Before running out to see the new remake of The Omen tomorrow (which is supposed to be a pretty good remake, and looks it), be sure and vote tomorrow. Even in local elections held in November, the number of voters participating in local and regional elections is quite small, and turnout will likely be even lower tomorrow. The good news is that means your vote really does count.
Check out the voter’s guide in Tuesday’s Daily Press and vote. Vote for whomever you want, just vote informed.
For Hesperians who can’t remember where they voted in the last election, here’s a listing. (Warning: That’s a PDF file, which government agencies seem addicted to for no reason I can understand — we’ve had tables available in HTML for more than 10 years.)
Hesperia Star office manager Maria Bamba and I will be manning the Hesperia Star booth at the 3rd annual Hesperia Community Business Expo on Saturday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. (Editor Peter Day will be putting the paper to bed so it can be printed up late Saturday night, so it’s hard to say if he’ll be able to make it.)
The Expo isn’t at Sultana High School this year, and I’m not sure where it is yet. (I’m told somewhere on Hercules Street, which is still a little vague for my tastes.)
This year is the first that we won’t be sharing a booth with the Daily Press, so I don’t know if we’ll have free copies of Saturday’s paper to give out as we have in previous years, but we will have the last of the Hesperia Star magnets (which are really nice, honestly — whoever bought them a long time ago spared no expense), copies of the paper and information about subscribing or advertising in the paper.
Hope to see you there!
Here’s a funny outgrowth of this site — and proof that Mom was right about always behaving myself in public, even when no one appears to be watching — I had a reader call up today and ask about the URL of this site. Apparently, it gets discussed among certain circles of readers. I can only hope she wasn’t too disappointed to see me nattering on about my cell phone and what I thought of the DVD I saw over the weekend.
(At least one city councilman and my publisher have let me know they also have read the site at one point or another, which I think mostly suggests the High Desert needs more bloggers, because this blog surely isn’t the most interesting one around.)
To throw everyone a bone, I’ll put up some photos of the cats soon, as well as the video I shot of Peter to test out the new camera. Look for those exciting updates later this week.
And make sure to read Tuesday’s edition of the Star, as things are starting to heat up in the city election. After tonight’s school board meeting, it looks like the school board race is beginning to shape up as well. There’s some other curve balls coming that I don’t know about “on the record” yet, but I expect to break soon. It’s going to be an interesting political season here in Hesperia, almost to a fault. Given that the school board and city council can be totally transformed this year — three open seats on each mean the potential for a new controlling majority — it’ll be worth the headaches keeping up with things.
No one who knows me in a non-professional capacity is surprised to learn that the last time I went to the principal’s office was a week before I graduated from South Lakes High School. (I called my drama teacher a bitch and, frankly, she was getting off easily with that.) I was a “challenging student” for my educators over the years.
In contrast, when it comes up when talking to people I deal with in professional life — today it was the man who oversees the expulsion process for the Hesperia Unified School District — they find it strange. (Tom Loomis actually laughed and laughed and laughed at the idea.)
I either put on a very good face to the world in my professional life or Hesperians have a much better impression of journalists in general than I guessed (and better than might be deserved, given the checked pasts of so many journalists that I know).
So, my former paper, the Potomac News, ran a story about a local girl appearing in the Girls of MySpace pictorial in Playboy. And the mention that young Brittany Fuchs (who by day works at Hooters) took off her clothes and was photographed for money has apparently caused something of a stir.
Folks from outside the DC metro area may not realize that Northern Virginia is, essentially, the DC suburbs and Woodbridge, where Fuchs is from, is closer, as the crow flies, to DC than Hesperia is to Los Angeles. I’m not sure if we’d have stirred up similar controversy if we’d run a comparable article in the Hesperia Star.
Had the opportunity presented itself, I think it’s probable that we would have covered it in much the way that Potomac News reporter Josh Eiserike did (Josh did not work there at the same time that I was there): Asking why, what was it like, what do your family and friends think. He wasn’t saying “hooray for 21-year-old boobies” or “shame, shame on your 21-year-old boobies,” he just was reporting that sometimes, boobies happen.
There are those — including Hesperia Star readers — who think that us reporting on news is tantamount to us endorsing the views of those we mention in the paper or, at least, we’re somehow legitimizing their point of view. Let me assure the readers of every newspaper, no journalist is endorsing murder, rape or arson when they publish accounts of them in the newspaper (well, some editors might, but they’re a different breed as a rule). That’s obvious, I know, but that attitude extends to other news as well. Newsworthiness, when it’s considered from a journalist worth a damn, is independent of what the individual journalist wants to believe the world is like or what they’d like the world to be like. I’ve interviewed people I find personally reprehensible and morally repugnant over the years, and they’re probably not who you’d guess.
Newsworthiness is determined by what the public ought to know about as much as what they want to know about. Brittany Fuchs’ story may not be one that the good people of Culpepper, Virginia (a fine town, if I may say so) all want to know about, but knowing it makes them better informed about what’s going on in the world today, the values of others in their region and even if they disagree with Brittany’s decision, they gain insight as to why someone would take off their clothes for publication in a major mens’ magazine, something most of us will never do.
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