Life + Outdoors
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Purple Jellies of Doom
Hi there. I’m a stranger from the future here to beg you to stop reading these Washed Up stories. The asshole who writes them made a vast fortune by bilking his readers. Then he became another one of those tedious billionaires who buy their way into political power and do a bunch of stupid stuff. […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
Democracy is in Peril
Friends, these are indeed unprecedented times and our democracy is in peril. But let’s not get crazy. We need to present a united front. Those of us who haven’t been pulled off the streets and disappeared by plainclothes ICE agents have an obligation to stick together and honor those stripped of their humanity because of […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Axis of Evil
Don’t blame me for the clickbait heading. Capitalizing on Dubya Bush’s 2002 State of the Union address in which he singled out Iraq, Iran and North Korea as Earth’s baddies, cosmologists Kate Land and João Magueijo employed the same phrase three years later for the title of their scientificxpaper. In it, they described a spooky […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Keeping the Beat for 50 Years in Humboldt
I felt like a stranger in a strange land when I drove into Rio Dell in March of 1975 to play a six-month job with a country band. Fortuna native Jerry Cooper, a musician I’d played with in San Francisco, had moved back home. He called me in San Francisco and offered six months of guaranteed […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Nature Red in Tooth and Claw
Following the death of his great friend Arthur Henry Hallam in 1833, the poet Alfred Tennyson began writing In Memoriam AHH, perhaps the greatest elegy in the English language. It would take him 17 years of composing, writing and editing until he finally published it — anonymously — in 1850. While the long (2,916 lines […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Gardening Undercover
Despite the early morning temperatures in the middle 20s, I made a visit to the winter garden during a lull between rainstorms. Because of the cold and the rain, much of the vegetable garden is muddy and even the winter-hardy cole crops look mushy. But this is the perfect time to check on the garden […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
A GOP FAQ
Well, it’s been a wild couple of weeks, and we’ve been hearing from more traditional party members having trouble keeping up with a platform that shifts like a drunk carnie is pulling levers on the ride. After all, not all of us came up listening to this generation’s hateful right-wing podcasts; some of us listened […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
30 Minutes that Made All the Difference
Thirty minutes. That’s all it took, 66 million years ago, to put the future on track for you to be reading this. Had the Manhattan-Island-size asteroid that crashed into the Gulf of Mexico arrived 30 minutes earlier or later, we wouldn’t be around to unravel the consequences of that mighty collision. We know very little […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
A Tale of Two Tails
Note: Names have been changed to protect the privacy of embarrassed furballs. On a chilly Sunday morning we noticed a young couple pacing up and down as they scanned for something. “Our cat is missing,” they said. The distraught couple were camping at Clam Beach and their kitty, whom I will call Pretty Boy, went […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Blue-winged Warblers, 2025 and Personal Bests
There’s something uncanny about birding in 2025. The Humboldt birders have hit the ground running this year. Everyone in my feathered circle is out there with single-minded dedication, chasing rarities, putting in long hours day after day, birding like there’s no tomorrow because — well, let’s not go there. I’ll admit I’m not a huge […]