I set out from Haight Street for a night’s walkabout anticipating end-of-the-world spectacles. It was New Year’s Eve, end of an even thousand years if you calculate things by Anglo ways of reckoning, the last…
Posts published in “from the archives…”
Let’s pause a moment before we head for the exits. I’m talking about the spectacular, the ludicrous, the humiliating and uproarious discomfiture of the Y2K doomsayers. How deliciously wrong they were! We’re dealing here with…
Somewhere around mid-November the Y2K whimpering died down out of sheer exhaustion. Humboldt county is calm. A couple of weeks ago I asked the amiable Jim, proprietor of Western Chainsaw in Eureka, how many generators…
The Butterfly has landed with a thud heard round the Northwest. On Saturday December 18, Julia Hill, aka Butterfly, descended from her aerie in a redwood near Stafford, California, touching ground for the first time…
Seattle has always struck me as a suspiciously clean city, manifesting a tidiness that verges on the compulsive. It is the Singapore of the United States: spit-polished, glossy, and eerily beautiful. Indeed, there is, perhaps, no more scenic setting for a city set next to Elliot Bay on Puget Sound, with the serrated tips of the Olympic Mountains on the western skyline and hulking over it all the cool blue hump of Mt. Rainier.
Anderson Valley's neo-Thoreauvians, Holmes Ranch division, came down out of the hills for last Thursday’s Planning Commission meeting determined to stop two of their neighbors from establishing County-sanctioned wine tasting rooms on the premises of…
Bad public policy is like the proverbial ghost; haunting elected officials — and the public they represent — long after its ill-conceived implementation. The lure of easy money in the form of so-called “free” tax…
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…