Does anybody around here remember California Governor Gray Davis? You know, the guy who so hopefully set up extra card tables at the Capitol to battle energy monster Enron during the 2000-2001 Energy Crisis? Didn't…
Posts published in “Essays”
“Play it again, Sam,” is not the actual line and it is not uttered by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Ingrid Bergman is the one who tells the piano player, “Play It, Sam.” The tune she’s…
Very old friend Kenny Hurst is a great story-teller and journalist too. I found that out right away almost fifty years ago when he wrote a flamboyant report for the “other” Anderson Valley newspaper I…
Barbara Ehrenreich made a quick visit to San Francisco last week to promote her new book, “Dancing in the Streets.” Her noontime talk at the Commonwealth Club Jan. 18, excerpted below, was attended by about…
In 1988, the World Health Organization resolved to eradicate poliomyelitis; polio for short. This followed the confirmation that the last case of smallpox was diagnosed in October 1977 and the WHO declared smallpox to be…
Where is Ronald Reagan now that the Regents at the University of California need him? Long gone, of course, to the Republican Party Heaven, while veterans of People’s Park, including Stew Albert, who came up…
With this fiftieth reunion coming up I'm taking a look back at my elementary years at the K-12 Burris Laboratory School in Muncie, Indiana where we were all lab rats without knowing it—who can I…
Today I suggest a modest memorial to the modest man who lives both among us and within us. He is the quiet gentleman who defers, serves, assists, and waits. A dullish, solid small bronze statue…
It used to be that we changed and the movies we loved didn’t. When we revisited classic films we could rely on their immutability. If we remembered bits of dialogue and certain scenarios differently, it…