I spent most mornings of my childhood standing, with legs splayed like a saw horse, above an old gas floor grate furnace in my dad's house on the Mendocino Coast. I love that heater. There…
Posts published in “Essays”
I just finished Jeffrey Toobin's excellent—if totally disturbing—Clint Smith, the Willits high school teacher who carried on a nearly year-long extramarital affair with his 15-year-old student. To be sure, the cases are different in fundamental…
Include me among the Mendocino County folks who thought that a decisive election outcome last month had put on hold, at least for awhile anyway, the battle over big box retail development in the…
Reader Michael Laybourn of Hopland recently asked: “Given the state of the county budget, what would you suggest to fix it other than layoffs of safety personnel?” First, the County should eliminate all management bargaining…
Ritual trumphalism about America’s righteous mission in the closing sentences of his speech did not dispel the distinct impression during President Obama’s 33-minute address to cadets at West Point Tuesday night that we were listening…
Only in the San Francisco Bay Area did the story cross over from the sports pages to the news pages: on October 30, Tim Lincecum, the Giants' ace right hander, was stopped by a Washington…
A curious invention hit the streets of SF yesterday: The San Francisco Panorama, a one-day only, 320-page, $5-on-the-street broadsheet, created by the folks at McSweeny's. That's 112 pages of news, sports, food and comics; 96…
The mainstream media is to “progressive” Mendocino County what liberal bias is to Fox News—a favorite punching bag, an omnipresent boogie man who manipulates, digests and excretes a pile of propaganda. It's a critique that…
It’s been unusually cold on the Mendocino Coast. It's the kind of weather that shows on ashen lips and huddled bodies, a conversation starter that always ends with an exclamation point. Needless to say, this…