True but strange

A few days ago, I read in the Los Angeles Times that some people calling the L.A County Registrar of Voters had been getting a recorded message saying that the deadline for registering to vote in ext month’s election has passed, even though the deadline is October 22, this coming Monday. It turns out that the phone system can handle 24 callers at a time and that the overflow callers had been getting the post-October 22 message. This message was reportedly removed the previous afternoon.


The Times said it is unclear how many people had gotten the wrong message, and who knows how many of these people read this small article inside the second section of the paper - why wasn’t it above the fold on the paper’s front page? - or got the news somewhere else. At least one can reasonably assume that this was just a technological snafu and not another attempt at voter suppression. (I got my permanent absentee ballot last week, but it seemed awfully late, and I had called a few days earlier and was assured it was on the way.)

This may well have been just a freaky error, but it is hard not to think that it fall in line with other strange goings-on. Unfortunately, such doings as those below are nothing new and, unlike with the phone message mistake, stem from an extreme ideology or belief. (I thought I had one or two other example but seem to have misplaced them. Perhaps readers can suggest others - the more specific and detailed the better.)

*The mayor of Costa Mesa in Southern California, according to a report in the L.A Times a few weeks ago, requested an investigation of some of the city’s most prominent and long-running charities in an effort to get the homeless out of town. Mayor Eric Bever targeted two organizations, Share Our Selves and Someone Cares Soup Kitchen, comparing them to nightclubs that have become neighborhood nuisances and said the that it would go a long way to solving the problem of homeless people coming to Costa Mesa “if we managed to put the soup kitchen out of business.” The mayor will be termed out of office next month, and the director of Share Our Selves, in addition to noting that the mayor has never visited the center and that “(h)is message is old,” said, “Thank God he is going out the door.”

*According to the L.A Times last week, Georgia Republican Rep. Paul Broun, running unopposed for re-election next month, said late last month that evolution, embryology and the Big Bang Theory are “lies straight from the pit of Hell.” He also stated that the earth is 9,000. What’s even weirder and more disturbing, if not anything new, is that this man not only is a physician, he also sits on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee. So this is our government’s idea of science. Yikes!