Waymo incident raised eyebrows

If you are faced with a car or truck heading toward you, the polite thing to do (for the drivers, assuming humans are behind the wheel of both, of course) is to pull over and allow the other to pass. That’s just a given. Perhaps Waymo hasn’t gotten the memo. It’s not clear.

We didn’t hesitate to determine if the robotic auto would behave in a rational fashion. In any event, a head-on mistake was avoided. Thankfully. Your scribbler pulled over to the side to make way for the oncoming sedan.

Maybe the Waymo car would have done the same at the last moment. We didn’t wait to find out. Prudence is always the wise course of action. Maybe Waymo will get the point as well. One can only hope.

THIS IS GETTING OLD: When will the drought end? It’s been 38 long years since a public high school girls’ basketball team representing the Central Coast Section (which includes San Mateo County) won a California Interscholastic Federation state championship.

The 2025-26 season has come and gone and, once again, the section, which embraces about 150 schools, has come up dry. The girls from Burlingame High were the last (and only) CCS public team to capture such a crown back in the spring of 1988 during the Reagan administration — a sporting aberration that sticks out like a sore thumb now more than ever.

Menlo-Atherton High got to within one game of a state final appearance but lost last week. Half Moon Bay High played for a CIF championship in 2025 and was defeated. The interminable situation has become a perplexing head-scratcher for followers of this hoops genre.

Conversely, CCS private and parochial schools have garnered 30 state hoops titles. That’s a yawning 30-to-one athletic achievement gap. This is getting old.

COURTHOUSE SQUARE VIGNETTE: The scene at the Courthouse Square in Redwood City can often be lively and diverse. It’s a gathering place for one and all.

The welcoming plaza, located on Broadway in the heart of a reinvigorated downtown district, is especially busy when the weather is indeed “Best by Government Test,” as the town proudly declares.

So maybe it was not altogether surprising to watch a woman wash her laundry in a plaza water feature and dry it on chairs and handy fencing last week as the temperature rose.

Perhaps unhoused (but that might not be the case, we are not judging), she seemed right at home out there in the bright sunshine.

No one bothered her. It was one more example that the Courthouse Square is for everyone, no matter what his or her circumstances might be.

DAVE NEWHOUSE DIES AT 87: Back in a local prep basketball mode, the passing of journalist Dave Newhouse last week was a reminder of his book, “The Game Would Not End.”

It is a retrospective about a fabled 1962 contest between Ravenswood High School of East Palo Alto and St. Elizabeth’s High School of Oakland at Stanford University.

Newhouse’ book dealt with both sports and the culture at that time. The early 1960s in the Bay Area were a time of societal change.

The 1962 game was a five-overtime thriller, the championship contest of the long-gone Peninsula Basketball Tournament. Ravenswood won, 60-58, on a clutch basket made by Nate Branch. Since then, both schools have closed.

Newhouse, a Menlo-Atherton High alum who wrote for the now-shuttered Oakland Tribune for nearly a half-century, died at the age of 87.

DISTRICT SEEKS PRINCIPALS: The San Mateo Union High School District is seeking to fill two principal positions for the 2026-27 academic year.

Both Aragon in San Mateo and Burlingame are losing their top administrators, Dr. Michael Jones (two-year tenure) and Dr. Jen Fong (four-year tenure) respectively.

Applications for those posts are being accepted by the district. Parent/student surveys to assist with the recruiting process have a completion deadline of March 23.

For more information interested parties can visit the district website, smuhsd.org.