Dunga Brook Diary: Catch Me If You Can
May 2011, Albany to LA, SW Flight #4938
Vicki Whicker
The morning sky is orange and pink and purple, the ground is a lush patchwork of greens and blues.
I’m on my way back to the relentless sun and baked neutrals of Southern California.
I already miss central New York.
I pick up my pen and open my journal…but how to describe the first taste of my future?
This Mother’s Day weekend trip, from Los Angeles to central New York, was my first visit to my new-old house.
Back in April, I bought the house, sight unseen, from a post on Facebook. My soon to be New York neighbor (a former LA acquaintance), Jim, is responsible for this purchase. He posted a photo of a forlorn little house for sale and asked, “Who wants to be my neighbor?” And, there it was, my little house, in a field of mud and snow… Read more
Dershowitz dishes on not impeaching Trump
Alan Dershowitz in his Twitter photo.
BY MARY REINHOLZ
Another version of this article first appeared in The Villager, a downtown Manhattan weekly.
Alan Dershowitz, famed criminal defense lawyer and professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, has been taking heat from fellow liberals for criticizing Special Counsel Robert Mueller and defending the civil liberties of right-wing Republican President Donald Trump, the subject of Dershowitz’s latest book, “The Case Against Impeaching Trump.”
But last Wednesday evening, the lifelong Democrat and contrarian who is nearly 80 and best known for representing notorious clients like O.J. Simpson and Claus von Bulow over five decades of courtroom combats, received a warm welcome on the fourth floor of Barnes & Noble at Union Square in downtown Manhattan. There he was interviewed by Josh Barro, a senior editor of Business Insider. Read more
THE SANDLOT GAMES OF AUGUST
By Bob Vickrey
Many years ago, and far away from the bright lights of packed football stadiums filled with cheering fans, there was another annual ritual playing out more quietly on sandlots in just about every Texas town across the state.
Thousands of boys like me, who had never played varsity football, gathered for our own version of the game on deserted and dusty schoolyard fields.
Houston’s scorching, humid summer months were hardly a deterrent for the boys of our town to assemble in the late afternoons and engage in competitive games of touch football. By early August there was already a sense of anticipation in the air about the upcoming fall football season, and many of us gathered as if we were training for the first game—even though few of us were actually members of any organized team. Read more
Law helps freelancers collect from deadbeats
BY MARY REINHOLZ
Another version of this article first appeared in The Villager, a downtown Manhattan weekly.
The Freelance Isn’t Free Act was implemented last year in New York City to benefit an estimated 500,000 vulnerable temporary or part-time employees in a variety of occupations from creatives to construction workers. Here’s hoping similar bills show up in other major cities where so-called “gig workers” congregate.
This transplanted California scribe remembers the way it was for independent contractors in downtown Manhattan when I frantically hustled assignments to stay afloat during the dark days right after 9/11, acting as a stringer for The New York Times and a couple of other daily newspapers.
My full-time writing / editing job at Graphic Arts Monthly had been abruptly eliminated during a company-wide downsizing by its corporate parent, Reed Business Information. During sparse work periods as a freelancer, I subsisted on a lot of cheap noodle dishes and paced the aisles of Jack’s 99¢ Stores for bargains. Con Edison once turned off my electricity because of late payment from an upscale magazine. 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.
