Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

For the past several years readers of the Monterey Herald have been subjected to a barrage of guest commentaries relating to our local water crisis. Some have come from the Monterey Peninsula Water Management District , affectionately known as “the water board” while others have been written by representatives from Cal-Am , the water company. These have typically been fluff pieces, saying little more than “we're making progress” except they use 600 words instead of three. But the vast majority of these commentaries have originated with a small cluster of citizens groups telling us the water board and/or Cal-Am are doing everything wrong. The desalination plant Cal-Am is planning to build is a rip-off, they say, frequently adding the opinion that only a public water company will ever give us a good deal. They trot out a mind-numbing array of facts and figures, which most of us average citizens struggle to decipher, to show that a better, faster, cheaper project can be ha...

Boo-boos in the Herald's print edition seem to be dwindling somewhat, but they're now appearing on the paper's website with some regularity. I first noticed this a few weeks ago when an individual posted a comment on the Herald's website saying he posted a comment under one article that showed up under an unrelated article. A day or two later the same thing happened to me. Then a few days ago, I clicked a link to an article and was taken to the wrong article. Back-button, try again, same result. And sometime last week Tom Karwin's weekly gardening column showed up on the Opinion web page. A mere fluke, perhaps? Nope, Barbara Quinn's nutrition column, which normally runs in Wednesday's food section, showed up on Monday's Opinion web page, with Jim Tunney's weekly sports column right below it. It's been bad enough that Digital First Media has made so many careless errors in the print edition, but now it appears they can't even get th...

I had hoped we'd get through the holidays without any more boo-boos, but the Herald gave us one for Christmas. The paper printed the same article twice, once on page 1 and again on page 3. The headlines were different, and the one which began on page 1 and finished on page 5 had three more paragraphs than the one on page 3, but the main text was otherwise identical.  

I spent almost a dozen years in the movie theater business. About half of them were in Carmel, but I got my start working in two large downtown theaters in Salem, Oregon. I started out in 1978 selling popcorn, and a year later advanced to assistant manager, and later, manager. My boss was a great fellow named Jerry Proctor. His friends called him Jerry, but everyone who worked for him knew him as Mr. Proctor. He was very businesslike, but easy to get a long with, and he loved to tell stories. One of his favorite stories involved a very bad movie. When he had managed a drive-in theater in Eugene a new coming attraction trailer hit the screen. He couldn't remember the title, but he said it was so offensive he had the projectionist remove it from the film immediately. Too late. A woman in the audience came in and told him in no uncertain terms that she would do everything in her power to keep that movie from ever being shown in Eugene. She made good on her threat. ...

Monday's Herald had just one small boo-boo. The opening paragraph of a front page article was printed in two different fonts.

This week, Carmel-By-The-Sea is starting a six-month experiment with paid parking. Ten "kiosks," which are essentially fancy parking meters designed to serve an entire block, have been installed along Ocean Avenue to test the viability of implementing paid parking throughout the business district. Carmel has flirted with this idea several times in the recent years, but this is the first time they've hopped into bed with it. The theory justifying paid parking, as I understand it, goes something like this. There are not enough parking spaces downtown to meet demand. Making matters worse, it is believed that downtown employees are parking in on-street spaces, even though they're limited to two hours, taking parking away from customers. It is alleged that employees keep moving their cars to avoid getting tickets. Charging for parking, it is said, will discourage employees from parking on downtown streets and encourage them to park in the free parking spots and lots ...

Honestly, is Herald management even aware that their guy covering Carmel doesn't know the territory? It has become painfully obvious that reporter Tom Leyde has never spent any significant time learning about the town, beyond what he's spoon-fed at city council meetings. I have documented numerous careless errors on his part, most recently in my November 7th Mental Note . Today, in an article about the town's experiment with parking meters Leyde magically relocated the north Sunset Center parking lot from the corner of Mission and 8th to "Junipero Street between Third and Fifth avenues." That is more or less the location of the Vista Lobos parking lot (on 3rd between Junipero and Torres) which he didn't place anywhere. At least he finally figured out that Carmel's numbered streets are "avenues" and not "streets." ________________ Elsewhere in today's Herald the weekly "Bits 'N' Bytes" column was publi...