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- Written by: Lake County News reports
The transition is effective Monday, Dec. 28, at 8 a.m. in Sonoma, Lake, Napa, Colusa, Yolo, and Solano counties.
It’s the latest fire season transition over the past decade, which has seen the fire season extend further into the late fall and early winter months.
Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit Chief Shana Jones reminded residents that safe residential pile burning of forest residue by landowners is a crucial tool in reducing fire hazards.
State, federal and local land management and fire agencies will also be utilizing this same window of opportunity to conduct prescribed burns aimed at improving forest health on private and public lands.
Cal Fire will continue to maintain staffing to meet any potential threat, as well as maintaining the ability to strategically move resources to areas that remain at a higher threat level.
Cal Fire also will continue to monitor weather conditions closely and still has the ability to increase staffing should weather conditions change or if there is a need to support wildfires or other emergencies in other areas of the state.
The 2020 fire season has been a very active year, even more so than in 2019. Statewide, Cal Fire and firefighters from many local agencies responded to over 8,000 wildfires within the State
Responsibility Area that burned over 1.4 million acres.
In the Sonoma-Lake-Napa Unit, Cal Fire responded to over 600 wildfires that charred over 434,000 acres.
During the cooler winter months, Cal Fire will continue to actively focus efforts on fire prevention and fuels treatment activities as guided by the state’s Strategic Fire Plan and localized unit fire plans.
These will be done through public education, prescribed burns and various types of fuel reduction projects. These activities are aimed at reducing the impacts of large, damaging wildfires, public safety and improving overall forest health.
Residents are urged to still take precautions outdoors in order to prevent sparking a wildfire. A leading cause of wildfires this time of year is from escaped landscape debris burning. Before you burn, ensure it is a permissive burn day by contacting the local air quality district and then make sure you have any and all required burn permits.
During burning, make sure that piles of landscape debris are no larger than 4 feet in diameter, provide a 10-foot clearance down to bare mineral soil around the burn pile and ensure that a responsible adult is in attendance at all times with a water source and a shovel.
For more ways to burn safely visit www.ReadyForWildfire.org.
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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
The following dogs are ready for adoption or foster.
“Bella” is a female Siberian Husky mix.
She has a long red and white coat.
She is dog No. 4428.
‘Ben’
“Ben” is a male American Pit Bull terrier mix.
He has a short brindle coat.
He is dog No. 4454.
‘Brownie’
“Brownie” is a male Chihuahua with a short black and tan coat.
He is dog No. 4431.
‘Bruce’
“Bruce” is a male American Staffordshire Terrier mix puppy.
He has a short smooth yellow coat.
He is dog No. 4383.
‘Bumble’
“Bumble” is a male Siberian Husky with a gray and black coat.
He is dog No. 4452.
‘Cindy Lou’
“Cindy Lou” is a female German Shepherd mix.
She has a medium-length tan and black coat.
She is dog No. 4448.
‘Jack’
“Jack” is a male Labrador Retriever mix with a short yellow coat.
He is dog No. 4155.
‘Jerry’
“Jerry” is a male American Pit Bull terrier with a short brindle coat.
He is dog No. 4455.
‘Rudolph’
“Rudolph” is a male shepherd mix.
He has a short tan and black coat.
He is dog No. 4436.
“Sadie” is a female American Pit Bull terrier mix with a short black and white coat.
She is dog No. 4460.
‘Sugarplum’
‘Sugarplum’ is a female German Shepherd mix.
She has a medium-length black coat.
She is dog No. 4447.
‘Tinsle’
“Tinsle” is a female American Pit Bull Terrier mix puppy.
She has a short brindle and brown coat.
She is dog No. 4433.
‘Toby’
“Toby” is a male boxer mix.
He has a short tan and white coat.
He is dog No. 4389.
‘Yule’
“Yule” is a husky of undetermined gender with a black and white coat.
Yule is dog No. 4432.
Call the Clearlake Animal Control shelter at 707-273-9440, or email
Visit Clearlake Animal Control on Facebook or on the city’s website.
Email Elizabeth Larson at
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- Written by: NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
Thousands of sparkling young stars are nestled within the giant nebula NGC 3603, one of the most massive young star clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy.
NGC 3603, a prominent star-forming region in the Carina spiral arm of the Milky Way about 20,000 light-years away, reveals stages in the life cycle of stars.
Powerful ultraviolet radiation and fast winds from the bluest and hottest stars have blown a big bubble around the cluster.
Moving into the surrounding nebula, this torrent of radiation sculpted the tall, dark stalks of dense gas, which are embedded in the walls of the nebula.
These gaseous monoliths are a few light-years tall and point to the central cluster. The stalks may be incubators for new stars.
On a smaller scale, a cluster of dark clouds called "Bok" globules resides at the top, right corner. These clouds are composed of dense dust and gas and are about 10 to 50 times more massive than the sun.
Resembling an insect's cocoon, a Bok globule may be undergoing a gravitational collapse on its way to forming new stars.
The nebula was first discovered by Sir John Herschel in 1834.
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- Written by: Peter C. Mancall, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
When winter cold settles in across the U.S., the alleged “War on Christmas” heats up.
In recent years, department store greeters and Starbucks cups have sparked furor by wishing customers “happy holidays.” This year, with state officials warning of holiday gatherings becoming superspreader events in the midst of a pandemic, opponents of some public health measures to limit the spread of the pandemic are already casting them as attacks on the Christian holiday.
But debates about celebrating Christmas go back to the 17th century. The Puritans, it turns out, were not too keen on the holiday. They first discouraged Yuletide festivities and later outright banned them.
At first glance, banning Christmas celebrations might seem like a natural extension of a stereotype of the Puritans as joyless and humorless that persists to this day.
But as a scholar who has written about the Puritans, I see their hostility toward holiday gaiety as less about their alleged asceticism and more about their desire to impose their will on the people of New England – Natives and immigrants alike.
An aversion to Christmas chaos
The earliest documentary evidence for their aversion to celebrating Christmas dates back to 1621, when Gov. William Bradford of Plymouth Colony castigated some of the newcomers who chose to take the day off rather than work.
But why?
As a devout Protestant, Bradford did not dispute the divinity of Jesus Christ. Indeed, Puritans spent a great deal of time investigating their own and others’ souls because they were so committed to creating a godly community.
Bradford’s comments reflected Puritans’ lingering anxiety about the ways that Christmas had been celebrated in England. For generations, the holiday had been an occasion for riotous, sometimes violent behavior. The moralist pamphleteer Phillip Stubbes believed that Christmastime celebrations gave celebrants license “to do what they lust, and to folow what vanitie they will.” He complained about rampant “fooleries” like playing dice and cards and wearing masks.
Civil authorities had mostly accepted the practices because they understood that allowing some of the disenfranchised to blow off steam on a few days of the year tended to preserve an unequal social order. Let the poor think they are in control for a day or two, the logic went, and the rest of the year they will tend to their work without causing trouble.
English Puritans objected to accepting such practices because they feared any sign of disorder. They believed in predestination, which led them to search their own and others’ behavior for signs of saving grace. They could not tolerate public scandal, especially when attached to a religious moment.
Puritan efforts to crack down on Christmas revelries in England before 1620 had little impact. But once in North America, these seekers of religious freedom had control over the governments of New Plymouth, Massachusetts Bay and Connecticut.
Puritan intolerance
Boston became the focal point of Puritan efforts to create a society where church and state reinforced each other.
The Puritans in Plymouth and Massachusetts used their authority to punish or banish those who did not share their views. For example, they exiled an Anglican lawyer named Thomas Morton who rejected Puritan theology, befriended local Indigenous people, danced around a maypole and sold guns to the Natives. He was, Bradford wrote, “the Lord of Misrule” – the archetype of a dangerous type who Puritans believed create mayhem, including at Christmas.
In the years that followed, the Puritans exiled others who disagreed with their religious views, including Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams who espoused beliefs deemed unacceptable by local church leaders. In 1659, they banished three Quakers who had arrived in 1656. When two of them, William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson, refused to leave, Massachusetts authorities executed them in Boston.
This was the context for which Massachusetts authorities outlawed Christmas celebrations in 1659. Even after the statute left the law books in 1681 during a reorganization of the colony, prominent theologians still despised holiday festivities.
In 1687, the minister Increase Mather, who believed that Christmas celebrations derived from the bacchanalian excesses of the Roman holiday Saturnalia, decried those consumed “in Revellings, in excess of wine, in mad mirth.”
The hostility of Puritan clerics to celebrations of Christmas should not be seen as evidence that they always hoped to stop joyous behavior. In 1673, Mather had called alcohol “a good creature of God” and had no objection to moderate drinking. Nor did Puritans have a negative view of sex.
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What the Puritans did want was a society dominated by their views. This made them eager to convert Natives to Christianity, which they managed to do in some places. They tried to quash what they saw as usurious business practices within their community, and in Plymouth they executed a teenager who had sex with animals, the punishment prescribed by the Book of Leviticus. When the Puritans believed that Indigenous people might attack them or undermine their economy, they lashed out – most notoriously in 1637, when they set a Pequot village on fire, murdered those who tried to flee and sold captives into slavery.
By comparison to their treatment of Natives and fellow colonists who rebuffed their unbending vision, the Puritan campaign against Christmas seems tame. But it is a reminder of what can happen when the self-righteous control the levers of power in a society and seek to mold a world in their image.
Peter C. Mancall, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.