Quick Links for April 27th

Now that I've finished unloading 3 cans of Febreeze into my bathroom to get that asparagus piss smell out of there, let's see if we can knock out some Monday Quick Links!

Oh, so that's how Stockton's population magically surpassed 500,000

Thanks to Christian Burkin's blog we now know how Stockton is considered more dangerous than Oakland even though Oakland has a higher violent crime rate. Long story short, the people who right those Forbes lists are lazy.

Basically, there's more shit around Oakland so they take that into account calling it a "Metropolitan Statistical Area". Because Oakland's in the middle of a bunch of other cities it's numbers get watered down. On our side of the Altamont, we're decidedly more spread out so our MSA is pushed to just a little under 700,000 and just past the 500,000 person threshold needed to make the list. So essentially, it's all Linden's fault.

So not only is the budget fucked now, but it's fucked 20 years from now? Sweet.

We'd be more pissed at this if we understood it, but we're not experts in medical retirement benefits since none of us is currently retired and only one of us enjoys current medical benefits. As far as we can tell, the city hasn't been saving their money for retiree medical benefits so they have to pay as they're billed or something. We basically have the Boost Mobile of retiree medical plans. So the city needs to work on saving some money so in 20 years they'll be able to pay for their own medical insurance instead of having the future/current generation do it...or something. Math's not my strong suit, that's why I got into journalism.

Where's that bottle of whiskey I mentioned earlier?

Sigh. Now that the gag order's in place the Record's got to get more creative with it's Cantu coverage. Now we get stories like "OMG, this judge has emotions!" and the gem of a story linked above. Anybody who's been paying attention has probably heard one of the many rumors flying around this story. The scene of the crime is a trailer park, it's bound to happen. None of them are printable because there's no real way to verify any of them. Although we do find it funny that the one we were able to semi-confirm, that Christian Sinclair is Melissa Huckaby's boyfriend, is the only one we have yet to see in the Record. But the Record can't let little things like fact-checking get in the way of keeping this story alive, so let's take all those little "rumors" and call them "theories"! They're basically the same thing except the second one isn't libel! "Mayyybe she was in the hospital because she swallowed razor blades!" "Mayyybe she's an attention whore!" See, the "Mayyybe" makes it news, not rumormongering. Everybody wins! Except of course for my sanity.