AVA READERS may recall our encounters with the late Yvonne Sligh when she was Mendocino College’s librarian. We clashed with the old girl when she refused to carry the AVA among her many periodicals, few of them showing any evidence of having been read, and none of them to the left of Time and Newsweek.
“THIS is a college, isn’t it, Ms. Sligh? Free exchange of ideas and all that?” Yvonne would harrumph, and stare back at me as if she were no comprende. One day, frustrated at her stonewalling me, I said, “Well, honey, you think it over and give me a call…” She bristled. “Please leave. Now!” I apologized. “I’m sorry, Yvonne. I didn’t mean…” Yvonne had retreated into her inner sanctum, emphatically ending that day’s visit.
IT WAS ALWAYS a hassle, and humiliating, begging various establishments to carry the paper-paper AVA with the libs, natch, perennially working to get it banned, but Mendo College was hardly a liberal institution. It may be marginally more open to dissent these days then it has been, but back in the day, it was impenetrable, probably because its faculty, a dim bunch based on our limited experience with one or another of them, but then, and it may be unique to this odd county but the entire faculty, high school through junior college, is politically, intellectually absent.
ANYWAY, it was fun to mess with Yvonne. When I had some time left over from necessary business in our charming county seat I’d pop out to the College library to bargain with her. “C’mon, Yvonne. Give me a break. Let me in.” One day I asked her if she would give me a hug, “because,” I said, “despite our differences, Yvonne, I think you’re doing a great job.” She shrank back. “Heavens, no!” she exclaimed.
MS. SLIGH finally agreed to carry the paper but hid it away on top of a top shelf where the County’s most dangerous publication to the moral well being of Mendocino County youth was placed three feet above eye level, and where short students would have needed a ladder to reach it.
THE COLLEGE, at the time, was heavy on noisy Christians, none of them much for learning in any known sense, and we soon learned that Yvonne, a member of one of the area’s more primitive congregations, may have thought she was doing God’s work by keeping Beelzebub’s journalism away from curious young eyes, of which there seemed to be few among the student body.
YVONNE was never welcoming but never entirely rude. She made it clear that she wished I stayed the heck outta her library named, by the way, after Leroy Lowery, the college’s first prexy who bragged at its opening that he hadn’t read a book in 20 years. And Leroy did the hiring!
I STILL REMEMBER being startled when I saw a Ms. Morgan Perry featured in a Sunday Ukiah Daily Journal’s “ACHIEVER” series as recipient of the “Yvonne Sligh Book Award” worth $150. My Yvonne! Ms. Perry said she would use the money to buy a trigonometry textbook for the Math 121 taught by Ms. Leslie Banta. Ms. Perry wanted to be a nurse, and apparently trig was part of that curriculum, but it beats me why it would be.
ACCORDING TO Ms. Banta’s class description: “This course will explore the mathematical uses and implications of triangles with its focus on the six trigonometric functions, the inverse trigonometric functions, and their graphs. Students will learn to solve triangles, apply trigonometry to physical phenomena, and work with the trigonometric functions in an algebraic setting. Topics will also include De Moivre’s Theorem and applications with vectors. A graphing calculator will be required for the course. Textbook Information: Trigonometry & MyMathLab Student Acc Kit Pk, Ratti ISBN 0321614704 Edition 1 (Required.)”
WHEN WE GOOGLED this textbook with its Student Acc Kit Pk, we discovered that it retailed for $190 but could be had (new) for as low as $140. We also discovered Trig for Dummies was going for $14 and another trigonometry text was absolutely free and downloadable.
TRIG HAS BEEN around for a very long time. How fancy a trig book does one need to master it? True, the $140-$190 book comes with a “Student Acc Kit Pk,” but why pay that kind of money for a book you’ll only use once?
GRAPHING CALCULATORS, according to my colleague, The Major, a math geek, go for about $100 or so, although there are also free downloadable graphing calculator software programs.
THE POINT? Why would a community college instructor require a student to buy a $150 trig book and a $100 calculator when there are so many options available that are cheaper or free? And in this case, the instructor wasn’t even the author of the textbook, the usual scam college instructors use to bilk the young? I still wonder if Yvonne would have approved.
CEO ANTLE GETS AN EARFUL AT HER ‘LISTENING SESSION’
Coastal Residents Say District Attorney, County CEO Bear Responsibility for Budget Crunch
Mendocino County Chief Executive Darcy Antle opened the first of several public budget listening sessions on Tuesday, inviting residents to weigh in on spending priorities and potential cuts for the coming fiscal year. The Fort Bragg meeting quickly became a forum for public frustration, with calls for accountability and structural reform. …
MAZIE MALONE:
Re: Proposed use of Measure B funds for the new jail wing…
Ummmmm, what?!
Scaramella: “Antle also suggests that the Board consider using Measure B money to cover some of costs of staffing the new (“mental health”) wing of the jail. There does appear to be Measure B money that was supposed to go to treatment services available. But using it for jail services is a twisted interpretation that is not what the preparers of Measure B told the voters it would be used for.”
Jail is not treatment no matter how you package it!
Every time I drive past the jail, which is daily, I look over at that new building being erected. It is going to be quite nice, no doubt. However, it does not take an entire new building to provide what is necessary to help incarcerated individuals with their Mental Health needs. That’s a new jail!
I mean, holy hell. Most of these people live on the street. They do not care about nice shiny walls and quiet treatment rooms! What they do care about is dignity and being treated compassionately.
You should see some of the psych wards. And if you have I am sorry!
MIKE GENIELLA: RIGHT HERE IN RIVER CITY—
The attacks came swiftly after I posted a response to people hailing the Trump administration’s promised intervention in the long and contentious debate over the fate of future Eel River-Russian River diversions. The latest plan calls for removing upstream dams, draining Lake Pillsbury, an iconic recreation area, and restoring upstream salmon fisheries after a century of being cut off behind dams. Downstream agricultural industries and domestic urban users support continuing Eel River diversions into the Russian River at Potter Valley. Water flows downstream to Lake Mendocino, a man-made reservoir erected in the 1950s for flood control and water supply. Mendocino County decided not to be the local partner with the Army Corps of Engineers, letting the Sonoma County Water Agency step in and secure 89 percent of the water stored behind Coyote Dam for a paltry $5 million. Arguments about who has what have been going on ever since. The latest plan, supported by local Democratic lawmakers, environmentalists, some tribes, and a group of veterans of decades of debate, is loudly opposed by farming (read largely the region’s wine industry) interests, domestic users in small towns from Ukiah to Marin County. In the Trump era, the opposition is hoping so-called support for the nation’s farmers, who twice now have overwhelmingly voted for him, will swamp remaining support for tearing down Scott Dam at Lake Pillsbury, and restricting Eel River diversions into the Russian River to wintertime only. My skeptical comments were immediately greeted with snarky putdowns and sharp swings at “liberal lunacy” and Democratic politics. So it goes.. A growing number of people, including myself, are willing to speak up and not be shouted down by followers of the MAGA movement, and the zealots leading them.
A MENDO LAWYER and his wife were stopped in Oregon by the Oregon State Patrol (OSP) a few years ago while the Mendo attorney and his wife were on their way to visit relatives. The lawyer and his wife were driving north and the OSP officer was driving south, the first circumstance of the stop. The OSP officer noticed that the lawyer was travelling about 20 miles per hour over the speed limit. The OSP officer quickly turned around, crossed the median strip separating the north and south bound lanes, and soon overtook the north bound Mendo couple, who’d seen the officer do his fast u-turn in their rear vision mirrors. When the OSP officer pulled up the couple had already pulled over and exited their car. The officer immediately asked, “Who was driving?” The lawyer realized that the officer was off to a disadvantageous start. “I don’t have to answer that question,” the lawyer said. “Didn’t you see who was driving?” The officer wasn’t amused. “I just need to know who was driving,” he said, irritated. “ Who was driving?” The lawyer answered, “I don’t care to assist you in your investigation. I’m not required to answer.” The officer grew more annoyed. “I guess I’ll have to hold you here while I perform a drug search with a drug dog.” “On what grounds?,” asked the attorney. “What’s the probable cause?” By this time the officer may have suspected he’d pulled over a law school graduate. “I don’t need probable cause to do a drug search in this state,” the officer replied, having noted that the attorney’s vehicle had California plates. “Then you’re doing it without my permission,” replied the attorney, pulling out his notepad. The officer seemed to know by then that he didn’t have an ID on the driver, and couldn’t swear under penalty of perjury (as required by the ticket form, as the attorney knew) that the person he wanted to give a ticket to was the person he’d seen speeding because he hadn’t seen who was behind the wheel “OK,” said the officer, “you’re free to go.” The attorney, realizing he’d won too easily, grabbed his wife by the arm and said, “Let’s go for a walk, hon.” The pair headed out into the woods beside the road. “Where are you going?,” asked the officer. “We’re going for a little walk,” replied the attorney. “If we get in the car you’ll have presumptive knowledge of who was driving and you could give one of us a ticket.” “Very cute,” replied the officer. “Maybe I will call for the drug dog,” he said. “Tell you what,” said the attorney, “if I show you a detective trick that you could use to determine who was driving, will you promise to let us go?” The officer thought for a moment, realizing he didn’t have a legal stop without an ID, no matter how frustrated he was. “Ok,” said the officer, “you’ve got a deal.” The attorney walked to his car and pointed out that the seat was as far forward as it could go and that his wife was significantly shorter than he was. “Obviously, my wife was driving,” said the attorney, “the seat’s pulled all the way up.” The officer was graceful in defeat. “You’re right, that is a good trick,” he said, and Lawyer Man and Mrs. Lawyer Man were free to go. (Mark Scaramella)
SPORTS NOTES.
A FRIEND gave me a box seat ticket to a Saturday day game between the Giants and the Dodgers, a box seat in section 101, deep in the right field corner near the visitor's bullpen.
A few steps away from the Will Call window I took a close look at this unexpected blessing and read that the seat had cost $136. Better not wave this baby around, I thought. Someone might snatch it out of my palsied hand and sprint off to Scalper Land with it.
$136? This must mean free drinks and all the negative food value items you can eat. But then I remembered that the Giants maintain a “flexible pricing system,” meaning that they jack up ticket prices for those games that people are especially keen to see. The flex policy flexes downward for games people don't want to see.
My seat was five rows up from the visitor's bullpen. It was a seat like any other, and it came with no freebies. No sooner had I settled in than I had to duck a screaming line drive that ricocheted around the empty seats behind me until it was finally grabbed by a tattooed man dressed like a small boy in a Giant's jersey and a pair of pants that ended just below his knees. He carried his own baseball glove.
The left handed hitters were drilling lots of batting practice foul balls right at us. I'd forgotten how hard major league ballplayers can hit a baseball. I once saw Orlando Cepeda hit one so hard it knuckled all the way to the left field wall. I haven't owned a baseball glove in years, but I could have used one that Saturday, imagining myself jumping up and snagging one from the tattooed 'tard in the short pants.
There was also an unsuccessfully tattooed cop standing behind the bullpen, or maybe his right arm was beginning to age and his tats were all running together. As it was, he looked like a leper. I suppose he was positioned there to keep drunks from rushing the field, but at these prices the people seated around me were a sedate mix of the middle-aged-to-elderly with a few grandkids who constantly chirped, “I wanna wanna wanna wanna, Daddeeeee!”
Four sixty-ish women in front of me got steadily drunker, taking turns for the trek to the liquor stand, laughing uproariously at the mildly lewd hip thrusts of Lou Seal, the Giants mascot, and constant ballpark reminder of how infantilized the population of our fine, fat land has become. I yearned for the Candlestick days when fans so often assaulted Krazy Krab, the Giants had to retire him for the safety of the guy inside the costume.
The ballpark demographic has changed from rowdy to well behaved, but then the ballpark has also changed from post-industrial Candlestick to gizmo-corporate AT&T with thousands of seats now occupied by non-fans who get their tickets as part of their signing bonuses down the street at Cubicle.com in China Basin. Candlestick was often wayyyyy outtahand, but how can you knock fans with the aesthetic good sense to pelt a cartoon character with beer bottles?
That day, Giants manager Bochy probably lost the game 3-2 when he let pitcher Matt Cain hit with two outs and the bases loaded, and Cain, who struck out, was pulled anyway the next inning, and the seagulls swooped down on the tons of garbage left in the stands by the departing gourmands, and off we went out onto the street and into the cool sunshine on the water, a great mass of sated Americans moving like shoals of landlocked Belugas, homeward bound.
IT WAS THE GREAT DAY IN 2014 when I biked over to Hippy Hill in Golden Gate Park to watch the 4-20 festivities. April 20 at 4:20pm derived from pioneer stoners at San Rafael High School meeting at 4:20 to furtively fire up some ditch weed. Today's marijuana, developed right here in Mendocino County, is a lot stronger. On April 20th, America's stoners all light up at once in mass celebration of a drug that makes them slow and, they say, happy. I expected something like a few hundred ancient flower children shaking their cadaverous booties with maybe the perennially annoying Wavy Gravy gumming some peace and love platitudes, but what I found was, well, put it this way — the hippies of '67 look positively wholesome put alongside this crew. If the event had been advertised as Thug Fest 2014 we would have had some truth in advertising. Lots of gangstas and no hippies of the traditional tie-dyed doofus type, only acres of tough guys and hard-eyed women very unlike the ones who married dear old dad. The entire area between Hippie Hill and the Children's Playground was wall-to-wall criminal intent. A cloud of pot and grill smoke hung over the park. Every other person seemed to have an apparatus that boomed out celebrations of murder. “You lost, Pops?,” a kid asked me, and it belatedly occurred to me that in my khakis and button down blue shirt I was definitely odd man out. The scene was, for sure, more than mildly disconcerting, and when I saw a large white guy, maybe 40, shirtless, obviously a veteran of many hours on a prison weight pile, his skin festooned with jail tats and a big White Pride announcement scrawled across his back, when I saw this guy, a maniacal grin on his face, wade into the multi-ethnic gang-bangers, I knew the love drug had failed to work its magic on him, and that bad things were about to happen in Golden Gate Park, the City’s sylvan retreat, urban respite of forest and meadow, natural solace amidst the din and clamor of city life, and I was glad to get on my bike and head home.
TWO DAYS LATER, the Chron's comment line was mostly a lot of huffing and puffing about “hippies” having left The City with a huge clean-up bill for a trashed park, and isn't it just like the hypocrites to talk about how much they love Mother Earth then leave tons of trash in our trampled park? But this thing was not a hippie event, and Marx himself never could have foreseen how many and how fearsome the lumpen had become.
KEEP IT CLASSY, MR. PRESIDENT
ED NOTE: Coming from anybody else, Trump's Easter message would be a sure sign of early stage dementia, right up there with his insane statement that Haitian immigrants are eating America's household pets. Biden was obviously ga-ga during all four years of his tenure, but he was never this ga-ga.
A SIX YEAR OLD UKIAH BOY was seriously injured in a bicycle incident on Friday, April 18, 2025 when the boy rode into the path of a 2006 Toyota pickup on Chablis Drive at Sauterne Place at about 6:15pm. The boy suffered major injuries and was airlifted to UC Davis Medical Center for treatment. Drugs or alcohol were not considered factors in the incident. CHP is investigating. If you have any information about the incident call the CHP/Ukiah at 707 467-4420. (CHP Presser)
ON-LINE COMMENTS OF THE WEEK
[1] I went to a nearby car wash recently that I have patronized for a few years. After waiting in a line of cars I finally pulled up to the payment kiosk and the credit card machine was locked up. I asked the attendant if I could pay for a wash and was informed that I would need to purchase a “membership”. When I asked to just pay for a car wash I was told no and directed to get out of the line and leave. It was humiliating and I tried to slink off without making eye contact with the other customers.
A web search revealed that my local carwash is now one of 270 car washes owned by a large private equity firm as part of an extensive portfolio. They own a variety of businesses and are operated by MBAs, lawyers, and suits from various Ivy League institutions. The car wash segment of their portfolio is described on their website as being in the business of “retail/subscriptions”.
[2] Gas went up .40 cents this past week here. Grocery prices aren’t going down and WTF?: ”The US is getting RICH ON TARIFFS.”
Does this fucking moron not understand who pays for tariffs? I mean it is really simple. The US customer/business pays the tariff and passes it on to their customers. China or the penguins on the Heard and McDonald Islands are not paying the tariff. I don’t know how this concept is so hard for anyone, especially someone who brags about graduating from Wharton.
[3] If a person wants to identify as a squirrel that is their business. If a trans person wants to identify as a man or a woman that is their business.
[4] Somebody once described life as that little flurry of activity between the 2 great eternities. Works for me. The thought of eternal life as opposed to oblivion frankly terrifies me, but all that really happens is somebody else gets my hospital bed.
[5] No woman is ever good enough for a mother's son. As a housewife you must live with that. Try telling your mother-in-law you do not give a jot for what she thinks of you. Because you are eternally grateful to her for producing such a wonderful son. That will infuriate her and be like ' heaping coals upon her head ' My wonderful mother exhibited the same fault. I spared her anxiety by never marrying. For my OWN reasons. Thus she had no rival for my love. God keep her.
[6] I am from Europe and every time I am in America, the food we eat makes us sick. The food in USA is absolutely junk! You can feel how your body just wants to reject even the so-called "quality" food.
[7] Everyone going solo on their phones all day whether on social media or gaming etc. are living solitary lives. Look at the effect porn has had on relationships! Gone are the days of a sleazy laser disc that was stored high in the closet for occasional “use”!
Back in the 1950’s and 60’s when I was growing up my parents had set nights to go bowling or play cards with friends. Lots of talking went on then! (We used to listen in on the steps). Church activities pulled people together socially and lots of interactions happened there as well.
The iPhone has changed all that. You can now sit alone on a park bench and continue bingeing the latest “White Lotus”! Back in the day one or two programs might be watched in an evening on the TV plus the news.
It seems to me that TPTB want us to be isolated and easily propagandized (lied to). So far they are winning.
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