London — Like the Brits themselves the weather on the last weekend of the BBC Proms—the biggest and longest-running music festival in the world—couldn’t make up its mind. Blistering temperatures gave way to humid showers.…
Posts published in “Essays”
You should never refuse a friend a favor, I thought to myself. You ought always be one upon whom counting can be done, like an abacus or the common hand. The lists to which your…
Wounded Knee. Enough said? Reason enough to be going to Washington DC to see the new National Museum of the American Indian. Not that the massacre history of the tribes in the museum's historic intent,…
Mr. Johnson was the reason I wrote “Chemistry” when asked to fill in the blank entitled “Major: ____” in the fall of 1962 when enrolling at Fresno State College. Mr. Johnson was my highly entertaining…
How many of you remember Lone Tree? Is the long ridge running south east and north west, north of Boonville still called Lone Tree Ridge? My daughter, Wendy Rowe, painted the accompanying picture back in…
The Emerald Triangle’s underground marijuana industry, with its backwoods setting and its code of silence, has given rise to widespread exploitation of women including numerous cases of violent sexual abuse. That’s the key takeaway from…
When they turn the attack dogs on you, you know that you’ve won…morally. Of course, moral victories aren’t worth much in the short term. All too often the price of a moral victory is to…
My father Carlo Scaramellla left his family in the tiny town of Delebio, in Northern Italy, to come to Northern California in 1900. He felt that the Catholic Church demanded too much of him in…
As I was watching the walking, talking public relations stunt that is Pope Francis capering on television, soaking up all the love and adulation bestowed on him by the apparently dewily naive and childishly gullible…