Cover Story
Dust to Dust
Arcata resident Michael Furniss traces his aspiration for a natural burial back to a rainy afternoon four decades ago when he was a graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley studying soil science and forestry. Watching swirls of water from the downpour absorb into the ground while sitting near a creek on campus,…
Music Tonight: Wednesday, April 17
Let’s hear it for the Logger Bar again, which has positively crushed it with booking this week, finishing strong with the return of Jenny Don’t and the Spurs, Portland’s favorite stardust country and lost highway soul seekers fronted by one of the best voices in the biz. The very talented Turtle Goodwater of Barn Fire…
State Bill Aims to Address Cyberbullying Off Campus
In response to his daughter receiving a swastika on social media, a California Jewish lawmaker is pushing for a bill that would give school administrators authority to suspend or expel students if they cyberbully fellow students away from school and outside of school hours. But Long Beach Assemblymember Josh Lowenthal’s Assembly Bill 2351 is coming…
California Salmon Fishing Banned for Second Year in Row
In a devastating blow to California’s fishing industry, federal fishery managers unanimously voted to cancel all commercial and recreational salmon fishing off the coast of California for the second year in a row. The April 10 decision is designed to protect California’s dwindling salmon populations after drought and water diversions left river flows too warm…
Music Tonight: Monday, April 15
The Logger Bar hits us with a rare Monday night show at 7:30 p.m. and this one looks like a rip-snortin’, garage-rockin’ deal with our local lovelies Clean Girl and the Dirty Dishes cranking the amp alongside SUX from Seattle, featuring a lady named Lolli from the infamous mean-ass punk band Mommy Long Legs. The…
Music Tonight: Sunday, April 14
Minnesota bluesman, picker, and singer-songwriter Charlie Parr is the real deal, by which I mean an artist who has sublimated the nerve-ending feedback signals of his life and the lives of those around him into a sound that captures the true essence of storytelling, that elusive place where fiction creates truth. I’m not the only…
Music Tonight: Saturday, April 13
Two free shows tonight at great local venues with some of the best and offbeat bands around. Rooster McClintock brings the fine country jams alongside Heaven’s Taint (lol), which I am told has a surf rock vibe, to the Logger Bar at 8 p.m. An hour later over at the Shanty, you can enjoy a…
UPDATE: Artillery Shell Deemed Safe in Ferndale
UPDATE: Ferndale Police Sgt. Robert Lindgren says the artillery shell that prompted the evacuation of a building and the partial closure of Main Street this morning while the county bomb squad responded was empty. Lindgren also corrected some inaccurate information initially disseminated to the Journal by police amid the dynamic events of the morning. Lindgren…
Eco Cemeteries, Flags, Impacts and Foods
For our annual Green Issue, we’re looking into all things eco. First, there’s green burial in the works in our county. We’ve also got updates on the Earth flag legal conundrum and Measure S. Finally, we’re looking into Sunken Seaweed’s quest to help reestablish bull kelp and grow sustainable seaweed for consumers, too. Hit subscribe…
Music Tonight: Friday, April 12
I really don’t want to write about the pandemic, so I’ll just say that 2021 was a heavy time for this beat, and the only real moment of grace came when the fever broke a bit in November and I was able to slink out of hiding to catch and review my first live show…
Music Tonight: Thursday, April 11
The Basement continues its hit parade of steady weekly shows featuring killer local acts. Tonight’s feature is the jazz fusion group RLAD, which, when I saw them last in 2023 was composed of Tim Randles on keyboard, Ken Lawrence on bass, Mike LaBolle on drums and Doug Marcum on drums. Skilled players, all of them,…
Alternative Energy Brainstorming with Billionaires
Welcome all! Thank you for joining me in my secret underwater bubble retreat overlooking the Mariana Trench. Please make yourselves comfortable — I only ask that you not tap on the glass. I think I speak for us all when I say the time for climate denial is over. It was a good run. Rupert, you…
Turning the Titanic
In May of 1911, the Titanic became the biggest object ever moved by humans at the time, weighing 23,587 metric tons. We start there to put this next number into some perspective: Since plastic was introduced in the 1950s, more than 8.3 billion metric tons of it have been produced across the globe, according to…
The First Omen and Monkey Man Fight Dirty
THE FIRST OMEN. With the recent spate of horror movies centered around nuns — from the Conjuring universe’s spinoff and 2023 sequel, Immaculate’s robes only lately sweeping out of the theater and now The First Omen opening — one wonders how recruitment is going. The Omen (1976), stars a fully gray Gregory Peck as a…
Our Last Best Chance
Four years ago, we took a stand in these pages that still keeps us up at night from time to time. It was November of 2019 and the Humboldt County Planning Commission was poised to decide whether to permit a company called Terra-Gen’s plans to construct 47 wind turbines along Monument and Bear River ridges…
Making Change: Love
In honor of this week’s Green Issue, let’s talk about … love. Welcome to part four of Making Change, a six-week series on the how and whys of personal, social and political change. Sometimes to define what one means requires explaining what one does not. I confess to an inner eye-roll when people talk about…
‘Subject to Charges’
Editor: I read the April 5 article (“Judge Rules Arcata Can’t Put Earth Flag on Top”) about the court ruling in weekly newsletter, Vexi-News, I receive from the North American Vexillological Association. While the court ruled based on California state law, the act of flying any flag above or higher than the flag of these…
Correction
A story headlined “New State Plan Could Help HumCo Foster Kids” in the April 4, 2024 edition of the North Coast Journal included inaccurate data on foster youth in Humboldt County. According to the nonprofit kidsdata.org, more than 400 children were in foster care in Humboldt County in 2018, while the Humboldt County Department of…
A Brief History of Dildos
“Thou … madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them.” — Ezekiel 16:17, KJV Along with notable human achievements such as the invention of the plow and the wheel, we should also celebrate a much older innovation, by tens of thousands of years: the dildo. In 2005, a team of researchers…
How to Survive This
I won’t check the news right now if you won’t. Instead, let’s think about summer peaches so ripe we’ll eat them leaning over the kitchen sink, or the crunching sound of walking on snow, and that dusty smell of the first rain, Let’s imagine how it would feel to put on warm socks right out…
Big White Cloud
No, we didn’t get a proper eclipse last Monday, but I still found a momentary pulse beat of Satori from a gliding collision of outside sources, and that’s good enough for me. I had been driving around listening to the sublime John Cale song I titled this week’s column after, so perhaps a moment like…
Sunken Seaweed’s Dual Mission
While at then Humboldt State University, Torre Polizzi and Leslie Booher were part of a team surveying seaweed along the North Coast, documenting the mass die offs of sea stars and kelp. “That was pretty painful to witness,” says Polizzi. The kelp, on which endangered abalone depend, are still being devoured by starving purple urchins,…
A Chime of Wrens
One of the prettiest places that my dog and I like to explore is the lower section of the Arcata Ridge Trail where it follows Janes Creek. Even though it’s not far from the industries that line West End Road, it feels remote, unspoiled and serene. But not quiet. Today the Pacific wrens were bursting…
