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Posts published in “Essays”

Tim Lincecum’s Pot Bust: Stigma Strikes Out

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…

McSweeny’s Eulogy for Newspapers

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…

Mainstream Media Madness

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…

Food news from another land: The Chinese garlic bubble

This story, from NPR's All Things Considered, about a Chinese "garlic bubble"  reads like a children's tale: Peasants in China's countryside fill their garages to overflowing with garlic. With swine flu fears running high—and a…

Crime Statistics & Wine Sediment

Drawing any conclusions from the state's Department of Justice statistics for Mendocino County and its semi-comparable neighboring counties requires the skills of an experienced and slightly inebriated tasseographer or oenomancer and an empty glass of…

The Spicy Hot Oil of the Gods

  Sometimes I discover a new cooking technique—a little trick, long-established but new to me—and it feels like I’ve landed on a new continent, where colors are twice as brilliant and my tongue possesses double…

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