Voicemails, emails, and snail mail

Blowing It

Maybe it’s not a good idea to tell people where bomb ranges are (City Lights, “Pearls, Petroglyphs, and Desert Shipwrecks,” April 17). People have been known to go out and collect pieces for the recycling value, and sometimes they blow themselves up.

• Dwight
• Downtown

A Slight Connection

I’m calling about “Pearls, Petroglyphs, and Desert Shipwrecks” (City Lights, April 17). I found it fascinating, and it turns out I have a slight connection to this story.

I have an acquaintance I haven’t spoken to for many years. Once he retired he pretty much dedicated his life to finding, documenting, and getting GPS locations for petroglyphs all over Southern California and Baja California. It seems to me that he said he works with one of the schools here in the archeology area.

One time he showed me some pictures of a rock with a sailing ship on it. He said it was out in the middle of nowhere — in the desert, but he never really specified where it was that he had taken those photographs. He spends weeks and weeks down in Mexico traveling in the most godforsaken areas, and has taken a lot of photographs of these petroglyphs. I thought it was fascinating because there would otherwise be no inkling that there would be anything out there like this.

Also, since I was a child I was always told that the Salton Sea was the product of an earthquake that shifted the route of the Colorado River. This was in the ’30s, and it took three years for the Corp of Engineers to shift the Colorado River back into its normal pathway.

In the article it says that the Salton Sea was a remnant of this gigantic inland lake. My whole life I always thought this was a product of something that happened in the 20th Century. There’s no information about it anywhere that I’ve ever read other than this article. I found it interesting.

• Robert Playstead
• via voicemail

Pass/Fail

Regarding this story, “Standardized Tests Shunned by South Bay Parents.”

In the very first paragraph, Susan Luzzaro quotes a parent saying that her child was worried “that if he failed the test he wouldn’t get promoted to the next grade.” Ms. Luzzaro makes absolutely no effort in the article to assure readers that the test is not actually used to flunk children. This is not good journalism.

I urge the Reader and Susan Luzzaro not to leave this false impression dangling in the minds of readers. Luzzaro should issue a clarification about the matter.

• Name Withheld
• via email

Slapped Silly

I would like to comment on Laura McNeal’s story, “The Desire to Leave Hangs Like Heat,” which was reprinted in the April 17 issue and originally appeared in 1995.

I grew up in San Diego and in southern Illinois. I went to public school in San Diego and Catholic schools in Illinois. I guess I lived in the old America because when I was a kid in grade school, anybody that called a teacher a “bitch” would have been slapped silly until his teeth rattled. He would have been hauled off to the principal’s office, his parents would have been called and told to come get him, and he would have been expelled unless he made a public apology to the teacher in front of the whole classroom.

I don’t know what the world’s coming to now. Evidently, even back in 1995 the world was in pretty bad shape if they let that kind of nonsense go on. It’s ridiculous.

When did I go to grade school? From 1938 to 1945, and I never called a female teacher or a nun a “bitch,” but I did act smart aleck sometimes, and I got myself slapped silly for it. I think I’m better for it now.

• Name Withheld
• via voicemail

Equal Time

I have noticed that every other week, the San Diego Reader devotes a column to and for religion. The column is all at once hilarious, unbelievable, a little scarey, and thusly somewhat entertaining; but where is the equal time here?

Many of your readers, this one included, see this as a part of the collapsing to right-wing American fundamentalist’s Christian infiltration of our country’s freedom of religion and freedom from religion so obtrusively and obnoxiously present since the G.W. Bush Administration’s “faith-based” community and “teach the controversy” nonsense and ignorance.

It is obvious that this is the conservatives’ intent to transgress the U.S. Constitution and allow one religion to violate our country’s complete history of the separation of state and church.

So, how about it, San Diego Reader? I, as an atheist, propose that every other week, the Reader run a column of the subject and personalities here in San Diego of agnosticism, atheism, free-thinking, humanism, and evolution/science. I will guarantee a read much more interesting, provocative, educational, and based in reality for your readers. Dare ya.

• David J. Child
• Encinitas