Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

What's up with Carmel these days? The city council has engaged in some very un-Carmelish behavior of late .   About this time last year the council began a six-month experiment with parking meters, devices long considered to be the ultimate insult to the dignity of the village. The council hoped to demonstrate that meters would solve a long-standing problem of too many cars and not enough parking spaces.   Parking “kiosks” (single meters designed to serve an entire block) were installed up and down Ocean Avenue to see what would happen. As I expected , locals avoided them by parking on every other street where parking was still free, while tourists, who didn't know any better, paid up. But city officials didn't interpret the results that way. They saw that Ocean Avenue parking spaces opened up more often and, based on that criteria alone, they declared the experiment a success. When almost nobody else agreed with that two-dimensional analysis, the city removed the m...

About three years ago I posted a “Pocket Guide to Local Water Politics” to help poor confused people like me sort out the crazy quilt of interlaced complexities of competing interests. A lot has changed since then, so I thought an updated guide would be in order. Unfortunately, things have become so insanely complex that I must increase the guide to briefcase size. Background: In the mid 1970s California experienced a severe drought. Here on the Monterey Peninsula residential water users were rationed to 50 gallons per person per day, a huge inconvenience in the days of 3 gallon per flush toilets and 5 gallon per minute shower heads. In 1978 the State Legislature created the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District, commonly known as the “Water Board,” to find and construct a new water supply so we would never have to go through that again. Nearly forty years and three droughts later almost nothing has been done. Despite the cries of “not me” echoing throughout the regio...

I thought I was going to quit doing the Monterey Herald Boo-Boo Watch. The paper's gaffes were becoming fairly infrequent compared to last year (but still excessive when compared to previous years), and I was getting tired of scanning every stupid mistake. But in the last month I've seen an increase in Boo-Boos once again. Still, I tried to overlook the caption that identified two people in a photo that showed only one, the incoherent sentences with missing words, another confusing photo caption, etc. But today I decided to crank up the Boo-Boo Watch when the Monterey Herald printed the weather map for the San Francisco Bay Area instead of Monterey Bay.  

Last night I was was watching KYMB, the local MeTV outlet, when I saw a commercial for the Monterey Herald. It started out saying that it was time to start reading the newspaper again, and to encourage you to subscribe they offered a free trial. Sort of. "Try for a free week" the announcer said, three times. Not "Try it free for a week," or "Try it for a week, free." Nope, you can call the number and try for a free week. You may get it, you may not, but you can certainly try! This isn't the first time the Herald has employed atrocious grammar to sell its own product. Early last October the Herald ran a print ad promoting a new advertising partnership with Google. In big letters it said "Are customers find YOU or your COMPETITOR?" It ran for almost a week and never was corrected.   The Herald has become its own worst enemy. After all, a newspaper depends on words to communicate the daily news. If they don't use them properly in thei...

Back in the early 1960s, when I was but a wee tyke, my mommy signed me up for a pre-school program at Bay School, the “Little Red Schoolhouse” tucked into the eucalyptus grove along Highway 1 just south of Carmel. This 19th Century one-room schoolhouse had been revitalized several years earlier by a colorful woman named Rosa Doner, who had a way of bringing joy, adventure, and just the right amount of discipline to what is now called early childhood education. Back then we called it nursery school. Parents were part of the program, and Rosa required every mother to participate in the operation one day a week. It was here I learned how to paint with brushes and fingers. I learned to play the triangle and tambourine. I observed that raccoons had human-like hands. I learned to chew the sour grass that grew alongside the playground. I saw first-hand where wool came from and that the school's sheep looked funny naked. And I found out that popcorn made me throw up and I refused to t...

I'll give the Herald credit for making fewer boo-boos compared to this time last year, but careless errors are still more frequent than when our local daily still had a local editor. On Monday, May 11th, the Herald had a front page story about efforts to stabilize the finances of Museum of Monterey . The article contained this bizarre statement attributed to a Pacific Grove filmmaker named Bob Pacelli: "Pacelli, who’s known about the museum struggles for decades, describes the museum as an incredible asset that never recovered from the ill-will that developed after the city built the tunnel to divert traffic to the aquarium." This statement is wrong in so many ways! For starters, the tunnel was built in 1967, at least a decade before the aquarium was even a concept, and about 17 years before the aquarium first opened. The aquarium is not the reason for the tunnel's existence. The tunnel also predates the Stanton Center, which houses the museum, by a good quarter ...

Although I am generally supportive of California American Water's effort to build a desalination plant to solve the Monterey Peninsula's water problems, I have less faith in Cal-Am's public relations department. They just don't seem to grasp the basic realities of modern household plumbing and water use.   About two and a half years ago I challenged Cal-Am's excuses for sudden unexplained spikes in some people's water bills. Cal-Am argued that they were caused by “silent” toilet leaks, which is baloney because toilet valves made in the last 30 years or so are designed to make noise when there are even small leaks.   Sometime between then and now Cal-Am ran ads about fixing shower leaks. They had a photo of an attractive lady taking a pipe wrench to a shower head, which was oh so very wrong! Shower leaks, like all faucet leaks, occur at the valves – the handles where you turn the water on – not where the water comes out. Pipe wrenches don't work on f...

There was a lunar eclipse very early this morning. Today's Herald says it's not going to happen until tonight. In fact, the eclipse was near totality right about the time the paper was landing on subscribers' front porches. Click image to enlarge I think I know how Herald staff got confused. The article states the eclipse would be seen on Saturday night in Australia, which every 5th grader knows is a day ahead of us in the time zone order. Herald editor, time to say "My name is Don Miller, I am the editor of two Monterey Bay area newspapers, but I am not smarter than a 5th grader." What a difference a day makes.

Late Thursday night I was listening (somewhat involuntarily) to the John Batchelor Show on KGO radio. Batchelor is an uncommon well-mannered right-wing talk show host who spends a lot of time bashing president Obama and liberals in a soft-spoken, intellectual fashion rather than by shouting insults. That night he was complaining that the New York Times and the “liberal” media in general have been using the word “conservative” to describe the hard-line leaders of China and Iran. He argued that the word “conservative” has a very specific meaning in America as a political ideology favoring limited government, low taxes, and that sort of thing - the very opposite of what the heads of China and Iran represent. He then stretched his “logic” to conclude that because liberals (in his mind) associate “conservatives” with “enemies” they now use the two words interchangeably as if there is no distinction, hence their use of the word “conservative” to describe unscrupulous lead...

Last Thursday, March 19 th , shortly before 10:00 PM, I was channel surfing and stopped for a few minutes to watch the live broadcast of the Seaside city council meeting. I came in at the end of a presentation about the library, and after a minute or so they invited public comments. I probably would have moved on to better entertainment, but the first person to speak happened to be someone I knew, so I stuck around. As she was speaking someone in the council chambers began moaning very loudly. The woman stopped speaking, turned around and said “We need an EMT.” The video cut to a wide shot of the dais where I saw councilman Dennis Alexander's chair turned around and his right arm was moving erratically. Men in police or fire uniforms were rushing to his aid as councilman Jason Campbell jumped out of their way. The mayor called a recess and the screen went dark. It was such a disturbing scene that I was shaking for the next ten minutes.   I tuned into the 11:00 news to ...

Monterey Downs, the controversial horse race track, hotel, and other assorted components proposed for an undisturbed portion of Fort Ord land, was a hot item at last Thursday's Seaside council meeting. I did not attend in person, but I did watch much of it on TV. The question of the day was whether the city should extend an exclusive negotiation agreement with the developer, Brian Boudreau, for another year or give up on it now. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn't a major turning point or an earth shattering decision, but it drew an enormous crowd anyway. After two and a half hours of public testimony with a majority opposing the project, the council voted 4-1 to approve the extension. No surprise there. With the exception of Jason Campbell, Seaside city council members have been known to drool excitedly over the prospect of any new development in Seaside, and something on this scale is beyond anything dreamed of before Boudreau came along. In short, t...