Days of Lore

WELCOME TO CHICO As much as some people complain about Chico, it’s really not so bad. Aside from the whole big-fish-small-pond syndrome that some people fall prey to in this town and the white-breadedness of the populace, I don’t have any real complaints. Sure, we’re known all over the world as a bunch of drunken, slobbering derelicts, but like they say, “Work hard, play hard.”

It is interesting, however, to hear people’s impressions of Chico after they spend a weekend in our fair town. I had some friends visit from the Bay Area and one of them brought a co-worker named David. Well, over the course of two days he sucked down Bloody Marys in the early afternoon, saw a couple of fights, found an old family friend ( Joe, the labyrinth guy) in this very publication, saw a woman fondle our friend right in front of her boyfriend and then, to top it all off, got hit by a car. That’s right, the driver of a car parked in front of Duffy’s Saturday night thought they were in “D,” when they were actually in “R,” and backed into David and another friend of mine, sending them flying to the asphalt. And instead of getting out and seeing if they were all right, the driver sped off.

Fortunately, no one was hurt and it ended up being sort of the running joke the next day. I just wonder what kind of story the driver told his friends. “Yeah, I totally backed into these two guys and then I took off not knowing if I killed or maimed them. It was sweet!”

And poor David will probably tell his friends back home what a bunch of drunken, slobbering derelicts we are.

IT’S NOT SO BAD Chico made some happy news recently in the Jan. 16 issue of ESPN The Magazine, not for our baseball team, but for our National Yo-Yo Contest. Right there on page 30 is a shout-out to 16-year-old Yuuki Spencer for taking the gold at the event held at the National Yo-Yo Museum on Broadway.

The Yo-Yo contest was given the spotlight right along side Sloppy Joe’s Hemingway Look-Alike Contest in Key West, Fla., and the 2005 French Pig-Squealing Championship in Trie-Sur-Baise, France. See? Chico is cool. I must admit, though, that I was a little miffed by the glaring omission of the annual Red Bluff Cow Chip Toss Championship. What does ESPN know about sports anyway?

OOH … SORRY THAT IS INCORRECT I was thumbing through the Enterprise Record Saturday when I saw something so beautiful, so perfect, that I could hardly contain myself. Right there in the correction box on 2A was this little nugget:

“The name of the Butte County Spelling Bee’s elementary division winner was misspelled.”

Yikes. Maybe the kid can land a job at the copy desk. I kid! I kid! That came hot on the heels of an ad that appeared in the Jan. 6 issue thanking some guy “for pleasing 15 women for an entire day!” followed by, “We are all exhausted and very satisfied and we look forward to next year!” An ad ran the following day explaining that it was a shopping trip they were thanking him for, not … you know what. But it still doesn’t explain why the guy in the ad had such a huge grin on his face.

But the E-R accomplished something amazing recently, though, with the headline, “Meatloaf manifesto,” err … “Meatloaf metamorphosis” That day CN&R editor Tom Gascoyne developed a voracious appetite for meatloaf, insisting that we go to lunch at a place that served it. Amazing! Hey I enjoy meatloaf as much as the next guy, but when you break it down to its true essence—it’s a loaf of meat—and that my friends, is disgusting.

AND THE MOTHER OF THE YEAR AWARD GOES TO … I couldn’t resist this one sent to me by my friend Mark “In The Dark,” courtesy of hotghettomess.com. I just about crapped myself because the kid in the back seat bares a striking resemblance to my nephew. Then I noticed the steering wheel was on the right side of the car. Thank God.