Elections produce shareable anecdotes and head-scratchers, and the one just completed was no exception.

One of my all-time favorite candidate names popped up this year, running for a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. The candidate was gloriously named Honey Mahogany (I love saying it: “Honey Mahogany”). Ms. Mahogany came to prominence as a drag performer while in grad school at U.C. Berkeley and went on to become a RuPaul protégé and then a political activist. Most recently, she served as chair of San Francisco’s Democratic Party, a position that requires tough political chops. According to Wikipedia, she selected her name from two Revlon makeup colors that she felt best matched her skin tone. It turns out we will not be addressing her as “Supervisor Mahogany”: She lost her race. (But let’s say it again: “Honey Mahogany!”)

A candidate who didn’t lose (unfortunately) was Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (yeah, that one). I risk desecrating these pages with her name only because of a guffaw-worthy quote from her. In a broadcast just before the primaries, she went on a rant about a government conspiracy to convince us to eat fake meat that’s “grown in a peach tree dish.” Believe me, that’s exactly what she said (well, she is from Georgia, the Peach State, but I don’t know what to make of that).

Twitter is in the news a lot these days, and I give a thumbs-up to the pundit who labeled Twitter users posting on a certain end of the spectrum as “Twidiots.”

For the “Aren’t we glad we live in California” file, consider this report in the Elko, Nevada, Daily Free Press about Jim Marchant, the G.O.P.’s far-right candidate for Nevada Secretary of State, the office responsible for the state’s elections: “While speaking alongside Trump in October, Marchant told the crowd ‘when my coalition of secretary of state candidates around the country get elected we’re going to fix the whole country and President Trump is going to be president again in 2024.’” That’s right: the word used was “fix.” Luckily, he wasn’t elected; scarily, it was a close race.

One thing that struck me about this year’s election coverage was how suddenly every nook and cranny of the media was featuring “explainers.” Ballot propositions provided particularly fertile ground for what we used to call “backgrounders.” Now they seem to be universally presented as “explainers.” I wonder how something like that bursts into prominence all at once from one side of the country to the other. (Yup, we even had an “explainer” here in the Point Reyes Light, which goes to show how up-to-date this paper’s staff is with journalism’s latest trends.)

Finally, the spirited campaign in Inverness over Measure O, the failed parcel tax initiative, resulted in a local resurrecting a copy of a report from July 1948 proposing the formation in Inverness of a public utility district to acquire the notoriously unreliable water company. The report, commissioned by the Inverness Improvement Association (later renamed the Inverness Association), was issued by a 92-member group called the Inverness Water Committee. 

The committee’s formal report to the I.I.A., penned by chair Bruce Johnstone, opens with the following paragraph, which I find too jolly-good not to share with you:  

“Two gentlemen of Inverness were good friends. Being of British ancestry, both enjoyed the pleasures of the bath. Tubbs’ home was built on a gentle slope, and just below him was neighbor Pears. All was serene during the rains but, when summer came, affections were put to the touch. Mr. P. had ‘gone American’ and loved a spanking shower; T., being on the portly side, enjoyed nothing so much as a loll in a full tub where, believe it or not, he occasionally read a bit. Water service was getting spotty, but the daily ritual continued, and then it happened: Pears reached for the faucet but at this identical moment, T. turned on the water full force for his tub, and Pears, lathered to the eyebrows, drew nothing but air. It took a week to restore friendly relations—both are now active members of the Water Committee.”

Not to leave you wondering what became of the committee’s well-researched recommendations, a month later a majority of Inverness voters agreed to create the Inverness Public Utility District. Alas, and notwithstanding Mr. Johnstone’s delightful turns of phrase, it proved more nettlesome to attain the two-thirds threshold needed to approve a $50,000 bond issue for acquiring and rehabilitating the water system. Bond elections came up short three times, in one instance by a single vote. The nascent IPUD gave up and went dormant, but it was resurrected in 1951 to take over the volunteer fire department and build the firehouse. It wasn’t until 1979 that voters finally said yes to buying the water company—this time at a price tag of $330,000, versus the $20,000 that Bruce Johnstone had negotiated in 1948! 

For 52 years, Wade Holland has kept an amused eye on the world’s foibles and oddities from his home in Inverness.