Janie Hubert and Lynne Demarest are both in their 70s and neighbors in a Section 8 apartment building in Eureka’s Old Town. They rely on the elevator to get to the street from their third-floor apartments. But twice this year, it didn’t work — once for three months and then again for two weeks — […]
Section Feature
Posted inLetters + Opinion
The Marlboro Man Cometh
Just about every year I’ve worked as a reporter in Humboldt County, the rumor has made its way into my newsroom: Philip Morris is buying up local properties, looking to get into the weed game. It’s never checked out — until now. Kind of. News broke last week that Altria, the umbrella company under which […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
Nursing Homes Balk at New Staffing Rules
More than half of California’s nursing homes, including four in Humboldt County, are asking to be exempted from new state regulations that would require them to spend more time directly caring for their patients. The state’s new staffing requirements for nursing homes, quietly passed in last year’s budget bill, seem universally unpopular. Patient advocates say […]
Posted inMusic
A Cracking Good Time
When Tchaikovsky’s ballet The Nutcracker debuted in St. Petersburg 126 years ago this week, it was generally considered to be a confusing and poor adaptation of the sourced Hoffmann and Dumas fairytale. The composer would die less than a year later, never knowing the heights of popularity that his work would enjoy in the middle […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Free Will Astrology
ARIES (March 21-April 19): When I write a horoscope for you, I focus on one or two questions because I don’t have room to cover every single aspect of your life. The theme I’ve chosen this time may seem a bit impractical, but if you take it to heart, I guarantee you it will have […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
Physics’ Beautiful Crisis
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” — John Keats, from “Ode on a Grecian Urn” What works for old pots doesn’t necessarily work for physics. In fact, the search for “beauty” has stymied progress in physics for the past 40 years, according to […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Dark Horror, White Christmas
Reviews CAM. As excited and outspoken as I’ve been in recent years about contemporary horror movies, the genre’s groundswell of creativity and renewed excitement at the theatrical experience, this weekend gave me pause. Because as much as I genuinely believe that the horror genre, at least as defined by the best contemporary examples, may well […]
Posted inArts + Scene
Fra-gee-lay Nostalgia
Taking place just after the Great Depression in a small Indiana town, the 1983 movie A Christmas Story tells the tale of one young man’s fevered quest for a toy firearm. It’s quaint, blackly funny and a yule-tide classic. The musical reworking, A Christmas Story: The Musical, currently showing at the Ferndale Repertory Theatre, carries […]
Posted inLife + Outdoors
The Darkness Garden
As the first autumn rains soak into the earth, here on the home farm we are beginning our darkness gardening routine. As the growing season winds down, we tidy up the remnants of autumn harvests and prepare for the winter planning and planting season. Now is prime time for cultivating high-flavor culinary gems in the […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
‘Blue on Blue’
It was a drizzly Monday afternoon in mid-December of 2014 when Maria Romero and her daughter Jennifer Garcia-Romero ventured down to Eureka’s Cooper Gulch to meet Jesus, Romero’s 14-year-old son. He’d called a few hours earlier, saying he needed money to buy shoes. He didn’t sound like himself. Jesus had been spiraling for a couple […]
Posted inNews (NCJ)
‘A Miracle Didn’t Happen’
When the California Fish and Game Commission took the unprecedented step last year of shutting down the North Coast’s 2018 red abalone season, the idea was to give the last vestige of the state’s once great fishery some time to bounce back. The decision came in the aftermath of what scientists call a “perfect storm” […]