It is so strange.
Sometimes I feel like I am making assignments for the reporters at the Big Paper.
Like the Gazette has a story on the brand new 20-plus million dollar Clearwater library, which has only 25 parking spaces, turning down funds and preferring to keep its computers open to all perverts who might wander by and desire to check out an internet sex site.
A week or two later, you read it in the BP.
Or the fact that Largo told Indian Rocks Beach that the idea of providing police services to the beach-side city just wouldn't work out.
You read it in the Gazette a couple of weeks ago.
The BP came up with it on November 4.
It's called "catch-up" in the business. If you are the one who has to do the catching up, you don't do it the next day. You let a couple of weeks go by -- the delay will freshen it; that is, maybe readers have forgotten.
This gives all of us a big, hearty laugh watching the BP fall all over itself while the small but brilliant and coruscating Gazette tap dances around the Big Paper, leading it to greater glory.
Unlike most daily newspapers that print the next day the happenings of a government meeting the night before, the BP strings out that news over several days because the local section it goes in is very thin on news (lack of reportorial enterprise) and the filler is needed. Oh, well.
Or for some reason a reporter can't get a story together for next-day publication. As happened last week. In the old days when daily papers had competition, that didn't happen.
Speaking of the library and its difficult situations these days, the august city manager of Clearwater sees "no issue" in the flap over not putting filters on library computers.
That is not to say that he favors perverts getting their fill on taxpayer paid for computers. But you wonder about judgment.
When the fact that the library had only 25 parking spaces available, the aforementioned city manager, Bill Horne, A.B., M.LL., LLD., DHL, KBE, etc., said he didn't take that kind of stuff "seriously." Oh?
Let's see now, if you don't take something seriously, you regard it as a joke, nicht Wahr?
So if you go to the Clearwater Library and you happen to be in the vehicle that is the 26th to arrive there at any given moment, you are going to have to park elsewhere. Do you think it is a joke? Do you take it seriously?
Hey, isn't this all a matter of judgment?
It raises questions, don't you think? In Dr. Horne's judgment, no parking spaces at the library equals no problem. No filters on public paid for computers at the library equals no issue, no problem. It's the Alfred E. Neuman approach -- "What, me worry?" It would be really funny if it were not so pathetic.
Of course, exercising judgment might be considered a prime requirement of an individual running a city of some 100,000 or so souls. Wouldn't you think?
Wouldn't you think that when something like the filters/no filters issue (of course it is an issue, it has proponents and opponents, that is what defines an issue) comes up some thought would be given to it. Other local libraries have the filters. Why?
Wouldn't you think that a $20 million project that forgets parking for its users would raise some concern? Wouldn't you think that the man running the city would take that seriously?
Judgment.
Again, how much leeway should be given to a high ranking city employee who has skirted danger zones several times? The situation is compounded when the individual exercises bad judgment and then poor judgment is exercised again when that behavior is condoned.
Where does the buck stop in Clearwater?