AN UNSAVORY MORSEL

AN UNSAVORY MORSEL: We couldn’t have been more than two or three years old when we somehow became aware- we suspect it was via our fount of all knowledge in those days, Bug Bunny- that we had been missing out on a culinary treat called mock turtle soup.

Of course we immediately made the obvious inference- they were made from mock turtles.

We’d heard of and seen lots of kinds of turtles. Over the years we assumed that, as the case is many times, it was like places called “Bear Creek” that had no bears- it was “just the name of the turtle.”

Over the years Lewis Carroll did nothing to dissuade us from our presumptuous assumption and so a decade later a trip to a fancy restaurant and a bowl of weak broth with some soggy crackers made a, well, mockery of our postulation.

We had gotten what we had long craved only to find out it wasn’t at all what we really expected and wanted.

So it was a bit of deja vu for us today after tracking down the answer to a question that people have been asking us for a couple of months now- who the heck if Sarah Blane?

The answer- Blane is our very own mock turtle.

At first we feared the worst- that references to Blane as “Kaua`i county spokesperson” meant that our old friend Public Information Officer (PIO) Mary Daubert might be on the outs. But Daubert’s name continued to be preceded by the same title.

Observation yielded another of those assumptions- Blane’s name seemed to be attached to county press release emanating from the Kaua`i Police and Fire Departments.

Could it really be true? After years of complaints from the public and KPD chiefs that they needed their own embedded PIO in order to speak directly to the public- rather than having to filter everything through the mayor’s office and his or her PIO- KPD had their very own spokesperson?

After all, KPD is set up by charter to be an independent department with a police commission, not the mayor, doing the oversight. They don’t need to have the contents of each and every communication with the public filtered through the political whims of the mayor.

So, after a month or so of seeing Blane’s name attached to police and fire statements today we asked Mary “whassup?”

And, as if we couldn’t have predicted it, she wrote:

Sarah Blane is the newest member of Kaua`i County’s communications team. The other members of the team are Beth Tokioka, director of communications, and myself, public information officer. Sarah joined the Mayor’s office staff on Dec. 1 at the start of Mayor Carvalho’s first full term. Her title is public information assistant. She is responsible primarily for media communications for KPD and KFD, the county’s Facebook page, and assisting with community outreach efforts.

In an administration where even the smallest bit of PR minutia is carefully controlled we’d have to be as naive as a two year old searching for a delectable misnomer to think that any KPD spokesperson would be situated in KPD and answer to the chief.

We can only imagine how Chief Darryl Perry really feels about this after having had his, er, legs cut off while he was off island during the anti-marijuana rally fiasco with a deceptive press release going out on KPD letterhead under his name- a release that only hours later proved to be a lie in order to cover-up the fact that the rally was cancelled due to an ACLU compliant, not the weather.

So pity poor Sarah the county’s mock turtle. She aspires to be real meat but ends up nothing more than a mouthful of watery mush.

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We're taking a long weekend. Be back next week.