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Posts published in “from the archives…”

The Battle for Seattle

SEATTLE -- Tuesday evening, this city is under martial law. National Guard helicopters are hovering over downtown and sweeping the city with searchlights. There was a 7pm curfew flouted by thousands -- those same thousands…

Obstructing Justice for Fun and Profit

Twenty-five or so people appeared at the Fort Bragg Library last Friday night to hear what Jim Martin of Flatland magazine and I had to say about the Judi Bari bombing mystery. As most of…

Off the Top (December 1, 1999)

RANDY COLLENBERG and his wife died last weekend when their van left the road not far from Reno where Randy and his family were headed for some R&R. He’d just begun contributing his columns about…

A Porter Who Dared Protest

Affluent white train passengers snapping out orders. Broadly smiling black porters rushing to carry them out, fetching drinks, shining shoes, making beds, emptying cuspidors, rarely daring to protest. That's how it was aboard the Pullman…

Vintners Behaving Badly

On Thursday, December 2, 1999, the Mendocino County Planning Commission will meet in the Cafeteria at the Boonville Fairgrounds at 9am. On the agenda are two Major Use Permit proposals from two local wineries located…

Parlez Vouz Anglais?

She had been waiting for this day for months. On this one test rested the ultimate fate of her young life. Such is the way in a bureaucratic society, her mom said. It was a…

Tim Leary Remembers the 60s

While I was writing the first “unauthorized history” of Dr. Timothy Leary and the psychedelic movement in America in the 1960s, I dropped in at the UC Berkeley Student Union for a fascinating lecture Tim…

Dope and the 11-Year-Old

When 11-year-old Spencer Musgrave appeared at Laytonville’s combined elementary and middle school on a recent Monday morning, the first thing he did was head for the office to get an absence slip. Spencer had been…

Bad Mondegreens

In the 1950s a kid standing next to me in church was singing along with "America the Beautiful," ending with "stand beside her, and guide her, in the night, with the light from a bulb."…

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