Quote of the day comes from Tax.com:
In America most income tax scams do not involve lying, cheating, or stealing. They involve hiring lobbyists and engaging in practices that are perfectly legal.
Tax Cheating American Style
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A Concise Description of Madhouse
I've been watching Madhouse on The History Channel (for excellent reviews of the show see KT's reviews at Esbee's blog) and I do enjoy it immensely, but one of my fears is that my friends and family in other parts of the world will think that the Madhouse crowd is representative of Winston-Salem in its entirety. Fec offers his own evaluation and I have to say that the first and last sentences of his second paragraph kind of sum up my worries:
I stayed up last night and watched the History Channel’s Madhouse chronicle of W-S Bowman Gray stadium modified racing. The series portrays our area in the worst possible light.
The shows are highly effective cautionary tales of men who refuse to grow up and the families they neglect. It is a cogent primer in abnormal behavior. The soul-crushing pastime of habitually racing on a track too small to pass renders the participants beyond their already limited capacities to maintain composure. It’s Jerry Springer on wheels.
I have nothing against the Madhousians, and in fact the culture reflected in Madhouse is one of my favorite things about the Winston-Salem area, but you have to remember that just a few miles away from Junior Miller and his K'ville Mafia live grown men who wear loafers with no socks to the pool at FCC. If that doesn't say "I haven't grown up" I don't know what does.
Official disclaimer: I see nothing wrong with going sockless, but why drag your loafers into it?
Why is Downtown Important?
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:
Are you stupid?
Dutch Olympic gold medalist speed skater Sven Kramer provides the best start to an interview in recent memory.
Nice Article on Labor of Love
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.
Well Educated Trolls
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.
An Econ “Lecture” That Even I Can Understand
If, like me, you've always wondered what the heck the difference between Keynes and Hayek is then you'll like this:
Labor of Love is a True Highlight
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.
Alert to Fellow Fathers of Teenage Daughters
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
Lemonade
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:
Befuddled 