The Autumnal Equinox is this Sunday, which means it’s time for the North Country Fair, an annual gathering on the Arcata Plaza with a history stretching back 34 years. Streets around the town square will be closed to traffic Saturday and Sunday to make way for musicians and dancers, booths manned by artisans selling their […]
Life + Outdoors
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How Did Our Agates Form?
Wave-polished translucent agates, as in the bottom photo, are found on Agate Beach and northward by eager collectors who brave the hazards of being swept out to sea by rogue waves. Agates consist of microscopically crystallized silica (silicon dioxide), called “chalcedony.” They often show growth bands. They originate in the hellish conditions of volcanic eruptions, […]
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Gem of the Season
There’s a little more than a month left in the current Oregon Shakespeare Festival season, and a couple of the plays I liked and wrote about are still running ( As You Like It, Stoppard’s On the Razzle ), as well as a few I will write about later in the column (Lisa Loomer’s Distracted […]
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What do banana slugs know about reproduction?
Q: What do banana slugs know about reproduction? A: Our familiar banana slug, Ariolimax californicus, denizen of moist forest floors, has solved one of the major paradoxes of life — sexual reproduction. As practiced by the great majority of animals, sex carries many costs, one being that only females produce offspring while the males simply […]
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Blacktail On
California blacktail deer rifle season opened on Aug. 25 in zone "B4" (all lands west of the Eel River), but most of the land in that zone is privately owned. Now, many sportsmen and women are gearing up for the season opening of zone "B1" — lands that lie east of the Eel River — […]
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$92 million question
Money is often on the minds of the Yurok Indians, but that’s usually because there isn’t enough of it to go around. In addition to being California’s largest tribe, it is also one of the state’s poorest. And with the tribe’s natural resources, once abundant, now facing an uncertain future, the Yurok can’t just wait […]
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Bye Bye Barstow?
Prospects were bleak for the Big Lagoon Rancheria on Tuesday afternoon, over there in Sacramento, where the state legislature was wading through 200-some bills on presumably the last day of its 2007 regular session and nary a one of the bills contained anything whatsoever to do with a Barstow casino. Who knows, maybe some last-ditch […]
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Showtime
Last month, I was in New York and I stopped by my publisher’s office to have a chat with my editor. While we were talking, my editor’s boss walked in and told me that she would be in Northern California in September. I asked her if she would like to stop by while she was […]
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Roadside Attraction
Driving to Labor Day destinations amid traffic and road construction can really try one’s patience. So just imagine the lucky drivers who unknowingly happened upon the Four Corners Bake Sale in Whale Gulch last weekend. Instead of rounding the bend and finding more dizziness-inducing roads, they found a welcoming committee of Whale Gulch locals offering […]
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The Weather at CR
Fog hangs like drapery around the outer edges of the campus. The commons is filled with anxious, confident and confused people milling about. It is the first day of classes at College of the Redwoods, and somehow things seem a bit more organized. Registration lines in the Administration Building are being managed (better than emergency […]
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Why do pelicans fly so close to the water?
This photograph by Ron LeValley shows a pelican gliding just above the surface of Humboldt Bay. It is not doing so to spy fish, which is better achieved at a higher altitude, but to take advantage of the so-called "ground effect," also experienced by pilots as they approach a runway. Let us first consider a […]
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Does LSD Kill?
Martin Cotton, the 26-year-old man who died in police custody on Aug. 9 in Eureka, may find himself a permanent resting place in the annals of a medical journal somewhere. Ken Falconer, the doctor who performed Cotton’s autopsy, said on Monday that he and Humboldt County Coroner Frank Jager have not quite worked out the […]