Bits & Pieces

 

Bits and pieces from this reporter’s notebook.

Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....If you’re waiting for Diana Ross to sing, you’re gonna have to wait some more. The 59-year-old crooner had her drunk driving case postponed again. The ex-Supreme was picked up for weaving last December, and recorded a blood-alcohol of .20, more than twice the legal limit. She faces jail time if convicted, at a hearing now scheduled for early January.

Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....Most of the wild comments I make about the North State refer to Shasta county, where I live, but there is yet another county between Shasta and the Oregon border and it’s called Siskiyou. It’s got about 45,000 people scattered over more than 6,200 square miles. Very rural, kinda hardscrabble, and not an apex of intellectualism, for better or worse. Worse for one 32-year-old, who, when the car in which he was riding was pulled over for a routine traffic stop, ingested an unknown amount of an unknown drug, and died.

Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....To our south but still wild, is Tehama County, with a bunch of Mexican nationals hiding in the rugged hills growing marijuana. The sheriff’s office there goes after the pop-growers like they need it for personal use, scoring plants by the tens of thousands. They might have left a deputy home minding the store, because over the weekend, someone broke into one of their storage lockers and walked off -- they probably drove a truck, actually -- with "67 pounds of processed marijuana, 100 marijuana plants, a 9 mm handgun, an assault rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun and the lock" for the door.

Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....Northern California isn’t the only place with wilds. Consider Culdesac, Idaho, which they spell without spaces, where a dog caught fire when his owner’s vehicle backfired, somehow spraying sparks into the cab. The dog’s hair was ignited, so a passenger let him out, where he rolled around on the ground, starting a grass fire. The dog stank but was uninjured and firefighters took care of the grass fire.

Da-deet-da-deet-da-deet-deet....Wilder still, if we think we have political troubles here in The Golden State, at least we don’t face the problems they do in Colombia. Candidates have much tougher races there; in the current run-up to state and municipal elections, sixteen of them have been murdered. It’s not as bad as the last election, but there are still three weeks to go. The killings have been the work of leftist extremists, rightist extremists, along with some common criminals.

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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