The Nice Section

I thought Sunday's editorial concerning the school district's financial decisions was well written and argued. It stuck to established facts for the most part. Paragraph 10 wandered into "and hey, our ACT scores are lower, too," which didn't help the argument unless you believe there's a straight-line connection between tax rates and ACT scores, which there isn't. But other than that, I thought it was a strong piece of writing.

The first of the ethanol pieces was pretty good, too. I found it slightly amusing that one source's idea to solve the demand problem was to get states in the Southeast and elsewhere to require 10 percent ethanol, too. Mmmmmmmm, sorry, but why on earth would they want to do that? Just to prop up some Midwest enterprises? This is a regional hornswoggle, not a national one.

Ah, the Oakley-Lindsay Center

My favorite Quincy white elephant. Now it needs $30,000 extra in hotel/motel taxes from the Convention and Visitors' Bureau budget to help pay for maintenance and operations. (Not that the CVB has shown much vitality lately, either.)

The two agencies are unhealthily entangled to begin with. The CVB has to feed off whatever scraps the OLC board gives it, and the OLC board gets to keep at least 3/4 of the hotel/motel tax. Is it possible, just possible, that the hotel/motel tax would be better spent in other ways than paying for the upkeep on an oversized convention center? $676K would pay for a lot of national media advertising, discount coupons, promotional materials, and the like.

That big white barn would make excellent storage space for city equipment, and all the offices housed there could very easily find space in some of the many empty downtown buildings. The little theatre could just go on pretending that it's not attached to the rest of that monster. Or if the city already has plenty of equipment storage....I see a private entrepreneur renting it out or buying it, and the "monster garage sale" becoming a permanent weekend attraction. Hey, nothing says civic pride like a giant indoor flea market!

Tech Time

I can access the Herald-Whig's website using Internet Explorer, but when I'm using Firefox it hangs up and never finishes loading. Anyone else experienced this issue?

Probably just another Microsoft conspiracy.

Unclear on the Concept

If I was planning a surprise birthday party for a friend of mine, would it make sense for me to put an ad in Sunday's classified section announcing it and inviting people to come, naming time and place?

The Herald-Whig blogs

I haven't gotten in the habit of reading the H-W's blogs, so I took a look this morning. They're obviously not as freewheeling as the independent blogs (they're done on the company's dime, so naturally....), but they're not bad. Very little difference in tone or content than the columns that appear in the paper itself, really.

I'll probably put them on my "Quincy Forums" rotation and read 'em every couple of weeks or so just to see if anything interesting has popped up.

Further interesting items

While browsing around the court records today, I wondered if anything new had happened in Sister Margaret Feldner's lawsuit against Quincy University for her firing.....oops "excusing from duties." Lo and behold, it no longer can be found in the Adams County Court Records! I used to look it up every two or three months just out of curiosity. Wonder if they've settled and sealed the records? What other explanation could there be?

Odd

The idea has been rattling around the blog world for weeks now that Rezmar Corporation, one of Tony Rezko's little babies, is the owner of the Newcomb Hotel. However, the building's owner is identified in the media as a man named Victor Horowitz, who bought it from Rezmar in December 2003. Perhaps someone can enlighten me if there is any other connection between Rezko and Horowits.

Now, Horowitz (whose actual name is Avigdor, not Victor, although he goes by both) is plenty of trouble himself....one of the nursing homes he operated, North Plaza, has gone out of business, and two others, Heritage in Champaign and Jackson Heights in Farmer City, went into receivership in September after he defaulted on promissory notes from the JP Morgan Chase Bank. So there's no need to drag Rezmar into the picture to get a thoroughly unhappy prediction as to what might happen to the Newcomb Hotel property. The whole receivership saga can be found at

http://www.websupp.org/data/NDIL/1:06-cv-04803-64-NDIL.pdf

Still, it's odd to me that the whole background of the Newcomb's ownership has never surfaced in our local media.

Eeeeeeek

I find myself in agreement with the Walter Williams column. I'd better go lie down.

How exciting

"The Quincy High School quiz bowl team captured the championship in the Quincy University Academic Challenge tournament with a 475-365 win over Quincy Notre Dame High
School team Feb. 23."

Mmmmm, wasn't that almost two weeks ago?

Seriously, I doubt if holding back the results of the Academic Challenge until after it's aired does anything to improve the show's ratings.....which is the obvious reason why this little story wasn't reported Feb. 24.

The Whig's new website

I've been waiting for a while before commenting on the Whig's Web makeover to let the bugs work out. Everyone I've talked to has had trouble with switching over their login. But those difficulties appear to have been solved.

I find the front page extremely cluttered and uninteresting. The typeface of the story heads is small and monotonous. Your opening view is dominated by a huge contest entry promo and some randomly selected thumbnail-sized art. The reasons typical readers would have for visiting the website, in my opinion, would be to find the .pdf versions of the paper when they are away from home and to read the Web-only features, such as the blogs and updated breaking stories. So how do we find those things? Well, to get to the .pdfs, you have to scroll down to the "interactive toolbox" and choose from among several same-sized selections. For the blogs, hunt your way along a menu of 13 identical words at the top of the screen. In other words, those features are hidden in the wallpaper.

The blogs themselves, on the other hand, seem to have quite a bit of work going into them. Too bad there are only two news blogs. And no, American Idol and Fitness Challenge don't count as news.

Simplify, unify, and focus the design. Direct our eyes. Don't just fling a double handful of junk onto the screen and hope that some of it sticks. WGEM and KHQA suffer from the same problem. The Hannibal newspaper's website is substantially more coherent.

Life's Little Ironies

The Quincy School Board finally achieves consensus on something....and then gets stiffed by their candidate who wants more money. I hope he's not thinking of that as a negotiating tactic.

The governors finally reach a handshake deal on a new bridge over the Mississippi in St. Louis, just as one of them is about to go out of office and the other is about to....well, whatever. Hope Blunt checked for his wristwatch after that handshake. He should ask the legislature about how well those handshake deals work.