All on January 22nd, 2023:
Monterey, CA: 1 man killed 10 people & wounded 10 more
Baton Rouge, LA: 1 man wounded 12 people
Shreveport, LA: 1 man wounded 5 adults and 8 children; 2 are in critical condition.
failing
Category: current events
defenders
“Since we first spoke with Kurt Klomberg, he resigned as the Dodge County district attorney. Klomberg sent an email to colleagues announcing he was stepping down as of January 13th, and heartbroken over the collapse of the Dodge County prosecutor’s office after retirements, resignations, and no new full-time attorneys accepting positions.”
[Klomberg:] “That left me alone to do the work of six attorneys after February first. My family has made many, many sacrifices for me to do this work. When we were fully staffed, I was leaving before my children would barely get up in the morning and I was coming home after they went to bed. I saw no end in sight. I was concerned about my own health and also about the fact that I can’t do that amount of work without committing serious malpractice.”
How is it that the legislature can leave vacant offices of public prosecutors and public defenders? Why is the legislature not required to raise the pay of these public officers of the court to a level that will keep these positions filled?
hacked
My Darling B’s Twitter account was hacked! She sat down on Tuesday afternoon to see what manner of madness befell the world and discovered that someone had logged into her account and posted a few hundred tweets extolling the greatness of a particular brand of cryptocurrency. After several failed attempts to log in, she finally correctly recalled her password and deactivated her account. Then she changed her password (it still mystifies me why the identity thief failed to do so), logged in again, and began deleting the offending tweets. There were so many that she finished deleting them only this very night. It’s the first time I’ve known anyone personally who had fallen victim to a hacker.
thank you Jenny
recycle
I don’t believe anybody’s recycling the plastic and cardboard we put in our recycling bin.
I still take the time to separate ‘recyclable’ material because it makes My Darling B feel better. And okay, I suppose that maybe, just maybe, there’s a tiny inkling of a chance that somebody somewhere might be grinding up a tiny percentage of the plastic bottles to make shopping bags or flip-flops. Maybe. But honestly I think they’re throwing 99 and 44/100ths of the recycling in the landfill.
That’s it. That’s my crazy conspiracy theory.
concur
faint hope
Pretty proud of myself for not going straight to social media this morning to read the bad news. Showered & made coffee first, then parked in front of my desktop to read my favorite web comics.
Then, took a deep breath. Held it. Let it out slowly and reached for the computer mouse. Opened Twitter and began to scroll, fully expecting to learn that Wisconsin was now Republican from the governor all the way down.
And was pleasantly surprised to learn that our Democratic governor won re-election. And so did the Democratic attorney general. And the Democratic representative to congress for this district. Well. What do you know about that?
Our Republican senator may have, unfortunately, won re-election (the count is 50/50 as I write these words, so his Democratic challenger hasn’t conceded). All those racist advertisements apparently paid off.
But otherwise, not a bad way to wake up on the day after the election, for a change.
lightening
Came home this evening to find that two houses on our street already have Christmas lights up in their windows. Just documenting it for future reference.
BAM
Heard a Christmas carol on the radio for the first time this season while driving to the bakery. Always a traumatic experience. Now I’ll have to deprogram at least half a dozen radio stations from the presets on the car radio. The van’s easier — I’ve got about 50 of my favorite CDs in there so I’ll probably just listen to those until the week before Christmas, which is when Christmas music is supposed to start AS EVERY SANE PERSON KNOWS.
not a newsie
T-Dawg came over last night to have dinner with us and play Spirit Island into the wee hours of the morning.
At one point he picked up his phone to look up an obscure rule or something like that. While he was searching through his feed for the answer to his question he stopped scrolling and said, “Wait, Elon Musk bought Twitter?”
“Yeah, that was a week ago,” I said. “You really don’t pay any attention at all to the news, do you?”
Although honestly I often wish I could ignore the news as thoroughly as he does, too.
This Is Drivel 