The idea came to Otis Miller in 1996.

He could hear the sirens of an emergency vehicle wailing so he stopped. So did everyone else. Except for one driver who almost collided with it. He had an epiphany: What if drivers were also alerted with a light, not just the sound?

Wait, don’t fire trucks, police cars and ambulances already have those? Yes, but they can be difficult to see if coming from another direction and are still far enough away. But isn’t that what the siren is for? Yes, but some people have the car stereo up too loud or they’re chatting away on the phone and don’t  always hear the sirens.

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 Debbie Cook, the Democrat who ran unsuccessfully against Rep. Dana Rohrabacher for the 46th Congressional District last year, managed to score very good tickets to the presidential inauguration.

Guess how?

Rohrabacher “called me and asked if I wanted them,” Cook said.

I laughed. The two ran a tough campaign and like most races there were of course some hurt feelings , but it was nice to hear Rohrabacher do something that classy.

“I ran a nice clean campaign so I guess he didn’t have any hard feelings,” Cook said. “he just called and offered two tickets so of course I said yes.”

Debbie got tickets in the yellow section. Those were a bit better than my purple-section tickets.

“I don’t think he had a lot of Republican friends who wanted to go,” Cook joked.

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Now and again some regular letter writers to the Pilot gripe about how we edit their contributions. I try to explain to them it’s nothing personal. We basically aim to correct grammatical mistakes and make sure it fits our style. For instance, you might prefer to write “twenty-five,” but our style is to use the number “25.” That’s standard style. Generally, you spell out numbers one to nine, but it’s the digits after that (there are, of course, exceptions but I won’t bore you with the details).

Often the most frustrating thing is editing copy down to fit the space we have available. Then you get into judgment territory — and some writers can get a little precious about their words. You may recall recently Assemblyman Chuck DeVore got a little hot when our copy editors chopped down one of his submissions to our “That’s Debatable” feature.

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