Letters + Opinion

You couldn’t have made it any prettier without wrapping a ribbon around it. Last Friday’s hearing in the Pacific Lumber bankruptcy case beautifully bookended 2007. The year began with the 150-year-old Humboldt County institution out of gas, having suffered from 20 years of combative ownership by the Houston-based Maxxam Corp. (Charles Hurwitz, chairman, CEO and […]

Everything we know we learned from the norovirus: The present writer considers himself fortunate not to be numbered among those who suffered from the dreaded viral outbreak that swept across the county last week. From what we can gather, norovirus plays out like a scene from 28 Days Later — disease-crazed infectees running around the […]

In the very second episode of this column (Sept. 7, 2006), we took note of some puzzling statements made by former Humboldt State University President Alistair McCrone in the letters page of the Times-Standard. McCrone’s topic was global warming, and specifically the idea that human activity could somehow influence the Earth’s climate. Nonsense, said the […]

Tuesday was a black, black day for the North Coast Railroad Authority, the public agency in charge of the 10-years-dead railroad tracks between Humboldt County and the Bay Area. It was the day when all the players who have been amassing in opposition to the authority’s quixotic mission finally laid down their cards. To brag […]

If this were any place but here, local reporters would be getting out of bed at 4 a.m. this Friday morning, dragging themselves down to Wal-Mart and waiting in line with the consumers eager to get their hands on cheap X-Mas geegaws. The reporter would examine the minds and wallets of these citizens, and with […]

The big headlines from last week’s Bay District election focused on the McKinleyville area, and rightly so. Up there, port development skeptic and fisheries biologist Pat Higgins utterly crushed 16-year incumbent Charles Ollivier, perhaps the loudest voice in favor of the dubious proposal to bring mass industry back to Humboldt Bay (see “Views of the […]

I never claimed to be omniscient. The record will show that a speaker at the Oct. 9 Board of Supervisors’ meeting, at which the board voted to institute a moratorium on new homes in areas zoned for timber production, issued a warning. Don’t believe it, this person said. The county now says that they only […]

Vigorously waving the white flag high over my head last Thursday afternoon, I stepped slowly toward the Scotia headquarters of the Pacific Lumber Co., scanning nearby rooftops for snipers. Every nine paces I unholstered my can of Silly String and sprayed the sidewalk ahead of me, scanning for invisible trip wires. All clear. Only when […]

The board of directorsof the North Coast Railroad Authority held its monthly meeting in Eureka last Wednesday. Many insightful things were said during the public comment period of that meeting. For me, the most insightful comment of all belonged to local realtor and staunch railroad supporter Marc Matteoli. “We’ve had some very serious setbacks in […]