In this morning's Letters to the Editor are two outraged missives bemoaning the closing of the Redwood Forest restaurant, complete with threats to boycott the new business to be located there.

The owners, Les and Tracy Hord, have gone to great lengths to calm the waters. They say that the new business owners are nice folks, practically locals, and look forward to their high-end candy store. The Hords have always been first class.

I remember when I first came to Chico in 1997, there were two "fine dining" establishments in downtown Chico; the Black Crow and the Redwood Forest. In all of Chico, there were only two other restaurants with any cellar to boast of; the Red Tavern and the Albatross.

SInce then, of course, opportunities to enjoy both haute cuisine and excellent vintages have proliferated. Soon after my arrival, Christian Michaels and Creekside Cellars opened. And in the past decade, we've seen the arrival of 5th Street Steakhouse, Johnnies, 33 Steaks Booze and Jazz, Monk's Wine Lounge, and Vino100. All of these establishments are within easy walking distance of downtown.

Used to be that Redwood Forest was an oasis for the local oenophile. Its cellar was nationally recognized by Wine Spectator magazine for its exceptional collection of fine wines. The good news is that this outpost of good taste and discriminating palates made it possible for other wine-oriented businesses to establish a foothold.

The Redwood Forest was also a haven for jazz fans. One of the best projects I ever engineered was the Charlie Haynes Quintet+1, recorded live at the Redwood Forest restaurant. The Hords deserve a great deal of admiration for introducing so many people to great music, excellent cuisine, and fine wines.

And while it is certainly disappointing to see them close their doors, I must disagree with those who see this development as a sinister harbinger of doom. The fact that downtown has become a magnet for excellent restaurants in recent years is encouraging. The fact that rents are increasing for downtown locations is a sign of increased vitality in a district that has struggled to attract and retain successful operators. Finally, the fact that the new tenant is targeting the high-discretionary-income market segment is encouraging. The Redwood Forest enjoyed an upscale clientele, and were it to be replaced with yet another down-market lifestyle retailer, I'd be worried. This seems to be a positive indicator to me, and I look forward to seeing the new store open.

Best of luck to the Hords in whatever endeavor they pursue. Their passion, commitment to excellence, and attention to customer satsifaction will serve them well no matter what they choose to do. And thanks again for all the good times.

This isn't a trick photo. According to the San Francisco Chronicle's Science Editor David Perlman, it's called a "circumzenithal arc", and is caused by sublight refracting through a curtain of tiny ice crystals.

Evidently not uncommon in more northern climes, it is something of a rarity in temperate zones. A Concord man photographed it on January 13th.

It's certainly a lovely phenomenon. I just have to wonder how it would look on a kite...

There was a time, not all that long ago, when I was fat. I had managed to sustain the illusion that I was really a thin man with a bit of a beer gut.

On a vacation trip about four years ago, I happened to pass a full-length mirror as I headed out the door to the beach in my swimming trunks and caught a glimpse of myself in profile. I put on a shirt and didn't take it off for the rest of the vacation.

Turns out I was fat. Jackie Gleason fat. Oliver Hardy fat. Not morbidly obese, but 50 pounds overweight. My feet hurt all the time, I could barely walk a mile without resting. I was developing a nasty problem with the left knee. And I had frequent heartburn. Every day around 2PM I'd have a little Zantac and Alka-Seltzer cocktail, as though it was the most normal thing in the world.

I got steered to reduced carbohydrate dieting. The Atkins craze was sort of cultish, so I looked into the science of ketogenic metabolism, insulinemia, and glycemic indexing. I started out by just cutting out all the white food, and switching to light beer (the hardest step). I lost seven pounds in one week.

Over the course of the next six months, as I got better at meal planning and monitoring my intake, I lost the 50 pounds. I also joined a gym during this time, and did a lot of weight training. But it worked. And I kept it off for three years.

Unfortunately, this last year or so I've gotten sort of lax in the low-carb discipline. I still use reduced carb substitute products when they are available (Dreamfields low-carb pasta is excellent, for example, as are Mission's low-carb tortillas), but I've been entirely content to eat bread, rice, muffins, cookies, etc. I've even been indulging in whole-grain craft beer from time to time, a real no-no. About the only thing I've been religiously avoiding is potatoes (an evil vegetable), although I've slipped up there a time or two.

So now I'm up 20 pounds, and today is the first day of Lent. So I'm getting back on the low-carb wagon, and going back to the gym. Between jumpstarting the metabolism with exercise and cutting out the starch, I think I can drop 20 in six weeks. Wish me luck.

For as long as humans have been upright, it has been a tradition to observe the dimming and subsequent rebirth of the sun in the winter sky. When human survival was more subject to the whims of weather, this celebration of the hope of continued survival made abundant sense.

Over the centuries, as belief systems have fallen and risen, this venerable tradition has assumed many forms. Notwithstanding the dominant religion in a particular society, the solstice time remains a universal holiday in every liturgical calendar. Even in conquest, you can take away a man’s gods, but you don’t mess around with his feast days.

The selection of December 25th as Jesus' birthday was not fixed until over 300 years after his death. That date had been previously used, for about a thousand years, as the birthdate of Mithras, a Persian sun god, because that was when the solstice fell way back then. Due to something called the precession of the equinox, the date of the solstice has crept earlier in the year. During the Age of Aries (we're currently in the age of Pisces; the Age of Aquarius doesn't actually dawn until 2012, Rado and Ragni to the contrary notwithstanding), it fell on December 25th, and that was a fitting birthdate for a solar deity. Mithraism was especially popular with Roman soldiers during the first few centuries of the common era. As a competitive strategy, Christianity adopted (read "stole") this date.

The relentless drumbeat of the Christmas Cult every year is as tedious as it is unavoidable, but it betrays no prospect of diminishing, so those among us who don’t necessarily resonate with the cultural iconography must grit their teeth and forbear for weeks at a time this incessant mass market compulsion.

The battle between those who assert an intrinsically Christian expression of this tradition and those who embrace only the secular aspects of it is as pointless as the tradition is essentially meaningless. It means whatever you want it to mean, including nothing at all if you prefer. Whether you are in the majority or not is utterly inconsequential.

My solution to the constant Christian omnipresence at this time of year is to embrace a belligerent secularization of the season. I set up a Pandora station to play seasonal favorites that have nothing to do with the divinity of Christ. I picked out three songs, "Baby It's Cold Outside", "Let It Snow", and "I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm", and selected "Rat Pack" renditions by Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis. The result is a hip, sardonic, jazzy playlist with no angels, shepherds, litte drummer boys, or silent nights. Wise guys instead of wise men. As a bonus, also no Frosty, Rudolph, or Jingle (*%$ Bells. It's more about sex and snow than improbable narratives about a virgin giving birth. Occasionally I get Bing's White Christmas, but that's as bad as it gets.

Send me your email address, and I'll send you a link to the station. Have yourself a merry little Festivus, on me.

I've taken a little time off from blogging since the election, but I'm over it, and ready to take up the cursor and observe the scene, local and otherwise.

Today's editorial rehearses many of the popular complaints about the new City Plaza, and some of them merit thoughtful consideration. But one remark really should be addressed:

And there are those back-in parking spaces. We don't get it. How do you let the driver behind you know what you're up to?

Now, I'm no fan of back-in parking, frankly, and there's a legitimate argument to be made against it, but this is not it. You let the driver behind you know what you're up to the same way you do with parallel parking; use your turn signals, and put the car in reverse. This will no doubt annoy the driver behind you, just as it does with parallel parking, but parallel parking is what we had there before, so I don't see this as a net loss, even on a busy street.

And that's the fulfrum of my argument against the practice; it introduces latency on the street segment, since the person parking is not going to wait until traffic clears before coming to a stop. The motorist sees the empty space, signals, stops, and parks. This is the proximate cause of much of the congestion that occurs in downtown. It's not that the streets are not wide enough, it's that the 30 seconds needed to parallel (or back-in diagonal) park a car can cause all the vehicles following to compact, attempt to negotiate lane changes, etc., and this repercusses on up the street. Hang around on Second Steet between Main and Broadway at lunchtime pretty much any weekday and you'll see this dynamic in action. Throw in a couple of knuckleheads trying to make a left turn at either end of the block, and we're close to absolute gridlock. Back-in parking introduces the same latency, but with twice as many parking places in play.

The advantage of diagonal parking at the Plaza is that most people are less adept at parallel parking on the left-hand side of the street. The advantage offered most often for back-in diagonal parking is that it make it easier for the departing motorist to see oncoming traffic, particularly cyclists, and makes the entry into the trafficway simplicity itself. These are valid arguments, and they obviously carried the day when the project was planned.

So the complaint that the editorial board of the ER doesn't "get it" betrays rather a diminished power of analysis on the part of the editorial board than it does on the traffic engineers who designed the parking.

Like traffic circles, the back-in parking will take some getting used to. But I am confident that even the editorial board of the ER will eventually figure it out.

I'm still getting the hang of this blogging software. My understanding is that I would be notified by email of comments posted to my entries so that I could then approve them for publication. The fact is that I was not notified of many comments over the past few days, and I only just figured that out. I've approved and published all comments to date, and I apologize for not doing so sooner. I would have done, if only I had known. The tipoff was a comment from Mark Sorensen last night at the DPAC meeting, when he said he'd posted comments, and I could only recall the one. Thanks, Mark, for the heads-up, and your thoughtful observations.

Thank you, all, for your remarks. Whether in agreement or not, a dialog must have multiple viewpoints to be worthwhile, and I very much appreciate that each of you has taken time to respond. Thanks, also, for self-identifying.

Thanks for visiting my new blog. As the name suggests, it will be somewhat unspecific in its focus, more or less random observations about local current events, philosophical musings, cranky complaints, fulsome praise, and, hopefully, some interesting give and take with you, dear reader.

A few ground rules; anyone is welcome to post a response, subject to the usual contraints of decency and accountability. Certainly libelous or otherwise malicious commentary will be elided. But in general I am willing to take it as I dish it out, so feel free to advocate for your point of view.

However, if you are not identifiable, I won't engage with you. You won't provoke a response from me unless you self-identify. Fair enough?