Cover Story
The Best of Humboldt 2012
Gray and green and glorious, Humboldt unfurls itself like a heron spreading its wings, like a 3-year-old twirling in the sunshine, like a seductive smile. Humboldt is what we make it, and we make it marvelous. We people the hills, but not too densely; we find the secret, quiet places and create the raucous ones.…
Woman Found Dead In Hoopa
The Two Rivers Tribune has more. Press release from the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office: On 09-27-2012, approximately 10:30 a.m., a California Highway Patrol Officer conducting a follow up investigation discovered a deceased female in a residence on Little Moon Lane, Hoopa. The Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office and Hoopa Tribal Police responded to and took custody…
Car plows into 3 joggers, kills Bayside woman
The mother of two young children was the jogger killed this morning after a car left the road on Myrtle Avenue near Ole Hansen Road, a relative has confirmed. The Journal is withholding her name for now to ensure that all family members can be notified. The woman, 40, is married to a Humboldt County…
Capleton’s Red Fox Tavern Show Canceled … but the fyah’s still comin’ (UPDATED, NEW VENUE)
This from Red Fox Tavern owner Brian Swislow’s Facebook page: For anyone who is interested, We at THE RED FOX TAVERN are cancelling a show set for October 11th. Yes, Oct. 11 was the day Capleton was set to bring the fyah. So, ya. The Jamaican-born reggae singer had successfully performed without incident to a…
Pot Adventure Debut
In the new novel Deadman’s Bust, former Humboldt grower Cory Marchese has written what Blogcritics.org calls “a real page-turner” about two brothers growing pot in the Humboldt hills in 1992: The adventure takes us right into the heart of George H. W. Bush’s “War on Drugs,” the Medellin cartel, rogue cops, and a huge pot…
Quit It, Idiots
The Two Rivers Tribune reported recently that certain rock-headed word wags have been sneaking onto the broad river bar that swings into the Trinity River outside of Hoopa and rearranging the “Fish On” that for years has been spelled out in large rocks there. Yes, they’re making cute little cuss words. Notes the TRT: The…
Best Modern Jazz Series in Humboldt
Humboldt’s keepers of the modern jazz flame are a small circle of jazz aficionados who put together a nonprofit arts organization called the Redwood Jazz Alliance. The dedicated crew has been bringing some of the best young players and veteran jazzers to Humboldt since 2006. As the RJA explains in its mission statement, “We envision…
Best Bookstore
I have this theory that bookstores make excellent barometers of a community’s livability, and by that measure, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, Humboldt County is the tits. Here’s an anecdote: While visiting family in Santa Rosa recently, my wife went on a quest for Lionel Shriver books. She visited three different bookstores. Nada. When…
Best Comedian
Nothing is off-limits to Sherae O’Shaughnessy, voted by you as Humboldt’s Best Comedian. Whether the topic is sex, race, politics or how you chose to dress when you sat this close to her stage, the Humboldt-glamorous co-founder of the Ba-Dum-Chh comedy troupe says what she wants without apologies. Over the past year, she and her…
Best Weatherman — Ever
Last Tuesday’s KIEM-TV news was a sad day for Humboldt as weatherman Jim Bernard gave his last weather report. Bernard is what you’d have to call a North Coast institution. He’s been informing local “weather fans” about our weather patterns and helping us plan out weekends for more than two decades. Bernard provided solid…
Drinkin’ Memories
Editor: Andrew Goff’s “The Rural Bar Crawl” (Sept. 13) brought me back 25 years to my then home along notorious China Creek, in southern Humboldt County. My parents liked to visit me, but no way were they staying at my place. So they checked in at the newly built Humboldt House Inn, along the southern…
Best Ice Cream/Yogurt
Starting with organic dairy products from Marin County’s Straus Family Creamery, Arcata Scoop handcrafts wild and ever-changing assortments of frozen flavor delights. Sure, they have your classics — chocolate, “just vanilla,” mocha almond fudge. But why not try a scoop of candied ginger, non-dairy coffee (sweetened with coconut nectar) or (yowza!) jalapeño? The adventurous flavors…
Best Restroom
“I need to take a picture of your bathroom.” It was a slow Sunday evening at The Speakeasy. After explaining further to bartender Sierra Anderson that these facilities had won our first ever Best Restroom award, she was cool with my proposition. A guy down the bar — Gregson Pullen of Connecticut, who’d just rolled…
Best Wish Ticket
There are certain things you can count on in Humboldt County: The fog will roll in, Safeway never has enough registers open, Betty will be tending bar at Everett’s, there will be a Craigslist missed connection about a Wildberries employee, Tad will be clad in nurse’s scrubs and protesting something, and Missing Link Soul Night…
Best French Fries
What qualities define the perfect pile of deep-fried potato sticks? Opinions differ. Thick cut or shoestring? Soft or crispy? A simple dusting of salt or something more exotic — Cajun spices, lemon parmesan or fresh chunks of garlic? Some folks treat fries as bedding for cheese, chili, onions and the like. Others prefer the succulent…
Best Solo Artist
Repeat, baby! Humboldt still digs on soulful, rootsy Americana. After sharing Best Solo Artist honors in last year’s Best Of poll due to a tie, local singer/songwriter Chris Parreira goes truly solo in this year’s winners column. (To be fair, last year’s co-winner Josephine Johnson spent much of the year away from Humboldt ears teaching…
Best Dueling Signs
There it is, partway up the pretty walk from the eastern end of Trinidad’s Indian Beach: a green sign, warning that one branch of the trail is for pedestrians and daylight use only; no dogs or wheel-borne travelers allowed. Head along that grassy bluff trail, owned by the city of Trinidad, and you’ll hear…
Clothesline Prayer Flags
My neighbor is Hanging clothes In the Ferndale…
Best Pizza
Crispy crust, so thin it sags under wisps of spinach and crumples under pepperoni and jalapeño, taunting you, daring you — the fork? Or the greasy lap? That’s Paul’s Live from New York pizza, at least as dished up in Eureka, and it is among the most beloved pizza in Humboldt. Perhaps it’s the…
Best Local Beer
“What are ya havin’?” On the whole, it seems as if HumCo will take a Steelhead Extra Pale Ale, please. High on drinkability, Mad River Brewery’s most popular ale is one of the most stocked beers in bars countywide. As one reader put it, “Steelhead is THE Humboldt beer.” Make it official. Now, Humboldt loves…
The Best Stuff
Our turn! All year long the Journal gives you the where, when, what scoop on the awesome soirees other folks are trying to seduce you to and, well, we’ve decided we wanna feel pretty too! And thus, in conjunction with our super scientific Best Of Humboldt Issue, the NCJ cordially invites you to our first…
Best Place to Send an Outsider
It’s almost become cliché. Every year we ask, where’s the best place to take your out-of-towners? And every year it’s the same answer: Fern Canyon. Hey, it’s good enough for Steven Spielberg’s CGI dinosaurs (“Jurassic Park II” was partially filmed at Fern Canyon in the late 1990s). But with the canyon’s 50-foot walls covered in…
Best River
Warm sun, and a tumbling, splashing, frothing, eddying river, with muddy-toe beaches perfect for dawdling and green-white rapids perfect for rafting or kayaking. By a big, big margin, Humboldt’s very favorite river is the Trinity. Not that it’s the only river in our hearts. “The Mad has great swimming and it provides us with drinking…
Best Nonprofit
Last year, the nonprofit Food for People, Inc., distributed 1.6 million pounds of food to Humboldt’s neediest. Until Outerspacians start parachuting cornucopias or other goodies onto our heads, Food for People likely will keep winning in this category. The 33-year-old nonprofit, which started out closet-sized, has grown into a wide-reaching outfit with 12 programs…
Best Secondhand Store
Who knows where the chicken and duck baskets once lived? The chicken’s ribbon necktie was tan and green and the ducks’ blue-and-white checks. Squatting atop a stack of less-animated basketry, they beckoned: “Come on, Thanksgiving! Gimme some bread to hold!” But when you’ve just got a few bucks to burn, you have to shop…
Best Local Author
Some of you need to read more, shall we say, closely. “Me no read local book,” said one commenter (sounding suspiciously like Bigfoot). “We have local authors? Have any of them gained notoriety?” asked another. Hullo — Bret Harte ring a bell? Raymond Carver? Certainly their names have leaked beyond our cloistered borders. True, though,…
Best Breakfast
We heard from the breakfast mavericks — “Ice cream.” The puritans — “Egg white on toast.” And the conditionals — “Alibi if you’re hung over, Renata’s if you’re a girl, Luke’s if you need a place to take last night’s successful date.” But mostly, resoundingly, we heard from people who think the best place to…
Best Radio Station
Another repeat winner, and no surprise. KHUM’s motto, “radio without the rules,” means it’s in tune with alt.-type readers. The flagship for Lost Coast Communications’ four-station mini-media empire, at 104.3 and 104.7 FM, fancies itself a “free-form” radio station, and the music mix is eclectic as hell, just nothing too heavy. (Look elsewhere for rap…
Best Club DJ
The choices were an A-to-Z of local DJs, from Accurate Productions to Zephyr. Various members of the Missing Link crew (especially Mantease) drew big numbers, as did DJ Red. One opinionated reader mused: “Best? Or most popular? Most popular = either Itchie Fingaz, Dub Cowboy or Matt n Adam. Best? Probably State Of Mind,…
Best Store Window
It’s the gas mask. A golden gas mask just cries out for a second look. Even if it’s really just a spray-painted respirator that Jane Williams, the artist owner of Bang! Bang! Vintage Consignment in Arcata, had acquired for some long-ago art project. The gas mask, plus Bigfoot and other past concoctions, helped Bang! Bang!…
Best TV Station
Scattered in among non-local answers like “Comedy Central” and “AMC” and wiseass answers like “Kill Your TV!” and “Go ride a bike!” a few sincere individuals confessed their love for the local appendage of the Public Broadcasting System and voted for KEET-TV Ch. 13. An excited Claire Reynolds told us the station’s recipe for success.…
Best Playground
For a professional jungle gymnast, this result was a huge upset: Eureka’s Sequoia Park?! Let’s talk about another place, first. Janes Creek Meadows Park, aka “Spinny” park, looks like a mini NASA training facility. It has elliptical pods that orbit with such force that your eyes roll back. The professional jungle gymnast in me thinks…
Best Public Art
He knows everything about you. The furniture you buy. The car you drive. Your idling-at-the-intersection habits. Your fast-food preferences. Whether you go for kayaks or bicycles or guns. That on Fridays you go the back way along Old Arcata Road but the rest of the week you split your route between Samoa and the…
Best Coffee Roaster
For most of us, our alarm clocks only half awaken us. Consciousness isn’t fully realized until our pupils dilate after the nose wallows in the smell of ground coffee beans wafting through the air. Last year we asked you who had the best cup of coffee, but this year we wanted to decide Humboldt’s favorite…
Best Annual Event
Obviously the oysters living in Humboldt Bay didn’t vote in this category. They’d hardly call the Oyster Festival — where 100,000 or more of their fellows get smothered in sauces and spice and chewed to death each year — the best annual event. We’d hazard a guess that their best annual event is the moment…
Best Not Reggae Band
Will wonders if the lack of reggae at the NCJ Best Of Humboldt Party is acceptable.
Best Bakery
We need to do a little intervention here first, folks, to deal with the whiner who “voted” in this category with the question, “Are you trying to make me cry?” Hey, weepy: Get a grip! I’ve cried my way through the ciabatta at Loleta, cried my way through the apple pandowdy at Ramones, cried…
Best Music Venue
The letters seemingly fall from the sky and stack vertically above the neon-lit marquee, spelling out the name of one of our fair towns: A-R-C-A-T-A. The iconic sign above the Arcata Theatre Lounge has become the focal point of the city’s skyline. And thanks to a rebirth in the past decade, the theatre is also…
Best Grocery Store
Once again, this category drew a large number of votes with loyalties split among Wildberries, Eureka Natural Foods, Murphy’s, WinCo, Safeway and Grocery Outlet, among others (no votes for Wal-Mart). But the clear winner (again) was North Coast Co-op. Note that we lumped together votes for Arcata Co-op, Eureka Co-op, The Co-op, The Coop, and…
Best Of
Best Of
Best Lunch
Sometimes it pays to specialize. When you’re only open from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., when your very name conjures up the midday meal — you’re clearly made a commitment to lunch and nothing but the lunch. So help you nom. That commitment, plus great food, locally sourced, helped send Café Nooner into first…
Best Band
This hard-fought category saw around 150 different local bands that someone considered “best.” Among them: “The one I saw at this one house — a gal was playing the saw with a violin bow in a Slipknot-esque mask. Sounded like a rockabilly metal set. (There’s a lot of good bands, I just can’t name them.)”…
Best Restaurant for a Vegetarian
Wildflower Cafe & Bakery beet the stuffing out of the rest of the competition here. Having never been there myself, I romained skeptical. However, after dining there last week with a few friends, lettuce say that we’re with the voters. For those of you who think a vegetarian menu is a missedsteak, I invite you…
Uh …
Editor: Reflecting upon Mormon Mitt Romney possibly becoming president and the hardships his policies could bring, Becky Peterson (Mailbox, “Missionaries, Not Troops,” Sept. 13) brilliantly addressed the issue of government attempting to impose a particular religious doctrine on its multi-cultured populace. While Becky explained that corporate manipulation of innocent sinners is typically advanced by Christain…
Best New Business
Here in Humboldt, we rejoice in our animal selves. Not the nasty, brutish and short part, but the eating, drinking and cavorting part. How else can you explain it, when a category open to every kind of commerce zeros in so markedly on food and drink? Barbecue and bakeries, pho and food trucks, brewers…
Best Radio DJ
The needle’s stuck. For the second year in a row, KHUM’s Mike Dronkers is Humboldt’s favorite radio DJ. Dronkers’ weekday midday show, “You and Meme,” features music from accapella to zydeco and commentary about life and local news, which he says he tries to deliver in a way that makes sense to normal people,…
Best Bar
Of all the beer joints, in all the towns, in all of Humboldt, voters liked The Shanty most. If you’re keeping score at home, that’s a hat trick with back-to-back-to-back wins for the Eureka dive bar with the key lime facade and iconic Martini glass neon out front. You don’t three-peat by dumb luck. A…
Don’t Forget Buck
Editor: In regard to Bob Doran’s column “Stranger Weather” in the Sept. 13 edition of the North Coast Journal: When Merle Haggard was inventing “the Bakersfield country sound,” where was Buck Owens (“born in Barstow raised in Bakersfield”) one of whose ex-wives, Bonnie Owens, is also one of Merle’s ex-wives? Sandy Walsh, Eureka
Best Blog
Repeat! Since running away with this award last year, Hank Sims’ Lost Coast Outpost has only gotten more souped-up with whiz-bang technological appendages. It’s the Voltron of local bloggage. Not content with his steady stream of crime reports, radio clips, withering sarcasm and whip-smart analysis, Sims unleashed his mad programming genius on county jail records…
Best Wings
In one of this year’s most heated, juicy, spicy, drippy, plump … uh, sorry … races of this year’s poll, we asked y’all to decide who makes fleshy fowl flying instruments the most delectable. It was a tight, three-way race, but in the end Six Rivers Brewery’s face was just a little bit saucier than…
Best Food on Wheels
As anyone who’s been to Portland can tell you, the mobile food phenomenon that’s sweeping urban areas has not quite caught on in Humboldt. As the voting here shows, we’re still dominated by family operated Mexican food trucks serving tacos and burritos. The closest we have to a food cart pod is a section of…
Dumb or Devious?
Editor: Friday’s blog item on the GPU process (also in Blog Jammin, Sept. 20), with Burn’s concluding question in response to Virginia Bass’ comment: “Could these be marching orders? Or is it coincidence that Sundberg and Bohn’s confusion and concerns led them to this very same idea?” pretty much sums up what some have long…
Best Elected Official
The lamentable early retirement of last year’s champ, First District County Supervisor Jimmy Smith (get well soon, Jimmy!), left this category wide open, and reader responses ran the gamut from the proudly ignorant (“none they all suck”) to the keenly argued (“Harbor Commissioner Mike Wilson: “He ushered in an era of change, much needed”). There…
Best Community Breakfast
Every third Sunday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Runeberg Lodge in Eureka (corner of Union and West Wabash) you’ll find what may well be the best breakfast bargain in the county: Six bucks will get you four Swedish pancakes, dusted with powdered sugar and crowned with a scoop of whipped cranberry butter,…
Best Asian Restaurant
Another hard fought battle with pretty much every Chinese, Japanese and Southeast Asian place in the county showing up as someone’s favorite (along with a bunch of inexplicable votes for the band Blood Gnome). While Kyoto was a strong contender, Pho Thien Long once again took first place. As the name implies, the classic North…
Audacious
[image-1] It takes a certain audacity for a young Brit named Declan Patrick MacManus to take on the name of the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll at the start of a music career, but Elvis Costello did just that. His audacious 1977 debut on Stiff Records, My Aim Is True, lived up to the name.…
Best Sports Event
It’s certainly true that everyone loves a winner, and this year the Humboldt Crabs captured their second straight Far West League championship in an extra-innings thriller. Yay, Crabbies! But the appeal of a game at the Arcata Ballpark hardly depends on something as transient as wins and losses. No, you can’t help but absorb the…
Best Trail
It is OK to dream. To dream, for instance, like one reader, who suggested the best trail in Humboldt County is “anywhere in the Alps.” Indeed we are not, in fact, obliged to remain in our coastal mountain landscape but can, in the blink of a swoony eye, drift ourselves into a wonderland where…
Best Dinner
Years ago, before artisan bakeries really caught on in Humboldt, a young couple installed a beautiful brick oven in a Eureka storefront and opened White Cat Bakery. Their business is long gone, but that brick oven remains — it now serves as the centerpiece to the appropriately named F Street bistro Brick & Fire, winner…
Fraud and Robot to the Rescue
Reviews THE IMPOSTER. It only takes a couple of minutes for British documentarian Bart Layton’s The Imposter to make viewers feel uneasy. As the film begins, home movies and photos of a 13-year-old San Antonio, Texas, boy named Nicholas Barclay — who disappeared without a trace in 1994 — are intercut with painful snippets of conversation…
Best ‘Garden Supply’ Store
Our mistake, in retrospect, is as glaring as the ballast in a thousand-watt grow light: We figured you all had inhaled enough Humboldt hints — the fertilizer ads promising “enormous buds,” the billboards touting “higher yields,” heck, the print ads in our own pages — that you’d cotton to the irony in those quotation marks.…
Best Urban Waterfall
There is a spot along Turner Road, on the south edge of downtown McKinleyville, where you can stand in a light-dappled forest and hear the steady, soothing whir of traffic on Highway 101 nearby. Walk a few yards and the sound becomes suddenly brighter, closer, not as compact and forward-sounding. It’s the even more…
Best Humboldt Cocktail
When the North Coast Journal asked me to suggest a cocktail for its “Best of” issue, I thought, “Humboldt in a glass. What does that taste like?” Well, it has to taste like our fantastic local beer. It just so happens that beer cocktails were all the rage this summer at Tales of the Cocktail,…
