The next thing they’ll do is repaint all those bulbout curbs black so the hundreds of tires that rub against them daily won’t leave telltale marks.
After that, they’ll block State Street off from vehicles entering between West Henry and Mill Streets. This will be explained as a “Pedestrian Safety” measure following a study conducted by the city suggesting downtown sidewalks “pose grave risk and imminent danger” from reckless drivers making unsafe righthand turns onto State Street.
What they’ll never do, despite having years to study and prepare, and despite the input of consultants, traffic engineers and construction workers, is admit they were wrong about their multimillion dollar State Street revamp project and the laughable bulbouts.
This was the City of Ukiah at its haughtiest and most arrogant, armed by an administration that declined all input, ignored advice repeatedly offered at meetings and in letters to the editor, and proceeded with calm and certainty toward an embarrassing and disastrous finish.
Everything was perfection-plus about the brilliant Streetscape plan except when finished most trucks and some cars couldn’t drive on it.
Other than that, just another quiet year at Fort Ukiah.
‘Put My Hands Up, Now!’
I only recently learned a lawsuit has been filed against various local police agencies and their officers for alleged misconduct by making illegal traffic stops on Highway 101.
One of the officers named is former Mendocino County Sheriff Tom Allman, now a Deputy Sheriff for the Humboldt County Sheriff’s Office. Let’s imagine Officer Allman quietly approaching a small house on the eastern outskirts of Willits.
Raising a bullhorn to his lips he shouts:
“Alright, I’m under arrest! I know I’m in there and I’ve got me covered; if I don’t come out with my hands up I’m coming in after me!”
Life Neeeds Two-Minute Warnings
It’s Super Bowl time, another sports extravaganza I’d happily avoid even if it didn’t exist, but it gives us one more opportunity to kick around the hapless Cleveland Browns. (It’s not nice to kick a team when it’s down, but the Browns are never up.)
Q) What do you call a Cleveland Brown with a Super Bowl ring?
A) A thief.
Q) How do you keep the Cleveland Browns from trampling all over your front yard?
A) Put up some goal posts.
And finally, from the Last Will & Testament of a suburban Clevelander who requested six members of the Cleveland Browns serve as pallbearers at his graveside services, “So they can let me down one last time.”
Fund Radio Shack Too!
There’s noise about another tax increase so more money can be funneled into our obsolete library systems.
This is a drive motivated by sentiment and nostalgia, based on rosy recollections in the lives of (elderly) enthusiasts for long-gone experiences in libraries that bear no resemblance to today’s.
There was a similar tax hike 25 years ago to “Save Our Libraries” but we’d all be better off, at least financially, had it failed. The only thing 21st century libraries supply is a place indoors for transients and a central location to herd children who would rather be somewhere else.
Teenagers have more information in their phone than all the libraries and librarians in Mendocino County put together, times 1000. There is no more pressing need for libraries today than for Sears & Roebuck outlets, Beta Max videos or Newsweek Magazine. All died of natural causes.
To keep the local library system on life support prolongs the inevitable with tax dollars better off in our own bank accounts. We could spend the money on vacations to Cleveland, tires for the car and lots of new books on Kindle.
A Kindle has more to read at the click of a button than you’ve ever read in your life, and more inside a 5 x 7 slab than all the books County libraries have ever handled. The collected works of Edgar Allan Poe for a penny, everything by Shakespeare, 99 cents. Bestsellers at a discount. Lots of books free or under a dollar, and anybody who self-publishes can sell it on Amazon Books.
The reason we don’t still have a thriving Pony Express service is obvious to anyone but library workers, baby boomers and progressives who can’t wait to plant “Help Save Libraries for Our Children’s Future!” signs in the front yard.
The new signs will be a virtue-signaling exercise to assure neighbors of the commitment to help bring healing to our community. Those old “We Can Do Better Racism” and the blue-and-orange “No Matter What You Did, Come Live with Me” signs are suddenly no longer fashionable.
They’ll also want bumper stickers.
(Tom Hine says giving money to the library is like sending money to any other county agency, like the Department of Weights and Measures or Social Services. TWK thinks libraries should hold bake sales, twice a week if necessary.)
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