Shirlee Zane had plenty enough material to have spoken at her departed husband’s funeral Sunday only about his humor, parlor-game and ping pong mastery, taste for adventure, intellectual curiosity and love of his children and grandkids.But the Sonoma County supervisor paused amid describing Peter Kingston and her family’s sorrow at having lost him. She took a breath and said, “I want to say something about that loss that needs to be said.”
“We need to learn to talk about suicide,” Zane told the great crowd in the Jackson Theater at Sonoma Country Day School. “We cannot be ashamed of the pain in our lives.”
She could have glossed over the depression her husband struggled with recently but she chose to bring it into the light. By encouraging the rest of us to reach out to someone in great pain, or to seek someone’s help if the pain is our own, her tribute to Peter’s life just may save others.
BACK TO THE MUSIC: Walter Collins was running United Way of the Wine Country until, one day last summer, he wasn’t. Now comes news that he has returned to his roots.
Before Collins came to Sonoma County and the United Way in 2006, he’d worked six years as director of the Redlands Symphony Orchestra. Before that he’d done marketing for the Riverside Philharmonic.
Collins now is the executive director of California Symphony, which is based in Walnut Creek and is Contra Costa County’s one professional orchestra. May they long make beautiful music together.
DARK, DISTURBING THINGS are rumored to take place beneath the redwood canopy and behind the security gates of the Bohemian Grove, outside of Monte Rio.
Ritual sacrifice, sinister plots by fat cats gorging on even more power and wealth, recreational peeing on trees. TV sleuth Brad Meltzer think it’s time to get to the bottom of what really goes on at the exclusive mid-summer encampment.
He and his “Brad Meltzer's Decoded” team will report on their Bohemian Grove probe in Thursday night’s episode of the History Channel program. Mary Moore of Camp Meeker, just up the road from the grove, will watch.
For decades, Mary protested outside the grove and she still urges Americans to pay more attention to the men inside, and that the public should be told whatever politicians say in speeches there.
Author/showman Meltzer months ago dispatched to Mary’s house a video crew that for hours shot and interviewed her about the Grove.
“I don’t know what to expect” from Thursday’s program, she said. “It’s a Hollywood thing, which is why I’m not staking my life on it.”
Among the allegations previously investigated by “Decoded”: That the Statue of Liberty is tattooed with weird symbols placed by a secret society bent on world domination, and that early humans were coached along by aliens.
Looks to me that the Decoders poke around, wear stern looks as they interview “experts” and conclude that, hey, stranger things have happened.
OUR DAUGHTER DODGE? Forgive new parents Junaida Semmler and Jacob Vedder for toying with giving their daughter a car name.
Junaida’s contractions suddenly quickened Sunday evening. As the couple pulled into the lot at Santa Rosa’s Kaiser hospital in their Dodge Durango, the baby was coming.
Jacob parked at the curb and went screaming into the Emergency Department. Then several Kaiser staffers, including Dr. Hilary Bartels, ran to the Durango.
The baby was born there in the passenger’s seat. The first-time parents later agreed “Durango” doesn’t work even as a middle name.
When you hear that there’s a place in California where they have homosexual orgies and sacrifice infants to a giant owl deity, it’s difficult not to jack in your job, bid adieu to the wife and kids and run screaming toward the lodge, shouting “yes, yes, YES!”
It was back down to Bohemian Grove on the History Channel last night as investigative journalist Brad Meltzer headed to the 2700-acre encampment near Monte Rio in California, in an attempt to verify some of the sinister rumours that have been eddying around the place for decades.
George W. Bush gaining incredible powers after a few weeks at Bohemian Grove
In Brad Meltzer’s Decoded, the television sleuth attempted to reveal amoral activities during the annual symposium of the sickeningly rich and absurdly influential from the worlds of politics, business and industry etc, who descend upon the massive wooded encampment in the middle of the countryside for wine, cheese, and to genuflect at the feet of a 20-foot high owl, whilst enjoying homosexual liaisons – apparently.
Attendees of the Bohemian Grove summit have been consistently accused of dark practises and bizarre devil-worshipping rituals by many enthusiastic conspiracy theorists, with this event being the event guaranteed to bring them limping and drooling like a bunch of evangelical zombies out of the woodwork of their trailer parks and into the real world. If there was a conspiracy theorists calendar (available at Walmart?), this would be the main annual event.
The problem with all the conspiracy theorists that are presented to us, is that they come across as slightly crazy, socially inept, fatuous evangelists that provide us with tenuous and often risible evidence to back up their inane theories – and oft delivered with the kind of unparalleled wet-lipped enthusiasm that would ruin their chances of success during an interview at McDonalds to insert ‘apple pies’ into little cardboard tubes.
Ritual fomenter and professional anti-New World Order crusader Alex Jones was the conspiracy theorist of choice on Decoded – a man so convinced that 9/11 was an inside job that he recommends keeping an arsenal of weapons cocked and loaded, should a crack team of marines, controlled by an evil group of the world governments’ elite arrive in a big black shiny helicopter, steal you and put you in secret prison. Compelling advice generally delivered via a handheld megaphone on street corners. Credible then.
Oh and did you know that George W Bush carries out rituals in a tomb as part of a satanic group called Skull and Bones? Yeah, a tomb!
If our rich folk want to get together and kick off their expensive but sensible leather slip-ons once in a while and a couple of virgins go missing as a result, what’s the big deal? They must have very stressful jobs. If someone sent me an invite that read “Bloody cabaret, owl deity (20 feet +), cheese and crackers,” I’d say yes in a heartbeat.
It’s not that I think secret government plans to cull and control the world population are unfeasible, I don’t trust the world leaders and industry giants and their Bohemian Grove antics anymore than I trust the word of Alex Jones, but if conspiracy theorists really want to convince us – of anything – they need to work on their delivery. They need to separate the possible truths from the obvious bullshit. They need to deliver their messages calmly and without the wet-lipped hysteria and bullhorns. It’s just not professional and it’s not convincing. Less rhetoric and more compelling evidence please, because I want to believe; really I do.
Please share your thoughts on the rise of conspiracy theorism, Bohemian Grove, cheese crackers and virgins, or anything else related to this article by leaving a comment.
