It started out as a simple enough road trip plan. We were going to drive to Oregon to ride on two tourist excursion railroads we’d…
Posts published in “Essays”
Recently listening to fascinating interviews with Noam Chomsky and Julian Assange, I was struck by their repeated use of the expression American Exceptionalism. The expression as they used it had geo-political connotations, but I think American Exceptionalism also captures the essence of the most popular operating system of the individual American psyche.
I was born in western Pennsylvania, in McKeesport, a steel mill town outside of Pittsburgh. I was the youngest seven kids and my dad was in the ice business, delivering ice to homes and businesses for their “ice boxes”. That was a business clearly headed for obsolescence. Shortly after I was born, he sold the ice business and bought a Mobile gas station.
With two games to go, AV remained in second place, just one point behind leaders Roseland Prep, who, given their opposition, would almost certainly finish…
When traveling, one can't help but make comparisons between what one knows and what one sees for the first time. The experience can be disorienting,…
I met with Judy Long at her wooded home in Rancho Navarro which she shares with her husband Garth. She warned me not to come to the house if I had allergies so I was not surprised to be enthusiastically greeted at the door by a tail-wagging tangle of pets including her giant yellow lab Tanner, her tiny Toy Fox Terrier Sassy and her very fluffy cat Spike. We all tumbled into her kitchen together to sit at the bar for our chat.
With four games remaining in the regular season, if AV were to win the title then they would have to win all of these and…
August, 1875 — While my great-grandfather John Robertson was herding every sort of livestock from oxen to turkeys overland from Little Lake (Willits) to Mendocino…
Rained almost an inch today in Mendocino, October 23, 2014. Will we look back from drier times and say, “Remember when it rained almost a whole inch in one day?” Or are we in for years of deluge? Most weather scientists think we’re in for a multi-decade drought, but the globe has so many feedback loops, known and unknown, currently looping and feeding back in ways we barely understand that five years from now California could be getting a hundred inches of rain a year. Or no rain at all. Or a hundred inches one year and none the next.
One of the most widespread platitudes about music is that it is a universal language: thus the golden LP of the Voyager spacecraft launched in…
Leila Jane Dornacker was always dynamic, and often first: she was credited in 1968 as the nation's first female mail carrier; she was elected homecoming queen her freshman year at San Francisco State, campaigning on campus from inside a birdcage.