DA Trials
Gallegos, Hagen and Jackson make their case for job of top prosecutor
Cover Story
DA Trials
When handsome, young defense lawyer Paul Gallegos upset 20-year incumbent District Attorney Terry Farmer in 2002, many saw it as a watershed moment for Humboldt County politics — a landmark cultural shift away from the good ol’ boy conservativism that had dominated local government for generations in favor of stricter environmental accountability, a healthy respect…
Sorry About the F-bombs
We missed it when Access Humboldt dropped the f-bomb on TV the other day, but apparently some concerned viewer who’d tuned in to watch the Kinetic Race got an earful. As a result, Access Humboldt Executive Director Sean McLaughlin issued the following apology: Access Humboldt’s mission is “Local voices through community media,” and our goal…
Eureka Planning Commission Approves Marijuana Ordinance
Eureka Planning Commissioner Jeff Ragan. Photo by Ahron Sherman. Fourteen years have gone up in smoke since Californians passed Proposition 215. Tuesday, Eureka’s Planning Commission voted 4-1 to recommend the city’s first medical marijuana ordinance to the Eureka City Council. The ordinance — Medical Cannabis: Cultivation, Processing and Distribution — seeks to regulate personal grows…
Humboldt Politics: Not So Bad, Comparatively Speaking
Tonight’s episode of The Best Show on WFMU turned me on to the eyeball-popping horror of Alabama politics. Little did I know — it seems that there’s a whole Internet subculture devoted to collecting election ads from America’s most troubled state. Let’s take a tour around Alabama’s 2010 political season. Here’s the ultimate attack ad…
Humboldt Roller Derby — the Saplings Version!
Saplings! Photo courtesy Arcata Photo Studios Hardly an eye stayed dry at Redwood Acres last Thursday. There, in Francesci Hall, the legendary tough ladies of Humboldt Roller Derby’s Redwood Rollers turned into mother hens as their young charges – aka Saplings – began their “Friends and Family” bout, complete with announcer Jason calling the action. The…
SF Outside Lands 2010 Line-up Revealed
Humboldt County offers a fair number of festivals, from oyster- to reggae-flavored. We get plenty of big name folk singers and often some notable hip-hop shows. What we rarely see beyond the struggling/touring bands appearing weekly at the Alibi, the Jambalaya and Lil’Red is serious rock shows – especially of the more modern kind. Which…
Killer Airborne Fungus Alert
A “hypervirulent” new strain of fungus has been discovered in Oregon. It is unpreventable. It is airborne. It’s killing people and animals. And it’s headed here. As much as this sounds like a setup to a cornball late-night sci-fi movie, this thing is (gulp) sci-fact. It’s pants-wettingly real, folks. And according to a National Geographic story…
Imaginary Numbers
I crafted a new set of imaginary numbers;…
Mad Props
Last week, we gave you the low-down on Propositions 13 and 14, which you can check out in the archives. Today, we give you the three other propositions California voters will decide on in June that could create a publicly funded elections scheme, make it more difficult for local governments to form publicly funded utilities…
SNL Films Still Suck
Previews Memorial Day weekend openings: For the youngsters we have Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, a sandy Disney period adventure based on a computer game. Produced by action/blockbuster king Jerry Bruckheimer, the light summer movie stars a buff Jake Gyllenhaal as the swashbuckling Prince Dastan, battling baddies in an Arabian Nights-style Middle East…
Decoration Day
They used to call it Decoration Day. Way back in 1865, a group of freed slaves in South Carolina honored fallen Union soldiers who’d died fighting for their freedom by turning a mass grave at a race track into a proper military cemetery. Today we mark Memorial Day with a three-day weekend (ah, freedom) that…
Swiping at the Air
On one point, anyway, it’s easy to agree with all the folks who stood up at last week’s Eureka City Council meeting and pleaded for that body to put a critical zoning change for the Balloon Track property to a vote of the people — it’s long past time for the question of that property’s…
McMenamaniacs
Editor: I was jazzed to see the “Town Dandy” piece (May 20). The suggestion by Hank Sims is something that occurred to me recently, not because I have ever stayed at one of the McMenamins establishments, but because I really, really want to. I know people who have gone north for that very purpose, and…
Papyrus (the font)
These are amazing times for typographers. Thirty years ago, nobody outside of the printing trades knew what a “font” was and very few people could name one. If I mentioned that Goudy is the eponymous design of the great American typographer, Frederic Goudy, or that Times was designed for the London newspaper, The Times, in…
I Will Be
The marriage of ’60s garage, pop and girl groups has roots in the pre-punk street glam of The New York Dolls, with The Ramones, Blondie and Mink DeVille following soon thereafter — each in their own unique style. London’s Thee Headcoatees, featuring Holly Golightly, Memphis’ The Hellcats, Barbara Manning’s San Francisco Seals and Boston’s Mr.…
Hog Heaven
I want to marry pork. The crisped, buttery edge of a seared chop is the epicurean equivalent to a money shot; you can’t get more delicious. My esteemed colleague Joseph Byrd wrote a series of articles in this paper pointing out the cultivated leanness and resulting tastelessness of supermarket pork, which is damned not only…
Ten Million Colors
In 1671, in a fit of reductionism, Isaac Newton famously split light from the sun with a prism and announced that white light was composed of seven colors. You probably memorized them as ROYGBIV when you were at school, although most of us can’t readily pick out the “I” (as in Indigo), distinguishing only Red,…
Script Tease
The musical Gypsy, now on stage at North Coast Repertory Theatre in Eureka, is the story of Rose, often called the “ultimate stage mother,” and her daughters, June and Louise. Rose sets her sights on making June a child star in vaudeville during its waning days in the 1920s and ’30s, and when June rebels,…
