The Emerald Cup, the sprawling Cannabis festival launched in Laytonville by Tim Blake in 2004, will be held at the Sonoma County Fairgrounds this weekend, and Dennis Peron is getting a lifetime achievement award. The marijuana legalization movement would not have achieved its great breakthrough in 1996 without Dennis, the founder and maitre’d of the San Francisco Cannabis Buyers Club. Proposition 215, which legalized the herb for medical use in California, was a collective effort, but Dennis was the indispensable organizer.
Posts published in “Essays”
Fifty years on and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy remains a national puzzle wrapped inside the enigmatic riddle that was Lee Harvey Oswald. Did he act alone? Or was JFK killed by a…
Big Dog came by the house on a Friday afternoon, late in the day. Watching his arrival from the front room I could tell by the deliberate walk to the porch and the concern on…
(June 2001) Driving to town the other day I got stuck behind a livestock trailer taking calves to auction. Bumbling along at 30 mph I was forced to listen to an NPR interview, by Terry…
What did people do before the invention of motion pictures to visualize the devastations wrought by natural disasters? From God’s fury on earth manifested in hurricanes and fires to the final cataclysm of the Last…
In the mid-1960s, Ken Kesey stormed the public stage like few writers ever have. His first two novels, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, were immediate American classics and best-sellers,…
We’re the bright young men, who want to go back to Nineteen-Ten, we’re Barry’s Boys. We’re the kids with a cause, yes a government like grandmama’s, we’re Barry’s boys. We’re the new kind of youth…
You may have heard that Russell Brand, the British comedian and movie star and ex-husband of pop diva Katy Perry, has made quite a splash of late talking about bringing down the current earth-killing systems of government and finance and replacing them with truly democratic socialist systems that serve all the people and stop killing the earth instead of only serving the bloody hell psychotic super rich.