By Mary Forgione
California’s deserts can be magical during wildflower season. This probably isn’t one of those years, and it has nothing to do with our pandemic cancel culture. The traffic-stopping orange poppies from Lake Elsinore to the Antelope Valley likely will be no-shows because the fall-winter season has been drier than usual.
“Nothing is blooming at all,” Death Valley National Park spokeswoman Abby Wines said in an email. “Usually, bloom on the valley floor is mid-February through early April. Given that nothing is blooming yet, and that we didn’t have much precipitation in the fall and early winter, it will not be a spectacular bloom.”
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We see plenty of talk about celebrities being “cancelled” these days and to some, this might look like it’s a new thing but anyone who knows the story of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle can tell you it is not even close.
I’m sure you’re aware of silent movies greats like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Legends. “Fatty” Arbuckle was arguably their equal at the time. Not only was he one of the most popular silent era stars, he was one of the best paid and his career was only going up. In 1914, Paramount Pictures paid him $1,000 a day plus twenty-five percent of all profits and complete artistic control. That was a stunning contract at the time and just four years later they offered Arbuckle a three-year, $3 million contract. In today’s money that’s close to $52 million.
How Joan Didion broke free The chronicler of American counterculture was tormented by neuroses – until she learned to turn them to her advantage. Joan Didion – the author of three memoirs, two political travelogues, five novels, and now, with Let Me Tell You What I Mean, seven collections of essays – was born in northern California, in 1934. Her upbringing was somewhat fraught. Her father drank and suffered breakdowns, her mother intoned the dirge-like motto, “what difference does it make?”, and Sacramento County unfolded its annual cycle of fire, flooding, wind and drought. Meanwhile, beady, small-boned Joan passed the time reflecting on the fact – or so it seemed to her – that nothing matters, and scratching away in the notebook she had been handed, at the age of five, to stop her “whining”.