And that’s the way it is
I was driving my Segway down Higuera when a jerk driver blabbing away into a cell phone suddenly backed out of an alley right in front of me. I couldn’t avoid the guy, so I plowed straight into the passenger-side door at 8 mph. My 12-year-old son in the Segway sidecar was pretty much unharmed, but I had to get 15 or 16 stitches on my lip, not because of the accident, but because the guy got out of the car and asked me if I was thinking of running for governor. I laughed so hard I fainted and smacked my face into one of those Trout About Town fish statues, except they’re not around anymore, so, uh, let me see, I’ll say that I smacked my face into that statue of the cat and the fiddle. That blobby statue of the cancer survivor doesn’t have any pointy edges, so that one with the cat is the only sculpture on Higuera that would work in this story.
Whatever happened, the cut on my lip swelled up, so now I look like an Elvis impersonator who got a collagen injection for a permanent sneer. Thank you very much.
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s not faring too much better, I hear, ever since he Evel Knieveled his motorcycling self into a car and had to get stitched on his lip. Nobody got charged or cited or anything, even though our very own governor didn’t have a license to operate a motorcycle. Turns out that the presence of a sidecar creates a loophole big enough to drive an Austrian bodybuilder through, so everything’s good, everything’s cool, nobody’s in trouble. Nothing to see here. Go about your business.
You ain’t nothin’ but a newshound
KCOY stopped the presses on Jan. 10 to announce that it finally found someone to replace former news director Mark Weiner. Weiner (pronounced either “whiner� or exactly as it looks, depending on who you talk to) had taken over after some guy named King Harris was abruptly and unceremoniously fired from the largest local news team on the Central Coast about two years ago. Weiner held fast at the helm and kept the ship from completely sinking in the treacherous waters of local broadcast news until the organization abruptly and unceremoniously didn’t renew his contract at the end of this past November.
Don’t say he was fired. He hates that. The bigwigs over at KCOY hate it, too. Plus, nobody will come right out and officially say why he left, so I guess it’s just a mystery, and the Hardy Boys are busy busting smugglers in Pirate’s Cove, so it may never be solved.
KCOY’s fresh-meat news director, John Zuchelli, is actually old meat, considering that he worked at the station in the late 1990s. His father, Ed Zuchelli, was one of KCOY’s original founders, but I wouldn’t call the new appointment nepotism, mainly because I don’t know exactly what that word means. Plus, KCOY seems to have been snatching up and then throwing away news directors like Kleenex — which is a gross simile that really only works if you know someone who only uses one tissue for every couple of years. I mean to say that it’s unlikely there’s any favoritism going on behind the cameras, considering as how the higher-ups have up and hired more than one guy who ultimately didn’t work out before landing John. It’s not like he was their first choice, as far as I know, but I hope he’ll be their last choice for a long while.
Of course, if John doesn’t work out, I’ll be writing another one of these columns in a couple of years, but I could be dead by then anyway, which would be a nice change of pace. Thank you very much.
The golden years
A Grover Beach nonagenarian friend of mine recently found her mailbox stuffed with 77 separate Medicare notices on the same day. The jokes for this one practically write themselves, so I’m not even going to try my own hand at humor. The jokes can take care of themselves for once. It’s not like they don’t owe me a favor or two, as well as last month’s rent. Bunch of slackers.
I will, however, point out that the post office recently upped its price for stamps, so someone at the sending end just blew a lot of money letting a 92-year-old lady know her billing summaries over and over again. To be fair, the statements have varying bits of information on them, so it’s not like someone just accidentally hit the number 7 twice on the copy machine and mailed off the results.
The weirdest part of this story, however, is that the letters are all from a private company that deals with Medicare, even though my friend canceled her Medicare coverage half a year ago.
It’s nice to know that someone out there is so concerned over the welfare of one of our area’s oldest residents, but the whole incident reeks of overkill to me. Plus, with a mailbox stuffed full of Medicare notices, how can she get other things like welfare checks and Publishers Clearinghouse Sweepstakes notifications? Viva Las Vegas. ?
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