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Posts published in “Essays”

Who Poisoned My Grapes? (Part 4)

I waited 16 months for Sonoma County to issue their report on the spraying of my grapevines. I did not get a call as promised, but at a social occasion I happened to learn that…

Coast Newspapers, A Brief History

The publisher of the consolidated Mendocino Coast newspapers is retiring. In modern parlance her 23 years as publisher is considered a long tenure. Long before those two papers were taken over by corporate interests and…

The Greater Good

We’ve been picking up our neighbor’s Press Democrat while he is away in Idaho hunting elk. The headline article of the Sunday edition is about the shortage of rental properties in Mendocino and all over California and America due to so many people choosing to go the Air B&B route with their rental units rather than rent long term to locals.

I Told You So

"Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost." — Leonard Cohen "Our lifelong cynicism about the American character has been vindicated. I Told You So has never felt worse. On the…

Mendocino Talking: Hal Zina Bennett

(Hal lives in Lake County with his wife, Susan Sparrow, and is the author of more than 20 successful books, including Write From The Heart -- Unleashing The Power of Your Creativity [2011], The Lens of…

Saved By Weather

"Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." This sentence flitted across my consciousness recently, apropos of nothing at all, and got me pondering. I think it's supposed to be a joke…

Nerve Gas Bosco: The Reload

BOSCO, the eternal curse. Frankly, we enjoyed the guy when he was an automatic Congressional vote for nerve gas, always waffled on offshore oil drilling, functioned as a total slave of corporate timber, and otherwise…

Redwood Classic Notes

THE 59TH ANNUAL Redwood Classic Basketball Tournament has come and gone, and I can say as a veteran of tournaments back to 1970, that the gym has never looked better, so good I thought maybe…

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