Beau Elliot
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Me? Oh, nothing. I’m just sitting here sneezing (it’s sneezing season) and wondering how (and when) Iowa City became part of the LA metro area.

I mean, when I lived in the greater LA metro area, Iowa City was most definitely not

part of the area. As I recall, it was a two- or three-day drive, but I might have dozed off at some point.

The other thing I remember about living in the LA area was that when the guy on the radio said it was a clear day, you could walk outside and the sky was not blue. It was yellow. Smog and whatnot. Yep. That was a clear day in LA.

I remembered that the other night when the full Moon came up, and it was the same yellow color because of the soot and ash from the wildfires in the Northwest. I even remarked to a nearby friend that that was the color of the sky on a clear day in LA.

I’m not really so fixated on LA and its sky, except that I wanted to listen to a baseball game on the radio via Internet the other day and discovered that Iowa City had joined the yellow-sky metro area. Hence, the Moon.

(You ever notice that people are always saying things such as, Hence, the Moon? Me, neither.)
The baseball game was between the LA Dodgers and the LA Angels (who technically play in Anaheim, when they bother to play at all), and I don’t really care about either team, but I like listening to baseball on the radio. As vices go, it’s probably not a major one.

Except that I couldn’t listen on the radio via Internet. MLB has a blackout policy based on geographical considerations, and Iowa City apparently is close enough to the LA metro area (including the three-day drive and dozing) to merit being blacked out.

Maybe people in Bermuda (famous for shorts and onions) could listen to the game.

The geography of it all, like the geography of most lives, was interesting. And it was made more interesting by the geographical insights of the new University of Iowa president.

You remember him, Bruce Harreld. He was perhaps the least-heralded on the candidates, but then, perhaps academics tend to give business people little leeway.

But our new UI president apparently can’t tell the difference between Colorado and Massachusetts. Well, that’s understandable; they’re only 1,200 miles apart. A blink of an eye, you might say. If you’re into to saying things.

And anyway, Colorado and Massachusetts are closer than Iowa City and LA, if that means anything.

In any case, new President Harreld is undoubtedly smarter, even given his MLB-like sense of geography, than, say, Donald Trump’s supporters.

Well, let’s see. According to Public Policy Polling, 66 percent of Trump’s supporters believe that President Obama is a Muslim; 12 percent think he’s a Christian. And 61 percent believe that Obama was not born in the United States (remember Trump’s birther rebirth a few years ago?); 21 percent believe that he was born in the U.S.

Me? Oh, nothing. Just sneezing and wondering about a clear day in LA.