Behind the Headlines

Check out some of the cool photos the Mars Orbiter took this week with its high-resolution camera.

Launch site here.

Scene: The Board of Commissioners special meeting tonight. Ended at about 7:20 p.m. Crowded board chambers. Many people exiting, standing around, etc. Jan Jay, citizen and man around the county, taking pictures of those at the board meeting, taking pictures specifically of CFO/Admin Charlie Londo.

Action: Jan Jay begins to target Charlie with his camera. Commissioner Jerry Oley gets in the way of the lens while Charlie is blocking his face from the camera. Jan Jay moves around, getting pictures from his other side. This angers Charlie. Jan Jay continues to snap away. And, according to several reports, Charlie steps forward and says something like “Get that damn camera out of my face or I’ll shove it…(blank blank blank).”
And scene.

The aftermath: In the hallway, as I was finishing an interview with someone else, Charlie comes out, with commissioner Henry Lievens and says to me, “yeah, I said it.” I didn’t know, at that point, what he was talking about. Then some others follow up and give me the scoop. Jan Jay is fuming mad and says he is going over to the city police to file a threat of sexual assault complaint. Preliminary reports relay that the case # filed with the city police is 8351-07.

The context: I’m sure that I can’t provide an adequate context since I wasn’t here for most of the conflict, but sometime in the past 10 years Charlie had filed a PPO against Jan Jay for what he perceived as threatening behavior. It goes on from there.

The feedback: What do you think of this? Does it matter that it was Jan Jay – meaning, if this happened to someone else, would you feel differently about it?

Leaving here late Saturday night, I went to get in my car. Innocently, I unlocked the door and stepped forward to get in when I spotted it. I froze. I was hoping that they wouldn’t make it inland – that they would just float around happily mating over the water, spending their 24 hours of life out there in the world instead of clinging to the safety of a screen or the hood of my car. But there it was – the first fishfly of the season.

I stared at the little googlie-eyed thing before growling at it. It stared back, dumb, unshaken, impenetrable in its silence and will to live. I spotted another one on a rear window as I went to roll it down. The fishfly, apparently not wanting to give up its post, clung to the moving window until it wedged into the rubber edging. The window made a horrible squeaking noise as the bug met its demise.

I can sometimes be anxious and something I’ve learned to do when anxiety is setting in is imagine the worst possible situation. It sounds counter-intuitive, but when you peg what that is, it’s usually not as bad as it seemed when unnamed. I mention this because bugs make me anxious. The worst thing I could think of with fishflies was two-fold. One, trapped in the hair and flapping around near the ear (this drives me crazy about bugs) and two, stepping on a green slicker of the bugs, I slip and fall into a mass pile of them and end up surrounded. Yuck.

I understand how good they are for the environment and how harmless they actually are, but it doesn’t mean I have to like them.