The Cistern Caper

Flirtatious: The act of wearing a Mini Skirt.

Real Mood: Kindly Cruel

My stepdaughter Rhonda and her husband Mark are here for the weekend.  They live in Livermore, California, on the edge of Silicon Valley. They live around Livermore Labs, which is sort of the civilian version of Nevada's AREA 19.

  "If I told ya what went on there I'd have to kill ya."

Have you ever noticed the phonetics of  the pronoun in that experession? It's always "ya" or "yuh," never just YOU. I'm wondering if its something they picked up from the Martians.

Anyway, Mark and Rhonda also live right next to one of the World's largest wind farms. Hate me, but I like it when life isn't pure. I like it when complexity turns a tyrant of any philosophy into a person of modest musing.  Wind farms are supposed be one of "Earth Mother's" solutions to environmentally saving the planet.

According to Mark (attribution students, always attribution, remember attribution, atttribution will save your ___) that wind farm is whacking about 5,000 or 20,000 birds a year in half before their "time."

A lesser known quality of the land where Mark and Rhonda reside is it's capacity for growing award winning grapes. Napa Valley gets all the glory, but many of those Napa wines, THEY say (lazy man's deep throat attribution), taste an awful lot like the Merlot and Shiraz harvest of Livermore.

As I'm want to do, I'm inching my way to the point. I'm not there yet. Up to this juncture I just want to establish that Mark and Rhonda live in a place where the rural and urban issues of the day blend.  While they live (hyperbole coming up) in a 2 million dollar two room condo, they still have plenty of open land around them. They see semis full of semi-conductors, and tractors in the same day. They see Lycra formed torsos on their Trek bikes speeding past hay wagons on side roads.  They are both well traveled,  before and after getting together. So I was not expecting any "ooh's" and "aah's" as I drove them out on the prairie. But none of us, at any time or age, has seen it all. In fact I took them out on the plains, because Mark (likely joking) told Rhonda he'd never seen a tornado.  He didn't just want to see a tornado, he'd like to see one hit a farm house. (could he have just seen that special someone just did on "The Wizard of Oz?")

We're getting closer now.  So we're out on the Plains, watching the cloud formations, babbling my amateurish weather monologue and Mark says, "Look! A windmill."

On further observation he adds, "looks like it's just pumping water into that cistern." Cistern is, I've discovered, the Livermoreese word for Horse Tank!  We're just about to the point.

Mark's windmill observence quickly reminded me of one of those TV reporting experiences that really need to be shared with the planet.  (we're into the point now.)

More than a decade ago now the station I worked for was looking for a way to increase viewership enroute to increasing it's revenue flow. So, as stations are always wanting to do, they went on a World Wide talent search.  They found their salvation in Canada. Now this is not an evaluation, rather a suspected and really openly stated perception.  The female (hired by a female by the way) was clearly recruited for, and known more for her physical attributes than her journalistic prowess. Let's say it, because in it's own way the station said it, "she had great legs."  We all knew that because this Anchor was taken from out behind the Anchor desk and presented to us standing erect in skirts that only came to mid thigh.

I can tell you, and mean it, that it's not fair to draw any conclusions from this. For one thing this Anchor defies the "Dumb Blonde" stereotype. She's a brunette. And I try to stay away from petty cheap shots at other people's journalistic skills when they can just fire right back. But I can't resist a great laugh.

We are in the newsroom, about a hundred of us, wondering how we're  going to cover this breaking crime story. We know somebody has been killed, we know a body has been discovered, we've heard over police scanners that it was in a particular county (a rural county), and here it comes, "Next to a Windmill."

 Bring in Inspector Clouseau. We must get to the bottom of this. Come on who needs Peter Sellers or Steve Martin when we have _______ from Canada. "Legs" pipes up with her powerful voice, "Well let's just go to the windmill? How many can there be? "

Some of us politely giggled on the spot, some of us looked for some biological reason to leave the room so we could guffaw uncontrollably, some us (me) got on the phone. I apologize to anyone who might have been waiting for an update on the crime, but my motivation was less than pure. I WAS trying to get information from my sources. But my goal was not to find the location of the body. My goal was to find out just how many windmills there were in that rural county. I was successful.  I didn't tell her, but I did share with many of my colleagues at the local watering hole that night, and I'll now tell you,  there were a whole slew of them.  

"Gotta tell YA, Mark, there are thousands of those cisterns out there."