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According to some reports I’ve read, as many as one million Americans may have been caught completely unaware by yesterday’s switch from analog to digital television broadcasting.

I think each and every one of them should write a nice, long letter to President Carter to complain about it.

Swindler’s List

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Let’s see:

  1. Bilk taxpayers out of $12 million to tear down a neighborhood and build an unneeded baseball stadium downtown? Check.
  2. Rename the team in honor of a punctuation mark (and not even the correct punctuation mark) and create a logo that looks like an angry purple penis? Check.
  3. Mismanage your business to the point where all construction on the stadium stops and contractors are owed almost half a million dollars in back pay? Check.
  4. Use this stellar track record to blackmail the taxpayers into lending you another $16 million so the bulldozed neighborhood, half-built stadium, and surrounding blight don’t hang around for another ten years or so attracting vermin? Check.
  5. Provide actual new stadium and revenue for the city while paying back the loan? Probably not anytime soon.

Who didn’t see this coming? Apparently not our esteemed mayor. But it’s amazing he can see much of anything, what with his head stuffed so far up Billy Prim’s ass and all…

Stadium as Panacea

Watching the city council meeting a few minutes ago, I found Evelyn Terry’s comment that Winston-Salem’s new stadium will somehow bring nothing less than total “social justice” to Winston-Salem very interesting.

And by “interesting,” I mean “idiotic.”

Also amusing were Dan Besse’s line of questioning — essentially nothing but a pointed attempt to have the city manager restate “for the record” all the very comforting assurances he’d just made in his report about how no tax money would be involved, how backing out would ultimately be “more expensive”, etc. — and Vivian Burke’s self-righteous scolding of all dissenters for “speaking negatively.” It was lovely the way they all managed to congratulate themsleves for their handling of the issue, though.

Of course, the bailout passed unanimously. As the mayor, entire council, the Journal, and damned near everyone else in the city’s power structure had been calling it “inevitable” since it was first announced, I had no illusion that there would be any actual deliberation.

Father’s Day 2009

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It’s a minor miracle. For the first time in recent memory, I was able to find my dad a father’s day present that he not only liked, but actually got sort of excited about. You see, my dad is not just difficult to shop for; he’s damned near impossible. He has almost no hobbies, and when he says “don’t get me anything,” I think he really means it.

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This year, though, I came up with something really unusual. Since I’m working temporarily in a museum where many city archives have landed, I was able — OK, my boss was able — to find a large photo of the entire 1950 Greensboro Fire Department, with captions identifying everyone in the department, including my dad, who was in his second (and final) year there at the time. He really liked it and was really excited about it, and is planning to take it to show all his friends, etc. It was one of those rare moments when I actually felt like I’d done something kind of cool for my dad. It was nice.

Don’t forget to call your own dad today, if he’s still around.

Zombie Time

The great thing about (unintentionally) waking up three hours earlier than you really need to is that by 10:30, you feel like you’ve really gotten a lot done. The bad thing is that by 11:00, you’re so tired you don’t care.

Alternatively

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The new Pittsburgh Magazine has a blurb about an upcoming Kid Rock show where he’s described as an “Alternative/Southern rocker”. Ahem. I’ll ignore the fact that he’s actually from Michigan, but using the term “alternative” to describe Kid Rock is a little like calling Wal-Mart an exclusive boutique. Kid Rock is about as mainstream (not to mention talentless, irritating, boring…) as it gets.

But I guess that’s pretty much true of just about everything that labels itself “alternative” nowadays. I’m a middle-aged guy who doesn’t really even follow new music all that closely anymore. If someone like me has heard of every act in Billboard’s “Top Ten Alternative” chart, there is absolutely nothing alternative about it. Yes, I understand that there are actual alternatives to “alternative” but I’m talking about the genre which is now little more than a marketing term and pretty much consists of three types of music:

  1. Over-aggressive metal-inspired schlock that is more or less the same crap Korn was doing badly more than a decade ago,
  2. White trash rap-funk-metal that pales in comparison to what the Red Hot Chili Peppers were doing two decades ago, and,
  3. Bland rehashes of the Foo Fighters (and I include the actual Foo Fighters in this group as well, since they now sound pretty much like a bland rehash of themselves).

Anyway, as long as I’m ranting on pop culture, here are three more thoughts:

  • If your radio station plays a jingle that goes “cool songs in the morning on K-104.7” and then follows it with, say, “Faith” by George Michael, people are bound to ask “What’s wrong with this picture?”
  • There is no such thing as a “gas saving SUV” and no radio commercial will ever convince me otherwise.
  • Unless they go on a shooting spree, Jon and Kate will never be newsworthy*. Neither will Perez Hilton. And that’s good.

*Yes, I’m admitting here that about two weeks ago, until we both read Leonard Pitts’ column on the subject**, neither the hubby nor I had a clue who the fuck Jon and Kate were as they glared at us from tabloids in the supermarket.

**I’m also admitting here that Leonard Pitts is kind of my favorite newspaper columnist these days. But that’s off-topic.