“Did The Shepherd Make It?” “Lady Of The Light,” “Bip Me, Baby”

Quite the week with positions on the Oddities Bingo Card filling up quickly. And that’s just the stuff that made it into print.

Because as you may suspect there’s a lot going on behind the scenes of our Little Local News Shop – much of it just not ready or suitable for prime time.

Back in the Days of Yore, when we labored at things called Newspapers, there was usually someone, a self-appointed desk editor or someone with a keen sense of humor, who collected the stranger stuff, i.e. odd headlines, crime tales, collisions of urban happenstance, and collated it for eventual staff dispersal. At one such shoppe an editor dubbed his Collection of the Unprintable – The Bondage Files – more a collection of the bizarre than anything sexual.

There was The Porcupine Man of Battery Street and the story of Anton LaVey’s lion, The Condor Club’s Killer Piano and the after-hours antics of the semi-rich and/or famous. Never official, the files were nevertheless widely read.

With a mindful eye on our past we draw on the tradition of the Bondage Files to regale you with a few timely, local tales which bounced around our newsroom this week.

First out of the gate was “Did The Shepherd Make It?” the most often-asked enquiry (yes, we know we went with the British usage there, don’t write…) of the week. It related to a failure in coverage, we guess, during a flurry of recent accidents on Highway 24, this one alongside the freeway near Central Lafayette.

Several people seemed to have spotted the crash while we were involved elsewhere, our critter-lovin’ readers concerned about the well-being of a German Shepherd seen near the crash site (one reader going hands on and trying to corral the pup) before it was either hit or was otherwise overcome by the effects of the crash – a good-hearted CHP officer observed on his knees administering mouth to muzzle resuscitation.

Well, our readers are critter lovers – we’re critter lovers – and we spent a bunch of time trying to find out what happened to the animal without success. If you know, let us know, and we’ll let everyone else know.

Also of interest to us this week was a tale we’ve dubbed “Lady Of The Light,” in which a local homeowner minding their own business one night was stunned when a flashlight-wielding female burglary suspect dressed all in black smashed through the home’s rear slider and briefly entered the residence before she was scared off. This one set off alarms – in our heads, not in the house – as we’ve been following the antics of a local burglary crew and this seemed to fit their MO. If you know about this or any other of the local burglaries we understand went down this week, let us know.

Also this week, betwixt the Sriracha Sauce Spraying Roommates and folks attempting to CSI the origin of their Front Lawn Cat Scat we were inundated by Social Media headlines where God-Fearing ‘Mericans blasted each other, use of the term “Bipping,” their local pizza parlor, and any random person who struck them as “odd.”

During a week where we saw a startling number of our fellow citizens parroting the rantings of none other than OBL we would like to seize this opportunity to say: Smarten the Hell Up. C’mon. Investigate what you’re reading and make informed decisions before re-posting a terrorist’s hate speech as gospel you can get behind.

Somewhere, some state-sponsored propagandists are rubbing their hands together and saying “oh goody” over that one. We thought, perhaps, the country had learned its lesson about this stuff but apparently not.

Let us know about the Shepherd.