Downstroke

We ain’t buying nothing … Every year on the day after Thanksgiving, the streets are jammed with SUVs and the malls are hopelessly clogged with hordes of holiday shoppers, dollar signs in their eyes, crazy for the scent of a 15-percent-off sale. But if you want to avoid the crowds this year, you could always take the advice of the folks at the Earth Peace Project of Butte College and celebrate “Buy Nothing Day” on Nov. 28.

This pseudo-holiday non-event was started a few years ago by the Canadian-based Adbusters magazine, which supports the view that unchecked consumerism is killing the environment, debasing society and turning us all into fat, inarticulate, uninformed automatons whose lust for material objects blinds us to the plight of those less unfortunate than ourselves and supports an economy that favors corporate profits over human lives.

Earth Peace says Buy Nothing Day puts our dependence on material goods in perspective and suggests that planting trees, visiting neighbors or taking walks can distract us from the uncontrollable urge to consume. Of course, we at CN&R have to assume that Buy Nothing Day doesn’t apply to the wonderful businesses that advertise in our little paper, which couldn’t exist without their generous support.

Well, we got ours: We guess Karen S. Haynes was right to follow her “heart” when she pulled out of the Chico State University presidential search so that she could stay in the running for the San Marcos post. A three-time finalist for CSU posts this year, Haynes, it was announced Nov. 20, will head up the San Marcos campus.

The Chico campus community for the most part is pleased with trustees’ presidential pick of Paul Zingg (some feared he be a toady for the chancellor) but were bummed that Haynes’ exit left only two candidates to choose from. Some even suggested extending the search.

Hey! That’s what San Jose decided to do last week, announcing that, rather than pick one of the three finalists (boy, must they feel lame), the search committee will keep looking.

We can’t help but wonder, with all the recycling of candidates there’s been in the last few CSU searches, is the presidential pool drying up?

Now he’ll get his: County Emergency Services Officer Mike Madden is both lucky and unlucky. He’s lucky no one was killed when he told the bomb squad to detonate a box of what turned out to be sodium cyanide, which he got from a ham radio pal. But he’s unlucky because he got caught lying about the box and now faces charges that could put him in jail for four years.

Apparently Madden thought he could sidestep procedure and ensure immunity for his radio buddy, a former miner who lives at a Paradise rest home, who told Madden he had some hazardous material, though he apparently didn’t know exactly what it was or how much he had. Madden, who should have known better, left the old-timer’s box of cyanide by Highway 70 and told the bomb squad to blow it up. Madden even went so far as intimating to officers on the scene that the box was being sought by “the wrong people.”

Madden is on paid administrative leave and faces six misdemeanor counts for lying to cops, illegally transporting hazardous material and withholding information.