PERITOPIA!

Reverse 911\’ may come to Mendocino County residents

Yikes, the implications of this are somewhat frightening. >>Reverse 911′s function is to send emergency messages county wide or if there is a need to alert the residents of a specific neighborhood to a threat it can do that to.<<

And annoying. >>According to the Sheriff’s Office web site a test of the system will be conducted on the last Monday of each month at 9 a.m. to assure that the system is working.<<

And amusing.  >>Keiser noted that computer voice speaks rapidly and is not able to pronounce Ukiah’.<<

Devoted fans of my blog (all one of them) might recall that one of my favorite topics is the tendency of local peeps to confess to additional crimes when they are arrested.  Well, the peeps are nothing if not consistent and predictable.  Here’s an early Christmas present.

>>ARREST — A 26-year-old Fort Bragg man was booked at county jail with a $10,000 bail on suspicion of possession of methamphetamine, according to a release from the Sheriff’s Office.  About 3 a.m. Friday, a vehicle was stopped in the 6800 block of Iside Way, Little River, for alleged traffic violations, the Sheriff’s Office stated.  When the vehicle was stopped, deputies reported smelling marijuana. Tucker Chester was in the passenger seat, and police said he smelled of marijuana. Chester allegedly also said that he may also have methamphetamine in his possession, the Sheriff’s Office stated.<<

I love Amazon, and I usually have no problems getting stuff from them — even though I live in the middle of nowhere (its technical name).  That is why I was confident ordering a space heater from them on December 8.  The estimated delivery date was December 21, plenty of time.  But that time has come and gone and still no heater.  So, I tracked it and discovered that my space heater has been really busy traveling across the country!  Oh, it came pretty close to its intended destination on December 16 (when it arrived in Menlo Park, CA) — but then, for reasons only it probably knows, it decided to return to Hodgkins, IL, where it had been on December 11 (I don’t know what it did there that day, but let’s just pretend that, whatever happens in Hodgkins, IL stays in Hodgkins, IL).  Check out its itinerary so far and stay tuned to find out when/if my space heater finally comes home.

Update: the heater arrived on December 28!

>>Because you live in Ukiah you are already familiar with how inept the batch of bozos in charge of this town can be.<<

Assignment: Ukiah – It\’s Ukiah. What did you expect?

You can’t fault the folks at the Ukiah Daily Journal for sugar-coating — County seat reporting is nothing but brutally frank.  And, I agree, giant pears attached to candy cane poles is worthy of rebuke.  You don’t see that kind of tackiness on the Coast.  Well, not outside anyway.

I just received notice that Verizon is going to build a wireless facility (read: cell tower) on my road!  This is beyond exciting.  It means I will be able to use my cell phone!  It means I can kiss AT&T’s pricey landline long-distance service goodbye!   It also means, I assume, that Comptche (the town 16 windy miles next door) will become a hotbed of bustling business activity — and, by that, I mean more easily able to communicate with “customers,” of course.

Yesterday, I went to the video store in town.  I belong to Netflix, mind you.   And, remarkably, it manages to ship here next day — although the US Post Office refuses to guarantee any next day deliveries will actually be delivered the next day.   But I digress.  My point is that, sometimes, when I am waiting for my Netflix movies to arrive, I have to go to the town video store to rent a movie (at an astonishing price of $4.25).  Anyway, you can imagine what the town video store looks like (hint: video store in “Men in Black II”).  But it gets the new releases — and fairly quickly in decent amounts — I rented “Up” on Thanksgiving!  It also has movies on VHS — which, at this point, look like 8-track tapes.  But what I noticed yesterday that I never noticed before — because, until then, I always just browsed new releases — is that the movies are stored on the shelves IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER.  There claims to be sorting by genre, but I found comedies in drama, dramas in comedies and virtually no musicals in musicals.  And, as if that weren’t irritating enough, movies are also not sorted alphabetically within genres.  That’s right.  No alphabetical sorting of movies.  So, if you want to find a specific movie (G*d forbid), you would have to read literally hundreds, if not thousands, of titles.  I elected not to because my level of boredom hasn’t reached that plateau.  But I have to wonder why, why, why???  The answer has to be that the local collective consciousness understands the movie sorting system at the town video store whereas I don’t.  At least, not yet.  And stuff.  What?

Update: I went back again today.  There is only one Woody Allen movie in the Woody Allen section!