As an historian, history tells me that this presidential election about to go down on Nov. 5 is the worst offering of prospective White House occupants in history. That’s three references to history in a…
Posts published in “Essays”
Those who tend to apologize too much when they make a mistake have a lot to learn from the editors of the San Francisco Chronicle. It was the Chronicle that gave the world its false…
In the summer of 2007 the Mendocino County Grand Jury released an unusual and barely noticed report about the fiasco surrounding the Supervisors’ firing of former CEO John Ball. (No other local news outlets made…
“No river should reach the ocean.” — Stalin Not so long ago there was so much water in the summertime Russian River you could water ski at Healdsburg. Where did all the water go? Why…
We can and do empathize with those who for circumstances unexplained and perhaps inexplicable, toil at tasks that cannot be accomplished. A man spending his days, years and lifetime pushing a boulder up a steep…
My sorta friend, White Man, was ecstatic at San Francisco’s growing Asian population. Chuckling in anticipation of a Tiananmen-like purge of the hundreds of metropolitan irritations besieging him, White Man would say, “When the Chinese…
“Yes,” someone even casually acquainted with me might say, “sometimes you do. And sometimes you go through life with a shamrock-festooned horseshoe hovering over your head like a protective halo, allowing you to continue drawing…
The season has changed, if reluctantly. Time to put the storm windows on the old clapbord house, tune the grand piano and take out a volume of 18th-century duets off the nearby music shelf. And…