Starting just north of the California border, there is a 200 mile stretch of exotic and dramatic dunes sandwiched between highway 1 and the ocean. You might not even know they’re there from the road. » Read on »

A conversation got started over on abetteroakland.com about crime in Oakland. V Smoothe (one of the truly great Oakland bloggers), wanted to make the point that crime in Oakland is bad, and to do so she used the FBI’s Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report to build a graph comparing the crime rates of several cities to show that Oakland’s is particularly bad. While I agree that crime is bad and that some people are unrealistic about the existence of a problem, I said that the numbers aren’t an honest or conclusive comparison of cities. » Read on »

Here we have Bongwater, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Bob Weir, and the Fabulous Pussywillows, all on one stage for a song, broadcast on National TV: » Read on »

Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, and lots of rejoicing is taking place around the world. And it should be celebrated – The Origin of Species fundamentally changed the way humans understand life on this planet. Maybe I’m splitting hairs here, but it’s frustrating to me how many times I’ve heard people refer to Darwin as the “inventor” of the theory of evolution.

He didn’t invent the theory of evolution. » Read on »

As I’m starting this blog, Lux Interior of The Cramps has just died of a heart condition. Technically he was 63, but really he was a timeless, in a way only true originals can be. I don’t mean that his music or his band were timeless (they draw heavily on early rock’n'roll but rarely pushed past those influences), I mean Lux himself was an archetype – a raconteur – and in that he’s timeless. » Read on »