Squeezed between a barred-up Two Street Music and the typically dodgy Eureka Rescue Mission, stepping into the bustling and well-lit space of the Livella Studios grand opening party Friday night was a great relief. Dark and drizzling outside, the antechamber provided a burst of warmth and light, a collection of large, glossy paintings hanging from […]
Life + Outdoors
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Creamgate
"What do we got?" said Len Mayer, interim CEO of the Humboldt Creamery on Monday. "We have a 22-year-employee, the CEO, resigning immediately. We can’t get hold of him, we can’t contact him. And he says there’s something wrong with the finances." The last few days have been busy ones for Mayer and for the […]
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The Largest Structure in the World
“Try to bring in ‘Humboldt’,” said the editor of this fine weekly paper when I signed on for this column. ‘No problem,” I replied, hoping I’d be able to find some link, somehow, somewhere … …which is why my heart leapt last week as I stood at the base of the world’s largest structure — […]
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Witness Recounts Stabbing
If Barbara Groom hadn’t been craving a pint of Häagen Dazs after a movie, she wouldn’t have driven into the parking lot of Ray’s Food Place in Eureka; she wouldn’t have seen two men fighting there; she wouldn’t have tried to stop them by yelling and inching her car into the fracas; and she wouldn’t […]
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Starting from Seed
I spent the weekend rigging extension cords, timers and power strips through the rafters in my attic so that I could get my indoor growing operation set up. And no, this was not your typical ambitious Humboldt County indoor grow. No blowers, no tanks, no generators. Just enough equipment to get some flowers going ahead […]
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Global Warming Win
Well, all of you sniggerers who like to put down Arcata for meddling in distant world affairs when it ought to be attending to its own potholes, here’s your comeuppance: Our favorite anklebiter city may have just helped shape future world energy development. Two settlement agreements were filed last Friday in the U.S. District Court […]
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The Roots of Love
Among the gases produced by volcanoes are steam, methane, ammonia and hydrogen. In 1953 Stanley Miller sparked these gases with a Tesla coil to simulate the lightning that often accompanies volcanic eruptions. Recent analysis of the resulting goop, forgotten for decades, revealed 22 amino acids, many of which are the building blocks of life (Bada, […]
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Broadband Disconnect
When it comes to bringing our rural nooks and crannies into the 21st Century — or, heck, late-20th would do — it may seem like little to no progress is being made. But it totally is. That was the reassuring message delivered this week at the first in a series of seminars from the Redwood […]
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Highway Robbery
The Eureka-based construction firm Mercer Fraser, well known for its work on roads and highways locally and around the north state, last week agreed to pay $1.3 million to settle a lawsuit charging that the company defrauded the federal government while bidding on several highway projects dating back to at least 2005. The suit, which […]
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Perry Collins’ Overland Telegraph
When I consider monumental works of humankind, I think of the Great Pyramid, the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, the Saturn 5 rocket, the Panama Canal, Boulder Dam … and Perry Collins’ Overland Telegraph. The last mentioned isn’t usually included in those lists of "mankind’s greatest achievements" for the good reason that it was […]
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The Big Spill
A couple of weeks ago — on Tuesday, Jan. 13 — Journal reader Rachael Brilbeck went for a stroll on the beach on the North Spit, right across from the Evergreen Pulp Mill, which is currently shuttered. Everything was normal when she set off on her walk, but when she returned an hour and a […]