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Posts published in “Essays”

Right & Wrong In The 21st Century

At the bus station, an old bum rolled himself around in a wheelchair, and as he rolled past me and onward, I could see the lettering on the back of his chair. It said, ALASKA…

A Brief History Of Glass Beach & The Caspar Dump

by former Fifth District Supervisor Joe Scaramella (1993) Some people used to think that Fort Bragg came up with the idea of moving the Coast Dump at what is now known as Glass Beach to…

Confessions Of A Curbside Weenie

My local health food store stopped curbside pickup on November 30th and I sure miss emailing my order in on Thursday and picking up my food on Friday. Are things really getting “back to normal”…

A Trip In San Francisco

Janice, Dierdre, and I arrived in San Francisco late in the spring of 1961, just as the cold seasonal weather was closing in. (Mark Twain has been quoted as saying that the coldest winter he…

Israel’s New ‘Government Of Darkness’

If a prize was to be awarded for the most important yet least reported story in the media in 2022, it might well go to the news outlets that failed to report on the escalating…

Bob McKee, Another View

Bob McKee gave me my first job when I arrived in Humboldt County in 1969, a poor hippie with a broken down car and a few bucks in my pocket. In the early 70s I…

San Franciscana

Oh, it's a city, all right. Idle statistic: San Francisco has some 800 buildings over seven stories tall, more than the rest of California combined. Places like San Jose, Sacramento and possibly Cucamonga have a…

The Media: Flacks for History

Washington, D.C. (August 1, 1974) — I sat for half an hour in the Judiciary Committee room last week and enjoyed a splendid view of the trousered area of a free-lance photographer. He was straining…

Cirrhosis Stout, For Those Who Think Young

Following half a century of drinking top quality American beers I’ve lost my bearings and gone rogue. It’s akin to a mid-life crisis where a guy sees the bald spot and the paunch and realizes…

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