It began with a soldier’s dying wish. 31-year-old Staff Sergeant Robert Toland, told his cancer was terminal, went home to upstate New York to spend his last days with his wife and kids. Staying out of hospitals and care homes meant adding a downstairs bathroom to his two-story house, which friends arranged with help from […]
Arts
Posted inArts + Scene
Out of the Woods
It’s getting harder to remember, but there was a time when Humboldt County’s cash crop wasn’t the ganja. Weird, I know. Maybe you’ve noticed those other big plants majestically covering our hillsides — biggest in the world, baby. Yeah, we used to cut those down. All the time. Of course, I’m admittedly too young to […]
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A Dream
Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends. And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up […]
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Hold Onto Your Coat
Whether you know it or not, odds are you’ve caught a glimpse of The Flying Karamazov Brothers before. Founded in Santa Cruz more than 25 years ago, they’ve worked as street performers and performed on Broadway. They juggled in the film The Jewel of the Nile, and once juggle-jammed with the Grateful Dead. More recently […]
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Christmas is Safe
By this point, you are no doubt familiar with the war on Christmas order of operations. Every year, like clockwork, some podunk town renames its “Christmas Parade” as a “Holiday Parade.” Citizens get upset. Fox reports. America decides. Someone sells some books. Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Is the war real? Maybe. But when it comes right […]
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Discussing Humboldt’s Future
Well, okay. Now what? In last month’s election, Humboldt County residents, as well as the whole of California, decided legal weed was not for them and voted down the hotly debated Proposition 19. Regardless of whether or not you believed its passage would have been beneficial to our region or not, had it passed, it […]
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HONK, HONK, HONK… HONK, HONK, HONK… HONK, HONK, HONK… HUH-HONK!
Did you know that all truckers are tone deaf? At least, that’s the logical conclusion any rational person would have to arrive at after collecting evidence any given year at Eureka’s annual Truckers Parade. Honk-a-phobes beware! See, those of us that took Professor Ed Macan Ph.D’s Music 1 class at College of the Redwoods know […]
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Santa Slurs
Christmas is a stressful time of year, for sure. But when you think you’ve got it bad, take a minute and be thankful you’re not the dude in charge. Believe you me, right about now, Santa’s swamped. So what does the Claus do at the end of the work day to take the edge off? […]
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Ruminations
Through Love all that is bitter will be sweet, Through Love all that is copper will be gold. Through Love all dregs will turn to purest wine, Through Love all pain will turn to medicine. Through Love the dead will all become alive. Through Love the king will turn into a slave! Rumi Word. If […]
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Un-cuddly Muppet Cousins
The Swiss theater troupe Mummenschanz first weirded its way into the American conscience in 1974 with, appropriately enough, an appearance on The Muppet Show. The easily YouTube-able moment begins with none other than Kermit the Frog himself introducing the group as “kind of distant cousins to the Muppets” and remarking that “they are as hard […]
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Winter Wonderland
Thanksgiving is upon us and with it comes the beginning of the holiday dance season. Living behind the Redwood Curtain does not preclude us from enjoying the classical arts with four seasonal ballets, three of them including renderings of that old chestnut, The Nutcracker. Thanksgiving weekend brings the first, a revival of the Nutcracker Ballet […]
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‘Shrooms, Beautiful ‘Shrooms
One fall day in the ’70s, not long after Joann Olson moved to Humboldt to study biology at HSU, she took a walk in the woods. “I saw these incredible purple mushrooms. I’d never in my life seen anything like them. I was just hooked, wondering, ‘What are these things?’ There were mushrooms everywhere in […]