A letter written by Gary Dielman and printed by the Baker City Herald was recently forwarded to me. Mr. Dielman raised a number of questions about Steve Brocato’s past job experience and his qualifications to hold the job of city manager.

I have direct knowledge of Steve’s capabilities, character and history and would like to provide some clarification.

LeGarrette Blount will never gain another yard for the Oregon Ducks football team.

Nor, come to that, will he lose another yard.

That latter achievement, though it’s one running backs such as Blount strive to avoid, is perhaps his more fitting epitaph, given the statistics he amassed during his final game.

He carried the ball eight times and lost five more yards from scrimmage than he gained.

Numbers aside, I believe it is appropriate that Blount has taken his last handoff as a Duck.

Blount’s frenzy immediately following Oregon’s 19-8 loss to Boise State on Sept. 3 warranted Coach Chip Kelly’s decision to suspend Blount for the rest of the season.

My 2-year-old can hear the refrigerator door opening from across the house, but it’s the distinctive squeal of a garbage truck’s brakes that makes her drop everything and race to the door.

Every morning when she wakes up, she asks “Garbage truck coming today?” in a hopeful little voice.

Six days of the week she’s disappointed. But when she goes to bed Thursday night, I get to say, “The garbage truck will be here tomorrow.”

Her eyes light up as she exclaims, “It’s Friday!”

(Repetition is everything in a toddler’s world.)

Quite a lot of people insist that the cure for certain afflictions which plague our planet, chief among them its increasingly fevered brow, is technology.

I happen to agree.

Yet implicit in this attitude, it seems to me, is the belief that this technology will inevitably be of the “new” variety.

If any reasonable doubt remained about the absurdity of the claim that smoking marijuana is a victimless crime, one toppled tree has crushed it.

The same tree that crushed the life out of Steven A. Uptegrove.

Hitler died 64 years ago, but his name — or at least his moustache — gets in the news so often you’d think the old monster was still kicking around.

Although he’d be 120, and so possibly incapable of the sort of evil that defined his life.

Probably you’ve noticed that Hitler has become a favorite, albeit a posthumous, tool of propagandists who endeavor to make their political foes look especially nasty, but who disdain devoting a lot of time to assembling a logical case to bolster their allegations.

These lazy molders of public opinion seem to have decided that it’s a silly exercise to exhaust themselves with hours of tedious research when there’s a perfectly good four-letter word available.

That word being “Nazi.”

I can go along with PETA for some distance but I keep getting distracted, and well short of applying for membership, by the group’s loony pronouncements.

Which, in defense of my ability to concentrate, is pretty easy to do when it comes to PETA.

I was pursued recently, and quite doggedly, by a heat wave. This experience intrigued me, as my interest in meteorological matters is boundless, but it was also a plain old nuisance.

The latter was due mainly to all the changing of shirts.

President Obama appeared on what seemed like half my channels the other evening, pitching his prescription for health care.

The president had plenty to say about the American people. Politicians have in recent years taken up the American people in a big way, and we are as a result getting quite a lot of press coverage.

Watched the latest episode of the Harry Potter series Sunday at the Eltrym, and the film erased two and a half hours as effortlessly as did the five movies that came before it.

Even without malted milk balls or red vines to sweeten the experience.

I expected as much.