Mendocino County Today: Tuesday, Oct. 17, 2017

• Evacuations Lifted
• Redwood Fire
• PG&E Plunges
• Underground Lines
• Search & Rescue
• AV Firefighters
• Fall Sale
• Silver Mistrial
• Little Dog
• Faking It
• Yesterday's Catch
• Trimmigrants Arrive
• Peace Out
• Dangerous Time
• Colonoscopy Query
• Harvey Hubris
• Murder
• FlipFlop
• Hollywood's Time
• Human Communication
• Trumpet Call
• Road Tripping
• Kaepernick Grievance

RE-POPULATION FOR THE VAN ARSDALE AREA

Evacuation warnings lifted

Location: Potter Valley, Redwood Valley, Willits and Van Arsdale communities

The following areas will be repopulated starting at 02:00 PM, October 16:

Potter Valley in the following areas:

• The community of Van Arsdale north of the Stroh Ranch (also known as John Day Hill) on both sides of the Eel River. This includes Van Arsdale Rd, Oat Gap Rd, Ridgewood Rd, and all feeder roads; EVACUATION ORDERS have been lifted but an EVACUATION WARNING remains in place
• The community of Potter Valley south of the Stroh Ranch (also known as John Day Hill); EVACUATION WARNING has been lifted

Redwood Valley in the following areas:

• All areas of Redwood Valley, EVACUATION WARNING has been lifted

Willits in the following areas:

• All areas of Willits, EVACUATION WARNING has been lifted

Those returning to their homes/properties in the Van Aresdale area should allow ample time and anticipate slow traffic.

Be sure to make any necessary notifications to your insurance company before disturbing any damaged or destroyed property.

We appreciate your patience. Stay aware of your surroundings.

REDWOOD VALLEY FIRE (MENDOCINO LAKE COMPLEX) INCIDENT

Last Updated: October 17, 2017 7:37 am

Acres Burned: 35,800

Containment: 60%

Date/Time Started: October 08, 2017 10:36 pm

Cause: Under Investigation

Evacuations: 10/16/17 Noon - Mendocino Lake Complex - Repopulation Plan
10/16/17 PM - See the latest Incident Update for current information on this fire.

Conditions: Significant progress towards containment continues throughout both fire areas. Firefighters are working to mop up and patrol the Sulphur Fire as suppression repair moves forward. The Redwood Fire containment efforts have progressed well. The current fire perimeter is still holding and firefighters are improving direct fire line. Firefighters will extinguish hot spots around structures and actively mop up.

Phone Number: (707) 467-6428 (Fire Information Line)

PG&E (NYSE: PCG) shares plunge as utility warns of potential liability for North Bay fires

bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2017/10/13/pg-e-shares-plunge-north-bay-fires-pcg.html

BURY 'EM

Editor:

There is the suggestion that fires start with windblown trees breaking power lines. Our recent fire followed the path of the 1964 fire. When areas are rebuilt, it seems prudent to put all power lines underground.

Sonoma County supervisors and the governor should consider improving our infrastructure. PG&E, being a private company, may look at shareholder profits and say burying power is too expensive, but there are advantages to citizens.

Underground power lines also would help when the “big one” comes as motion of the wires would be minimized. These tragedies are the result of antiquated, low-cost building practices that are high-cost to residents.

Tony Bryhan

Santa Rosa

JOY KINION AND KAREN DIFALCO have put in long, uncompensated hours on the Mendo fires, both working with Search and Rescue.  Joy is Boonville born and bred, Karen a long-time resident. Search and Rescue is reassuringly vague but it means, in this context, the painstaking, and emotionally painful task of recovering the remains of people who didn’t get out.

AV FIREFIGHTER VOLUNTEERS who participated in the Mendocino County Fire Response:

Wildland Engine Crew: Moy Perez, Ben Glaus, Saul Ochoa, Clay Eubank, Angela DeWitt, Otto Fraser, Aaron Martin.

And two water tenders: Colin Wilson, Kyle Clarke, Olie Erickson, Tim Holiday, Sarah McCarter.

JUDGE BEHNKE declared a mistrial in the Caleb Silver murder trial at about 2:15 Monday afternoon “due to an unprecedented series of events,” which began two weeks ago when one of the jurors was unable to make it from Fort Bragg, then again on Monday of last week, October 9th when two jurors from Redwood Valley were evacuated, one having lost a home, and the other having had to relocate to Chico, then on Monday the 16th a juror came forward after seeing a certain person in court that she knew, and it turned out that this juror knew something of the defendant’s past which made it difficult for her to be fair and impartial, so when defense moved for a mistrial – there being no more alternates – Judge Behnke granted the motion.  It was decided that the lawyers would call in on Tuesday October 17th and pick a new trial date, either October 30th or November 6th. Silver is charged with the murder of Dennis Boardman of Fort Bragg in December of 2015. Both men have Boonville associations. (Bruce McEwen)

LITTLE DOG SAYS, “Being outside all day, I'm something of a bird expert. Crows don't do much except walk around looking important, hummingbirds are mean little bastards, the finches are fine, but blue jays are the absolute worst flying thing in all of Bird World. All the birds will be singing and eating and splashing in the fountain and here comes a jay, scattering all of them, ruining every bird's day.”

DAVID MUIR, Mr. Sincerity at ABC News, looking very, very concerned for a guy with advanced degrees in faking it, said on the national tv news last week that the fires were going to get worse, and gosh was he ever sorry. I could tell Dave was worried sleepless because he scrunched up his face. And the equivalently phony Scott Simon of NPR, who could school morticians in unctuousness, outdid himself in pure mawk over the weekend.

CATCH OF THE DAY, October 16, 2017

JODY ANGEL, Ukiah. DUI, misdemeanor hit&run with property damage, probation revocation.

RICKY CORDOVA, Ukiah. First degree robbery, DUI, Failure to obey peace officer, criminal threats, suspended license, insufficient stoplamps, hit&run with property damage.

JOSEPH FITCH, Fort Bragg. Stolen property, controlled substance, appropriation of another’s property without trying to return it.

MIGUEL GUEVARA, Ukiah. Controlled substance, paraphernalia.

DOMINIK IDICA, Redwood Valley. Disorderly conduct-alcohol, probation revocation.

DEVIN KESTER-TYLER, Ukiah. Assault with deadly weapon not a gun, domestic battery, probation revocation.

AARON KOSKI SR., Fort Bragg. Criminal threats, probation revocation.  (Frequent flyer.)

ABRAHAM MONTALVO-CARRILLO, Covelo. DUI, no license.

ELIAS MORENO, Santa Rosa/Hopland. DUI, probation revocation.

DANIEL NUNEZ, Lodi/Ukiah. Controlled substance, under influence, false ID, county parole violation.

DANIEL SKAGGS, Redwood Valley. Controlled substance, probation revocation.

JOSEPH THOMPSON, Ukiah. Failure to appear.

RONALD VALENTINE JR., Ukiah. Trespassing at a business. (Frequent flyer.)

PLEASE DON’T SCARE THE TRIMMIGRANTS

by John Hardin

The trimmigrants really snuck up on me this year. A few Fridays, maybe a month, ago we were all talking about how dead it was in town. I recognized every face in the Garberville Town Square that day. Strictly locals. The following Thursday evening, however, at home, almost 20 miles from town, three miles from the nearest county road, I heard a faint “halo” outside my window. I looked up to see two young women with big backpacks, looking at me with hopeful eyes.

“Do you think you could maybe, please, give us a ride to where the dirt road meets the paved road?” one of them asked with an accent I didn’t quite recognize. It was about 7 p.m., dusk. I asked them what they planned to do when they got to the end of the dirt road. “Hitchhike back to town.” she told us. I advised against hitchhiking after dark. I told them that they were welcome to camp around our place until morning, and that we had planned to go to town ourselves the next day. “No” she replied, “We want to get out of here now.”

I could tell she was frightened. I asked her how they got here. She told us that one of our neighbors had hired them. He told them he had a few weeks work for them, but after two days and one night he had completely freaked them out. He had scared them so badly that they decided they would rather hitchhike back to town, after dark, than spend another night at his place. We understood completely. We gave them a ride to town.

By Southern Humboldt standards, we live in a pretty good neighborhood. We don’t know everyone in our neighborhood, and there are some we know that we wish we didn’t, but I do know that we have a lot of dangerous men around here, who live alone on large tracts of land. I believe these women had good reason to be frightened, and we were happy help them get away from a scary situation.

On the way to town they filled us in on more of the details. One of them was from Belgium and the other, Argentina. They had met in Mexico, and came here together looking for work, in hopes of extending their travels. Originally, they were a group of five, with three guys, but my neighbor singled out the two women, and they got into his car. He told them he lived on a “peace community” where they “practice permaculture and green building techniques.” They became suspicious when they didn’t see anyone else there. He also became more unpredictable, and went from peaceful, green eco-hippie, to angry psychopath without warning, and at the slightest provocation.

They both seemed very shaken by the experience, and were kicking themselves for their poor judgment. I could tell that they had never met anyone like this guy before, and he really scared them. We commiserated. I explained that a lot of people who live out here, alone, on large tracts of rugged land, do so because they don’t get along with people very well, and living out here doesn’t really help them develop those skills. We warned them that there are more guys like our neighbor out in these woods, and encouraged them to be more careful.

We wished them luck as we helped them unload their packs in Redway, where they headed straight into Deb’s for the wifi and something to eat. All around us there seemed to be dozens of young, hopeful-looking people with big backpacks getting in and out of vehicles. Suddenly, we have trimmigrants everywhere. Since then, several people have asked me, in a variety of accents, if I know where they can find work. I’ve seen people hitchhiking at every conceivable intersection, and there’s a lot more young people in town, not as many as in years past, I think, but still a good showing.

I see them shopping all over town. Local merchants should be happy about that. Things had been pretty slow in town, for a while, before all of these kids arrived. Trimmigrants have got to make up a significant portion of the tourist dollars spent here in SoHum. Still, I see “No Trimmigrants” bumperstickers all over the place. How bad do things have to get, economically, before we start to appreciate the people who come here and spend their money in our stores, restaurants and hotels? I’ve got a feeling we’re going to find out. Let’s hope we haven’t scared them all away by then.

(Courtesy, LostCoastOutpost.com)

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE WEEK

We live in a dangerous time. People are angry, violent and more prone to engage in conduct that a generation ago would have been considered immoral and unethical if not illegal. Point in fact is aggressive and even reckless driving. More and more I see drivers refusing to follow traffic rules by tailgating, refusing to dim their high beam headlights, passing on the right, driving 20-30 mph over the speed limit, running red lights and driving vehicles with non-standard equipment. I see this more frequently with white male drivers behind the wheel of 6 ton behemoths that cost as much as some homes. Not long ago a woman was traveling on one of our interstate highways on her way home with 3 children in the car. A driver in a large “decked out” pickup decided she was not going fast enough and began to tailgate her. Frustrated because she would not speed up the driver tried to pass and clipped her bumper putting her car into a spin at 75 mph. The car spun around and ran off the road striking a tree and killing two of the occupants. The driver of the truck did not stop. He was pursued by other drivers but sped up to over 100 mph and was never caught. It’s not just driving. It is everything we do. More and more we refuse to be civil, polite and compassionate to each other. We deserve whatever is coming.

A FEW YEARS AGO, I was sitting in a coffee shop in New York and writing in my notebook, and the man seated at the table next to me pierced the silence by barking into his cell phone, 'So how'd the colonoscopy go?' I asked the man not to talk so loudly. 'My dad's hard of hearing, asshole,' the barker said while gazing at his cell phone.

— Lawrence Millman

IN MEMORIAM: HARVEY WEINSTEIN

by James Kunstler

The Greeks and Romans had one up on us: their gods and goddesses were not so easy to impersonate. Their gods and goddesses acted at a remove from everyday life, out of reach, except in the popular imagination. Two thousand years later, along comes Hollywood with an industry designed to manufacture gods and goddesses, and churns them out in its “dream factories” like so many floor lamps.

Movies, it turned out, with their close-up shots on the giant silver screen, were a much better vehicle for depicting human mythology than the creaky old stagecraft of the Christian church, with its limp and tedious liturgical hocus-pocus. America went cuckoo for movies in our insatiable drive to comprehend the human condition — or at least to see it represented artistically.

The stereotype of the Hollywood Producer has been vividly established for nearly a hundred years now: a vulgarian alpha male in an expensive suit working the casting couch in his office on the lot. The studios made not a few movies about this entitled, predatory stock character, even back in the day when their rule was absolute. He was as well known as Porky Pig. Harvey Weinstein was the apotheosis of this type.

Harvey Weinstein was in the goddess business, the way his ancestors were in the pants business or the pickle business. Women of a certain goddessy type came to him out of the cornfields, the cities, the slums, the backwaters of distant lands, and he transformed them into goddesses for the movie audiences. He was good at it.

For decades, it was as well-known in the movie business, as night follows day, that Harvey often behaved badly among the goddesses he created and trafficked in. His reputation among the ladies must have been something like a walking-talking roach motel, Hell-in-a-bathrobe, with rat poison on top. Had he the good looks of Errol Flynn, the decorum of James Mason, and the melancholy charm of Humphrey Bogart, he might have gotten away with it forever.

But he had the look of some wild Teutonic forest swine, a monster out of the Maurice Sendak Wild Things gallery, with his oversized head and that unfortunate six-day scruff of beard bristling over his hoggish jowls. He was a physical specimen of a villain that only his pet director, Quentin Tarantino, might have dreamed up. In body, he was the very essence of a slob. With all that money, you’d think he could have engaged the services of a personal trainer, a cosmetician, perhaps even a plastic surgeon to buff off the rough edges. But, perhaps, unlike everybody else in show business, he was comfortable being himself.

His antics were legend well before the recent official documentation of his evil deeds in The New York Times. It’s something of a wonder and a mystery that, over the years, more manufactured goddesses didn’t run shrieking from his clutches, or lodge a complaint with the proper authorities — but such were the blandishments of stardom, I guess, that they didn’t dare. You’d think a certain code would have been shared generously among the ladies around their pantheon: don’t ever let yourself be alone in a room, or even an elevator, with Harvey. If there was such a meme, it didn’t stick.

Paradoxically, this repulsive character, with his outrageously brutish temper to go along with his boorish approach to seduction, produced many of the truly excellent movies of the last quarter century: The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love, Pulp Fiction, Il Postino, Flirting With Disaster, Emma, Good Will Hunting, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Chicago, Cold Mountain, Bad Santa, The King’s Speech, The Artist, The Human Stain, Silver Linings Playbook, Finding Neverland, Fruitvale Station, August: Osage County, The Fighter, Lion, and some not yet released. Many of these won awards, including Best Picture, from the film academy that tossed him under the bus last week.

Harvey’s story is an old one: hubris. He was too intoxicated with his own role as goddess-maker to recognize the dangers of fooling around in his own workshop. Especially in these times of all-out gender warfare. The other gnomes, elves, manufactured gods and goddesses in the Hollywood workshop only piled onto him when they thought it was safe (for their careers) to do so, so shame on them and boo-hoo. They’re as gutless as the grifters in congress.

But remember, there’s nothing that Hollywood, and perhaps America itself (if that entity still exists as a stock character), loves better than a redemption tale and a comeback. Harvey might do some jail time. When he comes out, I doubt it will be as a born-again evangelical pastor. But, heck, these days you can make movies on your phone. Don’t be surprised if the old reprobate turns up again in show biz, like the demonic “Michael Myers” in that sturdy old chestnut Halloween.

(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page: https://www.patreon.com/JamesHowardKunstler)

GET READY for the future. It is murder. — Leonard Cohen

HARVEY WEINSTEIN IS NOT ALONE

(Letter to the editor in today's New York Times:)

Harvey Weinstein’s public apology was both condescending and tiresomely clichéd. Mr. Weinstein has undoubtedly downplayed the sexual harassment of countless women in Hollywood over dozens of years. Unfortunately, he is not alone.

I spent nine years in Hollywood as an actress. With my freckles and my “girl next door” visage, I was always cast as the little sister or the brainy girlfriend. I naïvely believed that this would safeguard me from the proverbial “casting couch” I had heard so much about. It did not. Over those nine years, I had multiple interactions with well-known directors and producers that were thoroughly offensive, demeaning and inappropriate.

I was fortunate enough to extricate myself from these interactions. However, I never felt as if I could “blow the whistle” on these men. They were well respected, powerful and influential. I simply walked away, without giving them what they wanted and without the part.

It is disheartening to see that some 20 years later this behavior is just starting to come to light. We have investigated churches and boardrooms for this kind of behavior, and yet we are just barely starting to pull back the curtain of sexual harassment and coercion in Hollywood. It is time. It is beyond time.

Susan Mohun

San Francisco

THE TECHNOLOGY of human communication has advanced at blinding speed, but what people have to say to each other shows no comparable development.

— Theodore Rozak, The Cult of Information

TOOTER TIME

The Swingin' Boonville Big Band needs someone for the 4th trumpet chair.

We practice in Boonville and Mendocino on alternating weeks. We have someone coming in who is unable to travel for the coast rehearsals, so we have an opening for the coast rehearsals.  These are the first and third Wednesdays of the Month from 7 - 10PM.

Interested trumpeters will need some ensemble experience.  If you played in a high school band for a couple years you should be able to hack it even if it has been a long time since you had chops.

Interested? Get in touch offline.

knotsure@gmx.com

ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

I just drove 850 miles the past 2 days on a road trip to the south. Ugh. I guess I’m spoiled as other than the icy roads in the winter (and mud season on dirt roads) the traffic is pretty mild up my way in the far north. The drive was ok until I reached Binghampton NY on 81 and then all hell broke loose. Road construction, crazy traffic and aggressive drivers. It stayed like that much of the way after that.

I think there are just way too many people and cars all crammed onto roads that can’t handle them. Roads under construction and repair everywhere I went. Lots of speeding; no matter if the speed limit was 70 even, people flew on by. Aggressive driving, tailgating, scary lane changes. Seems to bring out the worst in people.

The coolest thing so far on this trip was when I crossed into NY from VT and this Amish guy was driving his horse and buggy on the road; brave soul! I think maybe they have it right. It sure doesn’t seem like having a car that easily goes 80 mph or more is making the people I saw on the road any happier. Add to that all the fast food “restaurants” by the highway. I brought my own food with me and stopped off for coffee and the restrooms. I noticed how unhealthy and obese most of the people eating at these places are. Huge drive-through’s so they don’t even need to get out of their cars to eat!

I generally take mass transit when I travel but as I’ll be down south for over a month I needed a car so I drove. Not looking forward to the return trip. I definitely think self-driving cars would do a better job on the highway than what I experienced the past 2 days. And if there’s anything sadder than a Motel 6 by the side of the highway in Frackville PA, I’m not sure what that is. Maybe a refugee camp in Bangladesh? Seriously gross and depressing.

COLIN KAEPERNICK, the quarterback whose game-day protests against police brutality earned the wrath of President Trump, has filed a grievance against the National Football League alleging that team owners have colluded against him. In a statement Sunday by Mark Geragos, Kaepernick's attorney, the former San Francisco 49er says athletes who engage in peaceful protest “should not be punished” for the move. Kaepernick opted out of his contract with the 49ers in March and has not yet been picked up by another team. The statement also appears to take a jab at Trump, saying protesting athletes should not be denied employment due to “partisan political provocation by the Executive Branch of our government.” Kaepernick ignited a nationwide debate on police brutality and racism last year by taking a knee during the national anthem, a move that inspired other athletes to join in. Trump slammed the protests for “disrespecting our country” and last month called for NFL players who take a knee to be fired.

(SF Chronicle)