It appears that there are lots of people who don’t want to believe it, but they’ve yet to settle on a preferred version of events. Some say it never happened, that it’s just a "publicity stunt." Others say it’s being blown all out of proportion — just an everyday pissing match, and a pox on […]
Letters + Opinion
The Big Picture
Open any sports page in just about any newspaper and you get a great rundown on what’s happening with teams from around the state and nation. But that’s not the case for news. The local papers here tend to give you a smattering of somewhat relevant local news, one or two of the biggest national […]
Job Shop
Hey, remember "term limits"? That was the quaint little theory proposed and approved by California voters back in 1990. The idea was that the business of government would be wrested from sharpies and placed in the hands of a new breed of "citizen-legislator." These wholesome, Jimmy Stewart-esque superhumans would rise from the tilled soil to […]
Dog Days
These are the days when we’re most blessed to be Humboldters. The Pacific takes us under her wing, blowing her cool breath upon our faces. We start most days under a crisp shield of morning fog, like civilized people. Meanwhile, our enemy, the sun, defenestrates the rest of the country — and, indeed, most of […]
Hard Rain
We sit at our desk, pushing around the scraps of paper that have accumulated here. We read them like tea leaves. And we have no way of saying for certain, but the strongest theory that arises is that the Houston-based Maxxam Corp., whose local affiliate, the once-proud Pacific Lumber Co., which has been in bankruptcy […]
Age of Majority
The comment I heard most frequently regarding last week’s pot cover was regarding the timing: "What if you were a parent dropping your student off to start school at HSU?" Well, I’ve actually had some experience along those lines. My husband and I have successfully navigated the minefield of raising three children to adulthood right […]
To the trenches
There’s a little local election coming up in a couple of months — on Nov. 6 — though you wouldn’t exactly know it by reading the papers. Nominations for most offices up for vote closed on Friday, Aug. 10. The final candidates for most races are known. What’s needed is a fight-card-style preview of the […]
Tricky machines
We carry no brief for Diebold, Inc., so we weren’t saddened to hear about California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s weekend massacre, in which the company’s touch-screen voting boxes, along with those made by competitors, were decertified for use in the upcoming presidential primary (Feb. 5) and beyond. Bowen immediately recertified the machines, but she […]
What’s it all about, Alfie?
In June the North Coast Journalwas accepted as a member of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), a group of 130-plus newspapers reaching “more than 25 million young, educated, active and influential adults in the U.S. and Canada,” according to the AAN website. “To meet the association’s rigorous membership standards, newspapers must demonstrate that they […]
The long and long of it
I reported any number of ridiculous stories over the course of my career — all brilliant conceptions of bone-headed editors. There was the one on how corporate executives fit physical fitness into their busy work schedules, summer stories about desert heat, a feature about elevators in the TransAmerica Pyramid, interviews with mall shoppers about the […]
Smörgåsbord of scandal
One.Vice President Darth Cheney evidently had elsewhere to be Tuesday morning, but the House Resources Committee nevertheless plunged ahead with its hearings on if and how and why he engineered the deaths of around 70,000 salmon on the banks of the Klamath River in August 2002. The hea…ring was called “Crisis of Confidence: The Political […]
When the people lead
How many North Coast Journal readers received an e-mail link to the transcript of the July 13 edition of Bill Moyers Journal, a weekly PBS show that appears on KEET? I received several, from different directions, so I thought I’d better read it. The topic was impeachment. When Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi took […]
