Lincolnite

Lincoln is, and will remain, a Pepsi town.

My dad recently ate at Las Herraduras, just across the O Street viaduct at 1st Street, and said he really enjoyed it. I don't know how I missed the news about the restaurant's opening. Now I need to find an excuse to get there. Have any of you been there yet?

Would you believe an ice cream van made its way through our neighborhood last night? I could hardly believe it. Robbie and I were outside playing in the front yard and checking out the moon and stars when we heard it. Since it was just about time for Robbie's evening snack I was even going to buy something. Then the van zoomed by without a bit of hesitation. So much for that.

StarTran's Larry Worth is proposing to replace 15 city buses with shorter, bike rack-equipped models. What a great idea! It's such a fantastic idea, you'd think public transportation advocates would have been suggesting something similar for eons now...

As soon as I saw this headline this morning I thought, "Here come the fireworks!" Then I looked at the comments so far. They are remarkably subdued. Where is the righteous outrage? With all due respect to Mr. Haltom, I doubt he stands a chance. It's all well and good to be a firm believer in the First and Second Amendments, but that won't get you far in a local political race.

[NOTE: The following is a contribution from Lincolnite regular nikkidemas. - Mr. Wilson] What do weather radios have to do with DTV? See "Emergency Situations" here: http://dtvanswers.com/dtv_faqs.html If you're one of the Lincolnites who rely on cable or satellite service to receive DTV (meaning you don't have a converter box or digital-ready TV), you may want to invest in a a means of getting DTV over-the-air, or a weather radio. I certainly hope it never happens - but in the event that a tornado takes out cable service, those viewers won't be able to get any televised weather information from digital TV stations. Remember, ALL stations will be digital by June 12th. Lincolnites will have to rely on radio & the sirens...unless you've got functioning wireless internet & a good surge protector for your laptop in your bunker 😊 And as much as I would love to say that DTV is perfect & everyone who has a converter box now gets crystal clear reception...I would be lying. There are going to be kinks that are being worked out for the next few months as more stations switch & viewers adjust. In any case (cable/antenna/satellite/hermits in shacks with no TV), if you have a smoke detector & a carbon monoxide detector, you may want to look into adding a weather radio to your collection. They're pretty cool now & you can program them to only wake you up in the event of warnings in certain counties. That way you won't lose sleep if Hall County has a thunderstorm.

Hear that? That's truly the sound of spring. What do I hear?

Could we see an all-Lincoln semifinal in the boys state basketball tournament? That'd be pretty nifty.

I am not sure why, but I have never been crazy about street names that utilize a person's full name. Rosa Parks Way is probably our newest example in Lincoln. Many communities have a Martin Luther King Jr. Street, which always seems like a tongue-twister. Why do I prefer Parks Way and King Street instead? I have no idea, considering I have no problem with street names like Rolling Hills Boulevard. The brain's reasons are a mystery. I do fear that personalizing streets too much could lead to a "vanity war" of sorts, where groups try to prove that "their" person is just as deserving of a street as those other people who already have streets. For now that fear is mostly hypothetical in Lincoln, but let's keep an eye on it. I also generally don't care for renaming existing streets. It is a pain in the neck for anybody with property along the street, and for anybody who needs to access that property. Certainly there could be exceptions, but the exceptions should come only in exceptional circumstances. With that in mind, I am inclined not to support Mike Scholl's family's request that West Stanton Street be renamed Mike Scholl Street. The request just doesn't sit right with me. Putting aside my own personal quirk about full-name streets, it appears to be a small but fairly significant step toward the "vanity war" I worry about. If Mr. Scholl gets a street, why shouldn't all local soldiers killed in action get a street? (Well, maybe they should, but that's a different discussion.) And certainly other local contributors are just as deserving, no? Or so the argument may go. I would feel much more comfortable with the request if we were talking about naming a new street after Mr. Scholl. New streets are named all sorts of wacky things; giving a street a name with meaning would be a nice change of pace. Alternately, if I were Mr. Scholl's best friend I think I would be rooting for Scholl Street to pass directly in front of Schoo School. I'm ornery that way. As I write this I can feel my position changing a little. Now is your chance to make the case that will push me to change my mind, or that will get me to reaffirm my original opinion. Have at it. For what it's worth, if anybody ever feels the need to name something after me, I think I would like it to be a park. Preferably a park with the best playground in town.

It's still a little difficult for me to picture what Antelope Valley will look like 20 years from now, but this first hint sure is nice to see.

There are a lot of issues going on in this article about Mayor Beutler's proposed changes to local ambulance staffing. Yet I just can't get over one relatively insignificant fact: we are renting out our ambulances and paramedics at the pathetic rate of $85 per hour. That's about a third of what I would have expected. Why so cheap?

Shoot. I was hoping the proposal to permit slot machines at horse tracks in Nebraska would pass so we could chip away at the government's hypocritical "it's ok for me / it's jail time for you" stance on gambling. No such luck. I'm sure it didn't help that supporters' claims about the amount of cash that would roll into state coffers were just a tad unrealistic. Oh well. Maybe next year.

Jack Mitchell doesn't take kindly to the Omaha World-Herald's two days worth of articles mocking Lincolnites' crappy driving skills. Unfortunately for the OWH, our own badged blogger throws water on the stories:

I could reduce our rate dramatically with the stroke of a pen by not submitting reports on non-injury crashes with damages of less than $1,000 to the property of any one person, or by declaring a moratorium on non-injury traffic crash investigations anytime the snow starts falling in appreciable quantities.

In other words, our cops are more complete with their paperwork. But I don't know, Lincolnites. Maybe we should let them have this one so they can spend some time working on their real problems. It's the least we can do.

Did you hear about the high school basketball coach who was fired after his team won 100-0? I didn't realize until just this morning that Lincoln Southeast's girls basketball team has put up similar numbers: 92-8, 97-18, 87-19. Yet I haven't heard anybody call for coach John Larson's head. I wonder why? Make no mistake, I'm not calling for coach Larson to be fired, or even punished. I liked the guy as a person back when I was in high school, and I have no reason to think he's out to humiliate anyone. Everything I have ever heard suggests he's a stand-up guy. Moreover, I have been a sports official for over fifteen years now and I have been a part of some of the worst blowouts you will ever see. I have only once heard a losing coach accuse the winning team of "running up the score" in one of those games (in a little kids' game). The losing team isn't happy, sure, but they seem to recognize both that their opponent is that much more skilled, and that asking their opponent to completely shut down would be more embarrassing than a lopsided score. Maybe folks around here understand all of that, thus preventing any fury. Or maybe it's simple ignorance; perhaps people don't know about these scores, due in large part to local media keeping such blowouts relatively subdued in their coverage. With regard to high school sports I wouldn't mind seeing some mercy rules enacted. Soccer could definitely use a "running clock' rule for large score differentials. (Even if the clock were to run the entire second half, that's still 40 minutes of discomfort.) Basketball could use a rule. Many baseball and softball leagues have mercy rules, but I don't know if any are used in high school matches. I was thinking that football might have some sort of "running clock" rule but I may have imagined it. Would you do anything to address blowouts in high school sports? Just for fun: I have been a participant in blowouts with the losing team, the winning team, and as an official. One of the worst maulings came in a soccer scrimmage against Capital City Gold. The coach wanted to experiment with players in different positions. I somehow ended up in goal. I was terrible. I gave up seven goals in something like 15 minutes. Now, in all fairness our defense did a crappy job by letting them get off that many shots. Still, I proved that day that I am no goalkeeper. Yikes.