Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

The Monterey County Weekly's cover story this week was about the ever present raccoons that prowl The Peninsula.   I remember my first encounter with a raccoon when I was three or four years old. It was at the Little Red School House, better known as Bay School, in Carmel. This was in the early 1960s. Someone brought a raccoon to show us kids. The one thing that fascinated me the most was their hands. yes, hands, not paws. They are miniature versions of human hands, complete with opposable thumbs. Interesting creatures indeed!   Three or four years later I learned something else about raccoons. I woke up one morning to get ready for school and saw a huge smear of blood on our sliding glass door. And more blood all over the patio of our home in the forest overloooking Hatton Canyon. It was a disturbing sight to say the least.   I asked my mother what happened. She said raccoons had attacked our dog Monty in the middle of the night. My dad had to use a shotgun to s...

For the last three years I have been an affiliate advertiser for various companies, including Amazon.com. This relationship has allowed me to offer links to books, movies, and other products of local interest. In exchange I get a small commission for every sale the links generate. On Wednesday Amazon affiliates in California were abruptly notified that due to a change in California sales tax law, all affiliate agreements involving California residents will be terminated effective immediately. Under previous law , the state could only require on-line retailers who had a physical presence - such as a store or warehouse - in the state to collect sales taxes on sales to California residents. This set up a major imbalance between on-line retailers like Borders, Barnes & Noble, Staples, Best Buy and the like, who have actual stores in the state, and retailers that operate strictly on-line from outside the state, like Amazon. The new law simply states that California based webs...