“He’s wasn’t a nice guy,” Gerd Stern said on a Saturday afternoon at the Sonoma Valley Museum in Sonoma, California, where Jack London once lived, farmed and wrote fiction and non-fiction. Stern was talking about…
Posts published in “Essays”
Last week’s column discussed marijuana legalization and some of the adverse consequences, especially economic consequences, it’s having on local communities such as Laytonville. I argued that there are one too many sets of regulations with…
Did you ever have that neighbor you’ve known for years offer a proposal for solving a societal problem that just blows you away? Practical or not, this person looked at the problem of homelessness and…
Dr. Russell Preston served the town of Mendocino as physician for thirty years, from 1909 to 1939. Even after his retirement he still saw some of his patients for assistance with their milder maladies. Preston…
Bach never went in the ocean for a refreshing dip. He never even set eyes on the Atlantic. He could have made it to the North Sea at Lübeck during his sojourn there to learn…
California is disappearing in smoke and flames. Global warming sits on us like a smothering blanket. Out my window I see two fires and there are at least seven ongoing fires in the state. Triple digit heat is unrelenting. Leaves are falling from the trees ahead of schedule as a result of a six-year drought with only one year of significant rainfall.
We first met Jack June in 1972, and what a surprise it was. My wife and I were part of the hippie invasion driving up property prices and corrupting Anderson Valley youth with our New…
The end of July and the beginning of August always reminds me of berry picking time, blackberries that is. Until the extinction of rotary phones this part of the year meant the telephone at the…
A polite term for it is “puffery.” It's also known as “advertiser-friendly journalism.” It has often plagued the magazine industry and especially since the 1920s when President Calvin Coolidge observed that advertising was “part of…