Author: CoolDMZ

I submit to you that this morning’s front page story about an art hoax in Colfax involving tiny Buddha’s head statues found floating in the American River, first mentioned here by SinghCity yesterday, is one of the finest encapsulations of the spirit of Sacramento. Go read it, it’s rewarding.

There is that particular feeling you get about Sacramento–the propensity to drive into buildings, the mobbing at local openings of giant chain stores, the tendency to seem incapable of maintaining the species that gives you pause, and yet you can’t quite articulate it in a full sentence. I believe (this theory is actually my wife’s, but I subscribe to it whole-heartedly) that it can be attributed to the theory that Sacramento is still a gold mining outpost, a lawless frontier fort, with all the paranoid grasping at civilization that you imagine the original ’49ers embodied. This story is a good example.
Continue reading “Tiny Buddhas make me warm all over”

I am very confused by today’s front page Bee article about the Lodi terrorists. See if you can help me.

A different Hamid Hayat than the one interviewed by the FBI in June – more self-assured, knowledgeable of terrorist training camps and with outspoken anti-American views – emerges from the transcripts of hours of secretly recorded conversations he had in 2003 with an undercover FBI informant.

During the videotaped interview on June 4 and 5, the 23-year-old Hayat . . . confessed to attending a terrorist training camp there in 2003. He appears on the video as weak-willed, very unsure of himself, scared of violence and somewhat confused.

Which is the different one? The self-assured one, or the weak-willed one? Both seem to have been recorded in June, one in 2003 and one in an unspecified year. Do I have to have a timeline to read this story? Am I just not parsing it correctly?