Whipped Cream Difficulties

Things have been kind of slow the past couple of days. Please accept this random collection of crap in lieu of actual content.

Today’s update from our “the street finds its own uses for things” file: “Mexican organized crime groups are using ultralight aircraft to drop marijuana bundles in agricultural fields and desert scrub across the U.S. border.”

Speaking of Neuromancer, there’s more talk about it finally becoming a film, with Vincenzo Natali (“Splice”) directing. I’ll believe it when I see it.

Back at the ranch, the City of Austin

…must retest more than 2,000 firefighter applicants amid concerns that some of them could have obtained confidential questions that they were asked in oral interviews.

I’m a little surprised that they had over 2,000 applicants in this most recent batch. I’m also wondering exactly what those questions were…

I also wanted to touch briefly on our fun city council elections. Yes, we had city council elections last weekend. Three seats (out of a total of six) were up this year. Two of those seats were retained by the incumbents (Chris Riley in place 1, and Laura Morrison in place 4) by pretty large percentages (66 and 73 percent of the votes, respectively.)

Place 3 is held by Randi Shade, who is finishing up her first term on the city council. Shade was initially a favorite to win re-election, but there was a controversy over some emails she sent, one thing led to another…and Shade got her butt kicked, badly, finishing second in a four-way race. Shade just barely managed to get into a runoff with the first-place candiate, Kathie Tovo; Tovo pulled in 46 percent of the vote, and it seems unlikely that the supporters of the other two candidates (former city council member Max Nofziger and Kris Bailey) are going to throw their votes to Shade.

(Tovo was also endorsed by the local alternative weekly; the way I read their endorsement, though, it was a close decision between Tovo and Shade. I’ve been unable to find endorsements from the last election on the alt-weekly’s crummy web site, so I don’t know if they endorsed Shade last time around.)

Tovo’s supporters are already calling on Shade to concede and spare everyone the cost of a runoff. Shade’s response? She’s filed an ethics complaint against Tovo. I’m looking forward to watching this one play out. Note to self: vote early.

This just in: remember the SWAT officer who flipped his cop car and was charged with drunk driving? Yeah, he’s out, pending the decision of the arbitrator. Our buddy Art also suspended six other cops who were supposedly at the party with him. Unclear from the current Statesman article is what the grounds for suspension were, or how long the suspensions were for.

Edited to add 5/20: Here’s a better Statesman article with more details on who was suspended for how long and why.