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MCT: Wednesday, January 2, 2019

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DRY WEATHER WILL CONTINUE TODAY THROUGH THURSDAY. Cold morning temperatures will moderate, especially for coastal locations, Thursday and Friday. A front may bring light rain to the northern portion of the forecast area late Thursday night into Friday. Wet and unsettled weather is expected to return this weekend and continue into the early portion of next week. (National Weather Service)

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SUNDAY DRIVE AROUND SUTTER BUTTES

by Katy Tahja

Spend 40 years driving by the same interesting-looking place along Highway 20 and saying “…Some year we should check that out…” and finally we got it together and took time to check out Sutter Buttes. Nicknamed the “World’s Smallest Mountain Range” the Buttes rise 2,000 feet over the Central Valley and you wonder what the heck they are doing there miles away from the Coast Range or the Sierra.

We were taking our son to Sacramento to catch a train so we had a perfect opportunity…and YES, people still ride on trains by choice. In this case he had to get to Seattle in the week between Christmas and New Year and the holiday airfares were ridiculous. For $89 he got a coach seat and we packed him lunch. It takes 20 hours for the trip, so it’s not fast but it is cheap.

So back to the mini-mountain range. Anyone with a passing interest in geology might look at the peaks and think, “That looks volcanic…” and that is exactly what it is…leftovers from ancient volcanic eruptions. It’s the plug of a volcano that erupted 1.5 million years ago and made of rhyolites and andesite. Up top there was a lake that filled with 1,000 feet of detritus and the whole mountain range is about 10 miles around. The real bedrock basement of the Central Valley, which has filled with alluvium over eons, is 7,000 feet under these peaks. There are 30 to 50 million-year-old seashells in the rock showing that once upon a time everything there was part of an inland sea.

Maidu and Wintu native peoples visited the peaks, and Gabriel Moraga, a Spanish explorer in 1808, was the first European to mention the mountains. Jedediah Smith passed them in 1828 and John Works of the Hudson Bay Company was stranded there during flooding as his party trapped beaver along the rivers. In 1846 John Fremont camped nearby during the Bear Flag Revolt. John Sutter, involved in cattle, lumber, trapping, farming and gold discovery had a land grant in the area of 33 square leagues. Each league had 4,439 acres in it.

People settled into the areas on all sides of the Buttes by the 1880’s using irrigation canals for orchards and rice production. Did you know California first grew rice commercially in 1912? The Thompson family, on the southeast side of the Buttes, perfected the seedless grape, revolutionizing the raisin industry. Commercial oil was developed in 1933 after a well was drilled 2,727 feet down to produce 3.4 million cubic feet of gas a day.

We drove off Highway 20 on the southeast side and passed through the town of Sutter until we got onto Pass Road and circled the peaks. Stone walls survive around fields; stone and hand-hewn was the only building materials readily available to pioneers. The fields on the north side of the road were smooth grasslands, while on the south side rock protruded from everything. This area grows hay, Blue Diamond brand walnuts and olives, with rice added to the north and east. Add to that a ranch we passed with zebra and llama in the field…we did a double take at the zebra…”Did we just see that?”

The gas wells are still there and still pumping. The Pass Road runs closer to the peaks than anywhere on the ride. We passed the West Butte School, which closed in 1943 after 30 years of use and where locals would like to start a museum. Small but beautiful cemeteries are seen, some complete with “Rattlesnake Warning” signs. Orange and yellow beehives were everywhere. The ground this time of year looked like green velvet in the orchards. The north side is close to Grey Lodge Wildlife Refuge and there were hunting clubs in wetlands. Will someone explain to me why, if there are 20 identical flooded rice fields, every migrating goose, swan and duck want to hang out in one single area? Safety in numbers?

This is a section of road with lots of sharp turns. There are many gated “mansions” next to old homesteads. You could guess the ages of homes by the size of the orange trees, palm trees and prickly pear cactus growing nearby. Bigger they were the older the home place was. Pioneers built windbreaks of pine and eucalyptus that still stand. We saw prune dehydrators and they are certainly a vanishing species in the agricultural world. And, thank goodness, we did NOT see a single vineyard.

Back in Sutter, we saw the high school was having a fundraiser for their Rifle Team, which competes in trap, skeet, sporting clays, and a bunker team (What’s Bunker?). I was happy to see the responsible use of firearms for sport being taught.

There were eight-foot high electric fences around some olive plantings of new trees, but I’d guess olives budding out would be tasty to deer. Olive groves are planted in rows suitable for mechanical harvesting. There were great old barns, one with a 1950’s jeep pickup parked outside that my husband wanted to photograph. I would imagine every family around Sutter Buttes thinks their view of Sutter Buttes is the best, and every side offers different vistas. The Middle Mountain Foundation is the name of the group that provides interpretive information about the area and they have an interesting website. There is a six-minute video of the drive to the top of the buttes, where telecommunication equipment has been installed, so the road is paved but not open to the public. That video is positively scary, even to someone used to driving back roads. It’s a narrow road with lovely views and drop-offs of hundreds of feet.

So, if time permits, take a drive around Sutter Buttes. It’s about 40 miles around the Buttes, and slow, but it’s lovely and makes a nice Sunday drive.

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ON SUNDAY, December 30, 2018, at approximately 8pm, David Carlos Amador, 34, of Willits, was traveling westbound on Highway 20 just west of mile marker 30.87 near the town of Willits. Amador was traveling at a high rate of speed when he lost control of his Honda CR-V and failed to negotiate a left curve in the roadway. Amador’s vehicle traveled off the roadway colliding through a fence and down a dirt embankment where the vehicle struck a tree and overturned. Amador succumbed to his injuries at the time of the collision. Due to the lateness of the hour and heavy fog the next morning the collision was not reported until 12:37pm the following day. Representatives of the Ukiah CHP, Sheriff's office, Willits fire, and ambulance personnel arrived on scene at approximately 12:50pm. Willits fire utilized pneumatic extraction tools to remove Amador from the vehicle. Alcohol and/or drugs were not believed to be a factor in this collision. The collision is still under investigation.

(CHP Press Release)


Background:

ON MAY 1, 2014 at approximately 9:50pm, a Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputy contacted 29 year old David Amador of Willits in the 21000 block of Meadowbrook Dr., Willits Ca. During the contact Amador was found to have a misdemeanor warrant for his arrest for the violation of being under the influence of a controlled substance. Amador was arrested without incident and during a search of Amador and his property approximately 1.0 gram of methamphetamine was located. Amador was also arrested for Possession of a Controlled Substance. Amador was transported to the Mendocino County Jail where his bail was set at $10,000.

Jan 15, 2015: DAVID AMADOR, Willits. Vehicle theft, receiving stolen property, addicted person driving a vehicle, possession of drug paraphernalia.

June 5, 2015: DAVID AMADOR, Willits. Stolen vehicle, probation revocation.

February 10, 2018: DAVID AMADOR, Willits. Controlled substance, county parole violation.

May 31, 2018: DAVID AMADOR, Willits. County parole violation.

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ED NOTES

JIM GIBBONS WRITES: "I was watching Jeopardy last week, as I do most days I'm home at 4 pm to compare my waning brain to others, when a guy named Greg came on, and during Alex Trebek's brief intro, Greg said he once climbed 180 feet into a Redwood Tree to interview a woman who was living up there to protest and keep them from cutting it down. I remember reading about her during the Earth First! era, but can't remember her name.  I figure you'll remember…Who was that? And did she really live up there for a couple years?"

JULIA BUTTERFLY was up in the tree for, as I recall, more than a year, as rotating platoons of neo-druids assembled at its base chatting with the area's botany. Ms. Fly managed to parlay her adventure into a lucrative career on the dingbat circuit pedaling new age nostrums to the credulous. She's very attractive, which didn't hurt her media appeal, especially when movie stars began climbing up to visit her for photo ops and, it's rumored, treetop boffs, thus solidifying their thin green credentials. Pacific Lumber, aka Charles Hurwitz, a junk bond swindler who'd stripped PL of much of its value, finally paid Miss Hill to return to earth. That deal was an agreement to fund a scholarship in, of all things, forestry, at Humboldt State. The preservation of Headwaters Forest was a massive gift of state and federal funds to Hurwitz arranged by Dianne Feinstein, whose husband, Richard Blum, occasionally did high finance deals with Hurwitz. Earth First!, in the form of Judi Bari and Darryl Cherney, signed off on the deal, and Hurwitz walked off with three-quarters of a billion public dollars for eight thousand acres of trees.

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RECOMMENDED READING: "The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia" by Masha Gessen. Lots of interesting but often dense Russian history leavened by the author's accounts of her and her family's personal experiences from Lenin to Putin. Not for everyone, and not even of burning interest to me, although the book held my interest throughout thanks to Gessen's vivid accounts of what life was really like for even relatively privileged Russians like her family, most of them canny intellectuals who managed to survive the serial tyrannies that comprise modern Russian history.

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MY SISTER handed me this book with the warning, "You won't be able to put it down." And the book jacket blurbs from famous writers like Edward Hoagland and Douglas Brinkley said the same thing. Yes, indeed, truth in advertising for once.  I couldn't put it down — "Pilgrim's Wilderness: A True Story of Faith and Madness on the Alaska Frontier" by Tom Kizzia. As a long time resident  of the Northcoast, this riveting account of a vile Jesus fake calling himself Papa Pilgrim resonated with me, as it probably will many of you, as a familiar type of lunatic hippie, megalomaniacal division. Kizzia, a journalist based in Alaska, had the misfortune to be an outback neighbor of the predatory Papa and his sprawling brood of socially isolated children who their oppressive father, claiming a direct link with God and to be raising his family according to his criminal interpretations of the Bible, converted this family into a gang of thieves and parasites, roiling whole communities wherever they landed. Like Mendocino County before it gentrified, but remaining nut-friendly in the deep outback, and of course much larger, Alaska has attracted mostly harmless screwballs of the isolation-seeking type for many years. But this guy's in a class by himself, hence an entire, often startling book about him, his captive family and their adventures, and even a connection, a real one, to the JFK Assassination.

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THE FLYNN SITUATION: A reader writes: “Hi All, Maybe I missed it but - Can we get an update on Flynn? I saw that he violated parole. Are you going to do a story on it or let him write his own story? I sure will miss his column if he stops writing. I wish him well and hopefully a quick return to the outside!”

ED REPLY: Flynn was released New Year's Eve. We assume he will be writing up his latest chapter himself. We understand, though, that Flynn got himself 90 days for parole violation, but we await his own clarification, which we assume will be forthcoming.

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PICTURE PERFECT PACIFIC

(Photo by Susie de Castro)

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ON MONDAY, December 31, 2018, at approximately 2:25pm, a green Acura sedan was traveling northbound on Highway 101 just south of LaFranchi Road near Hopland. The Acura crossed over the double yellow center divider and sideswiped a red Honda Accord driving southbound on Highway 101. The driver of the Honda Accord lost control of the vehicle and drove into a dirt turn-out east of the east roadway edge of Highway 101. The driver of the Acura lost control and traveled into the southbound lanes of Highway 101. At this time a red Nissan Versa was traveling southbound on Highway 101 and the front of the Nissan collided with the passenger side of the Acura sedan. The driver of the Acura sedan, Danielle Doris, 38, of Cloverdale, sustained major injuries of a pelvis fracture and broken ribs as a result of the collision and was transported to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital by air ambulance. The driver of the Honda accord, Wilma Whorton, 77, of Rohnert Park, sustained minor injuries of lacerations and pain to sternum and shoulder as a result of the collision and was transported to the Ukiah hospital by ground ambulance. The driver of the Nissan Versa, Karen Seydel, 75, of Ukiah, sustained major injuries of broken femur, broken pelvis, multiple broken ribs and broken wrist as a result of the collision and was transported to Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital by air ambulance. The cause of the collision is under investigation. It is unknown at this time whether alcohol or drugs were a contributing factor in the collision.

(CHP Press Release)

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EEL RIVER: SIGNS OF RESILIENCE

https://gyppo.com/new-events/signs-of-resilience

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CATCH OF THE DAY, January 1, 2019

Bodwin, Davis, Faber

IVY BODWIN, Willits. Shoplifting, public nuisance.

BRICE DAVIS, Laytonville. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

SCOTT FABER, Ukiah. Trespassing, false ID, failure to appear.

Fillion, Johnson, Jones

HAZEL FILLION, Lakeport/Ukiah. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

HOUSTON JOHNSON, Yorkville. DUI.

LEDA JONES, Willits. Disorderly conduct-alcohol.

Lundy, Madson, Myers, Neese

JADEN LUNDY, Fort Bragg. Domestic abuse, protective order violation, controlled substance, paraphernalia.

TATE MADSON, Willits. Failure to appear.

JEFFREY MYERS, Ukiah. DUI.

JOSHUA NEESE, Ukiah. Unspecified charges.

Razo, Reyes-Campos, Smith, Stock

GERARDO RAZO, Ukiah. DUI-drugs&alcohol, suspended license, probation revocation.

GABINO REYES-CAMPOS, Ukiah. DUI.

JOSHUA SMITH, Ukiah. Controlled substance, controlled substance where prisoners are kept, concealed loaded weapon, large capacity magazine.

DAVID STOCK, Manchester. Criminal threats.

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2018 HIGHLIGHTS FROM POINT CABRILLO LIGHT STATION

The promise of longer days and a new year inspire me to reflect on 2018. As always, every achievement is made possible by you, our wonderful volunteers, friends and supporters.

We painted the Lighthouse–and did so while welcoming visitors. As far as I know we kept the red paint on the roof and off the people. We refinished the wood floor at the entrance, and the railings around the lantern room are in progress.

We want this new railing to last even longer so our amazing Site Manager, Steve Nilson, is working on a solution which will balance historical accuracy with longevity.  

One of the significant events of the year was the retirement of our beloved Kath Disney-Nilson from her long-time volunteer position as Lighthouse Retail Manager. It is impossible to adequately describe her contributions and hard work in keeping the gift shop thriving for so many years. We are grateful she is continuing as a retail docent.

Another significant event was the hiring of Jen Lewis as our new Outreach and Fundraising Manager.

Jen is a full-time employee with an extensive background in marketing. We’ve been keeping her quite busy. Not only did she take on Kath’s duties of managing the gift shop and retail docent scheduling, she is managing weddings, increasing our visibility on social media, producing the newsletter, recruiting new volunteers, advising on fundraising, and attending all the meetings with partners and businesses we didn’t even know we were missing. When we first hired Jen, I had volunteers ask me if they were still needed and the answer is ‘YES–more than ever!’

Retail docents keep the doors open, floors swept, displays dusted, and visitors happy. History Docents meet the buses. Coast Guard Auxiliary volunteers keep the windows clean and the lens turning. Helen MacKenzie Morris stepped up to organize the Volunteer Party. It takes all of us to keep this magnificent site running.

Change has come to the Board as well. Lorraine Cheney left us for Ireland. Anne Eaton Kemp retired after many years of service and will continue as a retail docent. Eric Frey resigned due to his health, and we keep him in our thoughts as he continues to recover.

New to our Board is Ruth Walsh who agreed to be Vice President. Bruce Rogerson has rejoined the Board and taken on the task of updating our Historic Register documents and, potentially, acquiring additional State significance. Harold Hauck’s New Year’s wish is for someone with financial expertise to take over the role of Treasurer. 

Our everyday accomplishments in 2018 will continue in 2019. The Lighthouse, First Assistant Lightkeeper’s House and Marine Science exhibit will be open every day of the year.

Our Education Program staff will illuminate the natural and cultural history of Point Cabrillo for students. The aquarium in the Marine Science Exhibit will thrive thanks to the volunteers and staff who care for it. Visitors will spot Gray Whales during the Whale Festivals in March. Buses will come and be met by history experts.

On behalf of the Board of Directors, I want to thank you for all the work you did this past year. Whether you are new to our organization or a volunteer with thousands of hours, every accomplishment is due to your dedication and support. 

Sincerely, 

Tanya Smart, President

Point Cabrillo Lightkeepers Association

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"I ALWAYS LOOK AHEAD, To The Side, and Never Back."

—Sonny Barger 

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SHUT UP AND LIVE

Editor:

It’s all about you. Complain about carbon dioxide and methane gas emissions, melting ice caps, etc. And yet you have no qualms about driving out to the Sonoma County coast. Along Highway 1, I have done a lot of informal surveys on weekends and holiday breaks. From 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., there’s an average of 12 cars per minute. That adds up to a lot of pollution. Shoppers spent more than $720 billion on presents over the holidays. It all contributes to waste. If you don’t think you are guilty, look in the mirror. Get off your high horse, or just live life.

Charlie Beck

Bodega Bay

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FROM BIZARRE RAGE AGAINST JAMES JOYCE TO MI5 PHONE-BUGGING: WHY I COLLECT SNIPPIETS OF STRANGERS’ CONVERSATIONS

by Patrick Cockburn

For many years I have collected snippets of conversation accidentally overheard or one side of a phone call that sounded comic, menacing or just plain mysterious. My collection is small because most of what is garnered through unintentional eavesdropping is dull and long-winded, but I occasionally hear something which is rivetingly interesting or bizarre.

I was travelling on a train between St. Pancras and Canterbury West just before Christmas a year ago, when I became conscious of a middle-aged man making a phone call a few seats away who was raising his voice in irritation. As he kept repeating himself, the reason for this soon became clear, as did the identity of the person to whom he was speaking.

He was complaining vigorously and at length to his mother about the behavior of his sister whom he said had invited herself to stay for Christmas, though that was not the main reason why he was so upset. She was not only staying in his house, but she was demanding that he put a Christmas stocking at the end of her bed on Christmas morning. “I’ll do that for my nine-year-daughter but not for a 40-year-old-woman,” the man kept telling his mother, who was presumably trying to calm him down, in tones of increasing outrage.

My father Claud Cockburn, from whom I got the habit, would collect chunks of conversation that he found particularly intriguing. Once in New York he had heard one person saying to another as they walked past the open window of his apartment: “Yes, I can understand that, but why did he want to put the chestnuts down her back?” He speculated about what could have been the context for this strange query.

The prize of his collection was one half of a phone conversation being conducted by his solicitor in Dublin as Claud entered his office. The solicitor waved him to a chair but went on listening intently but with mounting signs of impatience to what a caller was telling him at great length. Eventually, it was the solicitor’s turn to speak and, by my father’s account, he said quietly but with great deliberation, “I have three things to say to you: f*** you, f*** your mother, and f*** James Joyce too!” He then slammed the phone down.

My father did his business but then said that, such was his fascination with what he had just heard, he really could not leave the room without hearing some explanation for what it was all about. The solicitor replied that, weird and aggressive though his words might have sounded, they had a rational explanation.

“I have a client who is in deep trouble and I have advised him to leave the jurisdiction of the state,” he said. “He keeps refusing to go abroad and, just now, he was telling me that he couldn’t leave Ireland because he loved Dublin. I said that that might well be so but he should still get out before he saw the inside of a prison cell.” The client had then gone on to say that he could not go because Dublin was the home of his mother and, after receiving the same legal advice as before, had added that his attachment to Dublin was all the greater because it was the city of James Joyce. It was at this point, the solicitor admitted, that his patience had finally given out and he had uttered the explosive words that Claud had just heard.

Most phone conversations that one is compelled to listen to on trains and elsewhere seem inordinately long, boring and repetitive. I have always felt a sympathy for those who have to listen for hours to the product of bugged phone calls. I did once read the published transcription of the calls of some much-feared mafia boss in New York or Boston who turned out to have spent much of his time on the phone trying to persuade the owner of a local restaurant to give him and his friends a better table when they came to dinner. Presumably, he had the sense not to talk on the phone about his more culpable plots and plans.

As a radical journalist, my father’s phone was bugged by MI5 in the 1930s and 40s, though few transcripts are preserved in the National Archives at Kew. Presumably, those discarded revealed nothing useful about his sources of information. Such texts that do survive appear to have done so because MI5 found them amusing rather than for any other purpose.

In June 1948, for instance, the listening officer writes that during a call between Claud and my mother Patricia, “Claud’s small son [my older brother Alexander aged seven] then came to the phone and particularly requested his father to get home early because he wanted him to read a new book nurse had bought him about Christopher Robin.” This was touching but hardly of much value to the security services.

Snatches of talk are occasionally intriguing enough to inspire authors to develop a context into which they might fit. Rudyard Kipling wrote a cryptic story called “Mrs. Bathurst” after hearing one seaman in New Zealand talking to another about a woman who would “never scruple to help a lame duck or to set her foot on a scorpion.”

Deliberate invention generally outdoes chance thoughts or snippets of dialogue. I particularly like the remark of Peter Cook: “Cricket is nothing if it is not one man pitted against a fish.” Few real proverbs are as good as this remark, though one Chinese proverb – “Of nine bald men, eight are deceitful and the ninth is dumb” – comes close.

On occasion, chance overheard remarks have all too understandable an explanation. Earlier this month we went for a drink and a meal to the wonderful Shipwright’s Arms, one of Kent’s most attractive pubs, which is located in the Ham marshes between Oare and Faversham, just below a dyke which protects it from the waters of the Swale estuary. We sat down in front of a blazing fire, got a glass of mulled wine, and only gradually became aware of the conversation around the bar which was particularly intense and of a practical nature.

I heard somebody say: “It all depends on whether or not the high tide and the surge come together.” Only gradually did it occur to us that this was not a general reflection about menacing developments in the Thames Estuary or the effect of climate change on us all, but referred to some more immediate threat to those present in the pub. These all appeared stoic and unruffled but, on inquiry, confirmed that a storm surge and an extra-high tide might well coincide, leading to water pouring over the dykes, as had happened in the recent past.

We darted up onto the dyke where we saw that the water was six inches below the top. The lights went out, adding to the sense of drama and we rapidly finished our drinks and left – though on this occasion the water receded before inundating the pub and the surrounding marsh.

(Patrick Cockburn is the author of The Rise of Islamic State: ISIS and the New Sunni Revolution. Courtesy, CounterPunch.org)

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FEW THINGS ARE SADDER than the truly monstrous.

— Nathanael West, Day of the Locust

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ON LINE COMMENT OF THE DAY

Certainly a project as vastly important as maintaining the cornball ‘American Way of Life’ is worth fiddling with the planet’s thermostat.

The stonemasons are already hard at work on humanity’s tombstone. After much soul-searching the epitaph will read: In the End, they simply wanted more stuff.

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BRENDAN KELLY, University of Alaska Fairbanks, on the scale of the climate crisis and the response from academics and government officials: “It’s sort of as if there’s a meteor coming at the planet and we thought, you know, I think I’ll start a couple PhD dissertations.” (via Jeff St. Clair)

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27TH ANNUAL PROFESSIONAL PIANIST CONCERT JAN 11-13

UKIAH CA. – On January 11, 12 & 13, 2019 the 27th Professional Pianist Concert will hit the stage with three concerts featuring eleven different pianists at the Mendocino College Center Theatre in Ukiah. Performers letting the keys fly this year are Spencer Brewer, Elena Casanova, Wendy deWitt, Gabriella Frank, Frankie J, Tom Ganoung, Chris James, Elizabeth MacDougall, Sam Ocampo, Ed Reinhart and Charlie Seltzer. The musical styles range from classical to jazz, boogie-woogie to Cuban, Broadway to ragtime…..each performance will be different! 

This utterly fun and stimulating series features the finest regional pianists on stage in a living room environment throughout the performance trading stories and melodies with two pianos on stage to accommodate impromptu collaborations. The event is an annual sellout because of the diversity, quality in a multitude of styles of music and humor that takes place throughout the evening. A special sculpture art show benefitting fire victims featuring Spencer Brewer and Esther Siegel will also be on display at the Mendocino College Art Gallery throughout the weekend…not to be missed!

Friday, January 11th at 7:00pm will feature Spencer Brewer, Elena Casanova, Chris James, Elizabeth MacDougall, Ed Reinhart, Sam Ocampo and Charlie Seltzer. Saturday, January 12th, 7:00pm performance features Spencer Brewer, Elena Casanova, Wendy DeWitt, Tom Ganoung, Elizabeth MacDougall, Ed Reinhart and Charlie Seltzer. Sunday afternoon’s 2:00pm performance will feature eight pianists for the 1st time in 25 years! The afternoon performance will include Spencer Brewer, Elena Casanova, Wendy deWitt, Gabriella Frank, Tom Ganoung, Chris James, Frankie J and Elizabeth MacDougall. No two concerts are the same, so if you love piano and piano music, enjoy more than one performance.

The concert benefits the Ukiah Community Concert Association, Mendocino College Recording Arts & Technology Program and the Allegro Scholarship Program. Tickets are on sale at Mendocino Book Co. in Ukiah, Mazahar in Willits and online www.UkiahConcerts.org. Tickets are $20 general admission and $30 "I ‘Wanna’ See the Hands" limited seating. For more information call (707) 463-2738. 

Sponsors are Sparetime Supply, Ken Fowler Auto, Savings Bank of Mendocino, Mendocino College Recording Arts, Willits Furniture Center, Waterman Plants, K-WINE/MAX, KOZT-The Coast and KZYX/Z. Wine & refreshments will be provided by Ukiah Community Concert Association. The Center Theatre is at 1000 Hensley Creek Rd in Ukiah. There will be autographed CD's by the artists for sale in lobby.

20 Comments

  1. Jeff McMullin January 2, 2019

    Editor,
    The best account of the rape and pillage of PL is David Harris’ “The Last Stand”.
    Another page turner.

    • Bruce Anderson January 2, 2019

      Yes, the best account out there. He was beset by the dwarf bully girls when he appeared locally. They criticized the book because they weren’t central to it.

      • Jeff McMullin January 2, 2019

        He was beat-down proof, but of course they were an easy mark. Hitch slap material

        • Mark Scaramella January 2, 2019

          Greg King to the AVA in 1996 (FYI):
          I wrote him [Harris] a 3,500 word critique, saying what I liked and what I didn’t like about the book. I sent that to him and we talked about it later. I thought that was far as it should have gone. Anytime you have a work of that length, there are going to be some things that don’t quite hit the mark. No writer is good enough to get it totally right, or to please everybody who reads it. It was friendly to the environmental movement although David said he wrote it as a neutral piece, he just wanted to get the information out there. It couldn’t possibly have hurt us. It could only have helped us. So I didn’t appreciate the effort being put into derailing it. I can appreciate the criticisms of it, but I couldn’t get behind the derailing of it. One of the things that I know a couple people were upset about was David saying that the War ended in 1990. It gave the impression that not much was happening after that. That was one of the things I said to him in my letter. I told him that a lot of very intense stuff happened after that, and I can see how people would be upset by that statement because anybody who reads it might think, “Well, I don’t have to get involved now.” But overall I was pleased with it. I liked it when I read it. I thought the information was unprecedented. He did some great research. Some of it had never seen print. It’s a valuable asset. What needs to happen now is that someone who is involved in the movement needs to write their own book. I would like to do that. I’m working now, but I’d like to do it — if someone wanted to dump a lump of cash in my lap. I’d do it. That’s what is needed next. You can’t step in from outside the movement into something that had been so rich and happening for so long and get what the activists want to see out there. The activists have to write their own, themselves. Judi Bari did it in a way, in her words. Someday I’ll do it, but I guess now is not the time.

    • Harvey Reading January 2, 2019

      And they were considered disposable, expendable, easily replaceable trash by the timber companies, whether they were loggers or mill workers. Aint kaputalism grand.

      • james marmon January 2, 2019

        Harv, talk like your’s is what caused the prison overcrowding we have today. Young men thinking the world owes them a living preferred stealing from the working class rather than do a day’s work. If we want wages to grow then we need to slow down of immigrants coming to America. Trump’s new Prison Reform Bill offers job skills training for prisoners who want to join society once released. When my dad was a young logger there were no large timber companies in Mendocino County, but hundreds of small mills. When the large companies bought out the small operations they started hiring illegal immigrants who were not unionized and would work for nothing while our white boys turned to drugs. The more drugs the immigrants brought to Mendo the more our young white men went to prison.

        James Marmon
        Social Worker

        • Bruce Anderson January 2, 2019

          Your chronology is off, Jim. “Illegals,” so-called, didn’t move into the timber industry in significant numbers until later in the 1980s. The outside timber corporations ruined the local timber industry, not hippies, not environmentalists, not tweekers.

          • james marmon January 2, 2019

            I was working in the mills in the 70’s and 80’s that is the time period I was talking about, my generation. I guess I should have been clearer. I also watch LP dismantle mills all over Mental-cino and rebuild them in Mexico because it was cheaper to mill logs there, thanks to NAFTA. Mexico didn’t have environmental regulations and they were tired of dealing with all the nuts from the Bay Area, the enviro-mentals.

            James Marmon
            Former Tweeker

            • james marmon January 2, 2019

              The impetus for a North American free trade zone began with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, who made the idea part of his campaign when he announced his candidacy for the presidency in November 1979. Canada and the United States signed the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in 1988, and shortly afterward Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari decided to approach US president George H. W. Bush to propose a similar agreement in an effort to bring in foreign investment following the Latin American debt crisis. As the two leaders began negotiating, the Canadian government under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney feared that the advantages Canada had gained through the Canada–US FTA would be undermined by a US–Mexican bilateral agreement, and asked to become a party to the US–Mexican talks.

              https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement

            • Harvey Reading January 3, 2019

              James, you must mean “former speed freak”. “Tweaker” lets the scum off the hook. Besides you spelled the word incorrectly. What school you went?

          • james marmon January 2, 2019

            Mr. Anderson, it is not politically correct to call immigrants illegal, there is no such thing as an illegal human. They’re called undocumented immigrants.

            “Imagine there’s no countries
            It isn’t hard to do
            Nothing to kill or die for
            And no religion too

            Imagine all the people living life in peace, you
            You may say I’m a dreamer
            But I’m not the only one
            I hope some day you’ll join us
            And the world will be as one”

            -John Lennon and Susie de Castro

          • George Hollister January 3, 2019

            With the exception of a brief period, from about 1940 to 1960, outside timber corporations have been the local timber industry. And the locals, when they dominated, managed redwoods the same, as a resource to be mined. And mining is what the locals did. There was nothing sustainable about it. On average, the outside timber corporations have actually done better.

            The transition to redwoods as a crop, and not a resource has been slow but forthcoming. This transition has been weighted down by institutional, and general public knowledge of redwoods that is more folklore than science. But progress is being made, in spite of this, and in spite of all the detractors as well.

      • George Hollister January 2, 2019

        Harv, what we see from the lessons of history is capitalism is the best alternative. Capital controlled by the Pharaoh, the Emperor, the King, the Chancellor, the Supreme Leader, etc., etc. treats the common man worse. Much, much worse. So while there are valid complaints about capitalism, alternatives, beyond fantasies of how it should have been, are lacking.

        Meanwhile our valid complaints are almost always a result of failures of what we have done, through government, to “make things more equal”, or “fair”. There are times when wisdom should tell us when to leave good enough alone, that there are unintended consequences, and attempts to make a perfect world is the road to Hell on Earth.

        • Harvey Reading January 3, 2019

          George, pure BS, of the lowest order. From which right-wing site did you copy it? It is the same nonsense I have heard all my life … from right wingers who (sometimes not too) secretly want a return to slavery and feudalism. Sadly, too many of them were wage earners, who, during my childhood, were making a decent wage, with benefits, a result of collective (socialistic) efforts, known as unions. They reaped the benefits, but cut their own throats, which would have been OK, but their stupidity–voiced these days by loony losers, brought us all down.

          • George Hollister January 3, 2019

            For those who feel we have been brought down, there are actions that can be taken. Volunteering locally is the easiest, and best. How about volunteering to give adult reading to someone through the local library? How about volunteering at the local volunteer fire department, or the local ambulance service? How about mentoring young adults? How about delivering meals to elderly people who can not get out? There are countless opportunities to volunteer locally. This local volunteering brings people together who have different visions of the world, but they all want to make the world better, and they do.

            • Harvey Reading January 3, 2019

              How about taxing the wealthy scum and providing free college, medical (health,dental, and vision) care, and a living wage to all? Your jabber is pure 19th Century.

  2. james marmon January 2, 2019

    Ron Snidow’s (Cleveland Browns) son Big Jim has a really good radio show on
    KLLG radio, Willits. Check it out some time.

    Local KLLG programmers connect with community in more ways than one

    “From 8 to 11 a.m. on Wednesdays, Jim Snidow (A.K.A. Big Jim) hosts Riparian Roots, a reggae show featuring music from around the globe. He said his primary focus is to “play reggae music that doesn’t turn people off” but instead inspires and educates people.”

    https://www.willitsnews.com/2017/06/27/local-kllg-programmers-connect-with-community-in-more-ways-than-one/

    4 days ago Ron Snider would have turned 77 years old.

    Ronald Wayne Snidow (December 30, 1941 – May 17, 2009) was an American football defensive tackle in the National Football League for the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Browns. He attended San Rafael High School in California. He played college football at the University of Oregon. The Washington Redskins drafted Snidow in the third round of the 1963 NFL draft. After five seasons with the Redskins, he was traded to the Cleveland Browns in exchange for a second round draft choice, just prior to the opening of the 1968 season. Snidow was first-team All-Pro with the Browns in 1969. He appeared in 126 career regular season games. After suffering a broken leg while playing with the Browns, he retired at the end of the 1972 season, having played 10 years in the NFL. After retiring from the NFL, Snidow worked as a commercial real estate broker in Southern California, until he retired. In 2008, Snidow was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease, which he died from a year later on May 17, 2009, while on a vacation cruise off the coast of Italy on the island of Elba.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Snidow

  3. Betsy Cawn January 3, 2019

    In various and myriad “discussions” about the impacts of redwood forest harvesting (and the conceptual transition from “resources” to “crops”), I have seen no mention of the long-term effects of the Northwest Forest Plan Initiative, which resulted in much of the shutdown of logging, milling, and timber production in the western counties of Washington, Oregon, and northern California.

    Upper Lake, the “gateway” to the Mendocino National Forest, was intended to be the recipient of NFPI “retraining” and “economic redevelopment” funding, which the County of Lake instead diverted to complete a critically needed sewage treatment system — correctly applied to prevention of Clear Lake pollution by putting northern shoreline communities on sewer systems in one of the most important stormwater drainage areas downstream from the Mendocino National Forest’s Clear Lake Watershed Management territories — those most recently devastated by 2018’s massive wildfire, where now the anticipated after-effects of super-charged stormwater runoff of natural soil and vegetative constituents are expected to far exceed the “Total Daily Maximum Load” (TMDL) and freshly energize the available “nutrients” attributed to the unwanted populations of equally natural freshwater algae, all of which are cycles of watershed and basin fertilization that are well beyond the abilities of local (county/community), state (departments of conservation, energy, and water resources), and federal (departments of Interior, Agriculture, and Environmental Protection) to change.

    Decades of reduced timber harvesting in private lands (slightly less than half of Lake County’s surface territories) and lack of “management” in formerly productive tracts of higher elevation woodlands leave us now with permanent occupations embedded in extremely high risk regions susceptible to natural and man-made threats of catastrophic future fires.

    Still without adequate warning systems, despite the widely popular demand for sirens in relatively unstructured “communities” (formerly thought of as “towns”) served by the county’s Office of Emergency Services, the County of Lake has recently discovered that its primary safety services — a system of highway-bound traveling law enforcement officers — are so vastly reduced that the Sheriff can no longer respond to calls for assistance in the field most of the time. Small time criminal and civil infractions and residential invasions are no longer within the range of activities our Sheriff’s Office can handle. And the County of Lake has replied to these civic ills by creating a new “vision” for county “leadership” that is dependent on the County’s fantasies of itself as a “tourist destination.”

    The psychological disconnect between real manufacturers of economic health and the distributors of public funds for public services has created, out of virtual “whole cloth,” an entirely new approach to dealing with the continuing decline of Clear Lake water quality — with UC Davis “scientists” scarfing up a big chunk of state-promised funding, for vaguely defined “monitoring” of the impacts of 2018’s River and Ranch fire on the lake, and for reaching a fantasmagorical status implied by the officials’ new program called “Clear Lake Clean.”

    This misnomer being the driving illusion endorsed by locally-elevated experts — approved by the AB 707 (Aguiar-Curry) Blue Ribbon Committee, with tightly selected local experts and land-trust-leadership sycophants of the County’s only funded watershed management project (“restoration” of the Middle Creek wetland filtration system, as chiefly a flood control boondoggle) in charge.

    This is the moral equivalent of a “forest fire free” objective in shaping the future of habitation in already disturbed (“built”) environments, where fire is an inevitable consequence of “fuel loading” and hotter/dryer atmospheric conditions.

    I wish all of you long-time logging and timberland experts would put your heads together to address the minimal public health and safety support systems — shortchanging fire protection, medical response, transportation and communication functions so often dependent on willing and able volunteers — as sanctioned by local government agencies like the Local Agency Formation Commission — delivered by County institutions seeking only the internally-necessary revenues that maintain the “institution first” mentality our two counties, for the sake of our collective “wellness,” and stop arguing over who is screwed up and why.

    The Counties of Mendocino and Lake have shared emergency management responsibilities that would greatly benefit from your wisdom and experience, to include whole communities in a reprioritization of public spending. Please, put your mouth where your money is.

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