Cover Story
After A
After spending some 18 months on edge, the local cannabis cultivation industry exhaled on Election Night, as Humboldt County voters overwhelmingly rejected Measure A, a ballot initiative that sought to overhaul local cultivation regulations and farms warned could have catastrophic consequences. Sitting down with the Journal about a week after the election, and just a…
David Lee Sams: 1931-2024
David Lee Sams was born on May 18, 1931, in Portland, Oregon, to Lee and Marguerite Sams and passed peacefully on Feb. 10, 2024, surrounded by his sons, at Alder Bay Assisted Living in Eureka, California. He lived in Humboldt County for the past 60-plus years, primarily in Ferndale followed by Eureka. After graduating from…
Carol J. Lauer: 1930-2024
It is with heavy heart that I announce the passing of my beloved mother, Carol J. Lauer, who departed on March 7, with her adoring daughter by her side. Carol was born in Berkeley, California, in 1930 to Dagmar (Larson) Knudsen and Morris Knudsen. She was preceded in death by her devoted husband of 70…
Music Tonight: Thursday, March 21
Mike Silverman is a Las Vegas-based musician who has gone about as far as possible with the “one-man band” concept while still maintaining a strong touring presence and niche success. Under the stage name That 1 Guy, he has been taking his homemade musical doodads around the world for decades to perform a jammy style…
California is not Close to Meeting its Climate Change Mandates
California will fail to meet its ambitious mandates for combating climate change unless the state almost triples its rate of reducing greenhouse gases through 2030, according to a new analysis released last week. After dropping during the pandemic, California’s emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and other climate-warming gases increased 3.4 percent in 2021, when the…
Music Tonight: Tuesday, March 19
Don’t ask me how, but we have hit the shoreline of the second season of the year and considering the windy wake of this winter’s wet wallop, not a moment too soon. There are many ways to celebrate this shift, from the internal reset to the journal entry to a nude, screaming barbaric yawp and…
Music Tonight: Monday, March 18
Savage Henry Comedy Club is hosting another Metal Monday and tonight’s line-up has a distinct grind flavor, so fans of extreme noise and outer-reach sounds should prick up your ears. Our scene will be represented by Malicious Algorithm and Sadistic Hallucinations, while Seattle is sending some rotten sonic spores in the form of the bands…
Music Tonight: Sunday, March 17
Regular readers will already know my preamble for this holiday, so I’ll make it brief. I’m one of the few American guys named Collin who doesn’t flex on claims of Irish heritage, and I bartended too much to pretend to enjoy this plastic Paddy green beer fest. But for those about to rock, I salute…
Music Tonight: Saturday, March 16
Luke and Rachael Price are a married couple who form the structure of the roots and country-fried soul act Love, DEAN. The fella plays fiddle and backup, while Rachael sings and strums to a gospel-tuned style of uplifting songwriting. The two lovebirds will be doing their thing at Wrangletown Cider Co. this evening at 8…
Music Tonight: Friday, March 15
Seattle trio Biblioteka struts a wide line across a garage rock and punk frontier littered with chewed-up bubblegum pop and distorted grunge debris. Big sounds and big fun come wrapped up in a tight, bombastic package, like a TNT glitter-bomb. Tonight at 9 p.m. at the Miniplex, you can park yourself at ground zero and…
‘A Source of Solutions’
Editor: It is true that Six Rivers National Forest Service, for the first 20 years after designating the Horse Mountain Botanical Area, let unmanaged target shooting continue. They have been unable to protect the botanical resource (“Trouble on the Mountain,” Jan. 11). That is changing, at governmental pace, as protocol allows for public input. This…
The Little Drone that Could
Ingenuity, “Ginny” to its friends, will never fly again. The little Mars-based helicopter-drone landed badly on its 72nd flight on Jan. 18, 2024, damaging all four of its carbon fiber wingtips and ruling out future flights. But in the three years since being released from the underbelly of its “mothership” the Mars rover Perseverance, it…
SUBATOMIC
Each up, each down, each strange, and every charm that naively splits the atom from which ghost particles emerge and leave us puzzling over metaphors and their meaning, leads us closer to the place where we either grasp the existence of the Divine, or the necessity of it. You decide. Adrienne Veronese
Court Challenge
In November, the Humboldt County District Attorney’s Office began employing what’s known as a “blanket disqualification” in all felony cases slated to be heard by Judge Kelly Neel, meaning the proceedings have to be reassigned to another courtroom. What prompted the legal maneuver nearly six years after Neel was appointed to the Superior Court bench…
When the Springtime Comes Again
Spring is coming back, which means we’ve pushed through two human-made hurdles in which I have little interest: the Oscars and Daylight Savings time. To the latter I say pick one and stick with it, a sentiment shared by a majority of my fellow Californians, and, like many such things, an issue hopelessly tied up…
The Elizabeth Dawn and CBD Mocktails Rising
The evolution of a concept can yield such an interesting timeline. Cannabis starts to become legalized in many states and suddenly we have a new beverage option hitting the shelves. Cannabidiol (CBD), one of the 60 active compounds found in cannabis, is non-psychoactive. The cultivation and sale of industrial hemp-derived products, including CBD, were legalized…
Wishful Weed for 2024
Ladeez Nite. Girlfriends, it can be tough to keep the fabulous vibes going when the people who want to define you solely by your reproductive organs also want to strip you of control over them and do a quick junk check before you can use a bathroom or compete in sports. This combination of Barbeez…
Once More into the Bay for the Perilous Plunge
A sunny and very timely break in Saturday morning’s rainy weather arrived just before wildly costumed Perilous Plunge participants gathered in Old Town for their parade to the foot of F Street in Eureka. From there, they would leap into the chilly water of Humboldt Bay. Their watery splashes in the 23rd annual fundraiser for the…
Oscar Worthy
So as not to be accused of bad faith arguments, a disclosure: I did not watch the 2024 Academy Awards presentation ceremony. In fact, I don’t think I have watched the thing in over a decade. This year, I second-screened — I know modern things! — while I prepared meals and watched Cocktail (1988) on…
‘Thank You’
Editor: Thank you so much for your very informative collection of election results on the day following the election (NCJ Daily, March 7). It is very well done and so important for all of us to have quick and thorough results of the election. I had spent decades working all night on election results with…
‘A Pretty Self-reliant Bunch’
Editor: You can say what you want about the folks behind the mysterious company that made the strangely high bid to buy the Jacobs campus property from the Eureka City Schools district, about whom all we know is that Rob Arkley is definitely not one of them, and/or about former district Superintendent Van Vleck, who…
