
Bold dumb predictions
editor's notes

Another holiday, another early deadline, so this week I bring you some bold dumb predictions for 2020 in no particular order.

1. Every time you turn around these days somebody’s running for something, so at least 15 more people will sign up to run for sheriff. That will bring the total number of sheriffing candidates up to about 30 brave men and true, all vying for the county’s top law enforcement job.

Maybe not that many. Maybe it only seems that way because of the yard signs and billboards stuck up here and there and everywhere on both ends of Bryan County, and you can’t stir social media with a boat paddle without turning up someone seeking office.

I suspect that’s partly because some people like to be in charge and tell other people what to do. But it’s also probably because nothing pays as good around here as a full time government job when you’re in charge of something, and this despite having highly skilled and highly paid government people working to bring in better paying private sector jobs so people can afford not to run for office.

That said, my figurative hat’s off to people dedicated and/or dumb enough to run for something, because I can’t imagine why anyone would want to deal with that particular segment of the public which likes to complain early and often when things don’t go their way.

I would hit them with a stick if they talked to me the way they talk to each other, or elected officials. And lest you think I’m talking about someone you know, after 20 plus years in this business I have come to realize that most people are good folks who just want to be left alone by everyone, me included.

But there are some who are just born whiners and a goodly number of those tend to come from elsewhere (you know where I’m talking about – many have colder winters and move down here to tell us how screwed up we are). Roughly 99.9 percent of them have social media accounts and spend a large percentage of their free time badgering each other and anyone else they can reach with various and sundry complaints, half truths, full lies and whatever else raises their cheese hackles.

Still, when you come right down to it, I’m whining about whiners, but at least I’m not running for anything, or gadding about on Facebook – which I predict will still be mostly stupid in 2020.

I predict the 2020 sheriff’s race is going to be lots of fun to watch, unless you’re tired of politics and wish people would stop running for things, or at least run against each other more quietly.

Of course, if nobody ran for office then we wouldn’t have elected officials to blame when things come to a grinding halt, kind of like traffic in Richmond Hill - which over the past couple decades thanks to wonderful amazing and remarkable leadership if it does say so itself (and it often has) went and transformed itself from a small, wonderful place to live into a great big fun kind of upscale suburb of Cincinnati, Michigan, only warmer and in some instances actually on the water, or marsh, or across the road from it, or over there where they dug a retention pond and planted some palm trees around it within a reasonable distance from the future Richmond Hill High School, which will probably have an enrollment of 32,187 before 2025 rolls around, and half of that number will one day run for sheriff.

I know, that’s a long sentence and likely full of grammatical misfires, etc. That’s because I’m trying to write the world’s longest sentence to end 2019.

The longest sentence I’ve read so far was let loose on the public by a gentleman named Tyrone Spearman, longtime editor of Peanut Farm Market News. I met Tyrone once down in Moultrie, and he is as nice a guy as you might ever want to meet, but he sure loves writing about peanuts.

Anyway, it was around 1999 and the sentence was his lede (that’s newspaper talk for the first sentence in a news story) and as I recall when I read it and then counted each word it weighed in at somewhere close to 100 words (me being middle aged if I live to be 116, I don’t remember things like I ought to) with only one or two commas thrown in so you could breathe and wouldn’t pass out if you read it out loud.

2. I predict I’ll make more predictions in the next issue, if I’m not run over trying to get home or back to Pembroke.

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