Fire !

Fire !

A typical winter day: cold, clear, calm, quiet.  I walked downstairs from the bedroom in the house next to the restaurant, the historic Jacob Stauer House.   In the kitchen below, I looked out the window into the garden behind the Inn.  There wasn’t much left of the...
Where The Artists Play

Where The Artists Play

The artists arrived so quietly the locals could not say when Mendocino became an artists’ colony.  Like a solitary ant that finds a pot of honey laying down its pheromones to attract the others, one artist discovered the beauty of the Mendocino Coast, then another,...
The Sad Story of Three Misfits

The Sad Story of Three Misfits

Three men I knew but not as well as I thought—a father, a disgruntled employee, a son.  Tragedy, families ruined, a bizarre plot to assassinate a President and detonate a dirty bomb in Washington D.C. by a disturbed young man who according to a TIME magazine reporter...
Coffee

Coffee

Panorama photo of Martin Schmidt’s coffee art by Krissy Jones   Farmer Brothers locked up the restaurant market by loaning out equipment—stainless cabinets, brewing machines, pots, and other essential accessories.  The policy helped cash-poor restaurateurs...
How I Learned To Eat Escargot

How I Learned To Eat Escargot

Snail shells are one of many examples of the Golden Spiral in nature.  One way to approximate the Golden Spiral is with a mathematical series called the Fibonacci series.  The ratio between consecutive Fibonacci numbers approaches the golden ratio as the Fibonacci...