California Watch

This fanciful idea of California falling into the sea trumps the public interest over the reality of the flooding of our lowlands all over the world.

Go ahead, Ahnold. Terminate the Debt. Don't stretch it out into one sequel after another.

The man-of-steroid-flabbed-muscles who squats in the Governor's Mansion appears to be ready and willing to reenact his roles as The Terminator in real life.

I've often told Lynn that Californians believe that snow is something that you go to visit on holiday weekends. A storm passed though on Friday and dumped a load on our higher peaks.

Now is the time when the canyon bottoms turn bright orange and lemon and the hills assume a ripening lime.

I often passed St. Sophia's when I sneaked up the canyon with my parents' car, a cream colored Ford Fairlane.

I'm getting tired of these high adventure scenarios that are becoming more and more what bureaucrats feel must be an essential of our daily life.

I guess I must have been napping when today's tremblor brought down a cheap belltower in Paso Robles and raised the altitude of the surrounding hills by a foot.

If we get two or three days of heavy rain, you may be reading about houses sliding off the hillsides and homes spared by the fires being washed away.

He's getting his chance here. I can't do anything else but give him one for the time being. But he remains unproved.

Lynn and I endorse the grocery workers' strike now underway in California.

Yes, I am sure that a recently laid off industrial worker making $35,000 a year (the supposed family average for the United States -- poverty level for a family of four living in metropolitan California) is going to jump at the chance to pick grapes and lettuce for much less.

The Right -- led by censorship king Bill O'Reilly -- has been flooding the airwaves with the accusation that Cruz Bustamonte and MECHA implicitly endorse the violent takeover and reannexation of the Southwest by Mexico. Note that second word: reannexation. The land we're on was Mexico's to begin with.

Before the war, Anglo-Americans insinuated themselves into lands owned by Mexico. Then they screamed persecution and brought the force of the United States to bear in favor of what was their minority rule. The land was seized -- by force -- from Mexico and ethnically cleansed of Latinos despite the assurances of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildago.

Many mock the state of my birth and yet they keep trying to own it. If they don't like the way we think and the way we do things out here, why not just leave us alone?

Someone went around my home town of San Bernardino, California, carrying a stencil and a can of silver spray paint in about 1970.

I raised my voice slightly as I said to Lynn "Don't you just love hatred?"

This singling out strikes me as Wimpocratic politics: the Right whines and you give them a few hours to spout their homophobia, meet others like them, exchange addresses, and organize a voting bloc to find new ways to undermine majority rule and minority rights.

There was a gardener in the pond. I'd never seen him before. He waded in the ale-colored water and scooped out the algae with a small, clear plastic box and a couple of large soap buckets.

The epicenter appears to be about 12 to 15 miles north of here. 4.6 is a very small earthquake.

The Runnion story is an old one, it seems, as old as human lust and panic.