What it's Really Like in the Pacific Northwest Town of Eureka

Just in Case No One was Confused Yet, May 14, 2006:
According to news sources, the Unites States government really is performing a highly advanced scientific experiment at the Eureka Weather Station. Yes, the NWS and NOAA have a weather station right here, in Eureka, on Woodley Island in Humboldt Bay, so you'd think that they would know right where to find Eureka.

However, it isn't the NWS or NOAA that's performing the experiment, but NASA. That should seem about right to those of us who saw the trailer, shouldn't it? If you also heard that instead of finding their way to the NWS Eureka Weather Station, NASA went to Canada, you wouldn't be terribly surprised, would you? No! You saw that coming, didn't you?

Well, the TV crews in British Columbia didn't see it coming. They didn't even see it arrive. Instead of even going there, NASA had to go find a weather station at a place called Eureka on an island named Ellesmere in a Canadian province called Nunavet. Eureka, Nunavet might as well be on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, and when I think of what their climate must be like, I'm sure I want Nunavet at all.

I wonder whether it would be worthwhile to inform NASA that the U.S. has its own Eureka Weather Station? Probably not, eh?

It seems that NASA, being NASA, wanted to find some place in the world where they could pretend they were on the Moon, or Mars perhaps, while they were making a hole in the ground using barely enough power to light a light bulb. Something tells me that they're going to wish their equipment shed a little more heat.

Did you get that all straight? Someone else didn't quite get it. While googling "eureka weather station" - a google I had done before - I discovered that unlike before, 9 out of the first 10 results were about Eureka Nunavet, instead of Eureka, California. In fact, the one site listed that has pages about both locations, Weather Underground, seems a bit confused, or perhaps, confusing.

On their page for Eureka, Nunavet, the title on the page clearly declares that it's abut Eureka, Nunavet. However, seven line down it states that its observations are from Eureka, CA. That's easy to say, but the temperatures shown are definitely not from any place in California this time of year. Meanwhile, on their page for Eureka, California, the title clearly declares that it's about Eureka, California. Seven lines down, it states that its observations are from Arcata, California.

It's hard to say whether the Nunavet page is confused, or just confusing. Even though they're calling the location of the weather station Eureka, CA, the conditions reported are clearly those of Eureka, Nunavet. Are they trying to use "CA" as an abbreviation for Canada, or for California?

What WU needs is a consistent standard concerning their spelling of place names. Either you abbreviate names, or you don't. Don't abbreviate on one page what you spell out on another page. Don't substitute the name of the nation or country on one page where you used the name of the state or province on another page. Use the same name for the place lower down on the page that you use higher up. Otherwise, you confuse other people to the point where they think you're confused.

Maybe Weather Underground really is confused. It would explain why they substitute the weather readings from Arcata on their page for Eureka, if they think that the Eureka, CA weather station is in Canada.

This confusion was brought to my attention by a friend, astrallady, at Delphi Forums, who understood from a media account that NASA is conducting their experiment at Eureka, CA. I can't blame her for the confusion. If I had encountered partial information from such a source, I would have guessed that it was a publicity ploy from the makers of the TV show.

For example, in those towns along U.S. 395 that no longer have a railroad through them, the time to complain about it was when Southern Pacific first proposed to abandon that track, not after the railroad stopped sending engines to pick up the freight-laden cars on your siding, and certainly not after they finished tearing out the tracks.

For another example, instead of having your Visitor Bureau struggle to lure conventions to your communities every year, lure reputable organizations that hold numerous conventions, to build their own convention facilities in your towns, so they'll look forward to coming back every year!

Wouldn't that be worth helping them to find the land and materials they need to build their own convention center, and having your busybody bureaucrats learn some philosophy besides obstructionism?

You can point out to the organizations, (corporations, non-profits, religions, etc.), that if they build their own convention facility, they can control :

• The atmosphere, decor, and maintenance of the facility
• The schedule and location of all their conventions
• The parking for all of their delegates
• All food and concessions on the site
• Who is allowed onto the premises during and between conventions
• Whether, and to whom else, they want to rent the facility

And most of all, they won't have to jump through your busybody bureaucratic obstructionistic hoops to obtain a permit to hold conventions, on top of the cost of renting some miserably inadequate, poorly renovated, run-down school building that you're trying to pass off as a convention center on the weekends despite the fact that the seating was designed for third graders.

Actually, there are some towns almost like that in Humboldt County too. The main difference is that when you drive through a ghost town in Humboldt County, you can usually miss it even with your eyes wide open. On the other hand, you won't even drive through them if you stay on a state or federal highway. You wouldn't guess that they're there at all if it weren't for the county roads passing through them being named after them.

Eureka isn't one of them. Any other town on U.S. 101 between Leggett and Orick rates a freeway, either all the way through it, or bypassing it. However, the largest city on U.S. 101 between Ukiah and the Oregon border puts up with the entire traffic load of the highway driving up and down its city streets, just like it has ever since before it was a federal highway.

You see, towns like Orick, Eureka, and Leggett understand which side of their bread the butter is on. Let the main highway through your town bypass it, and you turn into a ghost town. From what little one can see of Eureka in the trailer, that sort of ghost town could very well be the sort of town that the fictional Eureka is; possibly a once-thriving, but small, single-sawmill town, which is by now better equipped with spotted owls than with sawmills.

The glimpses of the forest are even more difficult to make out. At least it's not deciduous. However, there seems to be no pretense of it being redwood, and most certainly not coastal redwood. In fact, the entire landscape reminds me, once again, of the forests of California that are east of the Sierra Nevada and Cascades, although possibly not during a drought year. take it from a former Forest Service, National Park, and BLM firefighter and Fire Lookout, that's what those forests remind me of - a desert that happens to have trees sticking up out of it.

The one scene in the trailer that would look almost familiar to someone from the Eureka area is toward the end of the trailer, and is the one where something gory-looking has been done to the side of a cow. Ignore for a moment if you will, the gory-looking part. (If you refuse to look at a cow that has apparently had something gory-looking done to it, good for you. Please imagine a stereotypical black-and-white dairy cow of the Gateway-commercial variety that has had nothing gory done to it.)

The scene where we find the cow is on the edge of what looks like it might be an unfenced grain field, but is most definitely not a pasture. However, I imagine that the audience isn't supposed to know the difference between a farm and a ranch, (farms grow crops; ranches raise livestock), so we're not supposed to realize that. Unlike any ridge you would see in Humboldt County, the ridge behind the field, (not that you can focus on it through all the steam pouring out of what ever gory-looking thing was done to the cow), doesn't seem to be forested.

The one thing that seems entirely correct in this scene is the cow. It's a dairy cow, like you'd see in Humboldt County, not a beef cow, like you'd see in Lassen or Modoc County. That gives it one-up over most any other scene in the trailer. All in all, as Douglas Adams would have said, the cow scene was designed to look almost, but not quite entirely, unlike a scene near Ferndale or Loleta.

It's not impossible to film a movie or TV show in an entirely different location than the one in which the script sets it. For example, George Lucas was intimately familiar with Modesto, California, having grown up there. I'm not sure why he chose to pretend, while filming the movie American Graffiti, that Petaluma is Modesto, but he made it work. Even though Lucas had to change the name of everything to avoid lawsuits - something that reflects more on the illegal profession than on the movie industry - when people in Modesto watched the movie, they recognized the personality of Modesto, if not the actual locations.

We even recognized the people and places, even if they look different and are named a little differently. In the real Modesto, the Cunninghams are named Cummings, Mel's Drive-in is named Webb's, and Dewey High School is named Downey. However, if you know the personalities of those people and places, you recognize them. They aren't the real thing, but they are true to a pattern.

However, Eureka's author, Andrew Cosby, says that he has never been to Humboldt County, and that Eureka isn't exactly meant to be Eureka, California. That's a polite way of saying that he's not even going to try to make Eureka recognizable. Why, if he were going to try to make Eureka recognizable to anyone who's ever seen it, he might actually have to come here at least once.

How bothersome that would be for a writer in Hellay, who probably thinks that northern California is somewhere in Santa Barbara. No, it's not fair of me to say that about people from Hellay, but most of the things that people from Hellay say about, and do to northern California aren't fair, either, and there are a whole lot more of them doing and saying them. We have to fight back, somehow.

Addendum: I finally found a trailer for Eureka today.

Most of the port and harbor was never rebuilt. The railroad was repaired that time around, but was left in ruins after another storm took it out in 1997. Looking at all the money the nation is throwing at the rebuilding of New Orleans, a coastal city that's built below sea level and just waiting for the next hurricane to come along, one wonders, is a single railroad into northwest California - 40+ years late - too much ask?

Verizon customers with prepaid plans get rather ticked when they discover that not only are they on Roam for the duration, they can't even buy minutes here! Many of them have been told that they can walk into any Radio Shack, (and other stores), in the U.S., and buy minutes. Not in Humboldt County, they can't! So they walk into a Radio Shack in Eureka, Arcata, or Fortuna, and learn that someone lied to them.

My friend Brandon Wallace, who manages one of the Radio Shacks in Eureka, explained to me that something to do with SBC's franchise in this area prohibits Radio Shack from selling Verizon minutes here. I suspect that some busybody is enforcing some agreement, rule, or regulation in a way that either the authors never intended, or for which the authors never had the authority.

My brother-in-law, Dana Doll thinks that his company out of Portland OR, can build cellular towers for Verizon in Humboldt County. I'm recommending Table Bluff to him, as a tower location that would help to fill in a lot of dead spots. We'll see.

However, a cellular tower on Table Bluff isn't going to be much help in the nooks and crannies of eastern Eureka, where cellular signals of any kind are hit and miss, particularly down in the gullies.

A couple of them complain that the cast and crew took over their cafeteria, so that the kids had no food. Considering the fine gastronomic reputations of school cafeterias every where, I understand this to mean that the cafeteria was used as a camera set - not as a place to eat. Perhaps it would have served the cast and crew right to have to eat school cafeteria food for depriving the kids of their lunches, but I doubt that particular justice prevailed.

Still, knowing that their schools, (in at least two different towns), were going to be on the show, and having invested - at the very least - an empty tummy in the production, these kids are at least as keen to see this show as Harriet the Spy was to go out to the movies when the opportunity presented itself.

Now, just watch and see if some busybody bureaucrat doesn't prevent Canadian TV stations from carrying the show. Those kids will be hopping mad!

One person on those message boards brought to light a link to one of the earlier local news reports about this TV pilot, which I had missed. Taking a statement from that article out of context:

Reached at his Los Angeles office Tuesday, Cosby said that he as never been to Humboldt County, and that the town in his series is not meant to be Eureka, Calif., exactly. He said that he got the name of his fictional town by looking at maps.

"It just seemed like the perfect name," he said. Apart from the scientific connotations of the word "Eureka" -- the Greek philosopher Archimedes is said to have shouted it when he happened upon a novel method for calculating the volume of an object -- for Cosby, the name had a sort of Everytown quality.

He concludes that:

its based on a "fictional town called Eureka in the pacific northwest"

its ACTUALLY based somewhere in Washington or Oregon.

Unfortunately, he also heckled another commentator, and a moderator had to step in and delete some of the name-calling that apparently ensued. However, one of the heckled points out from the same article:

"The more we brand Eureka or Humboldt County, the more interest you raise," she said. "It gives us the opportunity to expand the production industry's image of what Eureka has to offer, and we plan to take advantage of that."

My own contribution to that discussion follows:

No, not exactly. That's like saying, "just sort of". In other words, a fictional version.

From the same article:

"Definitely, the Pacific Northwest setting felt right, with the trees and the mountains," he said. "For me, I love the towering feel -- the redwood wall. If the government has tucked away a town, they'd want it among the giants."

Redwoods only reach so far into the Pacific northwest. If "Eureka" is in Oregon, it's in the southwest corner of the state. Forget about Washington.

Also from the same article:

"He said that he got the name of his fictional town by looking at maps."

Did he find a "Eureka" or "Eurekaville" in the southwest corner of Oregon?

Just to make sure my position on this issue is clear; he found the name, Eureka, on a map of the portion of the Pacific Northwest that contains Redwoods. That narrows the possibilities quite a bit, even if he has no intention of accurately portraying the city of Eureka. At least he's a made a point of setting the show among redwood forests, which does answer some of the concerns I expressed earlier.

I'll bet there was a lot more smoke at that gathering than there is when the typical home smoke alarm goes off. This is yet another of the ways in which I don't expect the TV show, Eureka, to live up to reality. After all, it's meant to be science fiction, not a reality show. However, I doubt that even reality shows show the reality of home smoke alarms.

On a TV show, if a smoke alarm goes off, you can count on there being smoke. Either something is on fire, or something in the kitchen is badly overcooked. Even then, the smoke alarm isn't going to go off, unless the it furthers the story in some way.

Only in reality are smoke alarms in Eureka, as with so many other real-life cities, so absurd as to tattle for the whole neighborhood to hear, every time you take a shower or you cook your eggs to perfection.

The result of this disparity is that in TV shows, when a smoke alarm goes off, someone actually calls 911. Do that enough in reality, and the fire department will probably have you prosecuted for turning in false alarms.

However, that's what it sounded like at first. Within a few seconds more, it sounded like a large diesel semi pulling a heavy load up a grade. That's like a logging truck is bringing a load out of the forest, but first it needs to climb over that last... Oh, never mind! OK, city people, picture being in Frisco, and there's a huge delivery headed for the top of Lombard St.

About the time that I might have thought that the truckload of my belongings that got stolen during my move had finally pulled into my driveway and dropped its lugged-down power plant onto my front porch, this particular tremor got fed up with me mentally comparing it to things that are merely noisy.

In order to explain the next stage of experience, I need you to hunt down some 19-year-old who has tricked out his car stereo with the very best "subs" that money can buy. Such a person and his vehicle are guaranteed to come equipped with some kind of recording that will show off what those subs will do. Personally, I would choose the intro to the original version of Billy Thorpe's Children of the Sun, but today's 19-year-old is about 25 years late to be carrying that around with him. Get his permission to just feel the speaker cones on his subs with your fingertips during one of the lower bass guitar notes. Now, picture the sensation your fingers are experiencing, happening to your whole body.

The reason why I would choose the original version of Children of the Sun is that the intro includes a passage during which the drums let the bass guitar know just who is the boss around here. Since I don't know of any recording during which chords are played on the lower registers of the bass guitar, this about as close as you're going to get, in a musical recording reproduced on our 19-year-old's subs, felt by our fingers, and imagined to be happening to the whole house, to what our local earthquake did next.

Up to this point, all of the earthquake that I've tried to describe to you so far was produced by what is known as a "P Wave". A P Wave shakes things vertically, although this may be experienced as a back-and-forth motion radiating away from the source of the shaking. The "S Wave" travels slower, so in a distant quake, it may shake things again, after the P Wave has already passed. However, in this case, the S Wave arrived just as the P Wave's strength was peaking.

The experience of the P Wave of this local earthquake was much like that of being a small child in the care of a babysitter with a history of shaking small children, who has missed several anger management therapy sessions. Having the S Wave arrive just as the P Wave is peaking was much like there being two baby sitters with identical symptoms, but being in total disagreement about which direction to shake the child, and unwilling to take turns doing so.

Fortunately for me, all the knickknacks, paddy whacks, and ceramic dogs to which to give bones hadn't been unpacked yet, and the old man was already home, but there were enough rattling and tinkling noises going on to convince me that they were already in place on my shelves.

Perhaps I should tell about something that seems completely unrelated to politics: In the mid 1980s, I wrote, Platinum Plated Rust vs. The Successful Yard Sale, a how-to manual for yard sales. It didn't sell very well, probably because of how obnoxiously I went on and on about proper yard sale sign etiquette. That's because of the surprising degree to which people putting up yard sales signs exceed my own obnoxiousness, in doing so.

What is it about people putting up yard sale signs that prevents them from understanding that as you're driving past their sign, you don't have time to read a complete catalog of their inventory or a poorly-drawn map to a home 3 miles away from the sign? What prevents them from understanding that every day from here on out is, "TODAY ONLY", or that, "SATURDAY", happens every blasted week from here on out? I have little doubt that the reason my how-to manual didn't sell very well was that my reminders to take down your signs after your yard sale amounted to only slightly less than reader harassment.

One who has a clear idea just how obnoxious people can be while putting up yard sale signs is absolutely dismayed to realize to what extent political campaigners exceed that obnoxiousness.

While someone holding a yard sale can understandably be expected to put up yard sale signs around his town, these are typically put up at 1 to 5 strategically located intersections. What is about a political campaign that causes the belief that each candidate needs 1 to 5 signs on every city block?

It's disgruntling enough to see the same yard sale sign on the same post for 5 weeks in a row. What is it about political campaign signs that cause them to persist until the next election?

What is it about a political campaigner that provokes the absurd notion that anyone who cares enough to vote is going to allow that vote to be swayed by a campaign of eyesores?

I've known yard sales to try one-up one another with their yard sale signs, but I have yet to see one yard sale stupid enough to think that it will persuade people not to shop at another yard sale by defacing the other yard sale's signs.

However, that particular stupidity reigns among local political campaigners in Eureka. It doesn't matter whose campaign a sign is for; if it's prominently located, it gets defaced - and it's not just kids playing pranks with neon colored markers. During a recent recall campaign, campaigners on both sides churned out professionally designed stickers with which to deface one another's campaign signs, so that campaigners could reverse the meaning of a campaign sign by simply slapping a sticker onto it.

So far, the current political campaigns seem somewhat civil, but the signs are as prolific as ever, and past campaigns have taught me not to hope that it will stay that way.

There was quite a contention between man and dog about this issue. Man did not want dog following dog's nose onto the beach. On the other hand, dog was quite certain that there was some serious sniffing to be done on that beach and that he was just the expert to handle the situation.

I was just about to go and say hello to the man and dog, but at this point, a number of other cutenesses began occurring, dividing my attention until man and dog and had left.

Is there a correlation between attempts to impress people with truck tires, and inability to back up a boat trailer straight, or steer a boat onto a trailer? I must admit that the sampling I observed this afternoon was quite small, but when the tires on a 4WD rig all stick out at least 6 inches beyond the fenders, I get the impression that someone has something to prove, and if only one knew what the argument was about, one could be sure whether or not it was successfully proven. Likewise, the mounting of dualies on the back of a mid-sized pickup.

Generally, a Humboldt Bay boat ramp presents a fairly slick surface, and this wouldn't have been the first time I saw someone, particularly with dualies on, get their rig stuck. Fortunately for this driver, the boat was heavy enough, once winched up onto its trailer, to press the tire treads down through the mud, seaweed, and other slimy substances, and onto the ramp so that they could get traction. Dualies on the back of an unloaded pickup tend to skate all over the mud due to excessive buoyancy and propulsion differential.

Traction in the boat ramp's layer of mud was not an issue for our 4WD rig. Aside from the 4WD capabilities, the tread on these tires was so deep and so wide beyond the tires themselves that it was almost as if they were standing on stilts. The issue with driving that much inflated rubber into the water was whether the tread would ever dig deep enough into the water to hit the mud.

Once the driver gets their land-based vehicle to sit still, the issue is to tow the boat onto the trailer. At this point, it helps if the trailer itself doesn't float. Fortunately, people generally aren't as macho about their trailer tires as they are about truck tires, so they only have to fight with their boats. When the boat ramp faces westward into the bay and a fresh breeze is from the south, about the last direction a boat wants to point itself is eastward, onto the boat trailer.

The guys with the dualies had already planned to tow their boat using ropes attached to both ends of it to direct it where they needed it to go. They guys with the 4WD eventually figured that out, too, and one of them made quite a production of hauling on the line to pull the back end of the boat against the wind, so his partner could pull the front of it onto the trailer. There was some more commotion when he discovered that he also needed to tie the other end of the rope to the boat.

Why neither group of boater docked to the downwind side of the boat ramp, where the breeze would push the side of the boat up against the dock, so it would then remain parallel, instead of fishtailing, is beyond me.

Scattered underfoot around the bottom of the smaller boat was a dozen or so dungies, (Dungeness crabs). Haven't these guys ever heard of buckets?. They also had rods and reels with hooks baited with squid, but I didn't see anything they'd caught with them. Neither did the little girl who ran down the dock and back, announcing to her family that, "those fisher guys got crabs"!

This announced the arrival of a family group that had, "tourists", written all over it, consisting of the girl, two men, two smaller boys, and one woman, (addressed as "Mommy"). Shortly, they were clambering amongst the rocks beside the boat ramp, finding small rock crabs, and eventually onto the muddy beach on the north side of the ramp, where they found other small creatures. Technically, they were "taking" crabs and other shellfish "without a license". Much to their pleasure, the game warden was elsewhere.

Unfortunately for the little girl, the rest of her family group quickly determined that if they attempted to frighten a crab by shoving it up close to her face, it responded by causing her to scream. ("EEEEEK! Please don't make it bite me, Mommy!") This cuteness continued until presumably someone actually managed to touch the frantic child with a crab, whereupon she began crying and screaming inconsolably for several minutes.

Attempts to show her how helpless the tiny little crabs were, were futile, as the mere prospect of seeing one of the critters sent the girl into spasms of horrified hysterics, flailing her arms blindly, and seeing absolutely nothing.

Once the family gathered enough presence of mind to leave the girl alone, and allowing her to hide behind one of them every time someone touched a crab, she began to calm down and realize that she had survived her first encounter with a crab, after all. Soon she was running around like the boys, poking and catching things, and eventually discovered cuteness on her own in the form of what she declared to be, "newborn baby crabs".

The girl's expertise about crabs was soon challenged, and this presented her with the perfect opportunity to reassert her maturity, mentioning in passing, but at the top of her lungs, "I'm almost 8 years old, you know!"

I've just remembered another Main Street in Eureka. It's at Flea Mart by the Bay, where they seem to name their aisles after streets. Some aisles are named after streets where local flea mart vendors live, some names are meant to be clever, and of course, since the 60s, every community must have a street named, Penny Lane, even if it's just an aisle at the local flea market.

I haven't said much about the local politics, so far, except to say that some people like to argue. Don't worry, when the local politics find a way to annoy me, I'll be sure to mention them. Also, don't worry, because they are sure to annoy me again, sooner or later. The very nature of politics demands that it annoys me.

For example, what business does a nation that can't even hold a presidential debate without arresting two out of four candidates have presuming to teach "Democracy" to nations like Afghanistan and Iraq? Since the 2004 Green Presidential Candidate was from Arcata, it came to the attention of most local residents that both he and the Libertarian candidate were both arrested at the Presidential Debate, for simply attempting to enter. I realize that most people never heard about it. They don't live in Eureka.

My real beef with politics is what successful politicians - those who get elected - presume to call justice. This isn't necessarily about Eureka, so I won't write about it here. Instead, anyone who really cares to know what I'm up in arms about is welcome to read the outline for a speech I gave in my Speech class at C.R., a few months after 9/11.

I no longer remember what I was originally looking for, but I discovered Main Street on a MapQuest map of Eureka. It's off of Myrtle Avenue, and a couple of country blocks east of Redwood Acres Fairgrounds. By the way, Redwood Acres is not the county fairgrounds of Humboldt County. For reasons unknown to me, the county fairgrounds are located at Ferndale. And by that way, although Humboldt County is a great place to see ferns growing, Ferndale is not the best place in the county see ferns growing - it was named after a person, not the plant.

I had thought that the eastern-most towns that Eureka had absorbed were Cutten and Myrtletown. However, Main Street is southeast of Myrtletown, not even directly connected to Myrtle Avenue, and even further northeast, and completely isolated from Cutten. I've tried and failed to determine of which settlement Main Street was the Main Street.

It used to baffle me that of all the original settlements that merged to become Eureka, not one of them named a street, Main Street. Now that I know that one did, what baffles me is that all the other settlements had the foresight not to name any other street by that name.

Main Street is directly south of Murray Field, the primary airport for Eureka, so examining maps of the area brought the surroundings of that airport to my attention. Although one crosses a slough at the east edge of Eureka, what is not obvious to a motorist leaving Eureka and approaching the airport is that the surroundings of this stretch of U.S. 101 and the airport are Humboldt Bay. They are located on an island.

As one continues past the airport and back onto the mainland, it does become obvious that the farmland and scattered businesses across the highway from the bay are a few feet lower than the bay. This must be horribly comforting to the people whose livelihoods are on those farms and in those businesses.

We aren't accustomed to Humboldt Bay having much of a surf, but during the New Year's Eve Storm of this past winter, the surf washed over the railroad tracks, across the four-lane divided highway, and into the polder.

As I mentioned on April 21, there would be benefits to reactivating the local railroad. One of those benefits would be maintaining the railroad, which just happens to serve as the dike protecting most of the settlements on Humboldt Bay. If it weren't for the railroad, most of the other settlements would suffer from the winter tides nearly as much as King Salmon does.

If this were the 1950s, they could probably just get away with using paintings or blown-up photographs of redwoods for backdrops on their sets, and just make sure they're out of focus enough so that you won't recognize the paint or the graininess of the photo. However, I doubt that this millennium's audience will settle for that. More likely, they'll shoot scenes in front of pines, spruces, or cedars and hope that they're out of focus enough so that the audience won't know the difference. More likely yet, they'll simply hope the audience won't know enough to expect redwoods, and shoot their scenes in front of , (shudder), deciduous trees.

That won't fly. Eureka is in California. One of the few things that anyone from anywhere else knows, (somewhat correctly), about California is that this is where the redwoods are. Their first clue that they really haven't seen California yet when they arrive in Hellay is that there are no redwoods. OK, so the whole state of California isn't carpeted with redwoods like the tourists expect. However, Eureka and its surroundings are, so pointing out that there are no redwoods in Hellay isn't going to help.

If the producers find the decency to do a credible job of portraying redwoods, they'll probably still get it wrong. After all, how are they going to know whether to portray Sequoiadendron giganteum or Sequoia sempervirens? Let them figure it out. I'm not going to say.

Old coastal redwoods never die. They just fall over and their upward-pointing branches keep growing until puny creatures like you and me think they're separate trees. No, I'm not laughing. That's the truth.

Any respectable town within 50 miles of the northern or central California coast has a park with redwood trees in it. Cities like Eureka have several parks with redwoods in them. Some cities, like Eureka and Arcata, have small city forests. Want a description of Eureka's forest? The description of the Grand Fenwick National Forest from the novel, The Mouse that Roared, would be a good start. From that start, extrapolate that the forest is mostly of redwoods, that there is a roadway as well as footpaths, a stream runs through it, and that in the center of this forest, the stream is dammed, creating a duck and goose pond.

The duck and goose population waxes and wanes as delinquents shoot them up with air rifles and families whose Easter pets have outgrown them replenish the flock, and the birds die of malnutrition despite well-meaning attempts to feed them inappropriate fodder, such as stale bread.

In Eureka, it would be impossible to find a neighborhood without redwoods in it. Redwoods are so taken for granted and ordinary to Eurekans, that rather than realizing that they have a forest, they simply call it, Sequoia Park, and in general, the local population is much more enthused to have a mediocre zoo on the east edge of the forest.

Apparently, someone made the mistake of having their child spend too much time around St. Joseph's Hospital... or is it St. Joseph's?

Eureka was laid out in ways that made sense to the people who were settling it at the time. Thus, as one small town, then known as Bucksport, spread across a bluff, it was much easier to build roads more or less parallel and perpendicular to the bluff, than across it, so most streets that approach the bluff end at the streets paralleling it, rather than crossing the bluff. Meanwhile, as another small town known as Eureka spread from a harbor, streets there were oriented parallel and perpendicular to the waterfront.

As Eureka absorbed Bucksport and other small towns, such as Cutten, Myrtletown, and Pine Hill, someone finally decided that most of the streets should be oriented square with the world, just to make sure they would almost, but not quite, line up with the streets in existing portions of Eureka. That wasn't so bad.

However, at some point a committee got involved, (please see my previous rants about committees), and decided that there should be one-way streets, and obstructionism set in. I realize that particular blight isn't unique to Eureka, but it is certainly part of Eureka none the less, although I doubt that the TV show will show it as such.

The obstructionism that is part of the very nature of one-way streets is that if both the north-south and east-west streets are one way, you can easily be forced to drive six blocks just to go around the corner. Further, if you're new to a town and not yet familiar with where the one-way streets end and begin, you are bound to find yourself going the wrong way on a one-way street at least once before you get the hang of it. Also, just as you think you're getting the hang of it, you're bound to come to a situation in which newer streets almost, but not quite, line up with older streets, and you drive around and around, trying to get from point A to point B, and after driving a dozen blocks or more in this fashion, you suddenly realize that, (as my uncles used to say), "you simply can't get there from here".

(Knocks chip off own shoulder, so no one else will need to.)

When I was growing up, we had a term called, "Gross National Product". Upon going back to college in the new millennium, I've learned that this term has been replaced by, "Gross Domestic Product". So I can no longer point at the wrong ends of highways 299 and 36 and say things like, "the Gross National Product of Modoc County is rocks", or "the Gross National Product of Lassen County is sagebrush". That's OK though, because I can simply substitute the word, "Domestic", for "National", just fine and by doing so, I no longer seem to be inferring that those counties are nations. However, I do seem to still be inferring that there is something "Gross" about there being so many rocks and sagebrush at the wrong ends of those highways. Oh Well, Now What?

Can I say that the Gross Domestic Product of Loleta is cheese, without inferring that there's anything gross about it? Seriously, they produce some truly artisanal delicacies at the Loleta Cheese Factory, such as their Queso Fresco and Cheddar Curds. The Queso Fresco is made from an heirloom Mexican recipe, and just about anyone who has tasted the the Cheddar Curds when they are fresh has a nickname for them, such as:

• Fresh Cheese Curds
• Popcorn Cheese
• Squeaky Cheese

While aging benefits many cheeses, freshness is a must for these Cheddar Curds. There is a particular flavor and a particular texture that are both lost within days after manufacture. This texture is the basis for the nickname, Squeaky Cheese, and the squeakiness isn't something you can even hear, but is experienced through the teeth and tongue. Beyond that, words fail, and you'd need to experience the cheese to understand any better.

Literally translated, Queso Fresco means, fresh cheese, and this delicacy keeps about as long as preservative-free cottage cheese.

Loleta is the next-closest town to College of the Redwoods, besides Fields Landing, so besides being a small center for agriculture and agricultural production, it is also home to a few college students and staff. This includes The Ravin' Maven of Classic Film, Julie Stowe, a maestra of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Flash who teaches Digital Media on the side.

I haven't found time to pick up a Eureka Reporter this week, and the Times-Standard has stopped delivering newspapers that I didn't subscribe for, so when I finally got to sit down and read a newspaper today, it was a Press-Democrat that I picked up on Tuesday in Santa Rosa, and finally learned that Guy Fieri, a native of Ferndale, had won "The Next Food Network Star” competition.

Of course, the Santa Rosa newspaper focused on the fact that Mr. Fieri currently owns restaurants in the Santa Rosa area, and I had to read deep into the article to find where it mentioned in passing that he is a native of Ferndale. Of course, much better local angles are featured by the Eureka Reporter and the Times-Standard, once I found their articles.

One of the things I did is attend a seminar for disabled people, coordinated by the Northwest Committee for Employment of People with Disabilities to help us determine whether we want to become self-employed, and to learn what programs are available to help us do so. It was like a gathering with a Who's Whom of local agencies that deal with disabled people. Most familiar to me were Mary Thompson of College of the Redwoods' DSPS Office and Julie Timmons from the California Department of Rehabilitation.

Quite frankly, this particular disabled person hadn't recovered enough from his trip to Santa Rosa, earlier in the week, to cope with the amount of information presented.

I have been building my own home business for some time now. Until recently, it was more of a hobby and class project than self-employment, because despite all the sweat equity I'd put into it, I had no budget and was operating at a loss. However, it has begun to break even during some recent months, and with some of the available help I learned of at the seminar, I hope to make it profitable.

Just leave me alone, will you?!?

There seems to be an extremely common bit of propaganda that places Santa Barbara two hours north of Hellay, from which follows the notion among Hellayans and people visiting Hellay under the impression that that they can see California from Hellay, that either Santa Barbara is in northern California, or that northern California is beyond Santa Barbara. According to most any map, that places northern California about 100 miles west of Hellay.

If some of the people coming to such conclusions ever notice that California is several hundred miles long, and quite reasonably concludes that if you get to northern California by going west, there must be more of California to the south of that, it's no wonder that a tourist is rumored to have asked a travel agent about taking a train to Hawaii. Therefore, instead of blaming tourists for the stupidity, let's simply stop telling them that places west of Hellay are in northern California.

Let's get this straight - if you're south of Monterey, Fresno, or Bishop, you're not even in central California, much less northern California, and you won't enter northern California until you get to about Willits, Yuba City, or Lake Tahoe.

Now that you know one part of California from another, one thing you'll notice if you drive into northwestern or northeastern California is that the fuel prices are higher here, and amazingly, they are even higher in northwestern California than they are in northeastern California, as people from the wrong end of highway 299 are shocked to discover. If you're traveling east or west across California, gas up in the middle, not at either end. If you're traveling north or south through northeastern California, gas up in Nevada and Oregon, rather than in northeastern California. If you're traveling north or south through northwestern California, gas up somewhere around Santa Rosa, and in Oregon, rather than in northwestern California. The least fuel-efficient thing your vehicle can do is wait until you get to a place where fuel has to be trucked in from several hundred miles away to buy fuel that it will then haul in its own fuel tank back to the locale from the which the fuel was trucked.

The main north-south artery through northwestern California is U.S. Hwy. 101. About half a century ago, it commandeered a number of local and state highway routes, most notably California Hwy. 1, and added connecting routes between some of them. The resulting U.S. Highway was designed to be renovated into a freeway, to be funded by a combination of state and federal funds. In the 60s, both U.S. and California funding priorities changed, and numerous freeway projects throughout California were either scrapped in mid-construction, or left on roadways that had been intended to be temporary.

Occasionally since then, various parts of the highway have been damaged by floods, earthquakes, tsunami, retrofitting, and the like, forcing California Department of Transportation, (CalTrans) to either piecemeal patch or completely rebuild some stretches of the road.

Thus Hwy. 101 through northwestern California alternates between older two-lane roads, 1960s freeways, "temporary construction" bypasses, freeway completed when the national speed limit was 55 MPH, and more rarely, freeways designed more recently. (The story of U.S. 395 through northeastern California is extremely similar, the main differences being that that route never was as mountainous as 101 is, and that it had less priority to begin with, so a lot less of the freeway go built, north of Reno.)

CalTrans has a lot of gall putting speed limits as high as 65 MPH on some of those sections, and holding the speed limit down to 55 or lower on others. The speed limits rarely seem to take the condition or design of the roadway into consideration. That includes a hodgepodge of freeway designs through most of Humboldt County. Oddly enough, Eureka is the only city at which U.S. 101 arrives as a freeway at both ends, and suddenly reverts to downtown city streets, with no bypass available.

The confusing thing, coming up the freeway from the south is, knowing when you've arrived at any particular town or business route. On any other stretch of U.S. 101 coming up to a city, there would be signs saying something like, "Santa Rosa Next 8 Exits", and "Business Route 101 2nd Exit". The Fernbridge business route was renumbered to California Highway 211, but the same road through Loleta was simply made a county road. There is no sign along the freeway indicating a business route, so the businesses there have simply died. Loleta has three exits from the freeway, but there's no sign saying there will be three of them. Loleta shares one of those exits with Fernbridge, which also has a second exit.

Then there's the back road. The exit before the first Fernbridge exit is to Tompkins Hill Rd. So is the third Loleta exit, and the exit after that. The last two Tompkins Hill Rd. exits are accesses to College of the Redwoods, which is a downtown Eureka address, even though you still have to drive past Fields Landing, King Salmon, and Humboldt Hill to get to Eureka, and it's two miles from College of the Redwoods to Fields Landing.

Even people from Eureka are confused about Fields Landing and King Salmon. They'll say things like, "same smell", "how do you tell them apart", and "how do you know which you're in"? From talking to local people, I've learned that a lot of this confusion results from the Do Not Enter signs that one encounters under the overpasses. CalTrans has placed those signs so that they face traffic coming through the underpass, intending them to warn totally oblivious moronotorists from driving onto the freeway the wrong way, via the exit ramps. Naturally, the problem with totally oblivious knuckleheads is that they aren't paying attention to that sort of thing, do it anyway.

That leaves the reading of Do Not Enter signs to cautious, law-abiding motorists who weren't going to drive onto the freeway the wrong way, via the exit ramps, any way. Since the signs are facing those motorists, rather than facing the moronotorists who would drive onto the freeway the wrong way, motorists assume that the signs are meant for them, and understand from the signs that they are not allowed to drive into the east side of Fields Landing or King Salmon from the underpass.

Fields Landing and its piece of U.S. 101 business route is completely isolated by road, except for the one freeway exit. Something tells me I should be complaining about that, if only I knew to whom to complain. The business route at King Salmon and Humboldt Hill is likewise isolated, but at least you can get from King Salmon to Humboldt Hill, and vice versa, on it. Many local people always access the east side of King Salmon from Humboldt Hill, because of a one-way street that doesn't really exist. They have no idea at all how to access the east side of Fields Landing, and assume that there must be a secret access road from somewhere on Humboldt Hill.

Others have tried to tell me there's a back road between Fields Landing and Humboldt Hill, that you can turn north on the east side of the freeway and go up the hill. Others argue with them, that you can't do that; it's a one-way street! I've asked them if they mean that unpaved, single-lane, dead-end road? They'll ask if I'm sure it's dead-end, and have I been up that way? Come on people, that's my driveway you're talking about!

However, to tell Fields Landing and King Salmon apart, King Salmon is the one that has sloughs behind the houses instead of alleys, and gets flooded out with bay water at high tide every winter, and you can't drive from one to the other without getting on the freeway!

You're not really in Eureka until you've passed all these communities and crossed Elk River, and U.S. 101 is the only local road that crosses it.

Alas! Benches in the showers for handicapped students, that had room on them for three people to sit, and were sturdy enough to hold the weight of an elephant, were replaced with flimsy little things that were fastened to sheet rock with a few screws. These benches have a weight limit of 250 lbs.; not that anyone said so. The college waited until one of the benches collapsed under someone in February, put keepers in the wall and refastened the benches with bolts, dawdled around for a couple months more, and then put signs above the benches stating that the recommended weight limit was still only 250 lbs.

Before the renovation, benches in the locker rooms were just like the ones in the showers. They were replaced with something that could be a bench if it were at least a foot taller, with a concave surface that collects water when wet people sit on it, or people place wet objects on it.

The outer doors of this building were lifted an inch above the sill, leaving a gap through which wind blew constantly. One of my classmates who has a background in physics measure the airflow on a mildly breezy day, and determined that the wind could displace the entire volume of the air in the building in one hour.

The someone under whom the bench collapsed in the shower was my wife, who was already disabled. She has now been laid up from the spinal and shoulder injury for about three months. The spine shows little indication of getting better, and the shoulder has gotten worse. Due to my own disabilities, I had no business trying to take care of her, in her condition, but no one else was going to do it, so I injured my back as well, and I was laid up for a couple of months as well, and I was forced to withdraw from most of my classes.

You may very well realize that being laid up with a back injury would force me to withdraw from classes. That may very well be, but that isn't what forced me to withdraw from my classes.

What forced me to withdraw from my classes is the obstructionism that my wife faces in obtaining treatment and prescribed medication and devices for her injuries. The college's insurance is "reimbursive", meaning that it only reimburses my wife for expenses that she pays. We quickly ran out of money and could no longer purchase her prescriptions and other needs. The insurance won't reimburse her for prescriptions she didn't buy, denying her the benefit of the insurance.

If College of the Redwoods had simply seen to obtaining proper treatment of my wife's injuries, they would have found us willing to settle quite reasonably. However, her injuries aren't adequately treated, so they aren't healing, due the the obstructionism of the college and their insurance.

That obstructionism began in the Emergency Room at St. Joseph's Hospital where the college had her taken. (Or was it St. Joseph's? I can never tell.) When I walked in, there were three people working around her, making sure everything was just so. A fourth person walked in and asked for my wife for her insurance information. She informed them, as she'd been instructed by college personnel, that this injury was to be billed to the college's insurance.

Suddenly, the personnel wanted as little more to do with her as possible. She'd told them she's diabetic, so one of them bruised her finger in the process of testing her glucose. The hospital refused her food even though she was diabetic and hungry, took inadequate x-rays, and released her when she was in too much pain to ride to walk or ride in a car, and forced her to walk to our car anyway, without so much as a wheelchair.

This obstructionism has placed me in conflict with the source of my education. That might seem trivial to some people, but some people don't have my particular set of disabilities. I forced myself to complete a semester, a couple of years ago, in which I was in conflict with the college about my financial aid. I needed that financial aid from the beginning of the semester, but the college procrastinated all semester, I had to drop a late-starting class because I couldn't buy the book, the college penalized what little financial aid they were giving me, causing more difficulties, forcing me to drop another class, and finally I received the bulk of my financial aid on the Friday before Finals.

I was miserable all semester, and by the time the college finished with me, a student who'd had a GPA of 3.7 at the beginning of the semester averaged a D that semester. It wasn't worth it, so I am not putting myself through that again!

For a while, it looked like she would also have to go there for bariatric surgery. That's what the medical profession now calls a gastric bypass, which is what they once called what was, before that, known as "stomach stapling". It turns out that in the time that it took for the hospital in Frisco to forget that my wife was on their waiting list for the surgery, for her to find out that they'd forgotten, and then remind them of it, an excellent bariatric surgery center opened in Santa Rosa. Since the hospital in Frisco obnoxiously wanted her to start at the bottom of the waiting list again anyway, she decided to go to the hospital that's an hour closer and has a shorter waiting list.

Unfortunately, being an hour closer than Frisco means that Santa Rosa is still about five hours away. That's a ten-hour round trip, a drive that a person who needs the services of a hospital is unlikely to endure in one day. For us, staying overnight is Standard Operating Procedure.

That is precisely why I will not be here to add anything to this page on the particular Manic Monday that is tomorrow, and possibly Tuesday as well. We will be staying overnight after preparatory visits to a couple of doctors in Santa Rosa tomorrow.

Local telephone directories offer phone numbers and addresses of the Greyhound Bus Stations in Arcata and Fortuna, but they are quite secretive about the location of the one in Eureka. I knew where I had taken my wife to catch the bus a few years ago, but recent examination of that location persuaded me that it was no longer the Greyhound bus stop.

If there is any more effective way to persuade a person that a business has moved, than to place a sign saying, "For Lease", in front of it, I don't particularly need to know what that more effective way is, because the "For Lease" sign will do just fine.

However, knowing of no other location that could possibly be the Greyhound Bus Station in Eureka, I went there shortly before the bus was scheduled to arrive, just in case the place might suddenly become recognizable as a bus station due to the sudden appearance, at 10 PM, of a Ticket Agent or, wonder of all wonders, a Greyhound bus.

In case anyone may wonder whether I'm competent to recognize such attributes of a bus station, let me assure you that I easily recognized the Amtrak bus pulling out of the parking lot of Stanton's Restaurant as I approached the neighborhood. While Amtrak has no bus station in Eureka, at least they admit that they have no bus station in Eureka, and simply tell you to meet them in the parking lot of Stanton's Restaurant, instead of telling you to meet them at their bus station, which in fact, they do not have.

There being no recognizable evidence of a Greyhound Bus Station, I doubled back to the south end of town, from whence the Greyhound bus should approach, hoping against hope that the bus weren't exactly early enough to drive north along 5th St. while I was driving down 4th St. to look for it. Once I got to the intersection where the two joined to become Broadway, I looked up 5th and couldn't see anything resembling a bus, so I proceeded to K-Mart to wait for the bus.

I arrived there before the bus was supposed to arrive, so I had a fair hope of following the bus to where ever the bus station might be. At least, I felt such hope for the first 45 minutes that I waited there. Once 11 PM rolled around, I came to the conclusion that the bus probably had been precisely as early as I had hoped that it weren't, and returned to what may or may not have been the Greyhound Bus Station, but sure as heck is for lease.

At this point, I realized that a couple of women who'd been sitting in a car across a side street from the For Lease sign were still there, so I asked, and they kindly assured that this was in fact the Greyhound Bus Station, and that the bus had not yet come. Several minutes later, lo and behold, although a Ticket Agent never showed up, the bus made up for this lack by appearing in duplicate. Considering that only a few people disembarked - and the disembarking passengers hadn't a clue either - the reason for having two buses drive the same route and schedule seems obscure.

I'll bet that in the TV show, Eureka has a real Greyhound bus station, (or at least a prop that looks like one), complete with a sign in front that proclaims that it is a Greyhound bus station, rather than proclaiming that it's For Lease, along with a Ticket Agent, and that anyone who has learned about Eureka from watching that TV show will, upon arriving on a Greyhound bus, insist that this can't possibly be the place.

However, because there are so many differing opinions about that, not one opinion is capable of attracting a majority of the people arguing about this topic. In fact, such arguments have been completely eclipsed by arguments about whether the balloon-shaped place is a "Tract", or a "Track". The Times-Standard recently polled its reader - at least those who visited its web site - and the majority preferred, "Balloon Tract".

I could easily side with this opinion, since it is in fact, the tract of land with which something may someday be done. The railroad track is likely to be removed, as soon as someone tries to do something, and finds that it's in their way. Some people are still of the opinion that railroad tracks should be used as paths for trains, but at present, any given workday finds nearly as many automobiles parked on the railroad track, as train cars and engines.

However, my true opinion about the whole affair is that some people like to argue.

There is little dispute about the idea that having the railroad once again connecting to the outside world repaired would benefit Eureka and Humboldt County. One of those El Nino seasons of yesterdecade trashed the railroad route to Santa Rosa but good, and the committee whose job it was to get it rebuilt didn't do its job. Rebuilding a railroad is one of those jobs for which you need the right man to do the job, and the right man hasn't been given the job of rebuilding this railroad.

That's what you get for taking a man's job and giving it to a committee. This isn't the first time on this page that I've mentioned committees, but I would like to make sure I have made myself clear about committees: A committee is what forms when the stupidity of one person won't suffice.

Meanwhile, even those parts of the railroad that are located within local communities have been so badly neglected since they were cut off from the rest of the world, that they probably need serious repairs. For example, anyone who thinks that civilization continues to encroach upon the forests in this corner of California should examine any local railroad track, and see how the forests are encroaching upon civilization.

I'm personally not into cutting down live trees in December in order to prop them up dead inside my home, but I recognize that many people do subscribe to that tradition. I dare say that there are enough enough such trees growing between the rails of the local railroads to put all the local tree farms and retailers out of business this December. Further, if someone doesn't remove them, they will soon grow large enough to damage the ties and rails of the railroad, if they haven't already.

If you think they're not a lynch mob, then what do they have to hide? Why won't authorities talk to the public about why police shot Cheri Moore several times, when all they were asked to do was, check on her welfare?

If you think bigotry against mentally disordered people isn't alive and well, then examine some of the entertainment that pokes fun at the mentally disabled, such Me, Myself, and Irene! If a movie had made that much fun of the disabilities of a person in a wheelchair, a lot of theaters wouldn't have dared to show the movie.

She has good cause. Humboldt County Mental Health asked Eureka City Police to check on Cheri Moore' welfare. Instead, they had a confrontation with her, in which they intimidated her to the point that she became defensive enough to brandish the only weapon she had - a single-shot flare gun that she kept for protection. They also drew quite a crowd of spectators, which agitated her to the point that she yelled at them from her window, to go home.

It seems to me that she simply wanted to be left alone. Was that beyond the purview of an agency that had only been asked to check on her welfare? There are a great number of people who are expressing other ways that the police should have subdued Cheri Moore, but I wonder whether her welfare required that she be subdued?

An even greater number of people is questioning the judgment of the Eureka City Police for their handling of this matter. However, I question Humboldt County Mental Health's judgment for asking a law enforcement agency to do a job for which their own personnel are hopefully better trained.

Most people who think they know me, never suspect that I have a mental disorder. After making the mistake of revealing that information to too many people when I was first diagnosed in 1990, I learned not to advertise the fact so readily. While I have never been violent, except toward myself, and more rarely, inanimate objects, I have on occasion been misunderstood, and have had my fill of the kind of bigotry that leads certain thick-necked, close-cropped people to think that mentally disabled people are inherently dangerous and need to be subdued.

Fortunately for me, I didn't live anywhere near Eureka when I was diagnosed, as is evidenced by the persistence of my life.

Table Bluff was once the location of the most prominent lighthouse along this stretch of the California coast. The two-story-high base of the lighthouse structure is still visible among the trees to the south, along with single-story buildings that were once part of a Coast Guard station. The bluff is a favorite vista point for those of us who know to drive a few miles off of Hwy. 101, and a great place for launching model airplanes, as any local RC enthusiast will confirm.

The road seen hairpinning its way down the face of the bluff continues up the sand spit to the mouth of the bay, and is now paved along the entire length, although the pavement is frequently damaged by the elements. The sand spit, commonly known as the South Jetty, was a great place to camp out until the late 60s, and particularly the 70s, when it became overrun with squatters who lived there month in and month out, destroying and polluting the delicate ecostructure. In the 80s, Humboldt County and BLM evicted them, and had to put up a locked gate, still visible to the east, to keep them out. Up until about 2003, locals had to obtain a key from a county office to get in.

Although the Eureka Times-Standard's web site is the first site that comes up when you google "Eureka CA", it apparently does not carry the content of this insert. That's probably so you'll have buy a copy of the newspaper to get that content. That's definitely the reason why they've made the point of stocking extra copies of today's newspaper for sale throughout the week.

Since I subscribe to the paper, I only need to go to their office to pick up all the inserts that were missing from my Sunday newspaper. When I say, "all the inserts", I do mean "all" of them, because they were "all" missing. Our primary purpose for newly subscribing again is to have the Sunday TV Guide, which is the insert that is mostly like to be missing on any given Sunday, followed closely by the comics, which is the next section that I'm most likely to miss when it's missing.

Come to think of it, the reason why I dropped my subscription was that the part of the Sunday paper that was most likely to go missing was the whole paper. Since that was the issue we most wanted to have, that was also the issue that was most likely not to be delivered. On that premise, I refused to re-subscribe. Upon that refusal, suddenly the delivery of the newspaper became extremely reliable. That's right, once I refused to re-subscribe., the paper was delivered quite faithfully for a good four months. At that point, I realized that the unreliable service up until that point had been entirely my fault, simply for subscribing.

Well, a recent Sunday edition carried an insert offering a weekend-only subscription, which is what we had requested, but the newspaper hadn't offered, when we first subscribed. Since they were offering an entire year of Saturday and Sunday papers for only $20, in a moment of weakness we caved in and re-subscribed.

You may very well conclude that the primary result of re-subscribing to the paper is unreliable delivery and missing inserts. While that is a result, it's only a secondary result. The primary result of subscribing to a weekend subscription, and paying in full, was to start receiving the newspaper every day, and to be billed for a full year's subscription of daily newspapers at full price. I haven't completely decided what to do about it, but one thing I'm sure of: I am not going to pay for newspaper deliveries I did not order. If I were to do so, I'm sure I would stop receiving the newspaper altogether. Aside from that, I could:

• Send the bill back, writing something like, "already paid in full", across it, to see if they can figure out what we paid for.
• Wait for the Times-Standard to make harassing phone calls for payment, and then point out that I paid in full, and see if they can figure out what we paid for.
• Report the occurrence to the District Attorney as a Bait-and-Switch scam, just to rile things up.
• Cancel our subscription and ask for our money back, and see how reliable the delivery suddenly becomes.
• Ignore the Times-Standard and just pick up a copy of the Eureka Reporter every Sunday. It's free, their TV Guide is more colorful, and their comics are in color every day

The section of San Andreas fault that ruptured in 1906 was almost 300 miles long, and strong shaking was felt well beyond that length, so just about every city from Eureka to Santa Cruz is contenting for the blame. Let me rephrase that. Except for San Francisco, they've all adopted "Whose fault was it?" as a slogan. San Francisco has been unfairly hogging the spotlight, and everyone else wants a piece of the 100th anniversary action.

The worst structural damage was in Ferndale, about 15 minutes south of Eureka, and most of the aftershocks were also in Humboldt County. The worst loss of life was in Santa Rosa. As many people have already pointed out, most of the damage and loss of life in Frisco was caused by the fire, not the quake. Getting killed by an earthquake, which one cannot see coming, is one thing. Not getting out of the way of a fire is another. Considering that even today, the average San Francisco family either cannot or will not successfully raise even one child to adulthood, it seems that Survival of the Fittest only goes to San Francisco for vacation.

San Francisco does have a nice zoo, but when San Franciscans want to see something really novel, such as families with children, they go to a tourist trap, such as Fisherman's Wharf - or perhaps the zoo. Someone once told me that the reason you don't see children in San Francisco, even on the weekends, is that gay couples can only adopt other peoples' children rather than conceive their own. I countered that I had actually seen a few babies, but that since every baby I'd seen was in a stroller that someone standing safely on the curb had pushed out into the lane of traffic, it probably had more to do with the infant mortality rate. Granny in her wheelchair seems to fare just as well.

However, that's Frisco, isn't it? The reason Frisco comes up, besides hogging the spotlight, is that there are some things that simply aren't available in Eureka, and Redding isn't much better, so down the highway to Frisco we go, when we need certain medical specialists.

That reminds me. You don't want to go to a hospital in Eureka. There are two hospitals, and they are about three blocks apart. In a city of about 30,000 people, that was confusing enough. Then some committee recently decided that both hospitals should be named St. Joseph's. I assume that a committee was involved, because I can't picture any one person being that stupid all by himself.

The minute you say, General Hospital, which one hospital was formerly called, someone will correct you and say that it's now St. Joseph's. The minute you say, St. Joseph's Hospital, someone will ask you which one. Regardless of what you call it, some obnoxious person will eventually ask, "well, why didn't you just say so in the first place?" You may very well wonder if it's worth your breath to tell them how obnoxious they are. That's why I usually don't talk about the hospitals in Eureka.

You may suspect that the reason why I suggest not to go a hospital in Eureka is that you will probably show up at the wrong one. While that's true, it isn't the reason.

The reason is that you will be seen by hospital staff more quickly and receive better treatment, if you drive about 20 minutes south of Eureka, to Redwood Memorial Hospital in Fortuna. Perhaps St. Joseph and St. Joseph Hospitals are simply understaffed, since St. Joseph is attempting to staff both hospitals with one hospital's staff.

The one bright spot at St. Joseph's hospital... Or is it at St. Joseph's? Anyway, it's the Lab, where your doctor sends you to get blood drawn for your various blood panels. The staff in there is great. However, I think the committee must have heard about that, because they're planning another lay-off.

Perhaps British Columbia is capable of simulating most of Eureka's weather. However, be sure to snicker loudly every time it snows on the TV show, because Eureka has already had its quota of snow for this decade. After all, it is at sea level on the California coast.

According to the stated premise of the TV show, Eureka is supposed to be full of underground laboratories where all sorts of hyper-educated science geeks perform all sorts hyper-scientific experiments. Well, that's kind of funny. So is a lot of other science fiction, of course. Science fiction lends itself well to humor, because both sci fi and humor are based on premises that would be absurd if they were to occur in real life.

Real life? Sure! Just Google "RL", or look up "Real Life" on UrbanDictionary.com, and I'm sure you can download it somewhere - not that I have any experience with it.

What's funny about the premise of Eureka being full of hyper-educated people is in Real Life, how desperately Eureka tries to be a college town. A whole valley full of cow pastures and two forested ridges south of Eureka is the main campus of College of the Redwoods. Anyone driving from Eureka has to drive through Fields Landing to get there, yet Eureka has somehow contrived to give the Tompkins Hill address of C.R. a Eureka address, complete with the downtown Zip Code of 95501. Meanwhile, Humboldt State University is quite firmly located in Arcata, California.

Eureka is on extremely shaky ground. What do you expect me to explain about shaky ground? Shaky ground is ground that shakes, OK? Just in case any real science geeks read this, the explanation is that Eureka is near the Mendocino Triple Junction. Just in case anyone still thinks I'm using "shaky ground" as a euphemism, being near the Mendocino Junction means that the ground is shaky, and you probably aren't geeky enough to watch science fiction anyway.

Just in case anyone thinks that I blame science fiction for anything that you may misconstrue about Eureka from watching "Eureka" on TV, I am such a sci fi geek that I host a science fiction message board and webmaster for science fiction author Gloria Hartman.

There is a lot that people, and Americans in particular, can learn about from Eureka. The latest copy of the North Coast Journal provides an eye-opening article about the history of Humboldt County and Eureka's place in it. That article mentions one of the most heinous massacres of Native Americans in California history only in passing, because its focus is on the political shenanigans that the immigrants perpetrated against one another. This Wikipedia article does it more justice.

Immigration is one of the issues about which Americans could learn much from Eureka. Illegal immigrants may have had the sympathy of what is left of most Native American cultures, such as Eureka's Wiyots until the illegals made a particular argument for their case. One of the primary arguments about which illegal immigrants are publicly rioting this week is that the people who made America what it is were immigrants, just like them.

Hearing that argument, just about any Native American who is paying attention to this issue could at least think, "yeah, and look at where that left my people". Out loud, he may very well continue to sympathize with the illegal immigrants, just hoping to watch the descendants of yestercentury's immigrants get a well-deserved taste of their ancestors' own medicine. I'm not saying that they really think that way. I'm just saying that I couldn't blame them if they did.

By and large, Humboldt County is blissfully ignorant of what lies at the wrong end of highways 299 and 36. In fact, most Humboldt residents I've spoken with were under the blissful delusion that these highways end somewhere in the Sacramento Valley. I'm not about to burst any more of their little bubble either, because if any of the local obstructionists were to ever visit Lassen and Modoc Counties, by the time they returned, they would be fully inspired to new heights of obstructionistic legerdemain.

On a more positive note, the size of Eureka reminds me of the agricultural center where I grew up, back when it was an agricultural center, before it was paved over to make bedrooms for people who work in the Frisco Bay Area. When I was growing up, Modesto was the Walnut Capitol of the World, according to an article in National Geographic. Nowadays, there are probably as many walnut orchards around Modesto as there are Orange Orchards in Orange County.

Oh yes, this was meant to be a positive note, wasn't it? Well, Modesto was a small city, surrounded by nice agriculture, back in the 60s and 70s, when I was growing up. Back then, Eureka was bigger than Modesto, but now Eureka is about the size Modesto was then. That suits me. The laid back atmosphere in the smaller outlying towns, like the one I live in now, (Fields Landing), also reminds me of the atmosphere of the unincorporated county neighborhood I live in then, (Wood Colony), and that suits me even better.

If you've seen the tract of homes that's now called WoodColony in Modesto, that isn't Wood Colony, although it is located within the area of what once was Wood Colony. Wood Colony extended from Salida to Modesto, back when Modesto wasn't wrapped around Salida. Remnants of it may still be found in such diverse areas of west Modesto as the Wood Colony Cemetery and the Wood Colony Fire Station. However, the center of it was the Woodbridge Market, located at the corner of Beckwith Rd. and what was then a two-lane U.S. 99, next to the bridge over what was then an open irrigation ditch.