The current pandemic has reached a strange state. On the one hand, people are still getting infected in large numbers. In the US, on average there are 100,000 cases per day and the true number is likely to be greater since so many people are now testing at home and may not be reporting positive results to the CDC.
Readers may recall a recent post of mine where I described the heated emotions about the move to add a bike and pedestrian trail in the small town of Del Rey Oaks that I live in that would provide easier access to a small body of water accurately called the Frog Pond. Opponents of the move had put on the ballot an initiative known as Measure B that would have prohibited the trail and the vote was held on June 7th. Since California routinely allows mail-in voting, it takes a long time to get the final results and just this past week the official results were announced and Measure B had been defeated, which means that construction of the trail will proceed.
The result was a squeaker, with 387 ‘Yes’ votes and 399 ‘No’ votes, a narrow margin of 12 votes. Noteworthy was the fact that the total number of people who voted was 799. Since the town has a population of only 1520 with 1216 registered voters, the turn out was 65.7% of registered voters, more than twice the countywide average of 31.1%. This shows the intensity of the feeling that the Frog Pond generated. Leading up the the election, the only people who came to my door to canvass were those on both sides of this issue, not any of the candidates for office. Also, the overwhelming amount of literature that I received was about Measure B.
Of the 799 people who voted, for unknown reasons 13 did not vote on this particular issue, greater than the margin of the result. In big elections, it is is easy to feel that one’s vote does not matter and decide not to bother. It is small town elections that reveal the importance of voting.
During Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony that has been highly damaging to Trump World, committee vice chair Liz Cheney mentioned two messages that potential witnesses received before that day that contained veiled threats to pressure them to not say anything damaging to Trump and his enabling cronies. We now learn that Hutchinson was the recipient.
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Maybe because of my love of puns and other forms of wordplay, my brain, whenever it encounters any ambiguity in a sentence due to its construction or punctuation, immediately seizes upon the more bizarre meaning, rather than settling on the more reasonable interpretation. Take for example this story about fish falling from the sky.
Fish are falling from the sky in parts of San Francisco, and a boom in coastal anchovy populations is to blame.
Reddit user sanfrannie posted earlier this month that about a dozen 8-inch silver fish “rained down from the sky” onto their friend’s roof and back deck in the Outer Richmond. Several other users commented with similar experiences — one person said they “heard a whoosh sound behind me and heard a massive splat” before seeing fish scattered on a nearby driveway. Another commented that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus” in the Castro, and a third person said they assumed “a band of roving kids were doing a Tik Tok sardine-throwing challenge on a roof somewhere” after seeing several fish fall onto an Outer Richmond sidewalk.
Local fishers and researchers are blaming seabirds that, because of an explosion in the anchovy population off the coast of the Bay Area, now have more fish than they know what to do with.
My attention was caught by the line about someone saying that they “almost got hit by a fish waiting for a bus”. My thoughts went along the lines of: Why was the fish waiting for a bus? Was it in order to get back to the ocean? What did this person do to the fish that it tried to hit them? How does a fish hit someone anyway? With its tail? Its fins?
That is the way my brain works. Newspaper headlines are often my biggest source of raw material because their enforced brevity makes them ripe for misinterpretation for warped minds like mine.
In a detailed profile of Florida governor Ron DeSantis who is clearly running for the Republican party’s presidential nomination in 2024, Dexter Filkins writes that he is following the path that Trump opened up, that seeks to motivate base voters by being fiercely combative. The difference is that DeSantis is more articulate, determined, and focused.
For decades, the Democratic Party had commanded a majority of Florida’s registered voters. But the state was changing, as Trump’s election helped energize a shift in political affinities. The Republican Party’s rank and file became increasingly radical, and G.O.P. leaders appeared only too happy to follow them. “There was always an element of the Republican Party that was batshit crazy,” Mac Stipanovich, the chief of staff to Governor Bob Martinez, a moderate Republican, told me. “They had lots of different names—they were John Birchers, they were ‘movement conservatives,’ they were the religious right. And we did what every other Republican candidate did: we exploited them. We got them to the polls. We talked about abortion. We promised—and we did nothing. They could grumble, but their choices were limited.
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