This Week: A Yellow Flag

Tues | AUG 5 John McCain and wife visit the planet’s largest biker rally in Sturgis, South Dakota, as part of the candidate’s tour to drum up support for his new energy program—he wants to use it all up—and to make up for the fact that no one has written a hip-hop song supporting him yet. It marks the first time that a presidential candidate has visited the event (though visits by presidential siblings are so common that local bars had to purchase special mops) and McCain wormed himself into the spirit of things by suggesting his wife enter the Miss Buffalo Chip biker-babe beauty contest, which is usually topless but can go bottomless with three notarized letters of recommendation. Unfortunately, she was disqualified from entry for having too many tattoos, though she did place second in a contest where women open beer bottles with their teeth, breaking a record formerly held by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower.

Wed | AUG 6 Noted author Ray Bradbury publishes a heartfelt plea in the P-T asking if Long Beach is officially at war with the printed word. City officials responded amiably, explaining “us do like words good!” and asking if “him say bad things too much.” In a related cultural imbroglio, the long-dreaded Long Beach Museum of Art audit—which jeopardizes the “art” part of an organization already desperately clinging to “museum” and “Long Beach”—confirms 144 items in the museum’s archive have gone missing, a situation Executive Director Ron Nelson admits to the P-T is a “yellow flag.” (“Red flag” is when 144 items in the inventory are on fire or come to life simultaneously, he adds.) Much of the blame lies with previous directors, says Nelson: many items were simply loaned out and never returned, which academics cite as the primary factor in the closure of Amsterdam’s Museum of Hey Man Check This Shit Out, and almost half of the items were artifacts purchased at an airport gift shop in Africa, presumably during the last 10 minutes of an expedition where someone was supposed to be purchasing artifacts in Africa.

Thurs | AUG 7 Russia makes an impressive showing against the upstart Georgian team in a surprise Men’s Combat (Regular) competition initiated after murky reports of Synchronized Shelling and Mixed Persecution from the residents of troubled South Ossetia. President Bush is slow to react—officials blame a large lunch—but candidate McCain immediately calls for a Russian cease-fire, a firm NATO response, and if at all possible an official reinstatement of the Cold War so he won’t have to keep updating his foreign-policy references. His speech is later discovered to suspiciously mirror several key passages from the Wikipedia entry on Georgia, particularly during a discussion of Georgian history and of what episodes of the original Star Trek series Pavel Chekov reminisces most fondly about the motherland. Republican party chairman Mike Duncan apologized for the incident and promised that in future Sen. McCain would be required to show his work and cite at least three independent sources.

Fri | AUG 8 Huntington Beach Representative Dana Rohrabacher—granted congressional power over Long Beach as punishment for municipal sins committed during the 1970s—tells LBReport.com’s Bill Pearl that he’d support federal funding for a breakwater-teardown study, a reversal of an earlier statement in which he asked where Long Beach was and if they really had a beach there. “If the city of Long Beach wants me to do this, I will, but it hasn’t asked me,” he told Pearl, though he requested that the city of Long Beach at least dress a little nicer just in case somebody saw it coming out of his office. City officials were heartened by the news but said they’d like to tear down Acres of Books, the Main Library and City Hall before they can really start thinking about tearing down anything else.

Sat | AUG 9 “Got what I got the hard way/And I make it better, each and every day/So honey, said don’t you fret/’Cause you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

Sun | AUG 10 A Financial Times report finds that China will take over from the United States as the world’s leading manufacturer by next year, and that China will take over as the subject of every sentence including the phrase “take over” by 2012 at the latest. Although the United States had been No. 1 in manufacturing for 100 years, American officials seemed resigned to second-place, with the president of the National Association of Manufacturers—reached at a call-center overseas—calling the transition “inevitable” and reminding reporters that “it was fun while it lasted.” Although other recent reports marked China as the world’s top consumer of grain, coal and steel and the world’s top producer of gold, seafood, fruit and vegetables and Olympics opening ceremonies, American officials downplayed the trend, reminding the public that the United States remains the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels and that it still has the second-most nuclear missiles, too.

Mon | AUG 11 Second-most for now, anyway.

Tags: dana rohrabacher, georgia, john mccain, long beach museum of art, olympics, russia, sturgis