The RUNDOWN

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

President George W. Bush speaks to the Republican Convention—as opposed to at the convention—for a whole eight minutes . . . one for each of his destructive years in office. And speaking of surviving suicide, a couple of rock climbers are recovering from a near-death adventure in Idyllwild, while trying to scale Suicide Rock. One fell about 100 feet and suffered significant head trauma while the other was smashed, face first, into the side of the cliff and will require reconstructive surgery. They were saved by fellow climbers and authorities, whose rescue attempt was made even more difficult by the sudden arrival of a huge storm, which blasted them with marble-sized hail and pounding rain. “Accidents, when they happen, everything goes bad,” says the father of one of the climbers—as we’ve seen the last two election days. 

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 3

Just call her The Bitch to Nowhere.

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4

The Ontario-Montclair School Board votes 3-1 to investigate the behavior of colleague Paul Vincent Avila . . . and Avila doesn’t like it. He calls president Doreen McDaniel and board member Bob Hardy “garbage,” calls Hardy “a prick,” says member Debra Dorst-Porada a “bag of lies” and “an evil person who should not be trusted,” and describes the teachers association as a “cancer” and a “plague.” When association president Rick McClure challenges him, Avila says, “This is my time to speak. Little guy. Little brain. Little brain. Little mouth. Stop.” The board’s vote for the investigation stems from a series of incidents involving Avila, the most recent in June at an awards ceremony at Serrano Middle School, where he allegedly raised his voice at the principal and vice principal when his name was not on the event program.

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5

In a real-life “Amen!” to Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s vigorous endorsement of the Second Amendment—that’s the one she believes gives just about any nutjob the right to own just about any kind of gun—a patron who’d been 86ed from a Mira Loma bar comes back and opens fire with a shotgun. Eleven people are injured, including a security guard, while Palin remains free to go around shooting off her mouth. 

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 6

After watching the home-mortgage crisis meltdown the real estate market, I think we all agree that anybody who aspires to achieve a part of the American Dream—the part in which you get to own your own home—is an irresponsible opportunist and a deadly threat to the health of the national economy. Unless they’re already rich, of course. But now poor renters are also bringing us down. By choosing bad landlords—that is, people who turned out not to be able to afford the properties they bought and rented out through the Section 8 program, and are now in foreclosure—these renters are now losing the roofs over their heads. “I never missed a rent payment,” says Ruth Cordoba. “Then I hear someone outside one morning, and I go outside and see a sign on my door that says they’re auctioning the house.” Bastards! I mean, weren’t they supposed to have vacated by now?

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 7

A story in the Inland Empire section of the Los Angeles Times reports that a tuberculosis patient in Needles has been forced into medical isolation at Arrowhead Regional Medical Center in Colton because he refuses to take medication and continued to go to work. It sends a chill up my spine. As the day goes on I develop a fever, then a cough. I begin to feel fatigued and start losing weight. I go to bed but awake with night sweats and can’t get back to sleep. I’m going to be exhausted at work tomorrow.

MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 8

The collapse of the real estate market has its humorous upsides, too. Like the family of bobcats that have made their lair in a spacious Spanish-style home in the well-groomed Tuscany Hills subdivision of Lake Elsinore. Everybody is getting a kick out of the cute little quintet of kitty-cats, who came out of the nearby bone-dry foothills and meandered into a once-upscale area that has been hit hard by foreclosures. They settled on the house on Vista Palermo Street because they really like the koi pond in the back yard. Once everybody realized that bobcats don’t attack humans—they’re nothing at all like the people who work for mortgage companies—the ooohing and aahhhing was on. Even the cops were out snapping photos of the two adults and three kittens. “They are great neighbors,” said Scott Brown, who still lives in on Vista Palermo, “and as long as they don’t want to babysit my kids, it’s not a problem.” Ha-ha-ha, that’s funny. Bet whoever used to live in the bobcats’ house until about six months ago—when they were evicted—really appreciates the chance to laugh.