Past postings are numbered in the order they went online, with the most recent postings located immediately below the Table of Contents.

To go directly to stories without scrolling, click on the highlighted phrases following the numbers.

Weekly postings are published by Thursday.

262. Crafting the Considerate House

261. West Marin remembers Duane Irving

260. The art of boating

259. Firefighters in action

258. Do you like coyotes and bobcats? How about rats?

257. Los mapaches con cacahuates; también fotos de los cuervos y venados

256. Proposal for ceasefire in West Marin ‘newspaper war’

255. The young creatures of summer

254. Eli’s coming — causing momentary dismay at The Point Reyes Light

253. Under the volcano and in the eye of the storm — a firsthand account

252. The duel between The Point Reyes Light and The West Marin Citizen

251. Santa Muerte and El Cadejo

250. Wildlife around my cars on the Serengeti Plain of West Marin

249. A big Western Weekend Parade in li’l old Point Reyes Station

248. 4-H Fair and Coronation Ball keep alive Western Weekend’s agricultural traditions

247. A tail for West Marin to bear in mind this Western Weekend

246. Point Reyes Light sells and will incorporate as a nonprofit

245. Point Reyes Station area blackout rumored to have been sparked by bird

244. Planned Feralhood desperate for a new home

243. John Francis takes a walk down under

242. A day in a small town

241. Point Reyes Station’s notorious curve is scene of yet another vehicle crash

240. The Mother Goose method for getting rid of thistles

239. A benefit so that handicapped kids can go rafting

238. Where angels fear to tread

237. The Chronicle, hang gliders, and horses

236. Crowd celebrates 80th birthday of Marshall artist-political activist Donna Sheehan

235. A classic revisited

234. Nature celebrates spring

233. More on diplomatic news we’ve been following

232. Sportscar flies off embankment; no one hurt in miraculous landing

231. A chat with the Trailside Killer

230. Life and death on my hill

229. Valentine’s Fair raises money for Haiti relief

228. Historic irony as milk truck overturns in Marshall

227. Encouraging my bodhisattva possum on her path to enlightenment

226. Benefit for Haitian earthquake survivors filled with mixed emotions

225. What drought? Nicasio Reservoir overflows

224. Disconcerting standup reporting

223. The storms begin; schools close; a near miss at my cabin

222. Spare the rodent (or rabbit) & spoil the diet

221. Lookin’ out my backdoor: some of my favorite wildlife photos

220. Careening through the holidays

219. Chileno Valley journalist working in Abu Dhabi brings new wife home for visit

218. Just what would Mayberry be like on acid?

217. The foxes of downtown Point Reyes Station

216. Interpreting dreams

215. Let’s talk turkey

214. You’ll Never Walk Alone — an unlikely story

213. A wistful walk on the bottom of Nicasio Reservoir

212. Progress in the backyard peace process

211. John Francis leaving; 4 other artists turn pages but sticking around

210. What we inherit

209. Over 200 show up at fundraiser to help pay injured ad manager’s medical bills

208. A community helping one of its own

207. A country mouse in the Tenderloin

206. News of the week reported through pictures

205. Update on injured ad manager of West Marin Citizen; benefit planned; and will there be a race?

204. Startling weather; amazing stepdaughters

203. Talented-animal tales

2o2. Saga of The West Marin Citizen ad manager’s recovery spreads around the globe — not always accurately

201. And you were there

200. Hospitalized ad manager of West Marin Citizen coming home; friends volunteering to provide meals

199. Scenes from the Inverness Fair

198. Great progress for injured ad manager of The West Marin Citizen despite problems with convalescent hospital

197. Thieves use ruse to clean out till at Station House Gifts

196. Anastacio’s Famous BBQ Oyster Sauce goes on sale

195. A hillside of wildlife

194. Kaiser Permanente’s ‘Sicko’ machinations shock injured ad manager of The West Marin Citizen

193. Immobilized by multiple injuries, ad manager keeps selling from hospital bed

192. All creatures feathered and furry

191. The wildlife of summer around my cabin & an update on Linda Petersen’s condition 

19o. West Marin Citizen advertising manager hurt in crash; her popular dog Sebastian dies

189. Sunday’s Western Weekend Parade

188. The Western Weekend Livestock Show

187. Western Weekend parade will be Sunday despite reports to the contrary

186. The purple couch beside the road

185. A funny thing happened at the car wash Friday & other odd events

184. My brush with a badger

183. Scientists find no evidence oyster farm harming Drakes Estero; more likely restoring it

182. Why bottom of Drakes Estero can never become part of a wilderness area

181. Badger, Ratty, and the sensual raccoon

180. ‘And how the wind doth ramm!/ Sing: Goddamm’ — Ezra Pound

179. A tailgate gallery of bumper-sticker humor; Point Reyes weather both Arctic & tropical

178. Crowd in Inverness Friday calls for reviving park’s Citizens Advisory Commission

177. Flying over Northwest Marin

176. Spring meditations in a Miwok cemetery concerning the news of West Marin.

175. Two warning signs of Spring

174. Tomales may be little but it’s lively

173. Doe stalks cat; raccoon emulates Scripture — for the rain it raineth every day

172. Three-year drought comes to a symbolic ending as Nicasio Reservoir overflows

171. Pot busts at my cabin — again

170. Happy Valentine’s Day (as it’s evolved)

169. Blogging about blogging

168. Thinking about words

167. Point Reyes Station celebrates President Barack Obama’s inauguration

166. A reader in Ghana

165. The bittersweet story of a hardy little tree

164. A parting look at 2008

163. Blackout hits Tomales Bay area

162. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXXVIII: Way Out West in West Marin

161. Chileno Valley Ranch as depicted by a rancher-artist who lives there

160. Nature’s Two Acres XXXVIII: This time it’s a tale of two bobbed cats

159. Thanksgiving in Point Reyes Station

158. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXXVII: a bobcat at my cabin

157. Quotes Worth Saving II

156. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXXVI: The migrating birds of fall; or ‘Swan Lake’ revisited

155. Election night euphoria

154. The fun and anxiety of preparing for a disaster

153.  Porky Pig, Demosthenes, Joe Biden, and ‘K-K-K-Katy’

152. The political zoo.

151. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXXV: Mr. Squirrel

150. A coyote at my cabin

149. Preparing for the fire season

148. Telling the Raccoon ‘Scat’

147. Faces from the weekly press

146. Tomales, Tomales, that toddling town

145. How park administration used deception & sometimes-unwitting environmentalists to harass oyster company with bad publicity

144. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXXIII: Photographing wildlife indoors and out

143. What government scientists elsewhere had to say about the park’s misrepresenting research to attack oyster company

142. Landscape photos & paintings in Stinson Beach

141. What’s in the Inspector General’s report on the park that newspapers here aren’t telling you

140. Point Reyes National Seashore Supt. Don Neubacher seen as ’scary’

139. A demonstration to save Point Reyes National Seashore deer; park administration dishonesty officially confirmed

138. The good, the bizarre, and the ugly

138. Alice in ‘Wilderness’

137. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXXII: The first raccoon kits of summer

136. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXXI: The pink roses of Point Reyes Station

135. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXX: Baldfaced hornets

134. Scenes from my past week

133. Artist Bruce Lauritzen of Point Reyes Station draws a crowd for opening of exhibit

132. Kite day at Nicasio School

131. Sunday’s Western Weekend Parade in photos

130. Early projections hold: Obama, Woolsey & Kinsey win… Leno easily bests Migden & Nation

129. Western Weekend’s 4-H Livestock Show fun — but smaller than ever

128. Humane Society of the US says National Seashore claims about deer contraception are misleading

127. Lt. Governor John Garamendi joins battle to save fallow & axis deer in Point Reyes National Seashore

126. Nature’s Two Acres Part XXIX: Cold-blooded carnality… Or, why be warm blooded?

125. Nature’s Two Acres XXVIII: The first fawns of spring

124. The Beat Generation lives on at the No Name Bar

123. ‘Still Life with Raccoon‘

122. Nature’s Two Acres XXVII: Animals about town.

121. Newspaperman from Chileno Valley describes his life in the United Arab Emirates

120. Point Reyes Station and Inverness Park demonstrators call for a pedestrian bridge over Papermill Creek

119. Seeing history through newsmen’s eyes…. or the pen is mightier than the pigs

118. Five Faces of Spring

117. Supervisor Steve Kinsey defends further restrictions on woodstoves in West Marin

116. Prostitution in New York, Reno, and Point Reyes Station

115. A country without the decency to ban torture

114. National Seashore’s slaughter of deer traumatizes many residents here; ‘we demand a stop’

113. A tale of Kosovo, West Marin, and a bored battalion of Norwegian soldiers

112. Dillon Beach sewage spill update

111. ‘Drive-by journalism’

110. Sewage spills into ocean at Dillon Beach

109. Nature’s Two Acres XXVI: Which came first, blacktail or mule deer? Hint — their venison is oedipal

108. Nature’s Two Acres XXV: Talking turkey

107. Here’s hoping ‘the goose hangs high‘ this Thursday for Valentine’s Day

106. Signs of bureaucratic contamination

105. A final thought about the Caltrans worker who just did his job — and saved the day

104. Statewide campaign to legalize hemp and marijuana comes to Point Reyes Station

103. Heavy news media presence briefly halts axis-deer slaughterin the Point Reyes National Seashore

102. Storm damage bad but could have been tragic

101. Nature’s Two Acres XXIV: Buffleheads, Greater Scaups, and the 16.6 million wild ducks shot annually

100. Lawsuits against and by Robert Plotkin settled out of court

99. Nature’s Two Acres XXIII: Bambi, Thumper, and Garfield

98. Governor Schwarzenegger’s proposal to close Tomales Bay State Park to save money could prove expensive

97. Old Christmas trees, wild turkeys, and the famous cat-and-rat scheme

96. Blackouts, newspapers in the news, and poetic frustration on the prairie

95. Hurricane-force wind & heavy rain take heavy toll on West Marin

94. Marin County gets a bum rap from itself

93. ‘Eco-fascism‘ in the Point Reyes National Seashore

92. Guess who came to Christmas dinner

91. Yuletide greetings from Santa Claws

90. Assemblyman Jared Huffman’s ominous mailer

89. Nature’s Two Acres XXII: They’re hundreds of times more deadly than cynanide… and headed this way

88. Non-native species stops traffic in Point Reyes Station

87. Blackouts bedevil Point Reyes Station area

86. Urban legends

85. Nature’s Two Acres XXI: Coyote influx benefits some birds around Point Reyes Station

84. Winter Moon Fireside Tales — an undiscovered gem draws only four ticketholders opening night (but more for second show)

83. Striptease in Point Reyes Station… well, sorta

82. Our Lady of the Chutzpah — the many faces of State Senator Carole Migden

81. Stefanie Pisarczyk (AKA Stefanie Keys): a woman of two worlds

80. Point Reyes Station’s ‘Path of Lights’

79. Lessons to be learned from the oil spill

78. Nature’s Two Acres Part XX: Where coyotes howl and raccoons roam free

77. West Marin Community Thanksgiving Dinner celebrated in Point Reyes Station’s Dance Palace

76. Giving thanks for an abundant harvest

75. Being a Gypsy isn’t enough; KPFA fires host criticized for not being a ‘person of color’

74. Nature’s Two Acres Part IXX: ‘Things that go bump in the night’

73. Point Reyes Station pharmacist decries health-insurance practices

72. Farm Bureau president quits; defends independence of wife who disagrees with his political position

71. Ship hits Bay Bridge; spilled oil drifts out Golden Gate and mires birds on West Marin coast

70. California photo book’s release celebrated with gala on Inverness Ridge

69. Coastal Post’s December issue to be its last, assistant editor says; publisher contradicts her

68. West Marin’s ‘Mac Guru’ leaving town — a friend with a knack for surviving

67. One last warm weekend before the season of darkness

66. Ranching matriarch Hazel Martinelli dies at 101

65. Nature’s Two Acres Part XVIII: Seasonal sightings

64. White House Pool: a public park where management listens to the public

63. Tuesday’s Marin County Farm Bureau luncheon for politicos

62. Hawks on the move

61. Point Reyes Station’s Hazel Martinelli celebrates 101st birthday with party at son’s deer camp

60. Vandals dump sewage at West Marin School

59. Paving Point Reyes Station’s main street at night

58. Bolinas firehouse and clinic opening party Sunday

57. Nature’s Two Acres XVII: As seen by an old, almost-blind dog

56. Despite public-be-damned management, it’s still a beautiful park.

55. Language, politics & wildlife

54. Truth becomes an endangered species at the Point Reyes National Seashore.

53. ‘Possums,’ a sequel to the musical ‘Cats’

52. The KWMR/Love Field ‘Far West Fest’

51. Quotes Worth Saving & the Inverness Fair

50. Watching the Point Reyes National Seashore obliterate cultural history

49. Congress sees through Point Reyes National Seashore claims

48. Music, wildlife, and the cosmos

42. Garbage in, garbage out

41. 76-year-old Nick’s Cove reopens

40. What we didn’t celebrate on the Fourth of July

39. Ship’s flare or meteor

38. The death of a salesman: Andrew Schultz

37. Preventing fires at home while The Point Reyes Light feels the heat

36. Monday’s demonstration against The Point Reyes Light

35. Inverness Park fire Friday razes art studio

34. Western Weekend retrospective; anonymous satire of Point Reyes Light distributed at parade; Light’s use of unpaid interns may run afoul of labor laws.

33. Sunday’s Western Weekend parade and barbecue

32. Many fail to find Western Weekend livestock show; a new newpaper debuts in West Marin; The Point Reyes Light reports a former bookkeeper is in jail on embezzlement charges.

31. Nature’s Two Acres Part XVI: A gopher snake & other neighbors

30. New newspaper to be published in West Marin

29. Mermaids, cows, Horizon Cable, and Russia’s Internet war on Estonia

28. Nature’s Two Acres Part XV: ‘Among animals…one finds natural caricatures.’

27. Nature’s Two Acres Part XIV: ‘The world, dear Agnes, is a strange affair.’

26. Sheriff Bob Doyle ’stays the course’ despite blunder and gets county government sued.

25. Nature’s Two Acres Part XIII: ‘Who’s the Head Bull-Goose Loony Around Here?’

24. Nature’s Two Acres Part XII: April showers ‘cruel’ with ‘no regrets’

23. Nature’s Two Acres Part XI: The perky possum

22. Former Point Reyes Light columnist John Grissim, the late pornographer Artie Mitchell, Brazilian President Lula and the advent of orgasmic diplomacy

21. Nature’s Two Acres Part X: ‘Nature Red in Tooth and Claw’

20. Nature’s Two Acres Part IX: Point Reyes Station’s blackbirds

19. Nature’s Two Acres Part VIII: ‘Mice & rats, and such small deer’

18. The Gossip Columnist

17. Saying Yes to Change: A former Point Reyes Station innkeeper finds true joy by moving in with a working-class family in a poor neighborhood of San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

16. The Bush Administration at Point Reyes Part II: Whatever happened to the Citizens Advisory Commission to the GGNRA & Point Reyes National Seashore?

15. The Bush Administration at Point Reyes: Part I

14. Marin supervisors refuse to tilt at McEvoy windmill

13. Nature’s Two Acres Part VII: Rats v. dishwashers

12. Nature’s Two Acres Part VI: How Flashing Affects Wildlife

11. Nature’s Two Acres Part V: By Means of Water

10. Bankruptcy court trustee lets Robert Plotkin hold onto some of his Ponzi-scheme ‘profits’

9. Big Pot Busts at My Cabin

8. Storm-caused fire razes Manka’s Lodge and Restaurant in Inverness

7. Nature’s Two Acres Part IV: Christmas turkeys & where the buck stopped

6. Nature’s Two Acres Part III: Insectivores and Not

5. My background: Biographical information on newspaperman Dave Mitchell

4. Nature’s Two Acres Part II: Living dinosaurs actually found around my cabin

3. Nature’s Two Acres: A Point Reyes Station Photo Exhibit

2. Robert I. Plokin

1. Introduction to this site SparselySageAndTimely.com plus an account of orphaned fawns being released in Chileno Valley.

Turnout was light today, Tuesday, for California’s state primary elections — mainly because the state had already held its presidential primary on Feb. 5. Waiting for voters at the Point Reyes Station polling place in the firehouse are election workers (from front): Doug Long, Cathleen Austin, and Cindy Knabe.

US Senator Barack Obama today clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, as numerous news organizations early this afternoon began projecting he would.

Acknowledging her opponent’s commanding lead in delegates to the nominating convention, Senator Hillary Clinton told Democratic politicos in New York that she is willing to be Obama’s running mate.

Senator Obama, 46, is the first black presidential nominee of a major US political party.

Obama was born in Honolulu to a Kenyan father and a white American mother, who met at the University of Hawaii. His parents soon separated, however, and eventually divorced. His mother’s second husband was Indonesian, and when he was six, Obama moved to Indonesia for four years. He then returned to Hawaii where he lived with his maternal grandparents while attending 5th through 12th grades.

Obama graduated from Columbia University where he majored in Political Science, specializing in International Relations. In 1991, he received a law degree magna cum laude from Harvard Law School.

From 1993 to 2004, Senator Obama taught Constitutional Law parttime at the University of Chicago Law School while also working as an attorney. He was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996 and the US Senate in 2004.

Meanwhile, this news blog at 10 a.m. today (which is when I got up) projected Supervisor Steve Kinsey and Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey would easily win their races.

Incumbent Kinsey (left) ran unopposed in the nonpartisan Marin County race for the Fourth District.

He will now serve his fourth term on the Board of Supervisors, representing all of West Marin, along with pieces of Larkspur, Corte Madera, and San Rafael.

Incumbent Woolsey (right), who represents Marin and Sonoma counties in the US House of Representatives, likewise ran unopposed in the Democratic primary.

In November, Woolsey will face Michael Halliwell, who was unopposed in today’s Sixth District Republican primary. Woolsey has already served eight terms in the House, where she has one of the most liberal voting records of any member.

Update on the State Senate Democratic Primary: With 43 percent of the vote, Assemblyman Mark Leno handily outdistanced Assemblyman Joe Nation (29.3 percent) and incumbent Carole Migden (27.7 percent) in the Third State Senate District.

The district includes Marin County and parts of San Francisco and Sonoma counties.

Leno (left) will face Republican Sashi McEntee in November’s general election. McEntee ran unopposed in today’s Republican primary.

The Third State Senate District — like Woolsey’s Sixth Congressional District — is overwhelmingly Democratic, and a victory in either Democratic primary is often tantamount to election.

The moon was full Saturday night, and in the Giacomini family’s pasture next to my cabin, a coyote howled off and on from 12:30 to 3:30 a.m. Sometimes I could hear a second coyote answering from the Point Reyes Station Mesa.

During the past five winters, I’ve seen a coyote in my backyard stalking fawns, which bounded away while the coyote was squeezing under a barbed-wire fence; I’ve seen a coyote on Highway 1 downhill from the cabin; and I’ve found coyote tracks in frost on my steps. I’ve also seen coyotes twice on Limantour Road and once beside Nicasio Reservoir. Twice recently, my houseguest Linda Peterson has seen coyotes along Sir Francis Drake Boulevard near the Mount Vision Overlook turnoff, where she shot this photo. [Update: Since this posting went online, Linda has spotted (and photographed) yet another coyote.] In short, coyotes are again common throughout West Marin.
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Coyotes were once so common here that the town of Olema took its name from the Miwok Indian word for coyote. But in the 1940s, sheep ranchers using poisoned bait were able to eliminate coyotes in West Marin and southwestern Sonoma County, and there were none here for 40 years.
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In 1972, however, the Nixon Administration banned use of the poison 10-80, primarily because it was non-specific and killed many other animals too. Coyotes, which had never disappeared from northern Sonoma County, then began spreading south. Since they began showing up here again in 1983, they have put more than half the sheep ranches around Marshall, Tomales, Dillon Beach, and Valley Ford out of business.

In West Marin these nights, they can be heard howling as far inland as the San Geronimo Valley, and for listeners who aren’t sheepmen, the high-pitched, barking howls are a beguiling reminder of life on the western frontier.

Frontiersman Davy Crockett (1786-1836) liked to claim his reputation as a hunter preceded him into the forest. As Crockett told the story, he once treed a raccoon that resignedly cried out: “Don’t shoot, Colonel! I’ll come down! I know I’m a gone ‘coon.” This here raccoon was lucky to merely be shot with my camera.

An old friend, Joy Adam, who has been living in Germany for 20 years, dropped by my cabin Saturday night and cooked some spicy dishes from India as a birthday dinner.

Here one of the guests, Gabriela Melano of Nicasio, has a through-the-glass encounter with one of this hill’s roaming raccoons.

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On Friday, I had turned 64, and my former wife Ana Carolina in Guatemala had emailed me the lyrics to the Beatles’ song When I’m 64. During Saturday’s birthday dinner, Nina Howard of Inverness, Joy, and Linda used a printout of the lyrics to serenade me with; “When I get older, losing my hair/ Many years from now/ Will you still be sending me a valentine/ Birthday greetings, bottle of wine?/ If I’d been out till quarter to three/ Would you lock the door?/ Will you still need me/ Will you still feed me/ When I’m 64?”

I’d already had a earlier birthday dinner Friday at the Station House Café with my houseguest Linda plus Linda Sturdivant of Inverness Park, her partner Terry, her daughter Seeva, and our mutual friend Cheryl Keltner of Point Reyes Station.

Sixty-four didn’t sound that old when all of them sang Happy Birthday to You on Friday, but on Saturday after paying attention to the words to the Beatles’ song, I found myself wondering about my Social Security.

As it happened, I was sitting at my dining-room table when I spotted Ms. Raccoon looking over my shoulder, so I asked her what she thought about someone turning 64. Using my camera, Nina snapped this photo as Ms. Raccoon stuck out her tongue in reply.

Many of us in West Marin have gotten to know radio newsman Peter Laufer although his homes are in Fairfax and Bodega Bay. Ten years ago he was part of Víctor Reyes’ Spanish-language classes that meet every Tuesday evening at Susan Sasso’s home in Olema.

Photojournalist Ilka Hartmann of Bolinas found herself traveling part of the way with Peter when both rushed to Germany in 1989 to document the fall of the Berlin Wall. I first met him roughly 29 years ago when he interviewed my former wife Cathy and me about the Synanon cult for KNBR radio in San Francisco. Three years later I ran into him again in El Salvador. I was covering that Central American country’s civil war for the old San Francisco Examiner while Peter was reporting for NBC News.

Over the years we’ve kept up contact, and when we had lunch together last August in Fairfax, he told me how lively his Sunday morning radio show on KPFA had become. Subsequently listening to his show, I realized that while Peter did not shy from closely questioning his interviewees, he was invariably polite to them. A true professional.

So I was startled yesterday at a news release Peter sent to the press. Without warning, KPFA had dumped him. The firing came only two days after Peter had moderated a fundraiser that collected thousands of dollars for the non-commercial FM station. It was a case of a legendary radio station firing a legendary talk-show host.

And Peter is a legend in his own right. He has authored more than a dozen well-received books of social and political criticism; his most recent works probe the lives of soldiers opposed to the Iraq War and promote open borders with Mexico. (This photo is from his book Iron Curtain Rising.)

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Peter created the National Geographic World Talk radio show and is co-anchor with publisher Markos Kounalakis of the program Washington Monthly on the Radio. Ironically, Peter noted, “the firing came on the eve of a feature article in The San Francisco Chronicle by Ben Fong-Torres about me and my talk-radio career.”

In the article, Fong-Torres cites Peter’s book Inside Talk Radio: America’s Voice or Just Hot Air? and comments, “Laufer knows his stuff. He’s qualified to offer an update on the state of talk radio — albeit from a decidedly left-of-center viewpoint.” As the article notes, Peter founded talk stations in Berlin and Amsterdam, and has a talk-radio career that dates back to the first-ever talk station.

So why was Peter taken off the air? To quote his news release: “Laufer believes — based on letters and email, along with op-eds in the alternative press — that a group of malcontent KPFA listener-activists orchestrated a smear campaign against him because he is, as these critics wrote, ‘not a person of color’ and because his credentials are ‘too mainstream.’”

Peter’s radio career has been mainstream in the sense that he has won virtually every prestigious award in broadcast journalism. His worldwide reporting, for example, resulted in a Polk award for a documentary on Americans in prison overseas. Here in the Bay Area, he shared a Peabody award as a member of the KCBS news department when he co-anchored the station’s coverage of the 1989 earthquake that devastated the Bay Area.

As for his not being a person of color…. This criticism seemed so off the wall that I asked Peter about his ethnic background and was surprised to learn he comes from Gypsy stock. His father was, in fact, born in Hungary.

Hitler’s death camps, of course, gassed Gypsies — along with Jews, homosexuals, and Communists. And Slovakia is currently barred from entering the European Union because of its mistreatment of Gypsies. These days, however, to be able to understand oppressed minorities, it apparently isn’t enough to belong to an oppressed minority. You also have to look the part.

“If you can’t count on KPFA for tolerance of a diversity of views, what can you count on?” Peter asked. “Of course I harbor no desire to return to their airwaves after being treated in such a shabby fashion.”

So what’s a fan of progressive radio to do? Personally, my donations to non-commercial radio are going to KWMR 90.5 FM, community radio for West Marin.

Update announcement from Peter late Tuesday: “Peter Laufer and Bob Agnew, the program director of Green 960 — the Clear Channel, progressive, talk-radio station for the San Francisco Bay Area, have agreed to test Laufer’s Sunday morning talk show on the AM dial begining Sunday December 2. Laufer expects to lure his loyal KPFA listeners over to the wild world of commercial radio.”

Let’s start with the wildlife and move on to language and politics.

A female Anna’s hummingbird at my cabin. The website Hummingbirds in Motion reports, “The hummingbird (scientific family: trochilidae) does not fly in the same way other birds do. They can fly forward, backward, up, down, and even upside-down. The motion of their wings changes its angle with each flap. Unlike other birds, hummingbirds flap their wings horizontally in the shape of a figure 8. They also expand and contract their tail feathers, which allows them to hover in mid-air. However, hummingbirds flap their wings like this on an average of 50 times per second, and during courtship they can flap their wings up to 200 times a second.”

Red-winged blackbirds, with a few tri-color and Brewer’s blackbirds thrown in, forage outside my kitchen window. Stanford University researchers say the diet of the locally ubiquitous red-winged blackbird “includes few spiders; grass and forb seeds; rarely fruit. Young [are] fed 100 percent insects.” And what, you non-gardeners may ask, is “forb?” Wikipedia notes, “A forb is a flowering plant, with a non-woody stem, that is not a grass. Since it is non-woody, it is not a shrub or tree either. Thus most wild and garden flowers, herbs and vegetables are forbs.”

Male red-winged blackbirds fight ostensibly over seeds but mainly to establish their place in the flock’s hierarchy.

Harbor seals sunning themselves at the mouth of the Russian River in Jenner. Harbor seals spend roughly half their time on land and half in the water. They need their time on land to maintain body temperature, meaning that people should view them from a distance lest they be scared back into the water.

A blacktail doe watching me on my deck.

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A young buck in the shade of my persimmon tree. Blacktails love both the tree’s fruit and its leaves.

Turning now to language… As we were chatting last week, Inverness Park resident Linda Sturdivant was toying with her blonde locks when suddenly she said, “I don’t like the way my hair looks. I’m going to go home and dye it.”

“You don’t need to diet,” I assured her.

“I always dye it,” she responded.

“Why?” I asked.

“Because it makes my hair look better.”

“Why would your hair look better if you diet?”

To an eavesdropper, we would have sounded like George Burns and Gracie Allen, with me playing the role of Gracie.

As it happens, former Point Reyes Station resident Sheila Castelli sent me a similar story last week from her new home in Taos: “The County Ag Fair was this past weekend at the ‘One Eye Gonzales Building,’ as announced on the radio. I thought this a quite funny name for such a substantial building. But I happened to see a banner in town for the fair, and it actually is the Juan I. Gonzales Building.”

Obviously words mean different things to different people. Nina Howard of Inverness and I were discussing the meaning of the word “politics” a few months back. “Can union organizing be considered politics?” I asked. “Or are politics limited to government?”

“If they’re not, they should be,” replied Nina flatly. End of discussion.

Unfortunately, political rhetoric in this God-forsaken country no longer bears much resemblance to rational thought. Take, for example, the campaigning of Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson, formerly a lackluster senator from Tennessee. In courting the conservative vote, Senator Thompson has claimed “the Virginia Tech massacre proved that students should be allowed to carry guns on campus,” to quote the Sept. 1-7 Economist.

If Senator Thompson were right, highschoolers should also be packing heat to defend themselves. Year after year, they’re far more likely than college students to be gunned down in the vicinity of their schools.

To keep order in a well-armed classroom, teachers would, of course, have to be able to outgun their students, but that would merely require state-of-the-art weaponry plus a mastery of marksmanship and fast draw.

Senator Thompson may argue that because college students are older, they would be more responsible with their guns than high school students, but don’t believe it. Around the time I was a student at Stanford, members of an on-campus fraternity got drunk one night and shot out windows in a women’s dormitory across the street. That couldn’t happen at a high school because the students wouldn’t be old enough to drink.

As Winston Churchill aptly observed in 1920: “Politics are almost as exciting as war — and quite as dangerous.”

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Another snake in the grass… Friday morning, I spotted this small gopher snake warming itself in the sun near the top of my driveway. Gopher snakes can grow to nine feet long and often live to be teenagers. In captivity, they sometimes live into their 20s. The snake has a large shield on its nose for burrowing in search of small mammals.

There was a time in these parts when “W.M.” stood for “West Marin,” but in 1998, Waste Management appropriated the initials for its new, shiny containers which hold our home and yard debris. It now appears that this coast will soon be able to reclaim the abbreviation. These containers are at the foot of Balboa Avenue overlooking White House Pool.

Waste Management of Houston, the conglomerate that for most of July stopped picking up garbage in Oakland and other East Bay cities, may soon stop picking up garbage in West Marin. Here, however, another garbage company is waiting in the wings to take over the conglomerate’s role, so no interruption of service is likely.

In short, what’s in the works is not a big change in garbage but a change in Big Garbage. Waste Management has begun preparations to sell its West Marin franchise to James Ratto. A native of Italy, Ratto has been in the garbage business 51 years and has owned or been a significant investor in about three dozen garbage companies around California. He locally runs The Ratto Group of garbage-pickup operations in Sonoma County and is an owner of Fairfax Garbage Disposal and Novato Disposal Service. Waste Management owns garbage companies throughout the United States and Canada, as well as Marin County’s only dump, Redwood Sanitary Landfill in Novato.

Waste Management also holds separate franchises from Bolinas Public Utility District and Stinson Beach Water District to pick up garbage in those towns. For more than a month, the boards of both districts have been aware Waste Management wants to sell Ratto the franchises for their towns too. Indeed BPUD’s board was preparing to discuss the pending “sale of assets” this Wednesday night, district manager Jennifer Blackman told me earlier in the day.

Jeff Rawles, deputy director of the Marin County Department of Public Works, on Wednesday told me DPW is still waiting for a letter of intent from the corporation before drafting a Board of Supervisors resolution to change the franchise for garbage pickup in West Marin and other unincorporated areas. Referring to Waste Management staff, Rawles noted, “I talked with them. We’ve said, ‘Where’s your letter?’” The county is still waiting for it, Rawles added, but “we’re proceeding under the expectation they’re going to sell.”

Rawles noted that The Ratto Group (through competitive bidding) previously “took over most of Waste Management’s business in Sonoma County.”

Meanwhile, non-union garbagemen this past week began carting off some of the mountains of trash that have been steadily rising along streets in Oakland and other East Bay cities since July 2. On that date Waste Management locked out nearly 500 drivers who belong to the Teamsters Union. The Teamsters’ Alameda County contract with the conglomerate ran out June 30, and thus far negotiators for the two sides have been unable to agree on a new contract. Still at issue are pay, pensions, benefits, and worker discipline.

Waste Management said it locked out its drivers as a preemptive move lest they strike, but the logic of that gambit escapes me, for the effect is the same either way. The union, in turn, has said its members would rather be driving, but as management’s lockout continued, the Teamsters last Friday began picketing Waste Management’s garbage operations in Sonora and Stockton plus its recycling facility in Walnut Creek. With recycling drivers now staying home in Walnut Creek, Tom Ridder, Waste Management’s district manager here, spent Wednesday driving a truck in that city and was not immediately available for comment on the pending sale.

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With lettering almost as large as “Inverness Park” on the county roadsign, the Waste Management logo on its debris containers helps frame the gateway to town. The ubiquitous containers have created a leitmotif for West Marin’s scenic roadways.

In 1990, the County of Marin gave Shoreline Disposal a 25-year franchise to pick up garbage in West Marin, but Waste Management bought Shoreline in 1998 and took over the franchise. County government then ordered an audit of Shoreline’s books and eventually concluded the company had overcharged West Marin residents by as much as $479,000 in 1997, 1998, and 1999. Waste Management in 1999 negotiated a $244,000 settlement, but the money was not returned to the residents. The county held onto it, with most of the money earmarked for educating residents here about proper disposal of waste. That’s a lot of education. Or waste.

The West Marin franchise provides for the garbage hauler’s pickup rates to be reviewed every four years, and this year is that year, Rawles said. The county determines whether the hauler’s recorded costs and revenue are accurate, and if they are, the county allows a 10 percent profit, the DPW deputy director said. He predicted a change in rates and said it is unlikely they will be lowered. In Bolinas, the hauler is annually given a rate increase equivalent to 85 percent of the rise in the federal Consumer Price Index, Blackman said. Garbage rates in Bolinas, however, cannot go up by more than 8 percent a year unless BPUD’s board agrees there is an extraordinary need, she added.

And then there is the question of how all this affects the West Marin Sanitary Landfill, the Martinelli family’s dump in Point Reyes Station that closed in 1998. In 1996, Ratto argued there should be a transfer station at the dump so that a few large trucks occasionally — rather than several smaller trucks frequently — would transport coastal garbage over the hill. Waste Management would not be selling its West Marin franchise if it were very profitable, and driving up its costs has been the need for garbage trucks from the coast to regularly travel all the way to Redwood Sanitary Landfill north of Novato for unloading.

The Martinelli family would still like to have a transfer station at their Tomasini Canyon site. No doubt they could use income from it towards sealing and monitoring the landfill. However, Ratto, 67, is a tough bargainer and sometimes-controversial businessman, and he and the Martinellis several years ago had a falling out. It is, therefore, anyone’s guess as to whether the garbage-company owner would ever resurrect the transfer-station proposal.

Nick’s Cove restaurant and cottages, which Croatian immigrants Nick and Frances Kojich originally opened on the east shore of Tomales Bay in 1931, reopened last week after being closed seven years for remodeling.

This past Sunday, owners Pat Kuleto and Mark Franz held a benefit party for the Tomales Volunteer Fire Department and invited the West Marin community to be the resort’s guests. For me, it was a pleasant reminder of how many oysters I can eat when I’m not paying for them.

The restaurant, bar, and cottages had gone unused for seven years because of an exhausting permit process. The five-year process ran up the cost of refurbishing Nick’s Cove from an initial estimate of $3.5 million to an eventual total of $14 million, investors Pam Klarkowski née West and her husband Rick Klarkowski told me during the party.

When I had a moment to chat with Pat Kuleto, I commented that given all his permit hassles, I suspected there must have been four or five time times when he wished he’d never bought Nick’s Cove from Ruth Gibson (at a cost of $2 million back in 2000). “More like 400 or 500 times,” Pat responded. The restaurateur said that during his career (of more than 35 years) he has designed 190 restaurants. (Among them is San Francisco’s “beloved” Fog City Diner, which opened in 1985, the Nick’s Cove website notes.)

Pat Kuleto with his girlfriend Sarah Livermore, a singer who performed at Sunday’s party.

With 34 government agencies and citizen groups each wanting its own concerns addressed in the permit process, remodeling Nick’s Cove was “three times harder” than even the most difficult of his other restaurants, Pat said. In a sarcastic commentary, the Nick’s Cove menu this week facetiously included red-legged frogs on its list of appetizers. The frogs, which are a “threatened” species because non-native bullfrogs here eat them, supposedly were served with plenty of red tape and cost $2 million apiece.

It’s worth noting that the same county, regional, and state bureaucracies, as well as citizen groups, have managed to intimidate potential buyers from trying to restore the historic Marshall Tavern south of Nick’s Cove. Very few people can afford the red tape Pat encountered.

I asked Pam how many investors Nick’s Cove has. She didn’t know but said there were definitely more than 20. “Even a winery wanted to invest,” she said. “We’re not expecting to make our money back the first year,” her husband added.

Little Rock cottage on pilings over Tomales Bay rents for $975 a night on weekends in August.

Nor is the restaurant alone expected to repay investors. If all goes as planned, more than a third of Nick’s Cove’s income will come from overnight guests staying on both sides of Highway 1. The lodgings include four waterfront cottages, and July and August are high season. On weekends during July, the two-suite cottages rent for $680 per night while the two smaller cottages go for $595. In August, the weekend rates will be $850 per night for the smaller cottages and $975 for the two-suite cottages. On the other hand, the mid-week rate in July for the smaller cottages is a mere $440 per night.

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The bar at Nick’s Cove

Prices in the restaurant at Nick’s Cove range from $7 for a mixed-lettuce salad, to $12 for a gourmet hamburger, to $16 for fish and chips, to $24 for a grilled pork chop with peach chutney, to $32 for a 16-ounce, rib-eye steak.

Nick’s Cove executive chef Mark Franz (on right with his partner Pat Kuleto), has been on the “culinary scene” for 26 years, notes the resort’s website.

In 1997, Mark opened San Francisco’s Farallon restaurant, which was designed by Pat. Mark’s “coastal cuisine” at Farallon has received acclaim in Bon Appetít, Food & Wine, and similar magazines.

Several hundred guests showed up for Sunday’s party at Nick’s Cove, a lively event with a band and dancing in an outdoor dining area. Singing with the band was Pat’s girlfriend Sara Livermore. Chef Alex Klarkowski (below at right) and his older brother Ben barbecued oysters beside the bay all afternoon. Tomales firefighters, who parked two firetrucks outside the front door, sold raffle tickets while Marshall activist Donna Sheehan worked the crowd, trying to get people to complain to Caltrans about the lack of mowing this year along Highway 1.

Standing at the end of Nick’s Cove’s long dock and looking back at the restaurant and cottages, I remembered happy times when I used to keep a boat in Inverness and would periodically sail to Nick’s Cove for a meal, sometimes sailing home after dark. Thanks to Pat, Mark, and innumerable investors, a new generation of sailors can enjoy the same wonderful outing.

Inverness resident Andrew M. Schultz died on Monday, June 18, at the age of 58 from complications related to small-cell lung cancer.

His death will inevitably be described by those who knew him as “The Death of a Salesman,” and Andrew would be the first to agree, as evidenced by his personalized license plates, “AD SPACE.”

Andrew’s specialty was selling newspaper classified advertising to automobile dealerships, which he did almost continually for more than 30 years.

Born in Manhattan, New York, on July 27, 1948, to Fran and Leon Schultz, he attended public schools in the Bronx, Plainview, and Long Island, as well as Hofstra University on Long Island for two years.

For two years he studied to become a chef only to switch courses and attend two more years of classes at the New York Institute of Photography.

Andrew moved to California in 1971. “I had been wanting to get out of New York. I felt trapped,” he explained in an interview last winter. “I felt nothing was happening for me there.”

He arrived in Marin hoping to work as a photographer. Given his choice, he said during the interview, “I would have been a magazine photographer doing cover shots for magazines such as Glamour, Time, and US News and World Report — mainstream magazines.”

Many may have sent or received the composite postcard from Inverness with photos of downtown, a friendly pelican and the famous beached boatwreck. All those photos were taken by Andrew Schultz.

Another of Andrew’s favorite photo assignments has been the annual Disaster Council pancake breakfast at the Point Reyes Station firehouse. Andrew said he enjoyed capturing on film the pillars of the community stuffing their faces with pancakes.

“In 1972,” he recounted, “I went to work for The Funfinder as a photographer but quickly became a salesman. In those days, The Funfinder was an entertainment periodical the size of TV Guide, boasting a circulation of 20,000 in San Francisco and Marin counties.

When The Marin Independent Journal bought The Funfinder in 1975, Andrew went to work for The Independent Journal. “The most fun I’ve ever had was selling automotive classified when I moved from The Funfinder to The IJ,” he recalled. “It was one of the most interesting changes I made in my work life. It clicked, and I just loved it.

“With the majority of the people that I meet, I discovered that there are three stages. First, they don’t like me at all. Then it’s, ‘Let’s give this guy some time.’ Then, I really win them over. You always know when you’ve broken through to the customer.”

Andrew said he genuinely liked his customers. “About six times… dealers offered me jobs, but I didn’t want to sell cars. Whenever a dealership offered me a job selling their product, I knew I had them right where I wanted them… that they trusted me and we had built a strong professional relationship. Contrary to what most people think, business relationships are really personal relationships.”

Andrew worked at The Independent Journal until 1987, when he moved to Monterey County and began selling automotive classified adds for the Santa Cruz Sentinel. “Nine months after I got there, I won salesman of the year,” he recalled with pride. I left Santa Cruz a month before the Loma Prieta earthquake. I had been living in Soquel, two to three miles away from the epicenter in Aptos.”

After moving back to Marin County, Andrew sold advertising at The Point Reyes Light for a year, at the Petaluma office of a free “pennysaver” owned by newspaper chain publisher Dean Lesher, at The Petaluma Argus Courier, The Cotati Times, The Press Democrat in Santa Rosa, and Auto Trader in Petaluma.

Indeed, Andrew sold advertising space wherever he could find it, whether it was on cash register tapes or the community-access channel of Horizon Cable. In 1999 after public-utility deregulation, he even tried to sell electricity and was hopeful of signing up most of California’s schools. However, the company he was working for collapsed.

Many West Marin residents knew Andrew as an advertising salesman and operator of Horizon Cable’s community channel, Channel 47. As such, Andrew donated a good portion of his time to helping the local nonprofits with their fundraising.

West Marin had enjoyed good television reception until 1973 when Bay Area channels stopped transmitting from Mount San Bruno and began using the newly constructed Sutro Tower. TV signals to this stretch of coast were then blocked by Mount Tamalpais. Among those unhappy with the resulting poor reception was Andrew. The poor reception also prompted John Robbins, formerly of Inverness, to build the West Marin Cable system, starting in 1983; he sold it to Horizon Cable in 1991.

Robbins, who had employed Andrew part time, recalled in an interview last January, “The first time I met him, I was at the White House Pool building the cable system. He stops his car right on the corner of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard and Balboa Avenue and wants to know when he’ll get hooked up.”

When Robbins was building the Stinson Beach part of the cable system, he hired Andrew to line up customers. “I let him go there and knock on doors.”

Even after the cable system was built and sold to Horizon, Andrew continued in his spare time to sell advertising for its community-access channel, which was then Channel 11 and 13 and is now Channel 47. Only recently did he finally relinquish that responsibility to Horizon owner Susan Daniels.

“He’s a wonderful, pushy, in-your-face salesman, and he aims to leave you feeling good about the conversation,” Robbins said. “You always knew when Andrew was coming. His voice was a big as he was [6-foot, 3-inches and more than 250 pounds].”

“Sometimes I’m insensitive in realizing that I’m a very big guy,” Andrew acknowledged. “I’ve been told at times I’m disruptive… I’m definitely noticed. I’m good at parties, but I don’t care to go to them very often. I come home at night and the mask comes off.”

©Art Rogers/Point Reyes

Rather than socializing, “Andrew’s life revolved around his computer and movies,” Robbins noted. “At times, I am nearly a hermit,” Andrew confirmed.

“Yet I feel as if I have lots of good friends. I have loved many in my life. I have a hard time understanding jealous people. They don’t seem to realize that you can’t take love from others. Love is only given.”

Surviving Andrew are his brothers Billy, Nathan, and Barry Schultz. His father Leon Schultz died in 1990 and his mother Fran in 2000.

Andrew is also survived by his former partner, Daniel Medina. Andrew also leaves a long list of people he has loved and who have loved him, commenting several weeks ago, “They will all know who they are…”

At his request, Andrew will be cremated. Adobe Creek Funeral Home in Petaluma is handling arrangements. A memorial service will be held on Limantour Beach at 10 a.m. Saturday, June 23. Before he died, Andrew asked that in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to Hospice by the Bay and West Marin Senior Services — “please.”

Editor’s note: At Andrew Schultz’s request, several of us combined efforts to write this piece before he died.

Few Point Reyes Light reporters have received as many awards as Ivan Gale (upper left) of Chileno Valley, winning five state and national journalism awards in 2004 alone. The Light’s new owner, Robert Plotkin, on May 3 announced he will no longer display the awards won over the years by Gale and other Light staff. Gale left The Light to earn two master’s degrees from the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. He is now a business writer for the Gulf News in Dubai, the rapidly growing financial and tourist center in the United Arab Emirates. Here he attends a press conference where Shaikh Ahmed bin Saeed al Maktoum, the uncle of the ruler of Dubai, talks about Emirates airline’s annual results.

When I sold The Point Reyes Light to Robert Israel Plotkin in November 2005, San Francisco Chronicle reporter Jesse Hamlin asked me how I felt about leaving the paper in new hands.

“One thing that gives me confidence,” I replied, “is that the citizens of West Marin know what they want in a newspaper. And if you’re not giving it to ‘em, they’ll let you know.”

Eighteen months have now past, and West Marin residents have repeatedly let Plotkin (at right) know he is not providing the community newspaper they need and expect. How much longer The Light can survive in its present form is now a topic of much speculation around the community.

Nor is The Light the newspaper it appears to be. Some merchants have been mistakenly billed for ads that had been canceled, and Plotkin’s former printer Scot Caldwell has told others and me that a number of merchants are refusing to pay for these and other ads. Innumerable people have stopped subscribing to The Light — some as long ago as last year, but they have kept receiving the paper each week, Caldwell added. I have heard the same thing from dozens of readers who stopped subscribing to The Light months ago but continue to get it free in the mail.

Meanwhile, with financial help from his landlord, Plotkin is in the midst of refurbishing his office while also publishing dozens of vapid, but relatively expensive, color photos and not paying off creditors to whom he owes significant amounts of money.
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When Plotkin’s debt to Caldwell’s Marin Sun Printing reached $11,000, the printer told me, Plotkin changed printers. Plotkin has now paid off $4,000 of that debt, but the damage has been done, and Caldwell will soon be part owner of a new weekly newspaper based in Point Reyes Station. More about that in a moment.

• Last year, Plotkin’s inaccurate reporting so offended the Stinson Beach Volunteer Fire Department that Chief Kenny Stephens had t-shirts and bumper stickers printed that say: “Put out The Light until he gets it right.”

• Three weeks ago former Light publisher Michael Gahagan, who sold the paper to me in 1975, described one of Plotkin’s self-promotions as “meglomaniacal,” adding: “It saddens me that [Plotkin has] so mistakenly misunderstood, dishonored, and continue[s] to defile a community legacy.”

Part of the legacy that Plotkin has taken off The Light’s walls are state and national honors won by Victoria Schlesinger (at left), who like Gale left The Light to earn two master’s degrees in Journalism from Columbia University. The May issue of Harper’s magazine published a whopping nine-page exposé by Schlesinger of the so-called Millenium Villages Project that is supposed to lead the Third World out of poverty. Ironically, Columbia’s Journalism Department paid her way to Kenya to investigate a pilot project run by the director of Columbia’s Earth Institute, Jeffrey Sachs. The former Light reporter revealed Sach’s project is a poorly administered fiasco which is trying to replicate a failed experiment from a quarter century ago.

• Meanwhile, journalist Elizabeth Whitney of Inverness, who last December organized a community meeting to discuss The Light’s inadequate coverage of local news, is now organizing a public protest. “I think it is time to TAKE BACK THE LIGHT,” Whitney wrote in an announcement she began circulating last week.

“I am now initiating a focused protest on Monday, June 11, as TAKE BACK THE LIGHT DAY. If you have strong opinions about the Point Reyes Light, take your paper back to the editor at the office in Point Reyes Station and communicate verbally or in writing why you feel as you do. You can also mail your paper back with your comments to Box 210, Point Reyes Station 94956, if you find this easier.”

• On Monday of this week, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll wrote that the redesigned Light, which is heavy on color and light on local news, “looks like an alumni bulletin… The writing is terrible, but Plotkin is apparently not a words guy. Plotkin is a Plotkin guy.”

Plotkin’s malicious coverage of a deputy’s taking me into custody a year ago and having the county psych ward check to see if I was suicidal was “sleazy,” Carroll wrote in Monday’s Chronicle.

(In fact, as soon as county staff talked to me, they determined I was not suicidal, had no signs of emerging psychological problems, and should be immediately sent home in a taxi, which I was at county expense.)

Light reporter Micah Maidenberg, who wrote the story under Plotkin’s direction, knew all this from the public record, for I had emailed him copies. Maidenberg also knew the deputy went to my house after Plotkin made a bogus claim that I was suicidal. In addition, Maidenberg interviewed me, and I gave him straightforward answers.

However, neither the facts contained in the public record, nor my answers to his questions, nor his boss’ involvement were included in Maidenberg’s story, which instead lumped me in with a violent man from Bolinas who was taken to the psych ward and attacked a doctor.

• Maidenberg, by the way, is the same reporter who in March wrote the story identifying various Latino residents of West Marin as documented or undocumented immigrants.

Community leaders including Sacred Heart Church’s Father Jack O’Neill, Toby’s Feed Barn owner Chris Giacomini and his manager Oscar Gamez, Marin Community Foundation director Carlos Porrata and his wife Rebecca, Point Reyes Books owner Steve Costa, Cabaline Saddlery owner Vicki Leeds, 13 prominent Latinos, and a number of other well-known townspeople have publicly questioned Plotkin’s “journalistic ethics” in publishing Maidenberg’s story.

Not surprisingly, Maidenberg has given notice he’s leaving as of the end of this week. Maidenberg’s departure, however, is the least of The Light’s problems.

• Don Deane, publisher of The Coastal Post in Bolinas, has brought in Jeanette Pontacq of Point Reyes Station as editor. Under her, The Coastal Post has introduced color photos, is covering more West Marin news, and is picking up more advertisers.

On Wednesday, Deane told me he and Pontacq are also discussing publishing twice as often, fortnightly instead of monthly. However, he noted, no final decision has been made.

• One decision that is final was made by Joel Hack, owner of The Bodega Bay Navigator website, and Caldwell of Marin Sun Printing. They are about to start a new weekly newspaper in West Marin.

Debuting Friday, June 1, will be The West Marin Pilot. At least that is its tentative name. The public will be asked to submit suggestions for the final name. Hack said the first issue will be an eight-page introductory copy. Each week from July 1 on, it will be published full size and sell for $1 a copy.

Former Light editor Jim Kravets of Fairfax (left) will edit the weekly. Former Light advertising representative Sandy Duveen of Woodacre will sell advertisng.

Caldwell told me Kravets and Duveen will both share in the ownership. Like Caldwell, both of them have had a hard time collecting thousands of dollars Plotkin owes them.

As for The Navigator’s Hack, Plotkin is suing him and me for Hack’s letting me post items on his Sonoma County website. Plotkin has claimed that the postings violated The Light’s sales agreement in which I agreed not to work for another Marin County newspaper.

In a ruling that defies common sense — and presumably the law — Marin Superior Court Judge Jack Sutro last fall ruled a Sonoma County website is the same as a Marin County newspaper and ordered me to stop posting on it. That ruling is now before an appeals court.

Also planning to work for The Pilot are: Missy Patterson of Point Reyes Station, who for 25 years has handled the front desk at The Light; former Light historian Dewey Livingston of Inverness, who used to contribute West Marin’s Past; feature writer Ellen Shehadeh of Inverness, who had been a frequent contributor to The Light; obituary writer Larken Bradley of San Rafael, who had won a variety of state and national journalism awards while at The Light; and Charlie Morgan of Inverness Park, who covers sports events for KWMR, will be the sports writer.

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Caldwell told me The Pilot is still deciding where to have its office and might even move into the Creamery Building, where The Light is also located. As Duveen (right) remarked with a laugh: “That would be a hoot.”

Tomales cartoonist Kathryn LeMieux drew an enthusiastic crowd to Bodega Landmark Gallery in the town of Bodega Saturday when she opened a two-week exhibit of her surrealistic and often-whimsical oil paintings.

The final days are this Friday through Monday.

Not surprisingly, two of her favorite subjects — cows (such as Moonrise Over Tomales seen here, copyright K. LeMieux) and the California Mermaids — not only attracted the most attention but also the most buyers.

West Marin residents who read Feral West on The Bodega Bay Navigator website or read it for 10 years in The Point Reyes Light are familiar with two of her California Mermaids, Fera with her pet shark Fluffy, and Lana with her cigar and cocktail glass.

copyright K. LeMieux

For this exhibit, Kathryn added some unfamiliar and even more voluptuous mermaids, rendering them in a painterly, rather than cartoon, style.

Although Mavis the cow was missing, Kathryn’s paintings of cows jamming the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge (copyright K. LeMieux) and grazing around Point Reyes Station’s old, brick Grandi Building were on display and selling.

Kathryn claims Mavis the cow is her alter ego in Feral West, but many of us, including her husband Don Armstrong, believe she’s really a California Mermaid — as the photo below, which I took of her at the Marshall Store, would tend to confirm.

Kathryn, along with five other women cartoonists, also draws the nationally syndicated cartoon Six Chix for King Features. The strip formerly appeared in The Press Democrat and now appears on SFGate.com if you go to this link.
Other websites around the country also buy Six Chix from King Features, which has created a subscriber service “with perks,” Kathryn noted. One of the perquisites is that readers who miss seeing the cartoon in print can have it delivered by email to their computer daily. In addition, they can call up past installments of the cartoon.

Since the cartoonists get a cut of what King Features sells, drawing for online readers is becoming an increasingly significant part of their income, Kathryn told me.

More Internet news: Horizon Cable, which provides television, FM radio, and Internet service to more than 1,200 homes and businesses in Point Reyes Station and Olema, Inverness and Inverness Park, Dillon Beach and Stinson Beach (as well as roughly 375 customers in Novato) has moved its headquarters from Novato to the Farm Bureau building in Point Reyes Station.

Like many other Horizon customers, I was without Internet service for extended periods last week, but the outages were not related to the move. Susan Daniels of Fairfax, who with her husband Kevin owns Horizon, on Tuesday told me Horizon is in the midst of a major upgrade. “Every active component in the system will be changed,” she said, explaining this will increase the system’s bandwidth. Along with this will come improved Internet service, high-definition television, and more channels, she added.

This being West Marin, however, not everything that recently interrupted Horizon’s Internet service can be blamed on its being upgraded. On Monday night, a PG&E transformer exploded near the Red Barn in Point Reyes Station. Only a handful of nearby customers lost power, but one of them happened to be the Horizon cable system headquartered next door. It was down for several hours.

Indeed, there has always been a wild-west aspect to providing West Marin with a cable system. The original system, West Marin Cable, was created strictly to improve television reception. John Robbins, then of Inverness, began the system in 1983 and sold it to Kevin and Susan in 1991. John’s was not an entirely conventional system.

Creating a viable cable system for such sparsely populated towns as West Marin’s was daunting. Sometimes John had to string cable on power poles for more than a mile to reach just one ranch. In awkward locations, John had to string his cable on barbed-wire fences.

Horizon Cable office manager Andrea Clark fields the calls when customers need help. Her motherly manner makes it difficult for most of us, even when frustrated, to get annoyed with her. Owner Susan Daniels and system technician Jim Townsend standing behind behind Andrea say major improvements to Horizon’s television and Internet services are being implemented now that the company has relocated its office to Point Reyes Station in the center of its service area.

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John had been building the Stinson Beach part of his system when he sold West Marin Cable to Horizon. As it happened, county supervisors had issued John a cable franchise for Stinson Beach, but Seadrift subdivision developer Don Beacock had his own deal with Wonder Cable, which at the time served Bolinas.

Horizon had no sooner taken over the system when something like the Oklahoma Land Rush began on Seadrift Spit. Within the subdivision, cables had to be buried. Both Horizon and Wonder showed up with trenching equipment, and “it was a race for the spit,” Susan recalled, with each company trying to lay claim to the land first. With two cable companies digging parallel trenches on opposite sides of Seadrift’s roads, county supervisors intervened and ruled that Horizon’s franchise for Stinson Beach was communitywide.

That sort of cable conflict, however, pales in comparison to what is currently happening in the former Soviet Republic of Estonia.

For those of you who don’t follow politics in the Baltics, you should realize that at this moment a new and economically crippling form of warfare is being waged by Russia. It’s serious enough that the May 12-18 Economist warns that stopping the assault “is not yet NATO’s job, but it may be soon.”

As Britain’s Economist explains, “For a small, high-tech country such as Estonia, the Internet is vital. But for the past two weeks, Estonia’s state websites (and some private ones) have been hit by ‘denial of service’ attacks, in which a target site is bombarded with so many bogus requests for information that it crashes.

“The Internet warfare broke out … amid a furious row between Estonia and Russia over the removal of a Soviet war monument from the centre of the capital, Tallinn, to a military cemetery.

“The move sparked rioting and looting by several thousand protesters from large population of ethnic Russians, who tend to see the statue as a cherished memorial to a wartime sacrifice. Estonians mostly see it rather as a symbol of a hated foreign occupation.”

The attack, which is sabotaging Estonia’s Internet commerce, as well as government operations, was initially launched by computers traceable to the government of (Ras?)Putin (seen here in an Economist photo). But the assault has now been taken over by sympathetic supporters, some of whom plant viruses in other people’s computers so that innocent users unknowingly help sabotage Estonian institutions.

The assault would be called an “act of war” if carried out with a missile instead with computers, one senior NATO official told The Economist. NATO and the US have rushed observers to Estonia to figure out how a country can fend off such an attack.

In the meantime, “the best defence is to have strong networks of servers in many countries,” a Finnish expert is quoted as saying.