In the last seven years, not one of the 729 death row inmates has actually been injected.
That figure comes from a BANG story, which compares California’s death row policies with Arizona’s. Arizona, too, had a long hiatus in administering the death penalty, which was broken in 2010 when several court cases removed legal hurdles similar to California’s.
An August 2012 story that we ran reports “ever since a successful 1978 campaign to reinstate the death penalty, California has spent roughly $4 billion and carried out only 13 executions. This breaks down to $184 million a year spent on trials and investigations, death row housing, and both state and federal appeals. Most death row inmates wait more than 20 years to see their cases resolved.”
This ratio of effectiveness to cost was, of course, one of the arguments for Prop 34, which failed by 48 percent.
The BANG story looks at some of this costly legal “red tape,” still in effect in California. It’s both minute—how many injections to use—and lofty—that “evidence, gleaned from more than 20,000 homicide cases, that the death penalty statute is so overbroad that virtually any first-degree murder has been eligible, making it unconstitutional…”
It’s worth a read.
“Legal experts say Arizona, which has 128 death row inmates, wiped away all of these arguments.”

Martin Luther King Jr.’s Bible. Words that acknowledge both climate change and gay rights. It’s hopeful—and heavy, and difficult not to wonder how much idealism will be compromised in the next four years.
Which is why the Internet seems to be turning to Uncle Joe today. The Biden, that blond(ish) bastion of no-malarcky straight talk and aviator sunglasses, is always a welcome foil to his running mate, and doubly so when the future looms large and unknown. Here are some of the best offerings of Team Joe floating around the Web today.

1. Mother Jones’ refreshed this incredible retrospective, in which the VP plays Angry Birds, acts out a one-liner from CSI Miami and ignores a child.

2. If you’re not familiar with him, the Onion’s “Diamond” Joe Biden likes to hitchhike, show his chest hair and soliloquize about the everyman. In an excellent twist of virtual reality, Onion Joe hosted a Reddit AMA last Friday to celebrate the release of his book and was upstaged by his real alter-ego.

3. This is not recent, but it’s still excellent.

It’s great that the Marin County Kumbaya Patrol is ready to talk about gun control, and even better that they’ve been ready for quite some time now.
Still, now that the entity that sprang full-formed from the brain of Jon Stewart is a Facebook page, perhaps it could turn its attention to some issues closer to home. True, the hot-tub lovin’ mecca of open space and naked people is always chock-full of love, except when it’s not. Here are four local issues that could use some kumbaya.

1. Stop the Lawsuits!
Central Marin Sanitation Agency and Ross Valley Sanitary District have waged costly legal battles with each other, despite multiple grand jury reports on the pair’s disfunction. The latter has also been associated with a million-gallon sewage spill, an EPA investigation, claims of eco-terrorism, allegation of mismanaged housing dollars and a blog called “Ross Valley Sewer Truth.”

2. Do Something About Eldercare
All you need to start cashing in on the eldercare industry in California is a business license, and in the elderly county, this industry is veering out of control.

3. Address Affordable Housing
We’ve said it before: According to Marin Community Foundation, 60 percent of the workforce commutes in. Of course, someone brought up the helpful point to the New York Times—upping the county’s supply of low income units could turn Marin into Syria.

4. Talk About Domestic Violence
The wealthy county’s number one violent crime, this often-underreported resulted in 800 calls to police, 2,500 calls to local hotlines and 2 deaths in 2009, according to a 2010 Grand Jury report.

• Nicolas Grizzle
• Allison Krauss and Union Station at Weill Hall’s grand opening weekend. That’s Jerry Douglas on the Dobro guitar on the left.

I used to sell meat. My favorite part of the day sampling out bacon. Our bacon was real, thick-cut, how-it-should-be bacon, which many people had never experienced. Their reaction always began at the eyes, then traveled up to the brow before sinking into the rest of the face and, sometimes, weakening the knees. It was something they were familiar with, just didn’t know what it was really like or how good it could be. After seeing Alison Krauss with Union Station (featuring Jerry Douglass) last night at the Green Music Center, I now know that feeling from the other side of the counter,

It was maybe halfway through the concert everything came together in a rush of emotion, and Krauss’ emotional songs might have played a factor, but I was holding back tears when the realization hit me. Nothing will ever sound better than inside this hall. This is quite possibly the best-sounding band, the most professional engineers, in the most gorgeous acoustic space I will ever experience. This is the French Laundry of concert spaces.

This was the first non-classical concert in Weill Hall, the five-carat diamond amongst the surrounding gems of the Green Music Center at Sonoma State University. In addition to Krauss and Union Station wrapping up the festivities, this opening weekend included a piano concert by Lang Lang, a sunrise choral concert with original music composed for and dedicated to those involved with the creation of the center and an afternoon performance by the Santa Rosa Symphony, which has the privilege of calling this its home.

In comparison to the previous evening, which was full of tuxedos, Versace dresses, politicians and stuffiness, this was a decidedly blue-jeans event. There were even people dancing on the lawn, the mood was so jovial. The weather was perfect, absolutely perfect, and I can’t help but see exactly what drove SSU President Ruben Armiñana to create this indoor-outdoor concert space. In fact, though my seat was inside the hall, I strode outside in the second half to see what it was like, and honestly I preferred sitting on the lawn. Of course, weather permitting and musical style taken into account, it wasn’t inconceivable that the best seats in the house were, in fact, not in the house at all.

The two large LED screens flanking the opening to the concert hall were a little too bright, but what they showed was beautiful. Close-ups of the band, their expressive faces, their lightning-fast picking all dissolved with slow fades. Combined with the excellent, natural sound coming from both the hall itself and reinforced with high-hanging speakers and downfiring subwoofers (18 of them), this was the best outdoor sound I have ever heard. I had a tough time hearing some of the stories and witty banter between songs, but I suspect that had more to do with the storytellers turning away from the microphone for a moment. Can’t amplify sound that’s not there!

The band played together for about an hour before Jerry Douglas had a solo performance on Dobro guitar, which blew me away from my 10th-row seat. Even with a stack of speakers in front of me, the sound was natural, even, pleasing and rich. Not once did this sound engineer turn to look back in the direction of the mixing board to suggest something unpleasant was happening. In fact, I would like to give a written high-five to the engineer for the evening. You did the hall justice. You got on that balance between acoustic and amplified and walked the tightrope all night long. And when the band came back for an encore set, using only one microphone, they were right there, too, blending themselves using distance and dynamics between voices and instruments.

Douglas announced this was the last stop on their two-year (!) tour. They were so musically tight and having so much fun, it seemed like they felt at home. At one point, Krauss turned to the balcony crowd behind her and waved, turning back to the microphone to say, as understated as her music, “This like no other place I’ve ever seen.”

He was bad news from the start.

You know the type of guy you just get a bad feeling from.

For this year’s Jive writing contest, we’re asking for a 400-words-or-less piece of fiction around the wrong sort of man. He could be a boyfriend, a politician, a supermarket checker, a drifter. Something happens, and it isn’t always his fault. We want to read what your sharp fiction-writing minds have to say about this guy. Just make sure that your story at some point contains the phrase, “He was bad news from the start.”

Our favorite bad-news entries will be published in our Fall Lit Issue, and we’ll have a party and reading with the winners that very night, Oct. 17, at Copperfield’s Books in Montgomery Village at 6pm!

Send your entries to [email protected].

Deadline is Wednesday, Oct. 10 at 5pm.

The World Without You, the new novel by New York-based writer Joshua Henkin, opens with a big event. After 42 years of marriage and four children, upper-middle class New York couple Marilyn and David Frankel are separating. The separation will occur soon after the memorial for their son Leo, a journalist who was killed in Iraq one year previous. Marilyn hasn’t been able to get over Leo’s death, “Sometimes she feels like she could die, that she’d like to die, it would be better that way,” Henkin writes in the prologue. While her husband drowns his sorrows in running, reading and classes on the proper way to cut vegetables, Marilyn channels her energy into writing anti-war op-eds with the fervor of someone fruitlessly trying to bring back the dead. But before the separation, the couple will host their three surviving children, plus various grandchildren and spouses, and their daughter-in law (Leo’s wife) Thisbe who brings their three year-old grandchild Calder, at the family’s vacation home in the Berkshires. The family is getting together, possibly for the last time as a unit, for Leo’s one-year memorial, which happens to fall on 4th of July. It’s an occasion that most of them approach with dread, especially Thisbe, who has a new boyfriend in Berkeley, and doesn’t know how to break the news to her in-laws.

In a review on The Rumpus, Bezalel Stern called the novel, “that rare breed: the twenty-first century domestic novel,” which is exactly right. By digging into the inner lives of all three daughters: the tempestous Noelle, now an Orthodox Jew living in Israel with her headstrong husband and four children, Clarissa—the eldest—whose life, at 39, has become consumed with trying to conceive a baby, and Lily, the middle daughter with unresolved anger issues towards just about everyone. The combination of characters is like a pressure keg about to burst with the combustible combination of family resentment and love; It’s a tightrope act performed amongst the land mines brought about by the death of a beloved youngest child and brother. The character’s are drawn with fine detail and empathy, and even the generally unlikable Noelle has her moments, enough to where I didn’t end up hating her even when I wanted to. Just like in life, everything’s complicated by the messy, complex, reality of being a human in a world where true human psychological binaries are nothing but a myth.

Joshua Henkin reads from The World Without You on Friday, July 13 at Book Passage. 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera. 1pm. Free. 415. 927.0960.

• Steve Norwick with SSU students

On June 8, Steve Norwick set out for his regular Friday morning bike ride from his home near the SSU campus to Penngrove, where he’d enjoy coffee and breakfast with friends. Tragically, that day, the ride turned tragic when Norwick was fatally injured in a hit-and-run crash on Petaluma Hills Road. The driver didn’t stop (or even slow down, according to reports), even as Norwick was tossed into a ditch, where he lost consciousness permanently, dying twelve days later. The man convicted of hitting Norwick, 68-year-old Robert Cowart, could now face charges of vehicular manslaughter and felony hit-and-run.

The case has sent shockwaves through the cycling community, as well as Sonoma State University, where Norwick taught for nearly four decades in the Environmental Studies and Planning Department. For those of us who ride our bikes everyday, whether for fun or commuting, the case is a reminder that some drivers just shouldn’t be on the road (Cowart had suffered a stroke—most likely before the crash—and had to be wheeled out of the courtroom in a wheelchair) and that we must be careful and diligent at all times.

But Professor Norwick’s loved ones have said that the last thing that the beloved father, friend and professor would have wanted is for people to stop riding their bikes. In that spirit, the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition, Jill B. Nimble Bike Club, and other partners will honor Steve Norwick by holding a memorial bicycle ride on Sunday, July 8th. Everyone is invited to participate.

Details:

·     The ride will begin and end in the parking lot at Spreckels Performing Arts Center in Rohnert Park

·     Gather at 9:30 a.m. for 10:00 a.m. departure

·     There will be four routes to accommodate a range of rider ability/interest:

38 mile route led by Tom Helm:  http://ridewithgps.com/routes/1393221

14 mile silent route led by Dawn Silveira: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/1389668 ]

10 mile route led by Vin Hoagland: http://ridewithgps.com/routes/1388934

SCBC ED Gary Helfrich will lead a ride (details to come) following a route Steve Norwick often followed when leading students on geology excursions

For more information, contact Sandra Lupien, Outreach Director, 707-694-8702, [email protected]