EdCone.com

A proposed rezoning case threatens the so-called 1958 Commencement House at 2207 North Elm Street.

A meeting to discuss the rezoning will be held tomorrow, Monday 12/1, from 5:30 - 7pm at the Sherwood clubhouse near the corner of Elm and Cone; more parking off Alma Pinnix Dr. The plan is to develop the property for two medical buildings.

Time is short: Rezoning will be considered at a public hearing by the Greensboro Zoning commission on Monday, 12/8 at 2:00pm in the Council Chambers. Discussion may follow at City Council meetings on 1/6 and 1/20.

I'm told the home was purchased by Cornwallis Elm LLC, PO Box 4761, Greensboro, on Nov 7, 2006 for $285,000.

A neighbor writes: "It's interesting to note that the purchase aligns with the deterioration of the property that we all have noticed for the last couple of years."

The property is zoned residential single family; the applicant is requesting light office zoning. "This seems an incredible encroachment on the residential character of the neighborhood, not to mention the value of the historic property because of its association with both Edward Loewenstein and the former Woman's College class of 1958 that designed and helped to construct the structure."

Background:

[Architect Ed] Loewenstein began teaching an innovative course in architectural design at Woman's College (now UNC-Greensboro). Twenty-three female students designed a house, oversaw its construction and decorated the resulting structure, dubbed the "Commencement House" by the university's public relations office. The Greensboro Daily News proclaimed the house "as modern as tomorrow," hailing the women who designed it as pioneers, reporting that "they are the first pupils outside the schools of architecture to attempt the complete designing and building of a house." At its May 1958 dedication, an event covered by the paper and broadcast on WUNC-TV, North Carolina First Lady Mrs. Luther Hodges, herself an alumna of Woman's College, cut the ribbon on the house. Written up in the November 1958 edition of McCall's Magazine. Contractor: Eugene Gulledge (Superior Contracting Company of Greensboro).

More here.

That Apple store at Friendly Center (first reported here) won't be open by Christmas, says alert reader Anonymous.

"The long delay, I've heard, came about because Friendly Center's new owners squabbled with Apple over which space they ought to be in. The story I heard is that CBL [the REIT that bought Friendly from Starmount] thought Apple was just another computer store, so why did they merit primo real estate?

"Total cost of construction on the building permit: $1,772,835 (for 5,873 square feet)." At left, the projected site for the shrine store.

"The best barbecue in Texas is currently being served at Snow's BBQ, in Lexington, a small restaurant open only on Saturdays and only from eight in the morning until whenever the meat runs out, usually around noon."

The review. Additional reportage. Soon you can order your own.

The reference to Texas joints serving only packaged white bread reminded me of this place, and also of the old King's barbecue on Phillips Avenue, which had the best ribs in town.

And I'm willing to say not only that Hoggard's butt is "tender and yielding," but to call it mouth-watering, too.

We are thinking about frying some stuff in the leftover oil. Potatoes, of course. Oysters, maybe?

Hushpuppies have been suggested.

Also: Twinkies, Oreos, the last green tomato, and the roadkill possum down the street.

Keeping the dogs from eating oil-soaked dirt is part of the day's work.

UPDATE: Potatoes and oysters. Awesome.

Above, a big old pot of boiling peanut oil. A submerged turkey is attached to the metal piece at the top of the photo. The turkey was good. So was everything else. Happy Thanksgiving.

NYT calls for on-scene reports and photos of terror attacks in Mumbai.

He says "vehicle for gravy" like it's a bad thing.

Turkey is the platform for all those side dishes, the bass-line of the song. Also, it looks really good on the platter.

We've been frying turkey for years, in part because it's fun; you can do other good stuff with the oil, too. My sister cooks a breast in the oven, too, so the stuffing will have flavor and because some people like tradition.

Some alternatives.

Updates here and here.

Atlantic Records now brings in more revenue from digital music than CDs. Some thoughts here.

Semi-related: "I walked Betty — a 75-year-old woman called BeBe by her grandkids — into War Memorial Auditorium, and there, she saw a mass of 1,500 Deadheads turn one big room into one big dance hall." Previously.

Lisa Scheer took this pic recently in Greensboro

A proposed newspaper bailout in Connecticut. (Thnx to alert reader KB for the tip.)

Previously.

Bloggers blamed credited for derailing a possible Obama nominee for CIA director.

Now would be a good time for the House Democrats to show that they learned something from the DeLay era: "[Pelosi] should insist that the ethics investigation move forward — and that Mr. Rangel relinquish his chairmanship during the inquiry. If Mr. Rangel continues to resist, the speaker should permanently reassign the gavel."

The fact that we're trying to avoid the worst of an epic recession seems lost on people who keep saying that things were worse during the Great Depression. The comparison to make is not between 2008 and 1933, but between now and 1929 or 1930.

Sowell is correct that the GDP numbers get revised, but today's revisions went the wrong way.

"I'm sure you've heard the tale of Florida State safety Myron Rolle, who won a Rhodes Scholarship on Saturday afternoon in Alabama, then flew to Maryland (on a plane, we assume) played in his team's game that night, then killed a wild boar with his bare hands and fed his entire squad with it at the post-game meal..." Well done, sir.

Roubini sounds positive on Obama's economic team.

I must have missed the memo saying the Thanksgiving holiday begins today, because my usually-jammed office parking lot has a lot of empty spaces in it.

I've noted the French talent for bridging the gap (faire le pont) between weekends and holidays, but front-loading a Thursday occasion takes real talent.

The NCGOP finally caught a break with the retirement of NCDP chair Jerry Meek, but its own leadership race looks entertaining.

Previously: "[S]hould Democrats publicize the site...or root for Kindley to get the job he seeks?"

And: "I'm not sure the context really helps Marcus much."

Also: "Guilford County GOP chair Marcus Kindley gets some press for his blog, although it's probably not the best kind of publicity for his party or this county."

Perhaps my favorite: Marcus vs the Constitution.

Once I lived the life of a millionaire
Spending my money, I didn't care
Carried my friends out for a good time
Bought bootleg liquor, champagne and wine

When I began to fall so low
Nobody wants me round their door
If I get my hands on a dollar again
I'm gonna hold on to it til them old eagles grin

That's pretty much the point of this column by Robert Samuelson.

"When wealth rises, spending strengthens; when wealth falls, spending weakens...now the wealth effect is reversing...Americans are scrambling to increase savings and curb spending." Which makes the economy weaker, which causes more fear and tighter belts, which makes the economy weaker, and so on.

A story to warm the hearts of investors who rode Wachovia into the dirt: "Ten Wachovia Corp. executives are eligible to collect as much as $98.1 million in severance if Wells Fargo & Co. completes its purchase of the Charlotte, N.C., bank by Dec. 31."

Not all of the execs will take the money -- some will take good jobs with Wells Fargo instead.

Taxpayers get a little bit of joy, too: Wells Fargo got a slug of your money from TARP.

My answer to the question of Google being "evil" or not is that Google's motto was a promise that it wouldn't behave like a typical big company, and that as a public company it has obligations to shareholders that make the motto moot.

Here's some evidence for just-another-big-corporation theory (other reports dispute the size of Google's workforce reduction): "Google classifies 10,000 [...] employees as temporary operational expenses or 'workers'...The classification affords Google several advantages [including the hiring of] full time employees without full time benefits...By under-reporting actual employee headcount, Google looks good to Wall Street." 

Evil? Only by Google's definition of the word.

Fun times in alt-weekly world: "Ken was fired in a time of crisis because he talked back to Ben."

Thanks to the diligence of N&R readers, we now know a lot more about Thomas Reese Alexander and Harrett Pinnix than we did yesterday morning. I'll keep adding details as they come in at the bottom of this post.

If you see a better headline than this today, please send it to me: "Carjacking suspect struck with frozen turkey outside Harris Teeter."

Pithy post of the morning: "Damn those unions for destroying Citigroup!!!"

If you're hoping for a presidential pardon from GW Bush, hurry.

Congrats on the new addition to your portfolio: "The government’s preferred shares come with warrants to buy 254 million Citigroup shares at $10.61 each, allowing taxpayers to profit if the stock rallies following the government’s investment, according to a term sheet that accompanied the agencies’ statement. Citigroup is required to pay a quarterly dividend of no more than 1 cent a share."

Meanwhile: "In California, with a jobless rate topping 8% and home prices down more than 40% from their peak and falling [...] 4.15% of prime loans [are] seriously delinquent."

The Lamest Duck: "The markets are saying that George Bush is irrelevant to the economic future of the country, and they want to hear from Obama."

James Baker says the transition needs to be faster than usual.

On foreign policy, an influence from the Bush I camp.

UPDATE: "Obama's transition team is working with lawmakers on Capitol Hill so that on Obama's first day in office, Jan. 20, 2009, an economic stimulus package has passed both houses of Congress and is awaiting his signature."

The stuff stuff is made of is largely not stuff. Physicists have known this for some time, now they've run the numbers that confirm some of what's happening in "the teeming nature of the subatomic world, in which 'empty' space is no such thing...The results verify that only a small part of the baryon masses comes from the masses of the quarks themselves. The remaining mass comes from the energy that the quarks carry by virtue of being bound together or confined within a hadron."

We are the energy that binds us together. Sounds like philosophical bafflegab, but it's just physics.

Mortgage crisis still a crisis.

"North Carolina's decade-long influx of illegal immigrants may be waning as the economy falters and law officers crack down." The first part isn't quite the way we hoped the problem would be solved.

Another failure of free-market fundamentalism:

When Countrywide Financial felt pressured by federal agencies charged with overseeing it, executives at the giant mortgage lender simply switched regulators...

...the Office of Thrift Supervision, promised more flexible oversight of issues related to the bank's mortgage lending. For OTS, which depends on fees paid by banks it regulates and competes with other regulators to land the largest financial firms, Countrywide was a lucrative catch.

But OTS was not an effective regulator...[It] adopted an aggressively deregulatory stance toward the mortgage lenders it regulated. It allowed the reserves the banks held as a buffer against losses to dwindle to a historic low. When the housing market turned downward, the thrifts were left vulnerable.

More on Rubin: "The bank's downfall was years in the making and involved many in its hierarchy, particularly Mr. Prince and Robert E. Rubin, an influential director and senior adviser."

Some thoughts on Rubin and Obama here.

"The history of a place is chiseled into the plinths and weathered monuments of its boneyards, and this place that we live in is no exception."

My newspaper column picks up on a couple of recent blog posts about graves in Greensboro's old Union Cemetery, and the questions they leave unanswered. You can read the whole thing after the jump.

UPDATE: Additional info on both Harrett Pinnix and Thomas Reese Alexander added at bottom of the column, courtesy of alert readers.

Lisa Scheer took this picture quite recently in Madison.

A misleading headline -- "Woes at Citigroup Began With Failed Bid for Wachovia" -- on this article, as the article makes clear: "[L]ike so many other things for Citigroup over the last several years, it fell apart...[T]he globe-spanning conglomerate [...] had never really worked as a cohesive unit. Different divisions have consistently battled, and promised synergies between units have rarely emerged."

Now, "fears that a vast wave of damaged commercial loans would course through banks — including Citigroup — already hit by a tsunami of toxic mortgage products." Wachovia was supposed to be a lifeline, but Citi needed a lifeline because of woes that long predate the failed deal.

On the general subject of getting business news right, a reminder to the good folks at WUNC radio: corporate "earnings" are profits; the number you were looking for in last night's story on The Pantry was "sales" or "revenue."

And while I'm being pedantic, I know that "less people" has become accepted usage, but it would still sound better if a station with our state university's name in its call letters said "fewer people" will be traveling over the Thanksgiving holiday.

Less brilliant than he used to seem: Robert Rubin.

The new guy: "At a time of crisis unmatched since the Great Depression, President-elect Barack Obama has put his faith in one of the world's most experienced financial crisis managers -- a man popular with the Wall Street leaders he's consulted with closely over the years, but a mystery to many traditional Democratic constituencies."

Michael Lewis has some thoughts on the meltdown.

I've been thinking about the way the late Roger Soles steered the old JP through the junk-bond era, and wondering if he could have avoided some of the problems facing LNC today.

A 2.3% year-to-year jump in unemployment -- to 7% -- puts North Carolina on the BLS list of states with statistically-significant jumps in joblessness. It's a long list.

We're one of 14 states with unemployment of 7% or higher. Michigan and Rhode Island are hurting the worst, at 9.3% each. South Carolina is at 8%.

So does this mean the $750K payment on the EEOC suit has been rejected? Was that amount in fact the offer on the table? How much transparency will there be into the EEOC process?

UPDATE: An answer here: $750K offer taken off the table by Council, no further offer anticipated.

So...why did they rescind their decision?

Chuck Klosterman reviews Chinese Democracy.

On the aforementioned "Sorry," Rose suddenly sings an otherwise innocuous line ("But I don't want to do it") in some bizarre, quasi-Transylvanian accent, and I cannot begin to speculate as to why. I mean, one has to assume Axl thought about all of these individual choices a minimum of a thousand times over the past 15 years. Somewhere in Los Angles, there's gotta be 400 hours of DAT tape with nothing on it except multiple versions of the "Sorry" vocal. So why is this the one we finally hear? What finally made him decide, "You know, I've weighed all my options and all their potential consequences, and I'm going with the Mexican vampire accent. This is the vision I will embrace. But only on that one line! The rest of it will just be sung like a non-dead human." Often, I don't even care if his choices work or if they fail. I just want to know what Rose hoped they would do.

Incidentally, he likes the record.

Vampires as mirrors of culture (link via PiedmontParent).

Our resident teenage girl has read the Twilight books and is looking forward to the movie. Lisa and I have been partaking of the campy pleasures of True Blood. I once plowed through a bunch of the Anne Rice novels, even after I was bored, to find out more about her underlying mythology, which I remember as being sort of disappointing. One of the scariest vampire stories I've read was by Stephen King; it involves a vamp who keeps his coffin on a small plane and haunts out-of-the-way airports. He pisses blood, too. Sounds silly by daylight, but I read it alone in an isolated mountain house and it gave me the willies.

One day a while back I was walking the dog and as is not uncommon when we are alone together I was talking to her, and as we rounded a corner at my office building we encountered a guy who worked down the hall, a very cool young dude, filmmaker, do-ragged and dressed in black, leaning against a wall and smoking a cigarette. Mildly abashed at being observed in my foolishness I stated the obvious, "you caught me talking to me dog."

The guy nodded sagely, exhaled, and said, "Everybody do it."

And he was right. Everybody do do it.

Wrathful answer turns away donors: "James Dobson's anger-driven on-air politics has been driving away the mainstream love-focused Focus on the Family audience."

Something to ponder while sitting in traffic this afternoon:

The N.C. Board of Transportation is pumping $270 million in road money into Fayetteville, the hometown of Transportation Secretary Lyndo Tippett and of a key legislative ally, weeks before Tippett leaves office.

At meetings in October and November, the board approved the money for work on a highway loop around Fayetteville, as road money has been drying up and cash for loops around the state's other cities has been delayed.

Roubini: "At this rate of free fall in consumption real GDP growth could be a whopping 5% negative or even worse in Q4 of 2008. And this is not a temporary phenomenon as almost all of the fundamentals driving consumption are heading south on a persistent and structural basis...the current recession may end up being three times as long and at least three times as deep (in terms of output contraction) than the last two and worse than any other post WWII recession."

"[O]ver the last decade the North American ecosystem has also seen an unanticipated trend upsetting the always delicate relationship between man and wildlife: The hunters have been going away."

Serious stuff, but the part about Manhattanites dressing in camouflage to play a video game is pretty funny.

"President-elect Barack Obama's 3 million campaign volunteers got re-enlistment notices this week." Here's the agenda.

Related:

[Organizing guru Marshall] Ganz makes three really important points: The first is that we've never had a president enter office with an organizing social movement attached to him, and there's no precedent for thinking about how the participants in that movement have a voice in his presidency. The second is that this movement isn't going away, and the critical question isn't "who's going to get the list" but how will this movement govern itself. The third, which is somewhat of an open secret, is that there is a group of organizers meeting in Chicago right now trying to figure this out, and Ganz believes that their deliberations should be more open. "I think it's important to create the public space for this kind of discussion," he told me.

That last line is critical. The ability to interact directly with the people represents a potential shift of power to the White House that we don't yet fully understand, and that may not be wholly positive.

Lisa Scheer took this picture in Rockingham County earlier this week.

Henke, pausing only to mention Parker's blast at religious conservatives, empties both barrels in the libertarian-bashing Huckabee's direction.

Conservatism -- economic and social -- is not going away. The GOP's got some problems, though.

Update: Carter Wrenn says, "Neither of these arguments is about winning the next election. This is a fight where both sides are using our defeat in 2008 to advance their political agenda inside the party...

"...Here’s the debate Republicans need to have: How was it possible for the Republican Party to embrace policies that led to two unending wars and an economic meltdown? Once we have figured that out then maybe we can risk worrying about politics."

"Chinese Democracy" is the Titanic of rock albums: the ship, not the movie, although like the film it's a monumental studio production. It's outsize, lavish, obsessive, technologically advanced and, all too clearly, the end of an era. It's also a shipwreck, capsized by pretensions and top-heavy production.

Nobody but rock critics cares what rock critics say, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is pretty much true.

Axl used to know how to make a record.

Here's the comment from a local law professor that Fred Gregory read to the City Council on Tuesday night, as reported in today's Rhino:

In my past life, I represented both plaintiffs and defendants in discrimination suits of this nature. I find it astonishing that any competent attorney would tell the City Council that he cannot reveal the names of the plaintiffs in this case. And I find it even more astonishing that the City Council would go ahead and authorize a settlement of this size without knowing who the plaintiffs are and what the strengths and weaknesses of their case was...I truly hope that something was lost in translation somewhere. The alternative is simply too disturbing.

This is what he's talking about:

On two occasions the City Council has voted in closed session to pay $750,000 to 39 black police officers who filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). That complaint, filed in April 2006, charged racial discrimination. The council did this without knowing the identities of the 39 officers, the details of their complaints or any evidence that supported the charges. That information was kept from them by City Manager Mitch Johnson and City Attorney Terry Wood, who maintained that it was not legal for councilmembers or the public to have it.

Maybe there were good reasons for settling the suit, despite Johnson's subsequent statements that the City has no evidence that the Black Book was abused. Maybe there were good reasons for keeping information from the Council, despite the comment above from a law professor with relevant professional experience.

It sure would make an interesting article in the local daily, which has previously written extensively on related matters.