Marcy Burstiner

Places in California confuse me. When I first moved here I went with friends to the Colorado River south of Lake Havasu and, instead of raging whitewater, I found what seemed like a canal with barren desert and RV parking lots on each side. Death Valley turned out to be beautiful. I expected a lake […]

I drive an old Honda hybrid that gets little power on the road. But lately, I’ve been borrowing my husband’s fancy Audi. It gets great power. It is amazing how differently I get treated on the road. No one ever bothered me as I puttered in the next lane in my Honda. But when I […]

I couldn’t watch the Oscars. That’s probably a good thing. I had papers to grade. Still it irks me. My husband and I cut off our Suddenlink cable at the end of last year because we paid way too much for what we got. We now have a Roku device that lets us watch movies […]

Two years before George W. Bush left office, Universal Studios produced a movie called American Dreamz in which terrorists planned to kill the president — portrayed by Dennis Quaid as a manipulated idiot — in a suicide attack on an American Idol-like TV singing contest. The movie never made back the $17 million it cost […]

It is only Monday, but already I find myself repressing the urge to shop at Walmart Thursday night. The store will open at 6. That gives me time to clear the dishes if I can get everyone seated at the table early enough. And I never shop at Walmart. That urge comes from newspaper stories […]

Here’s my dark secret: I teach journalism but I hate reading the news. As my husband devours the two newspapers we get delivered each morning, I skim through them like they are cod liver pills I have to wash down. It wasn’t always this way. In college, I bought my own copies of the New […]

Humboldt State University loves posters. Well, some kinds of posters. The bookstore sells bland posters of famous paintings and rock stars each fall. The school holds competitions for academic posters about research. Posters for events cram bulletin boards during the school year. But you won’t see many other posters. In a few weeks, students from […]

Ryan Burns in the Lost Coast Outpost questioned the appropriateness of Honest Engine, the name and logo of a Eureka car repair shop, after it appeared prominently in an advertisement beneath my last column (“Art Attack,” May 29.). That column was about a painting that many people deemed to be offensive to Latino students and […]