May Day Immigration Rally

Below is a message from our local branch of  Obama  volunteers. It suggests that we gather at Roseland at 3:30. The march will not begin until 4:30 or a bit later. I plan to get there about 4:15.

Gary Goss


http://www.garygossblog.blogspot.com/
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Ways you can help OFA this week :: Immigration Rally on May 1st

Immigration Rally

We are joining with the North Bay Organizing Project (NBOP) to participate in the May Day March for Worker and Immigrant Rights - May 1st - 3:30pm - 665 Sebastopol Rd. Santa Rosa.  

https://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/immigrationreformactionevent/gskrmy

Alix Shor suggested we gather signatures for the OFA Immigration Petition at the May Day March. Look for a big sign with the OFA logo. We will meet at 3:30, gather signatures until 4:30 then march to Julliard Park.

Surfing Safari

Surfing, as we all know, originated in Hawaii, except that a team of pro surfers made a film a few years back about a small number of black surfers on the island of Sao Tome off the coast of Nigeria. Surfing was an old village tradition. The villagers had never seen western surfboards, but they paddled out on their own simple boards with American pros like Holly Beck of Redondo Beach and kept up well. I suppose it's no surprise that surfing has been invented twice. (The film is called THE LOST WAVE.)

Wireless Missiles

I lost track of my cell phone charger, so I drove to the Sprint office in Coddingtown to buy a new one. I ended up second in line behind a young dude who presented the two clerks with a smashed cell phone he hoped to get repaired. The clerks told me his story after he left. He had chanced upon his girlfriend in the embrace of someone else, and he'd flown into a rage and thrown his phone at them, missing. It bounced off a wall. The phone was too damaged to fix. Now he was out one girlfriend and $700.  I must have looked surprised, because the clerks told me the young people often have phones in their hands. Cell phones are the right size to throw, and if you suddenly fly into a rage. . . .  "I threw one at my boss once," the young woman clerk told me. "It cost me $75 but it was worth it." 

Intelligence Failure

Some of the political turkeys condemning the intelligence community for not discovering the plot that created the massacre in Boston are the same weird birds who voted against background checks for gun owners. Gobble gobble gobble.

The Son of Jan Brewer

The latest HARPER'S has an interesting article on professional wrestling in Mexico. I suppose that few of us follow the carefully staged morality plays of professional wrestling today, but I did for a while back when television was new. The dramas were mostly between a wrestler who was an outrageous cheating villainous person of doubtful culture and race and a wrestler who was noble and kindly. The one with with most box office appeal would win. 

Of course, 60 years ago our notion of a villain was backward. Gorgeous George was a bad guy because he had long golden ringlets and pranced around the ring; today we'd be cheering for him. Baron Leone was bad because he was Italian, I guess. Anyway, you can probably guess who gets to be the villain (a good living) in Mexico. He's a large American who has taken the stage name R. J. Brewer. He claims falsely to be from Phoenix, Arizona. He also claims to be the son of Governor Jan Brewer. His specialty is inciting paying crowds of Latinos (who understand he's fake) into screams of rage by saying, "I never had to scale a fence to get what I wanted" and so forth. Then he starts to wrestle, cheating in every way possible, hitting the referee with a chair, and on the most glorious days, at the last minute his darker skinned opponent rises up and smites him to the canvas! (I once thought I understood ethnic stereotyping.)

Moving, Moving, Moving

According to Dan Moran of the SACRAMENTO BEE, James Flavy Coy Brown, a schizophrenic in Nevada, was placed by Carson City authorities on a bus with a three-day supply of anti-psychotic medicine, "four bottles of Ensure and what he called cheesy peanut butter crackers." Like nearly 400 mentally ill people a year, he was then sent alone from Nevada to one of the other states. In Brown's case he landed in Sacramento, California, where he knew no one. While you might think that supplying a schizophrenic with food, meds and travel cost the generous taxpayers of Nevada needed cash, it actually saved Nevada a lot of money and consideration. Here's my thought. If this cost-saving measure works for Nevada, why won't it work for the other 49 states? There are always empty bus seats to fill. It's fun to ride along looking at the scenery. The buses are warm in winter and cool in summer.  The rain can't get in. The seat reclines. There are toilets on board.

Jim Wood

If I read the paper right, Healdsburg Council Member Jim Wood is running for our soon-to-be vacant assembly seat.  That is good news. Jim lives in Healdsburg and has his dental office in Cloverdale. He also serves as a forensic dentist. In my experience, Jim is a solid, thoughtful, pragmatic Democrat, a progressive and a small business man. It doesn't seem clear yet who else will run. Maybe Supervisor Efron Carillo. 

Mike McGuire has endorsed Jim Wood, who is raising money for the primary.  I trust Jim and Mike.

A Corpse Called Sneaker Man

Another bit from the ANDERSON VALLEY ADVERTISER, edited by Bruce Anderson, Boonville, Mendocino County, "American's Last Newspaper."

You should keep in mind that Mindo Co. is hilly, forested and mostly unpopulated. Along the delightful Pacific Coast you'll find retired city people from Berkeley etc. Inland you will find ancient families of rednecks, fond of beer and whiskey. Think of the TV series "Justified" or the series set in New Zealand called "Top Of The Lake."  Looking much like the rednecks are a third group, the hippie dope growers. Both sides are heavily armed and hate one another. You do not want to stroll far from the road, unless you are accompanied by children and a picnic basket, which might give you non-combatant status.  Mendo is the county where the sheriff used to issue legal pot farm permits, which were lost in a fire just before the Feds came with arrest warrants.  Anyway:

What follows is an update on a corpse they call Sneaker Man, a corpse that had been buried upside down, head first. "The human remains are believed to be that of a white male adult, approximately 25-45 years of age with a height between 5 feet 11 inches and 6 feet 5 inches. The gravesite and the body was discovered last October by a family near Piercy. For years they had seen the toe of a single sneaker protruding from the ground. They dismissed it as river trash. This last year a second sneaker toe was uncovered side by side with the first, which led to the man of the family poking around more deeply. On the day before Halloween, the man pulled one of the shoes out. It was difficult. The man thought that maybe roots had grown into it but instead discovered that the shoe contained bones and a sock. 'Once he found the bones they were put in an empty bag he had with him,' his wife said. 'When I went back with him to confirm (around disk), we brought a little shovel and dug out a little more until we could see the leg bone. It was only a little round end, but it was obviously a bone leading up to a leg . . . and we could see there was leg bone going up inside what looked like denim pants. That is what confirmed to us we really were seeing a human body, and it was time to call the police about it.'"

The investigation continues, and hats off to this woodsy family that had the good sense not to ignore two sneaker toes protruding from the dirt side by side.

Single Sex Schools

I'm feeling stupid after reading an article in THE NEW YORKER (April 1, 2013)  by Marc Fisher on an elite boys' school (Horace Mann) and its crew of predatory pedophiles, who protected one another and covered up with high culture for decades. Of course. Their students made it into Yale. And other single sex schools were doing the same thing. Of course. It turns out that the Roman Catholic Church has been only one place among many where children encountered a systematic expertly-planned seduction. I'll admit that elite secondary schools fall outside my experience, but why did this expose shock me? (Okay, I am provincial.)

Social Climbing

Ross Douthat of the NY Times wrote a piece on one of the ways in which the American oligarchy retains power. They send their sons and daughters to Harvard, Princeton and Yale to meet, marry and keep the class intact. These institutions use admissions systems that help screen out high-achieving Asians and working class students who do not know how to pad a resume. "That the actual practice of meritocracy mostly involves a strenuous quest to avoid any kind of downward mobility, for oneself or for one's kids, is something every upper-class American understands deep in his or her highly educated bones." (Communist China operates in a similar way.)

Trash Talk

The Press Democrat actually printed a news story this morning. That is news in itself. The Sonoma County Board of Supervisors is facing a difficult decision. Should they award the county trash contracts to local people and keep the money in local firms or should they give the business to gigantic, out-of-state Arizona corporations that shovel out campaign contributions like a horn of plenty? Supervisor Shirlee Bob Zane led the advisory committee in this matter, probably because she has received only $11,000 from the Arizona ringmasters. Two of the supervisors, Mike McGuire and Susan Gorin, have taken no cash, so I assume that they will make up the losing side on this issue. When a state bans the teaching of Latino history, as Arizona has done, then the Zanes of the world, the Republicans and Corporate Democrats, see it as their duty to ship Arizona corporations as much of our California tax money as possible. Fair is fair.

Time Travel

This afternoon my cousin and I were pedaling our recumbents along the Joe Rodota bike trail when we caught up with a guy riding a Rans recumbent. That was rare for us. We seldom catch anyone and never catch a recumbent. We exchanged greetings and were about to move on when the dude said that he had a gadget he wanted to show us. We stopped. The gadget turned out to be a tiny camera, about the size of a finger, that pointed out from under his helmet.  This camera recorded everything in front of it on a five hour loop. Nothing on it was permanent unless you pressed a button, and then the prior 17 seconds became semi-permanent. In other words, if you saw something odd and wanted a record of it, the camera would dip back into the past and keep a short video. This time machine cost about $150 and ran on almost no power.  Amazing!

Cabeza de Santa Rosa

On Saturday I joined my brother and cousin, who are two different people, for our weekly bicycle ride. This would take us to the eastern reaches of Santa Rosa, California.  My cousin unfolded a map to check out the road, and the map was so old it listed Santa Rosa as Cabeza de Santa Rosa. My brother and cousin had moved to the area 40 years before, but the term was unfamiliar to them and, of course, to me.

From what I have since read, this is the story. As you may know, the Spanish never issued a single land grant, but in 1841 the governor of California issued a Mexican land grant of about 9,000 acres to a woman whose three daughters later married (1) a Pacheco of Pacheco Pass fame,  (2) a Fitch of Fitch Mountain fame and (3) Gen. M. Vallejo of Bear Flag revolt fame. The land grant was named for St. Rose of Lima, Peru, the first American to achieve sainthood. Her cabeza (head) figures in the story because Rose (originally named Isobel) wore a painful crown of metal spikes covered with roses. She slept on a bed of broken glass, drank the juice from bitter herbs, etc. Naturally Rose did not live long, but on her death she became the patron saint of the Americas, which she is to this day.