A well-read article

It’s always impossible to know what sort of story will get the most reaction from readers.

In my first month at the Hesperia Star, I wrote a story about a gay church in conservative Hesperia. To this day, not a peep from the readers.

Later, I did a story about a man whose roosters were seized on suspicion that he was raising them for cockfighting. The pro-cockfighting folks from around the country filled my e-mail and voicemail inboxes with outraged responses.

And now, a story about how the Hesperia Unified School District is using early intervention to catch students before they get categorized as learning disabled due to their academic performance and thus having one of the lowest percentages of special education students in the state has had my e-mail inbox swelling to the bursting point again.

This time, though, it’s with positive e-mails, with educators from as far away as Scotland wanting to know more. They saw a link to the story in a weekly news round-up e-mail from the Council for Exceptional Children.

You never can tell.

Charter Communications wises up

Well, we were paying for broadcast stations only on cable (getting the signals up here in the High Desert without cable is an extremely iffy proposition), but we’d been getting TBS and FX for free. (Along with MTV2, but TiVo can’t find it automatically, and has to be manually sent to it whenever we want to watch it.)

This weekend, Charter Communications finally figured out that FX had slipped through its net, and yanked it from the line-up. Good-bye, The Shield, Rescue Me and Thief.

It’s not really worth paying the whatever more a month for more channels — I don’t need to pay to not watch women’s shuffleboard on ESPN-5 or whatever — but it’s still a little annoying.

More to put on the Netflix queue, I suppose.