Oh tragedy of tragedies: Evan Mecham finally died.

Never heard of him? Ah, that's because you didn't live in Arizona during the 70s and early 80s.

Mecham was one of those guys whose name showed up on every ballot for years, not unlike Washington state's Mike the Mover. Mecham made his money selling cars, so his campaigns were well-financed. He was a devout Mormon, and in Arizona during the 70s and 80s that automatically meant a substantial number of votes. Still, he never won an election. The majority of people in Arizona thought, correctly, that he was a right-wing nutjob.

Then in 1986, the Democrats ended up splitting the vote after one of the candidates ran as an independent, and Mecham had his chance.

It wasn't so much that Mecham was an evil man, merely clueless and combative. He was a product of his generation of Arizona Mormons, who'd absorbed Brigham Young's racism and deep distrust of secular government, and he ignored the first rule of holes: When in one, stop digging.

Mecham almost immediately made national headlines when he used a flimsy legal excuse to rescind any state celebration of Martin Luther King Day. He called "pickaninny" a term of endearment. To critics who called him a racist throwback, he retorted: "I've got Black friends. I employ Black people. I don't employ them because they're Black. I employ them because they are the best people who applied for the cotton-picking job.''

He made enemies throughout state government almost instantly by cutting every program he could get his hands on.

Mecham was such an embarrassment that a recall campaign started gathering serious momentum, getting over 300,000 signatures. But before the recall campaign could get on the ballot, Mecham was impeached, thanks to some fast-and-loose games he'd been playing with his finances and campaign contributions. He was replaced by Rose Mofford, she of the beehive hairdo and eternal quiet competence, who somehow managed to get the state government put back together.

It's always worth the reminder: your elected officials could be worse.

Via solarbird, this story just made my morning:

Paris' famous mausoleum, the Panthéon, has a 150-year-old clock that hasn't worked since the 1960s. The French government apparently had no interest in doing anything about it.

So without official approval, a group of self-described "urban explorers" snuck into Le Panthéon, with a clock maker, for a full year to restore the clock. They created a hidden workshop on site with "a design living room, wood furniture built onsite, electricity, and a computer connected to the Internet" and repaired the mechanism and the bells to the clock. They presented the results to the horrified administrator of the Panthéon, who was fired not long thereafter.

Apparently the new administrator acknowledges that the clock works, but refuses to wind it up or ring the clock's bells.

News article
The restoration team's tale
Pictures of the repair

The reminiscences of Dr. John H. Watson, M.D., as edited and published by Conan Doyle, make clear two things: first, that Holmes had visited and enjoyed the United States; second, that Watson hadn't.

( Did Holmes visit the US in the 1890s? )

Edit: Fixed up the formatting and added an LJ cut.