1. Terrorist attack

2. Gasoline prices

3. Dropped cellphone calls

4.  Being last in line–any line

5.  The Other

I found a Gallup poll from almost a year ago that asked, “How often do you, yourself, worry about the following things –frequently, occasionally, rarely, or never?”  The top five worries:

1.  Identity theft

2.  Having car stolen or broken into

3.  Home burglarized when you are not there

4.  Being a victim of terrorism

5.  Home burglarized when you are there

Delaware:

This guy does a decent job at describing some unsavory Delaware history.  And this.

District of Columbia:

I’m for D.C. statehood so I’m including it in my series.  Plus, it’s the nation’s capital!  Impossible to pass on D.C.  Just too delectable.  Check this:

Jayrece Turnbull will be spending the next nine years behind bars, for the crime of spending about $24 million of ill-gotten funds from the District’s Office of Tax and Revenue. Turnbull is the niece of Harriette Walters, who created the scheme about 20 years ago. Walters is in jail where she waits sentencing.

Turnbull and Walters might still be stocking up on beach houses, Gucci heels, and Louis Vuitton handbags if Jayrece hadn’t gotten all huffy with a bank manager. In the summer of 2007, Turnbull deposited a $410,000 check that came from the scam, in which tax collectors forged names of companies then wrote refund checks to them. When the manager raised questions about the check, Turnbull threatened him and said he was breaking the law. The manager called the law, and the scam began to unravel.

Follow the link above, they even had a technology huckster scandal.

And then there’s simple bribery:

Building inspector slaps a stop-work order on a project (who’s owner is an FBI agent) and seeks a $20,000 bribe to lift it. The FBI agent records the calls and they begin an investigation on the inspector (complete with sworn affidavits and secret wire taps), but his corrupt colleagues still won’t lift the stop-work order. This is costing him $700 a day.

And we all know former D.C. Mayor Marion Berry carried the scandal/corruption banner for a while.  I like his Wikipedia page–note the “Legal problems” category.

The Los Angeles Times announced that it will publicize the ranked names of 6,000 Los Angeles public school teachers alongside their students’ test scores. According to the Times’ reporters Jason Felch and Jason Song, the project was done in the name of in the name of transparency. Felch and Song say that they evaluated data that the Los Angeles Unified School District keeps but does not use. But many disagree over the move to put these numbers in the paper.

Jack Shafer @ Slate:

[Union leader A.J.] Duffy … grouched that the Times was “leading people in a dangerous direction, making it seem like you can judge the quality of a teacher by … a test.” [Ellipsis in the original.] Gee, Mr. Duffy, aren’t students judged by test results?

NYT:

“We have yet to identify the common threads between teachers who create a constructive learning atmosphere,” said Daniel T. Willingham, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and author of the book “Why Don’t Students Like School?”

(Apologies to the Chester Himes estate)

Besides being outright dysfunctional, California has been home to one of the more outlandish political corruption scandals in recent years, Duke Cunningham’s bribery scandal.  Lots of great pics here!  Funny Colbert video here!

Colorado:

Colorado seems not-so-bad and maybe even exemplary in terms of political corruption.  Still, scandals can be found.  It probably helps that “judges are nominated on a merit system, rather than through pure political appointment or by running campaigns for office.”

Connecticut:

Pretty cool, add a few letters, move around a few, and Connecticut becomes Corrupticut:

There was the mayor who liked to be plied with $100-plus bottles of Bordeaux. The governor who took a free hot tub. The state senator who was given a job that paid $30,000 for doing nothing — and then demanded a raise.

Alabama:

With ads like this, this, and this, Alabama is the hands-down winner of this cycle’s state-with-the-most-enjoyable-political-stories award.

bonus:

As an aside, just when you thought bingo could not get any crazier, two days after the Senate sent Bedford’s bingo constitutional amendment to the House, the U.S. Justice Department confirmed to the Gadsden Times that the FBI and the DOJ were investigating legislative bingo voting.

Alaska:

Alaska, a state seemingly still in puberty, always has been known for its colorful characters and political upheavals.

One former governor — there have been only eight — was nearly impeached and another claimed he was guided by an invisible “little man” on his shoulder. In the 1980s, two of the state’s most powerful lobbyists were sent to prison on extortion and racketeering charges. A state lawmaker was busted for illegal possession of machine guns.

Here’s more.  There’s always more!

Arizona:

I could point to recent controversies about Arizona’s “Where’s your papers?” immigration law (interesting fact: Did you know the Mexican-American border is one of the safest places in America?) or its law against ethnic studies, but the Arizona legislature’s plan to sell Capitol buildings to raise money might actually score higher on the ridiculosity scale:

Arizona lawmakers, desperate for cash, are considering selling the House and Senate buildings, then leasing them back over several years before assuming ownership again.

Arkansas:

There’s of course the political scandal that wasn’t, Whitewater.   And there was that odd little law that allowed toddlers to marry, provided they had parental permission. And Gov. Jim Tucker was convicted of federal fraud charges back in the day.  And there’s a scandal involving a Little Rock council member and somebody federal prosecutors say has ties to New York’s Colombo Mafia crime family.

We were supposed to have a garage sale on Sunday, August 28, 2005.   We had recently moved into a house we bought in Central City and had cleaned out our old Broadmoor apartment and planned to sell the odds and ends that didn’t make it to our new home.  It was to be the final hurrah of our move.  Suffice to say we evacuated the night before and the garage sale never happened.  I didn’t get back into town for another three weeks, but there on the second floor of our old apartment’s stoop was our last Times-Picayune, still in the plastic and dry.  I tossed the paper in the car and drove back to Houston.  I finally pulled that newspaper out of its plastic bag this weekend.

Today’s Times-Picayune has a Jobs section that is 4 pages long, while the Jobs section in the 2005 Times-Pic was 14 pages long.  Here’s what I assume is Charity Hospital’s last display ad:

A 16 year old girl who attended Chalmette High School died in a car accident on August 21, 2005.

On August 26, 2005 a man was shot to death in the Ninth Ward.  The Times-Pic reported:

His body was found on the north side of the street between a gray car and the sidewalk in front of Off Da Hook, a barber-beauty shop and music studio, and across from a neutral ground crowded with cars apparently parked by people seeking higher ground in anticipation of Hurricane Katrina.

Layers of misery …

Then, regrettably, there’s Sheila Stroup with a B-1 column called “Cat got what he wanted at church” : “This is the story of Grayson, a cat who went to church.  He was an Episcopalian, and a loyal one.” Last 2 graphs: “Even now, after a month and an outpouring of sympathy, it’s difficult for Patty to go to church, because there’s no gray cat sitting in the foyer, no shadow to follow her home when Mass is over.”  The cat died.

An editorial pushed the Orleans Parish School Board to approve the charter application for Lusher Alternative Elementary School.  A couple letters to the editor and a Stephanie Grace column raked over the details of a recent scandal involving an audit of the Orleans Parish School Board that found questionable expenditures on  overtime and stipends.

And here’s a couple of news nuggets from 2005:

Greenspan says Fed will survive departure

JACKSON HOLE, WYO — Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan expressed confidence Saturday that the central bank will meet the challenges that lie ahead after he steps down next year from the institution he has led for nearly two decades.’I have little doubt that my successors, and theirs, will continue to sustain the leadership of the American financial system in an ever-widening global economy,’ Greenspan said.

World record attempt kills Iranian daredevil

TEHRAN, IRAN — An Iranian daredevil died while attempting to break the world record for jumping over buses on a motorcycle, state television reported Saturday.  Javad Palizbanian, 44, was trying to leap over 22 buses parked side-by-side when his motorbike came down on the 13th bus, the report said… Minutes beforehand, Palizbanian had told an audience of hundreds: “I am going to break the world record and do something for my country to be proud.”

The Times-Picayune neglected to run our garage sale ad.

***

Yesterday as the sun was going down I took our dog for a walk in our Central City neighborhood.  It had rained all day but in the west a blue window of sky opened.  As I walked stunned by the blues, oranges, and grays of the clouds and sky I berated myself for not bringing a camera (I bring  a camera with me on roughly half of these evening walks).  I could only gawk and gawk I did.  I turned up certain blocks just to keep my eye on that blue window as long as I could.  I passed a guy sitting in the  passenger seat of a car with the door open.  “How about that sky?” I said.  He looked up. “Beautiful!  Just beautiful …”  I turned the corner and saw an old woman on her porch.  “How about that sky?” I said.  She smiled and shook her head in awe.  “Who could make something like that?” she said and entered into extended praise of god.  To another old woman on another porch, “Isn’t that sky beautiful?”  “Yes it is.”  On the next block my eyes moistened.  I ducked down a darkened block fearing I was about to lose it.  I get why most of us try to edit sentimentality out of experience.  It can be a little embarrassing.  But it can be earned, too.

The claim that it is “not easy” to live in New Orleans turns out to be one of the very few understatements in the documentary, which dwells at length on the many things that create this dis-ease — separate and aside from the storm that drew the country’s attention and the oil spill that refocused it. The viewer is led through policy debates and critiques and personal stories highlighting the demolition of New Orleans’ public housing projects and consequent housing crisis; the collapsed healthcare system (New Orleans’ public hospital remains shuttered because of political wrangling about the future of healthcare); the mental health crisis that has been responsible for murders, suicides and less-than-joyous substance abuse and drinking since the storm; the incompetence of FEMA in providing post-storm assistance to the city and the agency’s mismanagement of its emergency housing plan; the civil engineering missteps by the Army Corps of Engineers that made the city vulnerable to flooding and that have degraded our wetlands; the shattered education system; the out-of-control crime and violence that have plagued the city; the police corruption and history of police violence that have led to numerous federal murder and conspiracy indictments for officers involved in several, separate incidents; and deregulation that provided the opportunity for corporate greed’s fouling of the Gulf.

On a brighter note, today is kickoff to second line season.  Look out for the Valley of Silent Men: