Asked an acquaintance who took part in this week's open house at Stillwater Business Park to paint me a word picture of what he saw. He helpfully e-mailed: "Roads, a bridge and signs showing the parcels. Not a lot of...

Not the weightiest issue facing the city, but it looks like our vice mayor will get her wish - to move the annual "State of the City" luncheon from January 2011 (the first month of her term as mayor) to...

Excerpt of an op-ed at FlashPoint: As (Oakland) mayor, Brown oversaw a bloated Oakland bureaucracy in which more than 1,100 employees, were paid more than $100,000 a year. Even more startling: the number of people on the Oakland payroll earning...

Here's a first: Realtor Don. J. Wilkins posts a five-minute video on YouTube and manages to show neither a house nor a parcel of land for sale. Good vibe though....

From the Ashland paper: A series of snafus around a five-day music, art and New Age festival near Redding, Calif., apparently torpedoed its ticket sales, left vendors unpaid and sent organizer Mystic Garden Party of Ashland scrambling to cover about...

On the radio this morning Redding Electric Utility Director Paul Hauser repeatedly dodged questions from Carl and Linda Bott on how much electric rates will go up in the next year or two. He said he didn't want to put...

Seems bed bugs have infested New York City and rats have overrun a city park. Reminds me of one of the most played tunes on the juke box at the Spring Lounge in Little Italy in the summer of '78....

Could be. From the SF Chronicle: "You gotta remember, I'm an old man, and everything's shot to hell," said the so-called world's angriest man as he speaks from his cabin in Manton (Tehama County). How he got there, living an...

From the LA Times: The scandal over high salaries paid to Bell officials has city leaders throughout the state scrambling to limit the political damage. City halls have seen an uptick in residents calling to find out what their local...

Frank Strazzarino e-mails the scoop. "Well-known, affable and experienced greater Redding area Chamber Executive Director running for Council. Of course, that would be Debe Hopkins, Anderson Chamber's Executive Director. FS Source: Anderson Valley Post, hard copy edition"...

Theo Albrecht died over the weekend in his home city of Essen, Germany, at the age of 88. Albrecht and his brother pioneered discount supermarkets in Germany and then around the world. The Albrechts bought Trader Joe's in the late...

Bruce's blog this morning reminded me of a story I wrote three years ago about Randy Callahan, now deceased, a wonderful local man who snapped some utterly magical photographs of the world exposition on Treasure Island in San Francisco...

On his blog, local Realtor Skip Murphy linked to this Huffington Post article on Las Vegas, chronicling Sin City's real estate implosion and other woes. This graph jumped out: "Saturn," an exotic dancer at Spearmint Rhino, says she and her...

After Ted Turner. The top five landowners in the USA. Click here....

Wonderful feature from the Medford paper about a fire lookout that surveys part of the north state. It's a career that might have appealed to Garbo in her later years. Read it here....

Excerpt from an article about financially strapped Northpoint, Florida, which is considering a BLD park: "Cities that have gone into business with Big League Dreams are generally satisfied that the firm keeps its word -- even in Redding, Calif., where...

From parody to diagnosis in 15 years, reports Greg Beato over at reason.com. Excerpt: You may have been too busy monitoring Kim Kardashian's every passing thought-like thing on Twitter to notice, but Digital Detox Week took place in April, and...

Gil Moore, who wrote the following tribute to the career of Elvis Presley, was managing editor of the Record Searchlight when I first worked there, in 1969-70. (I owe my journalism career, such as it's been, to him.): In case...

That would be Clay Parker. Excerpt from the Corning Observer: (Parker) is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit recently filed in Sacramento by the National Rifle Association/California Rifle and Pistol Association Foundation Legal Action Project challenging state Assembly Bill 962....

Maybe it's just a perception problem, as Sheriff Tom Bosenko suggested to me last fall. Maybe it's just because it's pot growing and pot seizure season and that's what's mainly in the headlines. But after watching this scary and...

Hear Meg Whitman will be in Redding Aug. 3 for a fundraiser at a manse in west Redding (I promised not to divulge which one). Gee, I didn't think she needed money.... Arnold, as we know, found the Redding area...

So sorry to hear. Here's the YouTube clip of his wonderful song....

How do you explain to your wife that, without her knowledge, you've just blown 12 grand of the communal cash on a lemon of an electric "car"? From the tail end of Doug Craig's blog today, entitled "The sap and...

Asks this local blogger. It's a rhetorical question, of course. Excerpt: With a little care, you can grow just about any crop you want in temperate Redding. Outside. Using no electricity. Yet our town boasts enough retail establishments selling hydroponic...

The Enjoy Magazine folks were obviously less than thrilled at the prospect of having a food co-op go in the same downtown building they're in, as David Benda reports in a hilarious "Buzz" item in today's paper. But was this...

Winding my way west, I got to thinking about infrastructure and how California and Uncle Sam are going to pay to maintain and rebuild our indispensable network of interstates and highways and bridges if the economy stagnates and budgets continue...

As Yours Truly's been predicting for some time, Murray has decided to run for council again, on a "safety first" campaign. Conventional wisdom holds that the bigger the field the more it favors the incumbents. Trouble is, incumbents Patrick Jones...

And have the results published in the newspaper? In the interest of fairness, if candidate Russell Hunt gets one, shouldn't they all? From a profile this morning on Hunt, headlined: "Russell Hunt: Privatize city services to save funds": Hunt has...

(Photo: Marc Beauchamp) From the Huffington Post: SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- California finance officials will consider Friday whether to loan as much as $12.5 million to Modoc County as the rural, cash-poor municipality prepares for the possibility of filing for...

Mayor Patrick Jones told me just now he "wouldn't be surprised" if the McConnell Foundation made an offer to buy the Convention Center and the Rodeo Grounds from the financially strapped city of Redding. "You know something's brewing...they have a...

On Carl and Linda Bott's radio show just now, Shasta County District Attorney Jerry Benito said at this point he intends to complete his term, serving out the balance of the year. "Obviously business continues" at the District Attorney's office,...

Reads the headline above this Anderson Valley Post story reprinted on the Corrections.com web site. Excerpt: Hispanic-based gangs, motorcycle gangs and prison gangs have set their sights on Shasta County, multiple sources confirm. "This is an untouched area for gangs,"...

And some people hereabouts thought Mike Warren was overpaid... Welcome to Bell, a tiny, largely Hispanic enclave of Los Angeles, where the city manager pulls down nearly $800,000 a year and members of the part-time city council make $100,000 per...

CNN reports on the trend here. When I talked with RS Editor Silas Lyons on the radio a while back he said he thought there would be a "technological fix" to the issue that wouldn't require monitoring or self-policing of...

Fellow blogger Bruce Ross' hilarious post this morning about a Forest Service press release that euphemistically called an illegal alien caught in a pot raid a "displaced foreign traveler" was picked up by the hugely popular and influential Drudge...

That's the headline on this New York Times piece on Maywood, California. Here's an excerpt: "We don't want to be the model for other cities to lay off their employees," said Magdalena Prado, a spokeswoman for the city who works...

From Shasta Voices' July newsletter. The group clearly has a political agenda but in this instance Mary Machado has explained the City of Redding's employee retirement programs with a maximum of facts and a minimum of 'tude....

What's to become of the (as of July 1st) former Redding Convention and Visitors Bureau? The distinctive mid-Eighties-vintage concrete building with its metal roof is one of my favorite Nichols, Melburg jobs. It manages to reflect both the Monolith...

It was perhaps inevitable. The Wall Street Journal reports on this tectonic shift here. Lots and lots of implications....

According to this San Jose Mercury story, eight DAs across the state have gotten the boot by the voters, "a striking change in the political status quo." Here's the paragraph on our own Jerry Benito: Incumbents in several counties also...

Pull up Redding on Google Maps. Then activate "videos" from the pull-down menu. I was thinking - nay, hoping - to find a short promo for our $40-plus million Stillwater Business Park. Nope. Nada. Zip. Instead, there's a promo for...

Is Judge Eaton's old house on West Street haunted? Some folks in Whitmore apparently want to find out. Joyce Morrow, docent of the Behrens-Eaton Museum on Butte Street in west Redding, shared a letter she recently received from the founders...

Apparently under new EPA rules, biomass plants could be treated the same as green-house-gas-generating coal-fired power plants. This has Oregon's congressional delegation burning mad (the state is counting on turning forest thinnings into power and jobs). This article on the...

Check out this cool time-lapse video from the Intermountain News: Time Lapse Turbine from The Intermountain News on Vimeo....

If you only read his blog posts about climate change, you might not divine that Redding psychologist Doug Craig has a hilarious self-deprecating side. At a party last evening he had me (and my table) in stitches as he recounted...

Some long-time Redding residents will. After blazing the talk radio trail in Redding in the Sixties, he achieved fame and notoriety in the Bay Area, especially for a racy show called "California Girls." Here's a write-up on the Bay Area...

I sometimes wonder what the Park Marina riverfront might look like today if the powers that be - city hall, the McConnell Foundation and folks like stockbroker Mike Pohlmeyer - had treated the Kutras family with some respect. An article...

My column in tomorrow's paper is about quitting smoking, something I managed to do twenty years ago (but who's counting?). Here's an apt YouTube video. Imaginative opening credits from one of my favorite movies. (This one's for you, Bruce.)...

I've felt particularly listless today. E-mailed RS weather guru Scott Mobley to ask if it was my imagination or was it really humid - as well as hot - today? Scott helpfully informed me it's the dew point that's undoing...

The WashPost's Gene Weingarten, trapped in the "new" 24/7 online newsroom, pines eloquently and hilariously for the old. Worth reading the whole thing here. An excerpt: Everything is different today, and it's much more confusing. For one thing, there are...