News
Put up a Parking Lot
With an all-too familiar lack of imagination, aesthetics, history, safety and disregard for it’s own procedures City Council, in a seven to one vote (Thomas Crowder being the only renegade), sent a message about its fealty to the internal combustion engine and how easily cowed it apparently can be by a gaggle of self-indulgent youngsters staging a sit-in on the front lawn – sitting in Daddy’s cars. [Continued below the fold.]
The Downfall of the Great American Newspaper
News is what somebody else wants suppressed. All the rest is advertising.—Lord Northcliffe Advertising is the heart and soul of the free press.—Josephus Daniels Regarding the decade-long, ritual suicide of the US paper and ink “news” business, seems to me the disaster is unfolding via two factors: (1) The smartest guys in the room, as is so often the case, aren’t and/or (2) there is likely some deliberate nature to this. Other nations’ newspapers seem to be bearing up reasonably well. It isn’t so much that people don’t “like” newspapers anymore; on the contrary, surveys show that a desire for them remains high. It is simply that more and more readers are dissatisfied with today’s offerings. What is so unique about the Land of the Free, Home of the First Amendment? Newspapers are unequivocal in pointing the fingers of blame at the Internet, as if it were a vampire wolf gobbling precious advertising revenue. But sagging ad revenue is just another symptom. Read Petrblt on New Raleigh.
The Underpaid Raleigh Police Force and The City of Oz
Back in the old pre-crash days, my relationship with the man was never what you’d call adversarial, more professional in a perverse sort of way, merely a component of the operational conditions which occasionally didn’t go my way. “My job is to have fun,” I told one arresting officer as he cuffed me. “Your job is to try and catch me. You caught me.” He made this sort of muffled, choking sound. “But you’re gonna have to catch me every time!” Then he laughed. I had a good run with the not being caught part. That was the sum of my relationship with law enforcement—nothing personal, just business. The policeman’s lot is not a happy one, in part courtesy of jerks like me. Petrblt on New Raleigh.
Bad Blow Job
Autumn: a season of change; the death of the year; the contemplation of things undone… heralded by the swish of dry leaves, cerulean blue skies, bracing north winds and—from the outermost suburbs to the Capitol grounds, as ubiquitous as the caw of crows—the grating whine of the leaf blower commencing at seven AM, right alongside newschoppers hot on the trail of traffic shots. Petrblt on New Raleigh.
Race, Cultural Identity and The Election
Remarkable. The events of the last few weeks are deserving of that oft overused adjective. The people of the United States, in a show of wisdom and courage, elected a man who is truly and accurately an actual African-American, half Kenyan and half Kansan. In the welcome, resounding reverberations of a black man cresting the last political hurdle, we, all of us, additionally have a marvelous launching point for an open and wide-ranging discourse on the festering wound of the US race matter. The issue is not going to change immediately, of course, but the reverberations of the event have a potential to alter the nation and world, if channeled and directed with conscious effort. Read Petrblt on New Raleigh.
An Idle Thought
What I want to know today is why, still, in these days of high fuel costs, drivers continue to leave vehicles idling while they gallivant off to have their nails done or whatever it is they do that is so important that they forget to turn the engines off? Petrblt on New Raleigh
Sold: Raleigh City Council
The City Council’s reflexive, automatic, predictable approval of the Stanhope and Cameron Village towers should be illustrative enough of the meaninglessness of Raleigh’s Comprehensive Plan as to remove it from the serious list. Despite all the grand talk, it is a matter of history that a great majority of our elected officials seem possessed of the vision of a Chihuahua, the backbone of a frankfurter and the ethics of a five dollar road whore. I’m not much of a bettin’ man, but I saw this one coming so far off that there was no sense in keeping up with the news, automatic. I’m not to the level of insouciance of Joe. That’s next. Petrblt on New Raleigh
Post-Money Economy
Photos Courtesy base10 Let it come down. A Depression-type reality check might be just what the overfed infantile US “citizenry” could do well with. The correction/recession coming due via Market Forces sounds about right to me. The people of Cuba survived deprivation of their needs after the US embargo, urban gardens and all. Put that quarter acre ‘burb plot to use for something other the family Shih Tzu. Petrblt on New Raleigh.
Extinction of Liberty?
Anyone else catch the surreal theme of NCSU’s homecoming weekend “Operation Take Out Boston?”
Raleigh Rips His Knickers Off
“Get on with thy bad self,” Sir Walter Raleigh exhorted me from a street side banner, sporting shades that appeared to have been pilfered from Bootsy Collins’ nightstand. Sounded good to me. Friday morning, downtown was abuzz with preparations before the start of Raleigh Rips His Knickers Off aka Raleigh Wide Open, an unfortunate sobriquet mindful of a seventies porn flick. After all the shouting, and despite the grand expenditure and hoopla surrounding the wide-openness of the Convention Center, Raleigh still remains the beloved minuscule wet spot described by Barney Fife: “The big city, Andy, go go go, folks readin’ magazines, eatin’ peaches.” Raleigh Wide Open III on Petrblt.
Boylan Heights gets Dusted
Residents of Boylan Heights, the neighborhood adjoining the site of the new Central Prison Regional Medical Center and Mental Hospital, are being dusted by the airborne residual from the demolition of old buildings and site grading that is being conducted in preparation of construction. North Carolina Department of Correction and the contractor Balfour and Beatty have filed to implement standard practices to mitigate so-called fugitive dust, usually accomplished by simply watering the material being worked. They are avoiding the effort and attendant costs by letting the dust blow onto their neighbors, much as a litterbug would toss cigarette butts out the window of a car. “They’re supposed to water the site. That’s the law in every state,” said a construction worker who did not want to be identified. “I haven’t seen watering truck one. You see trucks carrying fuel to the dinosaur track hoes, but I haven’t seen a single water truck.” Read More below The Fold
Road Gone
Given North Carolina’s statistical position in the US prison-industrial state, the attendant collapse of North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services mental health sector and the already obsolete and dangerous Central Regional Hospital in Butner, a new facility to deal with the growing number of medical and mental cases remanded to the care of the Department of Correction is a genuine need.
Economic Dead Fall
The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” V.I. Lenin famously boasted. Nineteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Empire Wall Street seems to be doing what Communism couldn’t: threading its own neck through the noose.
Paride Report
The Fourth of July, forty or so dedicated cyclists braved temperatures in the mid-nineties to ride in the First Annual Independence Day Paride…
Jesse Helms: A Complicated Man
Al Adams, former legislator and law partner of Terry Sanford told me a story the day before Jesse Helms’ funeral of the time Sanford found himself seated on an airplane next to, as synchronicity would have it, Jesse Helms, as diametrically different from the ex-Governor as two southern boys could be.
That’s Raleigh’s Style
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” I was hectored during my grad-school years. Unfair, thought I, given the source: a critical theorist whose view of writers was like the butcher’s on meat, “You’re just a pig, what do you know about bacon?”
.44 or a Ford
The somber one year anniversary of the Blacksburg shootings brings us to an appropriate station-stop. Time to stretch our legs, pause and reflect on where we are, where we may be going and how the Hell we got here.
