Within a week I've seen A Walk in the Woods and Meru, two films about outdoor adventuring. A Walk in the Woods made it to Fort Bragg's Coast Cinemas. You are not likely to see…
Posts published in “Essays”
On August 10, two theatre people on the Board of Directors of The SF Mime Troupe –Joel Schechter and I resigned. Prior to that four others – long time Board Members -- also resigned in…
January 26, 1996 — The prime do-gooder bluestocking of all time was probably Beatrice Webb, who with her husband Sydney fostered the political tendency known as Fabianism, very influential in the evolution of the British…
I’ve alluded to being a registered Democrat now and again, a disclosure that makes some readers go feral with wrath. For years I could only justify it as formal opposition to the cretinous brand of…
By the light of the moon, the last thing Javier thought he’d see in the middle of the barren Arizona desert were all these empty water bottles. No humans for miles, other than his group…
If prison has taught me anything — and it damn well better have, representing at this point about 23% of my life thus far, a significantly longer period than that of my formal education —…
“Droughts come and go,” Stroeh tells me on a hot dusty August afternoon. “They’re part of the way we live, though now we also have global climate change, along with extremes such as floods and droughts.” Michael McCarthy, the author of the Man Who Made it Rain, and Stroeh’s biggest fan, argues that there are two obvious truths about hydrology today: “water is the new oil”; and “when water becomes a commodity, wars start.” Wars haven’t broken out yet in Marin but skirmishes have. This summer deputies from the Marin County Sheriff’s office raided commercial pot farms in Nicasio where growers purloined water from adjacent farms and diverted it from streams and springs to irrigate their crops. Then, too, several years ago, residents of Marshall nearly came to blows when Hog Island wanted to dig a new well on the uplands across from highway one.
Last Wednesday afternoon the team headed out of Boonville for one of their longest road trips of the season — to Middletown in Lake County, over two hours to the east, a non-league game. No…
In my dotage I am willing to admit that my loathing of the Los Angeles Dodgers is irrational, primitive, and downright silly, but I loathe them nonetheless and have hated them with a vengeance since the Giants came to San Francisco in 1958 and I was infected with an incurable Giants virus that not only causes blind devotion to my team, but inflames the adrenal glands whenever the Los Angeles Dodgers are mentioned on the radio or in print.