The NEWS24/680 Week In Review – Col. Jessup Edition

All in all a breathless week in the 24/680 with all sorts of news breaking, aspersions cast, dubious discoveries made and Halloween Hijinks thrown in for a little color.

We’ve named this screed for Jack Nicholson’s bellicose character in A Few Good Men and his famously ad-libbed “You can’t handle...” line because The Truth, apparently, is malleable and lives on a sliding scale.

We topped this week’s wrap-up with a pretty but scary (pretty scary?) photo of a firetruck deployed amongst our beloved redwoods after fire broke out and eventually leveled a home in Canyon, Ca. – a zealously protected community known mostly to its resident “Canyon Critters” and intrepid cyclists who venture in for a look at scenery more consistent with a few remaining coastal bastions than Contra Costa County.

Lucky enough to live nearby we got wind of this one early on as the smell of smoke wrinkled our oft-broken nose and the “Oh Oh, that’s a fire” alarm went off in our little heads. We fired up The Flash and soon after incoming messages and the increasing yeowl of sirens confirmed our worst fears.

“It’s bad,” a Flasher wrote before breaking off, others checking in for locations and evacuation advice. And it was. As sorry as we were to hear that locals had lost their home we were buoyed to know there were no injuries and the Fire People were able to keep the blaze away from other homes and, of course, those gorgeous redwoods.

Long-time “cord cutters” with no access to the local TV news scene, we’ll admit to a chuckle when a viewer sent us a clip of a reporter from one of the stations detailing her expedition into Canyon and her admission she hadn’t known that it was “so remote and dark.”

There was also quite a bit of pearl burnishing going on, apparently, when the TeeVee People advised us of the presence of – wait for it – coyotes in the 24/680, and we’ll just say that unless you’re from New York and have lived here less than a month you’re pretty much aware those critters roam these parts. Advice to take your pets in nights and not leave food out that might attract Mister Wile E. was also well considered if not exactly common sense, and a photo of a roamin’ Yote offered in support of the story was apparently taken in 2021.

If you guys need something more recent just let us know, we’ve gotta million of ’em.

Also mildly bemusing was the realization that the bevy of “news aggregators” which have sprung up in recent months and years have created some confusion among the readership – often confusingly packaging our stories as their own with readers angrily confronting us about missing stories – we broke.

These guys use software or a web application to scarf up digital content from blogs such as ours, apparently, and it’s turning up on local “community news” sites branded to companies we’ve never heard of – and that just ain’t right. There will be an accounting!

Granted, much of what we brought you this past week may have seemed difficult to believe – with a Concord man with an affinity for things that go bang tossing pipe bombs at pursuing police cars during a cross-bay chase that ended with a crunch in Martinez.

Seemingly nonplussed by the experience, which attracted world-wide attention, the primary actor in the story smiled when he asked emergency personnel loading him into an ambulance how his trip to the city and back scored on the Grand Theft Auto video game scoresheet.

We were thinking what would have happened if he’d dropped one of those babies in his car and it had gone off but, hey, priorities.

Our little mind tends to wander to such things – having seen the effects of an explosive device on humans in the enclosed space of a car – but thinking it’s best not to dwell on them as we’re not sure you’re ready for that very grim reality – hence today’s Jessup reference.

We struggled with the Handling Truth thing again this morning as a photo came to us depicting what we’ve come to call a “BioBombing” – essentially a person doing unmentionable things in or outside a local venue to gain attention or, presumably, just for shock value.

We won’t go into details as we know many of you are sitting down to lunch but let’s just say we feel very sorry for the employee arriving for work at a popular destination in downtown Walnut Creek this morning – you’ll find that someone has left a big surprise for you.

If you want to know who was responsible it wasn’t a bear, and we have photos to prove it – if you can handle The Truth.