Lincolnite

I hope I'm wrong, but I suspect you can be all but certain that Grateful Greens will be the next restaurant failure in the former Roost location next to Oso on O Street. Matt Olberding says they will offer "gourmet chopped salads and raw vegan food". Not. A. Chance. Let's count up all the factors making this a gigantic uphill battle:

1. Downtown is a cutthroat place to open a restaurant.
2. O Street is hugely competitive and rent isn't cheap. Just opening the doors is expensive.
3. The specific storefront has seen several businesses fail already, including the excellent Roost.
4. Salads aren't sexy. They're good for dieters -- yay New Year's resolutions! -- but they have limited ongoing appeal.
5. Vegetarian food is "weird".
6. Vegan food is really weird.
7. Raw vegan food is criminally insane.

I realize I know very little about Grateful Greens at this point. It could be the most awesomest restaurant Lincoln has ever seen. Even then, though, I see them going the way of Inna's Pirogi, a perfectly palatable restaurant that never stood a chance in the same location. I could see Grateful Greens doing fine if only they were to choose a better location. I realize that Downtown is sexy, but it's so risky. Downtown tends to do best with "safe" restaurants -- places that dish out pizza and sandwiches and burgers. Bucking that trend is hard. Very hard. I just happen to have a better location in mind. I've long hoped that Maggie's would one day join its fellow Haymarketeer The Mill in College View. In reality any good vegetarian or vegetarian-leaning restaurant has the potential to do well there. It's a heavily Seventh Day Adventist neighborhood, and SDAs just happen to tend toward vegetarianism. You've got decent traffic from 48th Street, an SDA college, an SDA church, some cool storefronts ... what's not to love? But I digress. I wish Grateful Greens the best. Perhaps they'll prove me wrong. If they're going to succeed, they've got a steep hill to climb. I know I'll give them at least one visit to give them a small boost. It's a start.

I can't help but laugh at poor ol' Steve Joel right now. The new LPS Superintendent had previously promised that school closing decisions would be based on "actual conditions" rather than forecasts. His promise melted quicker than a snowball in a microwave. Last night's decision to cancel classes today marked the second straight day he did exactly the opposite. And for what purpose? As far as I can tell it's to shelter Lincoln's kids from perfectly average winter weather. That's a rather quixotic agenda, and one that likely isn't as good at its goals as its supporters suggest. One assumes the goal is to protect the most vulnerable children, but ironically the best way to protect those kids is to allow them to go to school. I know I know, these complaints are tired and overused. I keep making them not because I have a penchant for dead horse beatings. I probably wouldn't have posted this at all except that Mr. Joel made such a big fuss about being different than his predecessors. He has earned a good mocking. Two, actually. I suspect that even he -- like so many politicians and public officials before him -- will admit that he should have kept his mouth shut. At this point I wish LPS would just come out and be honest. Quit making us wait until after bedtime to learn if school is out the next day. The rules are becoming clear: school will be cancelled if the forecast calls for a cumulative total of more than six inches of snow, or if the wind chill will be below zero. I'm not sure why they don't just come out and say that. It'd save everybody a lot of stress.

As expected, a little public outrage got us some answers about those late night phone calls the other day. The company responsible, FirstCall, has taken responsibility for the screw up. Best of all, Lincoln won't be charged for any of the calls. That's the good news. The bad news is that something is still wrong. FirstCall tells us they can make approximately 3,000 phone calls per minute. Yet we are also told that 90% of the 52,967 phone calls were made within 90 minutes. That's a rate of only 530 per minute -- a mere 1/6 the advertised rate. Why the discrepancy? Had the calls gone out at the advertised rate, they would have been done in about 20 minutes. Something doesn't smell right. City officials need to take a look at our contract with FirstCall and compare what we were sold with what we've been given. If FirstCall isn't living up to its promises, perhaps we need to shop elsewhere.

Mayor Beutler, I know that wasn't you on the phone last night after I went to bed, but I'm holding you responsible. The call I received came way too late, and my call wasn't even that late. John Spatz got his call just after 3:00am. Had that happened to me I would have driven straight over to Mayor Beutler's house and ... well, no, I probably wouldn't have done anything. But I would have been pissed. I was angry enough as it was. I understand why Lincoln uses robocalls as part of its emergency management strategy. They can be a quick and relatively cheap way to get vital information out to the public. Fair enough. But nothing -- NOTHING -- about a forecast that calls for four or five inches of snow overnight requires a phone call between 10:00pm and 8:00am. A tornado warning is one thing; a few flakes aren't going to kill anybody who is snuggled into their bed. I suppose City officials will try to claim that the information provided in the phone calls was important. Baloney. Not a single word in the recorded message was relevant to me or my family. Nor, I suspect, was it relevant to the vast majority of you -- at least not in the middle of the night. A snow emergency announcement just isn't very important. I can't park in certain places? No biggie. It's certainly not something I need to be woken up for. Particularly since the snow emergency was announced at 1:00pm on Sunday, and it was broadcast through every media outlet in and around Lincoln. Look, the point is that waking people up in the middle of the night to tell them "Hey! It's snowing outside!" is just plain dumb. That whole October 1997 thing? Yeah, now that was a snowstorm to wake up people in the middle of the night for. But that was unique because of the storm's scale, its damage, and -- this is important -- the fact that it was way more feisty than what forecasters predicted. Exploding trees, downed power lines, and general chaos are worthy of sounding the alarms; five inches of the fluffy stuff, not so much. Mayor Beutler's crew blew this one and he owes Lincolnites an apology, along with a clear explanation of the policies he is putting in place to ensure this goofiness doesn't happen again. Is it really a big deal? No, not in the grand scheme of things. But these little annoyances go a long way toward shaping public perceptions of local government. This is easy to fix. Fix it.

Jeff Korbelik finished out his top five restaurants in Lincoln today by naming Dish numero uno. I don't have much to say about the selection since I've never eaten there. I've heard Dish is excellent for whatever that's worth. We all know, however, that Oso Burrito was robbed. It didn't even make the top 13 -- what a scam! Where else can you get a bowl of mulligatawny, an avocado taco, a BBQ chicken burrito, and a beer? I demand a recount. Overall Korbelik's top 13 aren't too surprising. It's easy to quibble about individual placements on the list, but half the fun of creating a Top XYZ list is to make people froth at the mouth because they disagree with you. That being said ... other than Oso, where did Jeff get it wrong? What did he get right?

What is it with Lincoln's bridges? Bridges and their problems have been all over the news these past several years: the O Street viaduct was replaced; a bridge on Holdrege was closed to vehicle traffic due to safety concerns; bridges in Wilderness Park have collapsed or been closed in fear of collapse. And now even brand new bridges in Antelope Valley are getting into the act. It's like Lincoln's own little Big Dig. Sheesh! Keep an eye on those Antelope Valley bridges. It doesn't sound at this point like the problems are major, but somebody will need to be held accountable for the failures. How City officials handle the determination of accountability is important. Very important, in fact. Nobody wants this to turn into another firetruck fiasco.

It's really quite insane how popular the Lincoln Marathon has become over the years. This year the race has a whopping 10,000 runner limit, with 8,000 slots available for half-marathoners. For comparison, two years ago there were 6,500 runners. That's some pretty impressive growth. Let's put 8,000 half-marathon runners in perspective. If you were to line up all 8,000 runners along the 13.1 mile half-marathon course, you would have one runner every 8.6 feet; add in the 2,000 marathoners and they'd be spaced every 6.9 feet. That's a lot of people. Drivers take note: Marathon organizers are instituting a new starting procedure this year. To help decrease congestion along certain parts of the course, runners will be "funneled" at the start. That means the start process will take longer, which means runners will be more spread out, which means more waiting time as you drive around town. But you aren't really silly enough to drive across the route on that Sunday morning, are you? The best way to get around the affected part of town on the morning of the Marathon is by bicycle. Are any of you going to participate in the Lincoln Marathon or Half-Marathon?

Nebraska's new license plates are going to be showing up on the roads throughout 2011. Personally I think the design is fine. Not great, just ... fine. Whether you like it or not, just remember how awful it could have been. Besides, we only have to wait until 2017 for the next batch!

No doubt some of you are planning some lifestyle changes as part of a New Year Resolution. Or perhaps you're making some changes "just because". Whatever the case, here's a quick description of a change I made in 2010. Back on January 17, 2010, I began a new diet. I don't mean a "diet" in the "weight loss scheme" sense of the word. Rather, I upended my whole approach to food. This was a lifestyle change designed to shake up my notions about food. It was an adventure, not a chore. Or at least that was the plan. Initially I went full vegetarian. In retrospect that was a bit silly. My taste buds weren't ready for that kind of move, and besides, I had no idea just how complicated such a change could be. For one thing I didn't bother to tell the household grocery shopper about my decision. Nor did I tell the cook. (She happens to be the same person.) If this new plan was going to work I was going to have to make some adjustments. The first thing I did was allow myself meat at three meals per week. Then two. Then I fiddled with fish and shrimp in place of land-loving meat sources. I never made it to all-out vegetarianism. However what I learned was that by permitting myself some meat it made my non-meat meals significantly easier to swallow (so to speak). I also discovered that "meat substitutes" generally aren't nearly as awful as they've been made out to be. Veggie products that try to be meat often fail miserably, but products that instead try to take the place of meat often do an admirable job. Fast forward to today, just shy of a year later, and where am I? For the most part I have evolved into a pescatarian. That is, I eat fish and shrimp, and occasionally other types of seafood, a couple times per week at most. I eat non-seafood meat now and then, ranging from twice a week to once every three weeks. When I do eat meat (of any type) I try to keep my portions smaller than average. Four ounces is typically plenty for me. Along the same lines, my entire meals are significantly smaller than the quantities I used to eat. I still do the same amount of activity, just with less weight in my belly. My health seems good. I didn't get a checkup last January (and I regret that) so I don't have a baseline to compare to. Anecdotally I feel less sluggish than I used to. I lost fifteen pounds over the course of 2010. The first five came off extremely quickly; the next five took about a month; and the last five took a couple months. I've been at a stable weight for about six months now. It's a weight I'm happy with. I don't put much stock in BMI, but for reference my BMI is 22.6. The chub came off my face, and my belly fat -- which really began to appear around my thirtieth birthday -- is about half gone. I plan to stick with this diet for a good long while. Even if absolutely nothing else had changed, my eating habits in 2010 introduced me to a wealth of new foods and new presentations of old foods. That alone made the switch worthwhile. Well that, plus the look on my mom's face every time she sees me eating foods I never would have touched previously (like raw broccoli). If you're making some sort of lifestyle switch, I wish you good luck. I hope you have as much fun with your changes as I've had with mine.