After Humboldt County Growers’ abysmal showing at the 2013 Cannabis Cup Awards, where not a single Humboldt County grower placed in the top ten, local cannabis breeders have been stirring up the gene pool in preparation for the 2014 growing season. “I guess our stuff has gotten a bit inbred.” said one Humboldt County grower, who asked to remain anonymous, because he was so ashamed of his weed’s poor showing at the awards, adding, “We’re definitely going to have to kick it up a notch if we want to stay competitive.”
So, in hopes of a better showing at next year’s Cannabis Cup, Humboldt County growers will try dozens of new strains. As part of the effort to “brand” Humboldt County ganja, and to encourage more community buy-in, this year’s strains have all been named after prominent Humboldt County citizens. Here’s a sample of what you might be smoking next Fall:
Gary Lee Bullock One toke of this brand new strain hits you like a metal pipe and sends you straight to heaven.
Ray Oakes If you smoke this strain, you’ll recall some memory from the distant past, with exceptional clarity, but you’ll get so distracted that it will take you two or three weeks to get to the good part.
Blake Lehman Smoking this stuff will get you so high you think you own the whole town.
John Casali This strain is almost psychedelic in that it makes you see shit everywhere.
Paul Encimer Imbibe this new strain, and you won’t be able to stop talking, but nothing you say will make any sense.
Charlie Custer This strain gets you so stoned that you’ll say “um” twice before every sentence.
Bonnie Blackberry I love this strain, but if you smoke it, it will make you so paranoid that you’ll call the cops, just to find out what they are up to.
Apparently, Bonnie is also very paranoid about having her picture on the internet. Good thinking Bonnie!
Eric Kirk Be careful of this strain. If you smoke it, you’ll become hopelessly addicted… to politics.
Estelle Fennel This strain is strong enough to turn a liberal lesbian into a redneck Good ‘Ol Boy.
Anna Hamilton This pot makes people very empathetic, so much so, that it makes poor musicians worry that drug dealers aren’t making enough money.
Rob Arkley Jr This strain has the opposite effect of the Anna Hamilton strain. Smoke a joint of RAJ and you’ll become totally self-absorbed, and oblivious to the needs of others.
Chris Giauque A potent local strain, but nobody seems to know where to find it.
Ken Swithenbank This strain will give you a ticket or take you to jail unless you smoke its joint.
…but mostly, you’ll probably see tons of this generic:
Humboldt Dope Yuppie A popular strain among growers for its quick maturity and heavy yield, but generally despised by cannabis connoisseurs for its disappointing high. With a complex, but not exactly attractive, aroma that consists of equal parts dead fish, engine exhaust and money, this is the perfect strain for growers who actually prefer the taste of expensive red wine.
Who knows, maybe the next Cannabis Cup winning strain will be named after you.
A Correction, and What We Can Learn From the Bullock Family
It has come to my attention that the full name of the accused murderer of Father Eric Freed is in fact, Gary Lee Bullock, not Lee Bullock, as I reported last week. My apologies to all lygsbtd readers, and to Mr. Gary Lee Bullock for the misinformation, and I regret the error.
I’m sure that this is a difficult time for the whole Bullock family. I certainly don’t wish to minimize the overwhelming grief that so many must feel for the loss of Father Freed, but for the Bullocks, I’m sure this is also a time of heart-wrenching agony and soul-searching. I’m sure they are wondering, “How could it have come to this?” and “Where did we go wrong?” No one wants to go through that, and if we can learn anything from this tragedy that prevents another family from suffering the same fate, then perhaps some good can come from this horrible tragedy.
One thing that years of reading newspapers has taught me: If you don’t want to see your kid’s mugshot in the paper as the chief suspect in an horrible crime, don’t give your kid the middle name of “Lee”. Damn near every murderer, drunk driver, domestic abuser, drug dealer, bank robber, rapist, you name it, whose mugshot I’ve ever seen in any American newspaper, has had the middle name of “Lee”. I think there is a valuable lesson here, especially for any expectant, or aspiring parents out there. Whatever you decide to name your kid, don’t stick “Lee” in the middle of it. Better still, just leave “Lee” out of the equation all together.
If you name you your kid “Lee” you can forget about saving for college. Instead, you’ll need that money for lawyers and bail. “Lee” is such a common name among felons that the default name on all computerized police reports comes up as Lee Lee Lee, before the officer hits a key. Using this default name in the computerized crime report forms has saved taxpayers millions of dollars. Cops are such notoriously poor typists that saving them three keystrokes on almost every report adds up to tens of thousands of man-hours each year saved in police budgets across the country.
I know it rolls off the tongue nicely, and lends a certain poetry to, without distracting from, the first and last names, but it’s just not worth it. No matter how hard it it is to say or how distracting it may seem, any other middle name that you can think of is bound to be better than “Lee” for the effect it will have on your child’s future. Bartholomew, Zachariah, Toadsbottom, and Bloodyboogger would all make better middle-names than “Lee”, and if the Bullocks had known this, I guarantee that Gary, Bloodybooger, Bullock would not be sitting in jail right now.
Face it, there’s only a few times in life when most people use their middle names anyway:
Early in life, when a mother is scolding her child as in “Studebaker Lee Hawk, how many times have I told you to stay out of Momma’s Prozac?”
When you get your drivers license, which is just a preemptive mugshot anyway. When a cop pulls you over and asks to see your license, the first thing he looks at is that middle name. As soon as they see the letters LEE in the middle of your name, they smell blood. Cops always know they can find some reason to arrest anyone, but when they get their hands on a “Lee” they know they’ve found their man. They know the paperwork will be a breeze. They just have to figure out what to charge them with, and there’s always “resisting arrest”.
Finally, the last place you’ll see someone’s middle name is on their headstone after they die. Stone-cutters love the middle name “Lee”. It’s almost as easy as a middle initial, but they can charge more money for a full middle name.
So, as a parent the choice is yours. You can name your kid “Lee”, for convenient scolding, ease of arrest, and profitable burial, or you can give your kid any other middle name, and give them a fighting chance for a decent life.
This seems like a no-brainer to me, but apparently too many parents have not gotten the message. Just last week, Shena Lee Christianson was pulled over for running a stop sign, and ended up booked on felony drug charges. If her parents had read this piece, they might have named her Shena Daphne Christianson, or Shena Priscilla Christianson or even Shena Shena Christianson, and as a result, she’d have probably gotten off with just a ticket and a talking too. Instead, she’ll probably spend the next few years taking airline reservations for 18 cents an hour.
So please, share this with every young couple or woman of child-bearing age that you know. It’s time to bring the suffering that these three innocent looking letters have caused, to an end. Hopefully, the Bullocks, and the Christiansons, can be the last to carry this awful burden, but why did people start naming their kids “Lee” in the first place?
I think we can trace the whole “Lee” phenomena back to the Civil War, and General Robert E. Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army.
It seems fitting that we can trace all of the suffering the name “Lee” has caused, back to one of the darkest, bloodiest periods in American history, a time when brother fought brother with cannons and bayonets,
a time that reeked of death, dysentery, and gangrene, a time when the rivers ran red with blood.
General Robert E. Lee led millions of men to their bloody agonizing deaths to defend the rights of white slave owners to whip their slaves, or pay other white men to do it for them. They like to say they fought for “a way of life”, but it was a way of life that required millions of slaves to maintain; slaves who were kidnapped, shackled and sold as property, without regard for family connection, and forced to work long hours in the hot sun, motivated not by pay, but by the threat of the whipping post.
Lee fought for a “way of life” that said a white man could beat, rape and kill a black woman legally, if he “owned” her, but a black man could expect to be lynched if he dared to ask a white woman for a date. That’s a hell of a way of life! That way of life, that so many fought and died to preserve, gave us two of the most devicive, ugly, abhorrent stains on the fabric of American society:
Our ingrained racism
The middle-name “Lee”
Do you really want to remind everyone, especially your own child, of the screams and moans of men in excruciating agony, soaking in sweat, blood and excrement, delirious with fever from infected amputation wounds, best by flies, mosquitoes and maggots as they lay down their lives in defense of slavery and racism? Is that really what you want people to think about when they think about your kid? Is that what you want your kid to think about, every time he sees his own name?
Those three little letters open up a big wound, a wound big enough to swallow your child whole, with enough pain and suffering to curse your entire family for generations, as the Bullocks can no doubt attest. When you consider all that the name “Lee” implies, it’s no wonder that kids named “Lee” get into so much trouble, and it’s really about time we learn from our mistakes.
I mean, I can imagine that there were a lot of German people who weren’t thrilled with the outcome of World War II, but I’ll bet there aren’t many German guys out there with the name Hans Hitler Schmidt. I’ll bet that the popularity of the name Adolf declined precipitously after World War II, and has probably never recovered it’s prewar prevalence.
I mean no disrespect to anyone bearing the name “Lee”, and I completely sympathize with the burden they carry. At one time “Lee” was a perfectly good name, but today, it just has too many bad associations. Similarly, the swastika was once a perfectly good symbol, and you can find them by the thousands in mosaic tile designs in grand old buildings built before World War II. Today, no one in the Western World can look at a swastika without thinking about the Holocaust, so we let it go. Nobody uses swastikas in tile designs, logos, graphics or any other art-form for that matter unless they wanted to conjure images of institutionalized racism, antisemitism, systematic genocide, and mechanized murder.
Naming your kid “Lee” is like putting a swastika, or at least a confederate flag, in the middle of their name.
That is bound to have consequences that last a lifetime. So please, let it go. Unless you are Chinese, just forget about “Lee” as a name altogether. Save yourself the agony the Bullock family must feel every minute of every day right now. Don’t condemn your child to a future of embarrassing mug-shots and unflattering orange jumpsuits. Instead, pick a better middle-name than “Lee”.
Local Pig Blames Chinn for “Cockroaches”, Priest’s Murder
Eureka, CA Businessman Rob Arkley
If you want to know about the Humboldt County social milieu, this story says it all:
Long time Southern Humboldt resident, Lee Bullock, a 44 year old man, raised in Southern Humboldt, with a home, an address, and family in the area, got arrested after someone in Redway called the Sheriff about a man seen hiding in the bushes and acting “bizarre” in the early afternoon of this past New Year’s Eve. The cops came, picked up Bullock, and deduced that he was intoxicated on drugs of some kind.
That’s a pretty typical Humboldt County thing, and it happens every day around here. Drug use is not only the foundation of our local economy, it is a cherished tradition and way of life in Humboldt County, so sometimes we get a little wild and crazy. Even at 1:30 in the afternoon, Lee Bullock was probably not the first person arrested for public intoxication in Humboldt County that day, and he certainly wasn’t the last. This was New Year’s Eve, after all.
According to the cops, Bullock became “combative” while in custody. From Bullock’s mug shot in the papers, you can easily see that someone became combative with him. None of the cops reported injuries, but Bullock was taken to the hospital upon arrival at the jail in Eureka. Again, nothing unusual there. Cops beat people up all the time in Humboldt County.
After being cleared by medical personnel, Bullock was returned to jail, in Eureka, more than 60 miles from his home west of Redway, where they held him in custody until just after midnight. At a quarter-to-one in the morning, just in time for last call on New Year’s Eve, Sheriff’s deputies released Lee Bullock, on his own recognizance, into Downtown Eureka, the most densely populated city in Humboldt County.
Even though Lee Bullock has lived in Humboldt County for a long time, and has family in the area, no one came to the jail to pick him up. Either he did not call anyone, or the people he called were indisposed, declined the invitation, or failed to show up.
Look, it’s a long drive from Southern Humboldt to Eureka, and it was New Year’s Eve for God’s sake. Even if he had reached someone who cared enough to make the trip, what are the chances they were sober enough to drive?
So, Lee Bullock, no doubt crashing hard from his recent drug binge, found himself wandering aimlessly around Eureka’s residential neighborhoods on a cold night, without adequate clothing, and no way to get home. A little while later, a Eureka PD cop encountered him hanging around St. Bernard’s Catholic Church, and told him to go away.
The next morning, Eureka parishioners found their priest, Father Eric Freed, bludgeoned to death in the rectory of St. Bernard’s Church, and in Southern Humboldt, Father Freed’s car was found parked in the woods near the Bullock family home west of Redway. The cops put two and two together, and called the Bullocks to inquire about Lee’s whereabouts. Rather than have the Sheriff come all the way out to the Bullock family home, Lee’s family agreed to deliver Lee Bullock to the police for questioning.
Why would a Southern Humboldt family be so eager to drive Lee to the cops to face arrest for murder, especially when they couldn’t be bothered to pick him up from jail just the night before? I assume that was because the Bullock family home, like virtually every home in Southern Humboldt, was full of illegal drugs, guns and cash, and they didn’t want cops nosing around. That’s just a guess.
So, Lee Bullock’s step-father got in the truck and took Lee for a ride, without telling his step-son that he was delivering Lee to the authorities to face murder charges. What did Lee’s step-father say to Lee to get him in the truck? “Come on Lee, beer run!” Whatever line he used, apparently it worked.
If Lee’s step-father would have gotten in the truck the night before, he could have saved everyone involved, especially Father Freed, a lot of headaches. As it turned out, they didn’t get far down the road before Sheriff’s deputies pulled them over and arrested Lee Bullock for the murder of Father Eric Freed.
Motive: a ride home.
Now that’s a Humboldt County story, but that’s not the Humboldt County story.
The real icing, and it doesn’t get much icier, on this Humboldt County cake comes to us from the icy heart of Eureka bankster, bloodsucker, and all around swine, Rob Arkley Jr.
In a letter to the Lost Coast Outpost, Mr. Arkley expressed his feelings about this awful tragedy by blaming the murder Father Freed on Eureka philanthropist Betty Chinn.
Betty Chinn works to help poor and homeless people in Eureka, and the need is great. The recent Point-In-Time survey of homeless people, found more than 1,500 people living outside in Humboldt County in the dead of Winter. Betty Chinn does her best to help some, by no means all, of them get a meal, a shower, and maybe a place to sleep at night.
She can’t possibly help all of them, but Ms. Chinn has helped a lot of people who have fallen on hard times, put their lives back together.
Naturally, you can see why this caused a deranged SoHum druggie to murder a Eureka priest.
That’s how Rob Arkley Jr sees it, anyway. In that letter to the Lost Coast Outpost, Arkley erroneously blames Father Freed’s murder on nameless “transients” who he describes as “cockroaches”, and he blames Betty Chinn because, he claims, the services she provides to the poor, attracts more of them to Eureka.
Of course this is ludicrous, but Rob Arkley Jr is the richest man in Humboldt County, so people get paid to listen to him, and local politicians kiss his behind. Arkley hates poor people, even though, as a banker and real-estate tycoon, making people poor is what he does for a living. Arkley hates seeing poor people around town. He views them as vermin. He’d put poison out for them if he could.
Instead, he does the next best thing. Rob Arkley Jr has undertaken a one man, albeit one rich man, campaign to starve poverty out of Eureka. He wants to cut the already meager, county expenditures on social services to the poor, and goes the extra mile by smearing the good name of anyone who dares help the poor privately. That’s the kind of guy he is.
Imagine what it would be like if Rob Arkley Jr were different. Imagine what Rob Arkley Jr the millionaire owner of Security National Bank and Humboldt County real-estate tycoon, might say about the murder of Father Eric Freed, if Arkley were an honest man. I think it would sound something like this:
Eureka Embarrassment Rob Arkley Jr, What if he were honest?
“You want to know why that priest, what’s his name, got killed? That priest got killed because the underground marijuana industry that drives the economic engine of Humboldt County, not to mention my own personal fortune, relies very heavily on black-market drug dealers.
Wherever you have lots of black-market drug dealers, you are bound to have lots of black-market drugs. Whenever you have lots of black-market drugs, you can expect an abundance of drug-crazed freaks like Lee Bullock.
We get the picture Freddy
Now that this underground economy is a couple of generations old, we’re breeding drug-crazed freaks, like Lee Bullock, in the hills all over Humboldt County. These drug-crazed freaks don’t care about anything but themselves and their drugs, and they’ll kill anything that gets in their way. I know that because I have a lot in common with those freaks, except that I don’t care about anything but myself and my money.
Eureka, CA Businessman Rob Arkley
Now, whenever any of those drug-crazed freaks act-up, anywhere in Humboldt County, the Sheriff hauls them to jail, holds them for a few hours, then quietly turns them loose, in the dead of night, into the quiet residential neighborhoods of Eureka. That’s why father what’s his name got killed.”
Father Eric Freed. Eureka Priest murdered in the early morning of New Year’s Day
“Oh, and by the way,” an honest Arkley might add, “That’s also why we have so many homeless people in Humboldt County. Since most of the residential housing in Humboldt County has been converted into, much more lucrative, commercial marijuana farms,
…the remaining, non-drug-dealing populace, has been put out in the cold,
…and I’m damn sick and tired of seeing them there. I think we should put out poison.”
Unfortunately, Rob Arkley Jr is not an honest man, and he did not say that.
Nonetheless, that is the truth about Humboldt County.
Judging from what I’ve read in recent news stories, the things my mother tells me about Duck Dynasty are true. I’ve never seen the show myself, but my mother says: “Duck Dynasty is awful! That show makes me sick to my stomach! The men in that show are disgusting. They’re stupid, bigoted, racist, sexist jerks. Whenever I see their ugly faces they make me so angry! And you know what bothers me most about Duck Dynasty? All of the guys on that show look JUST LIKE YOU!!!”
Now if my mom had said, “Hey John, have you heard of this band: Whitesnake? I heard something by them the other day and thought they might be a band you would like.” I would have dismissed her opinion completely. However, for as little as she knows about my taste in popular music, the woman knows her TV, and she knows obnoxious behavior when she sees it, so I believe that what she says about Duck Dynasty is true, but a couple of things puzzle me about the whole Duck Dynasty phenomena.
First: How is it possible that people who look like me have a show on commercial television? Call me old-fashioned, but I remember TV as remarkably well lit place, inhabited entirely by attractive people. I thought that was the reason people watched TV. That is, to fill their ugly lives with images of attractive people. Apparently those days are long gone.
Second: Why do the Duck Dynasty guys want to look like me? Did my didgeridoo playing inspire them to make duck calls? Has this blog influenced them in any way, or do they just like the way I look? I suppose it is possible that the Duck Dynasty guys arrived at this look independently, the same way I did, through extreme, long term neglect of personal hygiene, but still, why would people who want to be on TV make that kind of investment in slovenliness? Did they think it would help their careers? It sure hasn’t helped mine.
Maybe success requires more than simple ugliness. Perhaps success demands stupidity. If that were the case, I’d expect more people to enjoy the fruits of success. I’ve seen lots of stupid, ugly people, and until now, I’ve never seen any of their faces on a beer cozy before, and I doubt many of them have their own TV show, but most of them watch a lot of TV.
I guess Hollywood has gotten the message that stupid ugly people want to see more people like themselves on TV. Maybe the bigwig TV moguls have felt the pressure from the “Ugly Liberation” and “Stupid Pride” movements. I guess you could see Duck Dynasty as a sort of perverse civil rights achievement, the way women everywhere knew that they had gained stature in society when tobacco companies began marketing to them, or the way gay people felt the first time they saw an Ikea commercial targeting them as suckers for their cheap flat-packaged furniture.
Now that I think about it, I can’t think of a better way to tap the vast reserves, and growing stockpiles of otherwise useless ugliness and stupidity, than with a show like Duck Dynasty. Stupidity and ugliness are clearly Americas most abundant renewable resource. In recent years stupidity and ugliness have spread like kudzu, choking out beauty and smothering intelligence and creativity everywhere. It’s about time someone found some use for it and cut it back a bit.
I wouldn’t count on Duck Dynasty for reducing the amount of stupidity and ugliness in America. No, Duck Dynasty celebrates the ugly and stupid. It encourages stupid ugly people to come out of the closet, and it tells young people that it’s OK to be stupid and ugly. Duck Dynasty helps people get in touch with their inner ugliness and stupidity, and encourages them to explore their stupid and ugly tendencies.
Even if we forget the show altogether, that Duck Dynasty swag I see (everywhere I look) promotes the ugly stupid agenda all on its own.
Face it. If you are stupid enough to buy a Duck Dynasty T-shirt, you are stupid enough. If you weren’t ugly enough before you bought the shirt, you certainly will be, once you put it on.
Further, Duck Dynasty helps make society more tolerant of stupid, ugly people, and before long, thanks to Duck Dynasty, we will all accept stupid and ugly as normal. I mean, stupid and ugly are already pretty normal. However, Duck Dynasty celebrates a special kind of stupid and ugly, that real ugly kind of stupid, and that real stupid kind of ugly that they try to weed out in public schools, but that still flourishes in places like Texas, Mississippi, and Alabama, and in smaller pockets all over this country.
Duck Dynasty makes that kind of stupid ugliness seem normal, healthy, fun, and entertaining, and provides stupid and ugly role models for millions of young Americans to learn from. Isn’t that the kind of civil rights victory we need right now?
This afternoon, Thursday January 2 at 5:00PM PST on KMUD, Redwood Community Radio, Garberville, CA, you can hear the 46th episode of The SHARC Report; A Show All About Radio for Radio Lovers Like You. Up until now, I don’t think I’ve mentioned The SHARC Report in this blog at all, but I’ve produced this monthly, half-hour radio show for almost four years now.
I’m writing about the show today for a couple of reasons:
I tried something different for this show, and I’m pleased with the results.
I recorded this edition of The SHARC Report at the club’s holiday pot-luck get together. I hoped to get a few candid interviews with the jovial ambiance of a party in the background. I think it worked out pretty well, perhaps one of the best episodes to date.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 