Columnists

Column: Dispatches from the Edge: Errant Nukes Over America; a Mystery in Syria

By Conn Hallinan
Friday September 28, 2007
Loose nukes sink…” well, just about anything. The official story is that on Aug. 30, the U.S. Air Force (AF) “mistakenly” loaded six nuclear-tipped cruise missiles on a B-52 at Minot, North Dakota and flew them to Barksdale, Louisiana for decommissioning. The mistake was discovered and the munitions officer at Minot was suspended pending an investigation. -more-

Column: Undercurrents: Tribune Trips Over the Facts in AB45 Analysis

By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor
Friday September 28, 2007
Our friends at the Oakland Tribune published an editorial this week with the opinion that “Oakland Not Ready For Control Over Schools” and urging, therefore, that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger veto Assemblymember Sandré Swanson’s AB45 bill that might speed up a return to local school control. -more-

The Berkeley-Oakland Neighborhood Name Game

By Steven Finacom, Special to the Planet
Friday September 28, 2007
Would a neighborhood by any other name still sell as sweet? An entertaining aspect of reading real estate listings in Berkeley has to do with the identification of neighborhoods. -more-

Garden Variety: Water, Water Everywhere — Or Not

By Ron Sullivan
Friday September 28, 2007
One of the limitations, frustrations, confusions, and overall learning experiences any gardener encounters here is water. Understand that I use “learning experience” as an expletive. -more-

Quake Tip of the Week

By Larry Guillot
Friday September 28, 2007
How Do I Love Thee? -more-

About the House: A Small Do-It-Yourself Job You Can Tackle

By Matt Cantor
Friday September 28, 2007
I know you’re out there: you who fear tools. Confirmed abdicators of all things mechanical. Live prey to all members of the Phylum Contractazoa. You who hide in corners until the power is brought back on again by mysterious means. I am here to help but there IS a price. Immersion therapy is not easy but it is simple and you can only change if you really want to change. -more-

Green Neighbors: How Are Things in Guacamole?

By Ron Sullivan
Tuesday September 25, 2007
You old hippies, you probably remember sticking an avocado pit on some arrangement of toothpicks over a jar of water to make it sprout. The tree, if it survived to that stage, made a decent houseplant when it wasn’t turning sickly yellow and dropping leaves and getting all etiolated like a wispy fishing rod because it was stuck in a dark corner and watered too seldom and/or too often by turns and potted in a bucket of backyard clay in the first place and the only fertilizer it ever got was when the cat peed in the pot. -more-