The fifth annual Humboldt Bay Witches Paddle on Oct. 19 attracted a record number of witches to Humboldt Bay on stand-up paddleboards, in kayaks and even on an e-hydrofoil board for a warm, sunny Saturday afternoon on the water. Celebrating the power, wisdom and beauty of women, the coven of witches met at the Eureka […]
Life + Outdoors
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Our Late Neanderthal Cousins
“Some Neanderthal populations died out, some got massacred, some interacted [with humans] and some only exchanged ideas.” — Sang-Hee Lee, biological anthropologist at the University of California. What caused our hominid cousins, the Neanderthals, to die out some 36,000 years ago? Ever since the first skeleton was discovered by quarrymen in Germany’s Neander Valley in […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
How to Be Scared
If the sun is still up and shining incongruously over the 8-foot-tall skeletons atop the entrance to the Humboldt County Fairgrounds — done up for its seasonal shift as the Scaregrounds for Griffin Loch’s Scream-A-Torium — fear not. Well, not yet, anyway. Treat the entrance like the lobby of the movie theater before you settle […]
Posted inLetters + Opinion
A Villain Intervention for Rob Arkley
Maleficent: Hey, Rob. Have a seat. So, this isn’t going to be our usual brunch, cackling over mimosas and the ruination of our enemies. Frankly, this Measure F campaign has us … concerned. Joker: We’ve always supported your work, Rob. Cashing in on those foreclosed homes, spreading all that dark money around, bankrolling those junkets […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Temporary Insanity
I’ve been a pretty casual birder all my life. I do a little birding every day and often take photos, but seldom range far afield. Sometimes I chase local rarities if they’re easy to get to; I’d rather listen to a Giants game from my cushy recliner than tromp through brambles and poison oak for […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Plenty o’ Nuttin’
“A physicist’s speculations do not morph, as if by cosmological alchemy or professional courtesy, from metaphysics into established physics.” — Robert Lawrence Kuhn, host of PBS’ Closer to Truth series Why is there something rather than nothing? A flurry of new scientific papers has recently appeared in response to this decades-old question. “Scientific” here means […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Cost of Loneliness
“Our [Stone Age] brains evolved to prioritize togetherness, and conversely to generate an anxiety response when we failed to find it.” — Matthew Shaer, The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 1, 2024 Two years ago, the Journal of the American Heart Association published a study 40 years in the making that quantified the mental and physical […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Pests of Fall
As the prime garden season winds down, you might think you wouldn’t have to deal with pests in the garden. You would be wrong. Especially after that unexpected rainfall we had a few weeks ago. Do you know what lots of rain followed by warm weather means? Yes, mosquitoes! Just when all the rain gutters, […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
David, Three Years Out
On recent a sweltering afternoon, I was fortunate enough to get a personal tour of Los Angeles City Hall. Accompanying me was my new intern who had just been released after eight years of incarceration inside juvenile hall, as well as a recently released formerly incarcerated individual working at Homeboy Industries and an employee with […]