Say what you will about our smokers, but once a ban goes into effect, they tend to obey it, no matter how much they have complained about it ahead of time. Smokers in Austin, though, at least the bar-hopping kind, seem to have a more "I'll stop when you pry it out of my cold, dead fingers" approach:
Does it ever seem to you that the press, in reporting economic news, just throws out the numbers and gets a few quotes and that nobody ever thinks about the implications of what they're writing?
The Associated Press, last Friday, reporting on the ominous implications of weak consumer spending:
Consumers battered by weak income growth and rising inflation trimmed their spending sharply in August. But analysts said a consumer confidence rebound in September should limit damage to the economy.
On the CBS News last night, the "Free Speech" segment was given to Bob Schieffer, who said the expected things about the Mark Foley case. I was struck by this line, which Schieffer tossed out casually, as if it were universally accepted:
There is only one reason for government: to improve the lives of its citizens, but this Congress has forgotten that.
One of the things I brought home from the Army was a taste for Vietnamese food, which I highly recommend if you like Asian cuisine but are tired of the usual Chinese fare. That's why you might occasionally find me at Saigon, the only restaurant in town I know with an extensive Vietnamese menu. I also recommend that place, if you think you can stand to venture into the scary south side. There's quite an eclectic mix of customers -- office workers from downtown, scruffy looking types, obvious geezer veterans, Hispanics who live nearby, members of the Vietnamese community.
Anytime there is a violent incident, the calls for more gun control come. The only difference is that this time, they're coming from former Mayor Paul Helmke:
I don't want to minimize the importance of anybody's death, but why do we overreact so much when a disease is exotic? The county's health commissioner says we should not panic over mosquito-borne illnesses, but on the other hand:
“We will be working with the Allen County Health Department proactively to help promote the importance of spraying with insect repellent day and night to try to prevent such cases as Christopher's,” the family said in a statement.
Certainly, we all know that taxes influence the choices we make and that any change will have ripple effects. Still, it's dismaying sometimes to realize there are people who spend a lot of time thinking not just about what taxes to impose to raise a certain amount of money but also about using them to direct our lives in ways they think best:
The governor goes into a kindergarten class for a photo opportunity and gets cute with the kids:
This week's professional study concluding the obvious:
CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. youths who watch television on weekdays tend to do worse in school than those who don't watch during the week, but weekend viewing appears to have no negative effects on schoolwork, researchers said on Monday.
Here's one for your irony file. "Fahrenheit 451" is about how our individuality contributes to our collective wisdom and how the resulting repository of human knowledge then allows individuals to find their way. That theme is apparently not universally understood:
Even in the pre-computer dark ages, writing a note at home didn't give students blanket protection against punishment. If we brought the note to school and passed it around and it said something like, "Mrs. So-an-So who teaches algebra ought to be met in the parking lot and beaten to within an inch of our life," too bad for us. We were out of there. That distinction still applies, which some of the "students have a First Amendment right" advocates don't seem to grasp:
This kind of story is appearing with depressing frequency:
NICKEL MINES, Pa. - A milk-truck driver carrying three guns and a childhood grudge stormed a one-room Amish schoolhouse Monday, sent the boys and adults outside, barricaded the doors with two-by-fours, and then opened fire on a dozen girls, killing three people before committing suicide.
I do wish these people would start getting it right: It's suicide first, then the murders, OK?
Everyone says we need to do something about our overreliance on property taxes in Indiana, and it's sure to be on the agenda for the next session of the General Assembly. It's also clear that the system has been tinkered with so many times that it's difficult to understand, let alone argue that it's "fair" to various kinds of property owners in any meaningful sense. But probably there will be nothing quite this radical proposed:
We all know the Friday Night Lights Syndrome -- people who make high school sports far more important than they should be, sending all the wrong messages to the kids and royally screwing up the education process. This seems to be the flip side of the coin, a school board that says, well, we can't win, so forget about it:
Just when we're getting over the great spinach scare, some Hoosiers now have this worry:
The Indiana Department of Natural Resources has advised fishermen not to eat fish caught in Wildcat Creek that runs for 81 miles through several central Indiana counties because of E. coli contamination.
Is it possible that we might achieve some sort of bipartisan consensus that what Bill Clinton did with intern Monica Lewinsky and what Rep. Mark Foley subjected male teen-age pages to were both wrong, and for the same reason?
The White House and Democratic leaders in Congress called Sunday for a criminal probe into former Rep. Mark Foley's electronic messages to teenage boys _ a lurid scandal that has put House Republicans in political peril.
The Fort Wayne International Airport is finally tackling the one thing that can increase its passenger numbers:
Airport officials designed the new site in part to counteract the tendency of people to search for cheap flights out of Indianapolis, Chicago and Detroit. According to airport research, 55 percent of passengers who should be flying out of Fort Wayne aren't. Indianapolis is the biggest draw, taking 31 percent of the potential market.
Ed at work commutes every day from Marion, and he was almost in this wreck. His was one of the northbound cars that "managed to avoid" the semi that crossed the median, and he was pretty shaken up all day. Hearing about a close call is almost like seeing the accident, and it yanks you out of your complacency. Driving day after day, we tend not to think about the reality, which is that a horrible disaster is always just a blink away.
The news just keeps getting more and more depressing for print journalism:
Even prison inmates have their standards:
A man serving a life sentence for molesting and murdering a 10-year-old southern Indiana girl now carries a constant reminder of his crime - a scrawled tattoo of the young girl's name on his forehead.
