Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

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...