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Category Archives: Column: Published Weekly in the Sonoma Index-Tribune

A weekly column published in the Sonoma Index-Tribune.

Thanksgiving in Blue

Last year, I wrote a piece on the so-called “turducken,” the culinary abomination that shares its theme music with the Frankenstein movies, and received the following note from my Washingtonian pal Geoffrey Cain, who opined: “If you are going to write about the turducken, you should remember to mention the Brazilian turdukenaconda. A duck is force [...]
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Leaf Blowers Must Die

Living in Sonoma during this time of year is like living in a postcard. Not the “Wish you were here” variety, which, in most languages translates as “neener-neener-neener,” but the ones purchasable at the visitors bureau that depict our rural countryside, braided with vineyards in autumnal hues that would make every crayon in the box [...]
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Sonoma Faces off on Facebook

In another of my social media-to-print experiments (OK, admittedly, Twitter interview made only partial sense – least of all to those on Twitter), I decided to “crowd-source” my column. Crowd-sourcing is like out-sourcing but instead of farming my column out to an emerging economy like India or East Petaluma, one taps the so-called “wisdom of [...]
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Best Little Horror House in Sonoma

Given the annual rate of attrition of the kids who trick or treat my house, this year I expect, at most, two – the one’s from next door whose parents make them come over for the sake of being polite. The low turnout baffles my wife who thrills at the sight of little one’s garbed as [...]
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Zombie Survival Guide (revised and expanded)

Having grown up next door to a mortuary and across the street from Petaluma’s “cemetery row,” I was keenly aware of the possibility of a zombie attack. This was during the second, “classic” wave of classic zombie flicks, produced by George Romero and his imitators, including “Day of the Dead,” which was released on my 13th [...]
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Sonoma Inn (San Francisco Edition) literally bites

Given my never-ending crusade to preserve Sonoma’s brand equity, imagine my surprise when I discovered poachers siphoning our identity from our own backyard. In San Francisco, at the corner of Bush and Van Ness, is a hotel named the Sonoma Inn. I initially assumed it was a residential hotel, by which I mean flophouse, of the [...]
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Lost in Carneros

I’m a conscientious driver. Or at least I try to be, which is why, when my hands-free earpiece began to pick up air traffic signals and short wave radio broadcasts out of Guam, I pulled off the road to take a call while cruising down Eighth Street East. I entered the empty sprawl of the [...]
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(If) You’re Going to San Francisco

There’s a type of Sonoman that I never thought I’d become. The one that brags to visiting friends, “…Another thing that’s so bloody great about Sonoma is how close we are to the City. Heck, we can go anytime we want!” But we don’t. The City in this scenario, of course, is San Francisco – that [...]
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Tipping Sonoma’s Sacred Cow

She’s everywhere in Wine Country – if it weren’t for all the vineyards, one might think we lived in one vast dairy farm lorded over by a cartoon cow with a propensity for milk-themed puns. The iconic Clo the Cow made her billboard debut in1969 and later began her award-winning reign of puns thanks to the creative [...]
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Searching for Sonoma in a Merlot Desert

While many Sonomans donned togas and attempted to drown themselves in wine at the annual cultic revel now known as the Sonoma Wine Country Weekend, I was busy doing reconnaissance work in the other wine country. Not Napa, but the other, other wine country – the one a few hundred miles south in Santa Barbara [...]
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