Fun fact: Fort Bragg used to be a major sea urchin fishery. These prickly (and delicious) creatures made a lot of people rather wealthy in the 1980s, and the urchin fishery was a large part of Fort Bragg’s commercial fishery. Then, a strange thing started happening. Urchins became much less plentiful. Fishermen insisted they weren’t …
Category Archives: Fort Bragg
On ‘Small Town Values’
Like ‘family values,’ ‘small town values’ is a very popular codeword on the political scene in the United States. I see it getting thrown around in all kinds of directions, and I’m not really sure that people know what they mean or are trying to convey when they use it. Around 75% of this country’s …
Unwanted In Any Neighborhood
Folks talk about “the homeless problem” a lot. I’ve actually always found this framing and phrase highly problematic, because it erases the actual people involved; it makes it sound like people are a problem. Homelessness is the problem. Being a homeless person is not. But, this aside, let’s talk about homelessness. Here in Fort Bragg, …
Give Me One Reason To Buy Here…
It’s a Fort Bragg doubleheader this weekend, sorry about that, folks. I’d like to think that what I talked about yesterday and what I am talking about today are applicable to other communities, though, so there really is reason to stick around. You can substitute the name of your own flailing hometown if you’d prefer. …
The False Promise of Tourism
I’ve been following NPR’s coverage of the proposals to increase broadband penetration in the United States because it’s a topic of interest to me, and recently they did a feature which dovetailed nicely with another interest of mine: The damage that tourism does to communities. An NPR reporter traveled to Trinity County to talk with …
The Devil and Aaron Vargas
Warning: This post includes discussions of rape, child molestation, murder, and suicide. These are the facts: In Fort Bragg, California on 8 February 2009, Aaron Vargas drove to Darrell McNeill’s trailer and shot him, once, with an antique pistol after an argument. McNeill took half an hour to die while Aaron and Liz McNeill, Darrell’s …
Buy Local Or Else
Every now and then, it seems like another little “buy local” bubble burbles up. It’s happening again here; I see signs in store windows, and people exhorting me to buy local in various articles, and, as usual, it’s evoking a series of emotions in me. You’d think that I might be all about the Buy …
What Is Normal?
We’ve been getting a lot of requests over at FWD/Forward to talk about medical marijuana, and I was recently having a conversation with some of the FWD contributors about what a complex issue this is, for me. I ended up going on quite the rant, and I realized as I was talking with them that …
Burning Down the House
So, yesterday I noticed that things kind of smelled smoky, but I didn’t really pay attention until they started smelling really smoky, and then I went outside to see what was going on, because, you know, smoky smells are bad, and… Yup. That’s our fire department, setting things on fire, because that’s what they like …
One Thing That is Awesome
Volunteer fire departments. Seriously, folks, volunteer fire departments rock. The house next to me caught fire today and the fire department was ON IT. We can’t afford to maintain a fire department in the professional sense, but that doesn’t mean we don’t need fire services, so I’m glad that members of the community are out …