KNOW YOUR NEIGHBORS. Black Bird Farm is still mostly known locally as Highland Ranch, ancestral home of the late Charmian Blattner, the Redwood Empire's longest-running print columnist. When Charmian was a girl, Highland was a…
Posts published in June 2013
Reading the local papers, you’d think there were no more child molesters at large in the community, that they'd all been rounded up. But over the past few months, the courts have been tied…
Greetings one and all. If you are sitting comfortably then I shall begin. So where did that come from? I’m talking about the couple of days of very welcome showers we just experienced. After the…
The Mendocino County medical examiner's credibility was called into serious question and the Mendocino County public defender was put on the stand over the possible bungling of a murder case, in an unusual all-day hearing…
On June 18th, in an opinion piece in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, Congressman Jared Huffman heroically announced that “this week,” along with other House Democrats, he’d be taking the “SNAP challenge.” The congressman from…
John is 46 but looks 20 years younger, with not a single white hair or whisker. His grungy style also suspends him in early adulthood. His mom was a registered nurse, then secretary at a…
No work of music has a greater lock on a single ritual than Edward Elgar’s Pomp & Circumstance March No. 1 does on American graduations. Cock an ear in the direction of high school and…
Memory is a curious thing. For me, pure memory (one without emotion) is like a photograph or moving picture, with a main element in crisp focus and peripheral elements out of focus - either slightly…
We’re only a year removed from Matt Cain’s perfect game. Certainly legions of Giants fans would say this was the finest performance ever by a major league pitcher. Older aficionados with a sense of the…