Football & Other Luxuries
• The 49ers were outcoached against Seattle. Just like we were outcoached in the Super Bowl against the Ravens (e.g., first and goal on the five with time running out and what happened?). And just like...
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El Undécimo Mandamiento
Herb Caen, legendary columnist of The San Francisco Chronicle, once wrote of the Crane Syndrome. According to Mr. Caen, Crane Syndrome occurs when you wake up in the morning, discover another body in...
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The Invisible Americans
I don’t speak Pashto, Farsi, Kurdish, Arabic or Urdu. Yet since 9/11 I have lived mentally in their homelands of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq thousands of miles away. Partly it’s because our troops...
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The River & The Thread
Rosanne Cash’s last CD was called The List; an album of covers released in 2009 and drawn from a list given to her by her father of his one hundred essential country songs. The Man in Black intended...
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Judge James A. Washington
The fact that people of color are punished disproportionately by drug prohibition is now widely acknowledged in the United States. Just last week in the New Yorker David Remick quoted the President...
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North By Northwest
North to Boonville. I’m going, finally, to Seattle. That’s about all everyone around here in Sacramento refers to when the inevitable I should, could be living somewhere other than here comes up. It’s...
View ArticleResilient Warriors of The Rustic Ranch
Inverness is a picturesque little town on the west coast of Florida about 50 miles south of Gainesville and 25 miles of Ocala. It’s a short drive from the Gulf of Mexico and within a few hours of...
View ArticleWho’s Your Doctor?
As of last week more than 3.3 million Americans have signed up for private health insurance through online marketplaces under the auspices of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). California leads the...
View ArticleSan Francisco’s Displacement Crisis
The tech boom has made San Francisco’s real estate the most expensive in the nation. Tech companies, from startups to Fortune 500 firms, are cleaving more and more income for themselves out of the U.S....
View ArticleBalboa Park
Downtown San Diego is so clean it sparkles. Its crown jewel is Balboa Park, a 1200-acre complex which includes fifteen museums, at least 18 gardens, and the world-renowned San Diego Zoo. Balboa Park...
View ArticleTrucking Hatchery Salmon
Last summer, Berkeley fisherman Mike Hudson enjoyed some of the most profitable salmon fishing he had seen in a decade. Dense schools of big fish congregated along the Bay Area coast through the spring...
View ArticleGoogle Money
If you google “money,” the search engine called Google, from which that verbification is derived, will tell you that there are 1.12 billion results (as of February 27, 2014). That sounds like a lot of...
View ArticleKilroy Was There
Snow speckled Middle Street in the North End during the last week of February. Near Mr. Pemberton’s meeting house boys were pelting the dry goods shop of Theophilus Lillie, pelting it with stones,...
View ArticleMountain Outin’ To Yellowstone
There’s no sensation like being rocked to sleep in a berth on AMTRAK as the miles fly by to put a relaxing end to a vacation. The fact that the trip featured snow, rain, icicles, and puddles made it...
View ArticleZozobra: Santa Fe’s Burning Man
Wrap up all your troubles and woes and give them to Zozobra to be carried away. Zozobra is a 40-foot tall marionette that has been torched by a dancer for the last ninety years in Santa Fe, New Mexico....
View ArticleO Five Charlie
We were surrounded by southerners at Fort Gordon. I disliked them. I resented their diabolical ability to exploit my chauvinistic northern prejudices about them and shuck me repeatedly.
View ArticleFarm To Farm
Country inhabitants of the Ohio river valley have endured the most arduous winter in memory, at least for people 77 years and younger. While the blizzard of ’77 lingers on in family photo albums, with...
View ArticleGM & The 1.6 Millimeter Solution
You’re driving at night in a General Motors compact car, a Cobalt or Cruze or Ion, and without warning the brakes, gas pedal and airbag suddenly give out. You hurtle into a tree and kill yourself. The...
View ArticleVolunteer Fire Departments
“What do you know about Winsted’s firemen?” my mother asked me one day when I was eleven years old. “They jump into fire trucks and go put out fires fast,” I replied. “Well, you should also know,” she...
View ArticleMisery Ridge
Abel is over from Portland. It’s a couple of hours past sunrise and, along with Trisha and Jeff, we’re standing atop a fat fingertip of rimrock overlooking a perfect horseshoe bend in the lower Crooked...
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