Lincolnite

Wow, I would love to be overpaid $10,000. Paying it back could sting, though. Seriously, how does an organization screw up four separate paychecks? That is absolutely inexcusable. What better way to give trust in local government a kick in the shins than to overpay a part-timer (earning $62K/year) by ten grand? Well, don't answer that. There are much bigger ways to screw up, and in the grand scheme of things this isn't that big of a deal. But it isn't good. What are the odds that, if elected, Mayor Beutler's first act will be to clean house in the accounting department?

Yeah, I know today's primary election is pretty insignificant. If you have the opportunity, though, you should still make an effort to vote. I would love to set a good example and do just that, but today's 8:00am to 8:00pm voting window is too narrow. I left the house at 7:00am and I won't get back until around 10:30pm thanks to a couple soccer matches after work. Speaking of voting, I want to counter something Wendy Birdsall said on the radio this morning. In regard to voting, she said something along the lines of if you don't vote, "you don't have a right" to have a say anything about goings-on in the city. I hear that sort of thing all the time, and I whole-heartedly reject the notion. For one thing I don't like the use of the word "right" in that context. Of course non-voters have a right to complain. Thank goodness for the First Amendment. You may think it petty to pick on word choice, but considering all the rights people in this country are willing to take from one another, I think that particular word is awfully important. Additionally, I know Ms. Birdsall and most others who say that sort of thing don't entirely stand behind it. Consider this easy case: can you imagine Ms. Birdsall, head of the Chamber of Commerce, standing before a gathering of youth and declaring "None of you have a right to participate in discussions about the direction of the city!" Of course not. Voters or not, we all have a "right" to affect the direction of the city. Voting is but one element citizens should use in determining how much weight to put behind a fellow citizen's opinion. Civic engagement, expertise, and myriad other factors can be as, if not more, important than one's voting record. But you should still try to vote.

A Windstream representative came to the door tonight to, in his words, "lower peoples' monthly bills". A salesman trying to sell cheaper products to existing customers? Sounds good to me. Of course, that was just his foot in the door. Most of the rest of his spiel was standard door-to-door sales talk. Of course, if that's all he did I wouldn't be writing this. Unfortunately, "D.R." violated a few rules. Future door-to-door salesmen of the world, take note. First, if the person who answers the door is obviously home alone with his kids, a good salesman will offer to come back later, or he will at least keep his visit as short as possible. My kid is only going to let me stay at the door for so long before he bonks his head, tries to eat the dog's bone, or does something else that requires me to ignore the guy at the door. Robert is a pretty low-maintenance kid, but he still demands my attention. Second, a good salesman will never lie, and he will never try to bullshit his way through a conversation on a topic he knows very little about. In D.R.'s case, for example, he made elementary mistakes like confusing megabits and megabytes, arguing that 3 Mbps is greater than 7 Mbps, and going off on a weird tangent about how "the whole Internet relies on phone lines", which proves that DSL is better than cable. I was waiting for him to call the Internet "a series of tubes", but he stopped short. A good salesman will either admit that he doesn't know something and offer to contact me later, or he'll wander his way around the topic, sticking to the stuff he does know, while doing his best to convince me that he answered my question. Third, and probably most importantly, salespeople really shouldn't advocate breaking federal law when trying to sell their products. People use broadband to illegally download music and movies. We all know that. Many people have done it, from kids to retirees. But that doesn't mean you should openly advocate using your company's 3 Mbps DSL plan to "download music, download movies (illegally, of course)". I made sure to remember that quote. Last, don't ask me for a pen so that I can write down your contact information so that you can earn a commission if I decide to go for one of the products at a later date. Why the heck should I give you a pen so that I can write down your contact info? Don't you think you should carry a pen with you? Or better yet, have some business cards handy? Sheesh. In the end, poor D.R. didn't make a sale. He tried, and he was nice enough. He may have even had me if he had stopped with the $5/month phone service upgrade. Unfortunately, it was all downhill from there. Now if only I could get a lawn service guy to come by the house. My yard looks awful. If anybody out there can make my yard look better than, say, the medians on 84th Street (zing!), I may have a sale for you.

The Lincoln-Lancaster Women's Commission plans to change its name and mission. The switch is partially in response to the county's aborted attempt last year to remove their share of the Commission's funding. That raises some questions: Do we need a publicly-funded Women's Commission today? Do the Commission's activities justify continued public support? Would private funding be more appropriate for the Commission's mission? Those are all honest questions, by the way, not statements disguised as questions. I really don't know enough about what the Women's Commission does to make a decision one way or the other. I do have a general bias toward favoring private rather than public funding for interest group organizations, but my opinions on the matter are not absolute. It seems like the burden is on the Women's Commission to justify its continuation (though I could be wrong about that). The Commission's reorganization seems like one attempt to do just that. What other arguments can be made for keeping the Women's Commission around?

I admit I don't drive around town all that much these days, but it seemed to me that pothole season was pretty kind to Lincoln's drivers this year. There were some big holes, sure. But there didn't seem to be as many of them at any one time, and the ones that did open up were generally patched very quickly. Does my impression match reality? If so, I think we need to give the city's pothole crews a round of applause. Oh, and I suppose I should mention that technically we aren't necessarily out of the woods yet. April's weather could still play tricks on us.

Things like this really burn me. I am not one to go negative on the street racing culture for the sake of going negative on the street racing culture. But this doesn’t have anything to do with culture. It has to do with being drunk and reckless. What on earth were these clowns thinking?

I meant to catch this one the other day. I want to applaud Edward Conradt for sticking to his guns in the Kenneth Albers murder trial in Pawnee City. His stubbornness and refusal to vote for a guilty verdict forced a mistrial in the case which, although unfortunate, isn't the end of the world. The defendant, Patrick Schroeder, will be tried again. It takes a tremendous amount of guts to stand up to 11 fellow jurors, and even more to acknowledge to the public that you were the lone holdout in what appeared to most people to be an open-and-shut case. Mr. Conradt had doubt and he voted accordingly. Good for him. Not having participated in the deliberations, none of us know whether Mr. Conradt's doubt was "reasonable". Who knows, perhaps he just wanted to be a real life Mr. Davis. It sounds like he focused a lot on the issues surrounding the defendant's confessions, perhaps at the expense of other, less questionable evidence. Raising an eyebrow at the prospect of a coerced confession doesn't sound unreasonable to me. But again, I wasn't there to see and hear all the evidence. Generally speaking, I'm glad there are jurors out there who are willing to stand behind their reasonable doubt. I wish there were more of them, lots more. Not because I want to see potentially guilty people go free, but because I hate to see potentially innocent people go to prison. Ultimately such jurors force police and prosecutors to do a better job, from the crime scene to the trial, and that's a win for all of us.

Wow, after about 16 years of construction, it looks like Five Willows at 48th and Pioneers might finally be nearing completion. I have heard all sorts of rumors about why construction was so glacial, but I don't know the real story. Regardless, the building looks much better than the white concrete block former Food-4-Less it replaced.

I haven't written a restaurant review in a long time. Here are five places I want to review in the near future:

1. Las Margaritas. The Missus and I ate there for the first time on Wednesday. Maybe it should be a group review along with El Toro, La Mexicana, and (the fourth location I'm forgetting about).
2. Ramo's/Busters. We hit this one a few weeks ago.
3. Stauffer's. I have lived within a couple blocks of this place for a few years now, and I still haven't written a review. Tsk tsk.
4. Paul's BBQ. Now that Paul's has been open for a while, let's see how it's doing.
5. Upchuck Cheese's. My sister, the evil fiend, is holding my niece's third birthday party at the rat hole in a couple weeks. I don't see how it could possibly be worse than the last time I was there, but I promise to keep an open mind.

I don't care if "the food at Midway is so-so". I want to go there anyway. Nachos, snow cones, hot dogs, shakes ... That's my kind of cuisine. Mmmmm, sugar and saturated fat ...

The Journal Star editors think texting should be banned while driving. But why a law specifically targeting texting? It is already illegal to be IWD (idiot while driving). Do we really need myriad individual laws for the huge list of ways one can be an idiot behind the wheel?

If you're up for a little good propaganda, go check out the City of Lincoln's Your 14 Cents Worth page. Learn about what you're getting for your $0.1419 per property tax dollar. To be clear, I don't have any problem with the City communicating to its residents what they're getting for their money, especially when they do it as frugally as Lincoln has done here. It would be nice if the page linked to some more detailed budget info, though.

I haven't had time to give the Transit Development Plan a close look, but clearly it is ruffling feathers among some riders. In particular, many people don't like the new routes. I haven't studied all of the routes in detail -- I especially want to compare them to current routes -- but I do like a few things that I see. For example, I like that most routes are "double-sided", in the sense that they hit both the north and south sides of town. I also like that there are a couple "neighborhood routes" that don't use the hub-and-spoke model Lincoln has relied on for so many years. (That's not to say I like the chosen routes, just that I like the idea.) I especially get a kick out of the fact that there is finally the possibility that Star Tran will revise the Downtown Star Shuttle route, and that they propose to add a Haymarket Shuttle on Thursday thru Saturday evenings. That idea was proposed years ago and quickly shot down by the folks at Star Tran. I even worked on a graduate class project back in 2002 or so in which we submitted similar proposals to the city. Our ideas were quickly brushed aside. In fact, many of the ideas we wanted to present in our final report were shot down by the city very early in the process, so we left them out. Oddly enough, some of those ideas show up in the current proposals. I'm not taking credit for that, mind you. It's just interesting to see ideas that were once verboten become acceptable. I'm sure once I dig in more deeply I'll uncover more of the factors that are getting folks' goats. But a lot of the buzz I have heard on the bus is relatively petty. Stuff like: "The bus won't go right in front of my house any more, so now I'm going to have to walk two extra blocks!" and "I won't be on the same route as you any more, so maybe I just won't ride." Still, there are lots of valid concerns out there. It will be interesting to watch this process unfold.

I was pretty bummed to see almost no coverage of high school sports in this morning's Journal Star. In particular, it's really a shame that the LJS's readers will never know about the Lincoln Southeast boys soccer team's impressive comeback over North Platte last night. I was the center referee on the match so it would be improper for me to editorialize too much about the game. But surely a team coming back from a 2-0 deficit in the second half to win 5-3 -- there were seven second half goals! -- is worth a story, and probably even a photograph. The Journal Star can't afford to send reporters to every event, of course, so I'm not faulting them for missing this particular game. There are days when I think the Journal Star does a good job covering high school athletics, and there are days like today when they really drop the ball. I wish more days were like the former and fewer like the latter. Perhaps they could work with journalism students in the local high schools and colleges to expand the reach of their coverage?