Author: Dick

On days when inspiration is as elusive as a truckload of $100 bills, I like to surf some of the news coming from smalltown America. Perhaps one reason for my turning to the less-than-metropolitan areas is as John Mellancamp has said: “I was born in a small town.” Also, I am bored and tired of reading about the economy, war, crime, politics and Brangelina. So here are a few stories about what REAL America is up to lately:

From Alaska: Although the legendary Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race is on perhaps every newspaper front page in the state, another race caught my eye in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. The Tired Iron Vintage Snow Machine Race and River Rally, (say that quickly three times!) pits machine against machine from when snowmobiles were men and women were glad of it. Maybe not but at least the snow machines don’t have to pee. Check out reporter Amanda Bohman’s story.

From Mississippi: Remember the “Wonderful Tar Baby Story” from Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus tales? No? Well, I won’t get into the subject but writer Reggie Ross in the Winona Times describes a monster tar saga in Carroll County, Miss., in which scores of automobiles are getting tar baths on a local road. Now it seems county officials don’t want to pay for any more vehicles that get tarred, while they are presumably, unfeathered.

“County officials are screaming enough is enough as ongoing tar complaints keep pouring in to the courthouse and even some of the supervisors’ homes,” Ross writes in his lede.

It certainly scares the tar out of me!

Finally, from Idaho: It seems as if anytime one turns on the local TV news stations somewhere in the U.S. they will find yet another story about kids in some school being “locked down” because either some crazy with a gun is either roaming the halls or the streets outside the school. But not in Moscow, Idaho, according to The Latah Eagle. The kids were kept after school at Moscow Junior High because a moose was on the loose — and it had nothing to do with the Canadian Moosehead Beer.

Eagle editor Kai Eiselein described how the local mounties were in a “Mexican standoff” with the moose and were unsure how to get the large critter out of town.

“With a plan in place, the IDFG officer went behind the house and chased the moose out of the yard. At first it went north, across E Street, then decided to trot west along E instead with a police cruiser, the IDFG officer and a Moscow animal control officer in hot pursuit.”

The moose was finally run out of town without any apparent harm while the school kids had to wait an extra 15 minutes to go home. I’m sure they didn’t mind, apparently the moose chase was the most exciting thing in town that day.

So much for news from smalltown U.S.A. As I have written before in such pieces, I do not write of these stories to make fun of people or the newspapers. I have edited a small-town weekly and you have to be creative to find stories that pass for news sometimes. My hats off to small-town reporters and editors everywhere. Here is hoping a gigantic vegetable story is sometime in your future.

It is a blustery day her on the upper Texas coast and a quite cold one at that. One hears people quite frequently refer to a day as “blustery” and sometimes I come to the conclusion that they are mistaken to some degree as to what the word means. Dictionary.com refers to the term as a form of “bluster” which includes “to roar and be tumultuous, as wind” as one meaning. That description could also fit someone who is in a grand stage of inebriation, as in “roaring drunk.”

The weather certainly seems not to know what it is supposed to do. This morning I woke up with the temperature being quite cool but there was only a faint wind when I went for a walk, then before finishing my walk the clouds seemed to break, followed by a light rain that hovered over me for about my final six blocks. Just a few minutes ago as I finished some research at the library, I came outside to very gusty (blustery?) winds which made things quite chilly.

Outside now, the sun is shining and some blue is showing in the sky but the weather service forecast includes a slight chance of snow, mostly north of Interstate 10. I live just two blocks south of I-10 so I don’t fully trust that the weather knows whether to stay put at an artificial boundary or not. The latter would be my conjecture.

With a five-day hiatus from my part-time G-man job, I have tried to get a bit of work done in my writing occupation. For that, I feel I have accomplished something but it will be Monday at least before I am able to mail (or e-mail) a query to a regional magazine about a story idea. That, however, is much better than I have been progressing lately. But after all is done in a short time later, I intend to curl up with a good book, perhaps watch Monk episodes and just wait to see what happens. Now is that a plan, I ask you?

Kudos go to my local hometown paper, the Beaumont Enterprise, for joining a lawsuit with the Texas Attorney General’s Office on an open records matter.

The issue at hand are use-of-force reports filed by the local police department which the newspaper asked for but were denied. The paper sought reports during a period in time in which the son of Beaumont Police Chief Frank Coffin, the son also a Beaumont P.D. officer, was accused of assaulting a man.

Beaumont officials maintain releasing such information would open the door to tons of lawsuits over such issues. The Enterprise and the AG, as well as appeals courts, maintain the records are public under the state’s public information law.

Now if we could just get the Enterprise to investigate another matter involving the Beaumont police — the issue of buy-and-bust drug arrests. The issue pops up from time-to-time especially when such police operations end like the one in January in which Beaumont officers shot and killed a man in a Jack-in-the-Box parking lot during an undercover drug arrest.

I have no beef with the officers’ action although one would hope for a great deal of scrutiny in officer-involved shooting situations in which one of the officers happens to be the son of a city council member as was the case in this instance. The officers were cleared because they defended themselves, which is how it should be. I do have, however, doubts as to the effectiveness of the buy-and-bust tactics used to catch drug dealers.

As I noted just after the shooting, there remains some doubters in police circles who say the yield in such operations tend to be mainly low-level drug dealers. Those tactics also are obviously dangerous for both officers and civilians.

I e-mailed a copy of my concerns as listed in my Jan. 24 post to a managing editor of the Enterprise but I suppose she thought I was a crackpot. I am, of course, a crackpot but that’s better than being a crack head, right?

There is something seriously wrong with the computer I am using here at the public library. Perhaps I will attempt a post from elsewhere tomorrow when I have more time…

Excitement has been bountiful during the last week or so over Texas playing a part in picking a president. Of course, Texans always play some part in picking a president. It elected a Texan during the past two presidential elections, but forgive us of that trespass.

Lost in the hubub over Hillary v. Barack is the bigger picture come January 2009. That will be when the new president steps in and Gee Dubya will load up his U-Haul for Crawford or Highland Park or wherever it is he plans to live after the White House. For that — the words “Bush” and “after the White House” — I will be so grateful. But regardless whether President Obama takes that sacred oath or President Hillary Clinton or President John McCain we will still have to deal with that little group of men and women on the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue known as Congress.

Unless change happens, meaning one party or the other elects more members in order to achieve a passable majority, we will be figuratively living in Deadlock City, U.S.A. If the present Democratic majority doesn’t increase sufficiently to do a little overriding and such, and if either Obama or Hillary is elected, I predict you will find the most do-nothing Congress in American history. That will especially be the case if we have another President Clinton. She’s the Anti-Christ to the GOPs, don’t you know?

So if Texas, Ohio and the other states voting today put Obama over the top, or put Hillary in a position where she may be finally sitting pretty, just remember it’s a long time from now until November. And it’s an even longer time until January. Then, we will have both a new president and Congress. Let’s just hope for the best, whatever that might be.