All The Pieces
The candidates for Humboldt County Supervisor on jobs, land use, law enforcement and trails
Cover Story
All The Pieces
FIRST DISTRICT Jimmy Smith What do you do for a living? I retired from commercial fishing and am a full-time supervisor. Why are you running for Supervisor? To continue my work as a regional (seven-county) leader and secure badly needed water and wastewater systems and watershed funding, and to hopefully expand the region’s scope to…
Nitro shakes
Auto Racing Daily found Fortuna native Hillary Will, fastest drag-racing woman ever, pining for vrooom and the sweet scent of dragster gas after she’d spent a rare weekend off over Memorial Day watching other people drive at NASCAR’s Coca-Cola 600 in North Carolina. “Being there made me miss the smell of nitro and the sound of an 8,000-horsepower race car,” she told…
Ta-da!
The North Coast Journal reaches a milestone today. After months — years — of heartbreak, we are pleased to launch a new version of our website. The old site served us faithfully for just about 10 years, I believe, and it was long past time to let the old trooper enjoy its dotage. Beneath its…
Wars Remembered
In 1991, Eric Hollenbeck, founder of the Blue Ox Millworks in Eureka, wrote a long poem about his experiences in the armed services during the Vietnam War titled Uncle Sam’s Tour Guide to Southeast Asia . In this week’s Short Stories section of the Journal , we visited Blue Ox Radio during their 11-hour Memorial…
Direct Action
Here’s a photo from Arcata that’s making the e-mail rounds. I’d credit the photographer, only I’m not sure he wants to be credited.
A Conversation with Ethan Miller of Howlin Rain
The intern for a NYC publicist e-mailed wondering if I was going to cover the Howlin’ Rain show (at the Jambalaya Wednesday, May 28). When I replied asking if an interview was possible, the intern’s boss stepped in and arranged a conversation, set it up for a late morning call. She’d patch me through at…
Quantum Physics and a Man-Eating Plant
The Little Shop of Horrors musical has do-wopped its way onto the North Coast Repertory Theatre stage. With fine singing, comic performances, clever set and costumes and an impressive puppet-monster, it’s a diverting evening of live entertainment. With music tied to its early ’60s origins in a cult Roger Corman film, a combination Motown trio/Greek…
Eh, Brah!
Previews Opening on Thursday, May 22, with special midnight showings at the Broadway, Minor and Mill Creek theatres, is Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, surely a contender for the top-grossing film of 2008. The venerable Harrison Ford, who seems to get better with age, returns as the archaeologist who just wants…
My Derby Daze
She said I was a natural, but I believe she was just pitying me. It didn’t feel natural. The maneuvers Jennifer "Grrl Haggard" Jenkins was asking of me felt all wrong. First lesson, get low — knees bent, butt out. Next lesson, fall to the floor. Third, get up without using your hands. Repeat. We…
Homecoming
I don’t imagine they know each other, but Ethan Miller and Mario Matteoli have followed parallel paths. Both were born and raised in Eureka. Both left Humboldt County just out of high school and established music careers elsewhere, then quit their bands to establish new projects. And both are coming home this week for shows…
Crazy About Food
Are we obsessive about food? The popularity of Michael Pollan’s recent books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, preceded by The Botany of Desire, and followed by In Defense of Food) suggests that we are. Pollan is a serious science writer and director of UC Berkeley’s program in Science and Environmental Journalism. But science battles pseudo-science in the…
The Education of Hopey Glass
Graphic novel by Jaime Hernandez. Fantagraphics. It’s a commonplace claim that comic books (pardon me, Graphic Novels) are now literature. Jaime Hernandez’s latest graphic novel is typically engrossing, and may very well be literature, but it’s also a lot more fun to read than most "real" novels. The Education of Hopey Glass is as character-driven…
Knockemstiff
Book by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday. Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection of stories has some obvious antecedents: the trailer park realism of Raymond Carver and the comic Faulkner of the Snopes cycle, maybe even the drug-soaked prose of Denis Johnson in Jesus’ Son. Pollock has his own strong voice, though, writing intense stories that are…
Trouble In Mind
By Hayes Carll. Lost Highway. "…sometimes it’s necessary to go a long distance out of the way in order to come back a short distance correctly." — Edward Albee, from The Zoo Story Though only in his early 30s, Hayes Carll seemed to have taken the long way ’round. But his way. The Texas singer-songwriter…
Hot Hot
Hot hot hot as the dickens out Here…
Pumping Heat
If you own a refrigerator, you own a heat pump, which moves heat from one place to another. Heat pumps can efficiently heat a home by transporting heat from the environment into the home. Rocky Drill and wife Kathy Marshall have reduced their carbon footprint by installing heat pumps which can also serve as air…
Drying Up
Is the Klamath Settlement Agreement dying? Not yet, but the proposal to end years of one of the West’s most vitriolic water wars isn’t looking too healthy right now. For the last couple of years, fishermen and environmentalists and Indians and farmers sat around a table, trying to reach an agreement that would share Klamath…
