Important Issues

Quincy's Young Professionals met with city leaders to talk about important issues to the city of Quincy......

......such as having cabs outside of Backwaters to take them home at closing time.

Oh, This Should Get the Oracle into a Fine Lather

"Van Der Hooning said he was
ordered to cut back the program
out of concerns over cost and the
worry among some on campus
that admitting dozens of “jar
heads” would dilute the quality of
the MBA program."

Yeah, those military veterans really dilute the "quality" of the fine programs at the Chicago-based executive MBA program! What planet is this guy from?

Interesting Dispute

.....between the IHSA and the Illinois Press Association over newspapers' increased use of photographs originally taken in a news context (and thus protected from invasion of privacy suits) for commercial purposes, such as reprints, coffee mugs, posters, etc. Newspapers, always searching for new revenue streams, may have drifted into the territory of commercial appropriation of individuals' images, which requires their consent.

On the other hand, who says the IHSA should control the use of a person's likeness, either? It's hard to feel much sympathy for either side.

Rainy Day Fund

Interesting concept of a "rainy day fund" as discussed by the Oakley-Lindsay Center board in Friday's paper.....usually when we speak of a rainy day fund, it's money we already have that we set aside, not money we borrow.

Tidying Up

Cleaning up the links.....the anti-Ron Brown blogger has called it quits, so out with that one. I had a link to all the WGEM blogs, but only two of them are worth bothering about, so I linked those two separately. The WGEM City Desk blog is unreadable....all that "the Desk thinks" and "the Desk wonders." News flash: a Desk is an inanimate object. It cannot think, wonder, suspect, believe, muse, ponder, propose, meditate, doubt, hesitate, calculate, negotiate, snivel, shilly-shally, or lucubrate. And the News Today blog is....mmmmmmm.....what to say? Unrewarding. Okay, I'll stick with "unrewarding." No point in a rant about that one. By contrast, the sports blog is damn good, and the book notes are a worthy addition.

Something Odd

Isn't the photo of the seemingly abandoned Corner Cafe at Fifth & Hampshire on today's front page a little out of date? I had some delicious Japanese food on that spot Thursday night.

Even-Handed

Nice even-handed story in Saturday's Whig about the Presbyterian Church's split from its denomination. Seems like churches always split over whether something is "biblical" ... to people for whom that matters, I highly recommend The Year of Living Biblically, in which author A.J. Jacobs sought to spend a year living out every commandment in the Bible. Not just a few, but all of them. He gets around the stoning commandments with a little finesse. The best part is when her has to follow the commandment that he cannot sit on anything a menstruating female has sat on, and his wife gets pissed at him and sits on every chair in the apartment....so he has to spend a week either standing or sitting on the floor.

There's also a good, even-handed comparison of the U.S. and Canadian health care systems in the Sunday St. Louis paper. It was originally published in the Dallas Morning News.

Ow!

Very tough but fair appraisal of the QU football program in Monday's paper. The column mentioned that the Hawks had 107 players on their roster this season. I'd like to know the 6-year graduation rate of that team; it's information that is required to be publicly available under the Student Right to Know Act, but you can't find it anywhere on QU's website. For comparison purposes, I checked Culver's website; its football graduation rate is appalling--19 percent for the entering class of 2000, with a four-year average of 30 percent. All the other sports actually had graduation rates higher than the college average. But at least the information is out there for you to see. QU's website just says to contact the admissions office if you want to find out.

I know we love our sports

.....but seven exclamation points on the front page is just silly.

How to Identify Criminals

They are just flat-out ugly.

Okay, #61 is cute, but the other 94 of them look like the Ugly Truck just came by and dropped them all off. Some of them actually seem to be trying to look ugly.

Note to self: when approached by an ugly person, run.

It's a darn shame......

that no Republican filed to oppose John Sullivan, and no Democrat filed to oppose Jil Tracy. Don't the parties remember the various sudden withdrawals that candidates have made in recent years?

Speaking of the legislature, I see that some guy has set a new record by sitting in a tub with 45 rattlesnakes. He should move to Illinois and run for office....he'd fit right in.

If the guy had really wanted to build assisted living apartments in the Newcomb Hotel, wouldn't he have filed suit to get that covenant lifted.....or redesigned the project by now? Or paid better attention to the deed before he bought it in the first place?

R.I.P., Twice As Mad As Hell

I am on the outside looking in at the current city government furor. I don't even have a good rumor mill source. But apparently one of the casualties of the investigation is Twice As Mad As Hell.

I would like to take a moment to appreciate T.A.M.A.H.

If you were to imagine all the grouches in Quincy -- all those people who:

-- write incoherent, angry letters to the Herald-Whig, which manage to get into print once in a while;
-- sit in the barbershop all morning, griping about the moral decay of today's youth, while waiting for the barber to take another sixteenth of an inch off their flattops;
-- believe that the closing of the Broadway Maid-Rite is a further sign of the decline of Western civilization, and that the only decent places to eat left in Quincy are Sprout's, the Patio, and of course the 12th Street Maid-Rite; and reminisce about the days when Lakeview was just a good hamburger joint where farmers from Liberty could stop on their way to Carson Pirie Scott;
-- attend the KC Barbeque and the St. Anthony's picnic, but complain that the food was better when Old So-and-So was still alive and running the kitchen;
-- believe that every school board member for the last twenty-five years, except Bud Niekamp, has been a participant in a vast conspiracy to take taxpayers' money and turn our childen into effeminate losers;
-- listen faithfully to WTAD, and cheer every time Rush lights into the "feminazis," even though he's never actually met one himself;

and rolled all those grouches into one Great Grouch, the Grouch of All Grouches, you would have Twice As Mad As Hell.

T.A.M.A.H. was a fine satiric persona of the Modest Proposal sort, and his blog posts were often painfully funny, in the same way that a Sam Kinison comedy routine was often funny.....wildly profane, creepily intense, right out there at the edge. My favorite moments were when anonymous commenters would buy T.A.M.A.H.'s routine, hook, line, and sinker, and egg him on to ever greater heights of extravagant invective. I don't know who created the T.A.M.A.H. character, but my hat's off to him or her.