Cheers: To voter registration. The Clark County Elections Office has extended mail and online voter registration until Tuesday. The previous deadline of Monday fell on Columbus Day, meaning that post offices will be closed. Online registration (www.clarkvotes.org) can be completed until midnight Monday night, and the elections office will be open until 5 p.m. Monday.
The change is a small but necessary one, and it provides the opportunity to remind people to register and then vote. Participating in elections is a civic duty and one of the foundations of our system of government. As Franklin Delano Roosevelt once said, “Nobody will ever deprive the American people of the right to vote except the American people themselves, and the only way they could do this is by not voting.”
Jeers: To scary clowns. We never thought that clown hysteria would be a thing, but apparently it is. What began in August in South Carolina, with unsubstantiated reports of people dressed as clowns trying to lure children into woods, has spread throughout the country. More than two dozen states have reported “scary clowns” undertaking one activity or another, and seven people in Alabama face felony charges of making a terrorist threat connected to “clown-related activity.” There’s no word yet whether they were seen escaping in a tiny car.
Reports of clown sightings have kept local law enforcement officers busy every night this week, according to the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. The clown craze has been humorous, but when it starts impacting schools or instilling genuine fear it has gone too far.
Cheers: To Bertha. We often have been quick to criticize the frequent breakdowns of Bertha, the world’s largest tunnel-boring machine, as it makes its way under the streets of Seattle. So some praise is warranted when the project shows progress.
Bertha passed the halfway point this week in its quest to dig a 2-mile tunnel through the city. Eventually, a double-decker highway will be constructed to carry Highway 99, replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The highway initially was scheduled to open in 2015, but delays have pushed that back to 2019. For now, though, we will celebrate Bertha’s small victories.
Jeers: To poorly managed growth. Vancouver’s Ogden neighborhood is experiencing the drawbacks of poor planning. With limited tenant parking at nearby apartments, businesses and homeowners are dealing with overflow parking plus the noise and trash that come with it.
Neighbors say owners of a nearby apartment complex have not been responsive to concerns, and we would suggest that those owners should be better partners with their community. Meanwhile, the situation represents shortcomings in the planning for an area that suddenly is overflowing, pointing out the need for well-managed growth.
Cheers: To historic discoveries. Thanks to a curious history major, a 1599 Geneva Bible has been unearthed in the basement of the library at Lewis & Clark College in Portland. It is believed that the Bible was placed in storage in 1967, the year the college dropped its century-long affiliation with the Presbyterian Church and the year the library was constructed.
“It’s quite rare,” Hannah Crumm?, the library’s head of special collections and college archivist, told The Oregonian. “It’s not the only copy of this particular book … but it is the only catalogued copy in the Northwest.” Sam Bussan, the student who simply opened a box marked “Bibles,” also found books dating to the 17th through 19th centuries. School officials plan to put them on display in the spring.
