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

Motel Piracy, May 13, 2008:
Mrs. Thorne and I need to stay in a motel for a few nights in the Eureka area this week, so she's done the Yellow Pages finger-walking all day today.  Several weeks in advance,  we set aside the one week in May when there is no holiday weekend for a particular family event, just to avoid our schedule conflicting with any large event, but only one of the motels that she contacted in Eureka has a room available for all the nights we need, and that motel has this corporate-inspired attitude that unless we're willing to pay for nights when we can't stay, they're not going to rent the room to us for the nights we need to stay.  Thanks a lot Best Western - Bayshore.

Travel Inn - Fortuna to the rescue!  Travel Inn may also be a corporation, but at least they don't have such a snobby corporate attitude.

If the standard American business policy is that the customer is always right, the standard corporate business policy is that the customer is always wrong.  When a business starts acting like a bureaucracy, it's a sure sign that corporacy has set in.  

Even if they haven't stated so in so many words, this is something that many of the people in Arcata recognized when they supported a city ordinance denying the legal doctrine of corporate personhood.

More than that, they also recognized that corporations have more rights than real people do. Corporations can do what ever they damn well please, and if what they damn well please would be a capital offense if a real person were to do it, corporations can't even be incarcerated, much less executed.  They remain free to continue doing what ever they damn well please.

Ironically, Arcata is the source of the reason why there are so few motel rooms available in Eureka this week.  Yeah, Arcata sold out, man!   Arcata is where Humboldt State University is located, and they're holding graduation this week.

I've already said that maybe I should move.  Maybe I should move farther. It's just as well, because even the most far-fetched, hair-brained ideas we've come up with in our attempts to find a way to continue living here have failed.  Yes, that includes buying a travel trailer and camping out.

We found exactly the right fifth wheel for our use, even if it was 100 miles away in Weaverville, two-thirds of the way to Redding, because the owner was willing to tow it to the buyer's location.  We even had arranged a place where we could park and live in it inexpensively.  It had already been customized for tall and disabled people like us.

However, the bureaucracies, corporacies and other forms of piracies in the Eureka area are determined to send us packing, so packing we are.  We're already back at the wrong end of Highway 299, and we're coming to Eureka this week to pack up and take with us the belongings that we left in storage there.

Those who are still able are doing their level best to at least diversify their work, and some are converting their boats for different fishing altogether.  As one owner explained while converting his boat to fish for prawns, “We don’t know if we’ll make any money in it, but we figured we could either go broke sitting still or we could go broke working.”

Don't believe me? Just try moving a mobile home from park to park, like you would a camper, travel trailer or fifth wheel, and see if some busybody doesn't tell you that you must go through a 60-day process to obtain permits before you set it up to stay in for for a maximum of 14 days.

Therefore, we gave in and decided to buy a fifth wheel, in hopes that we could remain in the Eureka area by moving from campground, to trailer park, to friends' driveways, etc.  It's too bad we didn't think of that immediately after my wife and I finally received the settlements in March and April, 2008 for her injury on the College of the Redwoods Campus in February 2005, . At that point, we could have a bought a fifth wheel outright.  Unfortunately, by the time we thought of it, we had paid a bunch of outstanding bills, saving only enough to make a down payment on a mobile home in another community, because it had become obvious that we couldn't afford to buy any kind of home in Humboldt County.  (The least expensive mobile we found would cost about three times the amount upon which we could afford the payments.)

By now, the lending institutions have made it clear that the only way that we could get financing to buy a home is through the Agency Formerly Known As FHA - Rural Economic and Community Development.  Said agency has already delayed processing our loan application two months, and the banker suspects they'll delay it at least another month; probably two.

Meanwhile, every month that we keep the money that we've set aside for the down payment, the Social Security Administration penalizes us for having it, depriving us of our SSI income, forcing us to use the money for living expenses that we saved for the down payment, so that we will no longer have enough money for the down payment by the time RECD allows us to make it.

In fact, it seems that various bureaucratic and corporate policies are bent on penalizing us for every delay and every penalty that any other bureaucracy or corporation can find to inflict upon us. It is inappropriate, and a perversion of justice, for the federal government to cause delays that will in turn cause the same government to penalize us, particularly when the penalty deprives us of the money we need to qualify for a home, so I will be appealing this noncents.

None of the articles I've found address this question, so I gather that what makes it different enough to call it the first of its kind is that it's the first one that had the audacity to claim that it's the first of its kind, when it isn't.

The effect is that these snobs are so bigoted against renters on limited incomes that they're telling us, you can't afford to pay a $500 per month mortgage, so you just go find a $1000 per month rental to live in.  I guess they're afraid that if they don't screw us over, we might not have to pay artificially inflated rent to them.

Yes, FHA, bankers, and lending regulators, I'm talking about you. You're the ones who wind up with all the foreclosed homes, after you loan money to evicted renters, aren't you?

I'll go live in a travel trailer in campgrounds before I pay you any rent.

This year, they are suffering even worse, from even worse damage to the salmon population that occurred on the Sacramento River, a couple years later. If the Fishery Management  Council has its way, all commercial salmon fishing along the Pacific coast of the U.S. will be canceled this year, and even "recreational" salmon fishing, (read that as subsistence fishing if you will), will be canceled along the California coast.

For a change, commercial fishermen are not arguing the point.  Even though they argued against the 2006 salmon restrictions they suffered, they concur that this year's salmon population is so badly decimated that not only would it threaten the population if they were to fish, but it simply wouldn't be worth their while.

Various people are blaming various causes for the decimation of the Sacramento River salmon population in 2004, but one cause that seems to me to have been neglected is that of the drying of the climate caused by the Klamath Reclamation Project.

Yes, I'm blaming problems in the Sacramento River basin on problems in the Klamath River Basin. The largest body of water in the Sacramento River drainage, and the headwater of the Pit River, is Goose Lake, which straddles the Oregon-California line east of the Klamath Basin, but the draining of the headwater lakes of the Klamath River was completed in 1907, and it dried the microclimate downwind from there to the point that Goose Lake stopped flowing into the Sacramento River via the North Fork Pit River by 1911, and has never flowed again.

We can't do that sort of thing to rivers' headwaters, and expect them to maintain healthy fish populations, but try telling that to politicians and bureaucrats of even the most recent turn of the century, let alone those of the previous turn of the century!  If I'd written this then, I probably would have been burnt at the stake.

However, the snow job that the Bureau of Reclamation has sold them has them so confused that not only do they think that the Bureau reclaimed something when it decimated their water supplies, but they now also believe that by agreeing with one another how to share what's left of the water, they are somehow restoring something.  Thus, just as absurdly as the the Bureau of Reclamation called destroying the river's headwaters the Klamath Basin Reclamation Project, these people call their agreement, the Klamath Basin Restoration Agreement.

The Klamath Basin itself is still there, so what are they really trying to restore?  To read the piles of verbiage published in newspapers such as the Klamath Falls Herald and News, you'd think that what these people are talking about most is one another, although restoring water is occasionally mentioned in passing.  Also in passing, even a suggestion to build or expand "deep-water" reservoirs to increase water storage was considered, but not very seriously.

How can people in the Klamath basins expect to restore their water without doing anything to increase the supply?  The same way that a federal agency can reclaim something that hadn't been lost:  Bureaucratically.

Thus, survival of the fittest among these people advances into survival of the meanest. In theory, real estate agents share their listings with one another, to make it easier to make sales, and the commission is shared between the listing agent, and the selling agent.  However, even agents who consider one another to be "old family friends", who hug each other on sight, and whose children may call the other agent "uncle" or "grandpa", don't seem to be above stabbing one another in the back.

For example, the house I'm currently trying to purchase was shown to me by two different agents before second - the listing agent - told me what I really needed to know in order to realize I could afford it, and to decide I wanted to buy it.  When the first agent showed us the place, inclement weather and lack of maintenance conspired to render the house inaccessible to my physically disabled wife. We had taken a camera along, specifically so we could take pictures inside the house, but found that the batteries in it were dead, so it was useless.

Once the place dried out, we asked to see it again, so that she could look inside. The agent then told us that the listing agent told her that the owner doesn't want people seeing the place unless they have cash or pre-approved financing, so she couldn't show us again until we're pre-approved.  The listing agent assures me that he never said that, and had no trouble showing us the place a second time.

My wife, who had previous experience with real estate, was suspicious to begin with, of the excuse not to show us the house a second time. On the other hand, if the listing agent wanted to cheat the other agent out of her half of the commission, he couldn't have contrived to do so more effectively than by preventing her from showing it to us again. Who should we believe?

Meanwhile, we didn't learn that that the furnishings and personal property currently in the house remain with it, that the seller is willing to come down in price, and is willing to carry part of the price, until we talked to the listing agent.  In fact, the previous agent had told us quite the contrary on those topics.  Surely, if she had known these details, it would have been in her best interest to tell us, and make the sale herself.

If the listing agent didn't conceal that information from her, just to make sure prospective buyers would have to come to him personally so he'd get the entire commission to himself, once again, he couldn't have done it better if he'd tried.

Our landlord, Frank Sperry, was very kind to us, and buffered us against this increase.  However, even though this was a diamond of a landlord, landlords aren't forever.  His health has suffered in recent years, and he needed to retire before the stresses of managing rentals kills him.  That meant selling his rentals.

The new landlord has to pay his mortgage, and his mortgage reflects an artificially inflated housing market.  (More about that later, I hope.)  Therefore, he was forced to double the rent, and we were forced to move.

Meanwhile, does anyone have the foggiest notion what, in the tiny bundle of nerve endings that passes for a sea gull's brain, makes these avian busybodies think that freshly washed cars need to be fertilized?

A couple weeks ago, a couple different news article came out, both stating that of the 33 cities that are each projected to have a population of at least 8 million by 2015, 21 of them are coastal cities, that are threatened by the same rising sea levels I mentioned last month. One article lists some of those cities, and the other focuses on the particulars of the rising sea levels.

On this list, neither Eureka nor Vancouver, BC, (where EUR^eKA is produced), counts.  All that means is that neither of those articles mentions that these two cities are threatened.  That they are in fact threatened simply isn't stated  The list names:

Alexandria, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Jakarta, Lagos, Los Angeles, Mumbai, New York City, Osaka-Kobe, Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Tokyo.

Eureka and Vancouver are threatened; we just don't count.  Then again, neither does Portland, Seattle/Tacoma, San Francisco/Oakland, San Diego, Boston, Baltimore, New Orleans, or Miami.  Oh well.

That includes the new landlord, who is purchasing it. Rumor has it that our rent will be doubled.  As I mentioned at the end of my previous entry here, maybe I should move. That raises the question, since I have no hope of finding another place around here that I could afford, where would I go?

It's been a while, but I did mention that I am a political refugee from Lassen County, California. Would I return there? Fat chance!

Just in case there was any chance that I would mistake Lassen County for a place where I could safely live, a member of my step-family who still lives there nearly suffered a welfare check this week, and he isn't even a mental health patient - yet - but if California state agencies' local officials don't stop harassing him, he's likely to turn paranoid.

However, his physical health is poor due to Congestive Heart Failure, and other problems. He doesn't need this

The local Unemployment Office, (officially euphemized as California Employment Development Department), finally resumed his unemployment benefits yesterday, after losing his paperwork and leaving him penniless all month, causing him to lose his rental home. Thanks to their bumbling, all he has left to live in, in a locale that typically suffers subzero weather in the Winter, is his vehicle, so he doesn't dare lose that.

However, the local California Highway Patrol officers has also started in on him, because the deadbeat who sold him the vehicle skipped town before smogging it and signing the bill of sale.  (The state of California holds the vehicle seller liable for smogging it, and will not allow the buyer to smog it without a bill of sale.)

Instead of going after the deadbeat, CHP goes after the buyer who is stuck with a vehicle that is still registered in someone else's name, and repeatedly pulls him over, because for some reason, they have flagged his vehicle in their system, as "stolen".  Fortunately, the deadbeat's parents live locally, and willingly confirm for the officers over the phone, every time they stop him, that their son sold the vehicle to him, and that it is his.  That doesn't stop CHP officers from .

I would like to think that the deadbeat's parents are harassing their son to sign the #*(#%^*# bill of sale already, so they can stop explaining the vehicle's ownership to policemen.

Meanwhile, the purchaser of this vehicle sometimes cannot drive from one end of Susanville to the other without being pulled over at both ends of town, and threatening to impound the vehicle, because he hasn't registered it, and if he is unfortunate enough to be already parked in the end of town where the CHP office is located, like he was one time this week, he may look up from what ever of his own business he was minding, to find that he is surrounded by CHP officers, each of whom is pointing a firearm at him, even though their fellow officer had just got through confirming his ownership of the vehicle at the other end of town.

I was trying to persuade this member of my step-family to come and live with me for a while, until he can get back on his feet financially, but now I doubt I'll be able to live here much longer, and where ever I go next, it certainly won't be back to Susanville.

How a person would phone a 911 system that far away, much less how no one would notice that it wasn't even a local call, is beyond me. I don't think I even want to know, because if I, who never even thought to ask such a question, were informed of such things, then probably a whole lot more people besides me, who never even thought to ask such a question, would be informed.

You've heard the phrase, if he had brains, he'd be dangerous, haven't you?  Well, I'm not claiming that this jerk has brains, but he had far more information than for which he could responsibly use, namely, how to hack, and make a report to, a 911 response system over 1000 miles away.

It almost caused what is known to us, here in Eureka, as a "welfare check", in Orange County, and for someone, some place more than 1000 miles away from here to send a "welfare check" to my neighborhood, wouldn't even require him to know my  neighborhood in Fields Landing exists.  All he'd have to do is send it to the 3800 block of the street by the same name in Eureka, and it would probably arrive here.

Maybe I should move.

If he turns out anything like the Black Lab-Irish Setter mix I once had, he has the potential to be a very bright dog, if he can overcome the trauma he was put through. Just don't expect him to be fond of plastic bags, and what ever else he mentally associates with his experience.

This story reminds me of gruesome things I used to observe at the dumps at the wrong end of California highway 299, so if you don't want to read about gruesomeness, skip the rest of this paragraph. Yes, Alturas, I mean you. This Eureka puppy was rescued, but the gunny sack full of puppies I found at Alturas' dump in the early 80s had been doused with gasoline before being set on fire, and it was far too late by the time I found them.

Another gruesomeness is the situation where this pup came from.  I can't help wonder if there are other animals at risk there. How about children? I'm particularly saddened to think that there may be a child who has been told that if he or she tells anyone that Willie was his or her puppy, Daddy or Mommy will go to jail.

I would love to give Willie a nice home, but due to my wife's allergies, I can't. Who ever gets him, please take good care of him, for all of us.

The article to which I referred in my letter is here.

Since then, the chronic Construction Zone progressed through Fortuna, and the northern end of it has finally reached the northern turn-off to College of the Redwoods, south of Fields Landing.  Placing the northern end of the construction zone at that turn-off is a rather unfortunate coincidence, because not only along the entire Construction Zone, traffic going each direction is limited to one lane, instead of the usual two lanes, but the moronotorists jockeying for position as the highway narrows, but also at the very same location where student moronotorists are jockeying for position to exit at the college turn-off, because Tompkins Hill Road only has one lane each way, and the dashed center line was replaced with a double-yellow when the road was resurfaced, so even on the rare occasion that it might be safe to pass some obstructionistic slowpoke, it's no longer legal to do so.

The result is both sets of moronotorists making a mad dash for the very same place, cutting in front of one another at around 75 MPH, and suddenly decelerating to about 40 MPH due to the traffic congestion they've caused, despite the fact that the idiots didn't even intend to drive down the same road.

As I explained, once you're on Tompkins Hill Road, you're stuck with the place in traffic that you're in. The same thing happens in the Construction Zone, regardless whether the CalTrans crews are working there or not, and the zone goes on for miles, regardless in which part of it CalTrans crews are working.

This brings out of the woodwork a particular variety of moronotorist, private contractors, who may or may not be authorized to have them on top of their vehicles, but do have blinking amber lights, to turn them on, pull into the closed lane, and pass the congested traffic as if it were standing still, which in fact it sometimes is, regardless how irrelevant their particular profession, say plumbing or electrical, is to the construction CalTrans is performing.  In its own way, this is somewhat amusing to other motorists, assuming we have any sense of humor left at this point.

The reason we may not have any sense of humor left is because of the follow-me-I'm-the-leader moronotorist.  This particularly obstructionistic variety of moronotorist seems to be a wannabe politician. It desperately wants to be a leader of people, and if it can manipulate its way into the front of a line of any kind, will defy anyone to take his place there and unseat him from what he perceives as a penny ante dictatorship.

To make sure that the rest of us know that he dictates to us, he obstructs the single lane of freeway traffic to the 40 MPH crawl that I mentioned traffic had come to, back at the northern turn-off to the college. A short distance beyond the southern turn-off to College of the Redwoods, is an extra passing lane on the steep grade up Tompkins Hill, so to make sure we don't escape his dictatorship, when he reaches that point, he accelerates to a speed at which it would be foolhardy for anyone to attempt to pass him, until he leaves the extra passing lane behind.

If only we could anticipate when some wannabe Saddam Hussein is going to turn 101 into his personal sandbox, we could save time by driving around Tompkins Hill via Loleta and Fernbridge.

When the rest of us are once again frustratingly obstructed to about 40 MPH, is when those of us who still have some sense of humor left are amused to see some moronotorist who has blinking amber lights driving up the closed lane to pass him.  I wonder if it occurs to him to do a sieg heil salute as he passes?

For the few of us who hadn't already noticed that CR's football team has a weak defense, Saturday's game should illustrate the concept.

However, there is something particularly sad about seeing this happen at Grocery Outlet, because, besides offering great bargains to those of us on limited incomes, the management there sponsors a program that provides free food once per month to really needy households.  By really needy, I mean the kind of household where they frequently have to choose between buying food, and buying medicine.

When it comes to the needy in Eureka, these discount stores are the proverbial hand that feeds us. What kind of ingrate would bite it, when they do so much for us?!?

However, I got to thinking about needy people shoplifting, and the thought struck me, if they are shoplifting, why are they needy? If they're getting everything they wanted, and for free, why aren't they wealthy?

That suggested to me that the 5-finger discounts may not be going to needy people, but to people who have adequate means of life. That is a suggestion that is ticking me off, but good!

Who I needed to blame was someone with a backhoe. This makes the third time our regional Internet outages have been caused by busybodies damaging the fiber-optic line, compared to only once by the weather, and it's the second time a backhoe was involved. The other human-caused incident that cut the line was a fire. I'm sure that each time this happened, someone said, "oops" or "sorry", but that just doesn't cut it.

I'm usually one who believes that we are already overly legislated, but I'm now tempted to think that there should be penalties against parties who cut our only Internet connection, and compensation for those inconvenienced by it. I suspect the busybodies would be a little more careful around the fiber-optic line if they faced consequences from damaging it.

That means that I have no idea when I will be able to upload this update to the server. Yes, I said upload. I code the HTML for this blog by hand, and upload it to my server. That would explain the absence of bells and whistles that most people expect on blogs these days, wouldn't it?  Using a regular blogging service wouldn't help with the Unplugged situation, since I wouldn't be able to connect to it, either. This way, at least I can work on it!

You would think that I would be able to access at least some local web sites that are on the same side of the Internet breakdown that I'm on, but I can't get through to web sites for the Eureka Reporter, the Times-Standard, or the North Coast Journal. Apparently, they have their web sites hosted outside the local area, to make sure that local people can't access them, in the event of Humboldt County being Unplugged.

This blog, on the other hand, is meant to explain Eureka to people who don't live here, so please accept my apology for hosting it outside the local area, where we occasionally become Unplugged.

Even if numerous local sources did have their web sites hosted locally, I would be at a loss to look up information on them, because to my knowledge, none of them are comprehensive search engines. At least one of them is a search directory, but it doesn't keep a searchable database of the content of local web sites.

By the way, having a nice, warm southerly breeze in Humboldt County usually means that we are about to get drenched. We've already had a few showers this Fall, but it will be good to have a significant rain to begin helping pull us out of the drought northern California has been in this year.

P.S. As of 7:30 PM, we are once again Plugged In.

Highway 101 between Eureka and Arcata is located mostly between the northeast edge of Humboldt Bay and reclaimed wetlands that are used for agriculture. It occurred to me a while back that it was silly of CalTrans to be designing a major upgrade of a highway that's going to be underwater by 2050, but that's just the way it is with a bureaucracy, such as CalTrans. They don't tend to pay any more head to any other form of Common Sense than they do to local input. (After all, bureaucratic policy is decided by committees, and as I've mentioned several times before, the primary purpose of a committee is to gather together sufficient stupidity when the stupidity of one person won't suffice.)

I figured they'd just have to find a way to deal with it when the time comes, and dismissed it from my mind. Fortunately, someone else has been thinking about this.

Thanks to Humboldt's currently Unplugged status, (now you know why I mentioned that first), I cannot research who Susan Norton is, as I had planned to do today. Who ever else she may be, she's from Eureka, wrote a Letter to the Editor of the Times-Standard to ask, "Won't the ocean cover the stretch of 101 between Eureka and Arcata if the ocean level keeps rising...", and I would assume that she is at the very least a student of Common Sense. (Unfortunately, the Times-Standard still doesn't post Letters to the Editor online, as far as I know, and unfortunately, thanks to Humboldt County's currently Unplugged status, I cannot currently confirm that.)

P.S. Once we got Plugged In, I learned that Susan Norton is the Office Manager for the law firm of Stokes, Steeves, Rowe & Hamer, in Arcata. And the Times-Standard does indeed carry Letters to the Editor on their web site now, but those that appeared in Sunday's paper are missing. I've reported that to their webmaster, so we'll see if he fixes that.

I'm grateful to have this question brought to mind again, in face of the fact that the projected rate of sea level rise is about to be drastically revised. (At least it will be if someone can yank bureaucratic policy out of the control of some blathering committee and apply some Common Sense.)  It's time to ask, "Won't the ocean cover the stretch of 101 between Eureka and Arcata by the time it gets rebuilt, if the speed at which the ocean levels rise, keeps accelerating?"

Today, the correct information came to light again - on the front page of the Eureka Reporter, no less. The title of the article is 'Railing' around the Bay'. Unfortunately, since Humboldt County is Unplugged today, I cannot look up the article online, and link to it. I will provide that link here, when I can.

P.S. Here is the article.

At any rate, the Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District's Five Year Plan, which I cited on that July 10, has apparently been updated, but still recommends using the local railroad grade as a trail, and despite the opinion of a local activist of possibly incorrect identity, there is indeed a local organization, known as Green Wheels, that wants to persuade North Coast Railroad Authority, (NCRA), to allow a foot and bicycle path to be built there, especially between Eureka and Arcata.

According to the article, NCRA has expressed disinterest in such a proposal.

Since neither the current news article, nor those I cited on July 10, 2006, mention the Trails Trust organization with which my source-activist seemed to be connected, and whose map of a trail they wanted to build did not include the railroad grade, apparently that organization is irrelevant to this effort and my correct information.

I therefore conclude that the information on this subject which this person provided to me, and which I then published, was nothing but propaganda. For that I apologize.

Common Sense demands that I re-examine the rest of the retractions I made that day, but for lack of a reliable source of information, and thanks to our currently Unplugged condition, I'm not sure whether to retract the rest of the retractions I made that day.

Sadly, to us, John and Mindy moved away a couple years ago. By coincidence, at that time, John sold Common Sense to Daisy Fresh Carpet Cleaning Service, owned by our mutual friend and my then next-door neighbor, Tony LaHecka. Since then, Tony and Joyce moved to a mobile home park across the ridge behind us.

Cheryl and I are considering a move to another mobile home park across the ridge from us. Coincidentally again, our mobile would then overlook a pasture with Texas Longhorn cattle in it, that she would dearly love to gaze at when time allows, because of her love for cows, and it's the very same pasture of cattle that Joyce reportedly dearly loves to gaze at, from the other side of the pasture.

One item of interest locally that students already knew and was brought out in discussion for the rest of us, was that rising sea levels are expected to put certain parts of Old Town Eureka in the bay by 2050. About the time we were discussing that, it came out in the news that the Arctic ice cap is melting faster than expected, because the historically absent Northwest Passage around North America opened up for the first time in recorded history this summer, which supposedly wasn't to happen for several more years.

With that information in hand, or at least in head, we can only assume that the date for parts of Eureka to be inundated will be moved up. We don't have nearly enough information to project now when that will be. Just for the sake of argument, I will guess, perhaps 2020 or 2030. Since that's for the sake of argument, if anyone knows a more likely date, go ahead and make your argument. I'll probably accept it, rather than argue it.

It's getting late, so I'll try to explain what it is that needs to be argued, tomorrow.

The usual reply to that question is something like, "it's named after Alexander Von Humboldt, who was a famous scientist in the 19th century. Then, only if the child is at that obnoxious why stage, the child repeatedly asks why, until you have to admit that you don't freakin' know the rest of the answer.

I'm guessing that someone must have encountered such a child recently, because Humboldt County has been graced with what Paul Harvey would call the rest of the story. Well, maybe a whole bunch of such children.

The thing is, to get the answer to why Humboldt Bay and Humboldt County were named after Von Humboldt, we had to receive the answer in the form of a letter to the editor from all the way on the other side of the state of Oregon. Lowell S. Mengel II reveals,

...In mid-1849, a crowd of 49ers sailed from Panama to San Francisco on a ship named Alexander von Humboldt. The ship arrived in California about Aug. 31.

Among the passengers was future railroad builder Collis P. Huntington. The passengers formed a club called the “Humboldters,” and each year for about a half-century, they held a banquet on the anniversary of their arrival. Huntington, one of the richest men in America, used his money to ensure everyone could attend the gathering.

Another passenger was Stephen William Shaw, born in Vermont about 1817. He was also a passenger on the Laura Virginia, which was the first ship into Humboldt Bay in 1850. The Laura Virginia passengers selected the name Humboldt for the bay.

The late Andrew Genzoli and the late Lynwood Carranco, Humboldt historians, both indicated they believed Shaw suggested the name, which came from the name of the ship he sailed on from Panama...

With sources cited, and having seen no rebuttal, that's probably good enough for me, until the next time I encounter a particularly obnoxious child.

For most of three months, the Times-Standard has carried a countdown in their hard copy edition, of how many days it has been since Cheri Lynn Moore died in a hail of bullets and shotgun pellets. I can't find that online. So it's only thanks to a calculator I found online, that I can tell you that it has now been 516 days. The reason the Times-Standard was doing this countdown was that this is how long the Humboldt County District Attorney has gone without reaching a decision about whether to file charges against any of the police involved, for her death.

Many people have asked why it was taking so long, but some of us have our suspicions. You see, local law enforcement departments don't like District Attorney Paul Gallegos, and  he has already faced one recall election as a result of a high-profile, unpopular prosecution. That recall election campaign severely eroded Gallegos' popularity with some of the voters. It was hard to say whether he would survive the first recall, much less another one.

Considering that the first recall election against him went to the polls faster than he could take the prosecution to court, it seems likely that if Gallegos had risked a second recall election, it probably would also have went to the polls faster that he could take prosecution to the court. I'm tempted to complain about politics interfering with justice, but what passes for justice in this nation some times calls for interference, and likewise what passes for politics in this nation calls for interference.   On this subject, the only things I'm certain of is that neither is competent to interfere with the other.

If one wonders what's so different now that Gallegos will risk upsetting the law enforcement apple cart, I think the most pertinent detail is that the Police Chief who ordered his officers to hang up the phone on the victim, just as she was beginning to negotiate with them, no longer works for EPD, and comments of the current EPD Police Chief suggest that having a Criminal Grand Jury investigate the death should have been standard procedure, rather than a stinking controversy.

It seems to me that the fact that he is making such comments after a man arrested by officers under his command died because they didn't take his symptoms seriously, EPD Police Chief Garr Nielsen expects justice to be served, regardless how it makes his department look. Then again, maybe he realizes just how bad his department's reputation already looks, and realizes that it isn't going to get better until after justice weeds out his personnel.

If your child were to ask you, while the two of you were sitting among strangers - or worse yet people who might know you - if you're cheating on your spouse, and the answer were yes, would you give a frank answer?  Then why would you expect your child to give a frank answer to a similar question under the same circumstances?

If all the answer you get from your child to such a question is, "Muh-thurrrr!", or a heavy sigh accompanied by rolling eyes, you had that answer coming.

To be sure, filling out the forms at the doctor's office is an excellent excuse to obtain answers to questions such as, "Are you pregnant, or might you become pregnant during treatment?" and "Are you using any illegal drugs?" However, that doesn't mean you need to wait until you're at the doctor's office to blurt out the question.

As for why your preteen child's podiatrist would need to know whether her uterus is currently occupied, I can only assume that she obtains her office forms from the same source where your dentist and obstetrician obtain them, and that one size fits all - sort of.

At any rate, if your child is or is not pregnant, and may or may not become pregnant, is none of my business, so please don't ask her in front of me!

Yes, that was a problem, but this was a bigger problem:

Seriously, the county fair here in Humboldt just didn't have as many features or as good entertainment as we were accustomed to in Lassen County. It isn't for lack of local talent, because they are numerous, or the unavailability of better performers, because the likes of Kenny Rogers and Jefferson Starship have played in the area during the past year.

Addendum: There are now conflicting eyewitness accounts of the arrest of the man who died two hours after being arrested. One witness claiming to love the deceased person says Eureka City Police acted appropriately, while another claiming to love the police says the police beat the man to death.   Some times, I think some people talk just to hear themselves talk. The trouble is with discerning which people those are.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday another man died in jail, this one apparently by suicide, reiterating the theme of being a mental health patient, along with questions about inmates receiving needed health care while in custody.

Students arriving at College of the Redwoods at the beginning of the semester after being gone for the entire summer were blessed to find Tompkins Hill Road, which leads us to the campus from the 101 Freeway, newly paved. It still has that goofy dip in it in front of the campus Fish Hatchery that makes your car bounce up and down enthusiastically if you've timed your trip to arrive at the classroom just as class starts, and are therefore traveling the speed limit. Otherwise, the entire road is unfamiliarly smooth.

What was really a blessing about it is that the road department timed the construction work to be finished before the Fall Semester began. Yes, there was "road work" underway this week, but that turned out to be little more than mowing the weeds alongside the road - at first.

It turned into a plumbing job yesterday, after the lawn mower broke off that 3-inch pipe that stuck out of the ground and angled up the hill maybe the length of a football field beyond the north entrance, so that students were greeted by the sight of an impromptu water fountain gushing about 20 feet straight into the air from a 3-inch-diameter pipe for several hours. One gathers that no one there knew where and how to turn it off. Now that it's fixed, the pipe seems to be very sensibly under the ground.

Some people in the eastern part of Eureka, specifically in Cutten, aren't feeling so blessed by the road construction in front of their school, because it was timed perfectly to coincide with the beginning of the school year at Cutten School, and entails the sort of detour that typically requires one to drive 8 blocks to go around the corner.

That's right, I said, "Cutten School". When I was growing up, cutten' school was absolutely forbidden, and I imagine it was that way when you were in school too. Not in Eureka, though!  Here, they name their school "Cutten". I guess the students are supposed to think that they're already cutten' school, just by attending. Those grownups sure are sneaky, aren't they?

Since enrollment is voluntary at a community college, such as College of the Redwoods, we have to cope with January Joiners twice every year, as compared with once per year at the gym. They're called January Joiners because New Years Resolutions are a primary motivation at the gym. That applies to college enrollment for the Spring Semester in January just as well, but we also have a huge influx for the Fall Semester.

At any rate, most of the new students at the beginning of each semester are no more serious about following through here, than they are at the gym. It's really quite thoughtless of them to hog the parking lot and the classrooms, so that serious students can't park or enroll, when they're only going to hang around for a few weeks, and then disappear.

The Eureka Reporter carried Garrison Keillor's Jose Padilla column today, in which Federal law enforcement and prosecution drives him to the edge of paranoia. I don't blame him, because it seems that if the feds think that some weirdo took something you say or write the wrong way, they can charge you with fomenting insurrection. His column becomes a disclaimer, according to which, his readers must agree to his assertion, otherwise they are not readers of his column:

I don't know you. I never knew you. I never asked you to read this column. Isn't that right?

I guess it's a good thing he did that, because the Eureka Reporter picked up and printed that column today, and distributed it all over Humboldt County, complete with another assertion further up in the column:

I am going to think back on my life and wish I had become a gardener. Nobody was ever indicted for watering plants.

If that man knows the first thing about Humboldt County, he surely didn't mean for that second sentence to be published here. Then again, maybe he simply hasn't the foggiest idea what kind of plants get grown in Humboldt fog - or what kind of weirdos grow them - or what wrong way they might take that statement.

Nope, I don't blame him for crawling to the edge of paranoia at all.

On August 18, I described the 4-month ordeal we had, getting GEICO to pay off our totaled car.

Then, on August 23, I explained how wrong the police (CHP) report was about the collision in which the damage was done.

Meanwhile, on August 22, I explained that, "just about any digital map of my neighborhood is wrong", and expressed that as a result, "I'm scared of the Eureka City Police coming to my home too, and I don't even live in Eureka."

You may think, like I used to, surely the city police wouldn't rely upon such a flawed source of information as those goofy digital maps. I had another think coming.:  Why not?  The Humboldt County Sheriff's department does, and unlike the city police, it's their jurisdiction.

If you have even a slightly inquiring mind, you'll want to know how I learned that, won't you?  I learned it when, just two weeks after the ordeal with GEICO was over, two different moronotorists drove up our private driveway at 1 AM, apparently under the impression that they were still on the freeway, doing about 60 MPH.

Because the Sheriff's' office botched their response, we may never know whether the moronotorist in the lead was one of those local know-it-alls who always assumed that Spring Street in Fields Landing goes through to Bell Terrace Road in Eureka, or it was someone who simply relied upon one of those goofy digital maps. We may also never know what he did that so ticked off the other moronotorist that he would try to empty a revolver into the first moronotorist's car.

The reason I say that he tried to do that is that he started shooting before he'd bothered to figure out whose car he was shooting at. It was ours - the new one. Like all my neighbors, I called 911, and was told a deputy was on his way. I stayed up for three hours afterward, waiting for the deputy to arrive; not that I could slept, anyway. I was told later that he spent most of that time driving up and down private driveways at the wrong end of Spring Street, because that's where his map showed the 6500 block to be, and the closest he ever got was to the house of my landlord, who lives several hundred feet down the driveway from where the shooting happened. On the other hand, a person we later spoke to at the Sheriff's' office seemed convinced that the incident had been in Loleta, rather than Fields Landing. Who knows where the deputy really was?

I tried to find a bullet hole in my car, but couldn't. It wasn't until several days later, when I tried to get my physically disabled wife's electric mobility out of the back of the car, that we found that the tailgate wouldn't open. I didn't even connect this problem with the shooting, so I took the car in under warranty the next day. It was the mechanic looking at the tailgate's latch who discovered - not the bullet hole, because he didn't see it, either - a bullet lodged in the broken latch. Only once we found the bullet could we get a Sheriff's deputy to come and look at anything, and that was in the car dealer's shop, not at the scene of the crime.

Even then, the deputy seemed oblivious to our earlier reports of the shooting and my attempt to show him an injury I suffered when I ducked away from the window when the shooting started. Considering that attitude, I hold little hope that anyone will make any connection between the one bullet in our car, four different neighbors in close proximity reporting the gunshots, and another car showing up somewhere with 5 bullets in it.

As I mentioned two days ago, a man died after being arrested for displaying symptoms that could have indicated Oxygen Deprivation, Diabetes, Congestive Heart Failure, Head Trauma, or any number of other ailments - instead of having an ambulance called for him. It turns out that "any number of other ailments", (my words), includes, massive LSD overdose. We may never know whether someone spiked his food or drink, he suicided, or he overdosed unwittingly. That's because neither bystanders nor police officers obtained medical help for him.

Following the example of Eureka's previous Chief of Police, (you know, the one who unwittingly ordered his officers to hang up on the besieged mental patient with whom they were beginning to negotiate), the current Chief has stepped into something deep and smelly just before putting his foot in his mouth.

He claims in that article that the overdose, '"reaffirms my view that the officers of (the) EPD acted appropriately when faced with a violent, incoherent, combative individual,”'  Speaking of incoherent, aren't "violent" and "combative" redundant?  "Violent" is the criminal law term, while "combative" is the medical term describing violence as a symptom. At the end of the article, while they aren't redundant, the Chief once again mixes legal and medical terms, "violent" and "impaired", when he says, '"Mr. Cotton was so highly impaired and his actions so violent that it was impossible for law enforcement to subdue him peacefully.”'

While Chief Garr Nielsen claims that his officers "acted appropriately", he knows darn well that the man they arrested needed the medical attention that they didn't get for him.

As I mentioned on the 18th, almost a year ago, my wife was in a collision on a very lonely road, and the police report incorrectly stated that she caused the accident by passing unsafely. Just how incorrect could a California Highway Patrol police report be, you may wonder?  This incorrect:

This report:

1. It was written about three weeks after the accident, rather than within 8 days, as the officer indicated it would be. Enough time passed meanwhile, that the officer could easily have forgotten details of the accident, or even confused them with other accidents he may have reported.
2. Falsely stated that she gave her speed at the time of the collision as 30 to 35 miles per hour, when she told the officer and others that her speed while driving on South Jetty Road was 20 to 25 miles per hour, and that she had slowed while approaching the other vehicle from behind.
   1. Considering that the marked speed limit on this road is 25 mils per hour, if she had indeed told the officer that she was going faster, why didn’t he cite her, or even admonish her, for speeding?
      1. Lacking any explanation for this on the report, we must conclude that the officer did not cite her then, because he changed his mind about how fast she was going at a later date, without explanation, and then put his conclusion into her mouth.
3. Falsely stated that she caused the accident by passing unsafely.
   1. If she had indeed passed unsafely, thereby causing an accident, why didn’t the officer cite her, or even admonish her, for passing unsafely?
      1. Lacking any explanation for this on the report, we must conclude that the officer did not cite her then, because he changed his mind about the cause of the accident at a later date, without explanation.
4. Falsely indicated on a diagram that the point of first impact on the other vehicle was the fender, when the first point of impact was clearly on the driver’s door.
5. Omitted measurements of skid marks and any other evidence concerning the speed and location of the vehicles.
   1. The road was so narrow that two cars cannot pass without at least one of them pulling at least partially off the road, which the other driver had done. Skid marks, showed that impact with his vehicle pulling back onto the road forced her vehicle off the road and into low sand dunes.
6. Omitted destruction of evidence by the other driver by dismantling damaged parts of his vehicle.
7. Omitted results of testing both vehicles’ turn signals to determine whether they were functional.
8. Omitted most of the officer’s interview with her, including:
   1. That the other vehicle had pulled to the right side of the road and stopped.
   2. Her use of turn signal while passing.
   3. That she slowed while passing the stopped vehicle.
   4. That the other vehicle did not signal for a turn while she was behind it, where she could have seen the signal.
   5. That the other driver refused to exchange driver's license info as required by state law.

Now, after I have found so much fault with this CHP report, you may wonder, do I have a bias concerning CHP officers?  Probably. One of my favorite cousins is a local CHP officer, and I'm sure he knows the officer who wrote the report.

Ever since Eureka City Police shot a mental health outpatient to death in the process of doing a "welfare check" on her in lieu of Humboldt County Mental Health checking on her themselves, some people in Eureka have become afraid of the police. Since another man died in jail a few days ago, two hours after being arrested for displaying symptoms that could have indicated Oxygen Deprivation, Diabetes, Congestive Heart Failure, Head Trauma, or any number of other ailments - instead of calling an ambulance for him - a lot more people are scared of the police, and more of them are becoming vocal about it.

I'm scared of the Eureka City Police coming to my home too, and I don't even live in Eureka. For one thing, since I could dropkick a football to Eureka City limits from my house, saying that I live outside Eureka seems like a technicality. For another, it's fairly common to see various Eureka City employees show up in the 6500 block of my street in Fields Landing, under the impression that they are in the 3800 block of a street by the same name in Eureka. So far, that has not included the police - that I know of - but it's a mistake just begging to happen.

And wouldn't you know - I'm a Humboldt County Mental Health outpatient, a Diabetic, and have Congestive Heart Failure. That puts me at triple risk for dying at their hands.

You may wonder why Eureka city employees would confuse Fields Landing with Eureka. Apparently this is another of those issues that I thought I had already explained, but hadn't:  Just about any digital map of my neighborhood is wrong. I wikied that here. To illustrate how it affects city employees, search for 3800 Spring St., Eureka on Yahoo Maps. That's Fields Landing you're looking at.

My apologies for not getting back here the next day - or the next. A worse-than-usual migraine, along with other issues, interfered. Hopefully, I'll be able to return tomorrow, to write about how these inept maps brought crime to my neighborhood, and how it apparently affected the County Sheriff responding to it.

Addendum:

Earlier news reports about the man who died in jail two hours after being arrested failed to mention that he'd only been released from the very same jail two hours earlier after being held there for a week. That begs some questions:

1. Was he a habitual jailbird?
2. Was his poor health caused by his previous stay in jail?
3. Was the last week of an innocent man's life spent in jail?

Being dead, under the Constitution of the United States of America, he cannot be tried for the charges for which he was arrested on either occasion. Therefore, he cannot be found guilty, and therefore, he must legally be presumed innocent. Therefore, he was arrested on false grounds, and his arrest - as opposed to hospitalization - resulted in his death, and it was manslaughter.

If he did in fact commit the crimes for which he was charged, then the people of the State of California have been denied justice by those who caused his death.

So Cheesy a Caveman could do Better, August 18, 2007:
Yes, I'm a GEICO customer. Yes, I'm ashamed. The thing is, their malpractice put me and my wife over a barrel.

Once again, I thought I had already explained my view of something, but I now cannot find any place where I had described my view of GEICO's"caveman" commercials. So here goes:

My Archeology professor explained that Neanderthalenses were genetically no more different from modern black, white, oriental, or Amerindian people than modern black, white, oriental and Amerindian people are from one another. This is a racial issue. Just ask The Angry Black Woman.

Moreover, the ridicule is being directed at people who have no opportunity to refute it. I would like to think that GEICO's motive for doing the commercials was to rectify that matter. However, I am thoroughly convinced that their motive was to sell insurance.

However, that is not the entire sum of what I have to say about GEICO. Even if I Quote from where I wrote about GEICO on my other blog last year,  I still have unpleasant things about them left unsaid:

• We've been paying through the nose to these guys for 11 years, and now that we have a claim, the settlements they're offering won't even finish paying off the wrecked car!
• We're disabled and on a fixed income, so we can't afford to accept a settlement that would take the car away from us, and leave us continuing to pay for a car we no longer have!
• All that does is blackmail us into refusing their settlements and continue driving around in - and making payments on - a totaled car for two months!
• Making GEICO commercials; so easy, a gecko could do it!  Thanks for nothing, you bloody green Gecko!

After we'd made payments - totaling around $1400 - on a totaled vehicle for four months, GEICO finally gave us a settlement that would allow us to pay off the totaled car. We demanded that they add reimbursement for those payments to our settlement, because their procrastination forced us to make those payments, but GEICO refused.

It is clear to us that GEICO's commercials claiming that their claim settlements are the quickest are false advertising. Every time we see one of those commercials, it comes across to us as harassment.

No, I'm not done yet. I mentioned at the beginning of this post that GEICO's malpractice put me and my wife over a barrel, and I haven't explained that yet, have I?

What GEICO did after the settlement is go, along with the other driver's insurance company, before an arbitrator without our knowledge, our consent, or our evidence from the accident scene that would have proven that the officer's report was incorrect in placing blame for the accident upon my wife. The result, as GEICO explained to us afterward, was that the arbitrator found that the accident was her fault, it would go on my wife's driving record, and the arbitrator's decision was final.

The result of that going on my wife's driving record makes the cost of changing insurance companies prohibitive. Of course, the first fault for the officer's incorrect report lies with the officer. I hope to write about law enforcement officers tomorrow.

I should have known there was a major earthquake somewhere around world, but when I feel that ill, I tend to forget such things. Actually, I did think of it, and tried to check the USGS web site for quakes, but I could only get the California-Nevada page to come up.

When I finally got to look at USGS' World earthquake map, sure enough, there'd been a magnitude 8 quake near the shore of Peru, along with about two dozen aftershocks near it in the magnitude 5 and 6 range. There has also been a flurry of magnitude 5 and 6 quakes around the Pacific rim from about one day before the Peru quake, and continuing to the present.

That means that our local risk of earthquakes is a bit higher than usual, right now.

I thought I had explained that around the time that long-wave vibrations, (about 20 seconds, peak to peak), from earthquakes around the world arrive where I am, I get ill, but I can't find where I did so, so I must assume that I didn't explain that. The one symptom I seem to suffer most often is feeling feverish - even though I don't have a fever. I some times suffer sneezing attacks, much like hay fever. I may feel anxiety or pressure in my head, or have a migraine, which may lead to nausea or worse.

Then again, I frequently suffer such symptoms on the full or new moon, especially if there is an eclipse. And some times, I really do get hay fever or the flu.

In Eureka, high school students who are misfit enough that they don't learn well are sent to a remedial school named Zoe Barnum High School. The last I heard, the location of this school was up in the air, because it was to be moved to a new campus, and just about any neighborhood that's nominated for its new location is immediately up in arms.

Meanwhile, Zoe Barnum High School seems to still be in the old location. Viewing this location on Wikimapia, one finds that someone has suggested  renaming it, "Zoe Carter High School in honor of the character on EUReKA". Someone else suggested not doing so, apparently because, "Zoe Barnum was a great ventriloquist." (That's more than I knew about Zoe Barnum.)

All this occurred before it was revealed in last night's episode that Zoe Carter's IQ is 46 points higher than her dad's. (Don't tell him that - she didn't.)  Therefore, even though I would love to infer that either of these conflicting suggestions was meant to imply that the students at Eureka's remedial high school are closet geniuses, I have failed to do so.

However, I don't think that the failure of the people making these suggestions to imply such a thing should be held against them or their suggestions. After all, most of the ideas acted upon in this world that turn out the best usually do so for reasons other than those for which the ideas were originally suggested.

One person wants the name of Zoe Barnum High School changed to Zoe Carter High School. The other wants to keep the present name. Are we ready for a high school with two names?  How about Zoe Barnum - Zoe Carter High School?

Since I've already asserted that most of the ideas acted upon in this world that turn out the best usually do so for reasons other than those for which the ideas were originally suggested, I decline to say why I think this is a good idea.

The fact is, as interesting a place as Eureka is, I'd already written about so many of the interesting things around here that in order to maintain a daily blog about Eureka, I had resorted to writing about things that were more political than interesting.

A little over a year ago, I mentioned that my opinion of politics is such that I would never accuse anything as intelligent as a piece of wood of being involved in politics. That means that writing about politics not only bored me, but it left me so depressed that I simply left this blog out to dry for 10 months.

If you understand how damp the weather is in Eureka - not unlike certain parts of EUR^eKA during this week's episode - hanging something out to dry can take a while. You remember that weird light that some times would come out during the day time and slowly creep across the sky from east to west?  I haven't seen it since I came back from Frisco this week.

I've come to the conclusion that if I am going to maintain this blog, my schedule for updating it will be dictated by the occurrence of interesting things to write about, rather than a clock or calendar.

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.