Mendocino County Today: Sunday 11/2/2025

By AVA News Service on November 2, 2025

DRY WEATHER expected today. Wet weather returns on Monday. Strong storm to bring potentially damaging winds, heavy rain and increased risk for urban and small stream flooding Tuesday night and Wednesday. Rain and potential flooding impacts to continue on Thursday before rain tapers off on Friday. (NWS)

STEPHEN DUNLAP (Fort Bragg): Happy Fall Back Day weather fans ! A very foggy 54F this Sunday morning on the coast. The fog looks to be very thin along the coast so it should burn off this morning. A lot of rain is forecast for Tue & Wed, then more next weekend. It will be interesting to see how this early wet weather pattern lasts ?

UKIAH SHELTER PET OF THE WEEK

Colt isn’t just a puppy—he’s a full-throttle, four-pawed adventure machine wrapped in fur. This energetic cattle dog mix is built for action, with brains and zoomies that could qualify for Olympic tryouts. He’s looking for a home that can keep up with his big personality and bigger energy needs. Think: daily exercise, training sessions, and someone who appreciates a good set of puppy teeth (because Colt is a bit mouthy—no small humans, please). Colt is still figuring out his doggy manners and will need slow introductions to new canine friends. But with patience, structure, and plenty of toys, this boy will shine brighter than a disco ball at a rodeo. If you’re ready to invest in the “puppy project of a lifetime,” Colt is ready to reward you with laughs, loyalty, and a whole lotta love. Cattle Dogs are very smart, and this smarty pants is 9 months old and +-40 pounds.

To see all of our canine and feline guests, and the occasional goat, sheep, tortoise, horse, and for information about our services, programs, and events, visit: mendoanimalshelter.com Join us the first Saturday of every month for our MEET THE DOGS Adoption Event. For information about adoptions please call 707-467-6453. Our dog kennels are now open to the public Tuesday-Friday 1:30 to 4 pm, Saturday 10 am to 2:30 pm, closed for lunch Saturday from 1 to 1:30. Making a difference for homeless pets in Mendocino County, one day at a time!

COUNTY NOTES

by Mark Scaramella

AN ODD ITEM on next Tuesday’s Supervisors agenda, buried in the quarterly budget presentation, is a “CEO Recommendation” that the Supervisors “Direct Staff to research options for the collection of delinquent Cannabis business taxes and to present findings to the Board of Supervisors no later than Mid-year Budget Report in February 2026.”

Why does the CEO need direction to “research options” to collect delinquent taxes, much less delinquent cannabis business taxes? Don’t they even know the options? How much are we talking about? Why are they delinquent? Did the delinquent cannabis businesses go out of “business”? What the…? Is this what constitutes staff work in the CEO’s office? We’ve done our own “research” and we’ve discovered that one option is to write off any delinquent taxes from entities that no longer exist, or in cases where the delinquency amount is not worth the effort of pursuing it. We offer this “option” as a way of saving our overtaxed (sic) CEO staff some time.

AT THEIR OCTOBER 21 board meeting Mendo’s Democratic supervisors (Haschak, Mulheren, Williams) rejected a proposed resolution drafted by the Republicans (Norvell, Cline) mildly objecting to the Potter Valley Project Diversion Decommissioning of Scott Dam on the South Fork of the Eel because, as best we can tell, the Democrats didn’t think there was much point in opposing the decommissioning at this late date. The Democrats said they had an “alternate” resolution and they’d agendize it for the next meeting (after the Republicans complained that the Democrat-version hadn’t been properly noticed for public review). That Democrat resolution appears on next Tuesday’s Supervisors agenda. It is awkwardly entitled:

“Resolution Of The Mendocino County Board Of Supervisors Reaffirming Its Support For The Co-Equal Goals Of The Two Basin Solution And The Water Diversion Agreement For The New Eel-Russian Facility.”

In many ways it is similar to the Republican proposal. Here are the key components of the Democrat proposal which no longer contains any hint of opposition to PG&E’s proposed decommissioning:

“… the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors acknowledges the community concerns regarding the decommissioning of the PVP and calls on PG&E to account for and address the social and community impacts of water loss because of its responsibility to the communities that developed around its operations.”

I.e., a plaintive request for PG&E — that well-known public spirited, philanthropic and generous corporation so sensitive to public feedback — to spend some of their money to help mitigate the impact of the decommissioning on Potter Valley.

“…consistent with the Water Diversion Agreement, the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors supports PG&E’s application to surrender its license with FERC and to decommission the Potter Valley Project and include the NERF diversion facility.” (The NERF is a plumbing/pumping option to pump winter high flows in the Eel River over the hill and down into Potter Valley and then on into Lake Mendocino since there’s very little storage capacity in Potter Valley at present.)

I.e., please know that we’re on board and we hope that PG&E will be nice to us.

“… the Mendocino County Board of Supervisors supports the development of new water storage projects for all the communities that have been dependent upon PG&E’s year-round diversions from Potter Valley south along the Russian River to the county line.”

What do the Democrats mean by “support”? It’s highly unlikely that any of the hundreds of millions that are estimated to be necessary to “develop new water storage projects” in Potter Valley will come from Broke Mendo — or PG&E.

Without mentioning storage financing, the Democrats’ entire “alternate” proposal is nothing but political window dressing that contributes nothing to the pending decommissioning. It’s probably true that the decommissioning is a done deal at this point. But at this late date, the Democrats’ “alternate” resolution expressing that opinion and hoping that PG&E is nice to Potter Valley is as pointless as their “This Is [insert politically correct subject here] Awareness Week” resolutions.

BARBARA COLLEEN GREPPI

Known for her beautiful smile and kindness, Barbara Greppi passed away on October 28, 2025 at age 96.

She was a source of love and support to everyone she met and had a deep devotion to family and friends. She loved nature and reveled in sitting outside listening to the birds and enjoying the sun.

True to her adventurous spirit and zest for life, she and husband Pete Duke took up to 8 grandchildren camping every year - and she enjoyed every minute!

Her dedication to helping others led to a career as an LVN and educator of High school students and adults going through a CNA certification.

Barbara is survived by her daughter Colleen Mack (Mickey), son Carl Duke (Donna) and numerous grandchildren and great grandchildren - all of whom she dearly loved. She was preceded in death by daughter Sandra Christensen, son George Duke, husbands Pete Duke and John Greppi.

She was an early member of Trinity Baptist Church. Graveside services will take place Friday Nov 7 @ 11 am at Russian River Cemetery 940 Low Gap rd, Ukiah followed by lunch at Todd Grove Room 599 Park Blvd, Ukiah.

Donations can be made to Ukiah Senior Center (ukiahseniorcenter.org) or Hospice of Ukiah ([email protected]).

“I’ll fly away; oh glory I’ll fly away in the morning when I die, Hallelujah by and by I’ll fly away.”

PATRICK M MEHTONEN

Patrick M Mehtonen peacefully passed away October 28, 2025 in Ukiah. He was born on November 25, 1955.

Pat is survived by friends and hunting buddies who have been enriched by his life and love for his ranch.

He was preceded in death by his sister, Marsha; mother, Wanda Burke Mehtonen and father, Marcus Mehtonen.

Pat grew up as a traditional Mendocino County rancher. Raising sheep, hunting, riding horses, and living off the land as much as possible. Over the years, as it became harder to make a living on sheep alone, he was able to turn his passion for hunting into a livelihood. Never one to need luxury, he lived his entire life on his ranch where he considered it the greatest place on Earth, constantly working to keep everything running as only a rancher could.

He was tough as nails, never complained, and could fix anything with baling wire and whatever he could find laying around. He didn’t just love his ranch – it was his life and his legacy, having begun as a homestead by his maternal grandfather William P. Burke in the late 1800s. According to family lore, the Burke’s were the first people to find a way to bring a covered wagon into Ukiah Valley. That toughness and determination was a trait Pat certainly inherited.

His greatest joy was spending time at his cabin, eating, drinking, hunting, laughing, and sharing memories and experiences with anyone who would join him. Although he never had children of his own, being a father figure came naturally to him. He was a role model to many, and everyone who spent time with him learned how to enjoy a simplified life. His sense of humor and spontaneity was always on full display and a joy to be around. The Mehtonen Ranch will live on and be a place to carry on the tradition of his family – his biggest ambition.

Pat’s one-of-a-kind personality, humor, jokes, and love for his ranch and hunting will forever be missed and never forgotten. So many cherished memories to reflect upon.

A celebration of life will be hosted by the Crudo family at Mike & Teresa Crudo’s home on Sunday, November 16^th at one o’clock. Bring your stories and photos to share. Please contact 707.489.0127 or [email protected] for directions.

Arrangements are under the direction of the Eversole Mortuary.

ED NOTES

REACH A CERTAIN AGE and you start to fall apart. For me, the great disassembly began when I hit 70, and has accelerated since to where I spend at least one day a week at the mercy of modern medicine. A recent Friday was spent hustling up and down Post Street to medical testing appointments. There was a claustrophobic hour in the MRI tube. “Don't move, Mr. Anderson, and I'll see you in an hour,” the brisk attendant said as the machinery slid me noiselessly into the thing. I wouldn't have been surprised if it spit me out two blocks away. The magic tube whirred and clanked me to sleep, but not before satisfying my mildly claustrophobic self that I could pull myself out of it if I had to. I guessed the attendant's birthplace somewhere within a thousand mile radius of Bethlehem, Iran maybe. She was minimally, professionally pleasant but all business. “Are you from the Middle East?” I asked. “Don't move,” she replied, and out the door she went.

IN NEARLY three years of surgeries and its subsequent consequences, not a single medical professional has expressed the slightest non-medical curiosity about me, not that I care, but it strikes me as odd. I make it a point of asking them who they are in their lives outside their stethoscopes, but they change the subject.

SAN FRANCISCO'S Muni kiosks, some of them anyway, feature electronic clocks that tell you when the next bus will arrive. In my experience, they're fairly accurate depending, of course, on traffic. After the tube, I needed to get myself a couple of miles west on Post for “blood work.” The Muni's clock told me the next bus was 50 minutes away, so I footed it to that cement sprawl of cancer-causing visuals at Post and Divisadero called Mount Zion.

I THOUGHT BACK to the hospitals of my youth when even Mission Emergency, the old part, had been built by people who cared about what big buildings looked like. If San Francisco has erected a single beautiful building since, I haven't noticed it. And if the Army, of all people, hadn't designed the Presidio, much of the city would be concrete high rises and one-way secret police windows like the ones concealing the Mendocino County DA in his basement Courthouse bunker.

LABCORP, for the blood draw, wasn't much bigger than a Muni bus stop. There was one woman at the desk of basically one room with a partition separating the waiting room from the two chairs allotted the phlebotomist and her patient, which was her and me. Waiting for my appointment with this besieged woman, I kicked myself for not bringing something to read, and we'll pause here for a quick treatise on medical-dental reading material. Waiting room lit ranges from ‘People’ to, at LabCorp, only a Marin County real estate mag pegged to high end properties. The doctors who own LabCorp would certainly lust after a home on Belvedere Island, or in the hills above Mill Valley, but low income people wanting to know if they've got the clap? And no art on the walls other than LabCorp's false proclamations of “We're Here To Serve”? Instant sensory deprivation.

THE MEDICAL ASSUMPTION in this country seems to be that the entire experience should be a bummer, from the waiting room to the operating table to the morgue when they finally finish you off, and boyo boy do they pile on the tests if you're on Medicare with some kind of “gap” coverage like I've got. In the past three years, while working people either pay or die, me, a guy with one foot on a banana peel, the other poised to join my old friends and neighbors at the Evergreen Cemetery, Boonville, Ca, my government has billed MediCare for upwards of $2 million.

THERE WERE SEVEN people ahead of me, one of whom, a tall, gaunt man in motorcycle leathers, his helmet under his arm, was one of the unhealthiest-looking individuals I've seen outside a funeral home's viewing room. The poor guy could barely walk, but after his blood was drawn, he shuffled out the door and, presumably, rode a motorcycle home to his deathbed. I couldn't help but notice that I, a person in his eighth decade, was easily the most robust person in the room.

ONE BADLY EXPLOITED, harried woman had to do it all at LabCorp, which, I assume, is owned by a syndicate of healing professionals pulling many millions out of this barebones, chain operation via these austere, exploitive little cubicles strewn around the Bay Area, much of the funding coming from the federal government while they, the healing professionals, vote religiously for purely theoretical hope and change so long as there's no fiscal change in their ongoing advantage.

THIS ONE LabCorp lady had to do all the paperwork for the steady stream of people needing to have blood samples drawn, answer the constantly ringing phone, and draw blood from a constant stream of customers. The doctors who owned the place probably pulled a couple of hundred grand a year out of her alone.

WITH THE INTERNET, you never know who's looking in, so I won't further identify the woman who took my blood, but from our conversation you can be sure she knows she's being ripped off. She did say the office had a steady turnover of phlebotomists. She deftly drew a quota from me, and I trundled off to meet a ride home mulling over the "Indeed" one of my innumerable medical pros had uttered when I, joking, remarked, "All this is a lot of trouble and expense for a guy my age, isn't it?" That's when the doctor's "Indeed" slipped out.

KEEPS you in fleets of Teslas though, doesn't it, healer man?

MICHAEL NOLAN: Who is showing in the AVA my favorite American artists Thomas Hart Benton, Millard Sheets, Edward Hopper, et al? What a treat. I especially admire Benton - terrific draftsmanship, colors and every bit of the painting is action and in motion. He and his student, Jackson Pollock, didn't like each other. But when You stand in front of "One" Pollock's fresh, radical, game-changing masterpiece You see what he took away from his time with Benton: the whole painting is colors everywhere in action and in motion. As different as two could be and yet the underlying technique is identical.

*One: Number 31, 1950* by Jackson Pollock

ANDERSON VALLEY VILLAGE: List of Events

BETSY CAWN:

In Lake County, “over one half” of the population depends on Medi-Cal, and roughly one fourth are enrolled in the federal SNAP program (Crystal Markytan, Director, Department of Social Services, January 2024). Our total population is under 70,000, and 20,000 of those are aged 60 and over (World Census 2023).

Mendocino County has always been food-focused, from the horticulture classes and greenhouses at the college to the farmstands on tertiary backroads, food at every event and hundreds of community events every year. And in spite of the general incompetence of your Board of Supervisors, civic participation seems to keep your government from going off the rails (it helps a lot to have a decent person in charge of county law enforcement).

We share your frustration, and envy your achievements, especially the everyday citizens who provide and pay for common infrastructure and congregate to address the ebb and flow of social crises.

(And I wonder, does it have to be like this — the constant delivery of crises and endless bemoaning of reasons? The government could just quick dicking with us, like ending Daylight Saving Time.)

CELEBRATED ARTIST WINSTON SMITH TO BE FEATURED AT MEDIUM ART CENTER

by Carol Brodsky

“It’s Always Something, Ain’t It?” is the title of the upcoming art show featuring the work of artist, illustrator, and album cover designer Winston Smith. The opening, taking place at Medium Art Center in Ukiah, is on First Friday, November 7th, from 5:00-8:00 PM.

A longtime resident of Mendocino County and San Francisco, Smith works primarily in the medium of montage. He is best known for the artwork produced for the American punk band the Dead Kennedys and the Alternative Tentacles record label, whose “bat” logo, as well as the logo Smith created for the Dead Kennedys, have become iconic symbols of the punk rock ethos. He has produced over 50 record covers and art for artists as well-known as George Carlin, Ben Harper, and MoonAlice, and as obscure as Fish Karma, one of my personal favorites from the era.

One of Smith’s most identifiable compositions is the cover of Green Day’s 1995 album “Insomniac.” A version of an illustration used on the back cover of a Jello Biafra/D.O.A. album, “Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors” was featured on the cover of the April/May 2000 issue of The New Yorker magazine. Smith’s work has appeared in Spin, Playboy, Wired, Utne Reader, Vice, Ad Busters, Juxtapoz, Mother Jones, Metro Silicon Valley, Ugly Planet, National Lampoon, and numerous punk fanzines, including MaximumRock’nRoll, to name a few.

Full disclosure: Winston is one of my oldest friends, having made his acquaintance at none other than the Palace Hotel about 45 years ago. You also might be thinking, “Hmm, Winston Smith. I’ve heard that name before.” You have. The person you’re thinking of is the fictional protagonist from George Orwell’s now-prophetic novel, 1984. I’ve always known Winston as Winston. But I do know his “dead name” and I’m keeping it to myself. And as much as it might horrify his most ardent readers, I can attest to the fact that Tommy Wayne Kramer spent more than a few nights at the Town and Country knocking a few back with Winston. Those truly were the days.

The taking on of the Winston Smith name is completely in line with Smith’s personal and artistic journey. Raised in Oklahoma, Winston’s mother was a sculptress who attended the Art Institute in Chicago. “Then WWII broke out, and my grandfather, who was an executive for the Santa Fe Railroad, got moved to Tulsa - the exact middle of nowhere,” he smiles. “She wasn’t Rosie the Riveter, but she worked in a factory where they were building the B-17 Flying Fortresses. They fit the girls with roller skates so they could deliver memos all over this huge factory.” In my mind, that memory of Winston’s looks exactly like one of his montages.

Winston’s mother made sculptures out of clay and wood, “which I couldn’t do at all,” he notes. “My mother did observe I had a little talent, and she encouraged me to be an artist.”

Winston’s father was a fireman for the railroad. “He didn’t put out fires, he started them. He was still shoveling coal into engines at that time.” His mother loved Norman Rockwell. “I was drawn to that type of art. The books and magazines we had were vintage Life Magazines and National Geographics. I thought they were brand new, but we couldn’t afford many new magazines, and we had a giant wall space full of art books.”

Winston used to watch television at friend’s houses. “I remember as a child thinking about TV shows- Beat the Clock, or Wagon Train, and thinking to myself, ‘That never happened. It doesn’t really exist. Those shows are plays. They’re not real.’ His early indoctrination into the world of DADA and Surrealism had already begun. “I realized early on that people were being indoctrinated by the media and other means. Growing up in Oklahoma was double-squaresville. It’s still that way. They have the lowest education statistics in the country.” Which is why, by the time he was a teen, Winston was ready to get out of Dodge. And Tulsa.

It was the early ’60s, and the look and feel of commercial advertising was changing. “It had gone from lush illustrations to photographs. There were no more illustrations for Pennzoil featuring a genie coming out of an oil can. Those things were almost surrealistic. There was an abstraction to them. Madison Avenue created Mr. Clean, with his gold earring, and Betty Crocker.” Though he didn’t inherit his mother’s facility for sculpture, he was a skilled enough artist to be accepted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, Italy, where he studied for several years before moving to Rome. And of course, in case you wondered, Winston still speaks perfect Florentine.

“Going to art school abroad was very affordable. I think I paid $40 for my own apartment in the middle of Florence. I was surrounded by the Renaissance art that I’d only seen in books. The food was wonderful, the art was incredible, and the girls were beautiful,” he smiles. “I was a belligerent 17-year-old, so I think my parents were happy to get rid of me,” he chuckles. “The war in Vietnam was raging. I registered for the draft in Florence, even though I had mixed feelings about serving in that particular conflict. I waited for my number to come up, but I was never called.”

In 1976, Winston returned to the States, hitched across country, and landed in San Francisco, where he worked as a roadie for local and national rock bands. The country had changed in 7 years, and from Winston’s perspective, not for the better. That’s when he officially changed his name. Around that time, Winston submitted a few of his pieces to a montage show in Berkeley. A mutual friend saw the work and contacted Jello Biafra, thinking he’d be interested in Winston’s art. He was, and the two have remained working partners and friends since that time.

Paranoid's Dilemna by Winston Smith (Contributed)

Enter Jayed Scotti. Many Ukiahans know Jayed though his years of volunteer firefighting and his decades of art conservation work with local artist Adele Pruitt. Or they know him because he is the second and final love of my life. Jayed was interested in book illustration when he met Winston in San Francisco, and they became friends, living together several times. Winston had been exposed to punk culture through his roadie jobs and discovered a burgeoning art scene within. Jayed and Winston shared a common interest in politics and satire, and what they developed was one of the earliest renditions of what today are known as “’zines.” Using the primitive copier machine technology available at the time, they published Fallout Magazine, in which they created fake advertisements for fake bands, original artwork - some of which ended up as album art - and no shortage of what was, at the time, rather shocking commentary on life under the thrall of President Reagan - ah, those happy, halcyon days. Not dissimilar to the work of many Dada artists of the 1930s, Winston and Jayed sounded off loudly on the political corruption of the 1970s, which, in comparison to today’s shenanigans, seems no more dangerous than the ham-fisted pranks of schoolboys.

Winston’s expertise with montage was a perfect device to augment the rough edges of punk rock. “I drew pictures at home because I wouldn’t dare cut them out of my mom’s art books,” he smiles. “Before there were photocopy machines, I drew things and cut up the drawings, so I’d have collected a dozen different pictures. Or I’d cut up things from magazines. I’d put them together in a way they weren’t meant to be. I was always interested in the Surrealists, and cutting up random images from popular media just made sense to me.”

Trance Ported by Winston Smith (Contributed)

Winston has a knack for taking neutral images and putting them back together, making an utterly out-of-context story. Jello Biafra once told Winston - and I’m paraphrasing: “You take two images that are right, and you put them together. Now they’re wrong, and that’s what makes them right.” His compositions are purely allegorical. A happy housewife triumphantly holding a dinner platter on which lays a slimy platypus may have a specific meaning for Winston - and many of his pieces do tell a specific story, but for him, it’s more about what the images evoke for the viewer. “People see what they see - maybe it’s something from their past, or an event, or maybe it’s just something absurd, or funny or disturbing.”

I recall Winston showing me one of his pieces decades ago - a nurse holding a newborn baby with a huge steam shovel about to snatch them up. In response, I said, “Yeah. Welcome to the world,” which remains the title of that piece to this day.

“In about 1979, I was attending an event in San Francisco. Some guys from the Berkeley Barb were looking at my work and invited me to visit them, which ended up with my work being on the front cover of their newspaper. A woman saw the paper, called me up, and told me there was going to be a 4-day Dada Festival in Ukiah. I’d never heard of Ukiah, but I knew I had to come to a Dada Festival. I stayed with PollyEsther Nation in a tent in her backyard in Talmage.”

“A year or so later, we came up to look at some property near Laytonville. It wasn’t what we were looking for, but driving back through Ukiah, we decided to stop at the Palace Hotel, which was so utterly elegant and beautiful at the time. We called Polly and let her know we were in town. Turns out she was working upstairs for a company called Up Yurts, owned by David Raitt. We found another property for sale, moved here, and David built our yurt, which we still live in to this day. Mendocino County has been my anchor for 44 years.” What also arose from this move were lifelong friendships between Winston and so many folks - Joann Stevens, Ada B. Fine, Tommy Wayne Kramer and Cheryl Johnson, and others who have passed on - Steve Scully, Steve Caravello, Buster Cleveland, and Buddy Eller, to name just a few. And did we have fun. There was a second Dada festival. In part, it involved a full-body Easter bunny costume, a nighttime heist of lawn flamingoes (which was reported on by the Ukiah Daily Journal), and the creation of a Patty Hearst-style ransom video addressed to the owners of said flamingoes.

Winston’s current work continues to be imbued with provocative, surrealist, and satirical imagery. He still uses vintage magazines and other imagery from Victoriana to mid-twentieth-century American magazine art. Despite the ease of computer-aided collage, Winston, a self-confessed Luddite, continues to hand-cut his montage elements, creating work that now inspires a new generation of artists. A not-to-be-named “fancy college” once canceled a workshop they’d scheduled with Winston when they discovered he used an Exacto knife and not Photoshop in the creation of his art.

The Divine Blossom by Winston Smith (Contributed)

He is widely credited for defining the iconic style still used by punk bands worldwide. His graphic style has become so ubiquitous that practically everyone has a Winston-esque refrigerator magnet lying around, featuring some ’50s style housewife holding a cake, saying something like, “Stressed is Just Desserts Spelled Backward.”

With the support of his wife and longtime best buddy Chick Lewis, Winston has been running successful montage workshops for the public in San Francisco, and the hope is that he will convene one in Ukiah sometime soon. Several months ago, an unexpected health crisis resulted in a cardiac bypass and a successful GoFundMe effort (but any contributions are still welcome). And finally, after all these years, an acknowledgment of Winston’s overwhelming contribution to Ukiah society exists- the naming of an actual street after him - just north of the Palace Hotel: W. Smith Street!

“Conspire to Inspire” is Smith’s slogan of the day. “I truly believe that everyone has a creative streak. Not everyone will become an artist or musician, but everyone has the ability to create,” he concludes.

The show will be on display for the month of November. At the opening, light refreshments, wine, and beverages will be available for a donation. Medium Art Center is located at 110 S. School Street in downtown Ukiah. For more information on Winston’s art, visit https://www.winstonsmith.com/artcrimes or his Instagram page. For more information about the art center, visit https://www.mediumarts.org.

(Ukiah Daily Journal)

ED NOTE: Among my proudest possessions, and I'm not especially acquisitive I promise you, I count a Winston Smith original signed by the artist called 'The Road to Hell, paved with good intentions — Hell next 666 exits."

Annoys me that some people dismiss him merely as a "collage artist," as if there aren't collages and collages. Mr. Smith's work is in a class by itself, and I'm not surprised he's become nearly as eminent as his famous namesake.

PROLOGUE: BIGFOOT

Rumor placed John Fleming Wheeler's birth in the Cherokee Nation around 1841. Census documents state he spent a large part of his childhood within McDonald County, at the southwestern corner of Missouri. John's father farmed there as well as practicing rudimentary dentistry. The county's western edge bounded the Indian Territory. McDonald County's western border bore a crooked line westward several miles as it traversed from north to south.

When the boy reached the age of ten or eleven, the Wheeler family also bore west, for California. A year later, young John and at least one sister appear to have made a return trip east with their father. According to John Wheeler's own telling, somewhere on the way he was taken captive by Indians. What became of his father and sister remains a mystery.

John Wheeler claimed that his riding and shooting skills were nurtured in this early experience of living with Native Americans. He told acquaintances in Mendocino, California, that after a few years as a captive, he escaped. In the years following, he apparently served as a scout for the U.S. Army on the Great Plains and on into the Rocky Mountain region. In this line of service, he supposedly crossed paths with both Buffalo Bill Cody and George Armstrong Custer. No documentary evidence survives to verify the matter; however, the locale and timeline of Wheeler's whereabouts do fit together enough to make this a possibility.

Newspaper accounts verify that while still in his teens, John Wheeler shot and killed a man in Oregon. Having won a not guilty verdict at trial, Wheeler moved on. He rode into Montana Territory in the early 1860s. Those who met him during this period remarked on the intensity of Wheeler's steel gray eyes and his small feet and hands. He sat tall and confident in the saddle. Many came to note his acuity with all kinds of guns.

Wheeler's skill on horseback allowed him to make his way on roads, trails, and cross country in places few others would attempt and in practically all weathers. Early on he served as a deputy county sheriff. Later, he wended his way along the rocky roads to Silver City, Idaho, at 6,200 feet elevation. Accounts from the winter of 1867-1868 show he spent a good deal of his time at the gambling tables of this boom town about seventy miles south of Boise.

In March 1868 he gained employment as a U.S. Deputy Marshal, helping quell a shooting war that had broken out between mining companies in Silver City.

With that behind him, Wheeler turned his attention to horse trading in that locale. However, in late June and early July, 1868, some of his finest steeds were stolen from a corral. Through intuition or straightforward information, Wheeler believed the horse thief to be none other than Bigfoot.

The presence of the figure known as Bigfoot in Idaho first gained attention at the scene of an Indian raid in 1862. In the following year, gold fever brought thousands to southwestern Idaho. Any number of raids and late night stock thefts held a common clue, one of the perpetrators left enormous footprints behind.

T.J. Sutton, who spent time attached to an expedition in 1863, described the footprints he witnessed first hand: “We also discovered and measured Bigfoot’s track, which was 17 and one-half inches long by six inches wide.” Sutton also wrote, “At that time we had no knowledge of the man, but the enormous size of his track attracted our attention and so roused our curiosity that careful measurements of its dimensions were made, and no little discussion indulged in as to whether it was a human track.”

Sutton described Bigfoot as “the boss horse thief of the plains.” The mythic description of Bigfoot caused boys in the area to create gigantic moccasins in order to leave seventeen inch footprints at the sites of many pranks over the next few years. The man, myth, or legend purportedly stood six feet nine inches tall, on a two hundred eighty to three hundred pound frame. Most who proffered such descriptions probably never saw the real Bigfoot.

The account of what happened after John Wheeler's horses disappeared remains supposition to some degree, though it has been re-told in several serious works of history. Apparently, the legend of Bigfoot, which had grown throughout the 1860s from Montana on across Idaho, did not dissuade Wheeler. In fact, he may have been encouraged by a thousand dollar bounty on the legendary figure. Wheeler garnered information that Bigfoot and two Paiute confederates planned to rob a stagecoach traveling the rutted Silver City to Boise run. Wheeler lay in wait amid willows south of the Snake River for three and a half days. Positioned where stage robberies often occurred in a narrow pass, he endured countless mosquito bites in the evenings and ran out of food during the last day of his vigil. Finally, with the rumble of a stage approaching, he spotted the potential hold-up trio on the high side of the road and commenced firing. One Indian fell dead, another headed for the hills. Bigfoot hid behind a boulder, crawling back and forth to peer around either edge, but the gunfire ceased for several minutes while the stagecoach passed from sight.

Meanwhile, Bigfoot cut loose a sizable piece of sagebrush and lashed it to his back. With this disguise he slithered a bit farther away until Wheeler's voice sang out in the summer mountain air, “Get up from there Bigfoot, you old feather-headed, leather-bellied coward. I can see you crawling off like a snake… Here's a scalp. Come down and get mine.”

Bigfoot stood in the open, firing his rifle into the willows. “You coward. I am no coward. You come out and I'll scalp you.”

Wheeler stepped forward, out of the willows. “Here I am. Now sail in, old rooster.”

Both fired nearly simultaneously…

— excerpt from The Mendocino Outlaws by Malcom Macdonald

To discover the result of this one on one confrontation, and how it links to a double murder in Mendocino County followed by a 1,000 mile manhunt, contact one of these fine merchants to purchase The Mendocino Outlaws:

Gallery Bookshop in Mendocino: 707-937-2665, gallerybookshop.com
The Book Juggler in Willits: 707-459-4075, thebookjuggler.com
The Mendocino Book Company in Ukiah: 707-468-5940
The Book Store On E. Laurel in Fort Bragg: 707-964-6559
Windsong on Main St., Fort Bragg: 707-964-2050
Goodlife Cafe & Bakery in Mendocino: 707-937-0836
Gallery Bookshop and The Book Juggler possess easy to navigate website for ordering.

If you're looking to couple The Mendocino Outlaws with other works by Malcolm Macdonald for gift giving, add the non-fiction accounts in Mendocino History Exposed or the novel, Outlaw Ford.

HEARTTHROB JAMES DEAN’S SHORT STINT IN MENDOCINO COUNTY

by Averee McNear

Whether you know James Dean from his influential (and tragically short) movie career or from his name drop in a Taylor Swift song, he is undeniably a cultural icon. A year before his death in a car accident in 1955, Dean arrived in Mendocino to film “East of Eden.” Based on John Steinbeck’s novel of the same name, the film was directed by Elia Kazan, whose filmography also includes 1951’s “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

While the story is set in 1917 Salinas and Monterey, California, by 1954 Monterey looked too modern for the movie. The film moved up the coast to join the long list of Hollywood productions filmed in Mendocino for its historic appearance. In late May, 150-200 crew members arrived in town. Calls went out for locals to work as extras. One article in the Mendocino Beacon said that Assistant Director Don Page was casting “25 men who, to use the term loosely, are fat, and who can be ready for immediate work as extras.”

James Dean in Mendocino, Calif., around 1954. (Kelley House Museum via Bay City News)

Filming began on May 27 at Dr. Russell Preston’s Victorian mansion. Preston was in bad health and bedridden while the crew worked on the first floor of his home. He reportedly called Kazan to his bedside on the first day of filming, saying “Should I die while you are filming, you must proceed with your work. You have vast amounts of money invested, and you cannot afford to stop filming your picture because I happen to die. Proceed as though I never existed.”

The next day, Preston passed away at the age of 77. Filming paused for the day in his honor.

Residents have many stories about the filming of “East of Eden.” One person recalled that Dean was patient with kids who visited the set and would play catch with them between shots. Another resident took Dean and actor Timothy Carey fishing on Portuguese Beach. Julie Harris is perhaps the most fondly remembered of the cast; she frequently talked with staff at the Little River Inn and mingled with extras. Filming wrapped on June 2.

“East of Eden” was released on March 9, 1955; it was the only of Dean’s three films in a leading role that was released during his lifetime. He was posthumously nominated for Best Actor at the Academy Awards and has since been ranked as the 18th greatest male film star from the Golden Age of Hollywood by the American Film Institute.

(Kelley House Museum)

CATCH OF THE DAY, Saturday, November 1, 2025

MICHAEL BRENNAN, 40, San Carlos/Ukiah. Paraphernalia, parole violation.

KEENAN BURTON, 41, Willits. Under influence.

FELICIA CHILDERS, 40, Willits. Failure to appear.

ROCKY DUMAN, 34, Ukiah. Controlled substance, county parole violation.

MARCO ESCARENO-PINON, 25, Covelo. Domestic battery.

JASMIN FLORES, 29, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse.

KARINA FLORES-OSORIO, 30, Santa Rosa/Ukiah. Failure to appear, probation revocation.

BRYAN GONZALES, 22, Ukiah. Under influence, probation revocation.

JEFFREY HAMMACK, Ukiah. Battery.

ENRIQUE HERNANDEZ, 29, Fort Bragg. Criminal threats, probation revocation.

GERARDO LEMUS, 26, Ukiah. DUI.

SCOTT MAINGI, 50, Ukiah. Petty theft with priors, controlled substance with two or more priors, paraphernalia, disobeying court order.

ERIC RODRIGUEZ, 31, Willits. DUI.

ALICE STRANG, 47, Redwood Valley. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, failure to appear.

DON WILTSE JR., 38, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

Greenfield Ranch, Easter 1977 (image by Jana Rose Chase)

“IT’S IT" EATING ETIQUETTE

When no one’s looking,
Grab one and slobber it down.
Get up. Walk away.

— Jim Luther

MEMO OF THE AIR: Bride of Chaotica!

"Be strong, leetle vun. Someday they vill all be dedt and you vill do a sheet on all of their graves."

Marco here. Here's the recording of all-Halloween-night's eight-hour-long Memo of the Air: Good Night Radio show on KNYO.org, on 107.7fm KNYO-LP Fort Bragg (CA) and also, for the first three hours, on 89.3fm KAKX Mendocino, ready for you to re-enjoy in whole or in part. https://memo-of-the-air.s3.amazonaws.com/KNYO_0668_MOTA_2025-10-31.mp3

Coming shows can feature your own story or dream or poem or essay or kvetch or announcement. Just email it to me. Or send me a link to your writing project and I'll take it from there and read it on the air.

Besides all that, at https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com you'll find a fresh batch of dozens of links to not-necessarily radio-useful but worthwhile items I set aside for you while gathering the show together, such as:

Snapshot of our local star, Mister Sun, 21:08:56 UTC, October 25. All of Earth would cover just a few pixels of this wild billion-year constant plasma explosion. And all of Earth's people, piled up like bricks, side to side, just to the rim of the Grand Canyon, to make a wall across it, would be only two people thick. And half of the cells in your body are not you at all but rather bacteria living inside you or bugs living in your hair follicles. Your meat robot is their comfortable world, not too big, not too small, just the right temperature, endless supply of yummy rot. All thanks to energy from Mister Sun. https://i0.wp.com/theava.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/sun.jpg

How to make 60-proof purple nurple. It's like purple drank but alcohol instead of cough syrup and pop. You need sugar, one lemon, a gallon of distilled water, a packet of champagne yeast, packet of Fermaid, a rubber glove, a single pin, an available refrigerator-freezer, and a pinch of butterfly pea blossoms so the color turns more like weak grape sodapop than like a truck-stop piss jar. It reminds me, as so much does, of when Scruffy said in Futurama, to comfort Marcie because her green Martian boyfriend was unjustly away in prison, "Prison ain't so bad. And you can make sangria in the terlit." Allow me to repeat: science has shown that no amount of alcohol is safe. Two drops of it increase your risk of everything from cancer to dementia. Alcohol kills 200,000 Americans every year. Transvestites reading aloud in libraries kill, what, five? Not 500,000. Five. (I'm kidding, of course. Transvestites in libraries kill zero.) Thirty thousand children are killed by guns every year in America. Some of those, I guess, their gun-within-reach parents or uncles are drunk, but a lot of them shoot themselves or each other. Handguns in the city, long guns in rural areas. And one-third of all car deaths come from alcohol, too. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/dM2CN-GR4rU

Jesus said to shelter and clothe the poor, feed the hungry, heal the sick, visit strangers in jail, welcome all immigrants, turn the other cheek, pray only quietly in secret and not make a fuss about it, etc. Naw, no, Jesus said exactly the opposite of all that and wants you to carry your gun around in case you need to shoot someone, kick your gay child out into the snow, hoard material wealth, and he could talk your ear off about how much he hates abortion and gay marriage, colloquial funny terms for body parts and dancing on Sundays. Which of those sentences, to you, is "the lines are straight" and which one is "the lines are bendy"? https://twitter.com/pickover/status/1982886110612353036/photo/1

Marco McClean, [email protected], https://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com

MY HALLOWE’EN ADVENTURE: HOW I MET KYM KEMP

by Paul Modic

After the farmers market I packed about ten books, my memoir from seven to seventy called Dirt Road Hippies and headed out that winding mountain road to the coast as I had a thousand times before. I took a left at The Yellow Dirt Road and babied my sweet Lesbaru, creeping slowly down the hill for a mile on that rough dirt road to the switchback and then the first visit to my old place since I sold it exactly six years before.

The new owner had shrunk the deck into something safer on that steep hillside, had created a garden around the parking lot pungent with chicken shit, built a wood shed next to the driveway and put solid new doors and locks on the house and outbuildings. They were all locked up, as I was looking for a safe place to leave her a copy of my book as a sort of truce.

When she had been trying to convince me to sell her the place, she’d said I could visit it any time and I was finally taking her up on her kind offer. Our deal had turned acrimonious at the end when she couldn’t accept that I was going exactly by our contract and we were no longer friends, so technically I was trespassing.

She had plasticked up the upper deck door which made me sigh in dismay: I had been battening that leaky door against the winter storms every fall, first stapling the plastic then covering that with old Mexican blankets with battens screwed in. After some years I finally paid an overpriced local carpenter $700 to install a hundred dollar storm door, and wow, still leaking? (When I did my yearly and disheartening battening project I left the sliding bedroom window open to crawl back in.)

The place was deserted and lonely, just like it had been when I lived those decades of isolation before escaping to town twenty-five years ago. She’d lasted about five years, first trimming weed then with little jobs in Shelter Cove, started taking short then longer trips and recently someone told me she’d moved away, perhaps going home to mommy in Oregon? When she was buying the place I asked her why she wanted to be in the middle of nowhere at fifty, though she’d been living there for a few years in a work/trade situation and felt settled: this was home?

I saw an old abused and unused ladder, which had been given to me by an ex in an informal “divorce” settlement, that I had forgotten to take during the massive move of all my useless crap six years before. I decided to finally take it, then saw it was wedged in by huge beams she’d had removed when she reduced the deck size, and besides that I might not have had any bungies to attach it to the top of my car.

The only unlocked door was the sturdy slider to the woodshed and I placed the book nestled in its plastic sleeve onto a splitting round and put a nearby log over it. I took a few pictures of the old place before climbing up the hill and driving over to the Trade Faire in Thompson Creek Meadow. (I gave one copy of my book for the raffle, traded and gave a few more away, mostly to the old timer survivors, and hung around the meadow for an hour or so until my supply dwindled to none.)

After some conversations and storytelling I drove back to town to see the Halloweeners marching along harvesting sweets, the town in holiday bustling mode with all parking spaces full. The streets on both sides were full of children of the hippies steering the grandchildren of the hippies along the crowded sidewalks. There was a raucous party at the Town Square which I circled as the costumed children of all ages tried not to get hit by my car as I crawled through the revelers floating on their sugar high.

Finally I found a place to park on the block of mostly boarded up storefronts, as Main Street Garberville had never been this abandoned, a reflection of the weed boom and bust. (Before the hippies came in the seventies every storefront had a functioning business.) I watched a few straggler families go by and noticed the library crew had taken over a doorway and were handing out books to the passing kids from off a mobile cart. I got out and went over and said, “What a novel idea.”

Then I had an idea, went back to the car and got a few of my homemade English/Spanish dictionaries and children’s story collections, both made in Mexico years before, and placed them on the top shelf of the rack facing the sidewalk.

“What are those?” said the librarian and she picked one up and had a look. “We can’t have these, we have 400 books to give away!”

I took my four mini-books back and said, “You’re the evil librarian,” as if finally guessing her costume.

Returning to the car, my usual vantage point at this major social event/celebration, I looked at my watch and realized I could stick to my dinner time from five to six and then come back to watch some more. Once home I ate my usual latest “dinner” combo: a cut up apple with a variety of nuts and seeds, then for dessert a bowl of yogurt with muesli and banana and a dollop of Nutzo on the side. I watched some of the World Series where Yamamoto was spinning his magic against the Blue Jays (the Canadian team I’m rooting for just to piss Trump off) then dashed the five minutes back to town a little after six.

Just like that town was deserted again, presumably many had taken their kids down the hill to the park for the haunted trails segment of the holiday, and I had to drive around looking for costumed people but found few. I parked in front of a restaurant where a mostly-costumed family was sitting around a big table on the sidewalk. I gawked at them for a while, not shy about saying they were my last chance to see some local color. (Sun Man was sitting nearby and we had a lucid conversation for a few minutes.)

Looking through the huge plate glass window I noticed some more costumed people inside, went up near their table and drew their attention, and said, “Oh, I just want to see your costumes. I got here late and you’re the last ones in town. Oh, you’re a witch, huh, you’re all witches!” (They agreed.)

A couple of women were sitting at a small table between me and the witches and they looked up at me. “Oh, you’re Kym,” I said and she nodded. “I’m Paul Modic, nice to meet you.” She shook my hand and I looked over at her dinner partner and said, “And you’re the other one,” Kym’s top assistant at RedHeaded Blackbelt, the go-to source of news in Humboldt County and beyond.

“Lisa,” Kym said and Lisa shook my hand and we said, “Nice to meet you.”

“Well,” I said, and as I made my exit I gave Kym an affectionate pat on her back. I had finally met Kym Kemp, by a circuitous and serendipitous route, World Series and all. Mission accomplished, it was a good day!

(Now we’ll see if my long-held theory is true, that if she’d ever meet me and maybe get to know me, she might reconsider the bad opinion she seems to have and realize I’m a nice guy and publish more of my stories.)

NEW STRETCH OF 101 FINALLY OPENED. DRIVERS SAY IT’S LED TO ‘UNMITIGATED DISASTER’

by Rachel Swan

Drivers in the North Bay waited 30 years for a new lane to alleviate congestion on Highway 101. But now some wish the project had never finished.

That’s because it came with new carpool hours, meant to align Marin and Sonoma counties with the rest of the Bay Area. Regional transportation officials have tried to standardize the window for high-occupancy vehicles — with at least one passenger in addition to the driver — to two weekday rush hour periods. The morning period runs from 5 a.m. to 10 a.m., while the evening starts at 3 p.m. and ends at 7 p.m.

Officials at Caltrans imposed this split-schedule after adding diamond lanes to fix a notorious bottleneck between Petaluma and Novato, while also filling a “gap” in the 52-mile carpool lane network on 101, from Windsor to Mill Valley. Notably, the new hours apply to all 52 miles, which means one infrastructure project has vastly expanded the carpool window in both counties.

For some, the change feels seismic.

Suddenly, motorists who found themselves jammed up on 101 would peer out their windows at a tantalizing sight: a beautiful and woefully-underused diamond lane. With transit and carpools thinning out after 9 a.m., some drivers observed, with intensifying bitterness, that the diamond lane appeared to be sitting empty.

People balked. They panned the new carpool hour regime as a “one size fits all” solution. They criticized officials for spending years on a project aimed to ease traffic, only to defeat the purpose entirely. They objected so loudly that leaders in Marin and Sonoma County are now lobbying Caltrans to reverse course.

“This is an unmitigated disaster,” said Eric Grover, who drives each morning from his home in Novato to an office in San Francisco’s Upper Market neighborhood.

Before the carpool hours took effect in September, Grover typically left his house at 6:45 a.m., and slid into his desk at 7:30 a.m. Now he starts driving at 6:30 a.m. and straggles into work at 7:45 a.m., having endured an extra 25 minutes of waiting in gridlock.

Another Novato resident, Carol Meyers, said her commute to San Rafael has swelled from 20 minutes to upward of an hour.

“All that to travel 12 miles,” she said.

It’s the latest chapter for a monumental freeway project that was supposed to revolutionize mobility in the Bay Area, partly by adding that third lane at the infamous Marin-Sonoma Narrows, but also by imposing rules to prioritize buses and ride shares. Although the rebuild dated to an era when planners embraced road-widening as a solution for congestion, it also reflected a more forward-thinking idea about multi-modal corridors.

Yet as it neared the finish line, the 101 overhaul became a source of drama and division. Many people who expected to glide down the freeway found they were hitting more snarls and moving slower. More than a few blamed Caltrans’ emphasis on high-occupancy transport, which had so far done little to nudge people out of their cars.

“You wait so long through all this construction,” said Nikki Gelardi, a Novato resident who drives to work in Santa Rosa. “And then none of it makes sense.”

Granted, others applauded Caltrans and other transportation agencies for the tough love approach.

“This is an opportunity for a real do-over, one that prioritizes smarter travel choices rather than sliding back into old habits,” a woman from Santa Rosa wrote, in an email to the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, which helped advise Caltrans on the carpool hours.

“Strong HOV rules are not about punishing commuters — they’re about building a healthier, more efficient transportation system for all of us,” the email concluded.

Debate about carpool hours stewed for months as Caltrans crews finished widening the Narrows between Novato and the county line. Crews broadened that 6-mile section from two lanes to three, an expensive and complicated project that came with conditions. Chiefly, the state permit required that third lane to be reserved for carpools at least part time, and environmental documents called for consistent hours between the counties.

Such requirements provoked bickering. Traditionally, Marin carpool hours ran from 6:30 to 8:30 a.m., only in the southbound direction, during morning rush hour. In the evenings, Marin’s carpool restrictions started at 4:30 p.m. and ended at 7 p.m. Sonoma, by contrast, had carpool hours from 7 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 6:30 p.m. in both directions.

Nobody quite knew where the twain should meet. Officials at Caltrans decided to compromise by spreading — or, perhaps, exacerbating — the misery, extending what had been about 5 hours of carpool a day in both counties to a new normal of 9 hours.

The new schedule, which is the same heading north as heading south, went live a few weeks before the third lane opened on the Narrows. This was, by all measures, a fraught moment. Owners of electric vehicles were on the verge of losing their carpool lane privilege on Oct. 1 (with enforcement to start in December), a development that would likely push solo drivers into the general-purpose lanes. School had started, which increased traffic.

If multiple factors contribute to the snarls on 101, a lot of commuters cite a plainly visible explanation: sparse carpool lanes next to general lanes that are bumper-to-bumper. Grover said he became grateful for the solo drivers who snuck into the carpool lane and created a little more balance.

“If it wasn’t for the cheaters, it could be worse,” he said.

It didn’t take long for the backlash to coalesce. John Goodwin, an MTC spokesperson, said he has already received scores of phone calls and emails with complaints — and a couple expressing support. He has tried to address everyone’s concerns and explain the rationale.

“Adding a third lane meant the third lane was required to be a carpool lane,” he said. “It stands to reason that the operating hours for the carpool lane be consistent throughout the corridor,” he added, referring to the full 52 miles. Moreover, Goodwin noted, other Bay Area freeways hew to these carpool hours.

An online petition protesting the hours had nearly 8,000 signatures as of Friday.

Under mounting pressure, the transportation authorities in Marin and Sonoma County sent a joint letter to Caltrans, asking officials for a “shorter” carpool duration, potentially 6 to 9 a.m. and 3 to 6:30 p.m., and not wait six months or longer to consider changes.

Staff at Caltrans assured in a statement that they are working “as quickly as possible” to gather data, understand the impacts of the revised HOV hours, and “determine the best path forward.”

“Caltrans and MTC are monitoring traffic data, including speeds in the HOV lanes and general-purpose lanes, vehicle occupancy counts, as well as the duration and length of congestion,” the statement read. It referenced a new data dashboard that Caltrans and other transportation agencies are making, to provide up-to-date traffic analysis.

Carter Lavin, co-founder of the Transbay Coalition, a transportation advocacy group, was disappointed to see this abrupt retreat. He views the longer HOV hours on 101 as an opportunity for culture change in North Bay suburbs where people love to drive.

“Our government spent huge amounts of taxpayer dollars on an asset that people in these communities have been clamoring for, even though widening freeways is a climate catastrophe,” Lavin said. He hoped that by prioritizing carpools, Marin and Sonoma transportation authorities could compensate for some of the damage.

“It should be easy for the counties to collaborate with Caltrans to advertise the carpool lane,” Lavin said. “There’s a lot of social media, there are so many ways to get the word out.”

Perhaps, Lavin suggested, transportation leaders could try something adventurous: a Tinder-style app that could match drivers with potential riders.

Gelardi said she has carpooled in the past and abstractly likes the concept, but that it’s become more difficult in an era of remote work.

“A lot of jobs will let you leave at 3 p.m. and finish the day at home, but it’s hard to do that if you have to wait for your ride,”

Anne Richman, executive director of the Transportation Authority of Marin, remains committed to the urban-planning philosophy behind the 101 project. She and her colleagues “want to be supportive of transit and carpooling,” while underscoring the positive impact of the third lane, which has relieved chokepoints, Richman said. Nonetheless, she acknowledged that slowdowns now seem to be occurring on other parts of 101, including the portion south of the Narrows, from Novato to San Rafael.

Whether the beefed-up carpool hours are entirely to blame is unclear. One alternative theory is that the Narrows effectively metered the flow of cars during peak hours. Now it’s a bit like an unclogged pipe, releasing more traffic southward.

Novato drivers like Grover and Meyers don’t begrudge their neighbors to the north for wanting some relief. They believe 101 could improve everywhere if carpool hours were limited to times when people are more likely to carpool.

Grover echoed Richman’s sentiments, assuring that he’s generally “all in for the carpool lane.” Just not at the expense of a project that took 30 years to build.

(SF Chronicle)

'I WILL KILL YOU': THE 40-YEAR CULT OF THE COSTCO HOT DOG COMBO

by Madeline Wells, Jessica Yadegaran

Few food deals inspire the cult-like fervor of the $1.50 Costco hot dog combo. Fans sport T-shirts and bumper stickers pledging their loyalty to the inflation-defying deal; some are diehard enough to get it tattooed on their skin. One diabolical Costco member even hid a positive pregnancy test inside a hot dog to surprise her partner.

It’s a deal so rare and so important to Costco’s identity that former Costco CEO Jim Sinegal once reportedly threatened murder if his successor ever thought of raising the price.

“If you raise the effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out,” were his supposed words to his replacement Craig Jelinek.

This year, the beloved combo turned 40. While the meal has changed slightly over the decades — the hot dog is now made by Kirkland Signature instead of Hebrew National, and the soda has shifted from Coke to Pepsi and back to Coke — it’s the same price today as it was in 1985. And that’s what matters most to its loyal fans.

On a recent weekday afternoon at the Costco on 10th Street in San Francisco, shoppers were huddled around tables eating their hot dogs in the bustling food court.

“I was just craving it today,” said Briana Aleman of Pittsburg, who was shopping with her boyfriend, Dominick Sanchez of San Francisco.

Sanchez was enjoying the chicken bake, but agreed with his girlfriend that the hefty hot dog on a sesame-topped bun is both craveable and a steal.

“It’s a good deal and it hasn’t changed in 40 years, can’t beat that,” he said.

Rafa Bautie of San Francisco has ordered the hot dog combo without fail during every Costco run he’s made since he became a member in 1996, he said. He always tops the dog with ketchup, mustard and relish.

“Sometimes I’m not even that hungry but I still get it,” he said.

The hot dog combo is Costco’s most popular food court item by a mile. In the fiscal year 2025, the warehouse club sold more than 245 million hot dog combos, Chief Financial Officer Gary Millerchip said on an earnings call in September — a new record. So it’s no wonder the company is working on expanding hot dog production. (Costco built its first hot dog-making plant in 2009 in Tracy.)

“While our members love the treasure hunt items that they find in our warehouses and online, our everyday value items are also extremely important to them, especially in times of economic uncertainty,” Millerchip said in the earnings call. “There are no better examples of this than our hot dog combo, rotisserie chicken and KS bath tissue.”

But it’s not just financial pressure that’s making Americans gravitate toward the $1.50 hot dog combo now more than ever. Social media trends have introduced it to a new, younger generation of shoppers, skyrocketing it from cult favorite to mainstream staple.

One meme seen all over TikTok features the phrase “enjoying my $1.50 hot dog after spending $600 at Costco.” The hot dog has been featured in mukbangs, and some have taken it to even greater extremes, like Sir Yacht, who went viral for sharing his experience eating nothing but the $1.50 combo for a week straight. The influencer claimed he only spent $43.50 and declared it “the culinary experience of a lifetime.”

Perhaps most prominent, though, are the wild Costco food court hacks, like the “forbidden glizzy”: a hot dog stuffed inside a Costco chicken bake (children, shield your eyes). Others’ ungodly creations include rolling a hot dog inside a slice of Costco pizza or ripping the cheese off of a slice of pizza to use as a hot dog condiment.

Offline, local Costco customers have their own hacks for maximizing hot dog enjoyment, too.

G.W., a San Francisco customer who preferred sharing only her initials, topped her hot dog with chopped onions and filled her large cup with lemonade before reaching into her backpack and pulling out a wad of paper towel-wrapped kimchi.

“It’s so good together,” she said, carefully placing the kimchi atop the frank. “It’s a treat. It’s not the healthiest, but I really like it.”

Even 40 years later, the easy-to-love combo is still gaining new fans. Jesus Davila was on his way to the office when he stopped into Costco to pick up his glasses from the optical department and started a tradition: His first hot dog combo.

“I’m rushing to work and wanted something fast,” he said. “It’s pretty cheap. I think that’s what makes it desirable.”

(SFGate.com)

ON-LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I have no trust in the media, nor do I trust the government. I compare it to fashion, what is in style at the moment and you look back in five years and just cringe. Much of the country is just trying to make ends meet. If you are doing investigations of the media ask if anyone really cares. I bet knitted socks that 85% of the USA doesn’t have the time, resources, interest, tolerance for the media as it is today. Investigations are subjected to personal bias, corporate money, and agendas; everyone knows this. We’ve experienced media personally, or professionally and the best and brightest are not rising to the top. We move on. This year I am seriously looking at the media I pay for and consume. I think there are going to be lots of unsubscribing because it's just stupidity, noise.

STONES IN MY PASSWAY

I got stones in my passway
and all my roads seem dark at night
I got stones in my passway
and all my roads seem dark at night
I have pains in my heart
they have taken my appetite
I have a bird to whistle
I have a bird to sing
Have a bird to whistle
and I have a bird to sing
I have a woman that I’m lovin
boy, but she don’t mean a thing
My enemies have betrayed me
have overtaken poor Bob at last
My enemies have betrayed me
have overtaken poor Bob at last
And ‘eres one thing certainly
they have stones all in my pass
Now you tryin to take my life
and all my lovin too
You laid a passway for me
now what are you tryin to do
I’m cryin please
please let us be friends
And when you hear me howlin in my passway rider
ple-ease open your door and let me in
I’ve got three legs to truck home
boys please don’t block my road
I’ve got three legs to truck home
boys please don’t block my road
I’ve been fellin ashamed about my rider
babe, I’m booked and I got to go

— Robert Johnson (1937)

BROS NEED SOME BROS

by Maureen Dowd

After my mom died, I went to the same movie every day for a week, a buddy comedy about two divorce mediators who sneak into weddings to seduce women. The Vince Vaughn-Owen Wilson bromance in “Wedding Crashers” was a hilarious, heartwarming distraction from my blues.

So I was happy, 20 years later, to see the real-life friends in Xfinity ads reprising their roles, bro-ing out on a sleepover where they watch sports and get ready for a Vaughn specialty: pancakes-and-guac.

Then I noticed other bro commercials: seriously buff comic actors Kumail Nanjiani and Rob Mac aiming to make DirecTV hip, sparring in fur coats, tinted aviators and lots of bling as they watch sports.

“Scrubs” BFFs Zach Braff and Donald Faison are singing, dancing and hanging in the hood, sometimes with Jason Momoa and John Travolta, pushing T-Mobile.

Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, stars of the first season of “True Detective,” showcase the zany Texas chemistry from their real-life friendship in ads for Salesforce.

And the Big Kahuna: Al Pacino and Robert De Niro bring the “Godfather” vibe to a campaign for Moncler focusing on their friendship, titled “Warmer Together.” It’s strictly business, but it’s also personal.

I was startled by all the cool male friendship ads, given the alarming stories about an epidemic of male loneliness, and a diminution of friendship and romance in the lives of men, especially young men.

With their depictions of fun buddy bonding — harking back to a time before technology swallowed communication — Madison Avenue is modeling the sort of friendships that are waning in society.

I Zoomed with Platon, the British photographer who shot the black-and-white Moncler ad of the two Godfathers cuddling — and secretly tickling each other under their arms. (The billboards are splashed everywhere from the Bowery to Sunset Boulevard.) Platon, who is known for his striking portraits of world leaders, also directed a short black-and-white video with Pacino and De Niro wearing the brand’s warm, puffy, pricey coats on a rooftop overlooking New York City and chatting about their warm feelings for each other. The soundtrack is a cover of Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me.” (The Italian octogenarians are still having babies, so they may need the paycheck.)

Friendship “is the greatest thing you can have,” says Pacino, who has been in four movies with De Niro and met him even before the “Godfather” saga. “And the understanding of life. There is just an innate trust.”

Noting that social media and politics now are built on anger, suspicion, division and tribalism, Platon said that the ad is auguring a better future for carbon-based beings.

“I think as the novelty of A.I. wears off and it just becomes part of the way we live, the genuine human connection between people, men and women of all ages, is going to become the most valuable social currency,” he said. “Something that’s real, something that has soul, something that is tender, vulnerable, sincere. And sometimes complicated to deal with. The human condition is very, very complicated.”

Not the solipsistic world that many young men are creating for themselves with pliable, eager-to-please A.I. companions and fantasy love objects. A Harper’s piece by Daniel Kolitz describes a shocking new movement of interiority among pornography-obsessed Gen Z-ers called “gooning”: a life filled with marathon masturbation that goes on so long it becomes meditation, in search of the “goonstate.”

“It’s young men who are not making connections with friends, mentors or mates,” said Scott Galloway, the podcaster and New York University professor whose new book is “Notes on Being a Man,” a memoir/aspirational code for masculinity for young men.

“When a woman doesn’t have a romantic relationship, she pours that energy into her work and her friends,” he said. “When a man doesn’t have a romantic relationship, he pours that energy into porn and conspiracy theories. It’s the guy that comes off the tracks and goes down a rabbit hole,” sometimes, in extreme cases, leading to mental illness and violence.

“Men need relationships much more than women,” he said, adding that the growing number of men who can’t connect to other men or women is “a disaster.”

“It’s a combination of the loneliness, the lack of economic opportunity for men and being in these synthetic online relationships where they aren’t forced to take risks and develop real life skills around work, friendships, and romantic and sexual relationships. And then they have this godlike technology that creates lifelike relationships that are frictionless.

“Managing a romantic relationship is really hard, but victory in that gives you the skills to be successful in other parts of your life and ultimately create purpose and meaning in life.”

Alarmed at the cases of teens committing suicide when egged on by an online avatar, Galloway said he believes that synthetic relationships should be outlawed for anyone with mental health problems.

“Young men need male role models, they need friends, and ideally a romantic partner,” he said.

Could the ad duets of actors who are friends serve as a positive example?

Galloway wasn’t sure that young, financially struggling, lonely men would be inspired by the celebrity bromances.

“These guys are wealthy and outside of the house a lot and a little bit older, so they’re not addicted to their phones,” he said. “They haven’t been radicalized. They have women in their lives, which is a key component.”

TAIBBI AND KIRN

Matt Taibbi: I’ve already found out that a half a dozen people who are in my contacts list were having their phones and emails monitored, which means my emails were being monitored.

Walter Kirn: Which means mine were probably.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Yeah. Exactly. So what does that say about the sanctity of the source relationship? That’s out the window now. Now you have to assume that the Justice Department knows that you’re talking to anybody who has any kind of official status so it’s very frustrating.

Walter Kirn: Matt. Matt, let’s not skip over the absolute teachable moment that you just brought up. You and I … I think this is true. You and I now can only assume and must assume in all of our communications with each other and with our sources particularly that we’re under some kind of surveillance.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, of course. Of course.

Walter Kirn: I didn’t always assume that, Matt. You do the kind of journalism where you probably get smart and wise to that stuff pretty quickly, even back when you’re communicating with-

Matt Taibbi: Well, but that’s why we’ve all been talking on Signal for the last eight years. Look, anybody who knows anybody who’s ever talked to anybody at Wikipedia, we all know that there’s a good chance that you’re on some kind of list, and there’s lots of other folks who’ve been investigated who are let’s say still on the outs and perhaps living in other countries. If you had contacts with those sorts of people, you should expect that you’re on a list somewhere and that your communications are being taken down. It’s a new day in journalism. This is a normal thing. You’re operating in the open. One of the problems with that is you can’t promise a source that they’re really off the record.

Walter Kirn: Nope. You can. You can.

Matt Taibbi: Yes.

Walter Kirn: Did I ever tell you about the time a source called me? I don’t know how much a source they were. Maybe they promised to be one or I thought they would be one. From a transatlantic flight they texted me and started getting me into a text exchange about, I don’t know, about the Korean War and other things like that. And then they went quiet, and then they informed me that in the time they had been quiet, they had landed at Washington Dulles. They had been taken aside and searched and had their phone searched.

Matt Taibbi: Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Walter Kirn: And I was like, “Oh, thanks, man. Good. Good.” I was never comfortable with the person afterwards. They might’ve been a victim, or they might’ve been a perpetrator. It was unclear.

Matt Taibbi: Right.

Walter Kirn: But I was like, how much insecurity of communication now and how … They’re probably waiting on the two hop rule for access to you, Matt. It’s like, come on. It’s our turn.

Matt Taibbi: I think that ship probably sailed a long time ago. There are people who were already caught up in the Russiagate thing who were in my context list. So anyway. The point is in the old days, if I sat down with a whistleblower for a big bank or something like that, I used to give them a little speech and say, “Here are the risks. You may not want to do this because X, Y, and Z can happen. I can promise you that I won’t talk about it until you’re comfortable coming forward.” Now you can’t say that. You can’t give that speech. At the beginning of the speech you have to say to them, you have to decide right now whether you’re comfortable coming forward, because anything that you say is probably already being reviewed by somebody or at least passively.

Walter Kirn: It’s certainly being stored. It’s certainly being collected for possible future use should you write the story. They can look it up, Matt, to be honest, it sort of drove me out of hard journalism because I realized I was sitting across from people that all I could tell them was if I say it’s off the record, I won’t report it. If I’m saying this is on background, that means I won’t write it. But that doesn’t mean it won’t come out in some form somewhere. And actually the minute you said you wanted it off the record was probably the minute they turned on the extra mics at the other end.

Matt Taibbi: Right. Right. Yeah. Exactly. It’s probably a key word…

THEY WANT YOU RELYING ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE So That You Will Lose Your Natural Intelligence

by Caitlin Johnstone

Your rulers want you to depend on machines to do your thinking for you.

They want you relying on AI to do your reasoning, researching, analysis, and writing.

They want you to require easily controllable software to form your understanding of the world, and to express that understanding to others.

They can control the machines, but they can’t control the human mind. So they want you to abandon your mind for the machines.

They want you relying on artificial intelligence so you stop using your organic intelligence.

They want your critical thinking skills to atrophy.

They want your ability to locate and parse inconvenient pieces of information to deteriorate.

They want your inspiration and intuition to decay.

They want your sense of morality to waste and wither away.

They want you perceiving reality through interpretive lenses controlled by plutocratic tech companies which are inextricably intertwined with the power structure of the western empire.

Generative AI is just high-tech brainwashing. It’s the next level of propaganda indoctrination. It is there to turn our brains into useless sludge which cannot function without technological crutches controlled by the imperial plutocrats.

They want us to abandon our humanity for technology.

They don’t want us making our own art.

They don’t want us making our own music.

They don’t want us writing our own poetry.

They don’t want us contemplating philosophy for ourselves.

They don’t want us turning inwards and getting in touch with an authentic spirituality.

They want to replace the dynamic human spirit with predictable lines of code.

Our brains are conditioned to select for cognitive ease, and that’s what the AI merchants are selling us. The sales pitch is, “You don’t have to exert all that mental effort thinking new thoughts, learning new things, and expressing yourself creatively! This product will do it for you!”

But it comes at a cost. We have to trade in our ability to do those things for ourselves.

Historically when a new technology has shown up, that kind of tradeoff has been worth it. Not many people know how to start a fire with a bow drill anymore, but it rarely matters because modern technology has given us much more efficient ways of starting fires and keeping warm. It didn’t make sense to spend all the time and effort necessary to maintain our respective bow drill skills once that technology showed up.

But this isn’t like that. We’re not talking about some obsolete skill we won’t need anymore thanks to modern technological development, we’re talking about our minds. Our creative expression. Our inspiration. Our very humanness.

Even if AI worked well (it doesn’t) and even if our plutocratic overlords could be trusted to interpret reality on our behalf (they can’t), those still wouldn’t be aspects of ourselves that we should want to relinquish.

In this oligarchic dystopia, it is an act of defiance just to insist upon maintaining your own cognitive faculties. Regularly exercising your own creativity, ingenuity and mental effort is a small but meaningful rebellion.

So exercise it.

Don’t ask an AI to think something through for you. Work it out as best you can on your own. Even if the results are flawed, it’s still better than losing your ability to reason.

Don’t ask AI to create art or poetry for you. Make it yourself. Even if it’s crap, it’ll still be better than outsourcing your artistic capacity to a machine.

Don’t even run to a chatbot every time you need to find information about something. See if you can work your way through the old enshittified online search methods and find it for yourself. Our rulers are getting better and better at hiding inconvenient facts from us, so we’ve got to get better and better at finding them.

Get in touch with the fleshy, tactile experience of human embodiment, because they are trying to get you to abandon it.

Really feel your feet on the ground. The air in your lungs. The wind in your hair. Teach yourself to calm your restless mind and take in the beauty that’s all around you in every moment.

Repair the attention span that’s been shattered by smartphones and social media. Learn to meditate and focus on one thing for an extended period. Don’t look at your phone so much.

Read a book. A paper one, that you can touch and smell and hear the pages rustle as you turn them. If it’s an old one from the library or the used book store, that’s even better.

It doesn’t have to be a challenging book if your attention span is really shot. Start simple. A kids book. A comic book. Whatever you can manage. You’re putting yourself through cognitive restorative therapy. Your first steps don’t have to impress anybody.

Get in touch with your feelings. The ones you’ve been suppressing for years. Let them come out and have their say, listening to them like a loving parent to a trembling child.

Learn to cherish those moments in between all the highlights of your day. The time you spend at red lights, or waiting for the coffee to brew. There is staggering beauty packed into every moment on this earth; all you need to do is learn to notice it.

Embrace your humanity. Embrace your feelings. Embrace your flaws. Embrace your inefficiency. Embrace everything they’re trying to get you to turn away from.

What they are offering you is so very, very inferior to the immense treasure trove that you are swimming in just by existing as a human being on this planet.

You are a miracle. This life is a miracle.

Don’t let them hide this from you.

(caitlinjohnstone.com.au)

“DID YOU SAY the stars were worlds, Tess?"

"Yes."

"All like ours?"

"I don't know, but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound - a few blighted."

"Which do we live on - a splendid one or a blighted one?"

"A blighted one.”

— Thomas Hardy, ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’

LEAD STORIES, SUNDAY'S NYT

Food Stamp Cuts Expose Trump’s Strategy to Use Shutdown to Advance Agenda

‘I’m Going to Stretch It’: Anxiety Over SNAP Leads to Hard Choices

Trump Administration Must Make Food Stamp Payments Within Days, Judge Says

Even for Some Mamdani Supporters, His Thin Résumé Is Cause for Concern

Anger Over ICE Raids Is Driving Some Latino Voters to the Polls

Democrats Running for Governor Stick to a Familiar Theme: Fight Trump

In Austin, Referendum to Address Homelessness Has Stirred Sprawling Debate

IN 1953, VLADIMIR NABOKOV carried the manuscript of ‘Lolita’ to a garden incinerator and began to burn it. He feared the novel would ruin him. The subject felt too dangerous, the language too daring. His wife, Vera, saw the smoke and stopped him. She saved the pages and convinced him to finish the book. Two years later, ‘Lolita’ was published in Paris, banned in several countries, and hailed as a masterpiece. The novel that nearly turned to ash changed their lives forever. Today, collectors still search for Nabokov's original index cards, some rumored to be singed at the edges, a reminder that great art often survives because someone refused to let it burn.

THE DEAD MAN WALKING

They hail me as one living,
But don't they know
That I have died of late years,
Untombed although?

I am but a shape that stands here,
A pulseless mould,
A pale past picture, screening
Ashes gone cold.

Not at a minute's warning,
Not in a loud hour,
For me ceased Time's enchantments
In hall and bower.

There was no tragic transit,
No catch of breath,
When silent seasons inched me
On to this death ….

— A Troubadour-youth I rambled
With Life for lyre,
The beats of being raging
In me like fire.

But when I practised eyeing
The goal of men,
It iced me, and I perished
A little then.

When passed my friend, my kinsfolk,
Through the Last Door,
And left me standing bleakly,
I died yet more;

And when my Love's heart kindled
In hate of me,
Wherefore I knew not, died I
One more degree.

And if when I died fully
I cannot say,
And changed into the corpse-thing
I am to-day,

Yet is it that, though whiling
The time somehow
In walking, talking, smiling,
I live not now.

— Thomas Hardy (1893)

29 Comments

Marshall Newman November 2, 2025

A couple of things.

Re: Ed Notes. I had my annual checkup and blood draw at Kaiser Permanente on Geary St. in SF last week. Every time I visit and see others there for their appointments or lab work, I realize how healthy and lucky I have been over the years. Knock on wood.

Re: AVA art. If the choice is between Jackson Pollack and Thomas Hart Benton, it is Benton every time. Your mileage may vary.

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar November 2, 2025
  
  More on Ed Notes: Bruce, you are a tough, persistent guy, hanging in there with your serious maladies, keepin’ on with all the medical appointments, with their certain small indignities always ready to bite one on the butt. I admire your ability to see your way through it all, keeping a sense of humor and humility, telling us your story. I quoted your first two sentences to my wife this morning, as we both are beginning to understand the grim truth of aging.
  
  We all wish you well. I hope you never forget for a moment the value of your creation–THE AVA. What if every little American town and city and county had its own version of the AVA? We’d be a better country for it…
  
  Reply
Julie Beardsley November 2, 2025

Anyone calling themselves a Republican these days should be ashamed of themselves. And that includes the two Republican members of our Board of Supervisors. How can you show your face in public with the non-stop erosion of our democracy?
Republicans threw themselves a Great Gatsby themed party this weekend, while millions of Americans will face hunger due to lack of SNAP benefits. Republicans have shut down the Federal government because they don’t want the Epstein files released. When they are, and they will be eventually, we will find out that Trump was a party to preying upon underage children.
Shame on anyone who supports this corrupt and sick administration.

Reply
- Chuck Dunbar November 2, 2025
  
  Yes, to your thoughts, Julie. I recall when Republicans were the party of probity and true conservatism, believing in our national honor, our laws and values. Not all were so, but their base was that. Some of them were statesmen. Many believed in working cooperatively with the Democrats, compromising many times to insure the government worked. They were not the perfect party, but they were not the crazed ones who’ve taken over now. They have all caved to a demented, grandiose, greed-monger. Historians will have a great time taking all this apart, assessing the blame. This fever will subside, and Trumpism will be viewed as a shameful, shallow part of our national history. The rest of the world knows this already.
  
  Reply
Kirk Vodopals November 2, 2025

I have to chuckle about all the Marin commuters complaining about traffic jams considering the fact that Marin County voters summarily rejected a sensible public transportation system to their wealthy enclave. Can’t have it both ways folks.

Reply
Paul Modic November 2, 2025

“Why does the CEO need direction to “research options” to collect delinquent taxes, much less delinquent cannabis business taxes?” MS

Humboldt just repealed all cannabis taxes (gee, wonder why)
Now Mendo wants to make sure they collect them?
From what, a turnip?

Reply
Harvey Reading November 2, 2025

THEY WANT YOU RELYING ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

i want as little AI as possible. It’s just another form of enslavement.

Reply
Kimberlin November 2, 2025

ED NOTES

Marin General

I always ask the tech folks where they got their training. One time I was having a stress test where you run on a treadmill until they exhaust you and then they read your statistics on a computer. The lead man was a black guy and he said he was trained in the military . Another one there said the hospital trained him. Then I asked the guy running the computer where he got his training and he said, “YouTube”.

Reply
michael nolan November 2, 2025

Hello Mr. Anderson, If it is possible, You might consider moving your medical life up here. Miss Anne, age 84, just had her knee replaced at Howard Memorial Hospital in Willits. We were both amazed at the level of personal care and attention from every staff person involved with her surgery and recovery from it. After a couple of days there it became obvious that this organization was top-to-bottom motivated for excellence. Whether it was someone hauling laundry or the surgeon and his operating room staff following up personally to check her recovery everyone was top pro competent- and cheerful about it.
We get our primary healthcare from Mendocino Coast Clinics and its affiliate hospital Adventist Health Mendocino Coast. Superb primary care physician, strong specialists (optometry, ear/nose/throat, etc.) same competent support staff. I don’t know anything about the Ukiah Adventist Health facilities but what I experience in Willits and Fort Bragg tells me that this is a terrific organization. You can’t get this level of performance throughout an entire system by hoping for it or writing mission statements. To create this reality takes great management of great people. And they’ve done it.

Reply
- Bruce Anderson November 3, 2025
  
  Cancer’s more complicated than knee replacement. Most Mendo cancer patients I know of head south for specialized ;care unavailable here.
  
  Reply
  - Mike Jamieson November 3, 2025
    
    And, those of us here who have had heart attacks are sent south to St Helena Hospital and some to Sutter in Santa Rosa.
    They just get you ready for transport by doing tests in Ukiah. Or anywhere in Mendocino.
    
    Reply
- Norm Thurston November 3, 2025
  
  I am compelled to say that any mention of the “new” hospital in Willits, and its success, should be accompanied by a tip of the hat to Dr. William Bowen. His commitment to the community, and his highly-regarded orthopedic practice, contributed much to that success.
  
  Reply
I yam wot I yam November 2, 2025

Original Post MCN

“My husband bought some extra food in anticipation of this gap in SNAP distributions. (I learned this week that over 65% of Mendocino Unified School District students qualify for free or reduced-price lunches.) From points south, just driving to and from the food bank in Ft. Bragg would be over a gallon of gas, so we thought it would be good to have some supplies available here in Mendo, near the high school. He bought three cases of black beans and one case of kidney beans, and five dozen free-range eggs. We also have some sardines and pasta. We have egg cartons that we’ll split in half for folks.

If you’d like some, please write, offlist, with what you’d like, and we’ll make up some sacks. We’ll have a table out for the high school students tomorrow with the same items, assuming there will be some left over.”

Jean Arnold
[email protected]

It’s available for everyone.

Reply
Jim Armstrong November 2, 2025

Bruce: You are in your ninth decade, not eighth. Me, too.

Mr. Nolan: Your Adventist health system is not in the same universe as mine, which sucks.

Reply
- michael nolan November 2, 2025
  
  I’m sorry to learn that your universe sucks. Is your universe in Willits or Fort Bragg?
  
  Reply
  - Jim Armstrong November 2, 2025
    
    Sorry for the ambiguous wording.
    It is the Ukiah Adventist Health Center that has failed to meet our medical needs in almost every way.
    
    Reply
    - michael nolan November 2, 2025
      
      Sorry for fooling around, Jim. We started out in the AH Ukiah system and were disappointed. When we found out that the Coast clinic had providers that would see us we switched to Fort Bragg. Way different. Two weeks ago, when Anne needed orthopedic surgery, we encountered the Howard Memorial Hospital crew in Willits and were blown away by the level of perfection. In every way from quality restaurant-level food service to the volunteers greeting at the front door and bringing handmade chochkas to the bedridden, to the nurses and doctors and administrators (one of whom teaches the class for personal preparation). That hospital employs 300 locals at high wages and benefits. It should be the blueprint for how to run a hospital.
      The Coast facility is smaller, simpler but the caregivers are top quality pros and cheerful about it.
      
      Reply
- Bruce Anderson November 2, 2025
  
  Depends on how you calculate it. I prefer the Chinese, but congratulations to you for making it so many productive years.
  
  Reply
  - Jim Armstrong November 2, 2025
    
    When you finished your first year, you were one.
    When you finished your first decade, at ten, you entered your second. And so on.
    What is the Chinese way?
    
    Reply
    - Bruce Anderson November 3, 2025
      
      I forget.
      
      Reply
- George Hollister November 3, 2025
  
  My experience is similar to Michael Nolan’s. Willits hospital is professional at every level, and the people who work there seem to want to be there. Their interface with Fort Bragg is the same. Nobody is perfect, so don’t expect that.
  
  Reply
  - Jim Armstrong November 3, 2025
    
    Actually the problem is not so much the hospital but the clinic system.
    
    Reply
I yam wot I yam November 2, 2025

“Mr. Nolan: Your Adventist health system is not in the same universe as mine, which sucks.”

TRANSLATION –

Mr. Nolan, It sucks that your health system is not in my Universe.

Reply
Marco McClean November 2, 2025

Pollock paintings, and countless others objectively indistinguishable from them, created by splorping paint around like a toddler’s tantrum, like the kind of music where several musicians are noodling at random on their instruments in the same room or on the same stage but as though they can’t hear each other at all and don’t care to, each in his own separate, frenetic world, are a meaningless, sloppy mess. Interpreting such art and music is funny in proportion to how sincere and serious the interpreter pretends to be, just like wine appraisal, or high fashion. The British term: “/They’re/ ‘avin’ a laugh,” comes to mind. Here’s just one example of the kind of music I mean: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ra6f_SbjMU

Right now I’m at Juanita’s place, reading, waiting for her to come back from her project that I slept too late to go with her to, and putting my radio things by the door to take it all out to the car, to go back home to Albion and get back to my day job for a month, I can hear a live band playing happy Mexican polka music in the bandshell in the park up the street. I don’t like that kind of music quite enough to get some and play it on purpose for myself, but it’s real music, like I’m sure we can all agree real art is real art. It doesn’t have to be art we like enough to buy or make, and it doesn’t have to look like a photograph of a real person or thing, but it took someone’s experience and talent and imagination and intention to make it, and they had an image or feeling or story or idea in mind that they wanted to convey to the viewer besides /Fuck you./ Every argument people make against A.I. art’s being Art can be made against Pollock. If Pollock is art, then spaghetti sauce bubbling on the stove is just as good and maybe better. An unmade bed is better art. A magnified millimeter of pond water. A crashed VW bus. A grain of sand. A blank sheet of paper.

One time years ago I took my mother to the Kaiser hospital in Santa Rosa for tests. They have art in the hallways. One painting arrested me: It was about five feet wide and four feet high. Bright and pastel acrylic colors. It was of fabric hanging in the sun, in a breeze, and there was a loose canvas awning above an open window and, come on, memory, curtains? Somebody painted that with brushes on a flat surface, but I had to get close, right up to it, to be sure it was flat, because the skill of the artist, the shadows, the shapes, made it so vibrantly 3D, the fabric in the picture seemed to be billowing out of the painting into the corridor. At around that time I had just read on the radio a short story, told in first person, past tense, about looking out a window and downward a little, across to the next apartment, where a young woman variously over weeks or months washes dishes in her kitchen window with rubber gloves, or cooks oatmeal, or dresses to go out, or sits in a lawn chair reading a magazine, or lies on her bed in a sliver of sun shining in her bedroom window. It’s slow and summery, but I think there’s winter, too. I think there’s a health problem involved, maybe cancer, maybe an abortion decision. I don’t remember if the narrator ever met or spoke to the woman, but the awning above the window in the painting in the hospital somehow connects to that, for me, even though now I’m not sure there even was an awning or a window. Maybe it was just bedding and towels on a clothesline. It doesn’t matter, does it? That was art.

Reply
- michael nolan November 3, 2025
  
  Hello Marco McClean, After reading your rant I conclude that 1. You have never stood in front of Pollock’s “1948 No. 1” 2. You believe that a real painting is a picture of something. 3. You imagine that You are able to designate that something is or isn’t art based on your opinion about it.
  Well, as a “realist” painter who has made over 90 “real” paintings, some of which are excellent, I say: though few in number, there are wonderful paintings that aren’t pictures of anything. I could never convince my 97-year-old mother-in-law of that any more than I can convince you.
  [Let’s examine our terms and notions. I stretch canvas tightly over a wooden frame. I dress the cloth with some substance to fill the pores and create a smooth surface. I buy expensive oil paints and various sizes and shapes of brushes. I then smear that paint onto that cloth with a brush. I spend many hours doing that. If I am successful you will look at that painted cloth and your eyes then brain will be pleased with how accurate and three-dimensional the scene is. Marco, it couldn’t be more abstract. We call it “Realism”.
  Now here comes some painter who looks at that blank stretched cloth and just starts painting whatever she feels like with no reference to anything else. Just a bunch of paint on a canvas- no illusion whatever. We call that “Abstract” Hilarious.]
  And as for number 3, Your Opinion is Your art. What you are seeing or hearing is someone else’s art. You get to decide how you think about it. The person who made it gets to name it. After wrestling with all this for years I conclude that art, no matter the medium, is a personal creation and as such can only be designated art by the person who intended it. My opinion about it has no effect whatsoever on the work, it only describes me.
  This applies to damn near everything. I LOVE it! It’s a masterpiece. I LIKE it- it’s evocative and lovely. I DON’T GET IT. It’s ok. I DON”T LIKE it. It’s derivative kitsch . I HATE it! It’s shit. Try the scale on cities, cars, restaurants, people, politics, paintings. Still just describing Yourself.
  But, of course, Your Life is Your Art. Like it or not you made it all up one note or stroke or move at a time, mostly so small and insignificant you don’t notice it being created. But here it is now and somebody would hang it on their living room wall and somebody else would put in the thrift store.
  PS. Most of Pollock’s paintings are ugly angry shit. But He broke the mold on the craft aspect of painting. His art aspect is all there: Line, Value, Color and Texture- “1948 No.1” has every one brilliantly displayed at 8 feet away. But the craft part is shocking- he threw the canvas on the floor. Rather than expensive pigments he used house paint. He used a brush but it never actually touched the canvas! Every bit of the work is in motion deeply dimensional, it flows with intent. It is truly revolutionary.
  
  Reply
  - Marco McClean November 3, 2025
    
    I hear you saying you don’t like my opinion. Fair enough.
    
    But I also see that you seem to have missed where I wrote: “It doesn’t have to look like a photograph of a real person or thing, but it took someone’s experience and talent and imagination and intention to make it, and they had an image or feeling or story or idea in mind that they wanted to convey to the viewer besides /Fuck you./” You wrote, “Most of Pollock’s paintings are ugly angry shit.” I think we’re close to being on the same page.
    
    Reply
    - michael nolan November 3, 2025
      
      Not quite. I care about your opinion only enough to know more about You.
      When You wrote “it took someone’s experience and talent and imagination and intention to make it” You couldn’t describe Pollock’s work more accurately. He was a experienced painter who studied under a master, his talent is obvious to anyone who actually makes paintings, his imagination created something so fresh so different that long after his death people are still arguing about it and his level of intent is awesome in 1948 America.
      Furthermore, You imagine that real art has “feeling or story or idea in mind that they want to convey to the viewer”. Really? Just what does Vermeer’s “The Milkmaid”, a most perfect painting, have to convey? Or if, You prefer, Monet’s Haystacks or Van Gogh’s Sunflowers? And what’s really funny is that often “abstract” art is freighted by the painters and their critics as deeply felt and rich with meaning when it’s just colored grease smeared on cloth. I don’t get any meaning from Pollock’s art. “Fuck you” is all yours.
      
      Reply
      - Marco McClean November 5, 2025
        
        That might be. Thank you for talking with me. Please post a link to your art. I’d like to see it.
        
        In other news, it took some time but I found the painting-like story I remembered, that I mentioned above. I’ll read it again on KNYO and KAKX this Friday, but you can read it here if you want to:
        https://biblioklept.org/2024/11/30/read-red-rubber-gloves-a-short-story-by-christine-brooke-rose
        
        Reply
Andrew Lutsky November 2, 2025

Love the coccora pic, thanks mk

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Mendocino County Today: Sunday 11/2/2025

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