HAVE YOU NOTICED whenever a Mendocino County public official moves on, he is wafted out of Ukiah on a cloud of superlatives? If you didn’t know better, you would think the County was managed by a brigade of saintly supermen. Mike Garvey, a Prufrockian sort of character if there ever was one, prompted this effusion from Dan Hamburg, “His experience and expertise will be missed. He has an exceptionally quick mind and he grasps large volumes of detail very quickly.” Of course anyone in the Courthouse who can string two sentences together is considered an intellectual and regarded with slack-jawed awe the length of State Street. Our tedious dealings with Garvey always brought to mind the old story about the starving teacher seeking a job in the darkest days of the Great Depression. When one old rancher looked at the teacher and asked, “Do you teach the world is round or the world is flat?” The teacher looked around at the other members of the board where he saw no clue, so he said, “I can teach it either way.” To be a civil servant in America today, you’d better be willing to teach it either way. Mike Garvey is eminently qualified for any position in contemporary government anywhere.
THE FOLLOWING STORES will not carry the Advertiser: The Comptche Store, Comptche; Earthly Delights, Fort Bragg; and our very own Navarro Store. It’s nice to know we have people among us willing to screen what we read, especially persons as literate and sophisticated as the proprietors of these stores. Think of all the time it saves us. One public guardian went so far as to question my patriotism. As the proud possessor of an honorable discharge from the Marine Corps, I asked him how many years and in what branch had he served. Silence.
LET ME ADD, gratuitously, that the combination of extreme stupidity and religious zeal can create one of the Ayatollah’s car bombs. If it happens here, we’ll know who to look for.
PERSONS LOOKING FOR THE Advertiser in Fort Bragg can find it at John Cimolino’s house between the hours of midnight and 4 a.m. Residents of Comptche will get their paper at a special, reduced price. We promise Comptche residents we will print nothing to disturb your pastoral stupor. And Navarro deependers are encouraged to buy their Advertisers at the Floodgate Store, a pleasant, civilized establishment.
THE BRITISH, despite contrary evidence in the form of their present Prime Minister, seem to be more astute than us when it comes to detecting humbug. The Brits have sicced their tax sleuths on our old friends and neighbors the Unification Church, contending the Moonies are a political organization. As might be expected, the Moonies were very popular with a number of our leading citizens, despite the fact Rev. Moon had been convicted in our courts as a liar and a thief. The Moonies are routinely described in the British press as a “neo-fascist political organization.”
WE WERE STARTLED by Homer Mannix’s description of the new Advertiser as the Boonville version of “The National Enquirer”. As we all remember, on the days it was legible, Homer’s paper was routinely confused with the New York Times. Who’s kidding whom?
IT COULD HAPPEN HERE. The new state budget has allotted $5 million dollars to finance an advisory committee of “tourism professionals” who will tell us how to promote tourism here in Northern California. The Napa Valley can happen here!
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