How many years does it take for a big annual event to seem “normal’, or even routine? Who knows, but the 4th Boonville version of the Sierra Nevada World Music Festival came and went in…
Posts published by “Steve Heilig”
One foggy afternoon long ago, I was taking a solo hike on the Marin ocean cliffs. The fog was so thick one could only see a few feet ahead. Sound was muffled too, yet I…
It was one of my first visits to Northern California. Still in high school, I had wandered up thru Marin, Mendocino and Humboldt counties; I'd seen redwoods and the amazing rugged coast for the first…
“Don't take the brown acid” was the famous warning issued about a bad batch of LSD from the stage at the Woodstock Festival in 1969. But meanwhile, some shadowy but influential West Coasters were counseling…
Poor Marge Simpson. In a recent episode of “The Simpsons,” the insecure cartoon housewife made the mistake of using nonstick cookware and offering plastic cups with No. 7 stamped on them. The other mothers at…
By Buddy, as told by Steve Heilig. Yes, I am a dog — a purebred one, if you must know. That's actually a handicap. I am here to confess that for a time I “practiced…
It was the first 'oil crisis' and I was in high school and had my first VW bug. To control demand for gas, the policy was that you could only get fueled up on even or odd days, depending on your car license number. I was planning a trip up the coast, to Big Sur I think, and needed a full tank so parked my bug about tenth in line by a gas station on the coast highway in old CdM. I walked down at about 730am and got in, and the station opened and things proceeded in an orderly fashion, each driver filling up and the line moving up - until my turn came.
As if Haitians have not suffered enough already, living in what is often identified as “the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere,” now the earth itself betrays them. The amount of human suffering there is…
The legendary American abolitionist Frederick Douglass observed in the 1800s that "Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will." And thus the long legacy of conflict whenever the status quo is…