Hoosier lore

Guess it's a sign of tough times when people decide improving their minds has to give way to more basic concerns.

It's OK to send your team to play basketball here, but please quit trying to hijack our tourists:

Tourism boosters from Louisville, Ky., planned to transform Downtown Indianapolis into their canvas today -- by projecting red-tinged laser images and messages on the sides of Downtown buildings.

The light show would have proclaimed why Louisville (with its Sweet 16 hoops team, the University of Louisville Cardinals) is so wonderful.

Yesterday, we tackled state songs. Today, let's do flags. Ever looked at Indiana's? It has a torch, the name "Indiana" and 19 stars -- know what they mean?

When's the last time you saw anybody smoking on TV, unless it was in an old movie on one of the cable networks? Are smokers going to start feeling like blacks must have in the 1950s, when television producers pretended they didn't exist? Just a passing thought, triggered by:

Smoking in a film? Rate it R, so that no children under 17 are exposed to it.

That idea, at least, is what anti-smoking advocates were promoting at a rally Wednesday evening in Downtown Indianapolis.

So, I've gotten drunk and stupid once or twice in my life. But there weren't that many witnesses, and none of the people involved have written books about the incidents so far as I know, so my indiscretions have been allowed to dissolve into the mists of time. They haven't haunted the rest of my life. There was this one time, for example, when a bunch of us who were stationed at Fort Hood started drinking on Friday night in San Antonio and somehow ended up in a motel room in Mexico . . . but let's not ruin a good memory.

Maryland is worried that its state song, written during the Civil War when people were kind of riled up, might be a little rough by today's standards, and there is some thought of softening it up:

The song begins with a hostile reference to President Abraham Lincoln, who brought troops through Baltimore en route to protect Washington: "The despot's heel is on thy shore, Maryland! His torch is at thy temple door, Maryland!"

Anybody who's ever followed a sports team has probably given in at least once or twice to the Evil Ref Syndrome. It always seems -- especially in close games -- that those rotten officials are calling us for fouls we never committed and letting the other side get away with murder! Why, somebody must be paying them off or something! Usually, this is all good, clean fun, emotions getting away from us in the heat of vicarious battle.

I was pretty sure I wasn't going to like the Journal Gazette's editorial called "A community's loss" right from the opening, when it quoted FDR's admonition for everybody to "remember always that all of use . . . are descended from immigrants and revolutionists." What else could this be but another JG effort to urge disobeying the law if it involves illegal immigrants? Sure enough -- this is the first paragraph:

This ban would cross the line, wouldn't it?

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. - The Monroe County Board of Health is considering a proposal to prohibit smoking in vehicles carrying children.

[. . .]

Caudill says children are a "vulnerable population" who may not be able to avoid secondhand smoke.

Mississippi, smarter than Indiana?

Among the bills signed into law by Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour on Friday is House Bill 1568, which bans the use of cameras to catch motorists running red lights.