City Takes Action Against Alleged "Candidates"

Trigger warning: Satire Ahead

Santa Clara City Hall filed complaints with the FPPC this week about residents who have pulled papers to run for City Council.

"We did our due diligence in this matter," said the City Manager.

"We hired Dewey Cheatum and Howe, the California arm of the Internet Research Agency, to investigate credible allegations of electoral ambition on the part of these individuals. DC&H found clear evidence that at least two known troublemakers were planning campaigns."

"This was never intended by our charter," explained the City Clerk. 

"The charter provides for elections when they are necessary — for example, if Council Members disagree with our great mayor. Elections were never intended to allow random people to run for Council."

The FPPC has yet to respond, although an official there, speaking on the condition of anonymity, commented that it was just another example of what the official called, "Santa Clara Looney Tunes."

"They are constantly sending us specious complaints. Right now the paper is useful in the face of the toilet paper shortage."

The City Clerk also said that the City is investigating the false narratives published by local news outlets.

"The First Amendment was never intended to allow newspapers to promote so-called 'elections,'" the Clerk said. "It's just another example of how Hillary Clinton and her space alien army living under Levi's Stadium are trying to take over Santa Clara."

The City was also investigating whether it could publish city legal notices in the Weekly World News, the Clerk said, until it was discovered the supermarket tabloid had gone out of business in 2007. "We were interested because of their fair and balanced Batboy coverage." 

City  Announces Progress on Day-Lengthening Initiative

At last night's Santa Clara City Council meeting, the City Manager announced that the City has made substantial progress in the City Council's goal of lengthening daylight hours.

"We can confidently say that the day is longer today than it was in December," said the City Manager. "We have done our due diligence and monitored KPIs and can state that we have definitely been able to add three hours of daylight. We're optimistic that we will be adding another two hours by mid-June."

The City Manager thanked City staff for their hard work in meeting the Council's goal. "I can say that staff put in a lot of late hours working on this. I also want to thank our consultant Magick Results for their outstanding work in achieving these stretch goals."

The City Council also passed a $500,000 contract amendment for MR to work on the Council's Rain Making initiative.

Welcome Literary Yuletide

Christmas is a time for many of our favorite stories. And when you say "Christmas story," the next thought for readers is Charles Dickens' (1812 – 1870) Christmas Carol.

Dickens was very much the "man who invented Christmas" as we know it today with his story of Scrooge and the three ghosts. So as you re-read that favorite, complement it with Les Standiford's, The Man Who Invented Christmas: How Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol Rescued His Career and Revived Our Holiday Spirits.

It isn't only Christmas Carol that cements Dickens' place in the canon of Christmas. He wrote many stories and essays about Christmas. One essay in particular, What Christmas is As We Grow Older, captures just what it is that Christmas — and all the world's holidays celebrating the mystery of light out of darkness — make eternally present:

"Welcome, old aspirations, glittering creatures of an ardent fancy, to your shelter underneath the holly! We know you, and have not outlived you yet. Welcome, old projects and old loves, however fleeting, to your nooks among the steadier lights that burn around us. Welcome, all that was ever real to our hearts; and for the earnestness that made you real, thanks to Heaven!"

Over the years I've discovered other tributes to the holiday of "all that was ever real to our hearts." Here are some I recommend to lovers of holiday sentiment.

One of the loveliest Christmas tales I've found is Zona Gale's (1874 - 1938) Christmas: A Story. A native of Wisconsin, Gale was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Miss Lulu Bett in 1921. Gale's writing is graceful and touching without being flowery or maudlin.

"Christmas: A Story" takes place in Old Trail Town where the shutdown of its only employer causes residents to cancel Christmas. But Christmas comes all the same, in the form of a child who comes to Mary Chavah, who has learned from hard experience not to expect much from life, and who, in making a home for her motherless nephew, brings Christmas to the whole town.

Another Christmas story of the American prairie is Cyrus Townsend Brady's (1861 – 1920) novella A Christmas When The West Was Young. The bittersweet story is about a heartsick couple struggling to make it through the prairie winter. Like Gale's story, the harshness of prairie life is a character in the story, and like Gale's story, a child brings Christmas when they least expect it.

Anthony Trollope's (1815 -1882) novella Christmas at Thompson Hall is a plum pudding of a Victorian Christmas tale, with an element of farce, but all ends well even if — horrors! — that includes a married lady finding herself in a strange man's hotel bedroom. It's published in a collection with seven other charming Christmas stories by Trollope.

Mystery, too, finds a home at Christmas, and Louisa May Alcott's (1832 – 1888) story The Abbot's Ghost or Maurice Traherne's Temptation by puts a pleasant shiver in the holiday.

As Little Women's devoted fans know, Jo March (Alcott's alter ego) wrote romantic plays and sensation stories, which Alcott wrote in real life. The Abbot's Ghost is an example of the Victorian sensation story crafted by a master of narrative and dialog.

As a final bonbon for the season, treat yourself to Robert Benchley's (1869 – 1945) parody of Charles Dickens, titled Christmas Afternoon and which begins:

"What an afternoon! There never was such an afternoon since the world began…In the first place there was the ennui, and such ennui as it was! A heavy, overpowering ennui…a dragging devitalizing ennui which carried with it a retinue of yawns, snarls and thinly veiled insults, and which ended in ruptures in the clan spirit serious enough to last throughout the glad new year."

Benchley's piece is in his collection "Of All Things" and in Dwight McDonald's "Parodies: An Anthology from Chaucer to Beerbohm — and After."

"Parodies" also includes H.L. Mencken's Declaration of Independence in American, and Ring Lardner's theater of the absurd parody, I Gaspiri (The Upholsterers). Give it to yourself as a gift this Christmas.

Many of these works are available for free at Gutenberg.org, and at very low cost on Kindle and Nook. Many are available as free audio books at Librivox.org.

And of course, they can always be found at a public library near you.

Carolyn Schuk (c) 2019

Proceedings of the Heavenly Planning Commission — Hearing on concept for the Garden of Eden development project

Artist rendering of
"Garden of Eden"
development concept

Attending: Archangel Michael, Planning Commission Chair; Commissioners Archangels Gabriel, Lucifer, Uriel and Raphael; representatives of builder, Heavenly Enterprises; members of the angelic public.

Overview: A proposal for 197 million square miles of parkland with newly created life forms. 75 percent of the site will be covered by water. Agenda report: www.heaven.gov/heavenbase/view.aspx?cloud.

The project is self-sufficient, where "plants" convert sunlight and "molecules" of "carbon dioxide" and "water" into "nutrients" and release "oxygen" as part of the chemical reaction.

"Animals" eat the plants to get the nutrients, releasing carbon dioxide as a byproduct of the "combustion" of the nutrients for "metabolism." "Weather" is a complex process whereby water forms vapor clouds that release "rain" on the park to return water to the "ecosystem."

The Garden will feature many different environments ("climates") that each will feature their own distinctive plant and animal life. Since the life forms will be native, after the first planting, they will be self-reproducing and maintaining and require little or no active gardening.

Resident Angel Eyeore:  I don't know about all that water. How are you going to guarantee that there won't be any flooding?

Resident Angel Oscar the Grouch: I have lived in this heaven for 45 years. It used to be a nice place, where everybody knew everybody else. Now you're proposing to make all these "humans" who can reproduce, according to the EIR, every couple of years. That's going to mean high rise apartment buildings, which will ruin our community, and there will be crime and red cup parties and cruising in cars—

Chair A. Michael: Thank you for your comments. There are no such things as cars. Next.

Resident Angel T. Frothingill Bellows: When are you archangels going to stop acting like you're so high and mighty and better than the rest of us? This is another one of those backroom deals where you guys think you can take our heaven and give it to the big moneybags gods over on Mount Olympus so they can turn it into their own little playground.

Resident Angel Debbie Downer: I have a very serious lung condition, and all the flowers and pollen — not to mention the methane gas that these "animals" will put into the air as a result of this thing called "digestion" — will be very detrimental to my health. When we moved to Heaven from Mt. Olympus ten years ago, we thought it would be a place where we could have a healthy life without Zeus' noise and smoke pollution. Now you're taking about building a giant garden that will make the air toxic. When are you going to listen to the people instead of just the big gods —

Chair A. Michael: Thank you. Your two minutes are up.

Olympus Resident Angel Rufus T. Firefly: I have nothing against gardens. Even though I live on Mount Olympus, everyone here knows that I have done more for gardens in the tri-heaven area than anyone. But this is the wrong garden in the wrong place. Heaven needs to bring in some real experts in earth-making to re-imagine the visioning of the conceptualization of this creation-making in the multiverse geospatial zone. And Archangel Lucifer, you’re doing an awesome job.

A. Lucifer, preening: You too, Rufie.

A. Bellows: You're hearing overwhelmingly the citizens DO NOT WANT a garden. For once put your money where your mouth is and represent the citizens of heaven instead of the big gods. This doesn't fit. Stop putting things where they don't fit. A lot of these animals are butt-ugly. Put them in your own backyard. Go put it on Mount Olympus or Valhalla. For once can't you hypocrites represent the citizens of heaven? Stop representing the big gods.

Chair A. Michael: Angel Bellows, this is my first warning. You've already had your chance to talk.

A. Bellows refuses to stand down: This is a free heaven. The first amendment says I can say anything I want. So screw you, Mike."

Chair A. Michael: There is no first amendment and won't be for another 4,789 years. And there is no second warning.

A pillar of fire appears and consumes A. Bellows. The Garden project is approved in a unanimous motion, with an amendment from A. Lucifer requiring deed covenants that garden residents cannot convert their tree canopies into extra bedrooms.

When Life Gives You Orchid Buds, Count Your Blessings

By Carolyn Schuk

Our cymbidium orchid usually starts blooming around Easter, as the days get perceptibly longer. Its last blooms fade in mid-June, on the longest days of the year. This year it has five flower spikes. The last time it was so abundant was 1991, the year my son was born.

Since the millennium, the cymbidium's offerings have been slim. It's as if the plant knows whether the year to come will be fruitful or not.

For example, 1991 was a rollercoaster year. When I was seven months pregnant, the retail chain my husband worked for declared bankruptcy and the future looked to be an unemployment line.

Portents of irreversible decline were unmistakable at the software company I worked for. That the management gave my office to someone else while I was on maternity leave didn't help my anxiety level.

So there we were – a baby on the way and what had seemed like economic security evaporating like a freak Silicon Valley snowfall.

When Will was born, things didn't look up. We were now pathetically inexperienced parents with a colicky baby. I remember watching the sun come up one morning after a sleepless night and thinking, My life, as I know it, is over. One friend says that the first months with your first child are, quite simply, the worst of your life.

But as the orchid buds began to open, things, likewise, began opening up.

My husband landed a job with Whole Earth Access helping to open the store – now gone, alas – on Stevens Creek Blvd. Now, while some people – like me – have panic attacks just thinking about a project like this, my husband likes nothing better than being in charge of a big, complicated project.

At only five weeks Will began sleeping through the night – an extraordinary 11 hours from 8:00 at night to 7:00 in the morning. Soon after, I discovered that as long as we went somewhere — especially at night — he was a perfectly happy baby. He was like the old disco song, "I love the night life."

Then my former employer asked me to come back to work as a contractor, managing the company's newsletters. My mother came out from Pennsylvania to help. It was the perfect fit.

With my mother to babysit, I could get out of the house a few days a week, wear real clothes, and talk to grownups. But I could also remain a mostly stay-at-home mom. A few years later, that contract job was the genesis of a freelance copywriting business. That copywriting business evolved into writing for the Santa Clara Weekly, the best job I have had in my life.

By the end of 1991, Bill had a job he loved, Will was delighted with his two new friends in daycare, and I ended the year making more money – and getting more sleep – than I had working full-time.

Twenty-eight years later the orchid bounty still lifts my heart and I still count my blessings – one in particular. 

It was Will's birthday this week, and he can now add "Mueller Day" to the other auspicious event that happened on April 18: Paul Revere's famous ride. A ride that set a new experiment in governance in motion and an investigation that, hopefully, will put it back on the course its founders intended.

Will has grown into a fine man, with the patient persistence to reach any goal he sets for himself, an affectionate husband and (to date) a fond "parent" to his dog and cat. He has a good and generous heart, slow to anger or even annoyance — even with his parents.

And so as the Easter buds open, I'm going to count a new blessing with every one. Happy Easter.