| Let a little hydrangea be planted in New Orleans
It's only a week and a half before Mardi Gras, and Carnival reigns in New Orleans. On Bourbon Street it's beer and booze and blaring music and Mardi Gras beads. Human statues hold their poses on almost every corner, and girls go wild on balconies. Parades appear out of nowhere; so do mounted police, their huge horses maintaining crowd control by size alone.
I'm in the French Quarter of the Paris of the New World, the town also known as the Big Easy, where a street kid named Louis Armstrong once searched garbage cans for food and now the airport is named for him. Where Fats Domino and Harry Connick Jr. and Wynton Marsalis and Al Hirt marched to their own music. Where Tennessee Williams started writing a play named for a streetcar.
Actually, I'm not here to revel but to attend a board meeting of the Garden Writers Association.
Dramatic 'Heavy Hitter' ads now considered OK
Members of a local Boy Scout troop appear in an advertisement for Las Vegas lawyer Glen Lerner that ran during the Super Bowl. The boy on the left portrays a young Lerner, supposedly honing his "Heavy Hitter" skills to defend a boy whose nose was bloodied by a bully.
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Ald. Mahoney has sensible plan to fix infrastructure
Ald. Mahoney has sensible plan to fix infrastructure Ald. Mark Mahoney’s proposal to help finance the infrastructure needs of the city makes perfect sense. Springfield is a company town. The companies are state government and the Lincoln sites. Both of these industries involve mass amounts of street traffic with little return to the funds that finance the maintenance of those streets. You have to look no further than any main arterial road into Springfield at rush hour to see the magnitude of traffic that enters this city every day. Secondly, the city receives no property tax from any state facility. When you add to that the flat revenue that finances our street needs, the city infrastructure has suffered. If you didn’t know, city street improvements are financed primarily by motor fuel taxes (MFT).
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