EdCone.com

Lots going on in this week's report from the City Manager. I find the stuff about Glenwood and the busker rules most interesting, your mileage may vary, but I think we can all agree that the word "busker" should be used more often.

"If you fight science, you are going to lose your children..."

Pat Robertson denies Young Earth Creationism.

This post doesn't make much sense to me -- a tougher ACC would be tougher for everyone, not just Wake. And in fact Wake's recent woes have come during a weak era for the conference.

Sign the next Duncan, Paul, or Childress, and you'll win in any league. 

The larger changes in college ball -- best players go straight to the NBA -- might help a program like Wake Forest. Ask Butler.

Tried to link to an N&R article for the previous post. The new N&R search function sent me to a page that is blank but for a headline and clip-art image; from what I'm hearing about the new N&R search function that's actually a pretty good result.

Also, why does "news-record.com" (as opposed to dubdubdubdot news-record.com) send me to oblivion instead of the place I obviously want to go? It's nearly 2013, I have no time for prefixes. It doesn't happen in IE, just Chrome, so I guess it's no big deal.

Opportunity Greensboro is the group pushing a downtown research and education campus, an idea that City Council is willing to spend some money to advance.

Really, United?

$1,384 is the best you can do from GSO to EWR, three weeks in advance?

The Continental deal is giving you indigestion, and it's not doing much for me, either.

I guess it's Delta to LGA as usual.

My plan to match up to $25 million in private contributions to a downtown performing arts center has hit a Powerball-related snag. 

Roy Carroll says he'll back City Council candidates who will vote his way on downtown noise.

It does not strike me as a winning issue.

If his dinner-party story is true, it sounds like Greene Street could be a better neighbor. But that's not reason enough to drive a new policy. 

Former YWCA site seems like a good place to put a performing arts center.

But despite my strong confidence in Kathy Manning's credibility and capability, the organizers are going to have to do better than "trust us" on the private funding. 

New N&R site...your thoughts?

Ben Holder reports that all phone calls to the City are recorded, even though callers are not advised of that fact.

Not necessarily a huge deal -- we're all used to having our calls to businesses recorded, and public business is public -- but it seems like they'd at least tell you they were doing it. 

IIRC NC law requires both parties to be aware that a phone call is being recorded. UPDATE: IDRC.

So, first, is this report accurate? And if so, what's the purpose of the recordings, and why don't they tell callers they're being recorded?

...And, Ben says he's heard from a couple of Councilmembers, and the taping will stop.

So, what up with all that?

The N&R's new real-name-only commenting policy has gotten a fair amount of reader response, with several people saying the change will keep them from contributing to future threads. 

Gauger's right that there's no free speech issue involved, but the readers who say they fear speaking out on social issues under their own names are pretty convincing. The argument for moderators, including volunteers, seems like a good one.  

I was more in favor of the new rules when I started the thread than when I finished it, but it's not a problem with an easy answer, or one that need have a uniform solution for every site.

FWIW, I haven't found pseudonymous commenters here to be much more or less obnoxious than real-name commenters, although the most extreme (racist, misogynist, etc.) commenters have been anonymous. 

I'm going to resubscribe to the News & Record.

I let my subscription lapse after the paper's Amendment 1 fiasco, a meltdown that went beyond the failure to editorialize on the biggest civil rights issue in recent North Carolina history to some serious news-side myopia and misjudgment. There was no heated moment when I canceled delivery of the newspaper that (with its predecessors) I've been reading pretty much since I learned how to read. Instead, the renewal notice sat on my desk for weeks, and I just couldn't see myself writing a check to the people who had let this city down in so many ways over the past five years, much less their feckless owners in Virginia. Eventually, they stopped leaving it in my driveway.

So for a few months I lived without a local daily. I didn't feel starved for news, largely because the N&R's reporting gets circulated and filtered through online media, but I wasn't seeing everything, and I missed the routine of reading the paper with my morning coffee.  And honestly I felt like I was freeloading by getting the info I got via other sources; I try to support local non-profits, including news orgs, so adding one that aspires to profitability wasn't a stretch.

What will I be buying? A paper that seems to have bottomed out. Hiring Travis Fain was a boost in terms of quality and optics, and I want to encourage that momentum. There's no quick comeback from the neutron bombs in the newsroom and a laughable online strategy, but we're here in the new normal and I find that I still want the print edition of my hometown newspaper on the breakfast table every morning. 

How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb: "Early January, doesn’t worry me at all." 

Optimism is unfashionable, but so was pessimism back when he was pushing it.

A singular wedding present given to Lisa and me all those years ago -- perhaps less appreciated by my bride than myself -- was a box of Betty Boards from my old friend Big Tom. Archive.org has long since superseded tape, but I still have the cassettes and the plastic cases with their hand-written set lists, and I have memories of listening to them in a rented Mustang convertible on our NoCal honeymoon, so, better than a chafing dish.

Anyway: "Obviously, this will end someday. There’s enough good material in the vault to go at this rate for another twenty or thirty years, or, at a slower rate, for fifty years."

I recently found the tapes of Allan Dodds Frank's multi-hour 1987 interview with Garcia, which he did after our much briefer backstage conversation (linked in the right rail). Ownership issues pending, I'll try to find a place to publish the transcripts and audio.

Thanksgiving dinner, at some point between the first one and the one on deck.

I have a bottle of fancy wine, born the same year I was (long story), which I decide to share with the family.

My grandmother declines; she does not like red wine, so why would she like this red wine? Um, because it's a 1962 Chateau Margaux? No sale.

The rest of us drink the wine. It is...tasty. Not transcendent. Maybe past its peak. Maybe pearls before swine. Maybe never that great in the first place.

But I wonder, then and now, how much better one bottle of wine can be than another, once some threshold of quality has been reached, and how much more it is worth paying for some incremental excellence discernible only to palates much finer than my own. A chacun son gout, but good enough usually is good enough for me.

Still, I cracked open a decent Burgundy the other night to preview our Thanksgiving pour. I could get used to it.

Tony Wilkins writes the CoG: "This letter is to confirm my interest in the District 5 Greensboro City Council seat to be vacated by Dr. Trudy Wade."

The coveted EC.c endorsement/kiss of death is his if he promises to keep blogging.

ACC RIP: Maryland joins the Big 10 Or So. 

Not saying there won't be an ACC, just that it won't be the one I cared about.

The last leaves of autumn, one of which clings to the muzzle of the clueless subject of the photograph, somewhat undercutting its seriousness.

To whatever extent Art Pope's mini-me version of the national conservative think-tank strategy has been successful -- and you don't need to be sailing the big blue Pequod to acknowledge that dude's got juice -- it seems that NC Democrats should be moving beyond the pearl-clutching and getting down to the business of creating the kind of data-driven ground-level organization that has proved a successful counterbalance to the GOP money machine at the national level.

But who is going to do it? The NCDP seems an unlikely candidate. And it seems like a tall order for an individual campaign, although a bunch of national money might do the trick in a Senate race, if both the campaign staff and national funders were on the job, early and in concert. After posting this I emailed a former Democratic official who actually used to win elections to ask what entity might take on the job.

The response: "Beats me."

The Carolina Way: "It's the adults who are not doing what they are supposed to do." 

3:00 today at Barnes & Noble, GSO native Carolyn Kates Brown will be signing her new biography of Eudora Welty, A Daring Life. 

You can go to Friendly Center straight from the Weatherspoon, where Porter Aichele will speak at 2:00 about the "sophisticated understanding of Matisse's theories about painting" visible in Etta Cone's famously cluttered apartment.

Ranks high on any list of songs with great choruses and lame verses.

Also, songs that sound really dated in parts and much less so in others, and songs that parody themselves better than Spinal Tap ever could.

I was reminded of it by this article on Cher and the rise of Auto-Tune.

Then I had to listen to some Faces, because Faces were awesome.

I saw Ron Wood on West Broadway not long ago; the internet says he's 5'9", which is cool by me because that means I am, in the words of Gomer Pyle, six foot.

City Atty addresses concerns about conflict of interest re Hoffmann/DGI after "local blogs raised questions" (short version: no lease, no conflict) in this week's report from the City Manager.

"Ohio might be one of the Republicans’ lesser worries." 

States they won by double digits (I rounded up NM) put Democrats more than two-thirds of the way to 270 electoral votes. 

I agree with Silver's typical cautiousness at the end -- things change, the GOP can rebuild its ground game, etc. -- but those are some daunting numbers.

Delta's acquisition of US Airways gates at LaGuardia* has degraded the customer experience at LaGuardia. Security lines seem longer, and operating across two terminals sometimes adds a bus-ride to the journey. I did get through the TSA chokepoint quickly last night, because the TSA lady put me in the express line after I made a funny under my breath. 

Anyway, home. The dog, if I am judging certain characteristic behaviors correctly, was glad to see me.

*This sentence has been changed from the original for accuracy.

If you missed Laurelyn Dossett on yesterday's State of Things (or just want to listen again), here she is.

Hey, it worked great the first time, so let's rewrite it up-tempo and...it works again.

Happy birthday, Avant Greensboro.

Creative culture grows from the grassroots. 

Post-racial America: "The Robesonian newspaper will no longer allow comments that are racial on stories that do not have a racial element."

More: "We can have a story about anything, and it turns into a race issue."

Maybe they learned it in college.

In July, City Councilwoman Nancy Hoffmann bought a beat-up and long-empty old building at 302-304 South Elm Street. It's the one next to Glitters, for those of you Christmas-shopping for family in Colorado or Washington. (Image courtesy of Google.)

The possibility that Hoffmann might lease space in this building to Downtown Greensboro Inc. has sparked some online conversation (see the comments here), ranging from accusations of crony capitalism to calmer questions about an elected official doing business with an entity funded in some part by the City.

So I asked Hoffmann for the 411. She says the building is in no condition to rent to anyone at this point, and that so far she's done nothing but clean it up. Her plan is to restore it to historic-district standards, which means multiple meetings with preservation honchos from Raleigh -- they're making a third visit to the site tomorrow -- and then, she hopes, approval from the feds. Best case is to start renovation by January.

What about DGI? Hoffmann says the group approached her several weeks after she purchased the building in July, and is one of several entities that have inquired about renting the ground-level space (the second and third floors will be high-end residential units). She has exchanged proposals with DGI, but there is no deal in place and as recently as yesterday she spoke with an apparel retailer who is another possible tenant. "I am nowhere close to making any decision," she says. 

I asked if she saw a possible conflict, or even appearance of such, if DGI does rent space from her. "Absolutely," she said, which is why she contacted the City Attorney within an hour of first being approached by the group, and would probably have to recuse herself from any vote regarding DGI funding if she does enter into any kind of lease agreement with them. But, she reiterates, there is no such agreement. City Council passed DGI's latest funding request without discussion in October.

Hoffmann has renovated several historic buildings in the past, and says she's excited to walk the walk in downtown Greensboro. "It's a good building, with great bones and great architectural detail. I anticipate that this [renovation] will be good for the city, although I'm not sure if it will be good for me."

Fish tacos from the El Azteca truck: Recommended.

The White House’s view is that real revenue from higher marginal tax rates in the hand is preferable to promised revenues from some vague tax reform process in the bush.

If you want nice things, you have to pay for them.

And people do want nice things.

In praise of Rolling Jubilee, "the latest bright idea from Occupy."

[I]t’s doing secret random debt forgiveness, not because that’s the most effective way to help out struggling indebted Americans, but because it’s about time that ordinary Americans started getting help with their liabilities rather than just too-big-to-fail financial institutions. Strike Debt is trying to build what it calls “a growing collective resistance to the debt system” — and this exercise is part of what you might consider a broad politically-motivated deleveraging, a way of taking power back from the creditor classes (a/k/a the banks).

And in New York, "what is being done in the neighborhoods I visited is being done by local community organizers or organizations like the increasingly impressive Occupy Sandy group, who have taken it upon themselves to muster some sort of makeshift relief effort and were doing the best they could to see that the resources they accumulated were delivered to the people most in need."

RTP on tour.

The GSO visit was today, sorry, I just found out about it.

The Research Triangle Park belongs to the people of the North Carolina and is a national economic treasure. For over fifty years, great stewards of the Park worked together. From industry, government and university, they moved North Carolina forward.

The obligation to continue that great legacy now rests with us. To meet today’s challenges, we need bold new ideas for how to reconnect communities, reimagine our future, and redevelop our state.

My bold new idea is reimagine the bold original idea that created RTP, tailored for specific regions across the state. But that could get expensive. Think our state government and public universities are up to the task?

The Petraeus scandal has had its farcical elements from the start, so this seems right on cue.

Maybe this housing recovery is real.

Actual good news if so.

Food trucks as brand extenders: "Operated together, owners say food trucks and grounded restaurants enjoy production and marketing synergies."

N&O article also looks at the economics of the business.

Elijah went bungee jumping in the part of New Zealand that played the role of the Misty Mountains in the LOTR movies, and all I got was this lousy Visa bill.

The gradual shift in NC political power from its historical base in the east has been noted here from time to time, going to back to Kay Hagan's emergence as a powerhouse in the state senate. After years that saw both US Senators come from the Triad, the ascent of Phil Berger, and so on, the election of Pat McCrory may represent the end of an era that goes back to colonial times.

The seniority shift discussed here may help cement that new reality (link via the Carolina Mercury).

Gallup, we hardly knew ye: A breakdown of pollster performance in the 2012 election.

Bad enough for the conservative entertainment complex to cook the data, downright weird for the Romney campaign to "unskew" its own polls.

For some reason I keep expecting to hear the phrase "It's not settled science."

I was going to post this morning about the NC Democrats and what they can do to recover after getting swamped in consecutive election cycles. The idea was to shore up local organizations that should have performed better (cough, Guilford County) and build out a statewide web strategy, starting yesterday, to support Kay Hagan in 2014. Plus, y'know, quit having scandals and civil wars all the time.

But then I read this article in the N&O, and found out there's no real problem.

But then I read a FB post by Laura Leslie, who says: 

...there's clearly overwhelming denial among NC Dems about having fallen asleep at the switch in 2010. 

...In the best possible scenario, I can't see NC Democrats returning to relevance before 2016. If they continue to refuse to confront their problems, I'd bet it'll be more like 2020. If they're lucky.

So now I'm back to my original idea.

Lots of people have marital issues, and lots of people have encountered financial problems in the past few years. 

Most of them work this stuff out in private. Politicians forfeit that luxury.

My guess is that voters will be more concerned with Perkins' tax woes than his personal life. 

Occupy completely routed, at all levels of the national campaign, the economic balderdash spouted by the Tea Party and its billionaire sugar daddies. For a movement that allegedly had "no concrete goals," those are some pretty concrete results right there.

After a generation of venerating wealth and waiting for trickle down, this country was overdue for some economic populism. 

The GOP social agenda is looking a little long in the tooth, too.

Mack Hofmann's review of the epic 1975 Who show at the Greensboro Coliseum dwelt on the advancing ages of the band members and the longevity of the music itself: "The Who's concert seemed proof that the rock of the '60s is not dead. For relics of the Beatles era it's a comfort to have the Who and their kind of music still around."

Thanks to Dr. John Hayes for finding and fwding the old clip. He and I both attended that show, a shared experience we discovered many years later at this blog. I was 13, and haven't seen much to equal it since.

Dr. Hayes went back to the Coliseum last night to see the group some call The Two, and sends along this evidence that Pete Townshend's "generally maniacal style," as the Winston-Salem Journal called it way back when, remains in effect.

For all the talk about how creative and revolutionary new media is, it has not been very creative about its monetization paradigm. Instead, it is slowly becoming just another environment where the old rules apply; where commercial and corporate interests topple social ones, and where only the wealthy can afford to reach a large audience. 

Sorry, but Facebook is the man, man. Zuck is not your friend.

Scoble may be right about Sulu and definitely is right about the war on noise, but he's overlooking the simplest and most effective weapons in that war: The off button and a ruthlessly limited menu of services followed.

Life offline is worth living.

Your weekly report from the City Manager is right here.

Donald Trump is the hair-metal band of politics, down to the curious coiffure, and as with those '80s MTV icons not everyone is in on the joke. 

Romney and his campaign got it: "Even one of Trump's aides conceded....'[Romney] looked about as sheepish as you can get. He looked like a guy going to a dentist's office.'"

But they also wanted to court the people who didn't. 

It did not go well.