Sunday Snippets

How’s this 2019 thing working out for you so far?

It has been a little off-beat for us, lately, both literally and figuratively as folks far and wide have asked us – very nicely – to come cover their respective hometowns. We like that so many seem to get, and appreciate, our rather quirky approach to gathering the news in our area and would like us to bring it to them.

For now, we’re concentrating on our Corridor – The 24/680 – and trying to wrap in new readers/neighbors where we can. Appreciate your interest.

A week of stories we chalked up as caused by the unusual planetary alignments and all these space vehicles landing on uncharted planets and such is gathering steam. We’re working a story (difficult on a weekend) about a Lamorinda youth sports coach being arrested for seeking sex with a minor and we know some parents who are really stewing about that news. And who can blame them? We’re working on it and if we can “bring it in” on a Sunday we will, we’re asking the questions.

We’ve also had a few houses catch fire, police fanning out in their search for bad guys in Walnut Creek and Martinez, and nervous neighbors pinging us asking: “what are all those sirens about?” or “why is there a big policeman standing in my backyard with a rifle?”

We should interject that those questions are welcome here at NEWS24/680, not only because they tip us to developing news stories in our area, but because we’re often able to maintain valuable – sometimes very humorous – contact with the affected resident.

And we should also say that it may behoove a prospective tipster to make sure they’re actually seeing what they think they’re seeing as sailing past an incident in the jalopy and calling it in can lead to problems. On the other hand we’ve gotten some very good descriptions of breaking news situations with folks calmly describing the chaos in real-time lately.

We’ve been sending out several of our highly-valued ball caps as a “thank you” to volunteer tipsters and they have taken on a life of their own, ranging far and wide with their owners – including Cabo San Lucas, apparently, where one was spotted atop a vacationing reader by another vacationing reader – which led to conversation between the two, which we like.

Between the news cycles we’ve been experimenting with various recipes, trying new things and strapping in for the roller coaster ride that the stock market has become. We like to think of ourselves as calm and collected but some of these swings are wilder than Grab-a-Partner Night at the Jitterbug Club. Round and round we go, where will we stop? No one seems to know.

And if the news and the markets aren’t enough there’s always the Health Care game, something we and some Scandinavian countries seem to take seriously, but which has become something of a shell game in our country. We won’t bore you with the details but we recently changed providers and that simple act touched off an avalanche of spam phone contacts from fast-talking insurance firms/brokers – one of whom was seriously affronted when we compared his patter to Leonardo DiCaprio’s phone pitch in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” We logged 34… that’s THIRTY FOUR calls from these folks in one 24-hour-long period.

Who says our system is broken?

Okay, we’re going to drop you here… tips are starting to come in and we need to hook up with some folks. Grateful to you all for reading us, calling us, and maybe even wearing those hats we send out from time to time.

Stay in touch.