Another of the great ones is gone. Dr. John Bryan died unexpectedly in his sleep on Easter morning. He was 68.
In his younger years, John ran the Boston Marathon, surfed, and biked, gardened, and maintained and drove a racecar at Madera Speedway.
He was also a devout churchman and a community servant through the Kiwanis and the Elks, the VFW and American Legion.
He was a wonderful citizen and will be profoundly missed.
• • •
If the weather forecasters are right, we’ll be getting rain this weekend, and a lot of us won’t complain. We are still short of rain, and every drop will be welcome.
Which reminds me for the thousandth time of how much we need the added storage capacity that Temperance Flat dam would provide.
The state water geniuses don’t seem to agree with that, but one wonders what the heck they’re drinking.
As the state’s population grows, the ability to capture excess rainwater becomes ever more vital.
That isn’t just an assertion — it’s a fact.
You can’t grow food without water, and you can’t have metropolises without water.
Let’s see — what’s California made up of? Oh, yes. Mostly farms and metropolises. And forests, which collect the water in the winter and provide runoff in the spring and summer.
Without the dams we have now, only about a third of the people who live here could be here. We would look like Iraq.
• • •
A lot of people thought that when the marijuana business became legal, we’d all be rolling in dough. Well, that isn’t the case.
Most of the marijuana trade is still controlled by crime organizations, because they are selling it under the table to avoid taxes that the legitimate dealers have to pay, then pass along to their customers.
Wasn’t that already happening?
It would appear at this point that California’s hopes for a marijuana windfall was more of a pipe dream than anything else.
• • •
It turns out that teachers in Israeli schools take guns to work, and that is fine with them. And with the students, too, apparently. The murder rate in Israel is much lower than even Los Angeles. The students do well, too. Apparently nobody ever tries to shoot up an Israeli school, and you can’t blame them.