Honey Visits the Gold Country
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste.)
My older daughter Feride and granddaughter Emma and I arrived at the Sierra Club’s Clair Tappaan Lodge, which is on the old Lincoln Highway — the first coast-to-coast automobile route in the country (1912-1913) — a little west of Donner Lake, at about midnight on July 3rd, after an incident that revealed to me that Feride had indeed inherited my parallel parking gene. (The parking event occurred when a total stranger opened my daughter’s car door and yelled, “I can’t stand it!” and made her get out so he could park the car for her. The first time someone did this to her, she thought she was being carjacked. Now she just tips them, which can be unnerving when the intervener turns out to be a surgeon.) Read more
Who Was The Real Hero Of The 1910 Bombing Of The Los Angeles Times?
By LIONEL ROLFE
Beginning in October, I will join with Lee Boek and Eric Vollmer of Public Works Improvisational Theater in presenting a series of salons and theatrical productions relating to the bombing of the Los Angeles Times and the almost successful candidacy of Job Harriman in becoming the socialist mayor of Los Angeles. He had already beaten the incumbent in a primary. Along with Nigey Lennon and Paul Greenstein, I penned the book “Bread And Hyacinths: The Rise and Fall of Utopian Los Angeles” which documents the story. That book is now available for your iPhone, iPad, iPod, Kindle or computer from Amazon’s Kindle bookstore. The book was optioned by Oscar-winning director and screenwriter Paul Haggis. Read more
Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
