It’s harvest time, folks. My favorite.
Back when gas was 20 cents a gallon, like many children of farming families, I was regularly shipped “down home” at the end of the summer to provide free labor to my kin on their Rocky Ford and Manzanola farms.
The reward for serious sunburn and destroyed hands was a day at the Arkansas Valley Fair — and keeping the best of the best in the fields of melons, tomatoes and apple orchards for myself.
There really is nothing like a sun-ripened Rocky Ford cantaloupe or watermelon. And when you get to cull and pick the top treat among hundreds? That is so August.
Similarly, it’s been a bumper crop this week of sweet and weird news nuggets, just ripe for the picking.
Here’s my recent harvest:
No matter how long I do this job, I still love me a hot mic story.
Remember the time President Ronald Reagan kidded into a hot mic that the US was done with Russia’s bullcrap, and how that nation would no longer be a problem because, “I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”
Ooops. Russians saw no humor in it.
Another plum was when the Rev. Jesse Jackson, on a hot mic, told someone on a Fox News set that he wanted to “cut the nuts off” of then-Senator Barack Obama for “talking down to black people.”
So President Donald Trump had his hot-mic moment this week thinking he was talking unheard to French President Emmanuel Macron about the critical and consequential Ukraine war.
Trump, reflecting his comments after meeting in Alaska with Russian President Vladimir Putin, told Macron, “I think he wants to make a deal for me, you understand, as crazy as it sounds,” the Associated Press reported.
Crazy?
No doubt this would sound crazy if it were anyone but Trump. Who else would be so transparent and easily taken in by someone like Putin, other than Trump? And who else would be so banal that he would share his embarrassment with another world leader, thinking somehow it puts him in a good light?
The disappointing part of a Trump hot mic bite is how it’s all the same stuff he says when he knows the cameras are rolling.
Much juicier this week was the news that an Aurora police car crashed into yet another Aurora police car during a half-hour-long car chase across three cities.
One of the cop cars was apparently stolen and driven away Tuesday morning, prompting other cops to jump in their cars and track down the purloined patrol car.
The ripe part of the story is that the thief was able to get in the police car and drive away, because the cop using it left it running. Apparently, cops sometimes, or often, leave their cars running. The cop had stepped out with the car keys in his pants pocket, police told reporters.
The cop probably figured, like I would, “who in the hell would have the nerve and lack of sensibility to steal a cop car — from a cop?”
Police say it was 31-year-old Brayan Reyes-Bernal.
It gets better. Aurora police told reporters that they have a security device that is supposed to stop the car if someone tries to drive away with it without their car keys, but it wasn’t armed or wasn’t working.
During winter, police call this “puffing.” That’s when people leave their cars running unattended in the cold, which are easy targets for thieves.
I guess no one, including cops, has to sweat it in the heat.
It must have been the heat that made someone think the name they came up with for a long-overdue and badly needed affordable housing project in Aurora wasn’t, umm, odd.
The news last week was that Aurora received $3.5 million from the Colorado Proposition 123 Concessionary Debt Fund to support the creation of an 85-unit affordable housing development in the city.
It’s part of a statewide effort to create places just working folks can get into and afford once they move in. The idea is that these projects need to get people in homes that are “close to jobs, schools, and in the communities we love,” Gov. Jared Polis said about the Aurora award.
What do you call an affordable housing project that seeks to give hope and dignity to new Aurora neighbors in the Expo Park neighborhood?
“The Stables.”
Ummm, like the people who live there will have “stable” lives? Or, they’ll save so much money they can have pet horses for fun? Or, affordable now means you get a dirt floor with straw and four walls made of old wooden pallets? Or, the working class is pretty much just cattle anyway?
It doesn’t matter what entendre you stick this story with, the project needs a new name.
But the sweetest treat this harvest season came from Colorado Public Radio reporter Bente Birkland, who ferreted out the story about the Colorado House GOP Minority Whip Ryan Armagost taking a picture of Democratic Rep. Yara Zokaie at the House lectern during a bill hearing earlier this spring. Zokaie was wearing “a black blazer over a short dress and knee-high leather boots,” Birkland writes. Armagost posted the photo to a private chat among other GOP state lawmakers, and it became a dog-pile of rude and crude comments about Zokaie’s appearance, according to the investigation, complete with snaps of the posts.
The post made its way to the real-world social media-verse and it was downhill from there for more rude and even threatening comments.
If you’re new to these parts, or forgetful, the state Capitol has been the nexus for sexual harassment problems involving lawmakers for years, essentially helping invent the #MeToo movement.
To help expose, address and prevent the sexist and sexual thuggery under the gold dome, state lawmakers created the House Workplace Harassment Committee. That’s “the group tasked with investigating and recommending punishments when lawmakers and others in the Capitol are accused of inappropriate behavior,” Birkland writes in her takeout.
You knew this was coming. Armagost is chairperson of that committee. Was.
He’s since left the Capitol, and Colorado, for a new job and life in Arizona.
That’s a keeper.
Follow @EditorDavePerry on BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook or reach him at 303-750-7555 or dperry@SentinelColorado.com
Here’s a “keeper” for you Mr. Perry. Newspaper editor writes a commentary about a stolen car situation in Aurora and makes it seem like the APD are the criminals not the criminal, himself.
Mr. Perry stick to the melon stories and get off of the APD’s back, please.
On another topic, David, do you think that any of us with more than half of their brain cells left believe anything that the AP writes about the Donald. And you report on the AP reports, so often.