Category: News

Someone’s attempt at planned obsolescence has gone horribly, horribly wrong:

Six years before the RMS Titanic set sail on its doomed maiden voyage, a Great Lakes steamship was launched, and it’s still in operation.

Now called St. Marys [sic] Challenger, it is the oldest ship still in service on the Great Lakes. This winter, the 101-year-old Challenger is docked in South Chicago while a maintenance crew from Milwaukee does minor repairs to get it ready for spring sailing.

No, wait; back in the old days, they built simple things that could run for a long time instead of complicated things that break right away. Because in the distant past, quality was a virtue more important than mere profit to companies and a feature more important than any bell or whistle to customers who had attention spans measured in generations instead of seasons.

Will city planners and those who’ve mistaken government service for a real-life game of Sim City take note about this development that, after a number of years, lacks the foot-traffic sorts of business it promised?

At first glance, a trip to the New Urbanist community taking shape on Hercules’ bayfront is reminiscent of the neighborhood depicted in the Jim Carrey movie “The Truman Show.” Each Craftsman, Victorian and Italianate home couldn’t be more perfect, glistening in an array of tasteful pastels.

But at least Carrey’s character, trapped in a seemingly idyllic seaside community, could walk to the local cafe for a cup of coffee. Three years after moving into the Promenade section of Hercules’ New Urbanist Waterfront Redevelopment District west of Interstate 80, residents still have to drive or take a long walk for items as mundane as a cup of coffee. The bustling just-walk-to-it village, touted as a model of the New Urbanist movement, has yet to materialize.

One of the tenets of the movement is that residents should be able to access essential services without having to drive to a strip mall on the outskirts of town. The idea is to locate retail hubs within walking distance of neighborhoods, or within easy access to mass transit. Currently, the mixed-use, live-work spaces on Railroad Avenue, which are meant to house these shops and services for Promenade district residents, contain real estate offices, finance firms and, of course, a company that specializes in staging homes for sale.

No, of course not; your community leaders know they’re smarter than those saps in California, and that their misunderstanding of how urban areas grow from central planning instead of organically based on industry/employment won’t make the same mistakes.

Of course, they will. They’ll drive out stinky heavy industry to beam down a Star Cups (an off brand coffee shop, because a profitable corporation knows that light residential areas are risky for sustained business operations). Meanwhile, the affluent types who can live in New Urban areas because they commute to higher paid jobs elsewhere or because they’re on a trust fund/retirement will continue to draw the sorts of businesses they can support–expensive places that can survive when the customers aren’t frequent. Like real estate offices, financial firms, a company that specializes in staging homes for sale, and expensive beauty salons.

Here’s today’s CNN.com home page:

Featuring the the Secretary of State as Nosferatu and a headline about the sitting president: Doctor plays whack-a-mole on Bush’s face.

Well, I guess the world’s first and most self-important news network has to compete with the Daily Show.

Police: Cell phones a weapon against drunk drivers:

Many drivers in Missouri and Illinois are armed with an important device to combat drunken driving: Cell phones.

With cell phone use on the rise, drivers are being encouraged to report vehicles that show the telltale signs of driving under the influence, such as swerving into the shoulder and crossing the centerline.

For safety’s sake, take your eyes off the road and dial.

Missouri bill would trade casino loss limits for a tax:

A Senate leader proposed a new twist Monday in the long-running debate on loss limits in Missouri casinos.

Senate Majority Leader Charlie Shields, R-St. Joseph, wants to remove the $500 loss limit per two-hour period and impose a 1 percent tax increase on casinos. Money generated from the changes would be directed at a new scholarship program available to all high school graduates attending a public or private Missouri higher education institution.

You see, they placed this artificial cap on spending to make sure that the casino clients had to fritter their savings away on the riverboat “cruises” (that’s what the two hour periods represent, time when the boats would be “cruising” the river; quaintly, riverboat gambling was supposed to take place on boats, not on buildings in an inch of picturesque river backwaters engineered to appease the letter of the law).

But never mind artificial tips to concern for the citizenry; there’s money to be made on it.

Coming soon: decriminalizing murder for hire and replacing it with a licensing fee structure, permit requirements, and an excise tax.

McCain denies links to ‘soft money’

His ill-guided support–and passage of–campaign finance reform (aka “make the trained monkeys dance faster when the fundraising organ grinder plays so they can gather smaller peanuts and empower the * Congressional/Senate Committee or Unattributable Issue Advocacy Groups) has ensured I won’t support McCain for president this time around, his attempts to deny candidates access to any money now is misguided.

Or maybe I misread the headline.

If you build thousands of lofts downtown, will thousands of loft dwellers appear from the corn fields? Maybe not:

Even the strongest supporters of downtown growth say that, at least in the short term, demand isn’t likely to keep up with the supply of new units.

“I don’t want to be naïve about it,” said Jim Cloar, executive director of the Downtown St. Louis Partnership. “There’s quite a bit coming online in the spring, and there will be a natural drop-off (in occupancy numbers). But in the next few years, it will get better.”

Demographics, however, suggest it could get worse before it gets better.

In all, 834 rental and 471 for-sale units are under construction downtown. Another 2,669 rentals and 865 for-sale condos are proposed or planned over the next five years.

If all of the proposed units are built and occupied, the downtown population would increase by about 9,800 people in less than five years. That would be a 50 percent increase over the growth rate from 2000 to 2005, based on the downtown partnership’s estimates.

The culprit for this glut? The Keynesian flat tire:

But many developers keep going because projects are being driven by tax incentives, such as historic tax credits, rather than market demand, said Dan Woehle, first vice president for CB Richard Ellis, a commercial real estate services company.

“It would be better if the units come online as the demand builds, but developers are scared that the incentives are going to go away,” Woehle said.

Kinda impedes thoughts of the downtown revitalization, eh, Williams?

Embedded within a story entitled Coroner kept man’s heart after autopsy — mom wasn’t told, we learn about a family’s victorious litigation that forced health officials to turn over the heart of the young man. And what the family did with it:

The couple keeps his heart in a polished, inlaid wooden box in their bedroom.

Imagine that burglar’s surprise when he goes for the jewelry.

Come on, like you’ve not accidentally let a small pistol slip through:

Lambert Field police never found what appeared to be a pistol that slipped through an X-ray screening machine Friday night at the airport.

Five flights were delayed and a sixth bound for Toronto was diverted to Detroit so that officials could re-screen the hundreds of passengers who had filed through Concourse A to the flights.

The incident began about 6:30 p.m. when a Transportation Security Administration screener reported what was believed to be a double-barreled derringer handgun on an X-ray monitor.

Airport police arrived within two minutes, said Chief Paul Mason. But the suspicious item and the man who brought it through security had left the area. Investigators reviewed surveillance video of the area but could not identify the man who may have been carrying a the weapon.

I’d expect it wasn’t really a two-shot derringer, but the fact that they could not immediately identify it, where they saw it, or the person whose luggage in which they saw it troubles me a great deal.

No doubt more inconvenience and government employees would help avert this situation in the future.

Man was arming for ‘war,’ FBI says:

A St. Charles man obtained fully automatic weapons and tried to buy as many explosives as possible in preparation for what an associate called “war,” the FBI says in court documents.

He bought three rifles and a Claymore anti-personnel mine and negotiated for a case of hand grenades, documents obtained by the Post-Dispatch show.

His name wasn’t Devlin, otherwise we would have heard about it for three weeks.

Let the Wookiee win: not just a strategy for holographic chess knock-offs.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch doesn’t fail to get its headline with Michael Devlin’s name in it today: No ties confirmed between Devlin and other missing children:

No definite links between Michael Devlin and other local cases of missing children have surfaced in a two-week investigation of the accused kidnapper, authorities said today.

But Sgt. Al Nothum of the Missouri State Highway Patrol, spokesman for the multi-agency task force performing the probe, said the investigation had just begun.

But will they ban Guernseys, Holsteins, or Jerseys over this tragedy?

A northeast Ohio farmer was attacked by a cow and died a day later of a fractured skull suffered when his head hit the ground, authorities said.

What goes up must come down? How quaint.

“Our townhouse in Wauwatosa, on the market for eight months, was reassessed at $391,000 last summer,” Boyce said. “Our asking price, after being lowered twice, is now $349,900 and still we have not received any legitimate offers. Assessments are completely out of whack with values.”

Government law trumps natural law, the laws of economics, and every other law it wants when it comes to getting its paws on tax money.

Don’t expect your property tax assessments to fall with the market. Expect, at best, they’ll hold steady until inflation or the government’s own meddling force real estate prices up again.

If you object too strenously, citizen, perhaps you’d prefer to see your house as a couple of parking spaces and a light standard for the new stadium/mall/mixed use complex, eh?

Apparently, 99 Green Balloons are not enough to start the apocalypse.

(Final hat tip to the cat man.)

Greendale wants a say in Southridge’s future:

Greendale officials want to influence the changes in store for Southridge Mall – the village’s biggest taxpayer – as it comes under new ownership.

The village is seeking proposals from two planning firms – HNTB Corp. and R.A. Smith and Associates Inc. – to develop its own vision for the mall’s future, Village Manager Joseph Murray said.

Conversations have focused on whether the 110-acre complex, the largest shopping mall in the state, could support mixed-use development, whether housing could be part of that mix, and costs associated with various redevelopment plans, Village President John Hermes said. Talks have been in progress for several months.

How come newspapers never ask the big question, by what right does the government think it should exert influence in private business transactions?

Maybe it’s just as well; the answer would be Might, perhaps followed by a little inquisition against those who would challenge the ever-increasing authority.

Don’t think we can? No permits for you.
Think we’re sliding totalitarian? So, is this your car parked eighteen inches from the curb? I think we’ll have to boot it.

And so on, and so on.