OMG, Butler is in the Final Four, so a hometown team will get to compete on national TV! This is just so cool! It's like Hoosiers! The underdog Cinderella team will give us all a reason to hope for a brighter tomorrow and . . . but wait a sec.:
Having a hometown team play in the Final Four has Indianapolis buzzing, but Butler's remarkable run — and the proximity of two other competitors — could hurt the bottom line from one of the NCAA's biggest events.
Though I lived only eight years in "The Region," I became very familiar with the kind of "Mom always liked you best" paranoia prevalent in northwest Indiana. Tucked away in a corner of the state, just around Lake Michigan from those mountains of conceit Illinois and Michigan, it was easy to think the rest of Indiana didn't know much or care about us, indeed that we'd get screwed every time we dealt with the downstaters. I knew a lot of people only had never been to Indianapolis and were only vaguely aware of the state capital.
Quick, who is the highest-paid state employee in Indiana? Certainly not the governor, who gets a paltry $95,000; he's not even in the top 3,000 when it comes to base salary (4.5 percent or 3,601 of the state's 80,161 employees make $100,000 or more) No, not Purdue University President France Cordova; she makes $450,000 a year. Indiana Supreme Court justices get $151,328 a year. Give up?
Enough with the trivialities of health care, the deficit and unemployment! Let's talk about something really important:
Technology benefiting the employee; the company, not so much:
It used to be if you wanted to catch the first round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament, you would need to come down with the "basketball flu" or take an extended lunch hour.
How the mighty have fallen:
For the 20th time in the past three decades, at least three teams from the state of Indiana have made it into the NCAA tournament. For the first time, however, the Indiana Hoosiers were not one of those three.
They weren't even eligible.
Jasmine Watson is already at the Univeristy of Massachusetts and apparently having a good freshman year, but the Indiana High School Athletic Association case involving her is still alive. When her parents moved from Elkhart to South Bend, the IHSAA ruled her ineligible to play for South Bend Washington because she moved "for athletic reasons," a violation of IHSAA rules. But a court bought her parents' argument that they moved for economic reasons.
One unfortunate aspect of the 24-hour news-gossip-celebrity bombardment is that something we might care nothing at all about
The surest way to keep Asian carp from gaining a foothold in the Great Lakes is to cut the link between Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River Basin, the navigational locks at Chicago. That would protect the $ 7 billion Great Lakes fishing industry from the carp invasion. But it would not please the barge operators who move millions of tons of commodities on the Chicago-area waterways each year. So the Obama administration has come up with a $78.5 million plan that nobody likes:
