When I think of high school football, the first thing that comes to mind is not grass or the Friday night lights, but the dust behind the gym, because that’s where we practiced: on a…
Posts published in “from the archives…”
In the Midwest, winter can crush you. It isn't always as harsh and long on the great prairie as it was this year, but you can count on it being a haul. The skies hung…
The proposed Mendocino County budget is written to hide the county's true fiscal plight. It also pretends that the austerity budget will work and that it's fair. But its overblown prose, larded with impressive-looking but…
I fell asleep reading an article in a magazine I grabbed in the hotel lobby. The author crowed about how successful we Americans have become in exporting our ways of life, our basic cultural values.…
Book Show: I steer a brand-new four-door Cadillac through Koreatown, which is much larger than I imagined. Block after block of Korean restaurants and banks and groceries, the rooftops where proprietors stood with rifles to…
Asked to a recent wedding in Virginia (it was a family affair on a grand scale), the proud parents asked if I would do some sort of officiation. It would be my second inning in…
So Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa was recently caught using a corked bat. Imagine that: Cheating in baseball! Some of our learned pundits have been shocked — shocked! — to the point of warning that…
As predicted, County Administrator Jim Andersen has suggested to the Board of Supervisors that they lay off several low level county workers to balance the county budget. Highly paid county employees are safe, including Andersen's…