Mendocino hosted her wedding to Frank Whaley, a San Diego businessman. The marriage was short-lived, however; Susan divorced Whaley after only two and half years, a radical step for a Catholic woman. However, California’s divorce laws were liberal for the time, with grounds that included: ‘impotence, adultery, extreme cruelty, desertion or neglect, fraud, habitual intemperance and felony conviction.’ Just which of those transgressions made Susan divorce Frank isn’t clear, but she returned to Mendocino in the summer of 1891, a divorcee and single mother with a two-year-old daughter. Home again, she resumed teaching piano and organ, for which she was paid ‘$12 a quarter’ for lessons given in Caspar, Mendocino, and Little River.

Susan looked after her mother and raised her daughter, Theresa Whaley, who died tragically when she was only nine years old. Theresa Whaley is interred beside her grandparents in Mendocino’s Hillcrest Cemetery. Susan is buried in Oakland alongside Adin Taft, an indication that she remarried. She was living in Oakland at the time of her death at age 70.

From Maidens to Mavericks: Mendocino’s Women, by Molly Dwyer, is for sale at the museum and on our website. The author’s lecture from May 17, 2015, is available to watch on the Kelley House YouTube channel

(KelleyHouseMuseum.org)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Thursday, March 27, 2025

JOHN ALVAREZ JR., 36, Willits. Controlled substance for sale.

ALEXANDER BARGER, 21, Ukiah. Stolen property, suspended license for DUI, offenses while on bail.

JESSICA BAUER, 37, Ukiah. DUI-any drug, controlled substance for sale, suspended license, failure to appear.

RYAN FRAZIER, 42, Willits. Domestic violence court order violation.

JUAN GARFIAS, 18, Ukiah. Assault on school grounds.

SERGIO LOPEZ, 34, Ukiah. Controlled substance, ammo possession by prohibited person, false ID, loaded handgun not registered owner, altered serial number on tear gas weapon, felon-addict with firearm.

ISHMAEL NASH, 26, Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation, no license.

KEVIN QUIJADA, Hopland. Marshall’s warrant, failure to appear, probation revocation.

ROGER SCHOENAHL, 53, Ukiah. Vandalism.

FROM E-BAY, A PHOTOGRAPH OF NO LOCAL INTEREST - BUT FASCINATING NEVERTHELESS

San Francisco: Playland at the Beach, Ocean Beach and the sand dunes that became Golden Gate Park, the Richmond District and the Sunset District. A 1880s photograph by I.W. Taber.

Marshall Newman

THE TRULY SHOCKING

Editor,

Regarding ‘It shook me to my core’: Pro-Palestinian protesters disrupt Israel Philharmonic concert in S.F.’ (Bay Area, SFChronicle.com, March 25): Bombing hospitals, schools and killing tens of thousands, and creating what a U.N. official called the ’largest cohort of child amputees’ in recent history, all this is fine, but demonstrating and displaying a Palestinian flag, ‘shook me to my core,’ according to one San Francisco Symphony audience member.

One can only wonder whether that core has a conscience.

Many of my family members were killed in the Nazi Holocaust, and as a Jew who grew up as a Zionist, I am ashamed, disgusted and disheartened that Zionist Jews support ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians.

Never again, as we say, means never again for anyone.

Blair Sandler

San Francisco

POWERFUL EARTHQUAKE STRIKES MYANMAR

Historic Mandalay Palace damaged, Sagaing bridge destroyed; fears grow for residents trapped in collapsed buildings

A powerful earthquake with a magnitude of 7.7 struck Sagaing Region in northwestern Myanmar today. Tremors were felt across several towns, including Sagaing, Mandalay, Kyaukse, Pyin Oo Lwin, and Shwebo in upper Myanmar.

Mandalay’s ancient palace is seen with heavy structural damage due to the earthquake

The United States Geological Survey reports that the earthquake had a magnitude of 7.7, with its epicenter located near Sagaing, approximately 10 miles south-southeast of Sagaing, and 10.7 miles east-southeast of Mandalay, Myanmar’s second-largest city. The area is already severely affected by ongoing civil conflict between resistance groups and the junta forces.

Witnesses told Myanmar Now on Tuesday that parts of the historic Mandalay Palace in Mandalay were severely damaged. At the same time, a bridge in Sagaing Township was completely destroyed in the quake.

A bridge in Sagaing Township, Sagaing Region, was completely destroyed in the quake

“A fire is breaking out in our neighborhood and many people are injured and some are feared dead,” a resident in Mandalay told Myanmar Now.

Sources say hospitals across Mandalay, Sagaing, and Naypyitaw are rapidly filling up with survivors. And a statement from a junta spokesperson released today says there is a growing number of injured nationwide, leaving an increased demand for emergency blood supplies.

Several high-rise buildings in Mandalay have collapsed, according to locals. There are growing fears that residents may be trapped in the damaged structures.

Sources say that a fire has broken out at Mandalay University, and multiple archaeological sites across both Sagaing and Mandalay have been damaged due to the quake.

At the 1,000 Bed Naypyitaw General Hospital—the biggest public hospital in the capital— numerous injured are being treated outside in the street due to overcrowding.

Other nearby towns, such as Kyaukse, Pyin Oo Lwin, and Shwebo, have also reported significant tremors, with local populations ranging from 50,480 in Kyaukse, to 117,303 in Pyin Oo Lwin.

Myanmar is situated along the Sagaing Fault, a major geological fault line that runs through several regions, including Mandalay. This fault has a history of significant seismic activity, making areas along its path particularly susceptible to earthquakes.

The earthquake was also felt in Yangon and Naypyitaw, the administrative capital of the ruling military junta. Footage from social media shows fallen buildings across the city, including at Thabyagygone market.

In response to the crisis, the military has declared Mandalay, Sagaing, Naypyidaw, Magway, Bago regions as well as northeastern Shan State under a state of emergency.

In the aftermath, several official websites controlled by the junta have gone offline since the quake struck. Local media report that junta chief Min Aung Hlaing has visited the hospital to supervise the junta’s emergency response. At the same time, the junta has ordered that all airports in Mandalay and Naypyitaw close with all flights cancelled.

The tremors were felt in neighboring countries, including Thailand, India, and China. The full extent of the damage and the number of casualties are still being assessed as the situation develops.

General Zaw Min Tun, the junta spokesperson, asked local hospitals to ratchet up their operations during this critical moment.

https://myanmar-now.org/en/news/breaking-7-7-magnitude-earthquake-hits-sagaing-and-mandalay/

BILL KIMBERLIN

Here are a couple of more shots from the production of ‘Back To The Future 3’. Notice the fire. Now why would there be a fire? When it hits the canyon ground, there is an explosion, why is that? I have seen Buster Keaton’s masterpiece, ‘The General’ where he crashes a real train from a trestle but guess what, no fire and no explosion. The answer is simple, we are in the movie business, and if we can blow something up…well, why not?

TURMERIC LATTES!

Give Me Something!

Awoke early at the Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter in northeast Washington, D.C. Am now on a guest computer at the MLK public library, about to go forth to the Washington, D.C. Peace Vigil in front of the White House. I’ve already eaten breakfast at Whole Foods on H Street, including a turmeric latte, and have purchased a LOTTO ticket for the next draw. Have taken the anarchist publication Slingshot, which had been sent to me from Berkeley, to share at the vigil. In the midst of the American society’s total meltdown, such an alternative view was well received. A minority of residents in the USA still value basic sanity. I am no longer attached to anything at all. All offers for enlightened community, which includes individual housing of course, will be considered. I’d like to leave the homeless shelter. Let’s face it, after a half century of radical environmental/peace & justice frontlining, at age 75, even a crazy society owes me the basics.

Craig Louis Stehr, craiglouisstehr@gmail.com

ESTHER MOBLEY, SF Chronicle:

Meghan Zobeck, previously the winemaker at Burgess Cellars, has been named the new director of winemaking at Opus One, reports James Molesworth in Wine Spectator. Longtime Opus winemaker Michael Silacci will remain on board for three to six more years.

In the New Wine Review, Jon Fine writes about Napa’s ‘traditionalists,’ folks like Jasud Estate’s Ketan Mody and Cathy Corison who make wines that ‘often harken back to — forgive the sentimentality and partial cliché — a simpler and more idiosyncratic Napa.’

Not wine-related, but I loved Tejal Rao’s analysis of the creepy role that food plays in ‘Severance.’ Office treats have ‘acquired all the chilling, spine-tingling dissonance of upper management,’ Rao writes. I’m still recovering from seeing that John Turturro-shaped melon.

STACKED

by Marilyn Davin

Armed with a backpack filled with clean socks and underwear and my Eurail Pass I boarded a cheap charter at SFO bound for Heathrow on my 18th birthday. The plan was to hitchhike around Europe for a month before ending up in Radolfzell, Germany (West Germany at the time) for an intensive German language program, which would have me chattering away in Deutche in no time.

I had no idea then that the giddy freedom I felt would be such a fleeting slice of my generation’s history ─ free to follow my endless curiosity about our world in comradely safety with armies of young explorers at the time, many American. Extensive travel in my youth shaped my world view in countless ways large (police didn’t carry guns) and small.

One example on the small side of that equation involved the female breast. I was ambling along a path in the Black Forest of southwestern Germany when I came upon a group of picnicking Germans. The women were sunning themselves or going about their picnicking duties, hardly an uncommon sight. What was uncommon to me was that they were topless. Coming from an American culture á la Carol Doda, where breasts were king, I was stunned. Nobody stared at those bare-breasted women, no teenaged boys lurked, leering, on the periphery, no husbands jumped up to hastily drape coverings over their wives’ breasts; no one even looked at them. It was just a picnic.

The National Institute of Health estimates that just under 5 percent of American women have surgically enlarged their breasts, mostly for appearance than, for example, after mastectomies. This is an important distinction when it comes to cost, since the 1998 Women’s Health and Cancer Rights Act requires that group health insurance plans that pay for mastectomies to also cover breast reconstruction. If for cosmetic reasons, women pay the whole freight – an elastic cost that typically runs between $5,000 and $10,000. The ‘breast augmentation’ outfits around our East Bay community predictably don’t even hint at their price tags on their websites, opting instead for photos of young, breasty patients offering smiling testimonials about how bigger boobs have changed their lives and even delivered that most elusive of human states: happiness.

Though it’s rarely listed among his hundreds of better-known quotes, British author Somerset Maugham wrote that American men are so obsessed with female breasts that he was surprised they didn’t marry cows. This is borne out in the public arena, and in the female consorts chosen by some of America’s richest men.

In Trump’s first term Melania Trump (who always dresses modestly) was quoted as saying that [you had to get] breast enlargements to get top modeling jobs. Given the plethora of skinny models with big boobs, that is probably true. But this breast-forward view has also gone public with non-models like Jeff Bezos’s girlfriend strolling into Trump’s second inauguration in her underwear (so dubbed by a courageous reporter who has probably since been black-listed by Trump), an open-to-the-waist number that somehow withstood the enormous strain of holding up her outsized rack for all the world to see. (I wonder how she gets ‘the girls’ to line up so symmetrically, it must take a professional outfitter with an engineering degree.)

I get that we’re free (at least in this respect) and can do what we like with our bodies. You have the dosh to go under the knife to pump up your breasts? Go for it. But understand that you’re buying into an American narrative of female attractiveness and sexuality, where appearance is all and character is an outdated concept.

I don’t know if I’ll live to see the day when our culture shifts to a more euro-centric cultural model where breasts are not the be-all and end-all of female attractiveness. But what I do know is that I can’t imagine a more bankrupt emotional state than pegging a sense of your own worth to the size and gravitational perkiness of your breasts.

CAN BUSTER POSEY’S SPRING OF GOOD VIBES LAUNCH GIANTS’ ERA OF BETTER RESULTS?

by Ann Killion

Walk into the San Francisco Giants clubhouse at Oracle Park this week and you notice the change immediately.

Built into the wall of the entry hallway, opposite manager Bob Melvin‘s office, is a trophy case with three spots, to hold three World Series trophies.

The two offices on either side of the trophy case are empty at the moment. But they will convert to being a clubhouse office and a space for former players. That’s what the spaces were, ever since the ballpark opened a quarter-century ago. Clubhouse manager Mike Murphy had his office there, which was always filled with legends, like Willie Mays and Willie McCovey, relaxing in comfy chairs, shooting the breeze and sharing stories of Giants lore with whoever happened by.

But in the past few years, that prime real estate was converted to analytics offices. Number crunching computers, manned by non-baseball people, were the very first thing you saw upon entering the players’ inner sanctum.

It was jarring. It was wrong. And it’s been corrected.

The analytics people are still in the Giants organization. They are still working hard and providing useful information. But they no longer occupy a symbolically significant location. Their placement no longer screams, ‘We are the most important part of this operation.’

This has been corrected thanks to the new president of baseball operations, Buster Posey, who promised the change at last year’s winter meetings.

‘I want to be clear: they’re a valuable piece to this entire picture,’ Posey said then. ‘But trying to figure out where they can be available for coaches and players — maybe it’s not right when you walk in the door?’

That physical change is a manifestation of a bigger transformation. As is the placement of the World Series trophies, which are not relics from the ancient past but tangible proof of what can be achieved at the corner of Third and King. For a time under the previous regime, the clubhouse was stripped of evidence of past accomplishments. But no more.

A new baseball season is always a reason for optimism. For blooming belief and flowering hope.

But for the 2025 Giants, that positive outlook is stronger than usual.

The team is going through a cultural reset.

‘We’re turning it back to how we did it,’ said one longtime member of the Giants, who had a hand in the reason there is a need for three trophy shelves in the clubhouse.

How the Giants did it then is a formula that can still work, melded with data and analytics: relying on fundamentals, prioritizing pitching and defense, working hard, respecting players’ individuality, honoring the past.

The fact that the man pushing the reset button is Posey, three-time champion and the most important Giant of the 21st century, only fuels the optimistic vibes. Ending Farhan Zaidi’s failed tenure would have brought a wave of positivity no matter what. But replacing him with Posey has put a bounce in everyone’s step.

‘There’s energy, the vibes are good,’ said the ultimate vibe master, former Giants outfielder and manager Dusty Baker.

Will these high hopes turn sour? Could this be another year of mediocrity?

The beauty of Opening Day is you have no idea how things will unfold. But one thing is for certain: Posey will have the trust of the fan base for a very long time. They’ve never seen him fail at anything — who has? — and most are willing to bet that he will use his brain, his methodical approach and his winning experience to figure out how to do this job. His grace period will be very long.

The Giants concluded an MLB-best 21-6 spring training, which has helped fuel the good vibes. Spring training results don’t really indicate anything, but having a league-best mark can certainly make the team feel lighter heading into the season.

At the annual Play Ball Luncheon at Oracle Park on Tuesday, there were plenty of smiles, familiar faces back in the fold, and a fresh feeling in the air. As Posey has said, baseball is a memory-making business, and a heady combination of nostalgia and hope filled the room.

A lot of this optimism is based on intangibles. The Dodgers are a foregone conclusion as NL West champions. Much of the Giants roster is similar to what Zaidi constructed, with the exceptions of Willy Adames, Justin Verlander and a locked-in-for-the-long-haul Matt Chapman. There are still doubts about whether ownership is as interested in baseball as it is in real estate exploits.

But there is an expectation that things on the field will be different. And that’s part of the beauty of baseball; there are intangibles at play, things that can’t be keyboarded into the computer and spit out on a spreadsheet. Baseball is held together by numbers, sure, but also by feelings and guts and momentum and chemistry.

Adames showed off his charm at the Play Ball luncheon. He, Chapman and Verlander are all professionals with high expectations, who can help with a culture shift.

But the biggest change is Posey. A leader whose devotion to the Giants is unquestioned, who didn’t need this job, who doesn’t need to feed his own ego and who understands the team’s culture, in large part because he helped create it. He will embrace the Giants’ history rather than feel resentful of it.

He carries himself with an inner confidence and won’t worry about what is being said on social media or talk radio. He will stress fundamentals and preparation, accountability and professionalism.

‘There’s a standard and expectation for being a San Francisco Giant,’ Posey said on the day he was introduced in his new job. ‘And it’s a privilege to try to go out there on the field and hold ourselves accountable to that standard.’

The Giants’ culture has been reset. And if the team is any kind of reflection of its boss, good things lie ahead.

(SF Chronicle)

GIANTS ERUPT IN NINTH AS FOUR-RUN UPRISING STUNS REDS ON OPENING DAY

by Shayna Rubin

CINCINNATI — Wilmer Flores spent nearly all of last season with an aching knee. Unable to generate power from his lower half, Flores turned in one of the worst offensive years of his San Francisco Giants career before he had to go in for a season-ending surgery in August.

Entering the final year of his three-year contract, there was a chance that forgettable, painful season would be Flores’ last in San Francisco.

But the Giants’ decision makers kept him on board with the belief that Flores, not long ago the team’s most productive hitter, had more left to give. With Thursday’s Opening Day game against the Cincinnati Reds tied in the ninth, Flores proved them right. Patrick Bailey’s RBI single set the stage for Flores’ go-ahead three-run home run in a 6-4 win.

“In 2023 Wilmer was our best player, by far,” Giants starter Logan Webb said. “Last year he was obviously in some pain and dealing with knee stuff and struggling a little bit. It’s great to see him back to what he is.”

But Flores’ moment doesn’t happen without his teammates having laid down the tracks.

The Giants entered the ninth looking destined for a quiet one-run loss after a hard battle against one of baseball’s hardest-throwing starters in Hunter Greene, who was hurling fastballs at a 99 mph average and a 85 mph slider that the Giants couldn’t sniff. Eight of their 17 strikeouts came against Greene, seven of those coming in the first three innings. Their only hope was to bump Greene’s pitch count up to get him out of the game.

Heliot Ramos was the man for the job. In the fourth inning, with the Giants down 3-0, Ramos fouled off five two-strike pitches before capping off an 11-pitch at-bat with an opposite-field, two-run home run that just slipped over the right-field fence. Not only did the at-bat cut into the Reds’ lead, but it pushed Greene’s pitch count into the 70s and served as a disruption to the pitcher’s flow.

“That was just as big as Flo’s,” manager Bob Melvin said. “That was just huge for us because not only did he hit a two-run homer, he made him throw a bunch of pitches and took a little wind out of his sail, too. And next thing you know, he’s out of the game after five. That at-bat was epic.”

It took until the ninth, but the Giants' spring focus on situational hitting came to life when it mattered. With one out, Jung Hoo Lee drew a walk, his second of the game, against Reds closer Ian Gibaut and Matt Chapman poked a single the other way to advance Lee to third. Needing only to put the ball in play to score a run, Ramos took a strike-three call. But Bailey came through, hitting a 3-1 fastball up the middle to score Lee and tie it.

Flores came to bat looking for something off-speed. Down 1-2 in the count, he got a sweeper over the plate and didn’t miss an inch of it, sending it 389 feet into left field.

“I was talking earlier with (shortstop Willy) Adames,” Flores said. “I said ‘I’ve never hit an Opening Day homer.’ And it happened.”

The designated hitter job is practically up for grabs with Jerar Encarnacion out for an extended period with a fractured left ring finger (he was scheduled to have surgery in Los Angeles on Friday). Flores was set to get a share of designated hitter at-bats in certain match-ups and platoon at first base with LaMonte Wade Jr. The DH job could belong to Flores if he’s at his pre-2024 strength. In 2023, he batted .284 with 23 home runs.

“It was about health for him. It looks the same, just last year he couldn’t drive off his leg,” Melvin said. “We saw some homers early this spring where he was pulling some balls. He’s good at sitting on pitches at times and he’s always been a clutch guy. A lot of walk-offs in his career. The bigger the situation, the better he’s been.”

Not since Madison Bumgarner in 2014-17 has a Giants pitcher started four consecutive Opening Days. On Thursday, Webb joined the club.

Webb was feeling confident after striking out the first two batters he faced. That he struck out the leadoff hitter, lefty TJ Friedl, on a cutter boosted his confidence even more.

“Something weird happened after those first two,” Webb said. “I was amped up. I thought I was a strikeout guy for two batters.”

Webb got “a little too cute” after the strikeouts and wound up issuing back-to-back walks to Elly De La Cruz and Gavin Lux. Only six times in the previous two seasons did Webb issue two walks in an inning — and these came back to bite. Jeimer Candelario singled into the right-center gap — just in front of right fielder Mike Yastrzemski, who trapped the ball but not in time to prevent De La Cruz from scoring.

“I got 0-2 to De La Cruz and I just kind of threw four straight balls after that,” Webb said. “Lux, I couldn’t throw him a strike all day, actually. … I got to be better than that. … Three walks, for me, is not acceptable.”

Candelario struck again in his next at-bat, hitting a bases-loaded single to score a pair. Webb threw his changeup, his go-to pitch, only nine times because the mound at Great American Ballpark is flatter than most, which alters pitch movement. Webb allowed the three runs on six hits, struck out five and walked three over five innings.

Briefly: This was the Giants’ first win on Opening Day when trailing through eight innings since 1968 against the Mets, when a two-run double by Jesus Alou capped a three-run ninth-inning rally in a 5-4 win at Candlestick Park. … The series with the Reds resumes Saturday with a 1:10 p.m. game that will be Justin Verlander’s debut with San Francisco.

(sfchronicle.com)

WORRIED ABOUT SOCIAL SECURITY CHANGES? THERE’S ONE KEY THING TO DO NOW AMID CONFUSION.

by Aidin Vaziri

The Social Security Administration recently announced significant changes to how it handles identity verification for individuals applying for benefits.

These changes, framed as a way to combat suspected fraud under the Trump administration, have raised concerns, particularly among beneficiaries without internet access or those who struggle with technology.

The confusion escalated on Wednesday when the SSA reversed its decision to cut phone services for some elderly and disabled Americans after facing backlash from advocates.

Here’s a breakdown of the changes and how they may affect you.

What’s changing?

Starting April 14 (previously scheduled for Monday, March 31), the SSA will limit phone services for certain transactions.

Many applications, including those for retirement or survivor benefits, will require online or in-person identity verification. Those who cannot access the internet or set up online accounts will need to visit a Social Security office.

Although the SSA initially planned for these changes to apply universally, they backtracked after widespread pushback.

‘We have listened to our customers, Congress, advocates, and others, and we are updating our policy to provide better customer service to the country’s most vulnerable populations,’ said Leland Dudek, the acting Social Security commissioner, in a statement.

The new rules will only apply to survivor, retirement and auxiliary benefits, leaving disability and Medicare claims unaffected.

Why are people concerned?

Last week, the SSA revealed plans to mandate in-person identity verification for millions of recipients, alongside the closure of 47 field offices across 18 states.

This would have particularly impacted those needing to verify their bank details and families with children receiving benefits who cannot verify certain information online.

Critics argue that these changes create unnecessary barriers for vulnerable populations. Many recipients lack the technological skills or equipment to navigate the online system, while others face significant transportation challenges when visiting offices in person.

A memo from the SSA estimated that between 75,000 and 85,000 additional people would need to visit field offices each week, further burdening an already strained staff.

‘Ending phone service and requiring in-person office visits would have a very serious impact on older Americans everywhere,’ Nancy LeaMond, AARP’s chief advocacy and engagement officer, said in a statement Wednesday. ‘Our members nationwide have told us this change would require hundreds of miles and hours of travel merely to fill out paperwork. Merely delaying the implementation of this change is not enough.’

About 72.5 million people, including retirees and children, rely on Social Security benefits.

What should you do right now?

To prepare for the upcoming changes, create a free and secure My Social Security account.

The online portal allows you to request a replacement Social Security card, check application statuses, estimate future benefits, and manage your current benefits.

You can also set up online notices to replace paper mail and receive text or email alerts when new notices are available. The portal allows you to sign up for direct deposit, update your address, and print benefit letters.

Creating your account today ensures you can handle many tasks online without needing to visit an office.

What’s next?

The SSA has pledged to continue evaluating the situation, and some advocates hope for further adjustments. In the meantime, Social Security recipients are encouraged to familiarize themselves with online tools or plan visits to local offices.

For those with limited mobility or no internet access, these changes may present additional challenges, but with preparation, it’s still possible to manage benefits effectively.

For more information, visit the SSA’s official website or call their hotline at 800-772-1213.

(SF Chronicle)

SOCIAL SECURITY UNDER ATTACK: FROM THE PLUTOCRATS, OF COURSE

by Eve Ottenberg

Insults, slurs, nasty comments and contempt for Social Security sprout up everywhere these days in Washington. Although Trump himself insists he will protect the program, his underlings sure hate it, and by extension, the nearly 70 million elders who rely on it; and ‘rely’ is an understatement – for many it’s their sole lifeline. These people voted for Trump in their multitudes. But now they hear from his advisor Elon Musk that Social Security is a ‘Ponzi scheme,’ or from billionaire financial services ceo turned commerce secretary Howard Lutnick that only ‘fraudsters’ cash their social security checks. It’s hard not to conclude that these haughty plutocrats want to snatch grandma’s money and leave her destitute.

Of course, this has long been official GOP policy. Just look at what the Republicans want to do to Medicaid. The House passed a bill in January to gut it, even dispensing with the prolonged, mendacious and de rigeur campaign to tar it with fraud. That’s the big lie about Social Security – that it’s riddled with fraud and therefore must be not just trimmed but slashed. I suppose Medicaid, like food stamps, so offends multimillionaire GOP House members that they figured they could dispense with the propaganda campaign and just ravage it.

Besides, all Medicaid recipients are poor, thus easily bullied by the mega-rich. And with its Medicaid bill, the Republican House revealed that it’s full of bullies, who’d like nothing better than to ditch Medicaire, Medicaid, Social Security and of course food stamps, so that the indigent can skip doctor’s visits, ration their chemo and their insulin, eat fewer, smaller meals and sleep under the stars. ‘Cause that’s where all this is heading – dispossessing tens of millions of people and shoving them into the ranks of the homeless.

Add the 70 million Americans on Social Security to the 90 million on Medicaid and you’re looking at 160 million people rendered destitute by snobs like Musk, Lutnick and GOP House leader Mike Johnson. These honchos of the Trump Sanhedrin apparently hate anyone who’s not rich. Lutnick best exemplified this vile disdain in a recent TV interview, where he proclaimed that his 94-year-old mother-in-law wouldn’t mind if she didn’t receive her Social Security check and only loud-mouthed ‘fraudsters’ would grip about that.

Well, I don’t know how wealthy Lutnick’s mother-in-law is, but I’d bet she has a lot more cash on hand than your average Social Security recipient, so it sure would be nice if these Beltway plutocrats would stop bashing Social Security. Trump could snap a leash on them if he wanted, but he hasn’t. Meanwhile lots of us are so grateful he ended the threat of nuclear annihilation via a U.S./Russia blow-up that frankly, that’s rather distracting. Nevertheless, this ferocious combat against the poor’s skimpy sources of sustenance is hard to ignore. Yes, we’re happy we won’t be incinerated in Biden’s insane attack on Russia and we hope there will be no World War III sparked by a U.S. assault on Iran, which could quickly turn radioactive and would bust the global economy. Also on the wish list is a halt to the Gaza carnage, something Trump did once with his ceasefire/hostage deal and could easily do again, if he wants.

But now that the Atomic Apocalypse is off our bingo card and we are permitted to survive, for lots of proles the next question is, how? If aristocrats like Musk and Lutnick keep trashing ordinary peoples’ means of subsistence, are they paving the road to a hell of illness, hunger and destitution for 160 million Americans? That’s not much of a platform for the GOP to run on in two years.

Some weeks back, Musk pronounced Social Security a Ponzi scheme. This is false. It is not investment fraud. It is a government-run insurance annuity; the citizens make a series of payments in return for a stream of income later in life. Insurance annuities are used for retirement planning all the time, and if Musk regards that as fraud, then he not merely slanders Social Security but an entire financial industry. Does he regard a pension as fraud? Because that’s another comparison that Social Security brings to mind. Possibly he considers anything other than a retirement 401k in the stock market as some sort of cheat – a scam against Wall Street, which has lustfully eyed Social Security income since it was first christened by FDR.

As billionaires wage savage class war against the rest of us, where are the Dems? Largely mute, licking their self-inflicted wounds from the Joe ‘War Is My Legacy’ Biden fiasco. In fact, any party that could foist a monumental deceit like that presidency on the American people deserves to be demolished, then rebuilt, from the ground up, with new people. But there’s no evidence of such efforts anywhere; the feckless Democrats, after nearly bumbling the world into nuclear Armageddon, under the ‘leadership’ of a ruler who probably would have been happier in an old folks’ home, which they assiduously concealed, those Dems can’t seem to muster the will to rally for the great social programs they invented. Why? Because snotty social climbers who advocated – Biden is Exhibit A – dismantling those programs long ago captured the party. Maybe just skip the Democrats altogether. Time for a new People’s Party.

In a country where, as of 2023, 36.8 million people live in poverty, where 56 percent of Americans cannot afford a $1000 emergency, where 22 percent of tenants spend ALL their income on rent and where even the phony, manipulated, government labor statistics – which don’t count as unemployed the hordes of people who gave up looking for work years ago – reveal that officially almost 7 million people lack employment while nearly 9 million work multiple jobs, in such a country, you would think that politicians with their eyes on the history books would be falling all over themselves to boost social welfare programs. But no. What was once called economic freedom, namely freedom from want, is today merely the freedom to starve and sleep under an overpass.

The infamous truth is that the U.S. is a nation of very few fabulously rich oligarchs who hog all the resources and hundreds of millions of ordinary people struggling to get by. Stealing their skimpy subsistence – and we PAY for our Social Security, it’s not a gift – is not only a way to lose votes, it will earn its promoters the condemnation of history. Trump evidently knows this. But his advisors? That’s another story.

(Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest novel is Booby Prize. She can be reached at her website. CounterPunch.org.)

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

— Noam Chomsky

LEAD STORIES, FRIDAY'S NYT

Musk and Aides Try Charm Offensive in Fox News Interview

Forgoing Oversight, Republicans Resort to Personal Appeals to Head Off DOGE Cuts

Top Senate Republican Protests Trump Bid to Withhold Spending

Kennedy Turns to a Discredited Vaccine Skeptic for Autism Study

Global Sea Ice Hits a New Low

A Shark Breaks Its Silence With Some Clicking Sounds

THERE ARE THREE ROADS that can be taken in addiction recovery. There is the clean path of sobriety, and there is the road to relapse. The third way is the fast out. That’s when the traveler realizes that relapse is just a slow suicide and there’s no reason to wait.

— Michael Connelly, ‘The Brass Verdict’

FOR JOAN DIDION, MEMENTOS OF HER DAUGHTER’S CHILDHOOD BECAME MATERIAL

The opening of the Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne archives in the New York Public Library reveals unseen aspects of their family life, and approach to writing.

by Lauren Christensen

An arrangement of dried flowers pressed between sheets of plastic, the name ‘Quintana’ written in a child’s neat lettering at the top.

A yellow Post-it with a poem written in cursive: ‘My mom is not a sigh/She does not eat pie/Maybe she can fly.’

A pocket-size notebook of handmade paper composed as a Mother’s Day gift in which the now adult daughter, Quintana, had pasted a series of photographs she’d taken of her mother, Joan Didion, on a television screen, her own blurry toe visible in the foreground, followed by a note in green ink: ‘Thought you might want to see yourself again. … To, of course, the best mom ever!’

The mementos are the sort any parent would collect: amateur artwork, loosely scribbled missives and a piece of scrap paper bearing the daughter’s ‘autograph,’ above her self-identification as an ‘Up and Coming Singer, Actress & Comedian.’

But Didion, who died in 2021, did not store these particular keepsakes among the family’s personal belongings; rather, she filed them as research materials for her work — together with the notes, articles and early drafts she drew on while writing ‘Blue Nights,’ her 2011 memoir of the death of her only daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael, at 39.

This poignant and revelatory ephemera from Quintana’s life is among the 240 linear feet of joint archives of her writer parents, Didion and John Gregory Dunne, now available for viewing at the New York Public Library. Together the research files offer physical evidence of how embedded Didion’s personal life was in her professional work — even, or perhaps especially, her most painful experiences.

Alongside these mementos Didion kept a stack of undated, printed pages she titled simply ‘NOTES.’ Around 20 pages in all, the pages are numbered, but some numbers repeat, suggesting she’d originally written them as separate documents, and perhaps later stashed them together. The notes within pertain not only to ‘Blue Nights,’ but also to 2005’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking,’ her National Book Award-winning account of another death that overlapped in time with Quintana’s — her husband John’s.

What happened, chronologically, was this: On Christmas 2003, Quintana was hospitalized for a flu that turned into pneumonia that turned into a coma. Five days later, upon returning home from visiting his unconscious daughter in the I.C.U. on Dec. 30, Dunne died suddenly, at the dinner table, of a heart attack that had been foretold for years but was nonetheless over in the span of an ‘ordinary instant,’ as Didion wrote in the 2005 book.

A year and a half later, on Aug. 26, 2005, after a torturously protracted series of health emergencies whose precise causes Didion leaves somewhat opaque (the Christmas flu that turned into pneumonia then turned into septic shock, and eventually into a cerebral hemorrhage), Quintana died too.

‘I write about this because otherwise I would be dead,’ Didion typed in the ‘NOTES’ document. ‘This is not a book I want to finish. When I finish we will be finally apart.’

Based on the entries immediately before and after these lines, she seemed to be referring to ‘Magical Thinking,’ but there is no clear demarcation in the file between the thoughts Didion intended for one grief memoir versus the other. Given that the timelines of these two catastrophic losses were so entwined, it’s not surprising that her notes about them would be too.

Except that Didion completed ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ in just a few months, barely a year after Dunne’s death — ‘I began this account on Oct. 4, 2004,’ she write in the same notes file, ‘I am finishing it on the last day of 2004’ — whereas ‘Blue Nights’ has none of the same sense of immediacy. Quintana died six weeks before ‘Magical Thinking’ was published; Didion would not publish ‘Blue Nights’ for six more years.

Although written in a truncated, deeply referential manner that suggests their only reader was to be herself, Didion’s notes reveal the steps in her writing process. They also reveal details of her family’s life that her books do not. (A journal of conversations she had with a therapist starting in 1999, ‘Notes to John,’ will be published next month.)

Beside a memory of having been so panicked at Quintana’s first loose tooth that ‘my sole remaining thought was to get her to the emergency room at U.C.L.A. Medical Center, 30-some miles into town,’ whereupon Quintana’s cousin Tony swiftly pulled the tooth with his bare hands, Didion adds by hand in the margins: ‘Was I the problem? Had I always been the problem?’ These lines made their way into ‘Blue Nights,’ almost verbatim.

What did not make it in: ‘I did not understand addiction.’

The materials reveal firsthand the simultaneous levity and depth of Quintana’s relationship with her parents, the ‘quicksilver changes’ Didion would observe in her daughter’s personality throughout her life.

Some reflect aspects of Didion’s professional life. Credit…The Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne papers, The New York Public Library. Photo by Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Among the material in the collection is a collage of photo cutouts Quintana made while she was working as a photography editor at Elle Décor in her 20s. Her casual humor with her parents is evident in the handwritten letter on pink paper on its opposite side: ‘I want you to look what J.F.K. is pensively staring at.’ To the right of the cutout of the former president in profile is a cropped photo of a woman’s butt and thighs in a tight miniskirt. ‘Sorry — this is just a stupid, highly obvious little joke I thought was amusing.’

A few days later, she continued writing the note with a more heartfelt expression of gratitude for her parents’ tough advice. ‘I cannot tell you how good this N.R.T. has been for me,’ she said, seemingly referring to the ‘Non-Resident Term’ at Bennington College, where students could take several weeks off to gain work experience. ‘It’s amazing how clear and evident my ‘winding down’ from Bennington has been. What I mean to say is that all the things you were saying to me in Los Angeles seemed so meaningless and foreign to me. … Well, as usual, you were both right.’

There is only one passing mention in ‘Blue Nights’ of Quintana’s substance use: ‘Because she was depressed and because she was anxious she drank too much. This was called medicating herself.’ Didion doesn’t say in the book whether her daughter’s drinking contributed to her cascading illness. She spends more time dissecting, belatedly, Quintana’s complicated feelings about her own adoption.

‘I had seen the charm, I had seen the composure, I had seen the suicidal despair,’ Didion wrote in the book. ‘What I had not seen, or what I had in fact seen but had failed to recognize, were the ‘frantic efforts to avoid abandonment.’’

‘Adoption was an area that John and I could not discuss until very late,’ she wrote in her notes. ‘Q worrying about how I would cope, how she would cope with me.’ These sentences alone are underlined in pen, but they never made it into the book.

Much of Didion’s published writing, particularly about her daughter’s mental health (she was given many psychiatric diagnoses over the years, culminating in multiple personality disorder), can feel like a whisper the reader strains to hear, but never quite does. What we do hear, loud and clear: the day Didion and Dunne brought her home from St. John’s Hospital in Santa Monica, Calif.; her coming-of-age among the cultural elite in Hollywood, Malibu and Brentwood; her lei-garlanded Upper West Side marriage to the musician and bartender Gerry Michael, only months before she got sick.

‘LOOK AT: the history of the nuclear family,’ Didion jotted. Also:

The Christmas cards.

The ‘princess’ dresses.

The time I took her on tour

‘In fact I no longer value this kind of memento,’ she wrote in ‘Blue Nights’ of the baby tooth she saved in a satin box after Tony pulled it.

‘I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their ‘things,’ their totems,’ she wrote. ‘In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.’

She kept them anyway.

(NY Times)

TRIGGER REACTIONS

by Fred Gardner

The photo by Mike Kalantarian of a blue newt with an orange belly and that bumpy texture… Could it have been a rare newt? Who knows their amphibians?
Warren Hinckle was living in New York when he launched War News, phoning and faxing copy and instructions to an ad hoc staff in San Francisco. It was a full-folio-sized newspaper. The first issues were laid out in a vacant restaurant/bar on Montgomery Street at Broadway that the Mitchell Brothers had recently bought. Jim Mitchell and Warren were planning to launch a San Francisco newspaper, but Warren felt impelled to respond immediately when Bush launched Operation Desert Storm. I was working at UCSF at the time. Warren asked me to write something for War News, and one evening after work —on February 26, to be precise— I delivered a piece to the Montgomery Street HQ, along with some copy Bruce Anderson had faxed to my office.

It might have been the very first issue. Someone with no experience was trying to set type using a Macintosh and was being taught over the phone, by someone in New York, how to paste up columns with rubber cement. I told Jim Mitchell there was a program called Pagemaker that might be more efficient. He asked me to take over the whole production side of the operation then and there. I said I couldn’t. He said let’s go get some dinner and talk about it. I said I was running late to pick up my kids in Sonoma and boasted that Doug was a great soccer player. Mitchell said he had a soccer-playing kid, too, let’s take them all out someday soon. I said sounds good. But that night he drove to Corte Madera and shot his brother Artie dead. People had theories about Jim’s motive and think the shooting would have happened anyway, but I think it was the utter chaos of the ‘newsroom’ and the stream of faxed scrawls from Warren in New York that put Jim Mitchell over the edge.

In 1988 I had interviewed his brother the Artie for a piece about San Francisco that ran in a glossy travel magazine called ‘Departures’ (published by American Express for its Platinum-card holders.) My description of The Tenderloin District ended with a reference to the Center for the Resettlement of East Asian Refugees. (In 1991 it looked like the refugees were breathing new life into the ‘hood.)

Next door to the Resettlement Center, placed there by a Higher Power with a sense of humor, is the O’Farrell Theater, headquarters of the Mitchell Brothers film group. On the ground floor is the Ultra Room, with a peep show, a live sex show (girls sit on customers’ laps). Also, a movie theater that plays the brothers’ greatest hits, including Autobiography of a Flea, Behind the Green Door, the Graffenburg Girls, Sodom and Gommorah, and Missy Manners’ Guide to Safe Sex.

Upstairs, overlooking the resurgent Tenderloin, is the brothers’ office. They are trying to raise money to make their first ‘‘R-rated’ (for Restricted) movie, a dramatization of Robert Crumb’s ‘Whiteman-meets-Bigfoot’ story. It will be scripted by Crumb and might even star Crumb. ‘I said I would never make any movie that wasn’t X-rated,’ Artie Mitchell explains. ‘I have my morals, you know. But when the great Robert Crumb came to me, I had to say yes. The great Robert Crumb,’ he repeats, picking up the phone. He wants to invite Crumb and his wife Aline to an Aerosmith concert, followed by a party. The band has been in town to play the Cow Palace and the Oakland Coliseum. Lead singer Steve Tyler and the boys showed up at the O’Farrell earlier in the week. ‘Do you know you’re in the center of the universe?’ Artie asked Tyler, who looked around and said, yes, he understood.

The key to making a porn flick that has sexual intensity, according to Artie, is casting. ‘I’ve always preferred using people that were in love, or mates if you can get it. But at least make sure they like each other. You can’t lie to the camera.’

Art and brother Jim have been busted nine times in the 19 years they’ve been making and purveying porno films in San Francisco. It has now been three years since The O’Farrell was raided and Marilyn Chambers arrested for taking tips from members of her live-show audience. (It required the entire SFPD vice squad to make that raid.) Three years, says Artie, is the longest period in which relations between the brothers and the city have been ‘relatively mellow.’

Sirens blare on Polk Street and we go to the window. A tour bus pulls up outside and 39 Japanese businessman skip eagerly towards the Ultra Room. The US trade deficit is about to be reduced by at least $1,000.

Another great photo: Charlie Chaplin squaring off with Primo Carnera! John Fleer wrote a song about Primo C.

Born and raised in Tuscany A stonecutter’s son

Met a French man in the street He said ‘You might be the one, you might be the one’

He taught me to keep up my guard To protect my plate glass jaw

In the ring I flailed about I’d push and I’d paw

CHORUS

They said ‘Primo! Primo C!’

He’s so big So ugly

Doesn’t bother me

I’m Primo Primo C!

They’d say ‘Primo! Primo C!’

The Mob took all the money

I’d do it again for free

I’m Primo Primo C!

They thought I was too dumb to know My boxing was a joke

I played along with each fake win I knew, knew we’d go for broke

The title belt for a while Lots of women, lots of drink

You ask me if I have regrets Amico, what you think?

CHORUS

John Fleer was the lawyer sent by Dr. Tod Mikuriya’s malpractice insurance carrier to represent him in 1999 when the Medical Board of California tried to pull his license. Mikuriya was the leading proponent of marijuana as medicine. All the complaints against him were made by law enforcement officers upset that they could no longer bust pot people with impunity. As lawyers Mikuriya hired the woman who’d handled his latest divorce, and Bill Simpich, a pot proponent. Neither of them had experience defending a doctor in front of an Administrative Law Judge. Fleer was a pro and if the fix hadn’t been in, would have won an acquittal. About 20 years ago he recorded one CD. He now lives in Sebastopol and is still defending doctors against the med board.

Whenever ‘our’ Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was in the news, I used to wonder what happened to Wynken and Nod?
Haiku inspired by the red baseball cap:

Greenland’s a clean land,

Denmark did not ruin it.

Servers need the cold.

Like millions of US Americans, I don’t share the Democrats’ outrage over the leak of ‘our’ plan to blast the Houthis to Hell. What the opposition party should be decrying is not the leak but the plan itself. They should be reminding everyone that the Houthis would stop their desperate attempts to hit a ship in the Red Sea if Israel would stop the genocide in Gaza. The beautiful architecture of Yemen has been blasted enough!

‘Pick on somebody your own size’ was one of the rules enforced by the older kids on the playground in Brooklyn. That was Before Gentrification, and long before computers kept the kids indoors. The jungle gym was made of steel, not plastic, and there were four big wooden see-saws (which were never called ‘teeter-totters’ in Brooklyn B.G.) See-saws are now being banned as a health hazard

I think the astonishing email link to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic –the voice of the establishment, a most prominent critic of the Trump Administration– was a big misdirection play. The so-called leak to Goldberg occurred on Monday, March 24. Next day, while the media were pre-occupied with the Administration’s so-called blunder, the Associated Press reported ‘President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a sweeping executive action to overhaul U.S. elections, including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and demanding that all ballots be received by Election Day. The order calls on states to work with federal agencies to share voter lists and prosecute election crimes. It threatens to pull federal funding from states where election officials don’t comply.’

This is obviously a much bigger story than the mysterious link to Jeffrey Goldberg (of all people). The AP story went on, ‘The Republican National Committee launched a massive effort to probe voter registration lists nationwide.’

Another great photo –the man emerging from the Blossom Restaurant on the Bowery (and the obscured woman)– reminds me…When Jerome Snyder and Milton Glazer originally planned their ‘Underground Gourmet’ column for New York Magazine in the early ‘60s, their idea was to review restaurants that were at least three steps down. The city was full of such eateries. Then they expanded the definition of ‘Underground’ to mean any restaurant serving lunch for 2.85 or less. The column was a huge success, and spawned a book, and the publisher spun off Underground Gourmet guides to other cities.
Ruth Stout was Rex Stout’s sister! Jill Lepore’s piece about her in the New Yorker came as a revelation to Rosie and Steve Howland (ardent Rex Stout fans). They also love the TV episodes with Maury Chaykin as Nero Wolfe and Timothy Hutton as Archie Goodwin.

Here’s the whole of Lepore’s long, fascinating profile. It’s not like we’re wasting paper.

How an American Radical Reinvented Back-Yard Gardening

Ruth Stout didn’t plow, dig, water, or weed—and now her ‘no-work’ method is everywhere. But behind her secret to the perfect garden lay other secrets.

If you haven’t heard of Ruth Stout, you haven’t spent much time in the Home and Garden section of a bookstore lately, and you haven’t been listening to gardening or homesteading podcasts, either. Stout, who died nearly half a century ago, lived most of her life in the shadow of her far more famous brother, the writer Rex Stout, the creator of the fictional detective Nero Wolfe. Alexander Woollcott, who for years wrote this magazine’s Shouts & Murmurs column, was convinced that he was the inspiration for Wolfe—like Wolfe, he was famously fat—and even took to calling himself Nero. ‘It was useless for Stout to protest,’ The New Yorker reported in a Profile of Stout in 1949. ‘Nothing could convince Woollcott that he had not been plagiarized bodily.’ Nero Wolfe, who is loath to set foot outside his brownstone on West Thirty-fifth Street, is obsessed with orchids and dedicates four hours a day to tending to them in his plant rooms on the roof. (Too big to climb stairs, he rides an elevator.) Aside from that, he has nothing to do with gardening. These days, most Nero Wolfe books are out of print and Rex Stout is largely forgotten—if not by his loyal fan club, the Wolfe Pack—but a whole lot of people are talking about his sister.

Ruth Stout’s three biggest books, ‘How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back’ (1955), ‘Gardening Without Work’ (1961), and ‘The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book’ (1971), have all been reissued in the past few years. What’s known as the Ruth Stout Method—’I never plow or spade or cultivate or weed or hoe or use a fertilizer or use a poison spray or use a compost pile, or water’—is an inevitable subject on podcasts like ‘The Beet,’ ‘Farmish Kind of Life,’ ‘The Daily Farmer,’ ‘Maritime Gardening,’ and ‘She Said Homestead.’ Stout is the bee’s knees, the goddess of soil, the doyenne of dirt. She’s all over YouTube and X (#RuthStoutMethod) and Instagram (#legend). There are millions of posts about her on TikTok alone, from weekend gardeners and trad wives, organic farmers and Carhartted homesteaders. In selfie videos of straw-hatted gardeners harvesting blue-ribbon pumpkins and the plumpest of potatoes, the Ruth Stout Method has been put to the music of everyone from Iggy Pop to Mama Cass. There are, of course, haters—’my ruth stout garden failed’ and ‘No More Ruth Stout’—but there are many more lovers: ‘How to Use the Ruth Stout Method to Get Amazing Results’ and ‘Ruth Stout is the best!’ There are even tribute videos. She is the Beyoncé of the back yard.

Rex Stout, who was the head of the Authors Guild, wrote fifty-two novels. (‘I don’t know how many times I have reread the Nero Wolfe stories, but plenty,’ P. G. Wodehouse once confessed. Me, too.) His books were translated into twenty-six languages. They sold more than a hundred million copies. Between 1965 and 1975, according to his biographer, ‘he had more books in print than any other living American writer had.’

His sister was proud of him, but her spirit of sibling rivalry was something fierce. Not only because of his fame but also because of his name, he was known as the ‘detective-story king’; she became the ‘mulch queen.’ When it was hinted that Rex, a noted child prodigy, had read the Bible by the age of two or the Iliad in the original Greek before he was born, Ruth would point out that she’d read everything Rex had, only she had read it first. ‘I don’t want to be remembered as Rex Stout’s sister,’ she said. ‘I want him to be remembered as Ruth Stout’s brother.’ She’s gotten her wish. At long last, she’s having her day in the sun. She didn’t plow and she didn’t dig. She didn’t use fertilizers or pesticides. She never watered or weeded. Not for nothing did she call her method ‘no-work gardening.’ She didn’t really believe in work. No tilling, no hoeing. No buying, no selling. What’s wild is how little about her truly radical life is generally known. She was, for a very long time, a Communist. Gardeners of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your shovels!

Much of what I know about Ruth Stout I know from reading her seven-hundred-page unpublished autobiography, which she seems to have written sometime in the nineteen-sixties. I found it in the files of an English professor named John McAleer, who published a biography of Rex Stout in 1977; Ruth was his chief informant. He sent her questionnaire after questionnaire.

‘Was Rex the family pet?’ he asked her.

‘No,’ she wrote back.

‘How did your mother react to Rex’s success as a writer?’

‘I think she would have preferred it if he hadn’t written about murder.’

But she also bridled at McAleer’s endless questions. She once wrote a book called ‘It’s a Woman’s World,’ but she knew it wasn’t. She decided to use the occasion of her correspondence with her brother’s biographer to tell him a great deal about her life. And then: she sent him the manuscript of her autobiography. ‘I’m mailing the ms. today & forget that promise to return it in 48 hours,’ she wrote him. ‘I’m in no hurry for it. I sort of ran thro it & was a little surprised at how dull it is.’ He never sent it back. It wasn’t dull.

Ruth Imogen Stout was born in Girard, Kansas, on June 14, 1884, the fifth of nine children. Rex, who arrived two years later, was the sixth. They grew up on a farm, though they didn’t so much help out on the farm as just live on it. They picked strawberries. They were intense competitors, especially in croquet. She once told this story: ‘When I was a girl, I took out a book, the title of which was ‘Will Power,’ from the library. When my mother saw me reading it, she said, ‘Oh, Ruth! Do you really think you need more will power?’ ‘ The family moved to the city—Topeka—when Ruth was twelve and Rex was ten. Ruth left Topeka around 1903. In 1909, the year she turned twenty-five, she followed Rex to New York. She tried her hand at fiction. During the war, she lost her job (she’d been working as a bookkeeper), and, ‘with $117.00 in my pocket-book, without a job and with Rex’s typewriter sitting idle,’ she writes, ‘I decided this was probably as good a time as any to find out if I was a writer.’ She had success in the pulps, with O. Henry-style stories like ‘Just Hungry,’ from 1917, about a girl from Kentucky who, out of work in New York, sells her virginity in exchange for twelve dollars and a dinner. (‘She hadn’t the faintest idea how to go about this professionally.’) Stout complained that her editor was ‘difficult to please.’ He called her into his office, she recounted, and ‘he said he would probably buy everything I wrote if I didn’t have such a peculiar point of view about a lot of things.’

Rex Stout began writing short stories in the nineteen-tens, too, and published his first detective story in 1914. Finding that there wasn’t much money in it, he became a businessman. Ruth also gave up writing, but became more of a bohemian—and more of a Bolshevik. She moved to Greenwich Village and, with a friend named Kitty Morton, opened up a tearoom called the Wisp, where regulars included the pioneering photojournalist Jessie Tarbox Beals. She became a political radical and a sex radical. She bobbed her hair. She organized strikes. She and Rex both became Socialists. On a trip to California, she stopped in Colorado to visit two of her mother’s sisters. ‘I could hardly wait to shock them with the news that I was a Socialist,’ she later wrote. But, when she made her announcement, one of them said, more or less, ‘Well, naturally,’ and the other said that she herself had been all but raised on Eugene V. Debs’s knee.

She and Kitty had a falling out, and so she opened her own tearoom—one with a dance floor, ‘on 4th Street, just off 6th Avenue.’ She called it the Klicket. She had by now fallen in love with an eccentric named Fred Rossiter (a Jew who had been born in Frankfurt as Alfred Rosenblatt). The hitch was that he was already married. In ‘The League of Frightened Men’ (1935), Rex Stout has Nero Wolfe reading a book by an ‘Alfred Rossiter’ called ‘Outline of Human Nature.’ This was a joke. There is no such book. Rossiter’s sole published book, from 1915, is ‘A Pocket Manual for Character Analysts and Employment Managers Based on the Blackford System,’ which offers a method for classifying workers by various physical and mental features. It’s an employment manual, but it is also, in its own way, a study of human nature.

In 1918, Ruth had to give up the tearoom. It had lost too much money. Her life began to collapse. In 1919, Rossiter broke things off with Ruth. After she learned that Rossiter and his wife had a baby, her hair turned white.

She published a poem called ‘The Wedding Contract’:

Of course, the whole thing’s wrong;

What they should say is this:

‘I take this man and live with him

Until we both get on each other’s nerves

To such a point

That we can’t stand it any longer.’

But, if it must be binding,

Till death do them part,

‘Twould be honester to say:

‘I take this man

And live with him

If it kills me.’

‘If you want a new enthusiasm,’ Rex told her, ‘you ought to go hear Scott Nearing.’ Nearing was an Ivy League economist, a charismatic social reformer, and a political dissident, and she quickly fell under his spell. She became first his student, then his secretary, and finally his mistress. Nearing had lost his job as a professor at the University of Pennsylvania for his political views. The provost had urged him to modify his teaching about subjects like poverty and child labor; Nearing refused. The university trustees then effectively fired him, citing his ‘public utterances.’ A furor ensued—the Nearing case, which the Literary Digest described as the ‘biggest fight for academic freedom yet launched in an American university,’ led to the creation of the American Association of University Professors. ‘The future of the Democracy hangs on the guarantee of free speech,’ Nearing said in 1916. A year later, opposed to America’s entry into the war in Europe, he published an antiwar book called ‘The Great Madness,’ and was indicted for sedition. ‘Scott Nearing! You have heard of Scott Nearing. He is the greatest teacher in the United States,’ Eugene Debs said, in a speech in Ohio in 1918, just before he himself was arrested and jailed for sedition.

‘He seemed to represent everything towards which my thoughts and ideals were groping,’ Ruth Stout wrote, describing her first encounters with Nearing. While working as his secretary, she began writing for socialist and radical papers and magazines, including the Call and The Nation. Working at a socialist summer camp, Camp Tamiment, in Bushkill, Pennsylvania, she was exposed to a new set of ideas about farming. She came across Knut Hamsun’s 1917 book, ‘Growth of the Soil,’ translated from the Norwegian, a novel about the conflict between agrarianism and modernity. Concerns about what plowing was doing to soil were growing in the U.S. well before the Dust Bowl of the thirties. In 1928, the U.S. Department of Agriculture would publish a circular called ‘Soil Erosion: A National Menace,’ warning that ‘removal of forest growth, grass and shrubs and breaking the ground surface by cultivation, the trampling of livestock, etc., accentuate erosion to a degree far beyond that taking place under average natural conditions, especially on those soils that are peculiarly susceptible to rainwash.’ The very dirt was dying.

During the twenties, Stout studied the soil, and she studied Russian, eventually becoming fluent. She was very likely exposed to the ideas of the Polish-born Jan Owsiński—a figure something like Levin in ‘Anna Karenina’—who introduced the notion of no-till farming in Russia in 1899 with ‘The New System of Farming,’ which was published again in 1902, 1905, and 1909 and was the subject of discussion in more than seventy progressive publications between 1899 and 1912. She could also have learned about what was called the Ovsinskyi System on a trip to the Soviet Union during which, in 1924, she attended Lenin’s funeral and toured the Kremlin. When she returned, she was asked, by everyone, to report on the Revolution; instead, she reported on rural life. ‘I talked incessantly,’ she wrote, ‘about the beauty of the Russian steppe, the valuable amber that the Russian peasant women wore around their necks, the steam bath, the long, beautiful sleigh-rides.’ She also talked about the ‘millions of lilacs’ in Buzuluk. In New York, she wondered whether she was ‘homesick for Russia.’

She spent much time in the twenties with Nearing on his farm, in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where they restored the soil and grew their own food. Nearing prepared to travel to Russia and China. ‘We worked on the book he was writing, answered his mail, worked in the garden, went swimming,’ she wrote. They sifted dirt through sieves. (Nearing’s wife appeared indifferent to his infidelity. ‘You should see the huge pile of dirt Ruth screened this morning,’ Nearing told her over breakfast one day.) Inspired by Nearing, Stout had become a vegetarian. Meanwhile, she served as secretary and business manager for The New Masses, a socialist magazine that Rex had helped found. But she did a great deal more than manage the office, as her correspondence with the editor Joseph Freeman reveals. ‘What am I? On what terms am I engaged?’ she complained to Freeman. She gave both Nearing and Freeman lessons in Russian. Freeman called her Ruth Ivanovna. She signed her letters to him, in Russian, ‘All the best, Ruthinka.’

Rex, too, was caught up in a circle of American radicals that very much involved Nearing, who appears to have feared that Ruth was having an affair with Freeman. ‘Scott wants you to have dinner with him—with us,’ she wrote Freeman. ‘He wants to talk about style and The New Masses. . . . And it’s your chance to talk to him about China.’ She also told Freeman she would happily divide her time equally between him and Nearing ‘for dictation, typing, or anything.’ In 1927, Nearing joined the Communist Party. Rex separated from The New Masses, realizing that ‘it was Communist and intended to stay Communist.’ But Ruth’s dedication to the cause was far deeper. She wrote Freeman:

God made S.N. and gave him charm and genius and a certain smile and put him in the radical world. He made J.F. and gave him charm and genius and a certain tone of voice and uncertain eyes and put him in the world of art. And God looked on his handiwork and saw that it was good. . . . R.S. looked around the radical world and found a certain smile, and she looked around the world of art and heard a certain tone of voice and looked into an uncertain pair of eyes,—and God watched her work and saw that it was not so bad!

Nevertheless, she eventually left The New Masses, telling Freeman that if she believed in nervous breakdowns she’d have had one by then. She didn’t so much denounce Communism as drift away from it. Her affair with Scott Nearing faltered. ‘Our romance seemed to me a little anemic,’ she wrote. McAleer wrote, of Ruth, ‘She did not want to be Mrs. Nearing.’ In any event, in 1929, Nearing left his wife and children not for Ruth but for another woman, Helen Knothe, whom he eventually married. The couple moved to Vermont, where they became a part of the back-to-the-land movement of the thirties. By then, Ruth had made a similar move, with a different man. In 1927, Fred Rossiter left his wife and he and Ruth moved in together in New York. She began working for The Nation. She and Rossiter were married in 1929. She was forty-four. She did not take his name. They moved to a fifty-five-acre farm in Redding Ridge, Connecticut, that they called Poverty Hollow. Two years before, her brother had bought a plot of eighteen acres a dozen miles away. He called it High Meadow. She ran her farm like a Communist summer camp.

Nearly as soon as Ruth Stout moved into the old farmhouse at Poverty Hollow, she built a kitchen and a washroom in the barn. Her brother helped her plant a garden. It was the Depression. Her friends never had any money, and now they had less. She told all the people she knew that they were welcome to come stay. That first year, she and Rossiter had hundreds of guests. It got to be so much that she printed a flyer, titled ‘Cash & Carry Farm,’ explaining terms to visitors. ‘We supply only: Beds, Blankets, Light, Fuel for cooking, Cooking utensils,’ it read. ‘We expect you to furnish: Bedlinen (if you want it), Towels, Dish Towels and Food.’ The barn was hardly ever empty. ‘Come any time and stay as long as you like.’ Around then, she decided to expand her garden. Meanwhile, she kept a hand in politics, serving on the board of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (‘We defend militant labor and the victims of racial oppression’). She remained close to Nearing, and when he lectured before the committee in 1935 she threw him a party.

Having made a fortune in business, Rex Stout built—himself—a house at High Meadow, and, in its woodshop, he built its furniture. He also grew his own vegetables, though he was much more interested in flowers: he cultivated a renowned iris garden. Above all, and at long last, he returned to writing. Beginning in 1929, he published a series of fairly scandalous and highly sexed novels, with mixed success. Anonymously, he published a political thriller called ‘The President Vanishes,’ a warning about the rise of American fascism. In 1933, he decided to try writing crime fiction. The first Nero Wolfe novel, ‘Fer-de-Lance,’ appeared the following year.

It’s unclear whether Rex intended Wolfe to be a recurring character. His publisher urged him to alternate his Nero Wolfe mysteries with novels featuring a new detective. In 1936, at a time when he was regularly visiting and sharing seeds and gardening tips with Ruth, Rex created Theodolinda (Dol) Bonner, one of the earliest female detectives in American fiction, in a novel called ‘The Hand in the Glove.’

Bonner is eccentric and fierce and, jilted by a fiancé, something of a man-hater. ‘I dislike all men,’ she announces, exuding much the same authority and coldheartedness with which Wolfe so frequently tells his Watson, Archie Goodwin, not to let any woman into the house. Rex is a king, Nero is an emperor, and ‘Theodolinda’ is a reference to a sixth-century Germanic queen. Dol Bonner is, more or less, Nero Wolfe’s sister: a fictional Ruth Stout.

‘God expects me to stand up fearless for what I believe, to speak up against what I think is wrong, but not to worry, either in small personal matters or in world affairs, for fear,’ Ruth once wrote. Bonner abides by Ruth’s rule for living. In ‘The Hand in the Glove,’ Bonner solves the murder of P. L. Storrs, committed in a country garden: ‘She knew Storrs took especial pride in the vegetable garden, and she turned aside and went through a gap in a yew hedge to give it a look, but saw only tomatoes and pole beans and tiled celery and late corn and fat pumpkins impatient for the frost.’ During an inspection of the vegetable garden, she considered the nature of soil, and of mulch, as she walked past ‘low brick-walled compartments for compost heaps, and stood looking at the conglomerate mass ready for decay on the heap most recently begun: corn husks, spoiled tomatoes, cabbage leaves and roots, celery tops, carrot tops, a little pile of watermelon meat, faint and pink and unripe. . . . She thought, ‘So recently living and growing, and now no good for anything until it rots.’ ‘ The key to the mystery comes when she finds gloves worn by the murderer, hidden inside a ‘large fine melon.’

In 1938, the year after ‘The Hand in the Glove’ was published, Whittaker Chambers, a Communist who had known Ruth Stout when he worked at the Daily Worker (to which she contributed, and in which her political protests were chronicled), stole some important papers from the federal government. In 1948, when Chambers testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he revealed the existence of the papers; it was later found that he had hidden them inside a pumpkin at his farm, in Maryland (a method of concealment not unlike hiding gloves in a watermelon). Representative Richard Nixon, a crusading anti-Communist, then made a famous speech about the so-called Pumpkin Papers, and the papers featured prominently in the trial of Alger Hiss. These events marked the beginning of the era of McCarthyism.

Ruth Stout, noted ex-Communist, was never hauled before McCarthy’s committee. This may have been owing to the influence of her brother, now not only a celebrated writer but also a celebrated patriot. During the Second World War, Rex, as the ‘lie detective,’ had led the Writers’ War Board and delivered a series of radio addresses, debunking German and Soviet propaganda. (‘Like Nero Wolfe, Stout is a fallacy detector,’ The New Yorker wrote.) Still, he had that dodgy background. His F.B.I. file runs to hundreds of pages, documenting everything from his earliest political activities to his death. J. Edgar Hoover hated him, especially after Rex published a Nero Wolfe novel in 1965 that was, in essence, an extended indictment of the F.B.I. Ruth’s scant notices in the files of the F.B.I. cover only the years 1927-38. After that, the Bureau apparently lost interest in her. No longer a Red, by the fifties she had reinvented herself as America’s favorite green thumb.

‘Organic gardening,’ by that name, came to the United States during the Second World War, alongside the Victory Garden movement. In 1942, J. I. Rodale, the founder of the Soil Health Foundation, began publishing a magazine called Organic Farming and Gardening. Rodale endorsed, for instance, compost heaps. ‘The introduction of the organic method into the United States may be likened to a war,’ Rodale said in 1949. Ruth Stout, who had been pioneering her own kind of gardening for more than a decade before Rodale came along, became a regular contributor to the magazine. She popularized no-till gardening, though when asked if she’d invented deep mulching she said, ‘Well, naturally, I don’t think so; God invented it simply by deciding to have the leaves fall off the trees once a year.’

But Stout likely learned about what she called no-work gardening from her reading or while working on socialist farms or during her travels in Russia, in the twenties. (The Soviet Union itself, so far from adopting the Ovsinskyi System, introduced the aggressive use of mechanized plowing that, together with forced collectivization, contributed to widespread famine.) By the forties, Stout was growing nearly everything she and Rossiter ate, and feeding their freeloaders, too. She did all this by undertaking very little work. Free the worker! She had no use for Rodale’s compost piles: ‘I’m against them. They are so unnecessary. Why pile everything somewhere and then haul it to where you need it?’ Hay, old mail, newspapers, ashes, food waste, whatever: she threw it all in her garden, which looked a right mess. Despite appearances, her method yielded impressive results. She once grew a fifty-one-pound blue Hubbard squash—during a four-month drought. About her only expense was paying a neighboring farmer to cut down the hay she grew in a meadow.

In 1953, Nearing and his wife published a book called ‘Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World,’ touting their methods of homesteading. A year later, Stout, seventy-one, published her first book, ‘How to Have a Green Thumb Without an Aching Back: A New Method of Mulch Gardening.’ She burst into print that year, also publishing a magazine article titled ‘Throw Away Your Spade and Hoe.’

The next year, she published an article in Popular Gardening called ‘Let’s Plant Iris,’ a somewhat begrudging profile of her brother. At High Meadow, Rex Stout grew a hundred and eighty-six varieties of iris on three acres. ‘At the height of the season the jungle of color is overwhelming,’ she wrote. ‘It runs all the way from the tall, cool elegance of Lady Mohr to the blazing braggadocio of Fire Dance. The pure proud white of Snow King; the incredibly deep rich yellow of Ola Kala; the lovely full blue of Chivalry; the velvety deep darkness, almost black, of Sable; the gay flippant medley of Argus Pheasant; the dual personality of Pinnacle, with milkmaids for standards and duchesses for falls; the delicate virginity of Pink Cameo and Cherie; the misty shimmer of Blue Rhythm; the spectacular virtuosity of good old Ranger.’ Her brother, she reported, kept a record of his irises, a loose-leaf notebook with a page for every variety. He told her, ‘Each year, as buds start to open, I begin to make entries.’ VW for ‘verdict: wonderful.’ VG for ‘verdict: good.’ He grew marvellous flowers; she knew she grew better vegetables.

Here’s the Ruth Stout Method. Start with a patch of grass. Don’t even bother to turn over the turf. Cover the grass with eight inches of hay or straw. Don’t skimp, and, ideally, don’t pay for it: you can get spoiled hay from a local farmer, or you can barter for it. Then, year-round, throw everything organic on top of it. Food waste, cardboard, newspapers, grass clippings, dead leaves, sticks, stumps. Anything. All of it. Always. When the time comes for planting, push the hay aside, toss some seeds on the soil underneath, and cover it up again. You’ll need to thin your plants and pick your vegetables when they’re ready. But that’s all. Your garden will be very ugly. You may hear from your neighbors. (Stout’s neighbors didn’t mind that her garden was not pleasing to look at, but she preferred to garden fully naked, so they kept their distance, anyway.)

The Ruth Stout Method isn’t really Ruth Stout’s. It’s just that, in the fifties, it was necessary to call it something other than Russian. In the McCarthy era, no one wanted to garden like a Communist.

During a second back-to-the-land movement, in the sixties and early seventies, Ruth Stout’s books gained a cult following. She and Nearing became the figurative grandmother and grandfather of a generation of hippies and lovers of communes. In 1964, Stout appeared as a contestant on the TV quiz show ‘I’ve Got a Secret.’ Her secret was that she’d smashed a saloon with Carrie Nation in 1901. Except that wasn’t really her secret. Her secret was that she’d been a Socialist and a Communist and a sex radical. (For Nearing, the political part of his life was never a secret; in 1981, at ninety-eight, he appeared, as himself, in the film ‘Reds.’)

In the seventies, she became something of an inspiration to the women’s-liberation movement. In 1972, Ms. magazine wanted to profile her. ‘Women’s libbers, they bore me,’ she once said. No profile appeared.

As they aged, Ruth and Rex Stout found it harder to travel to see each another, to make it across those scant dozen miles that separated Poverty Hollow from High Meadow. They still swapped seeds.

January 26, 1972

Dear Ruth:

Someone sent me two packets of cucumber seeds from Holland and here is one of them—if you want to find out what a Dutch cucumber is like.

Love, Rex

‘Reading bores me,’ Ruth wrote Rex in 1972, when she was eighty-eight and he was eighty-six. But there was an exception: ‘Nero and Archie never bore me.’ Mainly, she was writing to talk gardening, signing off, ‘That lovely manure I promised you is here waiting.’ In the end, it always came back to cow shit. But she remained, as ever, a freethinker. When she was almost ninety, she sent a postcard to CBS that read, ‘I’m planning to kill President Nixon. I’m willing to spend the rest of my life in prison for doing it. My question is: After I kill Nixon and go to prison, who’s going to take care of Agnew?’ It prompted the F.B.I. to send two agents to her house; they quickly realized ‘that a woman almost ninety years old had no immediate plans to kill the president.’

Rex Stout died in 1975. The next year, his sister was the subject of a documentary, ‘Ruth Stout’s Garden.’ In the voice-over, she says that she lived in New York until she was forty-five, ‘never once wishing that I could have a garden.’ But she wasn’t at Poverty Hollow for more than ten minutes before she looked at the lilacs and the apple tree and decided she wanted to start gardening. She did not mention Moscow.

Ruth Stout, Ruthinka, Theodolinda Bonner, died at Poverty Hollow in 1980, at the age of ninety-six. She donated her body to Yale Medical School. Aside from the papers and letters she sent to Joseph Freeman and John McAleer, her brother’s biographer, her unpublished writings have all disappeared: she threw them on the garden.

A neighbor of mine gave me a copy of ‘Gardening Without Work’ a few years back. He’d found it in his attic. It’s from 1961. I reread it every year. ‘It is October, and I trust your garden looks terrible, with dead vines, corn stalks, clumsy cabbage roots—refuse—all over it,’ Stout writes. ‘And I do hope you will leave everything there, and add the kitchen garbage to it through the winter.’ Winter comes, then January, February. My garden looks like a trash heap. March arrives. ‘A crocus opens its eyes. A redwing calls. You love winter, you really do, but this is something quite different.’ Does anyone know a farmer willing to part with a few bales of spoiled hay?

Ruth Stout died at Poverty Hollow in 1980, at the age of ninety-six. She donated her body to Yale Medical School. Aside from the papers and letters she sent to Joseph Freeman and John McAleer, her brother’s biographer, her unpublished writings have all disappeared: she threw them on the garden.

47 Comments

Kimberlin March 28, 2025

“Seven truckloads of food valued at up to $750,000 destined this spring for the Redwood Empire Food Bank may never arrive, leaving the region’s largest hunger relief organization having to figure out how to make up the difference.

That’s because the U.S. Department of Agriculture has halted $500 million in deliveries to food banks nationwide.

The allocations were previously set aside by the Biden administration for fiscal year 2025, through the Emergency Food Assistance Program, Politico first reported. The program is run by the Agriculture Department and backed by the Commodity Credit Corporation, a federal fund.”

A lot of folks writing here hate Biden. They have spent years voting for unwinable canadates. Now they are just starting to get the results of that past 20 years of votes. I hate to see the damage you have now caused. And it will be to the little folks not of course yourselves, you will keep voting as you have in the past.

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar March 28, 2025
  
  This news is so troubling and the results are so careless, thoughtless and cruel. A basic need, for those struggling to keep-up, now gets harder to meet. Shame on the shallow, stupid DOGE dummies who are wrecking humane programs like this one. And for all those in power now, who support them in their work.
  
  Reply
- Marshall Newman March 28, 2025
  
  A sad situation with awful repercussions. Plus setting it right – when and if it is set right – will take a lot longer than setting it wrong, and will happen too late for some vulnerable people.
  
  Reply
George Hollister March 28, 2025

Hear, hear to Louise Simson. We need more of her kind in education.

Reply
Kirk Vodopals March 28, 2025

Yes, Noam, let’s expand our freedom of thought into wide horizons. Namely, why exactly did you meet with Mr. Epstein?

Reply
- Bruce Anderson March 28, 2025
  
  If Noam did meet Epstein, it wasn’t to take flight on the Lolita Express. Please, Mr. V., share your source.
  
  Reply
  - Steve Heilig March 28, 2025
    
    Epstein and Trump were close pals, which DonCon’s cult never seems to mention…
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/01/trump-jeffrey-epstein-tapes
    https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/global-trends/us-news-jeffrey-epstein-donald-trump-terrific-guy-hes-a-lot-of-fun-to-be-with-what-donald-trump-once-said-about-jeffrey-epstein/articleshow/118626325.cms
    
    Reply
    - Call It As I See It March 28, 2025
      
      Think you’re confusing Clinton with Trump.
      27 trips with underage girls and one blue dress. How come you never talk about that?
      
      Reply
      - Bruce Anderson March 28, 2025
        
        Because nobody but you and kindred pervs are interested.
        
        Reply
        
        Steve Heilig March 29, 2025
        
        Right, plus seems nobody ever told poor Cowardly Call It that “two wrongs don’t make a right.”
        
        Reply
Call It As I See It March 28, 2025

The Major’s story about our BOS and their deep dive into the budget sounds like a comedy skit.

Haschak’s mindless mumbling that leads to nothing except for a plug for a workshop for failure, maybe begin the cuts with this stupidity.
Then Bowtie Ted, still wanrts reports. I thought Sara Pierce miraculously solved this issue. Here is an idea, Bowtie. Don’t conspire with others on an ill fated plan(Get Cubbison) that will cost the County millions.
And now to other three, maybe we need to get a list of five things they do each week. Maybe Elon’s on to something!

Well onto something that has some positivity.
Enjoyed Matt LeFever’s story on the Hopland Brewery.
It reminded of a story especially when he mentioned Michael Layborn.
Michael was a generous person with sense of humor.
He told me he befriended a young man who wanted to play music in his bar, his name, Tommy Heth, we all know him as Tommy Tutone. As years passed by Tommy started a band and got a recording contract. He appeared one day at the brewery with reel to reel tapes and told Michael the band’s first album was on those tapes. He asked Michael to listen and give him his valued opinion. Michael did. When he returned the tapes, Tommy asked, “What do you think?” Michael said it was great but one song made no sense and in his opinion maybe remove it from the album. The song, 867-5309 Jenny . Can you imagine?
One of the top ten hits of the 80’s.

I guess the moral of the story is, if Michael reviewed your music and told you it stinks, you’ve got a colossal hit. Michael is missed but his sense of humor remains. I remember him laughing as he shared this story. He taught me that in life humor is critical. Cheers to Michael and Red Tail Ale!

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- George Hollister March 28, 2025
  
  Mendocino is a microcosm for what is going on in Sacramento, and Washington. If we are spending other people’s money why care, as as long as we get ours.
  
  Reply
- Mike Williams March 28, 2025
  
  I got to know Michael over his last years, playing Bocce and weekly martini’s with him and my former landlord. He lead a very interesting life. Fermenter of bread became a passion, an artist and a raconteur.
  
  Reply
Justine Frederiksen March 28, 2025

If we are seeking the truth, apparently that meme you shared with the Trump quote reportedly from People magazine has been debunked several times: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-trump-did-not-call-republicans-the-dumbest-group-of-voters-idUSKBN2342DH/

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- Chuck Wilcher March 28, 2025
  
  Trump did say he “loves the poorly educated.” Fabricated quote or not, it’s not too much of a stretch.
  
  Reply
  - Bruce McEwen March 28, 2025
    
    CNN (for what it’s worth) had a clip of him on 1/6 saying something to the effect he either thought or expected that his supporters were a “better class of people.”
    
    I saw the clip on the barroom tv and nearly choked on my beer, so, sure, the quote from People seemed entirely plausible to me.
    
    But you Justine were always a careful reporter and I much admire you for it. Even when your calm, careful coverage of the niggardly kerfuffle made my report look so very tabloid-tawdry and callow.
    
    Keep making reporters trustworthy again!
    
    Reply
Bernie Norvell March 28, 2025

Supervisor reports/budget,
Supervisor reports are exactly that, report outs. It is not meant for budget discussion or how to attack it. In my opinion, we got way into the weeds on a non-agenda item during supervisor Haschack’s report out. The supervisor could’ve easily submitted an agenda item to discuss this which would’ve allowed for public comment and feedback from supervisors. Department heads, meet with the CEO and submit their budget requests and for the most part are asked to rework them if they are over budget. There will be a budget workshop I believe in Willits and a listening session in Fort Bragg, where the public will be able to come and give their opinions on where the money should be spent, and if and where cuts should be made. I have personally and I’m sure other supervisors as well have met with some department heads to try and gain a better understanding of their needs and Priorities. All of this information should be brought back to the supervisors to make the final decision on The best way to balance the budget. Again , Supervisor report outs are not the place

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- Call It As I See It March 28, 2025
  
  Then why is Ted asking for line items that he can take the red pencil to? That doesn’t sound like a report.
  
  Reply
George Hollister March 28, 2025

Bret Braier on Fox last night devoted his entire program to interviewing seven DOGE members and Elon Musk. That show is worth watching, https://x.com/doge. It pays to be skeptical of everything coming from Washington, and media. It is the way it has always been. The people being interviewed were credible, intelligent, talented, and devoted. Their facts are obviously only half the truth, we don’t know the other half. Another website to check out is the government DOGE website doge.gov. Two things that left me very skeptical was their contention that this process, while well intended, would prevent future government insolvency, and upgrading government computer systems will resolve many problems.

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- Norm Thurston March 28, 2025
  
  Any credibility Fox News may have ever had departed with Shepard Smith and Chris Wallace.
  
  Reply
  - Call It As I See It March 28, 2025
    
    Yes, where are they now after stints with those hard hitting, reliable networks CNN and MSNBC.
    
    Reply
    - Bruce Anderson March 28, 2025
      
      In the more sophisticated countries of the world, literate citizens understand going in the political bias of particular media. Here, everybody knows that CNN, MSNBC, NPR etc are conservative-liberal-Democrat while Fox etc are “conservative” but objectively proto-fascist. For intelligent takes on the world there are media like LRB, Harper’s, NYRB, American Scholar, and a host of other long-form publications, for which not a lot of people have the time to read, with an unending variety of blogs, podcasts and even YouTube (for those of you who need visuals to “get it.)” But outback frothers like Call think they’re really getting off zingers with their revelations that MSNBC is “liberal.” (Well, goddam. Whadaya know!) Call and his cretinous Maga cohort also think the Democratic Party is a gang of Bolsheviks, and how dumb is that? On the other hand, when Call talks local stuff about which he is knowledgeable he is pertinent, even interesting.
      
      Reply
    - Norm Thurston March 29, 2025
      
      CNN and MSNBC never had to payout a $787 million settlement for lying.
      
      Reply
  - George Hollister March 28, 2025
    
    Bret Baier is doing an interview. He can be judged by is questions, otherwise what was said came directly from people who are involved with DOGE.
    
    Reply
Jane Do March 28, 2025

Food Banks

PEOPLE DESERVE FRESH FOOD, LIKE FROM THE GROCERY STORE.

PEOPLE DESERVE CERTIFIED FOOD HANDLERS.

PEOPLE SHOULD NOT HAVE TO SIGN ‘AS IS’ FOR FOOD THAT SOMETIMES MAKES THEM SICK, AND FBANK DENIES LIABILITY.

PEOPLE DESERVE REFRIGERATION.

FOOD BANKS ARE -NOT- THE ANSWER

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- Chuck Dunbar March 28, 2025
  
  Until we live in a more perfect world, not coming soon, food banks are part of the safety net and serve a great purpose. Under Trump, none of the fine ideas you wish for will have a chance in hell.
  
  Reply
  - Bruce McEwen March 28, 2025
    
    “Once upon the nonce
    In a perfect world,
    Which is to say,
    A politically correct
    Universe, ruled by
    A benign perfectionist,
    Whose subjects woke
    At the snap of his fingers
    From their beknighted
    Slumbers in ignorant sloth
    To the dazzling ecstasy
    Of a glorious gilded age
    Of plenty and ease
    Rubbed their eyes
    Asking only to whom
    Do they owe this bliss
    And how shall they serve
    Their gracious lord?”
    
    —Rabelais
    
    Reply
    - George Hollister March 28, 2025
      
      A male version of Snow White.
      
      Reply
      - Bruce McEwen March 28, 2025
        
        Mark Twain’s essay “The Awful German Language” starts with a facetious Bible quote: “A little learning makes the whole world kin. (Proverbs, XXXII, 7)”
        
        If you scripture-chase the epigram you discover there’s no such proverb. Twain is deploying an old figure of speech, and I would be impressed if you could name it (hint: it ends in the suffix “nymn” ).
        
        Moreover, George, I thought you’d be the first scholar to get it that that my doggerel was no Rabelasian quote, at all. (Which doesn’t diminish your astute Comparison to Sleeping Beauty in the least!)
        
        Reply
  - Jane Do March 28, 2025
    
    NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO…
    
    Reply
BRICK IN THE WALL March 28, 2025

I donated to the Social Security system from 1962 to 2015…53 years to be exact. Never thought it to be an entitlement, but an actual program of investment into my future years. Now what I have not seen being discussed is the amount of money left on the table should a future recipient expire before reaching the retirement age. I’m wrapping up a gift for ELON which consists of barbed razor wire toilet paper, and since he’s so full of corked up shite, he may never use it but it can be melted down and recycled into Tesla parts.
Great story today about Ruth Stout.

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Jim Armstrong March 28, 2025

I don’t imagine Pacific Internet gave you any warning or explanation.

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- Bruce Anderson March 28, 2025
  
  No, they didn’t, and me a loyal customer since Pacific’s founding!
  
  Reply
  - Lazarus March 28, 2025
    
    I can receive e-mail but not send. I do have a Google for backup, nevertheless, this sucks.
    This is the second time in the last few months. I too have been with them for decades…
    Be well,
    Laz
    
    Reply
  - peter boudoures March 28, 2025
    
    Starlink
    
    Reply
    - Lazarus March 28, 2025
      
      My two sons use Starlink and say it’s great. They also say when it all goes down, with a generator or solar, Starlink may still work, for a while…
      Ask around,
      Laz
      
      Reply
- Jim Armstrong March 28, 2025
  
  24 hours now since I lost email thanks to Willits Online/Pacific Internet.
  Calls not returned.
  
  Reply
Norm Thurston March 28, 2025

Mark – I always appreciate your comments on the County budget. However, your comment today that law enforcement accounts for almost two-thirds of the general fund concerns me because of the use of the term “law enforcement”. There are many different interpretations of what that term means. In the most narrow sense, it may refer to just the Sheriff’s Office. After that, one might add the District Attorney, Probation, Jail, Juvenile Hall and Public Defenders (these could be part of “criminal justice” and “corrections costs”). In the broadest sense, “Public Safety” may include functions of Public Health, Environmental Health, and other non-criminal justice activities. If you look at the 2024-25 adopted budget https://www.mendocinocounty.gov/home/showpublisheddocument/69307/638723787182570000,
page 60, you will see a table of Discretionary Revenue (basically this is revenue which the BOS applies to general fund departments). Total discretionary funds budgeted totals $99.9 million, of which the Sheriff’s Office is allocated $22.85 million, or 22.9%. It’s a lot of money and a large chunk of the total use of discretionary revenue, but far short of two-thirds.

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Koepf March 28, 2025

Dark energy could have an accomplice that helps it slow the growth of large cosmic structures, such as vast superclusters made up of clusters of galaxies.
A new analysis of astronomical data suggests unknown physics is at work assisting dark energy in acting almost as “antigravity,” undoing the work of gravity, which clumps together matter to build vast structures.
The large-scale structure of the universe refers to vast, interconnected patterns of galaxies, galaxy clusters, and superclusters organized into filaments, voids, and walls that comprise the “cosmic web.”
Meanwhile, way, way down in Mendocino County, dark energy means something else entirely: grumpy old lefties harping incessantly into the void about how brilliant they are with ten cents in their bank accounts and their dreams of a Marist revolution moldering in the grave.

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- Bruce Anderson March 28, 2025
  
  Dreams of a Marxist revolution harping about how brilliant they are, and broke, too? Gosh what a sad story. If I know one I’ll offer help. Anyway, NexsMax isn’t formally a psychological disorder, but Colonel Von Umlaut, retired Elk pot grower presently a squaw man living in Wyoming off rich widows, has never been known as a clear thinker.
  
  Reply
  - Koepf March 28, 2025
    
    Bruce. As usual, you’re behind the wokey times. The S word is forbidden amongst your liberal peers. Other than that, how you doing, pal? But, really, and clearly, your daily AVA commentators remind me of all those old guys one would see in the smokey lobbies of Tenderloin hotels…one upon a time, before San Francisco morphed into a blue paradise.
    
    Reply
- George Hollister March 28, 2025
  
  Dark energy, dark matter, and likely antimatter as well, are creations to explain what we can not detect, and don’t understand. There might be more truth in what you are saying than you know.
  
  Reply
  - Bruce McEwen March 28, 2025
    
    “This is the true nature of gratitude. Time gnaws and diminishes all things, but it increases and adds to our good deeds: anytime we have extended a generous hand to a rational human being, that goodness keeps growing and glowing in the man’s heart, forever remembered, constantly contemplated.”
    
    —François Rabelais
    
    Reply
    - Koepf March 29, 2025
      
      “I’m so smart, I have to take a nap before I talk.”
      Bruce McEwen.
      
      Reply
Jane Do March 28, 2025

We will be so lucky to be Greenlanders.

CHANGE THE NAME! Words have meaning.

Nicest people…we need new blood.

In my Euro travels of long ago, bitter cold memories, I remember Denmark…

Ah, peaceful, calm, friendly…

We should be so lucky.

Hey, Greenlanders, Breaking News… we need YOU…desperately, like the seedling in the Spring 🌱 sprouting hope for better days to come.

Reply
- Harvey Reading March 29, 2025
  
  Hey, Greenlanders, forgive us for electing total idiots. By the way, it’s still the Gulf of Mexico…no matter how the brainless mutant may spout.
  
  Reply
  - Kimberlin March 29, 2025
    
    “How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? The answer is four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” Abraham Lincoln
    
    Reply

Mendocino County Today: Friday 3/28/2025

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