Budget Balancing

Many woeful remarks this morning about the closing of state parks and historic sites.

The cuts are fine with me -- when you're $2 billion in the hole, you've got to start cutting and cutting fast. Too bad he didn't do more.

And of course the governor is grandstanding. He's always grandstanding. But so is the legislature; apparently striking poses is part of their job description.

The sooner they get started making real cuts in the budget, the better. Sad to say, neither seems willing to confront the state's budget problems the way a businessperson would: when your income doesn't match your expenses, you either raise income or reduce expenses, or both. Closing a few parks isn't going to reduce expenses $2 billion.

The Road of Excess

Somebody complained a while back that I don't blog enough. Fair enough.

Fact is, I'm handicapped on that score. I don't hate the city government, I'm not obsessed with any particular topic, and I don't believe in posting my private thoughts for all to see. So I'm not a very good candidate to be a blogger in the first place.

Since I started blogging, several other blogs have gotten into the media-watch game, and because the beating of dead horses has never appealed to me, I do less media criticism than I used to.

I do enjoy reading blogs, though . . . I figure that of every five entries I read, one will be interesting. So if one out of every five entries I write is interesting in return, I've given back.

Reconsidering

I have a policy of never mentioning writers by name in this blog, because I don't want it to be about personalities; I like to talk about practices, not people. But earlier this week I had a moment of enlightenment, and I think a mea culpa is in order.

I think I have underestimated Steve Eighinger's work.

His news reporting has always been pretty straightforward, like most of the newswriting at the Whig. I've poked fun at the occasional infelicitous phrase, but everybody writes a clunker now and then. But I'll confess that I have almost always chortled at the columns -- and for reasons that I thought at the time were justifiable. The insanely lowbrow lists of favorite movies and TV shows. The ill-concealed tubthumping for favorite preachers. The unabashed love of fattening food. The fixation on "American Idol" and NASCAR.

I was starting to do that again this week, reading Sunday's column about (of course) "American Idol," NASCAR, a preacher, and TV personalities. Then my moment of enlightenment came:

Those things are exactly what everybody else in Quincy is interested in.

The guy's a freakin' genius. Just by being interested in the stuff he's interested in, he has perhaps inadvertently put his finger on the beating, cholesterol-laden pulse of Quincy. Or maybe it's not so inadvertent after all.....now I'm starting to doubt myself even more.

I'll bet that column is one of the most well-read columns in the paper every week. So what if he doesn't watch movies with subtitles? Nobody else in Quincy does either. I'm the one who's out of step here.

In other local news,

There was a ribbon-cutting up in Fairfield yesterday. That's Fairfield, Iowa. Yeah, the town 106 miles from here.

Memo

To: The Associated Press writer who came up with today's lead story for the Herald-Whig

From: All the News

Re: Springfields

Please note that Lincoln made his transition to the White House from Springfield, Illinois, not Springfield, Missouri. I know it all looks the same from 30,000 feet, but down here in flyover country we try to maintain a few little distinctions.

cc: Herald-Whig copy editors . . . you might want to read the AP stuff before you paste it in. Even the Associated Press makes a mistake now and then.

Another downtown landmark closes

Whatever the city has been doing to "help" downtown businesses, it needs to stop it immediately and do the opposite. Because they're closing faster than a storm door in a gust of wind.

Historic, historical

OK, I'm gonna holler at those little critters on WGEM's morning show if they mix up those two words again.

There! Hm, no response. Maybe I need to holler louder.