This Salesman’s Pitch Can Clear a Building

Look at this:

* Call it the gas attack that routed the San Diego Police Department.

A cop-supply salesman comes to the downtown headquarters and is demonstrating his wares to a bunch of laboratory technicians on the fifth floor.

He is selling a spray-on product that can protect your hands like rubber gloves. He sprays it on one hand and, to show it works, he dribbles some acid on his skin.

That goes fine, but when he puts the acid vial back in his sample case, it tips over and proceeds to set the case afire.

He also is hawking an aerosol spray that can mask even the most odious smell, like when cops have to work around a corpse and such.

He asks the technicians to go get something real smelly so he can prove it. They get some of the stuff that is added to natural gas (which is odorless) to give it a smell.

The salesman lets loose a bit of the concentrated stuff, which rapidly gets into air conditioning.

A captain in the narcotics squad down the hall smells the gas and figures there is a leak and that the building is about to blow. He rushes from door to door warning people to evacuate forthwith.

Much of the building is quickly depopulated, and a 911 call goes out to the Fire Department’s chemical-response team with their spacesuits.

The last office the captain goes to is where the lab technicians and the salesman are talking. The air is spring fresh because of the deodorizer.

The technicians explain what has happened.

“The last thing I remember,” says Assistant Police Chief Ken Fortier, “is a bunch of evacuees outside the building, a fire rig and the salesman with a burned-up sample case making his way quietly through the crowd.”

* The New York Times reports that despite the Pentagon’s ban on homosexuality, there is a “flourishing gay subculture” in the military.

A 34-year-old Navy lieutenant commander is quoted anonymously:

“When I went to San Diego from Norfolk, my friends here called their friends there, and I had a ready-made network when I arrived.”

Post-Election Politics

What are people doing, anyway?

* It is customary for political opponents to kiss and make up after an election and pledge to work together for the common good blah blah blah.

That may not happen with Pam Slater and San Diego Councilwoman Judy McCarty.

First, Slater beat McCarty for supervisor.

Then, at a Slater victory party last week, she gave a hearty introduction and endorsement to someone she says will defeat McCarty for reelection to the council next year: April Boling, 42, an accountant and activist in the Navajo neighborhood of San Carlos.

Boling worked for McCarty in both her council campaigns, but broke with her over the issue of building Jackson Drive. She then was the treasurer for Slater’s supervisorial campaign.

McCarty has not said whether she will seek a third term. But she may find it sticky if she does.

She co-sponsored Proposition A in June to limit council members to two terms, which passed but is not retroactive. Still, the ballot argument signed by McCarty said:

“If a two-term limit was good enough for Washington, Jefferson and Eisenhower, it is certainly good enough for members of the San Diego City Council.”

* Rep. Randy (Duke) Cunningham (R-Chula Vista) says he is writing two books: one comparing the Vietnam War with Operation Desert Storm; the other about the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

* The latest fight over San Diego’s (environmentally sensitive but visually ugly) orange street lights is in Rancho Bernardo.

Sencillo Court residents are petitioning City Hall to remove the bug lights because of poor lighting, crime, etcetera. They are willing to pay extra for white lights.

Don’t look though for the city to allow it. Policy is policy, no exceptions.

Hidden Message

It is common for truck owners to blank out letters on their vehicles’ tailgates for a little fun (like turning TOYOTA into TOY).

But one Mitsubishi owner in San Diego seems to be trying to express his displeasure.

The gate on his truck reads: ITS B S.