Rails, trails, bankruptcy and dope. It was a topsy-turvy year in Humboldt County — a wierd, shook-up year now spilling its contents into the next. The politically active portion of the community is still divided along lines that were drawn almost 40 years ago, when the first hippies started showing up in Arcata and Eureka […]
News
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Dear Landlord
The smoldering issues around Arcata’s marijuana business — grow houses and medical marijuana dispensaries — will be rekindled at Wednesday’s (Dec. 19) City Council meeting. The council’s agenda includes continued discussion about establishing a working group to explore standards for the regulation of personal marijuana growing in residential zones and the regulation of medical marijuana […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Meet The Neighbors
With the hubbub about Delta Airlines considering flying planes in 2008 between Arcata and Salt Lake City, perhaps it would be nice to become more acquainted with our potential new "sky neighbors" in Utah. Fry sauce. Liquor laws. Powder snow. Utah, despite being only a daylong drive or two-hour flight from Humboldt County, seems like […]
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The Union Comes For Dean
SF Weekly reporter John Geluardi, who once toiled alongside yours truly at a newspaper too unspeakable to name, has an awesome story this week about a big push to unionize several major Bay Area newspapers that were recently acquired by Sith Lord Dean Singleton (right). The national Newspaper Guild is funding a $500,000 organizing campaign, […]
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Back to a Life of Grindin’?
Peter Daniel Collins’ (aka “Manifest”) music video, “Life of Grindin’” Peter Daniel Collins, 35, the local rapper known as “Manifest,” was sentenced on Tuesday to the 11 months he already served in prison for stealing $198,000 in cash from the Cher-Ae-Heights Casino in Trinidad on Nov. 1, 2006, according to the SF Chronicle . Collins’ […]
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‘Sound, Credible Science’
Some letters to the editor are too long to print. And some people include long URLs in the text of their letters. Those long URLs are pretty much impossible to reproduce on paper, and useless besides. Even if we could print them, no one’s going to type a 40-character string of more or less random […]
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Trouble at the Vista
The local all-ages music scene just can’t catch a break, or if they do, it’s the wrong kind. Earlier this year you had The Placebo shut down amid permitting hassles at the West 3rd St. warehouse. Then Out of the Sun in Fortuna suffered a similar fate. The reopening of The Vista as an all-ages […]
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Carver Uncut
The New Yorker ‘s “Winter Fiction” issue was just published; it contains a couple of eye-opening pieces by and about one of Humboldt County’s most notable writers of fiction: Raymond Carver. In an unsigned essay , the magazine reveals that what we have come to think of as Carver’s ultra-sparse style was actually the work […]
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The Christmas Vibe
Our food writer Joseph Byrd, who moonlights as a music instructor at College of the Redwoods, sends along notice of the following seasonal recording made by a friend, Seattle-based vibraphonist Tom Collier. Notes Joseph: Ed Macan, himself an excellent vibes player, says it was done with four mallets in one pass, no overdub. So now […]
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KMUD Is Frickin’ Awesome
Usually it so happens that my Sunday Mendo-Humboldt runs are timed absolutely perfectly, radio-wise. From Willits to about Bell Springs, I catch the tail end of “La Hora Mixteca” , the coolest program on the coolest public radio network in the USA. The program is jam-packed with boppin’ chilenitas , heartfelt cross-border shout-outs and hosts […]
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More Millions For The Railroad
The Santa Rosa Press-Democrat reports that on Thursday the California Transportation Commission released an additional $13.6 million to the North Coast Railroad Authority. The money will be used to fund repairs in Sonoma and Marin counties. According to the P-D, the NCRA says the money is enough to open a 60-mile stretch of the south […]