The voters may not have realized this last week, but they picked a pretty sharp guy to be mayor in Ray Masayko.
We know. We made him take a test.
It started when we found out that Secretary of State Dean Heller put the State of the Vote Trivia Challenge on his Web page (sos.state.nv.us).
Mayoral candidate Tom Tatro was in the building, and Kelli Du Fresne suggested having him take the test.
Tom, City Hall reporter Amanda Hammon and I took the test that day. We had to e-mail Heller's office to get the answers, so we had to wait.
When we got the answers, the news wasn't good. Of the three, I got the high score with 18 out of 25 right. Tom was next with 17. I won't report Amanda's score, because doing so might be libelous.
My father was a government teacher, so going home this week with my head high will be difficult. But the quiz was pretty hard, and how was I supposed to know that The Red Hot Chili Peppers kicked off the "Rock the Vote?"
Mayor Ray came in the following week to take the test, achieving the high score with 20 right.
For the record, Teya Vitu's score was second highest with 19 right. Managing Editor Barry Smith, while not doing very well on the test, spotted an error in one of the questions.
"What percentage of U.S. voters cast a ballot in the 1996 presidential election?" Why, all of them of course.
Organ donor advocate Alice McKinney has been working since February to gather panels for a Northern Nevada donor quilt.
So far, six families have turned in panels for the quilt, including someone from Carson City and another family from Gardnerville.
Marv Bruse died in 1999 and his widow, Dee, put together a quilt panel with a photo of Marv from when he was in the U.S. Navy during World War II.
A Gardnerville woman, Lisa Rae Rose, who died in 1994, is also memorialized on one of the squares appearing in the quilt.
Alice, who lives in Fernley, says that when it is finished, the quilt will consist of 25 panels. She said the Transplant Network has received 32 requests for information.
Alice's own son was an organ donor, whose gift helped up to 70 people.
She said a law passed in 1999 allows Nevadans to specify that their organs be offered first to someone who lives here.
Anyone interested in learning more about organ donation may call the Transplant Network at 324-4501. Alice said people interested in contributing a panel to the quilt can call her at 575-1257.
Imagine being a 9-year-old girl sent to the garage on an errand and seeing a bear batting around a garbage can full of dog food.
That was the Bleuss' family's first encounter with a bear a few years back, but it was not the last at their Kings Canyon home.
Like a bad poltergeist, bears have been bothering the family for years. But last summer was the worst.
Mother Robin Bleuss said trouble began when the family moved the freezer and refrigerator into the yard while they worked on the interior of their garage.
"I went out their one morning and the refrigerator was tipped over and there were baby-back ribs all over the yard," she said. "He washed up in our fountain. He made a huge mess in the yard."
However, Robin and her husband had yet to see the furry bandit until one night when they heard a noise in the back.
"We looked out a window in the back door and we saw a big hairy butt hanging out of the refrigerator," she said. "I tapped on the door and it looked around and then slowly walked off the back patio."
Robin's bear was not afraid of her four dogs or anyone in the house. Things quieted down for a bit until the snow started falling last week.
"I went out to start my car and I saw the back door to the garage was open," she said.
When she got inside the garage, she saw the refrigerator had been broken into and there were cans of food all over the place.
"There was a frozen goose on the front lawn."
There was a call over the scanner on Wednesday that a bear was loose in a Kings Canyon back yard. We also received a report of a herd of deer hanging out on Division Street.
It seems to me that these animals are confirming state climatologist John James' prediction that this will be a long, cold winter.
I will be on vacation this week and the next. I plan to file my column from Las Vegas next week, so feel free to leave a message if you've got something to run. Happy Thanksgiving.
Kurt Hildebrand is assistant managing editor at the Nevada Appeal. Reach him at 881-1215 or kurtikus@aol.com
