How things can go wrong

I happened to notice another AP story posted after deadlines this evening, telling us that the peregrines are gone and the climbing area -- singular -- "on the cliff face of Granite Mountain and Thumb Butte" will reopen. I wonder who supplied the story to AP ....

Birds cause more than 1,100 APS customers to lose power

Wow, the Courier follows its usual practice of printing the official press release, and the commenters are suddenly out for blood! Who knew that an errant fowl might touch such a hot button, so to speak? Are you getting this, editors? People want you to ask the basic questions, even about the small stuff.

Monday, Monday

Eight minutes on paper clips, elephants, white dwarfs and neutron stars.

Editorial: Humane Society should get job

The City wants to privatize one of its services. The unnamed Courier editor seems all for it, the only question is which nonprofit gets the contract.

Speaking as someone who has run a nonprofit that operates a service for the City, I notice something important missing from all the coverage.

This says the City will pay about $50K, but there's no mention of how that will change in the future. Is it a year-to-year contract? Is there an inflation or population component? And very important, how much is the City currently spending? My guess is that it's a lot more, and the City is following its usual practice of dumping responsibilities and providing less money that it really takes to support the service.

I'd also be inclined to ask someone inside the Humane Society whether the City threatened to cut off all service and dump Prescott pets in Phoenix or some such, putting pressure on the nonprofits to take over or see a lot of animals killed.

In any case my bet is that the HS will be needing a lot more community support to deal with its new responsibilities. $50K looks awfully small for this. I hope they understand what they're getting into.

Election: Kuykendall

About the same as yesterday's, although this photo is kind of scary.

News to come: Basha's closing

The AP story detailing the closure of ten more Basha's stores, including the one at Frontier Village, posted a little before 7am. Let's see how long it takes the Courier to get a story up on it.

11am: Nothing so far. Here's the story as carried on the CNBC site.