The Great Tomato Raid
Or Smokin’ Salsa
A few days after the front page story
headlined Goat dies in drive-by shooting
(the victim was Maria, a friendly Nigerian dwarf goat who lived in a Santa Fe
neighborhood until her untimely demise in September, 2010), another shocking
headline assailed the readers of the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper: Pot raid at school turns up tomatoes.
After a heavily armed helicopter buzzed the
Camino de Paz Montessori School and Farm near Española in New Mexico and
fascinated the 12 students that comprised the entire population of the
school (the kids were excited because “They
could see gun barrels outside the helicopter…”), several men wearing
bullet-proof vests arrived in vans and demanded to inspect the school’s
greenhouse.
Patricia
Pantano, the education director of the school, which teaches farming as a way
to learn math and science, said, “As we have nothing to hide,… they went in the
greenhouses and they found it was tomato plants and so that was the story.”
Well,
not quite. It was just a bit
embarrassing for local authorities, who had to suffer Internet derision on
several blogs, some of which were in favor of legalizing the marijuana that
wasn’t found.
Grasscity.com
offered the headline: Put on your vests,
boys, those tomatoes might shoot back.
Tokeofthetown.com countered with “Your tax dollars at work.”
On boingboing.net, one blogger sneered, “Apparently
this is what the police from the Naked Gun movies do when not shooting.”
On the same web site, someone named “Charlotte
Corday” wrote, “Did they shoot the class’s guinea pig just to show them who’s
boss?” Corday was executed in 1793 after
she stabbed to death Jean-Paul Marat in his bathtub, which became the subject
of a famous painting. I doubt that
Corday is blogging today.
Freerepublic.com’s blogger Notary Sojac
observed, “Gotta have the tomatoes to make the salsa to feed the potheads
suffering the munchies.” This introduces
the possibility that the flying, vest-wearing
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