What a Confusing Saturday

Friday was not a good day, because the temporary fixes to my wife's  laptop came to a screeching halt. The virus protector fixed what it could but some file sectors were corrupted. I've been married for 46 years,so I knew better thanto ask her what she did before she saw those errors because that would open the all too familiar Pandora's box. The computer was eight years old,so if I wanted to watch some football this weekend,I knew I had to get busy.

Women have a knack for finding and remembering sales and my wife is no exception.She noticed that Office Depot had all their Windows computers on sale. She must of known how frustrating I was getting,so she knew that I would be open to a fast solution. 

Off we went to Office Depot and sure enough,they had a HP all-in-one computer on sale.I knew it came with Windows 8 but that shouldn't make a difference;so I thought.

We did the usual comparison shopping(Sam's,Best Buy, and both Office Depots) butmy eye caught the Mac Pro sale sign at Best Buy. Little did I know that by purchasing the Mac laptop,that I would be setting up myself for a perfect storm of frustration.

Figuring setting up a Windows  computer would be a snap,I took the Mac out of the box and began learning the new  functions of this foreign operating system. The keys are well spaced and back lit(night use) but I'm going to have find out what th"control,option, and some funny doohickeys are used for. I spent about 30 minutes looking for the shut down key  because it's not on task bar like it is on Windows. I now have it where I can comfortable navigate without much trouble.

It was time to set up my wife's computer.

I'm not one for instruction manuals.I mean, I've owned computers for 30 years,so who needs it? Wrong!After several attempts of trying to get used to closing the many windows I had open and looking for applications I had downloaded,I decided to look

on line for help.  Now I get it,go the right top hand corner of the monitor and all the menus you need will prop right up. I set up Google Crome  and set up a few of her favorites,taught her how its done,so now I'm free to watch football.

In the meantime I'm getting behind on the latest news but I'll get started in the morning.I don't know what I will start with. Will it be the city council "illegal meetings"  article Melissa Crowe wrote about in today's Sunday paper? I 'm pretty certain our country will be shutdown midnight Monday and all the details leading to that decision needs to be looked at. We pretty much took the good news of our latest foreign policy events off the front page.

Would We Miss Our Local Newspaper?

I was shocked when I heard that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos had purchased the Washington Post. I did not know that the newspaper had suffered seven years of consecutive profit losses. The newspaper spent an awful lot of money providing secondhand news. The era of big time newspapers is going digital in order to survive. There’s not a good plan to make people buy online content.

Newspaper circulation has been down since the seventies, as more people are getting their news from television. Some online services are providing news, but they don’t have any reporters, so they will follow the path of the print editions because that’s where they get their stories. The Huffington Post and Politico do have full time reporters, so they serve as models of where we will get our news. People on Twitter and Facebook will also play a prominent role in leading us to a good source for the news of the day.

I still subscribed to the Victoria Advocate, but it’s more out of habit than anything else. The Advocate provides a lot of its content online for free. The digital version is great, and it provides a lot  handy features. I don’t spend a lot of time reading the local newspaper, but I don’t fault our paper because I probably wouldn’t be reading the Houston Chronicle all that much either.

My older friends still subscribe to the Victoria Advocate but my children don’t. We have to provide all the death notices and other local tidbits to them if they happened to miss it on the free online version. Of course there’re busy and don’t rely as much on “breaking use” as an old retiree with nothing better to do.

I can remember sharing an Advocate at work, but we would have to wait for certain sections and then trade off. That’s no longer necessary with the digital version, and you can copy and paste an article or email it to yourself for future reference. The digital version will certainly save some trees, and reduce the carbon footprint, but it would also disappoint those who rely on the printed version. I can see the local newspaper staying afloat a bit longer than the larger city papers because of the local appeal people can’t get anywhere else.

I hear a lot of loving the feel of a newspaper or a good book and I can relate to that, but I think that’s more of a feeling of simpler times that we don’t want to let go of.

Some experts are saying that newspapers will be extinct in 10 years, but most think that’ll be sooner than that. It’ll go the way of the land line, phone books, address books, and photo albums. My doctor doesn’t need to give me an appointment card anymore because as soon as they tell me the date and time of my next appointment, I input that information into my cell phone. I sort of got the hint of what’s happening locally when I called to complain because I had  not received  my morning newspaper. The person on the other line didn’t seem too upset nor did they try to be accommodating saying that because of gasoline prices, they could only credit my account because it would be cost prohibitive to send someone out with another paper. They did encourage me to get a digital version, which I already had.

I don’t know, but it’s my opinion that alternative news is giving a platform for a lot of racist comments. I’m an old guy who grew up in a pre- civil rights era, but I’ve never seen so much racial hatred as there is today. Not the lynching but the rhetoric is there. Perhaps that’s a topic for a Saturday rant.

Every One is Out of Step but Willy

I agree with Don Jay Andres’s first and last sentences of his recent letter to the editor, but the body of the letter shows a total lack of understanding of the issue, in my opinion.

Yes, people need to stop nitpicking the race issue to death and facing the offender in person might be best. There are exceptions to the latter because the media and government are great equalizers, when the offended cannot not get satisfaction using normal channels..

Mr. Andres stopped making great points when he injected what he considered racism. It was a classic “don’t be crying racism…racists.” He went on to name the same-old things that he considered racist, like a separate beauty pageant and organizations as if a separate but equal things are not part of our normal day. In the House of Representatives ,we have a Tea Party, Hispanic and Black caucuses who break down the issues to suit their constituents. This has always been the case but those groups I mentioned have put a label on it.

You can get started on the reasons the voter results had to be translated into a Spanish document without it being racists. In other states, documents are translated into Vietnamese, Chinese or to the satisfaction of other groups who have been discriminated against in the past.   Texas election law has required bilingual election materials and bilingual clerks since 1975 because of their past efforts to suppress minority voters. They continue to be one of the five states who need permission from the Federal government to draw redistricting maps and other measures. The Supreme Court will rule on voting rights issues, perhaps as early as this week. I don’t think SCOTUS will satisfy everyone with their decision.

Mr. Andres called out the individuals who initially yelled “racism” but didn’t call out the editorial board  when they raised the same question? The letter writer expressed his views on what he thought to be racism (which I thought was nitpicking), and then he went public with his letter instead of confronting the people who offended him. It’s another one of those “everyone’s out of step but Willy” statements.

It was Just supposed to be a routine election

I’ve been noticing that it’s hard to find good people to run for national office anymore because it takes a lot of money, and the likelihood of getting anything done is darn near impossible. I don’t know whether it starts at the local level or vice versa.

Our mayor ran for reelection and then withdrew after coming in second in the voting which called for a runoff. Right away, the mayor’s opponents smelled a conspiracy, and they posted their feeling on our online forum and on local Facebook pages. I certainly don’t know the reason for Mayor’s Armstrong’s withdrawal, but if I was the incumbent, after serving three terms as mayor and I was getting along in age. I would give withdrawal a serious thought after coming in second place. It’s all about that “fire in the belly.”

I’m not a lawyer, election official or one who’s the least bit interested in local politics but I do like a “whodunit story.”

In what should have been a routine canvassing of the votes and the swearing-in of the new mayor turned in an illegal vote for a forced runoff. It was withdrawn after the third-place candidate refused to participate.

It must’ve looked like a coordinated effort by David Hagen, Emmett Alvarez Josephine Soliz and Joe Truman to the Victoria Advocate because they admonished them for their illegal action in an editorial. However, that was not enough for the newspaper because they thought that the public should know more, causing them to file two open records requests. They asked for the city-owned iPads, emails, other devices and phone records of all council members from May 13 to midnight May 14 to be turned over.

I’m not sure of the official status of compliance of each council member, but I believe three members are not completely complying. This prompted the Victoria Advocate to file a letter of complaint with the Victoria County, criminal district attorney against the city council and a duplicate complaint with the Texas attorney general. That’s enough for any reasonable person to take these charges seriously.
I can’t imagine what’s going through the minds of those going through the investigation and how it’s affecting their family life and business. If the four are exonerated, then I think the paper should put the same amount of effort in printing that portion of the story.

I know that most people think that “pleading the fifth” or taking your time to explore all of your options before turning in a personal correspondence is an act of guilt, but nothing could be further from the truth. I wouldn’t turn over my personal emails or phone calls unless my attorney could get the assurances that it was an absolute must and that the scope of the search would be limited to the details of the investigation. Then there are the moments of arrogance we might experience from time to time. For example, I’m an old dude who doesn’t have the energy to pull off a robbery, so if I was pulled over and asked to pop open my trunk, I just might tell the officer(s) “sure, after I see your warrant.”

From what I’ve seen, some people are using this situation to exploit their agenda. I’ve seen the talk of racism come to the surface and that same old “I pay your salary, so I own you” mentality. Others have conceded that the four might be guilty, so they want to bring up past “open meeting” violations that have been ignored as some sort of restitution. Then there are those who think that the Victoria Advocate is being selective in their outrage. That’s why I think that we need a quick resolution before the insane take over the asylum.

There’s no doubt that the media and politicians are at an all- time low in popularity but that’s why we need to stick to facts and do less assuming. Newspapers (freedom of the press) are known as the fourth estate because it’s supposed to bring about the transparency we want from government. Politicians are our elected representatives who give us our voice in government. This incident can start to restore our faith in those entities (at the local level) if we let the facts take us to the eventual outcome.

A Trip back to Yesteryear

I had a lot of fun looking through the Victoria Advocate archives yesterday. I immediately noticed that the newspaper 25 years ago was only 35¢ for its 64 pages but advertisements were in abundance. It wasn’t unusual to be reading one column on page A3 and finish it on page A12 because the rest of A3 was filled with a huge Dillard’s ad.

The big local issue of March, 25, 1988 was a discussion on giving teachers a 6% raise. Of course that was nixed, so the sentiment hasn’t changed in 25 years. I was surprised that nationally, there was a report out against standardized tests for kindergartners. Why did we start testing them in the first place and are we doing that now? Hey, I was in my early forties and raising two teenagers; so I probably didn’t know this was happening.

Nationally, President Reagan was still answering questions about the Iran-Contra scandal. Even back then they were setting up a deficit panel. On the business front, DuPont discounted making CFS (Freon) because it was depleting the ozone layer. The Dow Jones average was a mere 2,026 points and trying to recover from the S&L crisis.

This particular day, Henry Wolff wrote about his latest visit to Matagorda Island and described it only as he could.

Remember the old “Hocus Focus” where cartoon characters would be involved in some activities on two different panels? The object of the game would be to pick out the differences between the two panels. For example, one character might be using his left hand to pound a nail into a board and in the other panel; the character would be using his right hand. I remember it becoming a race between my workmates to find the differences.

The ads were interesting, and it’s a good thing they were because they were everywhere. In this particular edition, Kmart had their plants on sale; a full steak meal at the Sirloin Stockade was only $5.49 and Jerry Lentz had a 25% off on all their sporting goods. Twenty five years ago, Montags  had their round steak on sale for $1.99 a pound, but I would have opted for their tenderized fajitas at the same price.

The entertainment section of the paper was also interesting. Hungry Jacks had their 80¢ draft beer the Armadillo band was playing at Schroeder, but they all had to compete with the local night clubs like Cody’s,Dallas,Peppers,and the Cowgirl Club. We had three movies theaters, Cinema IV, the Playhouse, and Salem Six where you could watch a movie for four bucks.

I used to have my head buried in the sports section in those days starting with the cartoon Tank McNamara and finishing with Julius Ermis’s outdoor section.In between the Cowboys and Astros were in their hey day,so there was a lot of material to read.

Whatever happened to the Town Crier section where you could catch up on the gossip and what was the L.M. Boyd section about?