Writer Jonathan Rowe working at an open-air table in the front of Toby’s Coffee Bar in January 2008. I took the photo just after The Columbia Journalism Review published an article he had written about the ongoing faux pas of Robert Plotkin as publisher of The Point Reyes Light. He was now beginning a socio-economics commentary for Harpers.

Point Reyes Station writer Jonathan Rowe, 65, died unexpectedly Sunday morning after being taken to a hospital Saturday.

He leaves his wife Mary Jean Espulgar-Rowe and his son Joshua, a 3rd grader at West Marin School, both seen at right.

His was a life of achievements: in writing and editing for major publications; in Washington, DC, politics; and in helping guide civic affairs here in West Marin.

Mr. Rowe was a new member of the board of directors of the Marin Media Institute, which owns The Point Reyes Light.

A 15-year resident of West Marin, he was also known here as the host of KWMR’s America Offline program. Mr. Rowe’s being an on-air interviewer was especially impressive because he had a severe speech impediment while growing up but overcame it as an adult.

In addition, he co-founded the Tomales Bay Institute and its successor, the West Marin Commons project in Point Reyes Station.

He had been a contributing editor to The Washington Monthly and YES! magazines and had been a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor.

Mr. Rowe also contributed articles to Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Readers Digest, The Columbia Journalism Review, The Point Reyes Light, The West Marin Citizen, and many other publications.

Last year, he contributed a thoughtful essay, Fellow Conservatives, to the Fall 2010 issue of the West Marin Review. In the article, “conservative” is used in the sense of conserving both nature and community traditions.

A 1967 graduate of Harvard University, Mr. Rowe also earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1971. In the early 1970s, he was one of Ralph Nader’s “Raiders.”

He served on staffs in the House of Representatives and the Senate, where he was a long-time aide to US Senator Byron Dorgan (D-North Dakota). He also served on the staff of the Washington, DC, city council.

Mr. Rowe’s sudden death has shocked many of us. “I am grieving a lot myself like many of you,” wrote Elizabeth Barnet on the West Marin Soapbox website. “He was a mentor, a friend, an editor of my writing, an inspiring writer. We co-founded West Marin Commons.”

Jim Kravets, former editor of The Citizen and before that The Light, wrote that Mr. Rowe’s death is “an incalculable loss, absolutely devastating.”

Linda Petersen, advertising manager of The Citizen, wrote, “I counted Jonathan as a dear friend and mentor with a wonderful sense of humor. I would like to see his dream come true of a united community with one newspaper, which we talked about all the time. I will miss him terribly.”

Already, even before the cause of Mr. Rowe’s death has been made public, townspeople are talking of creating a memorial to him. A more civic-minded member of the community would be hard to find, and many of us are thinking of his family in this painful time.

Those interested in reading any of Mr. Rowe’s writings on a variety of topics can find them by clicking here.

With so many crises underway around the world, writing a less-than-grim posting about current events seems almost impossible. But that won’t stop me from trying.

As was first reported here four years ago, soot on the glass door of my woodstove sometimes creates an apparition of either Jesus or Moammar Khadafy. Back in 2007, I wasn’t sure which one, but with the the flames in my woodstove now resembling the fires burning throughout Libya, the ghostly image must be Khadafy’s.

By the way, Khadafy is fairly easy to write about because, as my friend Dave LaFontaine pointed out last week, it’s virtually impossible to misspell his name: Khadafy, Qaddafi, Qazzafi, Qadhdhafi, Qaththafi, Gaddafi etc.

The variety of spellings results from Arabic having letters and sounds that aren’t found in English, from differences between various dialects of Arabic, and from differing transliterations (the way words originally written in one language are written in another).

Members of Japan’s Self Defense Force hunt for survivors of Friday’s magnitude 9 earthquake and resulting tsunami. The disaster has killed more than 14 thousand people, destroyed ships, roads, buildings, and crops, and has caused explosions and fires at four nuclear reactors. Photo by Yoichi Hayashi of  Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper.

There is certainly nothing funny about the crisis in Japan, but some of the reporting on the disaster has sounded absurd.

Remember your high school English teacher warning you about misplaced modifiers? For example: Walking around a corner, a tall building came into view.

It’s an easy mistake to make, and India’s national daily newspaper, The Hindu, happened to make it last Saturday in reporting on the disasters in Japan: “The coastal city of Rikuzentakata in Iwate Prefecture was also devastated by a tsunami wave,” The Hindu reported.

“Traveling inbound at speeds upwards of 500 kilometres per hour, the city was completely engulfed.” That sounds like one fast-moving city.

The Ohio River four feet above flood stage in Pomeroy, Ohio. Photo by WSAZ.

Meanwhile, some areas in the United States, particularly along the Passaic and Raritan rivers in New Jersey and along the Ohio River in Ohio and Kentucky, have also been underwater this past week.

In Covington, Kentucky, the Ohio was so high that a riverside restaurant, the Waterfront, which is on a barge, pulled away from its moorings. “One cable remained in place and kept the restaurant from colliding with the Clay Wade Bailey Bridge,” Yahoo News reported.

The mishap required “everyone on board to be rescued using ladders and ropes for a makeshift gangplank,” Yahoo noted. Another news site, however, quoted a customer who seemed to be thinking of 1969 when an abundance of pollution in Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caused it to catch fire.

Said the diner, “I was so happy when we got wedged under the bridge, certainly saving us from the toxic waste and the fire.” Say what?

Amanda Weisal and John France on the Today Show.

And now for an update on the household dangers of Facebook. A Jan. 25 posting here described how Facebook led to a wife in Cleveland accusing her husband of bigamy.

As was revealed last August, the wife, Lynn France, had suspected her husband John was having an affair with another woman, Amanda Weisal, so she logged onto Facebook and typed in Weisal’s name. Not only did she find photos of her husband with Weisal, the pictures showed the two of them getting married.

My posting about Facebook went on to discuss the case of Craig Carlos-Valentino (right).

Last November, the 51-year-old Antioch man halted westbound traffic on the Oakland Bay Bridge for an hour when he stopped in the slow lane and told officers via a cell phone that he was armed with guns and explosives.

Carlos-Valentino also threatened to jump off the bridge. Eventually he surrendered to authorities. No explosives or guns were found in his car, and his 16-year-old daughter, who had also been in the car, was unharmed.

What was going on? Carlos-Valentino told officers he was upset that his wife was going to leave him. And why did he think that? She’d revealed it on Facebook.

Two weeks ago, Carlos-Valentino pleaded guilty to felony child endangerment and making a false bomb threat. He is scheduled to be sentenced at the end of this month, and prosecutors have said he faces one year in jail.

One might think that couples would realize the problems inherent in dealing with their disputes via Facebook, but many obviously don’t.

On Feb. 28, Hernando Today, an online version of The Tampa Tribune, reported that a couple living in Brooksville, Florida, got into a physical fight over Facebook.

Following the fracas, Hernando County sheriff’s deputies arrested Thomas Gannon, 35, and his girlfriend Tina Cash, 31, (pictured above) at their mobilehome. Both of them were charged with misdemeanor domestic violence.

Gannon said Cash while drinking had become upset and removed their relationship status from her Facebook page. She also “unfriended” him on Facebook.

When Gannon confronted Cash about this, she began throwing things, he said, and hit him in the face with a picture frame. She denied it and claimed he punched her. He denied that.

The incident was bad enough, but because it involved Facebook, it gave the Internet world an opening to snicker. One reader wrote, “White trash at its finest.” Another quipped, “He was framed.”

With so much misery in Japan and Libya these days, it’s easier to endure flooding in New Jersey and Ohio, a breakaway restaurant in Kentucky, accusations of bigamy in Cleveland, a distraught husband stopping traffic on the Bay Bridge, and a Facebook fight in a Florida mobilehome.

These are all serious matters, but they’re not all equally grim.

Artist Sue Gonzalez of Point Reyes Station stands at one end of a large oil painting of hers. The painting is part of a new art exhibition that opened Saturday at the Bolinas Museum.

Sue’s paintings might best be described as impressionistic realism. As has been said of the style of artist Gustave Courbet (1819-77), hers “is not photographic; it shows a keen sense of selection of what to paint among the details of nature to give the essentials of [the] subject.”

Sue’s subjects are inevitably large expanses of water. Although most painters would be challenged to make the unbroken surface of a tranquil bay interesting, Sue is such a master of light and shadow she is able to reveal the subtleties of seemingly simple scenes.

While “there is minimal but recognizable reference to place, Tomales Bay here in Coast Marin,” the museum comments, “this art is about planet water.”

Sue attended the University of Wisconsin and graduated from the San Francisco Art Institute. She also took classes at Sonoma State and Indian Valley College.

Stinson Beach and Bolinas Lagoon (circa 1902) by Arthur William Best. Also on display through April 17 at Bolinas Museum is a selection of art from the museum’s permanent collection.

View of Mountain Cottage by Ludmilla Welch, 1890. From the permanent collection.

The Dreamers. Photo by Kevin Brooks from the permanent collection.

Classic Torso with Hands by Ruth Bernhard.

The photographer (1905-2006) is best known for her nudes of women. “If I have chosen the female form in particular, it is because beauty has been debased and exploited in our sensual twentieth century,” she wrote. “We seem to have a need to turn innocent nature into evil ugliness by the twist of a mind.

“Woman has been the target of much that is sordid and cheap, especially in photography. To raise, to elevate, to endorse with timeless reverence the image of a woman has been my mission.”

Krishna and Radha by Gajari Devi.

Also showing at Bolinas Museum is an exhibit titled Sacred Walls, Dieties and Marriages in Mithila Painting.

“For centuries, perhaps for thousands of years, women in the ancient cultural region of Mithila in Eastern India, have been painting on their floors and the inner and outer walls of their family compounds,” the museum explains.

“With vibrant color and complex design, their art celebrates, protects and makes sacred or auspicious space in their homes for family rituals and events. Though there are a few male contemporary painters, this is primarily an art tradition handed down through women from generation to generation…..

“Encouraged to expand their creativity to painting on handmade paper, their art has become a source of desperately needed income and attracted international attention to their work.”

Fresh Killed Poultry by Lewis Watts. Part of the permanent collection.

Salud Compadre, Peru. By Steven Brock.

The photography in the current exhibition is from the Helene Sturdivant Mayne Photography Gallery, which is part of the museum’s permanent collection.

Bolinas Museum may be small, but it represents some of the best art in the world, as the current exhibition attests. It will continue through April 17, so you still have plenty of time.

The Age of Revolution once referred to the years from 1775 to 1848 when absolutist monarchies were forcibly replaced by republics or constitutionalist states. These upheavals included the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, and revolutions throughout Latin America.

After World War II, a second Age of Revolution occurred in Africa as colonies freed themselves from their European masters. Most of these revolts were in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Twenty-six wild turkeys two weeks ago marched for food in Point Reyes Station.

Now a third Age of Revolution is sweeping the world. It all began last month when street protesters in Tunisia toppled the 23-year regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. That, of course, helped inspire street protests which earlier this month led to the resignation of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak after a 29-year rule. An estimated 365 protesters had been killed by the time he left office.

Immediately protesters in Yemen demanded that President Ali Abdullah Saleh resign after 32 years in office. Saleh has said he won’t seek reelection in 2013, but protesters want him out now. Nine protesters have been killed so far.

Street protests also spread to Bahrain where seven people have been killed in demonstrations against the prime minister, Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al Khalifa, over economic problems in the island kingdom.

Other street protests in the region are occurring in Libya (1,000 or more protesters killed), Morocco (five killed), Algeria (two killed), Kuwait (some reportedly tortured), and Jordan (eight injured).

Elsewhere street protests have been cropping up against authoritarian regimes in China, Russia, and…. Wisconsin?

A fox on my deck last week looking for bread.

The street protesters in Wisconsin, who are upset with their anti-union governor, Republican Scott Walker, are reminiscent of women strikers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a century ago. Their demands back then? “We want bread and roses too.”

Nor is the fox alone in its desire for more bread, along with roses. Three raccoons showed up tonight to join in the demonstration.

Even a possum waddled onto my deck to take part.

The fox, the raccoons, and the possum all want bread but prefer peanuts. By offering them a few goobers, I was able to convince them to pose with a rose for these portraits.

No doubt authoritarian potentates from Vladimir Putin to Moammar Khadafy to Gov. Walker wish their problems could be solved for peanuts. But they can’t, which is why they find common people around the globe to be revolting.

Valentine’s Day will be Monday, and here are some thoughts for the occasion. The first is from Kaiser Permanente, which sent out a mass mailing this week noting that dark chocolate is good for your heart and that “some say it even mimics the feeling of being in love.”

While on the topic of hearts, here is my annual Valentine’s Day greeting from a flock of Canada geese flying over Inverness Ridge, as seen from my deck.

Romantically inclined gentlemen have traditionally given their ladies flowers for Valentine’s Day. Here Mrs. Raccoon, who works part time at Flower Power in Point Reyes Station, shows off a particularly nice bouquet.

How men respond to feminine beauty is to some degree, of course, a matter of culture, as we could see when an attractive young woman dropped what she was carrying during the G8 countries’ summit in Canada last June.

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was too preoccupied with his own appearance to notice, and President Barack Obama remained all business while French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi admired her comely derriére.

By now Valentine’s Day is often associated with greeting cards called Valentines, which are typically printed with saccharin
messages or a bit of doggerel: “The rose is red./ The violet’s blue./ The honey’s sweet,/ and so are you.”

The origin of that line, by the way, can be found 420 years ago in Edmund Spenser’s poem The Faerie Queen: “She bath’d with roses red, and violets blew,/ And all the sweetest flowres, that in the forrest grew.”

By the early 1800s, Valentine’s cards were being assembled in factories, and with the development of modern printing in the years that followed, printed messages replaced handwritten notes. The woman holding this large, pink Valentine was photographed about 1910.

There must be something trippy about this time of year. If you’ve never experienced an acid trip, the following kenesthetic hallucination will give you an idea of what it’s like.

Here’s what to do: click on the link at the end of this posting, then “click me to get trippy,” then stare at the center of the screen for a full 30 seconds, then look at your hand holding the mouse without moving it away from the mouse. You’ll be amazed at the result: Happy Valentine’s Day!

This blog periodically carries postings consisting of clippings from my file labeled “Quotes Worth Saving.” The idea for the file originated with the late San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen, who once wrote that he kept a file of items he could use on slow days.

Prompting this latest installment was a Jan. 26 Matier and Ross column in The Chronicle: “After a three-week trial, at a cost we can only imagine, a San Francisco jury has determined that a 47-year-old Cotati man was not, in fact, masturbating when he was moving his hands inside his pants as he stood on a Tenderloin corner looking at a 10-year-old girl.

“Jurors instead decided that the accused, who has no history of crimes against children, had been trying to retrieve his heroin, which had fallen down his pants. Since he wasn’t facing drug charges, the defendant walked.”

Lest you think this could only happen to a man in San Francisco, here’s an item from the police blotter of The Lewisboro (N.Y.) Ledger, as quoted in the May 26, 2008, New Yorker: “Sex offense reported at the Cross River Plaza in Cross River.

“A driver complained to police that a woman was touching herself in a car. Police spoke to the woman, who said that she had just been listening to the Beatles before shopping.”

It could have been tragic. The Gulf News in Dubai reported on Dec. 12, 2008, “Actor Daniel Hoevels accidentally slit his neck onstage after he mistook a real knife for a prop at the Burgtheater in Austria.

“Hoevels… was supposed to be using a knife blunted for use onstage, but the knife had been switched with a sharp one for the show on Saturday night.

“Vienna police said Thursday they were investigating ‘bodily injury caused by negligence.’ The theater company said the original prop knife was damaged and that instructions to blunt the replacement and been ‘carelessly’ disregarded.

“Hoevels received stitches for his injury at a hospital and was back on stage… the next day.”

A headline in the July 18, 2010, Chronicle, rather than the accompanying story seemed to be the real news: “Hamas Bans Water Pipes.” My God, I wondered, will power lines be the next public utility Hamas prohibits? In fact, it turned out that Hamas in imposing conservative Islam on Gaza had banned the smoking of Arabic hookahs (known as shisha) in public.

Was the word really supposed to be gratuitously, meaning done in an uncalled-for manner (e.g. gratuitously violent movies)? Or gratefully, meaning done with gratitude? Whatever the case, a reader last Sunday could sense a poignant story behind the following classified ad.

From Personals in the Jan. 30 Chronicle: “Does anyone remember EX-PFC USMC Oak Knoll-Menlo Park? Any response gratuitously accepted. (Highly & introspective, sensitive, neurotic). Mail response to: 1390 Market St. #1820, SFCA 94102.”

Gallery owner Claudia Chapline (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

An apt aphorism quoted in a Dec. 10, 1992, news release from the Claudia Chapline Gallery in Stinson Beach: “If you have no troubles, buy a goat.”

I’d think the answer would be self-evident. From Dear Abby on Dec. 29, 2010: “My husband travels a lot, three to four days a week. Sometimes when he’s intoxicated and we’re having sex, he acts as if he doesn’t know who I am.

“I asked him once, ‘Are you married?’ He said, ‘No…’ Another time I asked, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ and he said, ‘No, but you’re fine…’ The next day he has no idea he said any of this. Should I be worried?”

Grim news from the Palmetto State in the Oct. 10, 2009, Chronicle: “Officials say an alligator bit off part of a golfer’s arm as he leaned over to pick up his ball at a private South Carolina course.

The man, who is in his 70s, was retrieving his ball from a pond when the 10-foot alligator bit him at Ocean Creek Golf Course in Beaufort County.

“His golf partners were able to free him. Wildlife workers killed the alligator and retrieved the arm in the hope it might be reattached.”

Law enforcement run amok? The Associated Press reported on Oct. 9, 2008: “Police in Newark, Ohio, have arrested a 15-year-old girl on juvenile child pornography charges for allegedly sending nude cell-phone photos of herself to classmates.

“The girl was arrested Friday and held over the weekend. Her defense filed denials in court Monday. Police did not identify the girl by name, and prosecutors promised a statement with details later Wednesday. Authorities were also considering charges for students who received the photos.”

We’ll end with a sentimental report from the Aug. 19, 2008, Chronicle: “A lost humpback whale calf has bonded with a yacht it seems to think is its mother, Australian media reported. The calf was first sighted Sunday in waters off north Sydney, and on Monday tried to suckle from a yacht, which it would not leave.”

Mass communications began after a German goldsmith named Johnannes Gutenberg in 1439 borrowed money to produce souvenirs to sell at a religious festival only to have the festival postponed for a year.

Unable to repay his investors, Gutenberg (left) offered to share the proceeds of a “secret” with them and during the next 10 years devised a printing press that used movable type. The invention led to the printing of the Gutenberg Bible and eventually mass-produced books in general, as well as newspapers and magazines.

The first newspaper in the American colonies was Publick Occurrences, published in Boston in 1690. Its first and only issue was printed on a hand-powered press like Gutenberg’s. The newspaper, however, had not been officially authorized, and it was immediately shut down, its press run confiscated, and its publisher arrested.

The first paper to survive was The Boston Newsletter founded in 1704 by the postmaster. In the 1720s, two other newspapers were launched in New York.

By the start of the Revolutionary War, there were a couple of dozen newspapers in the colonies. By the end of the war, there were 43.

Virtually all were weeklies with circulations of roughly 500. Using Gutenberg technology, that was about all that a print shop could produce in a week. When the First Amendment guaranteed Freedom of the Press, newspapers such as these were what the Founding Fathers had in mind.

By the 1830s, improving technology allowed for creation of mass-circulation newspapers, and by the 1890s, two New York City papers, The New York Journal and The World, were each selling half a million copies per day. The day after the 1896 election of President William McKinley, each paper sold 1.5 million copies.

Then along came radio broadcasting, which began in Holland in 1919 and in the US in 1920. Suddenly newsmakers and entertainers could speak directly to audiences everywhere. Radio, of course, was only the beginning. From 1928 to 1931, the first television stations began broadcasting in different parts of the US.

Back when I was studying Mass Communications in college half a century ago, the news media consisted of magazines, newspapers, radio, and television.

The next medium to come along was, of course, the World Wide Web, which was launched in 1990. Soon organizations ranging from small businesses to the news media were creating websites to promote themselves. Meanwhile individuals such as I began putting blogs online. (The word blog, by the way, comes from web log in the sense of a ship’s log.)

In 2004, a new type of website devoted to “social networking” went online when Harvard University student Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook. Facebook allows users to post vast amounts of text and photos online at no charge. The company makes its money selling advertising on the site.

It all sounded simple enough at first. Friends and relatives used the site to let each other see what they’d been doing and read what they’d been thinking about. But then some strange things started happening. For example:

Last August it came to light that a wife in Cleveland, Lynn France, had suspected her husband was having an affair with another woman, Amanda Weisal, so she logged onto Facebook and typed in Weisal’s name.

John France and Amanda Weisal France on the Today Show.

Not only did she find photos of her husband with Weisal, the pictures showed the two of them getting married. Lynn France then accused her husband of bigamy. John France, however, denied it, claiming his marriage to Lynn in Italy back in 2005 was invalid although he acknowledged fathering two children by her.

Now that’s social networking. Or how about this?

Last November, a 51-year-old Antioch man halted westbound traffic on the Oakland Bay Bridge for an hour when he stopped in the slow lane and told officers via a cell phone that he was armed with guns and explosives.

Craig Carlos-Valentino (at right in CHP photo) also threatened to jump off the bridge. Eventually he surrendered to authorities. No explosives or guns were found in his car, and his 16-year-old daughter, who had also been in the car, was unharmed.

Carlos-Valentino is now in jail awaiting trial, but what in the world was going on? The suspect told officers he was upset that his wife was going to leave him. And why did he think that? She’d revealed it on Facebook.

Nor is the issue merely a matter of indiscreet postings. Much in the news this past three weeks has been the 1987 kidnapping of Carlina White. A woman posing as a nurse had stolen White, then a newborn, from a Harlem hospital.

The kidnapping suspect, Ann Pettway (at right in a North Carolina Department of Identification photo), had raised the girl as her own.

But Carlina White came to wonder if she were really the woman’s daughter and eventually found her actual parents via a missing-children’s website.

With all the publicity over the girl’s being reunited with her true family, Pettway disappeared for 10 days, but on Sunday, she turned herself in to Bridgeport, Connecticut, police. And how was that arranged?

Sunday happened to be police Lt. David Daniels’ birthday, and when he logged onto Facebook to see who had wished him a happy birthday, he found a message from Pettway saying to call her.

Communications have come a long way since Gutenberg, but so far I’ve declined friends’ and relatives’ invitations to stay in touch with them on Facebook. To me it just seems like a waste of time since I have no plans for bigamy, leaving a spouse, or surrendering to Connecticut police.

It’s not that I have no interest in self-promotion. While talking with my friend Lynn Axelrod Saturday evening, I began balancing a cup of coffee on my foot. To my disappointment, she failed to notice, so after 10 minutes I finally pointed out my balancing act.

Lynn quickly snapped a photo with her cell phone, and now the world can see that I too have a story to tell. It’s not, however, sordid enough for Facebook.

Great blue herons are the most widespread variety of heron in North America, and one of them has taken to frequenting the field around Mitchell cabin.

Great blue herons typically weigh 4.5 to 8 pounds and measure 36 to 55 inches from their heads to their tails. Their wing spans are huge, 5.5 to 6.5 feet. As birds go, their stride is also impressive, usually around nine inches in a straight line.

A Great blue heron and a Blacktail doe take a late-afternoon stroll together in my pasture.

Although herons do much of their hunting in shallow water, where they prey on small fish, crabs, shrimp, and insects, they also hunt in fields such as mine, where they dine on rodents, frogs, snakes, and even small birds. Great blues swallow their prey whole and have been known to choke on oversized morsels.

In other matters, if you have not yet seen the YouTube video of a “flash mob” in the Antwerp, Belgium, train station, you really ought to.

As people walk through the bustling station, a recording of Julie Andrews singing Do Re Me from The Sound of Music starts playing. Dancers young and old gradually emerge from the crowd until roughly 200 of them are prancing in the center of the lobby, much to the delight of onlookers.

Most of us know the song: “Do, a deer, a female deer; re, a drop of golden sun; mi, a name I call myself; fa, a long, long way to run…” The tune was running through my head yesterday, so I began singing it for my friend Lynn Axelrod.

When I came to “ti, a drink with jam and bread,” however, she was surprised. “I always thought it was ‘a drink with German bread,’ Lynn laughed. “Julie Andrews’ enunciation must not have been very good.”

I’d add that it’s just as easy to spot something else that probably contributed to Lynn’s misunderstanding. In the musical, Julie Andrews as a governess teaches the song to the von Trapp family children to mitigate the Austrian-military-style parenting of Capt. von Trapp.

As it happens, there is a word for mishearing a lyric the way Lynn did: mondegreen. It comes from people misunderstanding a line in an old Scottish ballad, “Thou hae slay the Earl of Murray and laid him on the green,” as “Thou hae slay the Earl of Murray and Lady Mondegreen.”

Other notable mondegreens include a line from a hymn, “the cross I’d bear” being heard as “the cross-eyed” bear.” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “There’s a bad moon on the right” has likewise been misheard as, “There’s a bathroom on the right.” (Please see the 1st and 3rd comments regarding this one.)

But my favorite mondegreen is confusion over a lyric from the Beatles’ song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. On occasion, “the girl with kaleidoscope eyes” has been been misheard as “the girl with colitis goes by.”

Western Africa. Ghana is in the center at the bottom of the map.

I used to wonder who the viewers are of all the beauty and wisdom this blog imparts each week, so I checked. Although numbers vary from day to day, the largest group of readers consistently comes from the United States, particularly California.

They’re followed (at the moment, which is fairly typical) by: Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, India, Australia, and Mexico. Somewhat to my surprise, however, were the many regular visits this blog has been receiving from the geographically small country of Ghana on the west coast of Africa.

Of the roughly 200 countries on earth, Ghana was recently 9th in visits, is currently 15th, and has consistently been in the top 25.

These are not the robotic visits of computers making contacts with this blog for only an instant. Typical visits last from 45 seconds to nine minutes, and often they come from people who have never visited this site before.

By African standards, Ghana with a population of 18 million is not unusually impoverished thanks to gold, oil, diamond, bauxite, and agricultural exports. Its literacy rate has been steadily improving, and if its residents keep getting information from this blog, it could become among the most-sophisticated countries in sub-Sahara Africa.

Before long, no Ghanaian will mishear the Beatles’s She’s Got a Ticket to Ride as “She’s got a chicken to ride.” (I suspect this mondegreen originated in the United States where some people have trouble understanding English accents.)

January takes its name from Janus, the god of gates and doorways in ancient Rome and Greece. Small statues of the god, who had two faces, one looking inward and one looking outward, were often placed at the entrances to homes. New Year’s is likewise a gate between two years, making this a time to both look forward and look back. So here goes.

Nicasio Reservoir overflowed Seeger Dam last Thursday afternoon, Dec. 23, district staff reported. More than 9 inches of rain have fallen here in the last two weeks.

As 2010 comes to an end, Marin Municipal Water District is looking into the new year with healthy water supplies. MMWD provides water to the San Geronimo Valley, along with most of East Marin south of Novato, and as of this week, the district’s seven reservoirs were at 97 percent of capacity.

With more than 200 people on hand, Missy Patterson’s daughter Alicia Patterson Ferrando (at center) on Tuesday spoke emotionally about her mother’s love for her family, as well as her candor.

A reception in memory of Rosalie “Missy” Patterson, who died Dec. 19 at the age of 84, was held Tuesday afternoon in the Dance Palace. The reception was preceded by a High Church mass in St. Columba’s Episcopal Church. So many people were fond of Missy that there was standing-room-only in the church for much of the crowd.

Missy, who came to West Marin in 1959, was the mother of 11 children. For 28 years under four ownerships, she was circulation manager and front-office manager for The Point Reyes Light.

Missy worked for me 22 years, and at Tuesday’s reception I noted she came to learn so much about her job that she sometimes had to explain to government staff the regulations for dealing with newspapers. (Photo by Lynn Axelrod)

People in West Marin trusted Missy, and when the last publisher found that numerous oldtimers felt he had turned The Light into a scandal sheet and had stopped reading it, he made Missy a columnist in an effort to win them back.

The column, Ask Missy, was a compendium of Missy’s thoughts about the world. Sometimes she was indignant and sometimes bemused. In her last column, which was published three days before she died, she wrote about being hospitalized (with pneumonia) on Dec. 2.

If she’d had her way, Missy wrote, her friend Barbara would have driven her to Cabaline Country Emporium and Saddlery to look at some shoes, but Barbara instead drove her to the West Marin Medical Center.

Missy ended up in Kaiser’s Terra Linda hospital for a week and then stayed briefly with a friend before returning to Kaiser. In her final column she thanked everyone who had come to her assistance, adding, “Take good care of yourself… and it’ll keep you around almost longer than my 84 years.”

Like many other West Marin residents I was dismayed by Rosalie (Missy) Patterson’s death Sunday at the age of 84. She was mother to 11 children, a pillar of St. Columba’s Episcopal Church, and a long-time employee of the Point Reyes Light.

For decades beginning in 1959, Missy and her family lived in Inverness although she spent her last few years at Walnut Place in Point Reyes Station.

Missy’s 28-year tenure at The Light was the longest of anyone’s in the paper’s 62-year history. I was second with 27 years.

Sometime after my former wife Cathy and I sold The Light to Rosalie Laird and her short-term partner Ace Ramos in late 1981, Rosalie hired Missy to help with bookkeeping. I kept her on as circulation manager when I reacquired The Light through a default action at the end of 1983.

When I sold The Light to Robert Plotkin in November 2005, he too kept Missy on the job and eventually had her also write a weekly column, Ask Missy. When Marin Media Institute bought The Light earlier this year, Missy kept her front-office job as well as her column.

Missy with former Light reporter Janine Warner and me in 2008. (Photo by Dave LaFontaine)

As front-office manager, as well as circulation manager, of The Light, Missy controlled who was admitted to the newsroom, the ad department, and the production area. She was very aware of the paper’s weekly deadlines and protected staff from folks who just wanted to gab when the paper was going to press.

Her sense of humor was wonderful. She was particularly liked recounting the time an indignant reader slammed the door as she stormed out of the office, only to be jerked to a stop when her skirt caught in the door.

When impertinent acquaintances remarked that she and her husband Donald must have made love constantly to have produced 11 children, Missy would cut them off with, “No, we only did it 11 times.”

Missy in the 2005 Western Weekend parade flanked by the late Frank Cerda (left) and the late Ed Brennan.

Part of Missy’s workday at The Light included trips to the post office and the bank. Six or seven years ago when walking long distances became a strain, Missy acquired an electric scooter to get around town, as well as back and forth from Walnut Place.

For Missy, the scooter was virtually a go-cart. She loved to speed up and down the sidewalk, beeping her horn and sometimes forcing townspeople to jump out of her way.

When Linda Petersen, who runs the front office of the competing West Marin Citizen, had to temporarily use a scooter herself following an horrific traffic accident last year, numerous people encouraged them to hold a race. Missy, whose scooter was more powerful, would inevitably respond, “I’d win.” Linda agreed, and the race was never held despite their being on friendly terms.

Missy died Sunday at Kaiser Hospital in Terra Linda following a brief illness. A funeral will be held at 2 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 28, at St. Columba’s Church in Inverness. A reception will follow at the Dance Palace in Point Reyes Station.