The Monday Fumble – Stuff We Know, And Things We Don’t

Our title today alludes to the resumption of football season and associated interest in all things football – which is America’s sport after all, isn’t it? Or is it?

We don’t watch much anymore and had to be informed that the San Franci… Santa Clara Forty Niners (we can’t keep up) had clawed their way back from a deficit against the Dallas Cowboys Sund… uh, Friday…. no, on Thursday and actually put up a win against America’s Team with a history of dominating America’s Game.

On-field controversies over standing, kneeling, fist-raising athletes continue to distract – once the job of the cheerleading squad and, as with just about everything else these days, politics seems to have entered America’s Sport.

Does everyone out there still watch? Or go to the games? We’re told viewership/attendance is down but the numbers seem to bounce around, as needed.

Speaking of getting bounced around, it is something we who attempt to ferret out information here at NEWS24/680 routinely encounter as we pester agencies and personnel in the course of our day. Now, we’re a small outfit but we can smell a news story with the best of them – what few of those are currently left out there, that is – and our NewsDar tends to go up when officials clam up.

Which they do, uh, do. A lot. Recently, we were notified of a large police presence in an Alamo neighborhood and interest in a car that had been crashed and/or abandoned there. As usually happens around here, we started getting emails and calls almost immediately – usually starting out with: “Uh, there’s a big cop with a big police dog in my backyard right now. Why?”

We’ll admit it would pique our interest, too, and it did – so we started asking around. Our eyebrows went up when no one would say why they were interested in the car or why so many police resources had been deployed in the search for whomever had abandoned the car and, presumably, fled into the neighborhood.

To shorten the story here – we never did learn what was happening out there that night. Until only recently, that is, when we discovered that officers were chasing a wanted felon from Vallejo, a person wanted in connection with at least two kidnappings and sexual assaults and someone considered “armed and dangerous” by police.

Now, call us crazy (so many people do), but we thought that information would have been useful to have known and been able to disseminate at the time. We asked why we – and, by extension, you all – were kept in the dark and we were met with a lot of averted gazes and shrugs.

We’ve been around the pony path a time or two but that made us go, “hmm, if they’re not telling us this stuff, what else are they not telling us about?” As we’ve always suspected, even in this age of 24-hour information there’s still a lot out there people don’t want us/you to know about. It bugs us.

We’re just wired that way, we guess, and it’s why we tend to object when stony-faced official-types ask us to leave – not just stay behind the flapping yellow crime scene tape – but to leave the area entirely. That’s like waving a red blanket in front of a bull.

And now, a New Monday is upon us and more stories are developing – in Richmond, and Pleasant Hill and Martinez and Walnut Creek – and there’s even more stuff for us to ferret out. And it’s time to get to it.

Keep in touch.

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