BIG NEWS! BIG NEWS!

Our local newspaper has a bit of trouble figuring out what is local news. Sometimes it's a report on a poll taken in our State Capitol. Local news might be city politics from the county seat of an adjacent county. Sometimes it's a new report from the Office on Aging. Our newspaper under its Local News section uses a different page for each of five areas of our county, but for some reason none of the pages seem very interesting to me.

That's a lot of space to fill and if the newspaper doesn't have enough ads or enough items to fill every page, they simply replicate what the TV talking heads do -- just blather away with extraneous words that may or may not be of some import.

Now I myself keep waiting for our local newspaper to talk about "The ROCK" - but I'm thinking that perhaps they see that story as being of interest only after the rock's move is over and done with. But it's their newspaper and their decision, so I let it be.

But I did have to laugh at one of the "In Brief" articles in our local section this week. Seems that there is a solar energy project going on in the desert of northeastern San Bernardino County (hundreds of miles from our local area) and this project ran into a snag because the area is the home of a whole lot of desert tortoises. And these tortoises were in danger of being accidentally killed, or if not killed at least accidentally harassed if they remained in the area. The solution was to remove them and relocate them to a safer area.

Federal biologists recently captured several hundred tortoises and have been keeping them in captivity until they can be resettled into another area. I like tortoises and I thought this was a nice thing to do, since I also like Solar energy projects.

But here's what our local news section reported this week: One lady tortoise had to be released into the wild early "because it kept trying to escape captivity and appeared to be under stress. She has since explored the release area...and spent her nights in an underground burrow."

Look at that picture above. Do you see the smile on the face of the lady turtle? And then, can you see the smile on my face for reading such interesting and exciting local news?