Come to a Wild Art Event – view and buy art work by many artists and a wide variety (pottery, oil paintings, photography, wood working etc.) and there will be wine tasting. Admission is $10 and includes an etched wine glass. Silent auction and live auction.” Saturday November 6, Noon to 6 pm at the WinRiver Event Center.
My friend and longtime musical collaborator Craig Padilla will be appearing there in a rare solo performance. He has some new material you haven’t heard (but I have) and it promises to be a terrific afternoon of music not often heard around here lately. I’ll be there. Then it’s on to ShopHop for a full evening of local shopping. It’s Really Redding.
The image above captures it all for me; the lunacy, the hypocrisy. I know Proposition 19 is not the perfect answer, but what we are doing now is worse. It’s not about encouraging drug use. That happens whether we like it or not. It’s about enabling organized crime, and training young people to ignore our laws based on hypocrisy. Time to send a message about personal liberty, common sense, and some recognition of reality. This step won’t end the argument, but please join me tomorrow in voting to repeal Prohibition again.
The image above shows a business in the foreground named Stoneys that mostly sells pipes for smoking marijuana. They may also sell some Wholesale Vape Pens, but the point stands. An apparently legitimate business serving the needs of the illegal drug using population. The large building in the background is the Shasta County Jail, located right across the street, ready to incarcerate Stoney’s clientele who come looking for the best product to smoke their aaaa weed with. No doubt you and I can rationalize this evident contradiction of black and white laws in a gray world. But what message are we sending our young people, who are trying to make sense of the world and our culture? It would make more sense if the drug was legal and controlled, really. That way at least this confused message will not be sent out any longer. I’m convinced the unintended message is that drug laws are to be ignored, and by extension perhaps all societal laws are just a joke. The hypocrisy is poisonous.
No. More like Grape Soda. It’s comfortably fizzy, but not overwhelmingly so. I was worried it might taste like too-old fermented orange juice, but it doesn’t have that twang. Nope, after 48 hours, it’s tasty Grape Soda.
Mainly, I’m glad to have survived the experiment. The box says that if you leave it longer, it will get stronger and drier, so we’ll test that idea and keep you informed.
“Dude, you’re making Pruno. That’s what they drink in jail,” he said with a smirk.
I shook my head. “No man, it’s Federweißer. I looked it up in Wikipedia. It’s big in Europe. At least, I think it that’s what it is.”
“Big in European jails, maybe,” he replied.
That’s the claim of Spike Your Juice. We’re going to find out if it works. For $10 usd, you get an airlock that fits a 64 oz bottle of grape juice, and some packets of the wine yeast.
I bought some Welches Concord Grape, which always seemed to me to be unfinished wine anyway. It has to be 100% juice, and at least 20 grams of (non-corn) sugar per serving. Supposedly, the yeast strain takes 48 hours to make the juice into a fizzy, sweet wine. Waiting longer to refrigerate it increases the alcohol, and makes for a drier wine. Instant winery. I don’t think I’ll be getting any French Oak overtones from the plastic bottle fermenter. As a longtime beer brewer, I was intrigued about this idea when I first read about Spike Your Juice online.
I notice the box says you must be 21 to purchase, but all I needed was a credit card. Hm. Kids, don’t try this at home. Anyway, will keep you informed of the progress.
Spotted this critter meditating under the porch light this morning.
An eye-catching line from the Wikipedia entry on Mantis behavior: “The reason for sexual cannibalism has been debated.” Really? Apparently, I missed those debates. I wonder how they went, and who argued the pro-cannibalism side?
Bugs meditating. It’s ReallyRedding.
Craig Padilla told me there was going to be an extraordinary video concert simulcast yesterday on NPR, of all places. Jonsi is the lead singer of Sigur Ros, a big favorite of mine. The concert did not disappoint. Hey, it’s still available to see for today only, at the NPR site. Well worth a view. Jonsi integrates art and music in a really different manner. Again like yesterday, its not ReallyRedding, but it is Really Interesting, and in the greater scheme of things, an online concert simulcast has no actual geographic location. The wolf and deer imagery was genuinely spectacular, and the final tune with the storm imagery had me by the throat. Jonsi’s singing is pretty unique. Check it out.
Okay, so its not Really Redding. Really Coachella instead. Fascinating to watch though. This is a photographic effect with which I’ve experimented previously here. An artificial reduction in depth of field. It makes everything look miniaturized. They’ve combined that effect with a speed manipulation and the resulting concert video is mesmerizing. Check it out.
Among the memories of my youth, I very fondly recall catching lizards. Their reptilian stares, their colorful and varied skins of beady armor. Although I no longer wield the hand-eye speed I possessed in those magical days of jars and cigar box terrariums, It seems I can still catch an occasional lizard. And still let it go.
This critter is more serpent like.
He or she fades in among the local colors. Adios.
Catch and release lizards. They’re ReallyRedding.
I don’t think of ReallyRedding as a political blog. But in fact, every act of written expression is a political act in this world. The recent award of the Nobel Prize to Chinese writer Liu Xiaobo makes this painfully clear.
“The internet is God’s present to China
by Liu Xiaobo
Today there are more than 100 million internet users in China. The Chinese Government is ambivalent towards it. On the one hand, the internet is a tool to make money. On the other, the Communist dictatorship is afraid of freedom of expression.
The internet has brought about the awakening of ideas among the Chinese. This worries the Government, which has placed great importance on blocking the internet to exert ideological control.
In October 1999 I finished three years of jail and returned home. There was a computer there and it seemed that every visiting friend was telling me to use it. I tried a few times but felt that I could not write anything while facing a machine and insisted on writing with a fountain pen. Slowly, under the patient persuasion and guidance of my friends, I got familiar with it and cannot leave it now. As someone who writes for a living, and as someone who participated in the 1989 democracy movement, my gratitude towards the internet cannot be easily expressed.
I really enjoyed the exquisite weather this lovely Fall Redding weekend. I enjoyed the natural beauty, the freedom to travel freely about the Northstate.
I am enjoying the freedom now to write about this controversial subject. Liu Xiaobo is in jail for for 11 years for the crime of trying to enjoy the same basic freedoms we dare not take for granted. His wife is now under house arrest because of his new international recognition. Here are the words of the man who nominated him:
“The courageous men and women who are challenging tyranny in these countries are looking to the governments and leading non-governmental institutions in free countries for assurances that their fate, and the fate of their countries, depends on something more than the bottom line. To fail to challenge the Chinese government on Liu Xiaobo’s imprisonment is to concede this argument internationally, at enormous peril to peaceful advocates of progress and change not just in China but all around the world. “
Come to a Wild Art Event – view and buy art work by many artists and a wide variety (pottery, oil paintings, photography, wood working etc.) and there will be wine tasting. Admission is $10 and includes an etched wine glass. Silent auction and live auction.” Saturday November 6, Noon to 6 pm at the WinRiver Event Center. 
The image above captures it all for me; the lunacy, the hypocrisy. I know Proposition 19 is not the perfect answer, but what we are doing now is worse. It’s not about encouraging drug use. That happens whether we like it or not. It’s about enabling organized crime, and training young people to ignore our laws based on hypocrisy. Time to send a message about personal liberty, common sense, and some recognition of reality. This step won’t end the argument, but please join me tomorrow in voting to repeal Prohibition again. 
