Crossing Schools
Will rearranging McKinleyville’s elementary schools save the district, or ruin it?
Cover Story
Crossing Schools
Eight-year-old Lydia Kenyon stepped up to the microphone in McKinleyville Middle School’s multi-purpose room, which was packed on this December evening with 200-odd community members — teachers, students, administrators and parents, many of them upset, many downright angry. As she spoke to the McKinleyville Union School District (MUSD) Board of Trustees, Lydia sounded nervous and…
Weed Chat Today
Radio alert: Friend o’ the Journal Jennifer Savage sent this along this morning: Thursday, Feb. 12 at 1 p.m., Jen Savage will conduct a conversation with bloggers Kym Kemp, Eric Sligh and “Sohumborn” in the KSLG studio. Kemp’s blog, “Redheaded Blackbelt,” covers issues inherent to living in the Southern Humboldt hills. Sligh’s blog, “Humboldt…
Witness recounts stabbing death
If Barbara Groom hadn’t been craving a pint of Häagen Dazs after a movie last Friday, 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…
Shark Jump
Internet.Shark Jump: The awesome power of the great white. Better a buoy than a
Whoa There, Wildcat
The AP reports that Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is dumping ye old Bush plan to open up areas of the Outer Continental Shelf in the Atlantic and the Pacific previously off limits to oil and gas drilling. A good portion of these virgin waters lie off of California. It’s not that Salazar is against expanding…
Arcata Whoops Feds
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…
The Fucking Weather
running.”The Fucking Weather: This is the best fucking weather site on the
T-S ends long theological debate
A snow angel Buried in the Op-Ed section of today’s Times-Standard is this stunning, er, revelation from contributor Dave Stancliff: Angels exist! This will no doubt be shocking news to the 17 percent of (hell-bound) Americans who have until now denied the existence “God’s Ambassadors.” “These blessed spirits are armed with the authority and might…
25 Things
week.25 Things: “6. My official portrait as Governor was quite controversial and the legislature refused to hang it. My Father said if I didn’t get a new one, I could never run again. It is now hanging and I am still
KEET to ignore analog extension
image ganked from popsci.com If you’ve been following the news this week you know that there’s been a lot of discussion about postponing the end of analog television and the coming switch to the digital age. It turns out that despite a lot of advance warning to get digital converter boxes before the big switcheroo…
State of California
(Click on the thumbnails to read the signs.) Today is the first day of the Governor’s imposed furlough for many state workers. Some of the “Closed” signs posted on the doors of state offices in Eureka explained the closure — fiscal crisis, big boss’ orders — and some apologized for the inconvenience. Some didn’t, including…
Clear As a Mountain Stream
The first heard time I heard Tristan Clarridge and his big sister Tashina play music, they were pre-teen fiddle prodigies wowing a crowd at the Humboldt Folklife Festival. At the time, the kids were living with their mom in a teepee out in Burnt Ranch; she was home-schooling them, basically allowing them to pursue fiddling…
Midnight Reg Runaround
Around this time of year, the basket weavers up around Orleans are gathering and cleaning willow root from the river exposed by the water’s rise and fall. In March and April, they’ll go for the willow sticks. In the summertime, there’s bear grass and maidenhair fern. Each season, they’ll gather only what they need to…
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…
Corrections
“For the first time in many, many years, Humboldt County’s unemployment rate had just slipped beneath the state average,” stated the Jan. 22 edition of “The Town Dandy,” referring to the Dec. 2008 figures collected by the California Employment Development Department. In point of fact, this turns out not to be the case. A review…
Merriweather Post Pavilion
Seeing how much Animal Collective’s last album, Strawberry Jam, blew, I have to admit I was nervous. There was a lot of discussion, as there always is about an upcoming release. Will it take the next step? Will it be in the right direction? If so there’s a sigh of relief, but if not we…
Hobart’s Suit
Editor: In your recent article “Hobart’s Children” (Jan. 29), you wrote: “Where did the current litigious battle for his legacy begin? Ellin Beltz suggests starting with Brown v. Humboldt Kinetic Association.” You also write that when the Humboldt Kinetic Association “… realized the race couldn’t turn a profit, they stopped payments and Hobart sued.” That’s…
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,…
PG-13
Editor: Last week’s “Town Dandy” (Jan. 29) was yet another example of why I shield my children from the local weekly in our town. Your verbal masturbation in place of balanced commentary created an impression of us v. them. It’s an easy out for you to quip, in your fanciful word dance, about taping shut…
Humboldt Wild
"The people here are tenacious," says photographer Arleen Olson about the people of Humboldt County. "They just get something in their heads and they do it — just like I did this book." The book is Humboldt Wild, a self-published photography book, a project that Olson describes as "monumental." Starting with no knowledge of the…
First Saturday Night Arts Alive!
Presented by USBank, with Eureka Main Street and the Humboldt Arts Council. Opening receptions for artists, exhibits and/or performances are held the first Saturday of each month. Phone 707-442-9054, for more information or to have an exhibit/performance included. http://aweurekatoday.blogspot.com/ 1. WORLD CUP 1626 F St. Georgia Long, recent works. 1a. F STREET CAFÉ 1630…
Obama and the Arts
What the heck is culture anyway? It’s a slippery term referring to anything from yogurt to blue fuzzy stuff in Petri dishes to hip hop to classical music. So when Tim Smith of the Baltimore Sun stated that "One of the best ways to promote and preserve the cultural health of this country would be…
Unstable Table
What would you get if you mixed The Bump Foundation’s funk, The Absynth Quintet’s jazz and the jam-based sounds of Likwefi? Not what you might think, at least based on Unstable Table’s debut eponymous CD. The band consists of Ryan Roberts (The AQ, Likwefi), Tim Lane (Likwefi, The Bump Foundation), Tommy FitzMaurice (Spank, The Bump…
Foot of Del Norte Street
grackles flash brass badges where weary sparrows flit…
Dark Ages
In the information infrastructure, newspapers represent the outmoded grid. But if you tear down the grid without having a replacement in place you will find yourself in the dark. Think about that as we prepare to spend hundreds of billions on infrastructure projects meant to shore up our collapsed economy. We spent $700 billion to…
The Lost Guys
In The Wild Guys, currently at Ferndale Repertory Theatre, we’re asked to believe that Andy (played by Mike Halton), an older executive and experienced men’s group leader, takes three men he barely knows on a retreat without telling them anything about what they’re doing. He invites Stewart (Joe Hiney), a produce manager in one of…
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…
Action! Thrills! Laughter!
Previews Good things sometimes come to those who wait. Opening Friday, Feb. 6, is Rachel Getting Married, featuring an outstanding performance by Anne Hathaway (I saw the film in Portland) as a woman furloughed from rehab to attend her sister Rachel’s wedding, to almost disastrous results. Also excellent is Rosemarie DeWitt as Rachel but this…
