Becoming Sunny | Contrails | PD Sale | Folk Duo | Courthouse Project | Mendo Homeless | Biracial Leaf | Ungoverned Ukiah | Wildflower Show | Boontling Classic | Blocking Comments | Starving Pelicans | Pomo Dance | Yesterday's Catch | Mister Anachronism | Westward Bound | Dreamed Poem | Christian Qualities | Tiger Skull | Running | Giants Win | Superman Curry | Not Here | Beating Nordic | Hurry Dad | Dental Cavities | Bad System | Let's Eat | Empty Promises | Sunday Times | Great Delusion | Bach Hydropower | Grammar Vandal | Candy Mountain | City Busking
DRY conditions are anticipated today as ridging builds aloft. A quick passing trough will bring increased cloud cover and a possibility of mountain showers on Tuesday. Dry weather returns on Wednesday with temperatures warming well above normal through Thursday. (NWS)
STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): A brisk 39F with clear skies this Monday morning on the coast. The fog is nearby so we will likely see it at times this week, a bit breezy into Tuesday, otherwise generally cool & clear is our forecast this week. Another shot of rain again this Friday? Will we get fooled again?
MARTIN BRADLEY: On April 23, Mas Air Flight M73618 flew over Ukiah en route from Los Angeles to Zhengzhou. Mendocino County is a flyover country for jets heading to Asia, with planes turning west between Point Arena and Point Mendocino towards China and Japan.
(Flight information from FlightRadar24)
PRESS DEMOCRAT GUILD WAIVES CONTRACT clearing path for paper's sale to Hearst
by Noah Abrams & Greta Mart
The sale of Santa Rosa's Press Democrat looks imminent.
The Press Democrat Guild is the local union for editorial staff at the Santa Rosa newspaper and its sister publications around Sonoma County.
The guild is bringing its current contract to an early end, a move they hope will smooth the takeover by Hearst Media.
Phil Barber, a reporter and member of the Press Democrat Guild, said it was still a tough decision.
"It was a choice of poisons in a lot of ways," Barber said.
Barber, a guild leader, said the union opted to waive the remaining year and a half of the current contract, set to expire in August, 2026.
That allows the Press Democrat's owners, Sonoma Media Investments, to sell the paper to Hearst Media, owners of the San Francisco Chronicle.
As part of the agreement between the paper's staff and Sonoma Media Investments, the guild will not attempt to block the sale.
In exchange, guild members will receive a payout, and, according to reporting in KQED, be offered employment at the their current salaries by Hearst. Barber said the current contract was seen as a stumbling block for Hearst, opening the door to bids from other parties.
Prominent Sonoma County real estate developers Bill and Cindy Gallaher were among a group of people who made a bid for the paper; another offer is rumored to have come from Alden Capital, an investment firm, which has been described as the "destroyer of newspapers".
With the path clear for Hearst, Barber said the guild is, "looking forward to hearing more about what Hearst will bring to ownership if in fact this deal goes through, and what Hearst can offer our workers."
"But we're hopeful in the long run that we can all still be providing the strong community journalism that I think made the Press Democrat and its sister newspapers a valuable asset," Barber said.
Barber said the memorandum of understanding to waive the contract has been signed by Sonoma Media Investments and the Press Democrat Guild, but he said the guild has not yet communicated with Hearst directly.
Editiorial staff at the Chronicle, like the Press Democrat, have their own bargaining unit under the Pacific Media Workers Guild umbrella.
One of the competing bidders for the newspaper is no stranger to the its coverage.
Husband and wife duo Bill and Cindy Gallaher, founders and leaders of real estate developer Gallaher Companies, are angling to bring the paper into their portfolio.
Asked why, Cindy Gallaher said, "because we know they're in negotiation to sell it to Hearst, and we feel it's important that we maintain a local paper for local issues."
The Press Democrat and it's sister publications the Sonoma Index Tribune, Petaluma Argus-Courier, Sonoma County Gazette, La Prensa Sonoma, Sonoma Magazine, and North Bay Business Journal are owned by Sonoma Media Investments, commonly called SMI.
The locally based group, led by prominent political lobbyist Darius Anderson, purchased the Press Democrat in 2012.
Former Congressman Doug Bosco, a member of the SMI ownership group, all but confirmed an impending sale of the paper in a recent interview with the San Francisco Standard.
Bosco said the many of the paper's owners are aging and interested in selling or passing it to on.
Publishing powerhouse Hearst, which owns the SF Chronicle, quickly emerged as a front runner to buy the 128 year old newspaper, with apparently an $8 million bid.
The rival bid headed by the Gallahers said they are offering $12 million.
Komron Shahosseini, another member of that prospective purchasing group, stressed their local ties.
"What we've done is essentially just said that there's an alternative here and it's a local alternative; and if SMI is interested, as they I think have made clear that they are in keeping the paper local, that we're available," Shahosseini said.
The Gallahers are frequent fixtures of the paper's reporting. They are prominent in Sonoma County civil society, with philanthropic ventures like saving the Athena House in Santa Rosa and it's women's treatment and sober living program.
They are powerful local political players as well. Bill Gallaher mounted an unsuccessful $1.8 million dollar effort to recall former Sonoma County District Attorney Jill Ravitch over her decision to sue Gallaher's company Oakmont Senior Living for abandoning seniors during the 2017 Tubbs Fire. Okamont Senior Living ultimately settled over their conduct during the firestorm.
Despite the family's contentious relationship with the paper, which includes a libel lawsuit, Cindy Gallaher maintained that their influence on the paper's editorial independence would be, "pretty much none."
"It's a good paper," Gallaher said. "It's done a good job, and we don't intend to exert any editorial control."
Shahosseini said the investment group does not want to cut large numbers of staff, and would honor the contract agreed between SMI and the Press Democrat Guild.
Editor's note - a previous version of this story described Alden Capital as a hedge fund. As pointed out to KRCB News by a company spokesperson, Alden Capital previously operated as a hedge fund, but is now an investment firm, according to SEC filings.
(norcalpublicmedia.org)
SUPERVISOR TED WILLIAMS
Several people have asked me about the recent news of a $144M courthouse at a time the county finances are a struggle. The Trial Court Funding Act of 1997 shifted the funding responsibility of courts from counties to the state. The courthouse is a state project. It has “Mendocino County” in its name, but the project is not by county government.
Why is the state doing this now? It’s been long in the making. I’m not a decision-maker. The efforts were under California Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jerry Brown, and Gavin Newsom (signaling bi-partisan). Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this is the rough timeline:
Mid-2000s: Court officials acknowledged severe issues with the 1928/49 Ukiah courthouse, including safety, seismic risks, and ADA compliance, and began evaluating replacement options.
2008: California passed SB 1407, providing funding for courthouse projects through increased fees and fines. Mendocino County’s new Ukiah courthouse was listed as a critical need project under this program. State feasibility studies around 2008 recommended replacing the old Ukiah courthouse due to significant deficiencies.
2011: A public site selection process occurred. The state’s Administrative Office of the Courts and a local advisory committee studied potential sites. In October 2011, a Draft Environmental Impact Report evaluated two main locations: the downtown “Library block” and the East Perkins Street “Railroad Depot” site. The rail depot site was selected as the preferred location. Plans at this stage proposed an approximately 114,000 sq. ft. courthouse with 9 courtrooms, a budget of roughly $120 million, and an anticipated construction start in 2014.
2013: The project faced a funding setback. Ongoing state budget issues diverted courthouse funds, prompting the Judicial Council to delay Mendocino’s project funding until at least fiscal year 2014–15. At this time, the project budget remained approximately $119 million for 9 courtrooms, but it was effectively on hold.
January 2014: The Judicial Council approved construction plans for several delayed projects, including Mendocino’s courthouse, as part of a statewide cost-reduction and prioritization effort. However, this approval did not immediately resolve funding challenges.
March 2016: The State Public Works Board approved the purchase of 4.1 acres at the Ukiah rail depot site for the new courthouse, spending $3.65 million to acquire and prepare the property. Escrow closed in April 2016, officially securing the site. An 8-courtroom courthouse designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was announced, with a tentative completion date set for 2020.
August 2016: Facing a $1.4 billion shortfall in the courthouse construction fund, the Judicial Council halted further work on the Ukiah courthouse immediately after the site acquisition. The project was indefinitely shelved pending future funding.
2017–2020: The courthouse project remained on hold. In 2019, a judicial branch facilities reassessment reaffirmed Ukiah as a top-priority courthouse project should funding become available.
2021: Governor Newsom’s 2021–22 state budget included General Fund dollars to reactivate the Mendocino courthouse project. The California Legislature approved an initial allocation of $3.3 million, plus future bond financing. The Judicial Council reactivated the courthouse project in 2021, adopting a design-build approach.
2022: The design-build procurement process proceeded, selecting Hensel Phelps and Fentress Architects to design and construct the courthouse, now planned as approximately 81,000 sq. ft. with 7 courtrooms and a budget of around $144 million. Preparatory site work began.
2023: The project was officially classified as an “immediate need” and received full funding through the state budget. State and local officials finalized designs and logistics.
2024–2025: Construction began with groundbreaking ceremonies held in spring 2025. Construction of the new Ukiah courthouse was underway, with completion anticipated by 2027, culminating roughly two decades of planning.
https://courts.ca.gov/…/mendocino-county-new-ukiah…
ED NOTE: Supervisor Williams has merely relayed the state’s version of the project, as if it’s all kinda magical, that at no point could locals not do a thing about it. In fact, the new courthouse, three long blocks from the present courthouse, will cost Mendocino County a lot of money it doesn’t have just in the logistics of getting the DA from his office in the old courthouse to the new one, nevermind the other court-related functions left behind in the present courthouse or similarly stranded. Local authorities, predictably, waved the new courthouse right on by, right down to its eyesore design. And it’s laughable to think this thing can be built, by outside contractors, for $144 million, all those millions paid for by the fines and fees paid by us, brothers and sisters. Williams has signed off on every disaster and misfire to come before him and his colleagues, and even helped engineer the disastrous prosecution (and persecution) of Ms. Cubbison, and here he is, predictably, signing off on one more.
SUPERVISOR MO MULHEREN (facebook):
Sunday morning I wanted to share two photos from Saturday. One is a sign from The Lot — a place run by a young man who’s working hard to create space for small businesses and local musicians to grow, that was stolen from where it was advertising a community event.
The other is a bike, chained to a tree in a homeless encampment. When people talk about the “family” feeling of encampments, what they’re often describing is trauma bonding — survival, not safety. The truth is, living like this isn’t safe, and it isn’t sustainable.
We can’t just leave people in these conditions and hope things get better. We also can’t keep letting them do harm to the people in our community that are doing their best to help Ukiah thrive.
That’s why programs like CORE Mendocino matter so much. CORE meets people where they are — and helps them find a way off the streets, out of the waterways, and into real support and stability.
We have the heart, we have the programs — now we just need to keep pushing forward, together.
We have to do things differently, that’s going to be hard for some people but it’s time.
You can read more about CORE at coremendocino.org
Facebook Response from Tim Schmadeke:
As a constituent i would love to see way more of this money better spent not on cleaning up after them but enforcing them to clean it up… it’s like raising kids, either you train them on taking responsibility for themselves or they train u by doing it for them and making handouts even more accessible. The courts have a community service program for ppl to avoid jail time and fines in lieu of… Should be the same for the homeless! There r many reasons your homeless population has grown, from politics, handouts, failure to hold ppl responsible for their bad actions, etc. But the biggest reason is instead of educating how to be better citizens we allow encampments to get out of control. Utilize law enforcement to clear out and then someone else cleans up their mess — and repeat! Upwards of $12 million is being spent on homelessness in Mendo. Yet it’s growing, not declining, much like California is spending $500 million and it’s growing. Your democratic policies are not working! Open your eyes and wake up!
THEY CAN’T EVEN GOVERN UKIAH
by Tommy Wayne Kramer
Denny’s restaurant, longtime cornerstone of Highway 101 and Ukiah’s busiest road into town, closed a couple years ago.
Nothing was done to prevent it being destroyed by various vagrants, criminals and druggies who infest the area. It’s not even clear city officials knew it had shut down; the Lords of Ukiah wouldn’t be caught alive at a Denny’s.
In March a representative from Habit Hamburger came to town to discuss purchasing Denny’s. The project manager met with the city’s Design Review Board. Among the comments from the Habit Hamburger rep were these:
1) “We would like to have outside seating, but that option is not preferred where there is a lot of transient population.”
2) “We’ve had a lot of people trying to break into the building, and have had to build a fence to keep people from parking trailers there.”
3) “People hide under the freeway overpass which leads to difficulties with our insurance company, and especially with all the fires that have happened. Our insurance company has actually been sending inspectors (to the Denny’s site) and if they see any homeless encampments around the property they send us a notice.”
4) Asked if the restaurant might be able to provide partially enclosed outside seating at the refurbished restaurant, the representative said, “Any (outside dining area built) would have to do a really good job, because people have climbed on the roof, so it would have to be almost entirely enclosed. Also, it has been noted that barriers become an attraction to certain people who climb over them.”
Lesson: a once-popular, thriving dining spot folds, leaves behind an empty but functioning restaurant, and the city shrugs its collective shoulders and spends the next two years ignoring it as it crumbles, decays, falls prey to criminals, druggies, vandals, arsonists and homeless who cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages.
It’s a scenario Ukiah has practiced to perfection through the decades as witnessed in the Palace Hotel, U.S. Post Office, the old train depot, North State Cafe and others. But the Perkins Street corridor is the main artery into town, and among the most vital and valuable commercial properties in the city limits.
By ignoring it, and worse, by allowing our imported criminal class to wreak havoc upon it, the city makes the Denny’s location less inviting, less desirable and less affordable.
Ukiah administrators are unwilling or unable to govern Ukiah. They ignore shops and stores closing all over town; East Perkins is a ghost street. The city is powerless in the face of ever-expanding homeless swarms, and has no answer to rampant graffiti that uglies the city from north to south.
Instead they focus on big ideas, big projects. Is there ever a time when officials aren’t boasting about new “affordable housing” projects anywhere they can be crammed into empty spaces? These monstrosities are government housing of a style and scope unprecedented in Ukiah. Our leaders love to Think Big, but ignore the little things that make life worse.
The downtown streetscape, botched from the start, will still be tormenting drivers 75 years from now. City staff grows and grows, having hired so many extra “workers” it bought the BofA building to accommodate them. What do these government workers do, other than ignore the homeless, the graffiti, the boarded-up State Street and the deteriorating Denny’s Restaurant?
Local officials, suffering no shortage of self adoration, are now launching an ill-conceived annexation plan to spread their visionary magic across another 800 acres. It will more than double the size of a modest little city that has remained oddly unique and comfortably accommodating through 150 years.
Shall we forfeit all that makes Ukiah Ukiah, so (temporary) bosses can make Ukiah Rohnert Park? Do you live here happily dreaming of the day Ukiah resembles an anonymous appendage to San Jose?
Are citizens obligated to acquire more land so administrators can carry out more foolish plans, but on a grander scale? When the bosses demand fresh targets for their glorious ambitions are we obliged to provide them?
Some fine day these fancy folks will stand on the roof of the still-empty Palace Hotel and overlook their newly acquired lands, as Caesar must have stood on a hillside looking down into Gaul, or as minor deities shake a snow globe and proudly admire their works.
UNITY CLUB NEWS
by Miriam Martinez
April showers bring May Wildflowers; just in time for the annual A.V. Unity Club's Wildflower Show May 3rd & 4th in June Hall at the Boonville Fairgrounds. Doors open at 10 and close at 4 both days. Admission is FREE!
Enjoy seeing all the Wildflowers collected by dedicated plant ID specialists. Bring in that plant you were wondering "Is this a Calypso Orchid?" Buy some plants, many of which are butterfly, hummingbird, or pollinator friendly. Visit with the folks from the California Native Plants Society. Learn more about ticks and Lyme Disease. View the highschool students Art Exhibit. Sit back and relax in our Tea Room. We'll be serving tacos, tamales, and an assortment of baked goods; coffee, tea and horchata. The beautiful photographs of wildflowers will grace the walls of the Tea Room. Stroll around the Silent Auction tables. You can treat yourself to wine tasting, dinner, local artisans' fine art, a tour, or a basket of goodies. The lucky bidders will be selected before 4 p.m. each day. You will be contacted by phone.
Saturday the 3rd of May will be very special. At 2:00 we will have a presentation by Kerry Winneger from SSU's Galbreath Preserve, on "Sudden Oak Death." If you've seen those trees split apart and melt into the ground, you have got to wonder why.
Our other special event is the Community Lending Library will be open extended hours (10 to 4) and we're having a sale. Get yourself a bag of books for only $5.00! You can't beat a bargain like that.
Come to the Anderson Valley Unity Club's Annual Wildflower Show May 3rd and 4th from 10 to 4. Admission is Free. All proceeds go to scholarships for graduating high school seniors, and other community projects sponsored by the Unity Club.
AV BREWING COMPANY: We’re excited to support the 40th Annual Boontling Classic 5k Footrace, coming up this Sunday, May 4th, at 10am! The race starts and finishes at the Anderson Valley Elementary School, and proceeds go to benefit the Anderson Valley Food Bank! It’s a great cause, and a great event! We’ll be providing some merch for the post-race drawing at the end of the race, so enter and run and get a chance to win some Beer swag!
EYSTER BLOCKING COMMENT
District Attorney blocking public comments on his social media posts
Hello,
I am Mike Geniella, a veteran North Coast journalist.
At issue is Mendocino County District Attorney David Eyster’s practice of selectively blocking public comments on his posts on the Mendocino County District Attorney site on Facebook and other social media.
The local news media have repeatedly raised the matter with him. Eyster ignores the complaints and citations of the U.S. Supreme Court opinion governing such issues.
I am requesting a review by the AG staff and an opinion on how to make the District Attorney comply.
Please advise,
Mike Geniella
Ukiah Daily Journal
Anderson Valley Advertiser
707-477-6733
BROWN PELICANS ARE STARVING ACROSS CALIFORNIA. Wildlife experts think they know why
by St. John Barned-Smith
JD Bergeron felt the dread return this spring when worried volunteers kept showing up at International Bird Rescue’s wildlife facilities with starving brown pelicans.
It’s happening again, Bergeron thought.
For the third time in four years, brown pelicans around California appear to be ailing. Over the past month, more than 100 malnourished and struggling birds have been brought to the nonprofit’s Bay Area and Southern California wildlife centers, said Bergeron, International Bird Rescue’s CEO.
The birds are arriving listless and starving, and are being found in places out of their habitat: parking lots, backyards and even a tattoo shop. Many sport additional injuries, probably caused by fishing hooks or lines.
“There’s been semi-regular problems with brown pelicans,” he said. “These large population crashes result in lots of birds coming in for care. Fortunately, many can be saved.”
Bergeron and others believe climate change is warming water close to the ocean surface — sending the fish that pelicans eat deeper and out of their reach, leading to skinny, malnourished and disoriented birds.
The phenomenon marks a potentially worrying setback for a species that has struggled over the years and spent decades on the endangered species list due to exposure to DDT, a synthetic pesticide that weakened eggshells, causing their breeding numbers to plummet. It wasn’t until 2009 that brown pelicans were removed from the list.
Last year, the Bay Area rescue center and its Southern California counterpart treated hundreds of malnourished pelicans, which wildlife officials attributed to a late spring storm that made fishing extremely difficult for the birds.
A similar starvation happened in spring 2022, when almost 800 pelicans were admitted into wildlife facilities and close to 400 were returned to the wild, according to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.
This year’s wave of malnourished pelicans came as the bird sanctuary was already dealing with an onslaught of birds suffering from poisoning from domoic acid, caused by algal blooms.
Then, dozens of young pelicans started arriving at International Bird Rescue’s wildlife centers. By the end of March, the center was treating 41 birds, including many that hatched this year, Bergeron said. Large numbers of fledgling pelicans can point to a strong breeding year, but he and others worry that the domoic acid bloom may have poisoned parent pelicans, causing fledglings to leave their nests in search of food.
More pelicans kept arriving in April, but many of those did not seem to be suffering from domoic acid, he said.
“It took us a minute to realize, ‘Uh-oh, it’s transitioning,’” he said. “We were nervous, having had challenges in 2022 and 2024, we thought, ‘Maybe this is something cyclical,’ but … this happening the very next year wasn’t on any of our radars.”
Bergeron and others are concerned that fish are swimming deeper to escape warming ocean waters, out of pelicans’ reach. Other animals that eat the same fish don’t seem to be suffering.
“There are changes in the ocean resulting in pelicans not being able to feed the way they historically have,” he said.
Now, the birds are gorging — they can eat their body weight in fish every day — and the influx of birds has Bergeron’s staff working long hours, scrambling to make sure it has enough food, medicine and other supplies to care for its patients.
“We’re clearly not out of the woods,” Bergeron said. “We need to dig deeper and figure out what are the root causes of this problem and how do we fix that?”
(sfchronicle.com)
CATCH OF THE DAY, Sunday, April 27, 2025
MICHAEL BARNES, 54, Willits. Under influence.
WILLIAM BARNETT, 27, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia, concealed dirk-dagger, probation revocation.
ANGEL CARILLO-LOPEZ, 22, Ukiah. DUI.
JACK GOUBER, 57, Ukiah. Domestic violence court order violation, resisting.
EUGENE HARRIS, 51, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
ELIZABETH JOHNSON-COSGROVE, 34, Ukiah. Robbery, probation revocation.
CAMERON LENHART, 36, Willits. DUI, controlled substance.
RONNIE MAIN, 49, Laytonville. Under influence while possessing firearm, paraphernalia, loaded handgun-not registered owner, evidence tampering.
COTY NOLLER, 29, Union City/Ukiah. DUI-any drug.
PATRICIA SIMPSON, 30, Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.
ALWOOD SMITH, 24, Ukiah. Vandalism, parole violation, probation violation.
SERGEY TOLPINSKIY, 48, Sacramento/Laytonville. DUI, resisting.
DAVID WYATT, 52, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, assault with deadly weapon not a gun, probation revocation, resisting.
WINGING WESTWARD
Have accomplished all that was committed to in Washington, D.C. during this sixteenth visit. The Peace Vigil across the street from the White House is ongoing. Am more than ready to leave the rough ‘n tumble homeless shelter. I didn’t get murdered. I’ll need a pick up at the Santa Rosa airport, and a place to live with other enlightened beings. You are welcome, postmodern America, for the past 50 years of frontline peace & justice and radical environmental organizing, direct action, and all of the writing/publications.
Craig Louis Stehr, craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
THE USES OF SORROW
by Mary Oliver (2005)
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY
The next time a Christian says, “If you had faith in God you’d enjoy loving, caring thoughts. I’ll pray for you,” notice how the sentence is used.
Is it a kind expression of love and concern, or is it what it is meant to be ~ a big ole slap in your face? “I am superior to you. I’m chosen. I have access to truths that you do not have. You are stupid, I know the truth. I am not all angry and do not hate everybody else like you do”
There is no condescension and arrogance like Christian humility, no ignorance like Christian knowledge and no hate like Christian love.
RUNNING,
wild rose ravine jumps, running
deer sorrel dog tooth violet
bog splash … trillium … running
wild parsnips & pussy-willows, centaurs & skunk cabbage
thimbleberry … huckleberry … star thistle … running!
doug iris running in the open
wild, running wild … strawberries
stinging nettles
penstemons
foxgloves & salomonseal
sword ferns & soap root running
bleeding hearts! running, wild-running
jack-in-the-pulpit & blooming sally
columbine & paint brush
plantain & ragwort … running, running
calypsos … ladyslippers … running
running green
running yellow red … lavendar
cerise running white
running wild
rain running
fog running
sun running
lupine & broom
mustard & wild
radish & vetch
monkey flowers
buckeye & rye
wild cucumbers
running
buckwheat & bracken
running!
log trucks & daffodils
Green Acres Welcome!
Winnebago Diesel Smoke Jake Brakes
popping grinding belching
“Gimme a three-dollar an hour man with a saw!
Rip up those trees!
Improve Our Lot!” … running … running
“Tear down those old buildings!
Burn off that block!” … running running
Banks & Real Estate … Banks & Real Estate
Park that bank over there please
Ice Plant, Atten—Hut! Banks & Real Estate
Banks & Real Estate
ice plant & junipers redwood chips
between the rounds … cold stone … running running
running White
running Wild
— Don Shanley
GIANTS WALK-OFF RANGERS ON RAMOS’ WILD NINTH-INNING LITTLE LEAGUE HOME RUN
by Shayna Rubin
The San Francisco Giants have won nine games at home. Five of them are walk-off victories.
The fifth walk-off was one of its kind: Through a series of throwing errors, Heliot Ramos turned a soft infield ground ball hit into no-man’s land into a game-winning Little League home run to secure the Giants’ 3-2 win over the Texas Rangers on Sunday afternoon. With that, the Giants won the series against the Rangers and finished 10-7 in their stretch of 17 games in as many days.
Similar to every other walk-off, the win was emblematic of what’s made this Giants team a force in the season’s early goings. In most games so far, the Giants have found timely hits, been steady defensively and pulled the right strings on the pitching end to keep a win within reach. Tuesday’s win was also their league-leading 10th win when trailing by two-or-more runs at any point.
“It’s how long we’ve talked about good defense and execution at the right times,” manager Bob Melvin said. “Giving yourself a chance to win without beating yourself. We’ve seen that multiple times this year and we try to preach that.”
Most statistical measurements paint the picture of a team that would’ve tripped up in the tricky National League West by now. Defensively, they fall below average in outs above average (-7) and defensive runs saved (-1) while their pitching rotations’ 4.20 ERA ranks 22nd in baseball. At the plate, the club’s 98 wRC+ (weighted runs created) is a touch below the league average (100) and their .688 OPS (On-base Plius Slugging) ranks 19th in MLB.
Where the Giants excel is in the bullpen. The group’s 2.30 ERA is second-best in baseball behind the San Diego Padres (an upcoming 4-game series opponent starting Tuesday after Monday’s off-day). Most importantly, they excel in the big picture: They have five walk-off wins, 19 total wins through 29 games and plus-23 run differential -- fourth biggest in the NL.
“We just take it one pitch at a time,” Ramos said. “Obviously, the pitchers always keep us in the game. We take good at-bats, we get on base. We do whatever we have to do to win the game.”
Early on Sunday, the Giants couldn’t capitalize against Rangers pitcher Jack Leiter and didn’t have their best at-bats against any of the four Rangers relievers manager Bruce Bochy tapped once Leiter exited one out into the fourth inning.
Leiter wasn’t operating with his best command, and the Giants loaded the bases on a pair of walks from Willy Adames and Matt Chapman sandwiching Jung Hoo Lee’s single to right. Wilmer Flores walked in a run, his league-leading 28th RBI, but the Giants couldn’t add on.
LaMonte Wade Jr.’s streak of bad luck ramped up with the bases loaded as he missed a home run by a few feet off the right field bricks and, a few pitches later, his 107 mph line drive found second baseman Semien’s glove for an inning-ending out. It’s progress for Wade, who in 22 games leading up to this series against the Rangers, was batting .094 with 21 strikeouts and 12 walks.
He went 0-for-3, but feels his pitch selection has improved during this recent stretch.
“I’m not hanging my head or anything,” Wade said. “It’s not like at the beginning when I was striking out a lot. So putting good contact on it, they’ll start to fall. I’m not worried about that.”
Second baseman Christian Koss tied it in the fourth inning with his first career RBI single, scoring Ramos from third.
After a rocky start to the year in which most starters struggled to pitch deep into games, the starting rotation is beginning to dig itself out of a slow start. Jordan Hicks had one of his crisper starts of the year.
Of the 17 runs Hicks has given up over six starts, 10 have come in the first inning. That includes two Sunday. Jake Burger and Joc Pederson hit back-to-back doubles, putting both runners in scoring position with one out. With two outs, Marcus Semien blooped a broken-bat single just out of left-fielder Ramos’ reach to score both.
“Got to live with those kind of moments,” Hicks said. “It’s baseball. Broken bat. What are you going to do?”
It would be the only runs Hicks would allow through five innings. With his sinker velocity down to 94.4 mph from its season high 97.6 mph -- a trend Hicks attributed to pitching at the tail-end of a 17-game stretch -- Hicks mostly kept ahead in the count and didn’t allow a walk while striking out three.
Hayden Birdsong played piggyback to Hicks with three shutout innings with very little drama. Pederson’s line drive to the right-center gap bounced off right fielder Mike Yastrzemski’s wrist for a leadoff triple in the sixth inning, but Birdsong retired the side with one strikeout to strand the potential go-ahead run. Birdsong lowered his ERA to 1.13 and has held opponents scoreless in all but one of his seven outings.
(SF Chronicle)
WARRIORS’ STEPH CURRY BEATS ROCKETS’ ‘CONSTANT BLITZING’ IN ONE OF HIS TOUGHEST GAMES
by Ann Killion
With apologies to Jimmy Butler, the “Batman” nickname didn’t quite apply to Stephen Curry on Saturday night.
In a crucial Game 3 between the Golden State Warriors and the Houston Rockets, Curry was more like Superman. A solo superstar. And the Rockets not only tugged on Superman’s cape, they scratched Superman’s arms, they pulled Superman’s shorts, they knocked Superman on his butt, and they did everything possible to be Superman’s kryptonite.
None of it worked.
In one of his toughest and most unique playoff appearances, Curry carried the Warriors past the Rockets, 104-93, and to a 2-1 lead in the first-round series. Curry scored 36 points and almost had a triple double with nine rebounds and seven assists. He made five 3-pointers and only turned the ball over twice against the Rockets’ swarming defense that Steve Kerr described as “a constant blitzing of Steph.”
“You know it’s not going to be a beautiful brand of basketball, because of the matchup, the defensive intensity, the physicality,” Curry said.
Gritty. Often ugly. But winning. The grind-it-out victory just may have sucked the soul out of the Rockets, who had successfully knocked Butler out of a key playoff game, had a 13-point lead in the second quarter, yet found themselves on the losing end to Curry “and the other guys.” The Rockets’ entire game plan was to stop Curry and they couldn’t do it.
“To play 41 minutes against that kind of defense, to have a slow start and then find his rhythm, which we have seen him do countless times over the years, to hit big shots, to only turn it over twice against that kind of pressure, he was brilliant,” Kerr said of Curry.
The Warriors had a collective slow start. This was decidedly not beautiful basketball. During an almost nine-minute stretch of the first half, the Warriors scored only four points. Curry took just four shots in the first quarter and was getting no help from his supporting cast.
“There was a moment in the second quarter, where I had to get a little bit more assertive,” he said. “It didn’t seem like there was a lot of flow, so I did kind of force the issue in the second quarter.”
Good thing he did. The Warriors only had 24 points and were down 13 with 5:16 minutes to play in the first half. At times they looked like the hapless pre-Butler, January Warriors, which is definitely not the way to strike fear into an opponent in a playoff game.
But then Curry scored 13 points in a 24-12 Warriors run to end the second quarter, cutting the deficit to just three points at halftime.
“I thought the key to the game was the way we closed the second quarter to get some momentum,” Kerr said. “We felt pretty good at halftime as a result.”
With spacing adjustments at halftime, and led by Curry’s tough brilliance, role players such as Buddy Hield, Gary Payton II and Quinten Post all started to contribute and the Warriors pulled away in the final minutes.
“We all follow him, with that type of tenacity,” Draymond Green said. “You’re not going to be the guy that lets him down when he’s running like that. I try to bring that energy and I didn’t have it. I followed him; we all followed him.
“He took it upon himself to bring that type of force to the game. And we all fell in line.”
It has to be disheartening to the Rockets that with everything they throw at Curry, he can still put on his Superman cape and beat them. He did it to their Houston forefathers 11 seasons ago and he’s doing it to this version of the Rockets team. At 37, the physical toll of this bruising series has been a lot.
“It’s been up there, compared to any other series we’ve been in,” Curry said. “I love it, as long as it’s consistent on both sides … It’s the playoffs. You try to not let it distract you and frustrate you if a call doesn’t go your way or not.”
Seeing their leader go flying to the ground after he lets go of a shot, and do a little crab-like dance on his back when it goes through and he gets the “and-one,” rallies the other guys.
“I think for us psychologically it just reconfirms to ourselves that we’re capable of making any adjustment,” Green said of winning without Butler.
As with all good leaders, Curry gave his teammates confidence. And he believes that will translate to the next game, whether or not Butler — out with a pelvic contusion suffered in Game 2 — plays (though there seemed to be a general sense that he will be ready for Monday’s Game 4).
“Hopefully he’s back next game; if he’s not we can still play at a high level and we can win a tough, physical playoff game,” Curry said. “We’re trying to win 14 more of these. We need Jimmy to do that.
“But if there’s a situation where somebody is not available, it’s that next-man-up mentality. There’s got to be a belief and a confidence. Two months ago, I don’t know if we had that.”
The Warriors have confidence. They have belief. They may not have had Jimmy Butler but they have their super man.
(SF Chronicle)
NORDIC AQUAFARMS TANKS IN MAINE
by Lawrence Reichard
It’s not every day a small town of 6,700 beats back a $500 million industrial project, but that’s exactly what just happened in Belfast, Maine, where Nordic Aquafarms of Fredrikstad, Norway wanted to build a land-based industrial fish farm that would have dumped 7.7 million gallons of effluent per day into Belfast Bay.
Nordic also has its sights on Humboldt Bay, but that project has been put on indefinite hold, at least in part for Nordic’s apparent lack of funds.
In announcing its departure from Belfast, Nordic said it had spent tens of millions of dollars in Belfast.
The Belfast project would have been as big as Boston’s Gillette Stadium, Fenway Park and two Boston Gardens - combined. In dollar terms, it might have been the biggest industrial project in Maine history. And it would have destroyed dozens of acres of mature forest, vital wetlands, part of a popular hiking trail, and the habitat of the extraordinary, and threatened, bobolink bird, which, at all of 1-2 ounces, migrates 12,000 or more miles a year, and 1,100 miles or more in a single day.
And in the best-case scenario, Nordic would have simply walked away when the mammoth project had run its course and become inoperable in 20 to 30 years - leaving behind its vast buildings.
For fully seven years the Nordic project stalked Belfast, propped up by a craven town government and Maine Governor Janet Mills, who never saw an industrial project she didn’t want to ram down the throat of a reluctant citizenry.
There were many nails in Nordic’s Belfast coffin, but the biggest was Nordic not owning the intertidal land it needed to lay its saltwater intake and effluent discharge pipes. Nordic knew early on it didn’t own the land, but it said nothing, apparently hoping no one would notice.
But someone did notice. Firebrand Nordic opponent and deed-and-title research whiz Paul Bernacki discovered it, and Nordic, caught redhanded, said in a Facebook post that it wasn’t their place to say who owned what. Hours later, perhaps realizing the post constituted a land-grab confession, Nordic promptly took down the post.
Nordic could have bought the intertidal land, and the upland seaside home connected to it, which were both for sale, but it didn’t, in an apparent effort to save some money. Nordic rolled the dice and lost, and spent the next several years paying a variety of Maine lawyers to defend its right to use land it didn’t own.
To build its project, Nordic needed a variety of state and local permits, and all of them required clear title to all needed land — something Nordic didn’t have. But state and local licensing agencies found a way around the ubiquitous clear-title requirements: they ignored them.
Nordic opponents also faced a Belfast City Council that rammed through a crucial zoning change in the face of written comments that ran 130-0 against the rushed vote. With that, the city council was off to the races, and for six years it never looked back.
The City of Belfast spent more than $160,000 on legal bills defending the ill-fated Nordic project, and when the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruled in 2023 that Nordic didn’t own the intertidal land it needed, the Belfast City Council attempted to seize the needed intertidal land through eminent domain. But Maine law bars eminent domain for private purposes, so the city council announced that it was creating a public park on the needed property.
The so-called park was ill-considered from the get-go. To access the park, visitors would have to park across Maine’s arterial Route 1, and then dodge vehicles in a 50-mph zone with limited visibility, all to enjoy a small park with a Nordic industrial pump house right in the middle of it. And with a 14-day dispersal rate for Nordic’s daily effluent discharge of 7.7 million gallons, there would be more than 100 million gallons of effluent discharge right offshore from the park at any given time.
But the Belfast City Council’s eminent-domain land seizure spilled over into the neighboring town of Northport, so it was tossed out by the Maine Supreme Judicial Court.
Undeterred, the Belfast City Council then voted to spend thousands of dollars in an attempt to get local surveyors to redraw the Belfast-Northport town line, a scheme that ultimately went nowhere.
And when the Belfast City Council finally gave up that ghost, Nordic, which for six years had professed undying love for Belfast, sued the City of Belfast for not doing enough to ignore the Maine Supreme Judicial Court ruling and redraw the town's boundaries.
After the 2023 Maine Supreme Judicial Court land-ownership ruling, and after Belfast residents Jeffrey Mabee and Judith Grace sued Nordic for $2.5 million for wrongly claiming part of their property, Nordic’s home office in Fredrikstad, Norway cut loose its U.S. operations in an apparent attempt to insulate itself from the potential liabilities of operations whose prospects were looking increasingly grim.
Then in January 2025, almost two years after the Maine Supreme Judicial Court effectively sealed Nordic’s fate, the company finally abandoned its Belfast project.
And so ended the seven-year saga of a $500 million industrial project beaten back by the citizens of a small town in midcoast Maine. All that’s left is resolution of the Mabee-Grace slander-of-title lawsuit, and it’s hard to imagine Nordic Aquafarms emerging from that without further financial injury.
(Lawrence Reichard lives in Belfast, Maine.)
CROCODILES REGROW TEETH throughout their lives, and as a consequence a crocodile will reflexively bite down with full force on a metal bar inserted in its mouth, even to the point of shattering its teeth. Testing the jaw strength of mammals who can’t replace their adult teeth is harder: they won’t bite. But even compared to other mammals, there are reasons to think that our dental problems may be particularly bad. The loss of teeth in mammals is usually a death sentence, but human societies can take care of the elderly: we suffer on with purées, soups and smoothies. The invention of cookery and soft foods has meant that bacteria are not as easily scraped off our teeth by the sheer act of eating, so most of us have to abrade them with nylon twice a day. Even so, the disastrous increase in refined sugar in the modern diet has left more than 2.5 billion people around the world with dental cavities.
— Liam Shaw (London Review of Books)
ISRAEL IS A BAD COUNTRY full of bad people. They are not bad because of their religion, they are bad because they live in a genocidal apartheid state whose existence depends on indoctrinating its people into seeing genocide and apartheid as good. It’s the system.
It’s always the system. Western countries are full of shitty people with shitty beliefs who do shitty things to each other all the time. This isn’t because westerners are inherently shitty, nor because humans are inherently shitty. It’s because here in the western empire we live under capitalism, which encourages selfish behavior and cutthroat competition against each other, and because we are indoctrinated into accepting the tyrannical white supremacist propaganda of western imperialism.
Nobody is inherently bad. We are all the products of our conditioning, and the systems under which we live play a large role in shaping our conditioning. That’s what mass media propaganda and the indoctrination of western schooling are: streamlined systems for determining what our conditioning will be. These systems can have as much of an effect on our view of the world as other forms of conditioning like trauma.
The powerful understand that humans are an easily conditioned animal, and so vast resources are poured into determining what our conditioning shall be. As soon as we are old enough to start learning about the world our minds are trained to shape us into good cogs in the imperial machine. Good employees and gear-turners for capitalism. Good soldiers and police officers. Good citizens who would never do anything to inconvenience our rulers.
We are funneled through carefully crafted factories of conditioning by the malignant systems under which we live. As long as those malignant systems exist they will keep churning out malignant people, and goodness will struggle to find any purchase. This is true whether you are talking about capitalism, imperialism, or Zionism.
— Caitlin Johnstone
IN 1938, HITLER ANNEXED AUSTRIA. Instead of coming to Austria’s defense, the rest of the world did nothing.
Emboldened, Hitler then pressed for, and was awarded, a strategic chunk of Czechoslovakia populated by “ethnic Germans,” referred to as ‘Sudetenland.’ The Europeans, hoping to “slake Hitler’s thirst and avoid a Europe-wide war,” agreed to trade away the sovereign territory of Czechoslovakia for a false peace and empty promises. Winston Churchill had seen it for the folly it was and had sent a strong warning to his countrymen, as well as the Americans. His words were chilling: “And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigor, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
— Brad Thor, ‘Spymaster’
WHERE THINGS STAND ON SUNDAY
Children Deported: A 4-year-old and a 7-year-old with U.S. citizenship were deported alongside their mother to Honduras last week, the family’s lawyer said, adding to the recent string of American citizens caught in the cross hairs of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. Lawyers said the mother was not given an option to leave her children in the United States.
Tariffs and Trade: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said he was not aware of any trade discussions between President Trump and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, days after Mr. Trump alluded to having received a call from Mr. Xi. Mr. Bessent sought to defend Mr. Trump’s aggressive tariffs, saying the president was embracing “strategic uncertainty” to establish leverage over foreign nations.
War in Ukraine: Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the Trump administration would decide this week whether to continue trying to broker a deal to end the war in Ukraine. “We have to make a determination about whether this is an endeavor that we want to continue to be involved in,” Mr. Rubio told NBC’s “Meet the Press.” It was not clear whether the remarks were meant to increase the pressure on Ukraine and Russia or whether President Trump was seriously considering walking away.
DEA Says more than 100 undocumented immigrants were detained in Colorado raid.
Federal agents raided an underground nightclub in Colorado early Sunday morning and detained more than 100 people who they said were undocumented immigrants, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.
The raid occurred at a club in Colorado Springs, about 70 miles south of Denver. Federal officials said there were more than 200 people inside the club at the time, including 114 who were in the country illegally. More than a dozen active-duty members of the U.S. military were detained as well, they said.
(NY Times)
CRY ME A RIVER: BACH’S SUSTAINABLE HYDROPOWER
by David Yearsley
Water is a frequent image in Bach’s music. Placid rivers sing the praises of enlightened monarchs. Other streams rush by, murmuring their eternal truths of earthly life’s fleeting nature. Elsewhere, storms rise up, from strafing Northern rains to tempests on the Sea of Galilea. Bach’s aqueous music can delight and despair, soothe and terrify. It can also sing of the fate of rivers in our time.
Bach was born some seventy years after the Great Thuringian Flood of 1613 when the water rose so high and furious that it swept away the famed gate to the city of Weimar, where Bach, a century later, would later serve as a court musician. The aftermath of the disaster let loose a deluge of angry sermons blaming faithlessness as the cause of the ceaseless rains. A catalog of the damage was assembled soon after the disaster by Abraham Lange, then chief cleric in Weimar. His account of the “The Horrible Storms of the Thuringian Flood of 1613,” lists the destruction to buildings and bridges, tallies the human deaths and the loss of livestock, and recounts harrowing tales of escape and doom.
The calamity was still a topic of moral and meteorological discourse, in print and from pulpits, during Bach’s lifetime. In 1720, one of Lage’s descendants, also a Weimar priest, published a comprehensive, 500-page account of the flood based on surviving documents.
The terror of rivers was real for Bach. He encountered many in his intrepid walks on his way to new musical experiences. On the longest of these adventures, a hike of more than 200 miles in the winter of 1705 from Thuringia in central Germany to Lübeck on the Baltic Sea (and back), he must have come to the mighty Elbe at Artlenburg where there was a ferry (the line was in service for some 700 years until was stopped in the 1960s). Only a few years earlier, Bach would have known of—and perhaps himself copied out and played—a famous keyboard piece from the middle of the 17th century that depicted a near fatal misadventure at just such a place. This evocative, ominous Allemande by the moodily peripatetic Johann Jakob Froberger warned that unpredictable currents could overturn human complacency at any moment, transforming calm into calamity.
Rivers coursed not only through Bach’s long journeys but through his musical imagination.
One of Bach’s earliest surviving autograph manuscripts is a copy he made of an epic organ fantasy on the chorale, An Wasserflüssen Babylon (By the Waters of Babylon), BWV 653, by the Hamburg organist Johann Adam Reincken. As a teenager, Bach would walk the thirty miles, many of them along the Elbe, from the city of Lüneburg to Hamburg to hear Reincken play the organ at the cavernous church of St. Catherine’s. Two decades later, in 1720, Bach played one of history’s most famous recitals on this monumental instrument, improvising on that same hymn tune for half-an-hour. After the performance, the aged Reincken told Bach, “I thought this art was dead, but I see that it lives on in you.” Several versions survive of Bach’s setting of this chorale melody, and even if these don’t contain any of the musical material from that vanished fantasy heard in the 1720 recital, these later chorale preludes inevitably echo that triumph.
The chorale text paraphrases the 137th Psalm: “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, and wept; when we thought of Zion.” Paradoxically, this chorale, so closely associated with the historic organ heroics of both Reincken and Bach, sings of harp and organ being hung up on riverside willows. The King of Instruments is made to hymn its own silencing. Yet the very act of music making resists, even overcomes, the condition of enslavement which the Psalm laments. The Babylon captors force their captives to sing, and while they do, they dream of vengeance. Like the psalm, the last of the chorale’s five verses ends in tremendous violence conjured against the Babylonian oppressors: “Happy is the one who seizes your infants / and dashes them against the rocks.”
There is no rushing current in Bach’s setting of this chorale. The continual trills evoke the riffling water across the broad, subdued flow of the piece. Other sighing ornaments give vent to despair as unstoppable as a river.
All this plaintive, potential hydro-energy is unleashed in one of Bach’s most kinetic creations, a chorale prelude on Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam (Christ, our Lord, came to the Jordan), BWV 684 published not long before he began making his final revisions to An Wasserflüssen Babylon.
The text of Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam was written by Martin Luther, who believed that his words coupled with melody would engrave his teachings on the sacrament of baptism in the minds of the young and confirm them in those of the old. These waters drown sin and from them the faithful emerge newly born, rescued from death and the devil.
In Bach’s setting of the chorale, the purifying musical stream rips along with exhilarating intensity. The current of sixteenth notes is unceasing, without even the slight pause for a trill at cadences. The revivifying eddies and rapids rush breathlessly all the way to the final chord, which Bach makes sure will be played short by carefully notating a nearly full measure of rests. An ever-renewable life force, this river can never be made to stop. The piece can only peremptorily be ended but that does not stop its message. For Bach, its cleansing power is eternal.
Having heard the tales of the watery devastations of 1613, Bach may well have welcomed subsequent developments in civil engineering and flood-control, but there is never doubt that this music conjures an uncontainable Holy River.
While Bach’s music can be diverted to the realms of aesthetics and theology, this move helps one forget that these works refer to real rivers: increasingly embattled, enslaved, entombed, the “Waters of Babylon” are the Tigris and Euphrates, massively impaired by Turkey’s Southeastern Anatolia Project which, since it got under way in the 1970s, has erected some 22 dams and 19 power plants near the Syrian and Iraqi borers. These have sapped the flow into Iraq from the two rivers by more than 80%. At its end the Jordan is depleted by 95%, reduced to a polluted trickle by hydroelectric and irrigation projects. Environmental groups assert that pollution is so high that baptism in the Jordan is harmful to the health.
Bach’s thrilling depiction of the Jordan stands as a monument to a river that he never visited, although he would have read about it in a volume in his personal library, Heinrich Bünting’s virtual travel guide through Holy Lands, the Itinerarium Sacræ Scripturæ of 1581. There, the Jordan is “pleasant” and “sweet”; it “runneth.” Bünting, who likewise never traveled beyond Germany, mentions the falls near that Jordan’s headwaters, which are perhaps portrayed by Bach in the bounding octave leaps in the left hand that sometimes replace the relentless sixteenths themselves as they jump to another voice higher in the textre.
Bach places the venerable chorale melody of Christ, unser Herr, zum Jordan kam in the pedal where it sounds forth with austere force. The text was attached inextrixably to the tune for Bach and his listeners, so that they would have heard it in their heads even when no one was singing the words out loud: the clarion chorale heralded “waters washing away sin.” Few will now have such unshakeable connectons to the poetry, nor welcome the first and last of Luther’s seven verses, drenched as they are in blood.
The straights and oxbows of the tune, composed in 1525 in the early years of the Reformation, trace an ancient course. I don’t hear God’s voice in it, but Nature’s, singing with a truth and timelessness that cannot be silenced by dams, wars, or petrochemicals.
This chorale prelude’s despondent riparian pendant, An Wasserflüssen Babylon, mourns the plight of so many of the world’s great rivers, now reduced to reservoirs of hubris and greed.
(David Yearsley is a long-time contributor to CounterPunch and the Anderson Valley Advertiser. His latest albums, “In the Cabinet of Wonders” and “Handel’s Organ Banquet” are now available from False Azure Records.)
BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN
by Harry McClintock (1928)
One evening as the sun went down
And the jungle fire was burning
Down the track came a hobo hiking
And he said, "Boys, I'm not turning”
“I'm headed for a land that's far away
Besides the crystal fountains
So come with me, we'll go and see
The Big Rock Candy Mountains”
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
There's a land that's fair and bright
Where the handouts grow on bushes
And you sleep out every night
Where the boxcars all are empty
And the sun shines every day
And the birds and the bees
And the cigarette trees
The lemonade springs
Where the bluebird sings
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops have wooden legs
And the bulldogs all have rubber teeth
And the hens lay soft-boiled eggs
The farmers' trees are full of fruit
And the barns are full of hay
Oh, I'm bound to go
Where there ain't no snow
Where the rain don't fall
The winds don't blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
You never change your socks
And the little streams of alcohol
Come trickling down the rocks
The brakemen have to tip their hats
And the railway bulls are blind
There's a lake of stew
And of whiskey too
You can paddle all around it
In a big canoe
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
The jails are made of tin
And you can walk right out again
As soon as you are in
There ain't no short-handled shovels
No axes, saws nor picks
I'm goin' to stay
Where you sleep all day
Where they hung the jerk
That invented work
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
I'll see you all this coming fall
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
I have never understood why the 2 locations for the new courthouse, recommended by the advisory committee, were both in the city limits. At the time that discussions were taking place, there was an effort to construct a criminal justice center similar to the one in Sonoma County. Such a center would have included a courthouse, a new Sheriff’s Office and jail, and offices for county departments such as the District Attorney, Probation and Public Defender. While it would have been an ambitious project, a number of issues could have been resolved. Clearly, the two locations put forth were not large enough to accommodate such a proposal. The location that was selected never seemed logical for a facility that will have hundreds of visitors every day, in addition to court employees. I expect that traffic on E. Perkins and E. Gobbi will become even more congested.
I seem to recall that the “Criminal Justice Center” Mr. Thurston refers to was never able to get state funding, well over $150 mil at the time, much more today. Mendo hired CEO Tom ‘I’m Looking Into It’ Mitchell mainly because of his alleged experience with a comparable regional justice center in the Sierras but it turned out that his experience, such as it was, was only on the periphery of that project and he was a major dud as a CEO. When he left after having “looked into” the possibility and finding no significant sources of money, the prospect of a CJC on the “Brush Street Triangle” went with him, as did the hopes of Dick Seltzer,John Mayfield and some other prominent Ukiah realtors who were pushing their site. The current Courthouse and Jail Expansion projects are the bastard children of that project and with it will come an abandoned but still in-use old jail, and an abandoned courthouse, which will join the list of other large abandoned Ukiah area buildings that we hope won’t stay that way. But, given Mendo’s and Ukiah’s official listlessness and incompetence, likely will.
Thanks for your broader perspective and historical knowledge, Mark. I was totally unimpressed by Mr. Mitchell.
Kurt Ard
Hurry Dad, 1959
Mixed media on paperboard
17 1/4 × 19 3/4 in | 43.8 × 50.2 cm
Unique work
US $79,000
The most telling quote in Ted’s piece: “I’m not a decision-maker.”
That just about says it all.
P.R. stunts by Bowtie Ted and Photo Op-Mo. Bowtie loves when he can pass the buck and hide behind questions with the statement, “I can’t comment on that because of pending litigation.” Would love for him to answer what his involvement was in the Get Cubbison Plan. Notice he has been quiet on that subject because DA Dave and Antle are taking the heat. Wait until the civil suit when Bowtie, Gump McGourty and Basement Dan Gjerde all get exposed for their roles.
Now onto Photo Op-Mo, are you f@#$king kidding me? Her post about homeless is not what she tells you face to face. She is an advocate for them, making excuses when they vandalize, deficate, urinate and commit just about every crime in the penal code. As a matter of fact she tells business owners and property owners they’re picking on them. Ask Tee’em Golf, she sent her little spy Goldilocks aka Mark Donegan to film the owners to see if their claims of homeless creating havoc was real. I guess the owners videos weren’t good enough. When says the CORE programs will get them off the street, bold face lie. I told Mazie Malone about my experience on the AVA comment section. So here it is again. I approached a homeless lady on one of our properties an advised her she couldn’t sleep overnight. She was respectful and told me she had no place to go. Feeling bad for her I gave her a list of numbers that she could call for help. The list was provided to me by Mo. She said they don’t do anything. So inquiring minds want to know, I said to the lady let’s see. I called Social Services, they laughed at me, then suggested I call Building Bridges, the 20 some million Schraeder business. Talk to a nice enough man who informed they were full and there was nothing he could do. So I asked, “What should she do?” He suggested I pay for a motel room for her. My answer was short and sweet, “I already have through taxes, which BOS gave to you. So why don’t you pay?” He told me I was crazy and he couldn’t do that. So when Photo-OP Mo tells you about all the services, please realize it’s B.S.
Are you really the homophobic misogynist you come off as?
I think Call raises a salient point here: With all the local millions spent annually on persons unable or unwilling to care for themselves, one would think there would be an emergency motel voucher available for the vulnerable woman he describes.
Happy Monday,
Dam. I was going to keep quiet today, I do agree with CSI on the confusion of Mo’s statements.The bigger issue about that is and lord help me because I despise buzzwords the Stigma attached to her statements. “
“We can’t just leave people in these conditions and hope they get better.”
“We also can’t keep letting them do harm to the people in our community that are doing their best to help Ukiah thrive.”
Lets clarify not every homeless person wreaks havoc & causes harm!!!
We have left people in these conditions for 50 years, creating new programs does not work when the foundation is broken!
As if these sick people have a personal vendetta on business owners! They don’t!
The ones who are an issue are the severely ill! And need immediate intervention & treatment!
For those that believe that all of these individuals can just automatically pick themselves up by the boot straps and “behave” “take responsibility” and get themselves together, there is a very legitimate reason they cannot they are afflicted with a neurobiological illness (brain dysfunction) the cause does not matter!
A definite yes on motel vouchers
CSI had a hard time accessing services even harder for the street folks..
It so often seems utterly hopeless
mm 💕
Once again, thank you, Mazie, for not resting on this issue, even when you try to take a day off! We need to hear what you have to say, based on your real-world experience with your son. We all–me too– don’t fully get it, don’t understand, don’t force the issue on decision-makers, don’t speak-out loudly enough, don’t do enough. Keep it up, Mazie Malone, even when it seems hopeless– you are doing the right thing, the right work.
Thank you Chuck, 🙏💕
mm 💕
Until these people get these comments properly on record there is nothing to move the director to force a re-alignment of services. RCS was amenable to the idea of re-alignment when I threw it out at the last BHAB meeting. Would be very helpful for the public to come ask for specifics from the director herself. I have found her very open and easy when bringing my ideas. And of course, the meetings are open. There was a reason I threw that out and I was surprised at RCS’s openness at the idea.
K
Aye, Sir, the wild oats Star thistle vetch and foxtails are running nearly waist high with all this wet weather and all too soon will turn the hillsides gold with highly combustible tinder….let’s get those weed whackers roaring and clear some fire breaks for the Real Estate and banks, as the insurance businesses have all been scared off! Great poem and the pace reminds me of marching at a route step with full battle rattle back when we were in the Corps.
BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN
Found–on You Tube, of course– the original version of this song–titled “Big Rock Candy Mountains,” sung by the author, Mr. McClintock, replete with whistling. It’s from nearly a century ago, a Victor record called an “orthophonic recording.” A hobo’s vision of a perfect world, for sure.
As to mountain songs, there’s also Neil Young’s, “Sugar Mountain,” one of his first songs–we all know the many others he wrote and sang for us over the years. This one sings of the regret of leaving sweet youth behind, going out into the big old world.
A timeless song written by McClintock in 1895, recorded later. A significant portion of our “homeless” population fits the profile, and our government provides the Big Rock Candy Mountain for them. I have wondered if in history any government has done this before us. The Roman Mob, maybe?
I am waiting for Redwood Community Services and the entire Mendocino County social service system to advise me that I have a subsidized senior apartment to move into, and will then secure an airplane ticket to leave Washington, D.C. to return to California. Aside from the sheer stupidity of the supervisor advising me that “the government doesn’t owe you anything”, the American government (which we are all supporting with our tax dollars) can serve me fully. Upon my return, I wish to associate with others who are Self realized.
Craig Louis Stehr
Adam’s Place Homeless Shelter
2210 Adams Place NE #1
Washington, D.C. 20018
Telephone: (202) 832-8317
Email: craiglouisstehr@gmail.com
April 28th @ 2:33 p.m. EDT
San Francisco and Santa Cruz have the highest subsidized units per 10,000. (Santa Cruz is mentioned in another AI overview responding to a different question.) Here’s info from an AI overview:
“california counties easiest to get subsidized housing
In 2023, San Francisco County had the most subsidized housing units per 10,000 people in California. Additionally, Fresno, Kern, and San Bernardino counties were among the most affordable for homeownership. While not directly related to subsidized housing, these areas are worth considering if you’re also looking for affordable housing options overall.
Elaboration:
San Francisco County:
While San Francisco County had the highest concentration of subsidized housing units, it’s important to remember that subsidized housing can take various forms, including high-rise buildings, garden-style apartments, and single-family dwellings, as mentioned in the search results.
Fresno, Kern, and San Bernardino Counties:
These counties were identified as among the most affordable for homeownership, indicating that they might also be more accessible for those seeking other forms of affordable housing, including subsidized options.
Other affordable locations:
Bakersfield, Chico, Clovis, Eureka, Fontana, Fresno, Sacramento, and Stockton are also listed as some of the most affordable places to live in California.
Wait Times:
It’s worth noting that the average wait time for subsidized housing in California was 2 years and 9 months in 2023.
To find specific information about subsidized housing in California, you can:
Consult the
California Department of Social Services website:
This is your best bet for learning about specific programs and how to apply.
Contact the
California Housing and Finance Agency:
They can also provide information about affordable housing programs and resources.
Search for housing authorities in specific counties:
Each county has its own housing authority, which may offer subsidized housing programs. ”
My experience so far in Mendocino County in applying for senior housing is that wait lists are long. Don’t really know if that state of affairs applies to wait lists for subsidized rentals.
A friend displaced in Eureka from her subsidized unit got a subsidized apartment real fast in Vacaville.
My erstwhile bro-by-marriage, a self-realized dude from Danville, was living in subsidized housing in the Sunset, when last heard from, and working for the county in the bureaucracy you speak of, Mike.
Craig might be inclined to relocate to the city anyway, as some of his favorite watering holes are drying up in fashionable Ukiah— if we can find Tommy Wayne’s lamentations credulous, that is.
Well, Craig, other than my estranged brother-in-law, I don’t know anyone who has achieved self realization, but your answer to our honorable supervisor (who apparently can’t make room at the govmnt trough for the likes of you cause o’corse he’s got both trotters in up to his gullet!) is a gem and I envy you it enormously, you dear sainted martyr. Save it for an epitaph.
Maybe we can ask Bowtie Ted to comment to Craig, now that Bowtie has returned to the AVA with a statement.