Figure it out Chron

We're doomed ... then again, maybe not.

At some point the San Francisco Chronicle's home page (http://www.sfgate.com/) will figure that one out, but right at this moment it looks like they're hedging their bets.

Their top headline says a tsunami may be bearing down on the West Coast, but another headline just below it says there's nothing to worry about.

Personally, I'm going to play it safe and stay inland.

Damn you swine flu

Check back on TWGB in a couple of weeks to see if I'm still alive and kicking because I'm pretty sure I've been expose to the swine flu.

I was actually feeling terrible before I was exposed to the latest, greatest doomsday disease but today I'm worse than ever.

I'm sore, totally fatigued, my eyes hurt, my throat is sore, I sound terrible and my nose can't decide if it wants to be totally stuffed up or runny.

Who knows, maybe it's ebola.  I knew reading "The Hot Zone" would make me paranoid.

So how did I get the swine flu you ask?

At the one place you're supposed to get healthy, of course: The hospital.

My wife and I had to run the rugrat to the emergency room last night with some breathing/eating problems and after the triage nurse directed us to a side waiting room rather than the normal one.

Seemed like an odd move as soon as she asked us to go to the other waiting room but it got worse as soon as we turned to corner and made our entrance.

The only people in there were a sad looking couple with a sickly looking child and they were all wearing face masks.

After about 10 minutes a nurse came to get them which was a relief .... until she brought in another couple with a sickly kid about 5 minutes later.  What were they wearin?  Face masks.

Where's my face mask?  How about a little protection for my wife and son?

Why did we get stuck being the canaries in the coal mine?

After the second set of swine flu patients were parked next to us I went out to see the triage nurse to ask why we were shacked up in the Doomsday Suite.

According to Nurse Ratched she stuck us in there to protect my son from the patients in the main waiting room.

I think I'd rather take my chances in the main waiting room.  In the 30 minutes we were out there we were sitting next to a woman with a back problem and a teenager with a sprained ankle.

Last time I looked those conditions aren't contagious or fatal.

Fortunately my wife seems to be OK and my son is no worse than we was when we brought him to the ER.

But me?  I'm a mess and going downhill fast.

My friends on Facebook are already laying claim to my office at work and all the odd little goodies I have in there.  It looks like all my other stuff will be up for grabs soon too.

If there isn't a new post here in a week or two feel free to cruise by the house for my estate sale.

Damn swine flu.

Gimme Jaycee's Law ASAP

By now it's painfully clear from all the details coming out of the Jaycee Dugard kidnapping that our law enforcement system is utterly, inexcusably broken and pathetically incapable of policing known sex offenders.

Convicted sexual predator Phillip Garrido was inexplicably cut loose from a 50 year prison sentence and then breezed through years of incompetent parole followups and a police visit, on his way to 18 years of raping and torturing Dugard before finally being caught last week thanks to the gut instincts and common sense of a UC Berkeley campus cop.

One solution?  How about enraged mobs of citizens taking up torches and pitchforks while looking up convicted sexual predators in their neighborhoods? 

That certainly appeals to me.

Kick down the doors of these sick bastards, turn their homes upside down looking for children trapped in secret torture chambers and chase them out of kid-filled suburbia.

Unfortunately, that's probably not going to happen.

Another solution that may be a little more realistic and the best bet for avoiding a replay of the Dugard saga?  How about revamping the way our legal system handles known sexual predators?

Call it Jaycee's Law or Jaycee's Reforms ...  give it any name you like but the bottom line is that things need to change in a major way across the board.

Start with making it a lot tougher for these bastards to get out of jail. Why was Garrido on the loose in the first place?

Follow that up with far stricter scheduled parole visits that involve full searches of the convict's premises.

Throw in coordination with the convict's neighbors to keep tabs on their behavior, a joint effort with local police to patrol the neighborhood a little more often than other parts of suburbia along with surprise semi-annual visits to the convict's house that includes a full search of the premises and we might be on to something.

The icing on the cake to all this would be the firing of every parole officer involved in the Garrido case throughout the tears along with a pink slip for the Contra Costa County sheriff's deputy who responded to a citizen's call about girls living in Garrido's yard but never ventured past the scumbag's front porch.

When everything is said and done Garrido and his wife need to end up on the business end of a lethal injection.

Every member of law enforcement with their fingerprints all over this train wreck need to be chased off the state's payroll.

Jaycee and her family need to start healing the wounds inflicted by 18 years of Garrido's twisted acts and the failure of our legal system.

But just as important as all of that is a concerted effort to learn from almost two decades of inexcusable failures by our legal system.

If something like Jaycee's Law or Jaycee's Reforms saves even one child from a lifetime of misery it'll be worth the time, effort and money required to make wholesale changes to the way the legal system handles monsters like Garrido.

Nothing to fear, the police are here

OK, let's get this out of the way ASAP: I don't really care for cops.

Never have.

Maybe it's just an immature disdain for some authority figures but I've never been a big fan of law enforcement.

Even with that in mind the Jaycee Lee Dugard story becomes more infuriating by the minute.

More details continue to emerge out about what a sick, twisted bastard Phillip Garrido is and how his wife is just as despicable for her role in the kidnapping.

But the thing I can't get over is how criminally incompetent overall law enforcement looks as the details surrounding this sad, twisted story come to light.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/08/28/BAT219F97H.DTL&tsp=1) in 2006 a sheriff's deputy fumbled away a golden opportunity to uncover Garrido's crimes after neighbors alerted authorities that children were living in squalor in his yard.

What did Super Cop do? He threatened the guy with a code violation. Without ever taking a look in his yard.

That's some impressive police work.

According to the sheriff in today's Chron article: "We should have been more inquisitive, more curious and turned over a rock or two. Our work product should have resulted in a better outcome."

That has to be the understatement of the century.

Super Cop was too incompetent, lazy and clueless to stick his nose in Garrido's yard which led to a poor girl being raped, abused and tortured for three more years of her life.

Yeah sheriff, I'd say there are better outcomes than that.

But Mr. Sheriff and Super Cop will probably continue to stuff their pockets with taxpayer money and "work" enough overtime every year to significantly pad their annual salaries.

Hopefully some heads in law enforcement will roll for this mess and changes will be made to keep either convicted sex offenders locked away for good or under far closer inspection once they're set loose.

At this point it's hard not to be at least a little suspicious about the "diligent questioning" by the police that allegedly revealed that the girl was a kidnap victim considering all the bungling by the authorities that's coming to light.

Combine that with the fact that certified nutjob Garrido claims in a semi-incoherent prison interview that when all the details come out it will become clear that this is actually an inspiring story about how he turned his life around and it's not completely outlandish to start wondering whether "diligent questioning" by our heroic boys in blue is actually B.S. code for "The crazy bastard freely admitted everything the moment he came in to see us."

I don't know what's worse, knowing that freaks like Garrido are living right next door to me in suburbia or the fact that morons like the CoCo sheriffs are the people who are supposed to protect us.

Major kudos to the UC Berkeley campus cops who flagged Garrido as a questionable character when he started sniffing around the university.

But the big question, and the big problem with the system, is why was he able to get away with his crimes for so long?

Since there are no campus cops here in suburbia I'd almost feel safer if the schmucks from the "Police Academy" movies (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093756/) were in charge of things because it doesn't look like anyone else with a badge can be counted on.

That ain't no Britney Spears

Proving, once again, that Dean Singleton's ContraCostaTimes.com sucks is today's "CelebPix" at http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_13161769.

The headline reels us in with the promise of Britney Spears in a bikini.

Once click later you're feasting your horny eyes on Bill Cosby (top photo).

That's right up there with the time the CCT teased to photos of Megan Fox and delivered a shot of Betty White.

You can see what you're missing in the bottom photo.

God bless America.