Paging Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury once commented that "watching local news will make you stupid."

He may be right. (Then again, watching most news these days, I'm not so sure what it does to the little grey cells).

Yesterday afternoon, the CD sirens here rang a second time (after their normal test). I was concerned, because they seemed to be ringing very long (and given stuff going on in Ukraine and elsewhere, I could JUST imagine something very bad happening).

So I checked both the local news stations webpages. Once they loaded (after all the autorun ads and stupid graphic heavy widgets loaded), nothing. So, okay: try twitter. When I finally found the "follow us on twitter" address for the one that tends to have slightly more local (and slightly less stupid-celebrity-tricks) type news, I followed them.

The tweets I got overnight:

Michael Sam has been picked up by the Cowboys (yeah, already knew that, don't really care, the only question is "Is he a good enough player to help them out?")
Football season is coming! (you don't say!)
A couple of semi-local stories, mostly aimed at generating Parent Outrage! In at least one case, we may not be hearing all sides of the story....
News of a contest that is happening at a local football game
West Nile found in area (that is one that might actually be valuable to me, but I kind of assumed it already was)
Someone drowned in a  lake an hour distant from me (Sad, but....)
Because of recent drownings in N Texas lakes, they're now suggesting swimmers wear life vests to swim. (I don't know how I feel about this. On the one hand, I get that swimming in a natural body of water is not like swimming in a pool. On the other hand, ugh, I'd be less likely to want to swim if I had to wear a life vest in order to do it.)

and on, and on. Reminds me of why I stopped taking the local paper. Very little of actual import.

I don't know whether to keep following them, or if something really serious happened that I had to deal with if I'd have time to wade through all the non-stories. (Also all the stories were for the slightly larger North Texas cities, not us.) I may just have to hope that if the Zombie Hordes are heading toward my town, that the city will actually bother to put it up on their disaster-preparedness Facebook page. 


Sigh.

Last night was long. I got home around 9 pm (earlier than I predicted, but still). One good thing: someone in my group who had had a recurrence of cancer and had to go through treatment, and things looked pretty serious at one point, was back and was doing well. And the woman who broke her knee (? I think) and had to have a full replacement (it was a serious break) was back. Not so good: one of our older long-term members (who had been too unwell to attend last year) passed away just a couple days ago.

Also good: the whole tax-exempt issue is totally sorted and we have been restored to tax-exempt status. (Well, considering our "profit" in the past 5 years was a grand total of $77 - once you subtract the scholarships we give out and the other donations we make to places like the Crisis Center - so I think we qualify. Well, yeah, I know it's a paperwork thing and a nature-of-the-group thing, but still, it's a relief to have that sorted.)

The new uni president's wife came and actually joined. That made me happy; she seems like a really nice person and it's good to see the new "people in charge" being involved.