If you ask me "Why is having a vibrant downtown important" I would probably reply, "Well, it just is." It's always seemed intuitive to me that a healthy and vibrant downtown is essential for a metro area, but I've never really been able to quantify my rationale. Thankfully I can let the folks at Downtown Winston-Salem Partnership do it for me:
Dutch Olympic gold medalist speed skater Sven Kramer provides the best start to an interview in recent memory.
Kim Underwood wrote a nice article for the Winston-Salem Journal about TAA's Labor of Love project at The Children's Home. As I wrote before, this is one of the most amazing projects I've ever been involved with and I think the article really helps explain why:
The cottage is needed because last Sept. 1, the Children's Home took over the operation of Opportunity House, a nine-bed emergency shelter for young people on Brookstown Avenue. The shelter had been run by the Youth Opportunities organization.
"The intention from Day One was to move that facility on campus," said George Bryan, the president and chief executive of the Children's Home…
When the Children Home agreed to take over the shelter, Bryan estimated that it could take $150,000 to renovate the 10,000-square-foot Stultz Cottage. With no money available, immediate action wasn't possible.
Along came Marc Crouse, a member of the apartment association who volunteers at the home and is in the process of adopting a young person who has been living there. When he approached Bryan about the association doing something at the home for this year's "Labor of Love" project, Bryan thought that fixing up the cottage for the program would be just the thing.
"From the first, we are considering this a miracle," Bryan said.
You'd expect the comments on an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education to be somehow less troll-ish than comments in mainstream rags. I guess that's why the comments on this article about the University of Alabama professor who shot a bunch of her colleagues seem even creepier than usual. The first commenter gets them off to a roaring start:
The tragedy at UAH was a racially motivated hate crime as evidenced by the shooting of minorities only. Dr. Robert O. Lawton, the chairman of the departmental committee that recommended against the killer's tenurel was not targeted even though he was at the meeting. She is a Harvard trained racist with the brain of a lunatic. Could it be that Harvard is a breeding haven for such lunatics?
One commenter manages to really poison the well in a couple of separate one sentence comments:
There is a good ceal of mental sickness among academics, not least among females.
and
ALL THE DEAD WERE DARKIES? GOOD SHOT, AMY!
and then there's the cryptic:
If that lady had no weapon how can she expressed her anger?From ancient time man are killing each other but their weapons were rudimental they killed few people. As mankind inventing new and new dangerous weapon killing is easy and horrible.Mankind inventing ultra effective weapons for safety but is living in more unsafe circumstance.
Leonard da Vinci realized that development of his military engineering skills once a source of pride and ambition was a grotesque error.While he continued to fill his notebooks with diagrams drawing and speculation.He wrote"I will not publish, not divulge such things because of evil nature of man.
Can today`scientists learn and lesson from da Vinci?
We can only hope that these people aren't actually involved in higher education. What am I saying? Why would higher ed be any different from other profession? They've all got their share of whack jobs.
If, like me, you've always wondered what the heck the difference between Keynes and Hayek is then you'll like this:
This weekend was the kick off for a project that I'm already sure will be one of the highlights of my career. The organization I work for, Triad Apartment Association, is doing it's annual Labor of Love project and this year it really is audacious. We're taking on a three story building at The Children's Home that has been vacant for over 25 years and fixing it up so that it can be used to house children that the Home serves. The project includes cleaning and painting every room, installing new carpet, replacing outlets and light switches, repairing all plumbing fixtures, re-glazing all bathroom tiles, replacing/repairing floor tiles, repairing and refinishing a parquet floor, removing an interior wall from one room, installing new appliances, installing 9 new ceiling fans, repairing exterior woodwork, providing new furniture and installing new landscaping. What makes it so incredibly rewarding is that all of the materials, time and money have been donated by companies and individuals involved with TAA, and even more remarkably, people in the community who somehow heard about it and volunteered to help.
We're getting all this done in four days, Feb 12-13 and 19-20, which you'd think would be impossible until you consider that on the 12th we had over 70 people show up to help and on the 13th we had over 90. We're expecting just as many, if not more, next weekend. We had so many people that we had enough to go out and do other projects on The Children's Home grounds.
One of our volunteers is a woman who grew up at The Children's Home and lived in the building that we're working on. I can't even describe the feeling of standing in a room with her as she painted a window and told a story about her first night at the Home spent in that very room and how it changed her life. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.
There aren't words appropriate enough to describe what all of these volunteers have given The Children's Home, so to those of you who have participated please accept these humble words: Thank you! If you would like to help with The Labor of Love you still can and please feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested. Otherwise there is always a need for volunteers at The Children's Home and there's plenty of information on how to help at their website.
We might be washed up old men who's memories of adolescent amore are but distant memories, but we forget the motivations of young men at our peril as evidenced by this story of a young British POW during WWII (h/t to Lex for the lead):
Within a few weeks Greasley and Rosa were conducting their affair in broad daylight and virtually under the noses of the German guards – snatching meetings for trysts in the camp workshops and wherever else they could find. But at the end of a year, just as he was realising how much he cared for Rosa, Greasley was transferred to Freiwaldau, an annex of Auschwitz, some 40 miles away.
The only way to carry on the love affair was to break out of his camp. From Silesia, bordered by Germany and German-occupied countries, there was little hope of escaping back to Britain…
Greasley reckoned that short absences could be disguised or go unnoticed. Messages between him and Rosa were exchanged via members of outside work parties, who then handed hers on to Greasley, the camp barber, when they came to have their hair cut. When, with the help of friends, he did make it under the wire for an assignation nearby, he would break back into the camp again under cover of darkness to await his next opportunity.
Sometimes, Greasley reckoned, he made the return journey three or more times a week
The only intro I'm going to give you to this short film is that it deals with getting fired and the title refers to what optimists do when they get handed a big lemon, or bunches of them:
I read an article in the Winston-Salem Journal this morning that said that Hanes Mall is likely to require anyone under the age of 18 to be accompanied by parents after 5 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. As the parent of three teenagers (17, 16, 13) I have just one question for the mall's management: What took you so damn long?
Teenagers are palatable, barely, when they are singled out from the herd. Heck, you might even be able to take them in groups of two or three if you limit the exposure to under ten minutes, but you get them in large groups and they're as bad as any group of human beings around. Actually they're more like zombies on speed, and knowing that and knowing that they have the same attraction to malls that zombies have I avoid that place like the plague. Sure I avoid the mall as much as possible anyway thanks to my aversion to shopping and Sbarro, but knowing that there are teenagers there in abundance absolutely seals the deal.
The only worse place than a mall to be on any given day is a high school or middle school, but we pay people to pretend to do something worthwhile with them in those places and for the most part we aren't expected to actually breathe the air there unless our children do something remarkable like achieve more than altered states of consciousness. So really schools don't count.
Hanes Mall management, on behalf of all normal human beings in the Winston-Salem vicinity I want to say "thank you." Of course there might be an unintended consequence that my wife will expect me to accompany her on shopping forays on Fridays and Saturdays after dark, but I'm well prepared with enough exaggerated illnesses and household tasks that I think I can fend her off for the near future. When I do run out of excuses I'll just add a requirement that we eat in the food court if we're to shop there. That ought to take care of it.
Dan Collins uses a little blog space to look at how Wake Forest is doing at the halfway point of the ACC conference schedule. His tool to measure them is the ACC Stats page and I agree with his assessment:
This is not a pretty team. Teams that miss a bunch of shots and turn the ball over rarely look good, at least not until the game is over.
But defense and rebounding statistics reveal effort. And it’s hard to argue that any team in the ACC has given more effort so far this season than Wake Forest.
Dan doesn't dig into the other ACC teams, but after watching UNC the last couple of weeks I'll offer one observation that I think the stats clearly back up: right now the young Tarheels can't guard their own shadows. That's not really shocking given their relative youth (most young college players don't defend well), but they better learn how to defend soon or it won't just be a long season, it will be a long couple of seasons.
Befuddled 