What’s going on in the head of Janice Millard? She’s the mother of the young Sebastopol man who laid a sob story on home-rental agents on the Russian River, then held a massive party whose catastrophic conclusion apparently injured him and others and could have killed somebody. Millard said it’s not [...]

Winter's always a little gloomy under the trees in Monte Rio, but more so this year. The Pink Elephant has closed. Lots of towns have a friendly, funky downtown bar, but at nighttime in Monte Rio the Pink Elephant really was the downtown. For years and years, the heart of the [...]

In the printed, hold-it-in-your-hand Press Democrat for Jan. 5 I wrote about the creativity that's popping around Sonoma County's next Big Read, which will encourage everyone in the county to read a single book - Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer." A leading partner in The Big Read, KRCB [...]

Do what you want, but I’ve said them both out-loud 100 times and I’ve decided Twenty-Ten sounds better than Two-Thousand Ten. We called 1810 Eighteen-Ten and 1910 Nineteen-Ten, so why would we pronounce 2010 Two-Thousand Ten? Only because the past decade has put us in the habit of saying Two-Thousand [...]

I wrote a week before Christmas about Terry and Rick Divine, the 57-year-old twins who share a tent on an undeveloped parcel near the Corby Auto Mall and were missing their dogs. County animal-control officers took Neeko and Dee Oh Gee for a 10-day rabies observation after Dee Oh Gee [...]

Prepare to be incensed.   The story of what happened to a trusting and gullible 71-year-old Santa Rosa widow will enrage you, but maybe the telling will cause other seniors to be wary. Several months ago, as her husband was dying, the woman began receiving phone calls from exuberant callers [...]

Two grizzled men, identical brothers, blinked tears as they spoke Wednesday morning near their home, a tarp that’s tied to a tree on an undeveloped parcel off South Todd Road. Terry and Rick Divine, 57, have lived beneath the tree for almost two years, subsisting largely on food they glean [...]

Time is running out to look a survivor of Pearl Harbor in the eye and thank him or her, but there will an opportunity in Santa Rosa on Monday. The corps of veterans who were on Oahu at the time of the Japanese attack in 1941 has dwindled so that [...]

There are many people, I'm sure, who reaffirmed a personal vow never to ride in a sailplane after they heard of the tragic, double-fatal crash near Middletown last weekend. I understand why anyone would consider it foolhardy to be towed into the air in a plane with no engine. But [...]

The phone rang at Herb Williams' home in Santa Rosa on Thanksgiving eve. Suddenly Williams had something more to be thankful for. The caller was an associate of CNN host Nancy Grace. He told Williams, a well-known Sonoma County political consultant, that Grace was interested in honoring Williams' late son, [...]