North Coast Journal Blogthing

Damn! That was a pretty good one.

Update: What? Centered in Willow Creek?

We’re going to fill this week’s paper with tributes and memories of a unique, historical figure in Humboldt County. But we can’t ignore the fact that this tragedy takes place at a time when Roger Rodoni was running for re-election. People are confused about what happens next, and we believe that we finally have the answers.

First of all, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has the power to appoint someone to fill the remainder or Rodoni’s term. He could also choose to fill the seat only until the results of the next election are certified, and a clear winner is chosen. Schwarzenegger is currently accepting applications from Second District residents interested in filling the seat, and Johanna Rodoni, Roger’s wife, has applied.

In the matter of the upcoming election, things get sticky. But several county staffers held a meeting to hash things out Tuesday afternoon, and County Clerk-Recorder Carolyn Crnich, under whose bailiwick the Elections Department lies, sorted out the Journal shortly after this meeting.

Rodoni’s name will stay on the June ballot. There will be three candidates: Rodoni and challengers Estelle Fennell and Clif Clendenen. If either Fennell or Clendenen takes over 50 percent of the June vote — unlikely – they will be the next Second District Supervisor. Depending on whether and how Schwarzenegger arranges an interim appointment, the winner could take office either shortly after the election or when Rodoni’s term expires in January.

If Rodoni wins over 50 percent in June, the Governor will have to appoint someone to take Rodoni’s seat. That appointment would be effective until 2010, the time of the next countywide general election.

There’s a third scenario — perhaps none of the three candidates will win a majority in June. In that case, there will be a runoff election in November between Fennell and Clendenen. Rodoni’s name will not appear on the ballot, no matter whether he places among the top two candidates or not. This contingency, which is sure to mightily piss off Rodoni supporters, is spelled out in California Elections Code Section 8807. Rodoni gets 40 percent, Fennell and Clendenen each get 30? Runoff between Clendenen and Fennell.

There may be another scenario or two out there, possibly involving last-minute write-in candidates who may wish to assume the Rodoni mantle, but this is what’s on the table right now.

I think the last time Roger and I talked was almost a year ago. We bumped into each other at the Courthouse Market, where he was a regular. The Tamara Falor matter was the big thing in the news at the time. Everyone was trying to figure out why the county had signed a confidentiality agreement and handed $300,000 to its chief legal counsel to get rid of her. (No one’s figured it out yet.) So what’s the deal? I asked Roger, knowing that he couldn’t answer. Was it that the county lost the Tooby Ranch case? The “Pepper Spray 8″ case? What’s going on? Eh?

Roger saw an opportunity to bust out with his cowboy Zen routine. His eyes lit up as he prepared to make mischief. He took up his umbrella and grandiosely pointed off to the left, into the imaginary distance. “Everyone’s lookin’ over there,” he said. He swooped over to the right: “They’re lookin’ over there.” Then he tapped the tip of the umbrella on the ground in front of him. “Right here,” he concluded. And then he may have allowed himself to smile, pleased to have befuddled me further while at the same time, no doubt, telling me some version of the truth.

This morning, the morning after the horrifying car crash that took his life, a group of five or six Arcata political activists was gathered around a table at Cafe Brio to plan some kind of campaign. I didn’t quite catch what it was, and I didn’t bother to go up and ask. They had blank forms out on the table. One mentioned that his website gets x number of hits per day. The phrase “guerrilla marketing” floated into the air. I imagined that Roger would be regally amused at such a spectacle, at the earnest folks whose politics were served up in these bloodless terms — statistics, messaging, interest groups. Run through an up-to-date dictionary of political campaign jargon. See if you can find anything in that vocabulary that carries the stench of humanity: love, struggle, glory, death. You won’t.

Roger, I guessed, would have recognized that this is the way things are headed, and that in this world honor and handshakes and horsemanship will come to mean less and less. But since the ornery son-of-a-bitch was always so sure he was right, he’d just keep on doing things his way, pausing once in a while to cackle at the fools who won the county but lost their souls.

This just in:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

KSLG’s afternoon radio personality, Dr. Syd wants to buy you breakfast on Earth Day, Tuesday, April 22 from 7:30 to 9:30 a.m. at the northern Eureka Burger King. The catch is that Dr. Syd will only buy you breakfast if you carpool, “The importance of carpooling is finally being realized by many people now that gas has hit $4 a gallon.” Dr. Syd says.

KSLG wants to encourage Humboldt citizens to be environmentally conscience not just on Earth Day, but every day. Dr. Syd wants people to realize, “its also important to cut down emissions so on that note this coming Tuesday, Earth day we will be rewarding carpoolers with free breakfast from Burger King and KSLG.”

While we’ll have to agree that car-pooling is a good idea, bringing people to a fast food joint for Earth Day seems a bit, well, weird. Not that Burger King is a prime offender in the world of meat — they actually made history lat year when they vowed to stop using pork and eggs from supliers who confine their animals in cages or crates — but fast food and meat consumption in general are not exactly Earth-friendly.

Here’s some stats from a recent New York Times story, “Rethinking the Meat Guzzler.”

Americans eat about the same amount of meat as we have for some time, about eight ounces a day, roughly twice the global average. At about 5 percent of the world’s population, we “process” (that is, grow and kill) nearly 10 billion animals a year, more than 15 percent of the world’s total.

Growing meat (it’s hard to use the word “raising” when applied to animals in factory farms) uses so many resources that it’s a challenge to enumerate them all. But consider: an estimated 30 percent of the earth’s ice-free land is directly or indirectly involved in livestock production, according to the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization, which also estimates that livestock production generates nearly a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gases — more than transportation.

To put the energy-using demand of meat production into easy-to-understand terms, Gidon Eshel, a geophysicist at the Bard Center, and Pamela A. Martin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Chicago, calculated that if Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan — a Camry, say — to the ultra-efficient Prius. Similarly, a study last year by the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Japan estimated that 2.2 pounds of beef is responsible for the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide emitted by the average European car every 155 miles, and burns enough energy to light a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days.

photo courtesy of Moe, borrowed from Moe’s Flickr Photostream

Tired of being thwarted in your quest for a dignified meal in a restaurant because you can’t read the damned menu? Well, the LightHouse of the North Coast wants you to know that it has teamed up with the Humboldt Council of the Blind and other groups to provide free Braille and large-print menus to three restaurants: Northwoods Restaurant in Crescent City and the Lost Coast Brewery and Sea Grill in Eureka. Normally you gotta pay for this stuff.

The LightHouse plans to deliver 10 menus to the Lost Coast Brewery tomorrow, Friday, at 4:30 p.m.

You know you’ve been waiting for this update: Remember at the end of March when we reported that Bigfoot researcher Tom Biscardi had gone to South Carolina to investigate strange happenings in the land of the Lizard Man?

Yes, well, he’s telling folks there that his hi-sci monitoring leads him to believe that they’ve “got the real deal.” That is, the stronger-than-coyote-jaws THING that is chomping on very sturdy entities, like cars, and cows, is very likely one of the 3,500 Bigfoot-like creatures lurking about in the country, according to the former Las Vegas show promoter.

Biscardi allows that he doesn’t know much about the Lizard Man — Lee County’s own mythical green-pigmented fright-beast — or if this current car-chewer is the same creature. Whatever: The chamber of commerce is enjoying brisk sales these days of “Lizard Man is back” T-shirts.

It’s all about promotions, people. Or is it…?

Read more tidbits as faithfully told in the April 13 edition of the The State newspaper.

Petrolia resident David Simpson has been down in Texas attending the Palco bankruptcy hearings. This week he started a Community Forest Team blog titled, Dispatches from David. As someone involved in the legal morass, he has an axe to grind — that said, his first hand accounts are insightful and well worth reading. Take this excerpt from the end of his first post: “Lawyers Gala“

A note on this festival of lawyers- Over 90 people packed in to the relatively small courtroom at peak attendance this morning. There were two security people and a smattering of PL executives, forester Bill Kleiner from Humboldt and I. That’s pretty much it for the non-solicitor presence. There were well over 40 lawyers in the inner court itself and a least another 10 or maybe even 20 more outside.

That makes close to 60 lawyers. Some represented PL, some the note holders or MRC or Marathon—all on the meter, all being compensated at an average rate of maybe $500 an hour. If they clocked in six hours just for their courtroom efforts, it could add up to over $300,000 for the one day in a multi-day event. And it all comes out of the trees. Our trees! The lawyers in a bankruptcy, one should remember, get paid first no matter who wins or losses or what happens to the land or our community.

The Houston Chronicle’s Loren Steffy dries the tears in his eyes long enough to again sing the tragic tale of one of Houston’s finest, Charles Hurwitz. The occasion is Hurwitz’s recent losses — or are they really wins? – in a couple of court cases, including our own Pacific Lumber bankruptcy case and the reversal of his recent monster lawsuit against the FDIC.

Steffy’s column is scored for strings, with 100 detuned violas scraping out the sad, sad story of a great man brought to heel by a society too base to appreciate his accomplishment:

Charles Hurwitz called to make sure I knew it was a victory.

He was talking about last week’s appeals court ruling that wiped out at least $57 million of the $72 million in sanctions a lower court said he could collect from the government.

“That’s a win all the way around,” he said.

And on and on — Hurwitz with his head held high, facing the coming death of his Maxxam Corp. with steadfast dignity. I should have told you, Hurwitz — this world was never made for one as beautiful as you.

Steffy’s previous work includes a laff-a-minute blog post entitled “It Seems Like Charles Hurwitz Just Can’t Catch A Break,” which enjoyed a brief moment of fame here in Humboldt County.

Used to be, California condors sailed the western skies from Baja to Canada. Now just 148 hunker down in captivity and another 136 exist tenuously in the wild — 63 of them in California, mostly in Southern California although some live up around Hollister at Pinnacles National Monument.

But someday we may see the return to our own skies of the gigantic, sluggish, bald-headed, scavenging Gymnogyps californianus: The Yurok Tribe has just been awarded a $200,000 Tribal Wildlife grant from the federal government to study the feasibility of reintroducing condors to the tribe’s ancestral territory. 

Alex Pitts, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told the Journal on Tuesday that the grant will fund habitat assessments in Redwood National and State Parks and in the Six Rivers National Forest. The assessments will be checking out the land’s suitability, including availability of appropriate condor chow. And, the grant will allow the tribe to map air currents to determine how well the birds will be able to get around.

We couldn’t reach anyone from the tribe today to talk about the condor research; maybe later. But Pitts said there are reports of condors in this region in explorer Jedediah Smith’s journals, as well as accounts and stories of condors from tribal elders in T.T. Waterman’s  book Yurok Geography.

“There are lots of stories and rituals that have been passed down that indicate condors are part of their cultural heritage,” said Pitts.

You can hear the pronunciation of the Yurok word for condor, pregonish, at the U.C. Berkeley’s Yurok Lamnguage Project site (scroll to No. 85).

And, some folks in Oregon recently groused about the lack of condor reintroduction efforts in their state.

Is Humboldt County not thinking out of the box enough in terms of economic development? or out of the crab pot in this case? The International Herald Tribune has an article about a reality TV show about crab fishermen that’s taking viewers by storm, literally:

Dutch Harbor, a fishing port in this town on a pair of islands in the middle of the Aleutians, may be the bleakest, wildest frontier left in America. There used to be a bowling alley, but it closed. So, just recently, did the worst and most dangerous of the town’s three bars. Now most of the port’s social life, and a fair amount of its business activity, takes place in the two others. One of them, the Unisea, has a sign outside that says, “If you fight on these premises, you will be 86′d for an indefinite period of time.” Inside there is a sign proclaiming “Where Fish and Drink Become One,” whatever that means.

These are not bars for amateurs or casual drinkers. Getting hammered is the whole point.

Some of these guys are also TV stars, of a sort, and appear on “Deadliest Catch,” a reality series that begins its fourth season on the Discovery Channel on April 15. The show is watched by some three million viewers a week, making it one of the top-rated programs on basic cable, and it’s about work, of all things - the boring, repetitive and sometimes brutal job of crab fishing in the Bering Sea.

A typical episode includes monstrous waves that slosh right up on the inside of your television screen, along with scenes of slicker-clad deckhands nearly faint with exhaustion and of anxious, bleary-eyed captains cursing and chain-smoking up in the wheelhouse.

Here’s a video clip from the show:

Read the Journal’s take on the local crabbing industry here.

The California Report shines its light northward and takes a closer look at the PALCO bankruptcy proceedings. Listen to today’s show here:

Trifecta. Photo by Elizabeth Mackay.

You knew he had the up-and-coming trail-centric activist types nailed down. But did you know that he’s also pocketed the establishment?

That’s Third District Supervisorial candidate Mark Lovelace, flanked by the once and future Wes Chesbro and outgoing Supervisor John Woolley. In other words: The two leading representatives of the machine that has run Arcata — and much of the North Coast — for the last 30-odd years. They are to unveil their Lovelace endorsement today.

Cue the boilerplate:

“Mark is passionate about the well-being of our community and he has the experience to use that passion effectively and practically,” said Woolley. “His emphasis on smart, planned growth strikes the right balance and reflects his diversity of experience. He has the proven leadership ability to move us forward on this and other important issues.”

“We know that Mark will work to preserve our unique small-town way of life, while growing our economy,” [Chesbro] said.

So Lovelace has threaded the needle, squared the circle, done the impossible — united the trail activists and the old train-based establishment behind his candidacy. Is there anyone else? In the Third District: Not really. If you’re Bryan Plumley, Lovelace’s principal opponent, you’re feeling mighty lonely right now.

Click through for the entire Chesbro-Woolley press release.

(more…)

According to an Associated Press story published yesterday, we here in Humboldt County will soon get to experience the joy of living under remote-controlled aerial electronic surveillance. Who says war brings no peacetime benefits?

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — The U.S. Forest Service has bought a pair of flying drones to track down marijuana growers operating in remote California woodlands.

Agriculture Undersecretary Mark Rey, who oversees the Forest Service, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the pilotless, camera-equipped aircraft will allow law enforcement officers to pinpoint marijuana fields and size up potential dangers before agents attempt arrests.

Rey said there are increasing numbers of marijuana growers financed by Mexican drug cartels using California’s forests to stage their operations.

“We’re dealing with organized efforts now — not just a couple of hippies living off the land and making some cash on the side,” Rey said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

Yes, this is going to play really well here on the ground. Especially following yesterday’s mass uprising against the county’s odd new dope-bust tactics.

UPDATE: Much more from the Sacramento Bee.

SIDE NOTE: Did the AP really title its report “Pilotless Drones to Battle Pot Growers”? Believe it or not, that’s probably a sly AP in-joke referencing the following SF Chronicle podcast, which is legendary:

The Times-Standard is running a piece today on a yesterday’s drug raid by the Humboldt Drug Task Force and the Eureka Police Department in the 300 block of West Del Norte Street. That’s City Councilman Larry Glass’ neck of the woods. And the article mentions a recent community meeting Glass organized which included the Eureka police chief, the head of the Humboldt Drug Task Force and the Eureka fire chief.

“It’s been in progress for a long time, but I think the meeting gave a nice little push over the top,” Glass said, adding that he received plenty of calls from constituents on Thursday, once word of the raids got out.

“They are just ecstatic — that’s the best way I can put it,” Glass said. “They feel empowered that their voices had finally been heard and something had been done about it.”

Many people at that meeting expressed concern about the property, and some said that it had been in the “deplorable” state the police found in it in yesterday for well over a year, but nothing had been done about it. Why was that? they asked. What does the city need to clean places like this up? More money, the agencies responded. Well then tax us, the man said.

One man in the front row said he knew it was a meth lab. Jack Nelson, who heads up the drug task force, asked him how he knew for certain. They told me themselves, the man said, and I’ve seen smoke coming from the place at night. Nelson told the gathered crowd that he was more than willing to listen to people’s complaints about problem properties, but he needed evidence. Take pictures, he said; record the activities of the inhabitants.

Now we’re being told that the neighbors feel empowered. That’s not the vibe I got from the meeting — please correct me if I’m wrong. My read on the situation is that it takes getting the chief of police, the head of the drug task force and the fire chief into one room and shaming them publicly in order to get them to act summarily.

If you didn’t know already, next Wednesday, April 9, Soroptomist International will be holding a fundraiser, “Take a Walk in Her Shoes,” to give prominent male members of the community an inkling of what it’s like to be a woman — or at least to know what it feels like to wear high heels. (For details see the NCJ’s calendar section this week.)

In the same shoe vein, trolling YouTube today for recently-posted Humboldt-related videos, I ran across Leftshoe the Bunny Slipper (parts 1 and 2), which, perhaps for the first time in cinematic history, narrates the vicissitudes of a slipper’s life. The film — a slipper rather than a sleeper hit– was shot on location in HumCo in 2006 and directed by Montel VanderHorck III of Mercy Me Productions, Arcata. It’s full of sole and worth watching: