Globex Corporation Newsletter

I woke up yesterday to the aftermath of nine inches of heavy snow. I took a little drive yesterday to see how many trees were felled by the wet clinging snow. There were quite a few down in my neighborhood, though the trees behind my apartement where the deer hang out seemed to do OK. I don't know if the hillside prevented them from taking all of the snowfall, or just exactly what the reason was.

But I live in Rapid City, South Dakota. Nine inches of snow on the ground yesterday morning, almost none today. That's right folks, a snowstom one day, and right now it's 52 degrees. The snow is almost completely gone except for shaded areas. The weather here never ceases to amaze me. I could go into the meteorlogical "whys," but that would be boring. Living on the leeward side of a mountain range is always interesting, weather-wise, and the fact that the Black Hills only stretch about 150 miles north to south makes are interesting weather patterns here even more localized. You don't have to travel too far east of here to run into country that is practically a desert, yet, in normal years, we have plenty of moisture in our little corner of the world. Even though nine inches of snow one day only to have it gone the next isn't particularly rare here, it still amazes me every time I see it happen.

I'm helping a friend take broken branches out of her yard in a little while. I just helped her take a bunch of branches out of her yard a few weeks ago, those came down on purpose. I don't know how much was left to fall into her yard, but I'm always glad to help out.

We had a real live media circus here with the Base Realighnment And Closure recomendations relased this morning. Brac (not the guy from the old Space Ghost cartoon) recomended closing Ellsworth AFB which is just a little east of here. Rapid City has spent a lot of money trying to save Ellsworth, as an issue, it was used to defeat the sitting minority leader in the Senate. You knew it was going to turn into a media circus, and there's nothing I like beeter than watching a media circus. When live events like this happen, I always flip channels and see what all the stations are doing. At 8:30 there was the announcement by the Under-Secretary of Defense (not important enough for Rumsfeld?) which was carried by all of the local stations (except KOTA, I guess Regis & Kelly gets them HUGE ratings) plus CNN and MSNBC, Fox News carried some of it but dumped out pretty quickly. When they opened the floor to questions, the local stations all broke away to a press event at the base where the base commander would make an announcement. That is except for KOTA who were still running Regis & Kelly. There was a little time before the base commander arrived, so the stations had their reporters blather on about stuff they really don't know much about. Now that's entertainment! There were also some really stupid comments by Jon Wilson of KELO. I used to work with Jon Wilson, and he's every bit as stupid as he sounds. How does someone that unintelligent (and unable to show up for work on time when I worked with him) continue to have a job?

When the base commander finally arrived he went straight to the podium and started speaking. KOTA had just finished up Regis & Kelly and were starting The View. Hey, nobody wants to miss The View, economic impact to the region be damned! Watching the commander's speech on one of the other channels I saw a hand appear at the bottom of the frame with a microphone in it. The microphone was then layed on the podium during the speech. The microphone's markings identified it as belonging to KOTA. I switched over to KOTA quickly, and sure enough, they finally broke into The View with a special report.

So did this event catch KOTA off-guard, is it that simple? Did they not know that the Brac report was being released today? Did they not know that the base commander would be speaking after the announcement, one way or the other? I'm not in the media, and I knew it. It was all anybody was talking about around here, how could they miss it? KOTA carried less than ten minutes of the speech then went back to The View. This wouldn't bother me so much except that they chose not to carry the entire speech because they didn't want viewers to miss Regis & Kelly and The View. Is their news judgement really that bad?

Well, all I know for sure is that Jon Wilson is an idiot. I hope the rest of the folks out there picked up on it.....

BOJ