OCCUPY MENDOCINO has been denied permission to hold meetings at the spacious Fort Bragg Senior Center. Which is odd because most of Coast's Occupiers are themselves fully certified geezers. It's not as if a gang of Black Bloc-ers wanted to use the place to assemble Molotov cocktails.
WE HADN'T HEARD anything about the FB Senior Center since that smarmy crook who used to run the place went off to become a lawyer, having taken preparatory classes in the Bay Area on the Center's dime. What WAS his name? Come on, come on… Nasty little fat guy who used to go on about how much he loved the old folks when he really wanted to sell them for cat food? That guy, and boy o boy, don't we get 'em in Mendocino County?
ACCORDING TO THE CENTER'S odd website, and I say 'odd' because it asks visitors “to report a random act of kindness” as committed by the boss or one of his trustees, and we have to assume from the request, made against the purple graphic obligatory in the circumstances of both such requests and unicorns, that random acts of kindness are serially committed by the boss and his trustees. Or they're such pricks that if they so much as say good morning it's noteworthy enough to be shared.
I MANAGED to continue reading through the sudden nausea possessing me that Charles Bush is now capo di tutti at the Center and there's an eight-person board of directors with Kathleen Johnson serving as president and two sensible women I happen to know — Gloria Liner and Phoebe Graubard — functioning as trustees. (Gloria! Phoebe! Surely you won't stand for this, this, this.... this fascism!)
I'VE WRITTEN in to ask why the Occupiers can't meet at the Senior Center, and I'm perfectly prepared to report my request as a random act of kindness if someone will tell me why.
SO, LIKE, if the Senior Center won't let the Coast's tabby-tame Occupiers gather at the Center, why don't the Occupiers occupy the Senior Center? Maybe burn their AARP cards or toss a couple of walkers at a window?
FOR PURE MISGUIDEDNESS, political division, the Solomon campaign's mailer attacking Stacey Lawson is real dumb. A “progressive” like Solomon ought to be going after the corporate lib in the race, which is Huffman, not Ms. Silly Sally. And a progressive ought not to be getting out slick election-defiling mailers period, if the prog claims he represents the high road. I was offended by the Lawson mailers and I'm not easily offended. So, she might buy her way into the run-off. I don't think so, but I guess the wizards advising Solomon think she might, hence these idiot mailers pointing out that she made a lot of money young and she doesn't vote much. Solomon voters will vote for Solomon. They don't have to be reminded that Lawson is a major feeb. I mean this is the area represented by Mike Thompson. Alongside him Lawson looks like an intellectual.
THE GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE almost collapsed in 1987 during the 50th birthday of the most marvelous span in the world. The bridge authority had closed it for the day, inviting pedestrians to do a Frisco-to-Marin walk across as people did in 1937 when the Bridge opened. The diff between Americans of 1937 and Americans of 1987 was a million tons of Big Macs. The '87 Yanks almost sank the whole show. They crowded onto the Bridge in huge numbers, so many of them they couldn't move, and so many of them they flattened the structure in its vulnerable middle, the single span section. The road surface flattened, the cable supports tilted inward, and the cables holding it all up got so tight they almost snapped. Only the installation of a lighter roadbed in '86 kept thousands of celebrants from plunging to their deaths. This terrifying near miss still doesn't seem to be well known. Kevin Starr's little book on the Bridge — Golden Gate: The Life and Times of America's Greatest Bridge — is the definitive work. Starr summed up the near catastrophe this way: “It is virtually beyond comprehension to contemplate what might have occurred — possibly the greatest man-made accident in human history.”
Be First to Comment