Inside UDJ by Editor K.C. Meadows

All I can say is, if we are going to bail out homeowners who spent too much on homes they could not afford, then I want the government to make whole my 401k account too. In the past three weeks my husband and I have lost almost half of what we had set aside so far for our retirement (which WAS going to be in just a few years for my husband). We were encouraged to do this as responsible Americans. (And believe me, I know we are not alone.) I'm not demanding a bailout per se, but if we are getting to the point of bailing out people with mortgages, I am just as at-risk if I have no money for my golden years. Come to think of it, Purina sounds like a good company to invest in right now.

Posted by K.C. at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A local reader stopped by the office to show me something he had just purchased at the North State Street Republican Party Headquarters: a "$3 bill" made to look like real US currency with Barack Obama's face on the front in Arabic headress. There are a lot of other just plain stupid political references on the bill, like the signature of Teddy Kennedy as "Chief Socialist Advisor," but it is the clear, bigoted, racist prejudice of the bill's portrait of Obama of which all Republicans should be thoroughly ashamed and I find it really shocking that our own local Republicans would buy into such a stunt. It does nothing to advance any serious views you have and reveals you as not only desperate, but unprincipled.

Posted by K.C. at 04:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As someone of the following generation who still thought Paul Newman one of the most attractive men in the world but also No. 1 on the all around good guys list, I was really sad this morning to log on to the Internet and find that he had died. His death was not unexpected. It was widely known that he was very sick. Last month New Yorker magazine did a story on him that was clearly a prelude to his obit, but somehow the reality of it is hard to swallow.
The world is just not as good a place today as it was yesterday.
If more people could do what they loved in life, be true to their spouse for decades, raise their children to care about the future and just give away to good causes the money they don't really need, what a world this would be.

Posted by K.C. at 09:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Remember Chris Stone, the man who is trying to build some housing at the south end of town and getting the runaround from the county? The last time I wrote about him he was awaiting a promised meeting with county officials. Right after that episode it turns out that the county decided it can't talk to him directly anymore because at some point in his addresses to supervisors he said something about having to resort to some legal action if the county continues to jerk him around. So, the county, instead of meeting with him as promised turned around and said, oh no, now we can't meet with you because you are a potential lawsuit.
That is a twisted, stupid attitude and one that just confirms why no one wants to come to this county to try to create jobs, or desperately needed housing or anything else. When someone actually does file suit against the county, then by all means go to your corners, but to cut off communications with someone hiding behind "you might sue us" is cowardly and uncalled for.

Posted by K.C. at 08:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Although the school doesn't really want to talk about it, on Wednesday some six or seven Willits High School students were sent to the principal's office, reportedly under the influence of pot brownies. Ambulances were called to take them to the hospital for what was termed on the emergency scanner "marijuana brownies overdose." Later it was learned that while the ambulances were called, the students were not sent to hospital and it may be that only one student was really under the influence. One high school student (not one of the seven) asked the next day if he knew what had happened, explained that the pot brownies in question were made with pure marijuana bud rather than hash oil, and commented that "Everyone KNOWS you can't make them with bud, you have to use hash oil."

Posted by K.C. at 08:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's my question. With the State of California telling us they can't spend money, and with no budget in sight, where's Caltrans getting the money to repave miles of Highway 101 between Ukiah and Hopland - which by the way, didn't look like they needed repaving anyway. And doing it at night when you know all those workers are making gajillion-time dollars. I have been traveling all week between Ukiah and Willits and if Caltrans wants to repave something they should have started at Calpella and headed north. The slow lane between the bottom of Willits Grade and Calpella is terrible. (The fast lane is fine but that never means Caltrans skips repaving it anyway.)
But the worst of Highway 101 can't compare to most of the county's roads. This is where taxpayers throw up their hands and say government simply doesn't work: Caltrans has multimillions to repave pretty good roads and the county has no money to repave terrible roads. When you ask why, government officials tell you it's because Caltrans' money comes from some different pot of cash and can't be interchanged with the money from the lowly counties. What taxpayers however see, is their tax dollars being spent with no apparent sense of proportion or need.
You can translate that into just about any sector of government and there's not much secret about why taxpayers get riled up about government waste and inefficiency.

Posted by K.C. at 07:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For those who are going to be glued to convention coverage in the coming week, be aware that at the UDJ we have on our opening Web page all the coverage from our sister paper The Denver Post. Go to www.ukiahdailyjournal.com and you can click into the section and get the complete Denver Post coverage of the Democratic convention.
When the Republicans convene in Minnesota the week after, I believe we will have the same Web site access on our opening page from our sister paper in St. Paul.
So you can get all the convention coverage in the coming weeks right from www.ukiahdailyjournal.com.
We will also have stories from our own correspondent Tim Riley who will be attending both conventions on our behalf and will be looking to connect with Mendocino County residents there. If you know anyone locally who will be at either convention, email me their contact info at udjkcm@pacific.net and I'll make sure TIm gets it so he can talk to them while they're there.

Posted by K.C. at 09:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As happens here at the Daily Journal from time to time, we are having a splash of turnover in our newsroom staff. Some of you may have noticed the byline of David Minton. He is our new education reporter. He will cover Ukiah Unified School District, Mendocino Community College and The Mendocino County Office of Education. Also he will cover a variety of other things like children and youth, health and transportation, and write features. His phone number is 468-3522 and his email will be udjdm@pacific.net as soon as I get it set up - which should be today.
Our law enforcement and courts reporter Ben Brown is leaving us Aug. 29 for San Jose and we have a Humboldt State journalism school about-to-be-graduate Zack Cinek coming in. Zack hails from Willits and will serve a five-week internship with us to fulfill his last semester of course work. We hope to make him a permanent part of our staff at the end of that time. He will takeover the police/court beat. That beat also includes agriculture and the environment. After Aug. 29 contact Zack at 468-3521 or udjzc@pacific.net
Our sports editor Anthony Dion is leaving us for a new job in Colorado. His last day is Saturday. On Sunday I will become sports editor for a time so expect the sports pages to be abbreviated until we find a replacement. I have interviewed six candidates from all around the U.S. this week and will offer the job to someone today. If I get an acceptance this weekend I hope to have a new sports editor in place by mid Sept. at the latest. In the meantime all you sports coaches, parents and players, please use our web site sports reporting feature or call up at 468-3518 to report scores or just email udjsports@pacific.net with your game reports. I will have a photographer out and about shooting local games but I won't always have the results right away unless people call in. I will have no one to actually cover games. Our part time sports writer position is also still open, so anyone locally who wants to write sports and can learn to lay out pages on our Quark desktop publishing system should come into the office at 590 S. School St and fill out an application.

Posted by K.C. at 08:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here's a press release we got today:

“For Better or For Worse” Sets Date to Start Over with New Material

Kansas City, MO (Aug. 13, 2008)—Calling the next phase of her comic strips "new-runs," Lynn Johnston announced that beginning Monday, Sept. 1, her immensely popular "For Better or For Worse" will start over again. Using new comic strips drawn in the style she used 29 years ago when the Patterson family first appeared on comic pages, Johnston will begin retelling their story from the beginning, eventually blending at least half of the classic original comic strips with new material.

Johnston explains her approach and talks about why changes in her personal life led her to back off from earlier plans to retire on a video posted on YouTube.com. Please copy and paste this url into your Web browser: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUzkOxgmmc4

“Everything in September is new,” said Johnston, "the punch lines, the drawing, all are new. The only thing retro is the way I'm drawing everything. I want it to flow into the classic material seamlessly.”

“This first year, the ratio of old to new will be at least 50-50,” explains Johnston. “I want this to be the best thing I’ve ever done, and I’m having so much fun drawing Lizzie as a baby again and revisiting all the characters.”

“For a generation of new readers unfamiliar with ‘For Better or For Worse,’ it’s a chance to begin an exciting journey; for current fans, it’s a chance to relive their favorite episodes,” says Lee Salem, president and editor of Universal Press Syndicate, Johnston’s syndicate. One such episode is the adoption of Farley, the Patterson’s beloved dog. That will come in October.

For the past year, Lynn Johnston’s widely syndicated comic strip has been a blend of new and old storylines.

“At first I thought that I could segue back and forth from today to yesterday, but that became very confusing. Some people really enjoyed it and some just wanted us to get on with the story,” she says.

Johnston will select material from her collection of almost 10,000 archival strips to help retell the Patterson family's story as her longtime fans remember it, pausing in spots to update references that seem confusing or even to flesh out characters she didn't explore in the first telling.

"I'm starting right at the very beginning—when Elizabeth was a little crawling baby and couldn’t say too much, and Michael was in kindergarten,” she adds. “I’m a better storyteller now, and I want to … improve the storyline or take a piece of art and make it better. What a luxury to change, fix and to augment. I'm such a perfectionist; I want to put my hands on it and have it tweaked here and there.”

Johnston says that a change in her marital status changed her mind about retiring completely.

"At this time in my life I thought I would be on a cruise ship to Panama or the Mediterranean, retired with my Tilley hats, my sneakers. But I’m a single lady now, and I want to keep working,” she says. “Because I don't have to work 365 days of new material into a year, I can still take some time off to paint and travel.”

“I’m considering this a renewal, not a retirement,” she adds.

Over the years, not only did her characters age in real time in the strip, but Johnston’s art style changed, too.

“When I first started the strip, the comic’s style was fast and loose, probably because I was so busy and I had to get it out fast,” she says. “It had a happy freedom to it. What I’m experiencing now by redrawing, it’s almost like I’m drawing portraits. I'm changing John's jaw. And over the years, Elly's nose grew up to the size of a potato. Now, I'm drawing it smaller again, the way it was when I first started to draw. There is a huge difference between the earlier and the later styles.”

“For Better or For Worse” has been syndicated since December 1979. In 1985, Johnston became the first woman to receive the Reuben Award for Cartoonist of the Year from the National Cartoonists Society. She has also received the Order of Canada and claims a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame. This summer, Johnston was inducted into the "Giants of the North" -- the Canadian Cartoonists' Hall of Fame. She lives in Ontario.

"For Better or For Worse" now appears in more than 2,000 papers around the world. Read by people of all ages, the award-winning comic strip deals honestly with both the lighthearted and the serious, and has effectively brought families together for laughter, tears and dialogue. Johnston has produced 46 books about her strip, and her strip has been adapted into six animated television specials and a popular animated series.

Biographical information and more can be found at www.amuniversal.com/ups and www.fbofw.com . Daily strips are posted on www.gocomics.com .

Posted by K.C. at 03:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got back from a wonderful vacation at a beach house back east to find the surprising news about John Enquist, the long time Mendocino County Winegrowers Alliance director who went on to become the head of the newly formed Mendocino Winegrape and Wine Commission.
According to the press release from the Commission which we reported on when it came out the first week in August, Enquist allegedly misappropriated about $200,000 from the new Commission funds. The Commission and Enquist apparently came to a settlement after a state audit of the books as Enquist is not being prosecuted and the press release indicated he is not accepting any official liability. However he did repay the commission $217,803.82. What he was doing with that money will forever be a mystery to most of us I guess.
The Commission says it now has some new auditing procedures in place that will prevent whatever didn't happen from happening again.
The release also indicates that Enquist was terminated from his job last December, when at the time the public was told he was just moving on and they threw a big party for him.
I know that the business community hates bad news and a brand new commission already having a financial scandal doesn't help, but it also looks just as bad for the public to find out after the fact that all this was going on. I know everyone is always worried about someone suing someone and they have to be careful not to make a formal accusation in public against someone they weren't willing to formally accuse before the law.
They got their money back, so they just want to put it behind them.
Enquist obviously had the money on hand to give back to them and he was willing to pay the additional expenses of the recovery of the funds so he's no doubt glad to have the thing behind him too. Nothing has to go on his record or his resume. Unfortunately, Google will still be around and the reporting on this will be out there in cyberspace forever.
I assume the press release was approved by him or his legal representatives.
I am amazed at John. I worked with him on a couple of local projects and saw him several times a year and liked him when he was with the Winegrowers. He was always a good source for news on the local wine business. Why would anyone get tangled up in something like this? It makes no sense.

Posted by K.C. at 06:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Those who were sitting in the June 10 Board of Supervisors meeting heard from a local man who has been severely abused by the county's planning department and who has still to get any relief. Chris Stone has been trying since January of 2007 to build a little over 200 homes - some houses, some apartments -- on 50 acres at the south end of Ukiah across from the Redwood Health Club. The land is already zoned for exactly his kind of project and the project, by all accounts is well-designed, uses advanced sewer discharge systems, anticipates solar use and carves out a retail space for perhaps a local store. It has the lower, mdidle and upper income homes all together and from what I can gather is exactly the kind of development local politicians say they need and want.
So what does the county planning department do? It stalls and ignores Mr. Stone, demands unnecessary studies and generally makes the man spend hundreds of thousands of dollars without any sign that his project will move forward. Mr. Stone produced the environmental studies - although the project should really get a negative declaration since it's a zoned use - and based them on not only what the county's rules currently demand but used more challenging assumptions than the county would have.
What does the county planning department do? It decides to demand new studies based on what it thinks it might have in the Ukiah Valley Area Plan at some future date. And everyone knows the UVAP is far from being ready to adopt.
So Mr. Stone very politely - for someone who could and probably should have been raging much sooner - went to the Board of Supervisors and complained. The county planning department pretended to be on top of the situation, and supervisors promised Mr. Stone that he would get action from the tippy top, the CEO himself.
Mr. Stone tried to schedule meetings with the CEO to no avail. So he went back to the supervisors in July and lo and behold the county administration suddenly scheduled a meeting and acted like they'd never seen him waiting hopefully in their anterooms.
How that July 17 meeting went is unknown as of now, but Mr. Stone has another gab session in August.
County Planning Director Ray Hall is retiring in days - as far as I'm concerned he should have been retired after the Vichy Springs development debacle in the early 1990s. The county now has an opportunity to recharge its planning department - and not with $177,000 a year consultants and not with anyone who has been working in the department under Hall's "leadership." The county needs a talented planner who it will allow to be creative, but demand be responsive and who will lead the county into the future. This county's reputation for micromanagement, anti-developer sentiment and political mayhem will make that person difficult to find.

Posted by K.C. at 07:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Overheard in a Sonoma County tasting room Sunday was an American couple who live with their children in Beijing explaining that the air pollution in Beijing is so bad (LA is Lake County by comparison) that the Olympic athletes already in the region are actually staying in Tokyo and flying over to Beijing when necessary. They say that young people are routinely urged to wear masks when they are outside but often refuse to do so and that they do not let their own children outside to play. (One wonders what income is worth that but anyway ...)
Today I read in the Washington Post that Beijing has begun a three-week air cleanup program that prohibits all public smoking in the city of 16 million, and that has shut down factories and limited residents' driving to certain days of the week.
Will it be enough to clean up the air by the time the torch is in place? I don't know but I can say that this is one summer Olympics I wont be wishing I could attend in person. And I suspect that a lot of Americans who go over there are going to be rudely awakened to the fact that they can't breathe. Can you clean up the air of a city of 16 million in three weeks?

Posted by K.C. at 07:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tidbit 1: I have noticed in the past couple of weeks that Bruce Bread is no longer available at Safeway. I wonder if thehigh prices of wheast has put a crimp on Bruce Bread's product. They were always the expensive loaf. If cheap bread is now at $4-$5, perhaps Bruce Bread got too expensive? I had actually begun buying Bruce Bread since at $4-plus a loaf it was the same price as the lesser loaves.

Tidbit 2: Gas at Hopland's USA station (or what ever the southernmost one is) is $4.39, the cheapest I've seen around.

Tidbit 3: I understand that Peter Richardson, former owner of Rainbow Construction has settled with Ukiah Unified School District. I don't know for how much. The person who told me said he couldn't divulge that part. As you may recall, Rainbow went out of business after the school district refused to pay more than $3 million in charges the company felt it had coming to it when the Grace Hudson School was finished. The construction was over a year late and the school district said the overages were Rainbow's fault. Rainbow said they were the architect's fault. From what I have seen in reports on the construction and from talking to subcontractors, I believe Rainbow got a raw deal and the school district basically put them out of business (plus the Ukiah Valley lost the more than 200 good construction jobs they represented locally). Also it is telling that UUSD is now suing the architects.

Posted by K.C. at 09:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I read somewhere that the day that Shea Stadium will close down approaches (in September), I recalled a time when Mets games were an important part of family life for me. For those of you who aren't baseball fans or who don't know the New York area, Shea Stadium was opened in 1964 in Queens to house the new New York Mets baseball team. My single mom found it a great place to spend an inexpensive evening with her two daughters, me 10 and older sis 12. You could take a subway right to the park (we never owned a car) and I don't know what admission was, but it was cheap. My mom often had another woman, someone usually from her midtown office, along for the games and my sister and I learned for the first time about baseball. But mostly we were delirious to be out at night with mom, watching as the night deepened and the bright field lights and the deep green outfield and burnt orange infield came alive. We also loved the Mets fans around us. Loud, raucus and almost obsessive, they had coffee cans and wooden spoons, homemade horns, bells, whistles and other noise makers which my sister and I never had a hope of being allowed to imitate. Of course in those days the Mets were new, and not very good as I recall. But we loved them.
I guess my mom wasn't a Yankee fan and Yankee Stadium was harder to get to and not in a neighborhood a single woman wanted to walk with two young girls at night. (Although my Dad, who lived across town from us in Manhattan used to love to tell us that Yankee Stadium was owned by the Catholic Church and, being Catholic, wasn't that just grand?)
One year about 1988 or 89 my husband and I were in NYC visiting my mom and we all decided to go to a Mets day game. I had forgotten how tall Shea Stadium is and when we took our seats in the rafters in a chilly wind, we realized that even the resident crows and pigeons were flying below us and about four innings in, stiff with cold, we decided we'd had enough and left.
Despite that, and the fact that Shea is far from a great ballpark, it will always be part of my childhood - along with the big World's Fair globe nearby - and that's how I'll remember it.

Posted by K.C. at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)