Oh, are we playing "let's concoct random conspiracy theories without reference to fact?" How about this one: There are no staff people at the clerks office! They are all holograms! What you see behind the counter there is actually a realistic three dimensional projection. If you tried to go more than two feet beyond the front counter you would run into a solid wall - the front surface of the vast alien computing engine that projects the appearance of a county clerks office to allow it to gather the vital statistics of the City of Ann Arbor as part of an alien xenosociology research project. This theory explains everything ... or it would if there was much of anything in need of explaining.

You know, even in workplaces where a boss's hiring decisions are not as visible to public scrutiny as those of a civil servant, departments hardly ever seem to get filled up with "kin and cronies". Most people have a hard time finding more than a few kin or cronies who actually want to work directly for them. Heck, my kin and cronies seem to prefer to move to other cities.

I can't think that public speculation about what horrors could conceivably lurk in the county clerks office is particularly helpful to smoothing Larry's transition in his new job. If the staff there are worried about the transition, having random semi-anonymous people publically accuse them in front of their future boss of various arbitrary things isn't exactly going to help put them at ease.

Honestly, I think Larry might need to think about whether this blog is entirely compatible with his new job. My personal inclination would be to keep the blog, but lose this comments section. One of the sad side effects of public office is that you need to be a bit more careful of your public statements, and letting people embellish them in this way just doesn't make sense to me. Silly comments posted about his team elsewhere on the net Larry can blithely ignore, but ones posted on his blog tend to demand a response from him. If he's silent it just starts people wondering whether or not he actually suspects them of being holograms.

The blog itself is good though. I can see the day when we'll have a President who keeps a personal daily blog. "Fireside chat" for the 21st century. Well, not within the next four years, but maybe after that.