The city is busy making patches to keep its Harrison Square deal from falling apart and trying to recover from the has it hash made of the public safety academy. In the meantime, it is flunking the fundamentals by losing a neighborhood:
The city is busy making patches to keep its Harrison Square deal from falling apart and trying to recover from the has it hash made of the public safety academy. In the meantime, it is flunking the fundamentals by losing a neighborhood:
Well, hell, let's bail them out, too. What's a lousy $1 billion considering the numbers we're talking about today? As a matter of fact, everybody get in line. Airlines, you're right behind the automakers. One-chair barber shops, come on down!
In an effort to combat its budget deficit of over $1 billion, the United States Postal Service is, allegedly, trying to upsell its premium services while hiding its less expensive options.
Former Fort Wayne resident Amy Wellborn considers this "one of the oddest places" she's ever lived. Her lengthy post mostly is about Fort Wayne's parochialism and resistance to change:
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to blame it all on the Amish. Seriously.
The planet has just gained a little in its supply of common sense:
There was a huge controversy when the silly burghers of Torbay in Devon slapped an X-rating on the Life Of Brian movie.
They accused the Python team of blasphemy and mocking the story of Christ.
In case you haven't been paying attention:
In Washington these days, an 11-figure expenditure barely attracts notice.
Who knew? Sheep aren't people:
The Michigan Court of Appeals has ruled that a Battle Creek man who was convicted of sodomizing a sheep will not have to register as a sex offender when he is released from prison.
[. . .]
This is one of the oddest arguments I've seen this political season:
Dude, guv sz no txt whi drv. bmr!
Drivers caught using their phones to write, read or send messages will be hit with a $20 ticket the first time and $50 on each subsequent offense. The penalty is a base fine, which is uniform across the state, but does not include the fees added by local municipalities.
A $20 ticket? Boy, that's probably like, you know, two or three days of txt cst.
Still paying off a building after it's torn down. Only government would have the audacity to do something so breathtakingly irrsponsible:
INDIANAPOLIS -- Indianapolis leaders on Wednesday did what a homeowner could never legally do -- demolish a building while the mortgage is still unpaid.
The three gubernatorial candidates talked to a bunch of editors about the press this week. Libertarian Andrew Horning was the most critical:
Although he has run for governor as a Libertarian before, Horning suggested that the media figures he will only get 2 percent of the vote "so let's throw him off the side."
He even quipped that it would fine if they called him "poopy head" if it got him more press.
Barack Obama is a great speaker but is said to be a spotty debater, and foreign policy is supposed to be John McCain's strong suit. So this just seems dumb:
Our 2nd District Rep. Mike Pence is getting some attention for his pithy quote on the bailout proposal:
"I must tell you, there are those in the public debate who have said that we must act now. The last time I heard that, I was on a used-car lot," said Rep. Mike Pence, R-Indiana. "The truth is, every time somebody tells you that you've got to do the deal right now, it usually means they're going to get the better part of the deal."
Roger Ebert posted an article, "Creationsim: Your questions answered," on his blog as a bit of satire. Anybody who knows the least little thing about him will know this was not meant to be straightforward. But there were thousands of comments on his site and throughout the blogosphere reflecting the widespread conviction that age and/or illness had turned him into a Creationist or a lunatic.
Do states have collective personalities? Research just published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science says so, and, based on 600,000 questionnaires, states were ranked in five categories: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness:
One of my favorite Hoosier excursions over the years has been to the June bluegrass festival in Bean Blossom -- good music (when Uncle Pen played the fiddle!), good food (ham 'n beans n' cornbread!) and friendly people in a relaxed atmosphere. And you get to see and even meet the people whose records you've been buying for years. So hooray for Steve Johnson, the Indianapolis businessman who is trying to save the place.
Criminal genius of the week:
A text-messaged picture led to the arrest of a Perry Meridian High School student who confessed to and apologized for vandalizing a rival high school, police said.
Investigators said the 15-year-old student, whose name was not released because he is a juvenile, found an open door at Franklin Central High School in an area that is under construction.
How would you like to be seated in a restaurant booth and have an SUV come crashing in on you? Greenfield police have released the video of a high-speed chase that ended with such a crash. "Me and the cook, we look at each other and run out and they're like 'Down, down.' " I'm like OK, you were scared, huh?
Let's keep our eye on the ball:
Only one of the three candidates for governor supports an amendment limiting residential property taxes to 1 percent of a home's assessed value. Incumbent Republican Mitch Daniels, who pushed for the proposal during the last legislative session, will make it a priority of the next session, his senior policy adviser said last week. Democrat Jill Long Thompson and Libertarian Andrew Horning oppose the cap but for different reasons.
I confess to being one of the ones surprised to find out he isn't dead:
Abe Vigoda found out he was dead in 1982. He was doing a play in Calgary, Alberta, while a People magazine writer visited the "Barney Miller" wrap party in Los Angeles, California.
"Somehow it mentioned in the article that 'the late Abe Vigoda' was not [there]," Vigoda recalls.
This will go over well:
Mayor Richard Daley said today the city will ask bars near Chicago's baseball stadiums to voluntarily cut off alcohol sales after the seventh inning of home games where the Cubs or White Sox could clinch a playoff series.
While other city officials cautioned that they had yet to discuss the plan with bar owners, the mayor said it was a no-brainer.
