Colin McEnroe’s column in the Courant today digs into the recent legislative action on gas prices, by way of a Hartford ode on traffic, dream of a roundabout, knock at the CT DOT and identifying Hartford legislators and their staffs as “stupidheads.” Highlights:
Modern roundabouts — the traffic intersection of choice in many other parts of the world — are statistically safer than signal intersections and they keep traffic moving more smoothly. For those reasons, they have been opposed by the Connecticut Department of Transportation, which believes that people are safest when they have just been in a traffic accident and when their cars cannot move at all.
The LA Times chronicles the impact of a falling dollar ’round the world. It’s a good story and you can read into the effects that a continued weak dollar will have on the US economy fairly easy. When our manufacturers in China and India see no profit based on the exchange rate, something will change. Either the dollar will stop being the currency of contracts, something the entertainment industry has already figured out, or that price of manufactured goods will raise erratically. Uncertainty of course is something the industrial world doesn’t like. There’s been many articles writing about the threat of the petro dollar soon becoming the petro euro. Should this happen, all those treasury notes held by foreign companies instantly devalue. If you think credit is tight now ….
Lee Whitnum has forced an August 12th primary in the the 4th congressional district race. The Democratic party flunkies had endorsed Jim Himes as the candidate to challenge Congressman Chris Shays at the Democratic 4th CD nominating convention. This was after months of Himes dutifully making the rounds of DTCs and other flunkie gathering events. Whitnum too had been making the rounds, just seemingly without traction. So it comes as a surprise that she achieved the 2% threshold of signatures of Democratic registered voters to trigger a primary.
One question that apparently doesn’t seem to have been asked by the BOE upon hearing Corda wanted to cut the news stand in City Hall was how much revenue comes in from the news stand. We know, from The Hour report, that $40k was the operational cost. At least from the budget perspective. But a full P/L, profit and loss report, would have provided the detail necessary to determine if, in fact, the news stand operated at a loss. It would be quite the dubious decision to have cut an operation that had real world educational merits and didn’t really cost anything to run.
The bids have been sent out for contractors to bid on repairing the Haviland Parking Deck, the lot that runs behind Washington street in SoNo. The proposed timeframe for construction is after the SoNo Arts Celebration in August. People will be redirected to other lots, which inevitably means that people, will have to, gasp, walk a bit farther to reach Washington Street.
The statue of John Harvard, outside University Hall in Harvard Yard is a prefect example of the old adage that you can’t believe everything you read. It’s something that history scholars learn early, which is why source materials are always the preferred starting point for academic studies, rather than the stuff that follows. It comes in handy in programming too, although with a bit of geeky humour, the declaration, “use the force, read the source” will make you too, a jedi master. Naturally, after my usual WTF moments after reading the Hour this morning, I thought of the statue, more commonly known as the statue of three lies, because the article about the latest in the battle of 93 East Ave is so …. mind boggling.
Garbage, or as the engineered like to refer to it, solid waste, is not a subject that most people gather around the proverbial kitchen table to discuss. Unless it’s about who is taking the trash out the night before pickup. Once the cans hit the curb though, that is usually the end of the thought process about what happens next. Yet, what happens next is precisely the part that has preoccupied so few in town that on a rainy Wednesday night 45 people filled the community room, with the lead pipe and Professor Plum Crazy. Of those 45, by my count, half were political flunkies. Of the non political flunkie set, there were clusters of representatives from trash hauling companies and the press. What’s the frequency kenneth?
Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a
bad day at the office.
I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would
share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not so bad after
all.
Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with
a few technicalities of my job.
Out in the real world, I occasionally get real world comments about the blog. There’s a sentiment held that somehow the comments on this blog can get out of hand. I don’t disagree, but I’ve always felt rather strongly that the first amendment is pretty important, and that anyone who comes to a blog to discuss news and issues is taking that step to exercise that right to free speech. Sometimes that speech comes anonymously. There’s a long history of anonymous speech on the internet. And many issues of privacy that come with it. Huge issues of privacy in fact. Every pixel posted in email or on web sites such as this one, is recorded somewhere. And no one knows who will end up owning that data. Privacy in the age of unknown ownership of data is one reason I tolerate anonymous comments. I wish posters would pick handles, so at least repeat posters can I identify which “anonymous” they are, but that choice is left to the individual who chooses to post a comment.
