A 79-year-old bicyclist from Terra Linda, David Hauer, died at approximately 12:25 p.m. Friday in Inverness Park when he fell against the passenger side of a passing pickup truck driven by Juan Rubio, 52, of Marshall. Both the truck and the bicycle were eastbound on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard.

“The preliminary investigation revealed that as Mr. Rubio was passing the bicyclist at a slow speed, the bicyclist began to lose control of his bicycle for unknown reasons,” the Highway Patrol later reported.

“It appears that the bicyclist fell to his left and under the pickup truck where he was struck by the rear wheel of the pickup.”

The victim covered with a yellow plastic sheet remained in the roadway long after the accident.

The impact cracked Hauer’s helmet, and he received major head injuries. The accident occurred next to the parking area for Perry’s Inverness Park Store and the Busy Bee Bakery. Gail “Shorty” Coppinger, who works at the store, and a friend attempted without success to resuscitate Hauer.

Then “paramedics arrived on scene and after attending to the bicyclist determined he suffered fatal injuries,” the Highway Patrol noted.

“Mr. Rubio (right) heard the collision and immediately stopped to see what had happened,” the Highway Patrol added. Rubio said he did not see what caused Hauer to fall over.

Two other bicyclists (at right) were riding with Hauer, but they were ahead of him and did not see the accident, they said, but described the victim as “an experienced rider.” Hauer’s bicycle (seen here) was not damaged in the accident.

Rubio, a Highway Patrol officer, and one of Hauer’s companions together inspect where the truck was scraped when the bicyclist fell.

The Highway Patrol and the Coroner’s Office each conducted its own investigation, and “both lanes of Sir Francis Drake Boulevard were closed for approximately three hours while the collision was investigated,” the CHP reported.

Because few roadways in West Marin have paved shoulders, let alone bicycle lanes, even some experienced bicyclists have become wary of riding on local thoroughfares. A nearby resident who stood watching the scene, his car stuck in the traffic jam, noted he and his wife no longer ride their bicycles here, fearing an accident such as this could happen to one of them.

She’ll be missed. Thursday was the last day of February, which also meant it was Kathy Runnion’s last day working in the Point Reyes Station Post Office. With the Postal Service eliminating employees, closing post offices, and stopping Saturday deliveries to save money, Kathy accepted an early retirement offer.

Kathy on Thursday said her goodbyes while serving refreshments in the post office’s lobby. One of the reasons for doing so was to assure postal customers she was in good spirits and hadn’t “gone postal,” she joked. With her are Oscar Gamez from Toby’s Feed Barn (at left) and David Briggs from The Point Reyes Light (at center).

Kathy, who lives in Inverness Park, worked 24 years for the Postal Service, 14 years as a clerk in the Point Reyes Station Post Office, four in the Bolinas Post Office, and one in the Inverness Post Office plus five years as a rural carrier in Glen Ellen.

It’s not that Kathy had been angling for early retirement. Seated at a Toby’s Feed Barn table near the post office, Kathy (at right) in November 2011 distributed American Postal Workers Union literature. The flyers urged the public to back a congressional measure, House Bill 1351, so that the Postal Service would be saved rather than savaged.

“The problem,” the APWU explained, “is that a bill passed in 2006 is pushing the Postal Service into bankruptcy. The law imposes a burden on the USPS that no other government agency or private company bears. It requires the Postal Service to pay a 75-year liability in just 10 years to ‘pre-fund’ healthcare benefits for future retirees. The $20 billion in postal losses you heard about doesn’t stem from the mail but rather from [the] congressional mandate.”

Unfortunately, Congress as usual wasn’t up to protecting the public interest once politics got involved.

Another lost cause. Kathy (right) in May 2008 joined other West Marin residents in trying to dissuade the Vedanta Society from letting the Point Reyes National Seashore use Vedanta property as a staging area for slaughtering a herd of fallow deer. Estol T. Carte (center), the Vedanta Society’s president, listened to the polite group of demonstrators but promised nothing and delivered just that.

US Senator Dianne Feinstein, then-Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey, then-Lt. Governor John Garamendi, famed zoologist Jane Goodall, and the senior vice president of the Humane Society of the United States, John Grandy, PhD, were likewise on record as opposing the impending slaughter, but the Park Service was out for blood.

Nearly all the fallow and axis deer in the park were gone within months despite recent assurances from the National Seashore that the killing would be carried out over 11 years, which would allow time to take another look at whether to get rid of all the exotic deer. It was one more frustrating flip-flop by the Park Service, which in 1974 had insisted the deer belonged in the National Seashore because they were “an important source of visitor enjoyment.”

Kathy feeding denizens of a Planned Feralhood enclosed shelter at a Nicasio barn.

Retiring from the Postal Service will not take Kathy out of the public eye, however. For 12 years she has headed Planned Feralhood, an organization that traps and spays or neuters feral cats.

More than 700 of them have been adopted for pets. Some of those which could not be domesticated were let loose but with feeding sites established so they don’t have to fight over scraps of food and garbage. Others are being cared for in Planned Feralhood shelters.

Planned Feralhood recently became a non-profit corporation after operating for years under the fiscal umbrella of other nonprofits. Donations can be sent to Box 502, Point Reyes Station, CA 94956.

Two gray foxes basking in the sun as seen from a rear window of the Point Reyes Station Post Office. The foxes are on the roof of a shed that’s part of Toby’s Feed Barn and adjoins the Building Supply Center’s lumberyard.

In December 2009, I was at home one morning when I got a call from Kathy at the post office. I’d probably like to get a photo of a pair of foxes sleeping just outside a post office window, she said. I grabbed my camera and rushed into town, managing to get there in time to record the scene.

Two days before she retired, I received a similar message from her: “I’ve got a downtown wildlife story for you that needs investigation.” Naturally, I asked what was up. Kathy said she had seen some kind of hawk, although not a red-tailed or a red-shouldered hawk, walking on the cement floor just inside the Feed Barn next door.

People were at the coffee bar in the entranceway, but they didn’t seem to worry the hawk, which was surprising because hawks tend to avoid humans. Kathy added that all the small birds that used to nest among the rafters of the Feed Barn had disappeared.

I asked Feed Barn owner Chris Giacomini about this, and he confirmed the birds had disappeared, but he didn’t know about the hawk. It seems a hawk had discovered good hunting at Highway 1 and Second Street. All the pigeons that used to perch on top of the Grandi Building also disappeared for awhile, Kathy told me, but a few have returned.

With Kathy’s retirement from the post office, Point Reyes Station is losing not only a first-rate postal clerk but also a first-rate observer of the wildlife to be found in the town’s commercial strip.

Less than seven months have passed since our jubilation at the historic events of August 5, 2012, and yet most folks seem to have almost forgotten about them.

No, I’m not talking about the 100th anniversary of Tomales High’s opening. Yes, the school did open on August 5, 1912. And, yes, Tomales Regional History Center on August 5, 2012, (which conveniently fell on a Sunday) held a lively reception for a new exhibit on the school’s evolution. None of that will ever be forgotten.

What seems to be fading from memory are the events that occurred a few hours after the History Center’s reception had ended. NASA scientists endured what they called “seven minutes of terror” and gently landed an automobile-size robot called Curiosity Rover on the planet Mars.

Mars is a mere 154 million miles away as the crow flies. The spacecraft carrying Curiosity, however, took a circuitous route, so the trip expanded to 350 million miles and took eight months.

Back in August, Curiosity’s landing on Mars was news around the globe, but that news cycle is long gone. Nowadays, the press rarely reports on NASA’s curious robot. Nonetheless, Curiosity is still up there, and it’s doing stuff even more significant than landing gently.

Of late, the rover has been drilling holes in Martian rocks. It is now analyzing bits of ground-up rock to learn what Mars is made of.

Photos in this posting are from NASA/Jet Propulsion Lab-Caltech/MSSS

Curiosity Rover’s self-portrait at what NASA has named the “John Klein” drilling site. The picture is a “mosaic” of dozens of exposures taken on February 3.

“The rover’s robotic arm is not visible in the mosaic,” NASA explains. The camera “which took the component images for this mosaic is mounted on a turret at the end of [the] arm.”

“The rover’s drill in action on Feb. 8, 2013, Curiosity’s 182nd Martian day of operations,” NASA says. “This was the first use of the drill for rock-sample collection. The target was a rock called ‘John Klein,’ in the Yellowknife Bay region of Gale Crater.”

Why does NASA call the rock outcropping “John Klein?” The Los Angeles Times’ answer: “The drilled rock is named John Klein after a deputy principal investigator for the [Mars] mission who died in 2011.”

As for the “Gale” of crater fame, that would be Walter Frederick Gale, an amateur astronomer from Sydney, Australia, who observed Mars in the late 1800s.

Yellowknife Bay, meanwhile, takes its name from the small city of  Yellowknife on the shore of Great Slave Lake in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Last August, Curiosity chief scientist John Grotzinger of Caltech sipposedly gave this explanation for why a chunk of Martian landscape had been given the name Yellowknife Bay: “If you ask, ‘What is the port of call you leave from to go on the great missions of geological mapping to the oldest rocks in North America?’ It’s Yellowknife.”

The “Slave” in Great Slave Lake, by the way, has nothing to do with slavery. It refers to the Slavey people, a tribe indigenous to the area who nowadays usually call themselves Dene. The “Yellowknife,” who gave their name to the area, were a local tribe of Dene. Using copper from deposits near the Arctic Coast, the tribe made knifes and various tools to trade with outsiders.

Drilling a hole in Mars. To satisfy your Curiosity, I should note the hole is 0.63 inches (1.6 centimeters) in diameter and 2.5 inches (6.4 centimeters) deep.

This, says NASA, is “where the rover conducted its first sample drilling on Mars…. Several preparatory activities with the drill preceded this operation, including a test that produced the shallower hole on the right two days earlier. The deeper hole resulted from the first use of the drill for rock-sample collection.”

A handful of dust.

Here, NASA reports, is “the first sample of powdered rock extracted by the rover’s drill. The image was taken after the sample was transferred from the drill to the rover’s scoop.

“In planned subsequent steps, the sample will be sieved, and portions of it delivered to the ‘Chemistry and Mineralogy’ instrument and the ‘Sample Analysis at Mars’ instrument.” The instruments are, of course, onboard the robot.

Mars takes its name from ancient Rome’s god of war. The planet looks red because of iron oxide on its surface, so I guess it was reasonable to name it after the god of bloodshed. Curiosity’s drilling, however, has determined that Mars’ red color is only superficial. The planet isn’t rusty below its surface.

During the 1930s, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena established the antecedents for what would become NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Eighty years later, engineers at that lab are giving orders to a robot that’s on a planet 154 million miles away and all the while getting back scientific data. Of all the mind-boggling accomplishments of California’s current technology, operating an automobile-size, multi-talented robot as it carries out various tasks here and there around Mars would seem to top the list.

These are the eight presently accepted “planets” in our solar system, but that can always change. When I was growing up, Pluto was a ninth planet, but it got kicked out of the club in 2006 for being too small (about a third the volume of our moon). It is now dismissed as a “dwarf planet.” For the most part, Pluto’s orbit is outside Neptune’s. Its orbit, however, has been called “eccentric” because every so once in awhile Pluto gets closer to the sun than Neptune.

I gather that Curiosity’s analysis of the John Klein rock is turning up pretty much the same old minerals we have here on earth. No one, therefore, is likely to spend any money trying to strip mine the red planet. I’m sure extra-terrestrial environmentalists are pleased.

Of course, if NASA could manage to bring a bunch of martian rocks back to earth, they probably could be auctioned off for enough to finance a future mission to Mars.

Getting a robotic “rover” named Curiosity to Gale Crater took eight years of preparation and $2.5 billion. In comparison, the war in Afghanistan has been costing well over $2.5 billion every three days. This country would be in far better economic health if its rockets had been trained on outer space and not the Middle East.

Actress Meryl Streep is reported to have said, “It was the greatest night of my life.” A bit of how that night in November 2011 looked can now be seen thanks to The Atlantic Monthly. The magazine a week ago put online a 22-minute documentary, Lil’ Buck Goes to China, which was directed by Ole Schell, who grew up in Bolinas and now lives in Manhattan.

Ole’s documentary follows Lil’ Buck, a street dancer from Memphis where he had briefly been a gang member, as he travels from storm-sewer gates along the Los Angeles River to the Great Wall of China and Tiananmen Square. Ms. Streep and the world-famous cellist Yo-Yo Ma appear in supporting roles.

All this is extremely convoluted, so please pay close attention.

Ole Schell, the son of highly accomplished parents, has begun racking up his own accomplishments. In 2010, his full-length documentary on the exploitation of fashion models, Picture Me, debuted in theaters on both side of the Atlantic.

Ole, 38, is the son of Ilka Hartmann of Bolinas. Ilka is a native of Germany, who as a small girl during World War II barely survived the fire bombing of Hamburg. She came to the United States in 1964. Ilka has taught classes on the Holocaust and on German literature at Sonoma State University, but she is best known for her documentary photographs of the Black Panthers, the anti-War Movement, the United Farm Workers, the 1969-71 American Indian occupation of Alcatraz, and other social causes.

Ole’s father is China scholar Orville Schell of Berkeley, where he formerly was dean of the University of California’s Graduate School of Journalism. Previously a resident of Bolinas, he authored The Town that Fought to Save Itself (with photos by his then-wife Ilka) and was once a partner with rancher Bill Niman, raising cattle and hogs in a humane and environmentally sound fashion. He is currently Director of the Center on US-China Relations at the Asia Society. We’ll get back to that in a moment.

The subject of Ole’s film could not be more unlikely. Lil’ Buck performs a Memphis version of hip-hop known as jookin’. The dance style originated in the late 1980s, says Ole, but it never caught on in the rest of the country. In jookin’, the top of the dancer’s body remains stiff while the legs are fluid, moving almost like water, Ole explains.

Performing along with Lil’ Buck at the National Performing Arts Center in Beijing, Meryl Streep recites a Chinese poem in English accompanied by Yo-Yo Ma on the cello. Although of Chinese descent, Ma was born in France and moved to New York with his family when he was five. The concert was part of a Forum on Arts and Culture organized by the Asia Society’s Center on US-China Relations, of which Ole’s father is director.

Lil’ Buck jookin’ beside the Los Angeles River at the beginning of the film.

In Ole’s documentary, Charles “Lil’ Buck” Riley says that some of his friends in Memphis have been incarcerated; some still are; some have been killed by police and some others in shootouts. In escaping from street life, Lil’ Buck says, he told himself, “I got this gift [as a dancer], and I gotta do something with it.” So he did and eventually studied classical ballet.

A former principal dancer with the New York Ballet, Damian Woetzel, took Lil’ Buck under his wing, and during a party in Los Angeles, Woetzel introduced him to Yo-Yo Ma. With Ma playing the cello, Lil’ Buck then danced to Saint-Saens’ The Swan. The performance was videoed, and millions later watched it on YouTube.

By coincidence, the concert in Beijing was organized by the Chinese musician Wu Tong and by Ma. The cellest, because of his experience playing with Lil’ Buck a year earlier, quickly agreed when the suggestion was made to include the street dancer in the concert, Ole said. During the concert, Lil’ Buck again dances as Ma performs The Swan and then performs an impromptu dance during Ma’s final number.

Ole films an interview with Lil’ Buck, who says of his dance style, “I get motivation and inspiration watching water and seeing how smooth it is.”

Dancing at Tiananmen Square. “I’m the only black person in a hundred-mile radius,” he says with a laugh.

Like the woman at left with her camera, many Chinese citizens were surprised and amused by Lil’ Buck’s impromptu dances. One couple is so intrigued they take turns posing for photos with him. He so delights one street vendor that she begins dancing beside him. Lil’ Buck’s public dancing encountered no problems except when he danced too close to the late Mao Zedong’s turf at Tiananmen Square and guards hustled him away, Ole told me.

Jookin’ at the Great Wall of China. On the drive there, Lil’ Buck comments to Ole, “I understand this Wall of China is an old-ass wall. I don’t know anything [about it] other than that.”

Lil’ Buck says none of his friends or relatives has ever been to the Great Wall, or Asia, for that matter. In fact, he adds, he is the first person in his family to ever leave the United States.

World politics are clearly not Lil’ Buck’s cup of tea. “What do you know about communism?” Ole asks him at one point. “Communism?” replies Lil’ Buck. “China’s a communist country,” Ole says. “So I’ve heard,” is Lil’ Buck’s only response.

You can watch Lil’ Buck Goes to China by clicking here. Or you can see the documentary, as well as an interview with Ole about making the movie, by clicking here. The film has already been shown at the Oldenburg Film Fest in Germany and the New Orleans Timecode Film Festival.

Lil’ Buck, meanwhile, has now spent six months touring the world with the singer Madonna and has appeared in magazines and on billboards as part of a Gap stores advertising campaign. The Wall Street Journal is currently preparing a story about him, and on Thursday, Feb. 21, he will be on the Colbert Report.

As was noted when I began this perspicacious series six years ago, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen (1916-97) once wrote that he kept a file of items to use whenever he had space, so I began keeping a similar file, which I labeled “Quotes Worth Saving.” Here is the latest installment from it:

“A list of things that Americans judge more favorably than Congress, according to Public Policy Polling, a survey firm, includes colonoscopies, root canals, lice and France.” The Economist, Jan. 19, 2013

“‘If you want to see my penis, you’ll have to fly to Britain.’ Ewan McGregor in Premiere magazine about a full-frontal scene in the forthcoming ‘Young Adam,’ which was cut out of the American versions of the movie.”  San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 5, 2003

We interrupt this program for an update on non-human animals. This Red-shouldered hawk was seen at Mitchell cabin on Sunday, Jan. 20.

“A very well-placed San Francisco city commissioner just had his lively little daughter bounced out of a very prim Catholic elementary school. Her crime? Calling one of the nuns ‘Mister Sister.'” San Francisco Chronicle Feb. 20, 2011

“From a description of a 20-minute videotape of activity outside of bars in Hoboken, New Jersey. The video was shot in April by police in support of a proposed ordinance prohibiting local bars from admitting patrons after 1 a.m. A man is leaning against the wall of a bar drinking. Next to him, a friend is undressing. Two men leave a bar fighting. Two men enter a bar fighting. A young man and woman lean against a fence and begin kissing passionately. Another woman taps the man on the shoulder. He leaves and she takes over for him. A woman leans on her boyfriend and vomits. A woman urinates beside a parked car as her boyfriend acts as a lookout. A man and woman walk down an alley together in zigzag patterns. Eventually they walk into a brick wall.” Harper’s Magazine, September 1994

A Red-shouldered hawk along the levee road near White House Pool, which I photographed during a full moon back in 1985. Here is how the photo, unfortunately straddling the newspaper’s fold, appeared in The Point Reyes Light.

“After two days of testimony, a jury in Lake County, Ill., has convicted a woman who was painting her nails while driving when she struck and killed a motorcyclist at a red light. Lora Hunt of Morris Ill., was found guilty of reckless homicide in the death of Anita Zaffwe in Lake Zurich, Ill., on May 2, 2009.” San Francisco Chronicle May 7, 2010

“As psychologist Robert Leahy points out: the average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.” Slate magazine, Jan. 31, 2011

“The sexual epithet beaming from the electronic billboard at the Marin County Civic Center was so alarming that at least one startled motorist called 911 early Sunday morning: ‘F–k! F–k! F–k!’ Somebody hacked the billboard after breaking a door and cracking a keyboard code, according to Jim Farley, head of the Cultural Services Department, which oversees the sign advertising Marin Center events. ‘They ripped open the door in the middle of the night, cracked the code and reprogrammed the message on the sign,’ Farley said. ‘It took brute force and computer skills….’ Chris Haeuser, Marin Center box office manager, ….speculated the caper was the work of teenagers, noting that adults might have caused more mischief by posting a message saying something like ‘Golden Gate Bridge closed.'” Marin Independent Journal, July 26, 2011

“Police Commissioner Jamie Slaughter is married to Stacy Slaughter, vice president of communications for the San Francisco Giants, so baseball is a constant topic in the house. Slaughter says this week his son asked him if he knew what day it was. Dad was expecting to hear it was the first day of winter break, but no. ‘Position players report to Spring Training,’ 8-year-old Ben said.” San Francisco Chronicle, Feb. 19, 2011

A bobcat hunting gophers outside my kitchen window on Tuesday, Jan. 22.

“MARION, Ala. Members of two feuding families were in jail Tuesday after years of quarreling erupted into a small-town riot in which 150 screaming people hurled rocks and tools and even struck the police chief. Five men named either Moore or Sawyer and several juveniles were arrested on assault charges after Monday’s violence, said District Attorney Michael Jackson. Authorities said a 2- or 3-year-old dispute between the two families prompted a melee that eventually swelled out of control to include friends and gang members. It wasn’t immediately clear why the families didn’t get along.” Associated Press, Aug. 8, 2009

From an obituary for political activist Joseph Cannon Houghteling: “He had a wry sense of humor, [his wife] said, and got a kick out of the thought of someday having his ashes thrown upwind from a boat so that his remains would blow back into the eyes of his mourners, forcing them to shed a tear.” San Francisco Chronicle, June 28, 2009

“At the same time he was selling US secrets to the Soviet Union, former FBI special agent Robert Philip Hanssen was a key supervisor in a 1980s domestic-spying program…. The program, which lasted for more than a decade, monitored peace and anti-nuclear activists and other groups that the White House worried could be manipulated by Soviet propaganda…. As a result, the FBI invested thousands of hours collecting political intelligence, [and in one] instance it warned that Philadelphia was ripe for Soviet infiltration.” Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2001

I’ll finish with a highly educational news story. The marching band director for the University of California at Davis, Tom Slabaugh, complained in a memo to school officials that “on the band’s fall retreat in 2007, four drunken band members were caught urinating in a dormitory elevator, and at band practice the next day, four others took their uniform pants down and simulated the incident for a photographer. At outdoor rehearsals, male members dropped their pants to get a laugh while women sometimes stripped to their bras, he wrote, and one evening practice was disrupted when a bass drummer began performing lap dances…. In his memo and in meetings, Slabaugh urged UC Davis to give him the power to remove bad actors from the [student-run] band.” San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 6, 2008

In his 1938 novel Scoop, the British writer Evelyn Waugh portrays a young journalist sent by a London newspaper, The Daily Beast, to cover a civil war that’s brewing in the fictional African country of Ishmaelia. (Tina Brown, by the way, took the name for her news-aggregator website The Daily Beast from the novel.)

Evelyn Waugh (left), 1903-66.

Scoop, which is based on Waugh’s own experience writing for London’s Daily Mail, satirizes the foreign correspondents who rush to wherever big news is supposed to be happening.

Even if they find nothing much going on, they still must satisfy their editors by filing stories, so they create news, Waugh suggests.

One of the book’s more colorful characters, Wenlock Jakes, provides a facetious example of what can happen. The character is based on Chicago Daily News correspondent John Gunther (1901-70). As another character comments, “When [Jakes] turns up in a place, you can bet your life that as long as he’s there it’ll be the news center of the world.

“Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong [train] station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand-word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window.

“Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special [correspondent] in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough, but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too.

“Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny, and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the press for you.”

One of the best-known newspaper correspondents of all time was Sir Henry Morton Stanley, who was born in Wales, emigrated to the United States, and ultimately settled in England.

Henry Stanley (right). Drawing from my own copy of Allgemeine Illustrirte Zeitung, 1877.

Although Stanley was a courageous newsman and explorer who faced down danger in the Ottoman Empire and various parts of Africa, he is best known for one utterance.

In 1869, The New York Herald sent Stanley to find Dr. David Livingstone, a Scots missionary and explorer, who disappeared for six years in Africa while looking for the source of the Nile River.

When Stanley found Livingstone in a village on the shore of Lake Tanganyika in 1871, there were no other white men for hundreds of miles around, which presumably inspired the journalist’s tongue-in-cheek, formal-English greeting: “Dr. Livingstone, I presume.”

Gun controlled.

Point Reyes Station residents can set their watches by a loud, recorded moo from the top of the Old Western Saloon at noon and 5 p.m. daily. In Scotland, this gun at the top of Edinburgh Castle is fired at 1 p.m. every day but Sunday. The One O’Clock Gun allows “citizens and visitors to check their clocks and watches,” the castle’s website explains.

“The origin of the tradition lies in the days when sailing ships in the Firth of Forth were able to check and reset their chronometers in the days before accurate timepieces were available.” (For those of you not familiar with the Gaelic, a firth is an estuary, in this case of Scotland’s River Forth, Black River.)

Now here’s chance to test your Scottish brogue with a bit of Gaelic humor:

A wee Glesga wumman goes intae a butcher shop, where the butcher has just came oot the freezer, and is standing haunds ahint his back, with his erse aimed at an electric fire. The wee wumman checks oot the display case then asks, “Is that yer Ayrshire bacon?” “Naw,” replies the butcher. “It’s jist ma haun’s ah’m heatin’.”

Scots writer Alasdair Gray, whose wife’s resolute thrift saved their family more than $8,000.

More tidings from Scotland, as reported in the London Times Literary Supplement. Last year the Scots writer Alasdair Gray “refused the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year award for his book A Life of Pictures. Not to be outdone, the judges refused Mr. Gray’s refusal and sent him a cheque for £5,000.

“Mrs. Gray, refusing to believe what her husband had done, refused to accept his refusal of the judges’ refusal of his refusal, and cashed the check.” Such refusals are hardly new. In 1964, the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre refused the Nobel Prize for Literature on grounds it could change him and get him involved in East-West politics.

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (1917-2008).

I’ll close by noting that the late British science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke and I were alike in at least a couple of ways. As he once acknowledged: “I don’t believe in astrology; I’m a Sagittarius and we’re skeptical.”

The winter solstice came and went. Civilization obviously didn’t collapse on Friday even though millions of people around the world had been counting on it.

Jungle has risen up to reclaim what it can from Mayan civilization, as I witnessed for myself at Tikal, Guatemala, back in 1983 (above). Despite the deterioration of their buildings, the ancient Mayans, as of Saturday morning, were once again renowned for civil engineering rather than apocalyptic prognostication.

Superstitious people are easy targets for hoaxes. Witness the 39 Heavens Gate cultists who committed mass suicide in 1997. Their leader, Marshall Applewhite, had convinced them that by doing so they would get a ride in a supposed spaceship trailing the comet Hale-Bopp. Harder to explain are all the people worldwide who believed that civilization would collapse last Friday. Why? Because there were rumors that Mayans more than 1,000 years ago had predicted it.

Wait a minute! Mayan civilization itself collapsed before 900 AD. If the Mayans could look more than 1,200 years into the future, why couldn’t they have seen their own impending demise and avoided it? Significantly, today’s descendants of those ancient Mayans didn’t expect Armageddon last Friday, merely the start of a new era.

Fall’s finale. Sunset over Inverness Ridge.

Like a modern Mayan, I’m ready for the challenges of a new era. In these parts, that new era is called winter. The era began with heavy rain, strong wind, thunder, and lightning on Friday night. The house lights flickered but stayed on.

A curious blacktail doe at Mitchell cabin.

With the rains has come green grass, and an abundance of wildlife is showing up around the cabin. Along with wintering birds and a healthy supply deer, foxes, raccoons, squirrels, jackrabbits, tree frogs, and salamanders, there is evidence of a badger. It’s a zoo said a first-time visitor last week.

Keeping an eye on the does is a good-sized blacktail buck, who often drops by to graze before lying down to chew his cud.

A young raccoon watches me from a safe distance up a pine tree next to the cabin.

Social grooming. Youthful raccoons on my deck clean each other’s coat of insects, parasites, and anything grubby. This is done for not only hygiene and appearance but also as a way of bonding, of reinforcing relationships.

This was the advice our late President gave the public at Christmastime in 1950, but I don’t follow it. Sixty years ago, it may well have been just as thoughtful to give friends cigarettes at Christmas as to have fruitcakes mailed to them. But those were simpler times.

My partner Lynn Axelrod and I next to our Christmas tree.

We invited two people, including one visiting from overseas, to help trim our Christmas tree. The inter-nondenominational group included a non-practicing Jew, a non-practicing Muslim, a non-practicing Catholic, and a non-practicing Christian Scientist. Afterward we sat around the fire and sang Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Harry Belafonte songs. Plus a couple in Turkish with which I wasn’t familiar. In Mitchell cabin too, the yuletide is evolving.

What remains unchanged is the pleasure we get in extending Season’s Greeting to all of you. Merry Christmas! Heri za Kwanzaa! And a Happy New Year!

Shoreline School District’s departing superintendent, Steve Rosenthal, received a warm sendoff Friday in Tomales’ William Tell House restaurant and bar.

By grim coincidence, it was the same day a mentally ill young man shot to death 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, and that tragedy was on the minds of many of Rosenthal’s well-wishers.

Friday in Tomales, Steve Rosenthal received an etched-glass plaque honoring him for his 14 years as superintendent of Shoreline Unified School District. The guests included representatives of the district and the county schools office, as well as friends from the community.

School officials who arrived early at the party (from left): Jill Manning-Sartori, Shoreline School District trustee; Jane Realon, principal at Tomales Elementary and Bodega Bay schools; Tim Kehoe, president of Shoreline’s board of trustees; Jane Healy, trustee; Susan Skipp, Shoreline business manager; Penny Valentine, special education director for the county office of education; Steve Rosenthal, retiring superintendent; Adam Jennings, Tomales High’s principal; Nancy Neu, Shoreline’s incoming interim superintendent; and Matt Nagle, principal of West Marin-Inverness schools. Other trustees showed up later.

Shoreline, like school districts everywhere, has periodically had its problems, but compared with too many schools elsewhere, the district was almost idyllic during Rosenthal’s tenure. As it happened, the superintendent’s farewell party unfortunately coincided with not one but two attacks on school children.

In China’s Henan Province, a mentally ill man stabbed 22 grammar-school students as they arrived for classes. Most private citizens in China cannot own guns, so the attacker could only knife the children. All of them survived although seven had to be hospitalized. “No motive was given for the stabbings, which echo a string of similar assaults against [Chinese] schoolchildren in 2010 that killed nearly 20 and wounded more than 50 people,” the Huffington Post reported.

And you’ll recall that here in the Bay Area a former student killed seven people in a shooting rampage at a private Christian university in Oakland last April 2. A month earlier on Feb. 27, a gun-toting 17 year old killed two students and wounded two others in a Chardon, Ohio, school cafeteria.

In a 2008 shooting spree, a former student killed five students and wounded 18 others at Northern Illinois University, and just 10 months before those murders, a 23-year-old gunman killed 32 people in a Virginia Tech dormitory before killing himself. Even an Amish School in Pennsylvania was the scene of a mass shooting in 2006 when a 32-year-old man killed five girls and then himself.

Probably the most-infamous massacre at a US school in recent years occurred in April 1999 when two students killed 12 classmates and a teacher, as well as wounded 26 others, at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado.

A Newton Bee photo seen round the world shows students being kept in a conga line while being evacuated from Sandy Hook Elementary School.

Although he was also carrying two semi-automatic handguns, the killer, Adam Lanza, 20, shot his victims with an M-4 assault rifle designed for urban combat. Under current US law, civilians can buy such weapons, and apparently Lanza’s mother owned at least five. She also taught Adam how to fire them, supposedly to give him a sense of responsibility. Instead he took three of her guns and murdered her before heading to the school.

Among those Lanza shot to death at Sandy Hook School was principal Dawn Hochsprung, who heroically tried to overpower him. On Sunday a Republican congressman from Texas, Louie Gohmert, wildly claimed that what really went wrong was that Hochsprung didn’t have her own assault rifle to shoot it out with Lanza inside the school. Gohmert told Fox News he could imagine Lanza going down in a hail of Hochsprung’s gunfire: “She takes him out, takes his head off before he can kill those precious kids.”

Speaking more rationally, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-California), announced on Sunday that she will introduce legislation to restore the federal ban on assault weapons, which expired in 2004.

The Associated Press on Monday reported: “Gun control was a hot topic in the early 1990s, when Congress enacted a 10-year ban on assault weapons. But since that ban expired in 2004, few Americans have wanted stricter laws, and politicians say they don’t want to become targets of a powerful gun-rights lobby.”

AP, however, added that gun-control politics may now change. The National Rifle Association (NRA) eight years ago pressured supporters in Congress not to renew the ban on assault rifles. In the wake of the Sandy Hook School shooting, however, Senator Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat from West Virginia and a prominent gun-rights advocate, told MSNBC: “Never before have we seen our babies slaughtered. It’s never happened in America that I can recall, seeing this carnage….

“Anybody that’s a proud gun owner, a proud member of the NRA, they’re also proud parents, they’re proud grandparents. They understand this has changed where we go from here.”

Supt. Rosenthal said he will begin his retirement with a visit to his vacation home in Arizona. “It’s the only home I own,” he told me with a laugh. Many of us will miss him.

Rosenthal leaves a school district that is debating its future, especially how best to educate students from Spanish-speaking homes.

Many teachers, parents, and other community members disagree over what approach to take, but debate is central to the operation of a public school. It’s how school personnel and the community air opinions, warn of potential problems, and suggest solutions. But there are no crystal balls.

Sandy Hook Elementary thought it had taken all the proper security measures to keep students and staff safe; however, almost nothing could have protected them from a sociopath with an assault rifle who entered the school by shooting his way through a locked glass door.

The simultaneous merriment in Tomales and suffering in Connecticut last Friday once again demonstrated that even at schools that are well run, outside forces, good or bad, can sometimes determine whether all goes well.

A German word, schadenfreude, is steadily becoming more common in English. It means finding pleasure in the misfortune of someone else, and it’s pronounced just like it’s spelled. In the aftermath of last week’s election, Democrats, many commentators, and most pollsters can’t be blamed for indulging in a bit of schadenfreude.

Fox News used to claim that most of the other news media have a “liberal” bias. In the wake of last week’s election, the new complaint from Fox is that most of the news media have a “mainstream” bias.

The schadenfreude isn’t all in reaction to Mitt Romney, the plutocrat, having lost to the more-egalitarian Barack Obama, although Democrats were certainly delighted by their victory. Interestingly, much of the schadenfreude is in reaction to the humiliation of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. Unlike Romney, who conceded with grace, Fox News commentators have been apoplectic. Despite many polls to the contrary, they had insisted right up until the end that there was no way their man could lose.

(With Florida’s election results finally tallied, Obama as of Sunday evening had won the nationwide popular vote by a margin of almost 3.3 million votes out of 120 million cast. In the all-important Electoral College race, Obama trounced Romney 332 to 206.)

“It’s not a traditional America anymore,” Fox commentator Bill O’Reilly growled as the outcome became obvious, “and there are 50 percent of the voting public who want stuff…. People think they are entitled to things.” O’Reilly refused to acknowledge that convincing voters a Republican has what it takes to be President is no Tea Party.

“Could it be that the Fox model has played out?” asked columnist Jon Carroll in Friday’s San Francisco Chronicle. “Could it be that the lack of civility and grace, the embrace of the most extreme candidates as long as they were Republicans, indeed the whole idea behind [Fox News president] Roger Ailes’ brainchild, a pimping station for the far right, may be politically bankrupt?

“Perhaps not financially bankrupt; it seems supported by its advertisers very nicely. It could go on for quite some time. The question is: Is it hurting the very people it is supposed to be helping? Does the existence of this high-profile echo chamber deafen candidates to what the electorate is actually saying?”

General David Petraeus and his biographer Paula Broadwell. Photo by Command Sgt. Major Marvin L. Hill.

Only two days after last Tuesday’s election, CIA chief David Petraeus admitted he’d had an extramarital affair with his biographer and promptly resigned, acknowledging he had used “extremely poor judgment.”

As news media worldwide were quick to report, Broadwell and Gen. Petraeus had formerly spent time together far away from home in Middle East war zones. This has led to a popular tweet, I am told by a friend with a Twitter account, “Having sex with your biographer is unquestionably more fun than having sex with your autobiographer.”

Before leaving the Middle East, we might note a headline CBS used for an online account of a gruesome crime. It sounds as if the testimony will be riveting.

Finally, for those of you who refuse to believe that alligators and crocodiles live in sewers, such as New York City’s, here’s a crocodile caught after two years in a Gaza sewer. Al Jazeera photo.

“A crocodile that has been roaming the pipes of the sewer basins network in the besieged Gaza Strip has been captured, according to Brigadier General Mohammed Abu Sissi, a police officer,” Al Jazeera reported Nov. 5. Already there there had been word of the crocodile making forays out of the sewer long enough to snap up a couple of goats.

“‘We have been chasing the crocodile to catch it before it grows more and becomes a real threat for civilians. We have used all possibilities, including fishermen and civil defense men, to catch it alive. We could have sniped it, but we preferred to catch it alive and bring it back to the nearby zoo where it fled from,’ Abu Sissi said.”

Regarding the alligators in New York City’s sewers, most Americans have heard that the story is a classic urban legend. If so, how do skeptics explain all the alligators down there? I’ve lived in New York, and as everyone in the city knows, residents vacationed in Florida, brought small gators home as pets, got tired of them, and ultimately flushed them down the toilet.

Don’t believe it? In 1935 (this is true), an eight-foot alligator was captured in the sewer under East Harlem and pulled out of a manhole. Moreover, retired New York sewer official Teddy May in the 1950s (again this is true) told public utilities historian Harold Brunvand that he had actually seen one colony of alligators in the sewer system 20 years earlier and had his workers get rid of them.

Fox News is headquartered in New York City, and finding out how the alligators fared during Hurricane Sandy’s flooding of the sewers would seem like the perfect assignment for Bill O’Reilly.

After months of preparation, Tuesday was, politically speaking, D-Day. For awhile it seemed that almost anything could happen.

Republican-controlled legislatures in several states had made it more difficult for minorities and the aged to vote. Voting was chaotic in Florida, where the period for early voting had been greatly shortened. On Sunday, so many people waited, often unsuccessfully, at the Miami-Dade elections office to cast absentee ballots that some of them had their cars towed from a parking lot across the street. Yet Republican Governor Rick Scott refused to extend the hours for early voting.

“Democrats are traditionally more likely to vote early, which is why many in the party have ascribed political motives to Scott’s restriction of the process. According to a report in The Miami Herald on Saturday, Democrats were leading Republicans ‘by about 187,000 early in-person ballots cast’ as of that morning,” the Huffington Post had noted a day earlier.

Meanwhile, blacks in Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida were receiving robocalls that falsely informed them they could vote by phone.

D-Day in West Marin. Photography is not allowed in California’s polling places if it would intimidate anyone from voting. Fortunately when I showed up during a lull at the Point Reyes Station polls, both women marking their ballots told election workers they had no objection to being photographed.

Listening all Tuesday evening to reports from the front must have been far harder on our commander in chief than it was on those of us whose main responsibility was to photograph a bit of the event. The Rupert Murdoch-controlled Wall Street Journal was predicting that our fight was lost. Reports from battles for bunkers in the Senate sounded encouraging, not so good for advances in the House.

Barack Hussein Obama was leading in the Electoral College, but Willard Mitt Romney was temporarily ahead in the popular vote. Anything seemed possible. Television kept telling us the outcome in key states was still too close to call. Periodically I had to tune it all out just to clear my head.

One hundred twenty-four years of happiness. Malia, 14, Michelle, 48, Sasha, 11, and Barack Obama, 51, celebrate his reelection as the 44th President of the United States. New York Times photo.

Suddenly television showed Obama supporters in Chicago cheering. The fight was over, and the country for the moment was again safe. It hadn’t been Romney himself that had me worried as much as the rightwing fanatics with whom he is now allied. Can you imagine Paul Ryan a heartbeat away from the presidency?

Apparently Congressman Ryan had trouble imagining that too, for he kept on campaigning for his current seat in the House of Representatives while separately running for the Vice Presidency. He realized the likelihood of his being elected to serve as Vice President of the United States for four years was less certain than the likelihood of his being reelected to represent southeast Wisconsin in the House for two more years.

Obama carried California by more than a million votes and Marin County with 73.93 percent of the vote.

Democrat Dianne Feinstein, 79, (right), who has already represented California in the US Senate for 20 years, won easy reelection for another six.

Measure A, which had been supported in West Marin by Marin Agricultural Land Trust (MALT), as well as many individual ranchers and conservationists, won countywide with 73.6 percent of the vote. The quarter-cent sales tax to support parks and open space needed a two-thirds majority.

Measure C, an eight-year extension of a $184.70 parcel tax to maintain and improve Shoreline School District, won with 76.8 percent of the vote. It also needed a two-thirds majority for passage.

Measure E, which would have authorized a $49 parcel tax in Bolinas for maintaining Mesa Park, lost despite getting 65.44 percent of the vote. It needed 66.66 percent for passage but fell short by 1.22 percent.

Measure F, which merely allows the Stinson Beach Fire Protection District to keep all the tax revenue it collects, won with 64.6 percent. It needed only a simple majority for passage.

Stinson Beach Water District elected three directors: Barbara Boucke, 239 votes (29.33 percent), Sandra Cross, 233 votes (28.59 percent), and Marius E. Nelsen, 195 votes (23.93 percent). The losers were: Terry Bryant, 78 votes (9.57 percent) and G. Scott Tye, 63 votes (7.73 percent).

House of Representatives: Democrat Jared Huffman appears well ahead of Republican Daniel Roberts, winning 76.59 percent to 23.41 percent in Marin County. That’s a 43,247-vote margin. The 2nd Congressional District runs from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Oregon border, however, so results are not yet in from all northern counties.

State Assembly: Democrat Marc Levine beat Democrat Michael Allen by 2,131 votes in Marin County and trailed him by 468 votes in Sonoma County, giving Levine a 1,663-vote margin of victory.

There have been some odd returns around the country this election season. In August, residents of Jacksons’ Gap, Alabama, decisively reelected Mayor Janice Canham even though she had died in July. This week, Texans reelected State Senator Mario Gallegos, a Democrat, although he died last month. Likewise Iowans reelected State Senator Pat Ward, a Republican, even though she too had died in October.

These unlikely results will now, of course, necessitate special elections, but at least they stand as a testament to the popularity of the deceased incumbents. Thank God Obama not only won reelection but is alive and well in the White House.