Dispatcher: The RP (reporting party) at #4 Cherry Court is reporting that there are several kids pounding on her door.

Cop #1: Did she mention that it's me and I've been shouting "POLICE?"

Dispatcher: 10-4 (I understand)

Cop #2: She must think you're a really big kid.

Bruce Sterling wrote in “The Hacker Crackdown” that anywhere you put a communication system you also put a community and, as human beings, we bring all of their virtues and prejudices with us into the online world. This is not surprising, as Sterling notes, our lives in the real world are just as complicated despite significantly more practice.

In this county, this appears to mean that almost every discussion on the forum will eventually became an argument about marijuana.

There is a lot to be said about marijuana, and we write about the topic frequently. Even if Measure B were not on the ballot, I would still be writing about something to do with marijuana at least once a week without even looking that hard.

You would think that this would provide ample opportunity for anyone who wanted to talk about marijuana to do so, but this is apparently not the case.

In the office we have coined the phrase “time to pot.” This is a measure of the number of posts it takes for comments on a non-marijuana story to mention marijuana, generally diverting and polarizing the thread.

For a several weeks the fastest “time to pot” was three posts, on a story about a man who was alleged to have sexually assaulted his girlfriends daughter. You would think there would be plenty to discuss in that case, and there is, but that doesn’t keep marijuana from becoming a factor.

That story remained the fastest “time to pot” for almost a month until a story in Thursdays paper, about a local sign dancer, was diverted to a discussion of marijuana in a single post.

Marijuana stories tend to be the most read in the newspaper as near as I can tell. They are usually among the most viewed on our website, they are the most likely to attract triple-digit numbers of comments. Coworkers in the circulation department tell me that any paper with a big marijuana story in it sells roughly 10 percent more copies than one without.

Online, this phenomenon has become so bad that there is actually a forum thread on the site dedicated to the discussion of whether or not the entire forum system should be separated. Divided into one forum for people to talk about marijuana and one forum for people to talk about everything else.

This is the problem with communities, no matter where you put them. There will always be enough extremists and ideologues warring back and forth to control the discussion and divert it to what they want to talk about.

If only we could put them in their own room out here too.

It’s an urge that exists deep down somewhere in the lizardy parts of the brain, the same part that compelled early man to paint on cave walls and still motivates young children to ruin expensive paint jobs.

Anyone who walks or drives the streets of Ukiah, and has their eyes open, has probably seen our local graffiti. Tags are everywhere and range from gang sigils to errantly scrawled felt tip designs to the infamous “NINJAZ.”

There is an electrical box across the street from my office and I often run by it in the mornings. Like the dumpsters nearby it is intermittently covered with a spastic scribble of ink. What the authors of these scribbles are attempting to convey I don’t really know. I don’t honestly pay that much attention to them, they’re just part of the landscape.

A couple of weeks ago this particular electrical box caught my eye. Not because of the graffiti, but because of this.

If you’ve met me professionally, that’s probably how I introduced myself. If you met me under other circumstances you may have noticed me struggling not to say that last part, such is the nature of my job, I never really feel like I'm off the clock.

After years of resisting the inevitable nature of my business, I have been drawn, kicking and screaming in my digital shackles, into the full light of the 21st century. Now that I’m here I’ll try to behave decently and not make a mess on the carpet while I take a swing at this blog business.

There wont likely be a lot of high minded writing or criticism here, for that you need to go next door to House of Burgess . Mostly this will serve as a place for me to publish all those bizarre things that go on in my world, precariously balanced here on the edge of those spaces in society occupied by cops, firefighters, first responders, criminals and attorneys.

This will likely be an irregularly updating feature. Such is the way with surreal occurrences, they often balk at attempts to schedule them.

Mostly I’ll treat readers to what I call “the best of the blotter.” Part of my job is to read the records of law enforcement activity every day to record the more interesting arrests. Often there are incidents that appear in those logs that do not meet our rigorous standards for publication, but they will find their place here.

So check in from time to time, and see how weird the place you live in actually is.

comments? questions? concerns? udjbb@pacific.net