Wine Merchants Gourmet is hosting a tribute to Aussie winemaker Chris Wingland this Saturday February 14, otherwise known as Valentine's Day. If you're looking for something to do as a warmup for your romantic night out this might be the ticket. They are offering seven of his wines for a tasting and it runs from 11 am to 5 pm. Good on ya!
Recent actions by the Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools has caused me some concern and prompted me to ask a couple of questions. First came word that they want to put the school resource officer contract up for bid, effectively putting the sheriff's office on notice that a renewal of the current contract isn't a given. Actually there isn't even a contract at this point, so let's call it an agreement. Then in last night's meeting when they set the legislative agenda the schools' attorney said that they are talking to state Rep. Dale Folwell about introducing legislation to allow the school system to access the state law enforcement agencies' gang database known as Gang Net. They want to be able to see if students are listed.
US News & World Report has a list of 15 companies that stand a good chance of going belly up or at least declaring bankruptcy this year. Unfortunately for Krispy Kreme they made the list along with Six Flags, Sbarro, Blockbuster, Six Flags and Trump Resorts to name a few.
I'm really, really enjoying Dan Collins' blog "My Take on Wake." Today I read his post on the history of the Wake Forest-NC State basketball rivalry and truly enjoyed the perspective it provided. Go give it a read.
Bankers, who probably are now in the same league with lawyers and politicians in terms of popularity, are not happy with potentially losing their bonuses. Here in the US there's been at least one prominent case of bonuses being granted despite some putrid performances by the company. Still, the bankers here haven't gone so far as to sue to keep their bonuses. In England? Bankers are gearing up for legal battle.
D.W. blogs about missing his regular Tuesday night Contra Dancing at the Vintage Theater in Winston-Salem while he was out of town. He has a little video to share as well. This caught my eye because I think it's where two of my favorite people met. D.W. describes the crowd as decidedly "hippy" and that definitely describes the members of my family who met there.
Celeste and I were driving through greater downtown Lewisville on Saturday morning when we encountered a closed lane on Shallowford Road and saw a race start/finish line set up by the square. We figured it was a bike race and both of us commented about how often we see things happening in Lewisville that we'd heard nothing about before the actual day of the event. We then wondered if it was a town sanctioned bike race since Lewisville is very popular with cyclists, or if maybe it was a race sponsored by a private company which is why we never heard about it.
WXII is reporting that some residents at Lazy Acres Mobile Home Park here in Lewisville may have been overcharged for years by Duke Energy. Apparently Duke charges a higher rate to homes that aren't 100% electric, and some of the mobile home residents say they were charged that rate despite being entirely electric. The difference is less than a penny a kilowatt hour, but for people on a fixed income that can make a big difference. One resident said she'd lived at Lazy Acres for 25 years and had been paying the higher amount the entire time. If that's true then Duke could be ponying up a hefty refund for her.
There's a cool graph at the Institute for Emerging Issues that shows changes in North Carolina counties from 1970 through 2030. The categories are population, population density and per capita income. What's really cool about the graph is that you can set it to play and it shows you how each county has changed in relation to the others over time. So you can see that a handful of "urban" counties were pretty much clustered together in terms of population in 1970, with Mecklenburg having 350,000 residents, Guilford 290,000, Wake 230,000, Forsyth 220,000 and Cumberland 210,000. Then in the 80s and 90s Mecklenburg and Wake literally exploded in population and that trend is expected to continue so that by 2030 Mecklenburg will have 1.39 million people and Wake will have 1.46 million people. Compare that to 590,000 for Guilford and 440,000 for Forsyth and I'd say we'll be living in a bucolic paradise by comparison.
and compare that to today:
and 2030:
Things don't seem to be trending well for Forsyth, huh? Actually that's kind of simplistic thinking because you also have to take into account cost of living and I suspect that if Mecklendburg and Wake have almost 1.5 million residents apiece the cost of living there will be sky high. Of course that helps explain why the income for some smaller population counties like Orange and Chatham are expected to be higher than the counties like Guilford and Forsyth; work in Wake but commute from a more sedate county like Chatham (sedate being a relative term). Huh, sounds a lot like the Northern Virginia I left five years ago.
Did you see the main op-ed pieces in yesterday's (Feb. 8, 2009) Winston-Salem Journal? Two pieces involving newspaper navel gazing. One was a piece titled "The Crisis Facing American Newspapers" by a guy at an investment bank that said the following public policy changes need to happen for newspapers to be saved:
I have to say that I agree with the basic premise of the first three, but it's the fourth one that cracked me up. Here's the entire reasoning for the anti-trust exemption:
Newspapers should be granted a finite (36-month) anti-trust law exemption to permit deployment of an industry-wide system to track and charge for re-use of their content. Whether that is accomplished through a "rights society" as with music publishers, or through the use of electronic watermarks, which could facilitate digitized tracking and usage charges, publishers cannot continue the practice of paying for the editorial staffs to source the news and then have it used for free by competing Web aggregators. There are numerous organizations that already have infrastructure in place to serve this purpose. The Associated Press already has existing license fee and "pay-per-click" payment structures.
Sadly the newspaper industry is making the same mistake that the music industry made, only 10 years late. They aren't recognizing the market for what it is. They aren't realizing that whether or not there's a printed form of journalism is irrelevant. Paper is a delivery vehicle, same as the airwaves and the internet. They also need to understand that if they pursue the whole watermark thing all they are going to do is minimize their own exposure and tick off their customers. What's important for them to understand is that instead of building walls around their news gardens they need to learn how to take their expertise and their (diminishingly) unique place in society and use every tool available to reach their audience.
Befuddled 