The Anderson Valley Variety Show is always full of surprises. The most surprising act I remember involved a man named Rudy Knoop cooking soy beans on a Coleman stove live onstage. He had an assistant…
Posts published in “Essays”
Late one afternoon I got a call from a fellow squadron commander over on the training side of Keesler Air Force Base when I was stationed there in 1970. This was unusual. Our aircraft maintenance…
Where there were once hop fields, apple orchards and sheep in the Anderson Valley, by the middle 1970s there was marijuana and an outlaw population of people who weren’t really outlaws, but middleclass back-to-the-landers forced…
No, this is not an article about Italian cooking, although some historians believe pasta originated in China in the BC Era, this is about me and my dog Pasta, my travelling companion for hundreds of…
Last year 4,007,908 teachers toiled in our nation’s public schools, 3,197,000 of them in California. The last few years have been rough on students nationwide, what with pandemic lockdowns, distant learning, social-media saturation, and general…
Remember that first television appearing in your house in the early 50s? That tiny screen in the middle of a big clunky cube? Didn’t it look like some sort of oracle in pre-prophecy slumber, an…
My reputation as a brooding intellectual blossomed in junior high then flowered in high school. It was a period in my life when I hauled around thick books on serious topics by profound authors for…
Is Vladimir Putin a freedom-hating madman bent on conquest regardless of the human cost? Why did he invade Ukraine? The incontrovertible fact is that Putin's action came in response to prior US actions. Without those…
Needing assurance it was still in business, I pushed the Forest Club door open, took a stool and called for a cold can of Coors. Good choice, this, I told myself. Last time here I…