Not wanting to be out-stupided by County Supervisors, our City Council has suddenly demanded the Palace Hotel must be fixed, bulldozed or moved to Laytonville within the next 30 days.
And we mean it! Or else! That’s final! Grrr!
The Palace Hotel has been empty and rotting for 40 years while one gaggle of council members after another built careers out of ignoring its problems. After decades of city neglect, now comes a 30-day deadline to draw up plans to fix the hotel up, tear it down, or drag a big blue plastic tarp over the whole mess.
(Cue laughtrack)
Disappear the Palace Hotel, the council says, so we may resume our focus on neglecting the abandoned Post Office and ignoring the soon-to-be empty Courthouse. And Curry’s furniture, and Denny’s. And graffiti.
What provoked all five council members into jolting themselves from their collective stupor to blurt out such silly demands? Even Sage Sangiacomo erupted into command mode:
“Blah Blah,” said Sage, “Safety is our priority, etc., blah.” (Not an exact quote from Justine Frederiksen’s recent UDJ story. But close)
Council rep Susan Sher, well-respected structural engineer, heavy crane operator and seismology expert, has had it. It’s time, she says, to do in the next 30 days what no one has been able to do in the last 40 years.
Sher, longtime construction crew boss, is quoted saying a 30-day deadline is “more than reasonable, and asking for more time is almost laughable if it weren’t so tragic.”
As the rest of us sit back and wonder: Where have these bozos been?
They didn’t know broken windows, sagging floors and collapsing walls got started the day the hotel closed? They’re ignorant of long-simmering Palace Hotel debates starting in the 1980s in letters, forums and elections?
They think most structural damage came from last winter’s rainfall? They think a deadline of 30 days, which my math equates to about two one-thousandths of 40 years elapsed, is “more than reasonable” ?
Meanwhile out on Low Gap Road it’s the same old once again deja voodoo repeated some more: Supervisors are obsessed with firing employees, hiring lawyers and blubbering about budget shortfalls and tax increases.
An all-star team of Council reps and Supervisors couldn’t run a lemonade stand. We cannot state with confidence which is more stupider than the other.
But remember: We elected them.
* * *
Fun with mail
Longtime readers may recall a column written years ago about our dead cat. Kittyboy had gone to his reward, but a greater reward awaited him had he lived a bit longer, because I’d bought him a subscription to Vogue.
For my $10 check Kittyboy was to have received 12 months of Vogue, the Magazine of Fashion Absurdities, and a free “glamorous tote bag.” We threw out the tote bag because it was ugly and because Kittyboy was dead.
The best thing about subscribing a dead cat to a braindead magazine came later, when new and unanticipated solicitations addressed to Kittyboy began arriving in our mailbox. Vogue is a publication for women with a lot of money but not much sense, happy to pay ridiculous prices to dress up in shower curtains or Hefty bags so long as such garments had recently been featured in Vogue.
No one ever went broke targeting morons with lots of money, unless the moron was a cat, and Kittyboy wasn’t even that. But we kept getting things sent to him in the mail: Vacation brochures, clothing discounts, invitations to the Oscars and lots of magazine offers, some of which promised free tote bags.
Even today, a decade gone, Kittyboy remains within a demographic circle advertisers cannot resist, and his mail, always ridiculous, keeps rolling in.
Now my point:
It is in this same spirit of idle amusement and pointless delight that I recently mailed, in Kittiboy’s name, Congressman George Santos $25 for his re-election campaign. George is my favorite politician and in danger of being my favorite public figure. He has no competition for 2023’s Funniest Elected representative.
George Santos (R: Jupiter) is a nonstop marvel. He’s Elizabeth Warren on steroids, but with a better hairdo.
If we captured and boiled down every mendacious, lying sociopath in Congress, and if we strained their remains through fine mesh cheesecloth, and then spiced it with cooked offal and nasal drippings, the result might be a petri dish casserole of Baked Soros Surprise we could bottle and sell as ketchup.
That would be a lie, but that would be the point.
George Santos lies when he says “Hello.” George Santos has told so many lies that if we wait long enough some of them may turn out to be true.
(It must, of course, be asked: Other than size, scope and success, how does George Santos much differ from Clinton, Inc.?)
Send money to Team George and your mailbox will bring delight for years to come.
(Tom Hine writes this. TWK takes credit. They live in Ukiah except when they live in North Carolina.)
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