No Postings on March 31

To celebrate the day that this blogmeister officially stops being young.

I share a birthday with political and quasi-political figures Michael Savage, Al Gore, Barney Frank and Patrick Leahy. The Eiffel Tower was also finished on March 31.

March 31 is also the anniversary of the first instance of Daylight Savings Time in the USA (1918), and of Netscape releasing the source code of their browsers under an open source license, which would eventually beget Firefox, Thunderbird and NVu (1998, that being the first day I could legally drink).

2007 Municipal General Election Preview

There are only two issues in the area that interest me enough to comment.  City school board doesn’t matter because it’s about to be made impotent.

ST. LOUIS CITY PROPOSITION P

Recommendation:  No
Prediction:  Passes

Commentary:  This would force a public vote on all future matters regarding the seizing of St. Louis City park land for development.  This proposal is in reaction to the BJC-Forest Park issue.  I get the feeling that this is the kind of law that, while it appears to be a positive thing to do now, that many people in future St. Louis city are going to wish that their 2007 ancestors had not passed.

OVERLAND CITY PROPOSITION A

Recommendation:  Yes
Prediction:  None

Commentary:  Would recall Mayor “Raggedy” Ann Purzner.  We all owe it to City Attorney Bob Herman to endorse this thing, and to vote for it if you live in Overland, because of how Purzner illegally tried to oust Herman.

Combine Two Paragraphs, And It Makes More Sense

Combining two disjointed paragraphs of this KSDK article, and it makes a lot more sense:

Ricky Martin, who was named person of the year in 2006 by the Latin Recording Academy, has hits including “Livin’ la Vida Loca” and “Shake Your Bon-Bon,” defended the right of pop stars to come out of the closet, saying he felt solidarity with Christian Chavez of Mexican band RBD, who recently said publicly that he is gay.

If you don’t remember who Ricky Martin is, then don’t feel bad. Those two hits listed above, released way back in 1999, were his only two hits.

If you do remember who Ricky Martin is, this means that you also probably remember who Lou Bega is, and that begs the question: What happened to Mambos No. 1 through 4? And why no Mambos No. 6 and higher?

It Happened Here, Too

The Bluffton University (Ohio) baseball team, five of its members were killed in that infamous Atlanta bus crash earlier this month, is playing ball again.

It’s an old story, but there is a local analogue to that crash, or more specifically, poor road engineering that caused that crash there and a number of similar ones here.

What happened in Atlanta is that the bus driver was driving along an Atlanta freeway, in the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV, or Carpool) Lane. In Atlanta, the HOV lane is simply the leftmost freeway lane striped off with double white lines, in contrast to some cities whose HOV lanes are barrier-separated.

There are a few direct exits from the HOV lanes in Atlanta to regular streets and boulevards, but since the HOV lane is on the left, the exit is a left exit. That bus with the Bluffton baseball team was going through Atlanta on a foggy night, and the bus driver, who himself was fatigued, couldn’t read the signs as he approached one of these HOV exits, and continued to the left on the exit ramp as if he was staying on the freeway. In other words, his own default expectation made him think that forking right was an exit.

But he actually was on an exit, ascending up a ramp to a signal with a street. His speed continued to be that of regular freeway traffic, and he ran right through the signal, and crashed through the other side of the overpass, and the bus fell right back down onto the freeway.

St. Louis had a similar setup until the late 1990s. Going westbound on I-70 through north city, which has barrier-separated reversible (not HOV, Missouri has no carpool lanes) lanes, there was an exit for Union Blvd., where one could exit the express lanes (assuming those lanes were westbound) onto Union, or exit the main lanes to Union. The exit for the express lanes and the one for the main lanes led to the same ascending ramp, so the express lane exit was a right exit, but the exit for the main lanes was a left exit.

Every once in awhile, the same thing would happen here. Somebody, confused by fog, darkness or alcohol, would think that the left exit from the main lanes was the continuation of the main lanes, while the three main lanes were themselves the exit, and they would race toward Union on that ramp and crash into the overpass wall on the opposite end, or fall off of it.

All those problems were swept away in the late 1990s when the state reconstructed the interchange as a regular right-hand exit ramp only from the main lanes.

Are You Hornier Than A 5th Grader?

Monroe (La.) News-Star:

Two fifth-graders had sex on a classroom floor while two others fondled each other in the classroom, according to a teacher at Spearsville High School.

And that might have happened because:

Students at the kindergarten through 12th grade school are unruly, disrespectful and rarely disciplined, Walker said.

“They cuss at the teachers and throw things at them, and nothing is done,” Walker said. “There was even one student who grabbed a teacher in the butt and nothing was done. The students run the school.”

Spearsville, Louisiana, probably not named after Britney Spears, is a dot on the map in the north central part of the state. Wikipedia’s article states that Spearsville is 96.7% white.

 

Parliamo Italiano in Italia

Italy’s parliament has approved an amendment to the country’s constitution making Italian the official language of Italy. What a shock.

There were actually two main and contradictory pillars of opposition to the motion. One were outright communists, who oppose anything that legitimizes particular groups of human beings over the universal, and the Northern League, which has pushed for Lombard irredentism, and whose Italian dialect is more Venetian than Sicilian.

They’re Angry Alright

New York’s Catholics are indignant over the naked chocolate Jesus statue. While they plan to do a lot about it, read this article carefully.

What is more interesting here is words you won’t read.

You don’t read “riot,” “wilding,” “behead,” or words like that. Those are words you did read in the Muslim reaction to the Mohammed Cartoons.

As If There’s Any Debate

AFP:

A defiant Robert Mugabe openly acknowledged an assault on Zimbabwe’s opposition leader Friday as he sought his ruling party’s nomination to stand once again in next year’s presidential election.

(snip)

While there have been rumblings of discontent within ZANU-PF towards Mugabe, no-one has so far put their head above the parapet to challenge his nomination.

Probably for good reason.  What Mugabe’s goons do to white farmers and his black opposition would not be spared on rivals within his own party.

Inside and Out

A French engineer thinks that the Great Pyramid at Giza was built from the inside outward.

I don’t read anything in this article about aliens or extraterrestrials, and that will make Art Bell and George Noory sad.

The Decline and Fall of the Fox News Channel

They are partnering with the Congressional Black Caucus to put on several intraparty Presidential debates.

Most of the chatter on this issue is from leftists and radical blacks, along the lines of, “CBC, How Could You?” The pertinent and real question should be from our people, “FNC, How Could You?”

If Fox had a right wing reputation once upon a time, they’re losing it. These days, the two most conservative cable TV talking heads are not on Fox. They are Lou Dobbs (CNN) and Glenn Beck (CNN-HN).