Today we are launching an all new and improved website. For the past couple of years we have had an electronic page-turn edition, but not a functioning website.
The new rhinotimes.com site has all the bells and whistles of an actual website, and we know that some of the bells won’t ring and some of the whistles won’t blow. Please let us know if the website isn’t working properly. I’ve never known a website where right out of the box everything worked perfectly, but maybe this will be a first.
We’d like to thank Clever Robot for creating a great looking website for us and for putting up with all the changing requests we made during its development.
The page-turn edition is now a part of this website. So if you became addicted to that, have no fear – it’s only one click away.
*****
The first Schmoozefest of fall is Thursday, Sept. 28 from 6 to 8 at Lee’s Sports Bar at 2618 Lawndale Dr. in the shopping center across from Target. Free beer, wine and hors d’oeuvres will be available while supplies last for those who sign in and wear a name tag.
*****
People in High Point are so disappointed in the response from the Guilford County Board of Commissioners concerning funding for the proposed baseball stadium that discussions have been rekindled about High Point seceding from Guilford County and forming its own county.
High Point is the ninth largest city in North Carolina, but the second largest city in Guilford County. If High Point were a county, it would be the 27th largest of the 100 counties in the state by population.
The details would be tough to work out, but it’s an idea that has been kicked around forever. Around 1912, there was a real push to separate High Point from Guilford County, but it fell through.
If High Point became its own county, it would make Guilford County much more streamlined. Guilford County would only have one courthouse, one jail, one register of deeds office and one of a lot of other things.
*****
I’d like to wish my mother, Hannah Hammer, a Happy 90th Birthday.
*****
The fact that Greensboro is even going after Amazon is evidence that we don’t know our place in the world. Greensboro is not a top tier city. It isn’t a second tier city, which would I think include Charlotte and Raleigh.
Currently, I think Greensboro is in the same tier as Durham and Winston-Salem in the state and Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Greenville, South Carolina, in the region.
Greensboro is a great city to live in and there are a lot of industries out there that would be a good fit; Amazon isn’t one of them.
Going after Boeing and Amazon is a waste of time and money. Think about it for a moment. What if Amazon picked Greensboro? Where would the 50,000 new employees and their families live? How would they get to work? Where would they eat? Where would their kids go to school? There is no way Greensboro could handle that influx of people in a short period of time.
So why kid ourselves? We couldn’t handle Amazon and we aren’t in that league.
*****
At least for now, the Carolina Plott Hound, a conservative website that aggregated state – news much like the Drudge Report does with national news – is no more.
The Civitas Institute, which is funded by the Pope Foundation, owned the Carolina Plott Hound and pulled the plug on it last week. The reason for pulling the plug was that the Plott Hound had linked to a post from the Triad Conservative, written by Dr. Joe Guarino, which was blatantly anti-Semitic. Guarino, who was once a community columnist for the News & Record, has posted anti-Semitic pieces on his own blog site, but when this one was brought to the attention of Civitas, the decision was made to shut the whole site down. That is unfortunate for North Carolina conservatives because the Plott Hound was a good source for news in the state.
*****
The News & Record ran a lengthy article about the problems created by the closing of Cotswold Avenue because of the construction of the Urban Loop. Cotswold Avenue was a temporary road built to connect Lawndale Drive to Battleground Avenue; closing it forces that traffic on to Cotswold Terrace and recreates what became a huge political issue in the 1980s.
The article ignored the real question. Everyone knew the Urban Loop was going to be built and close down Cotswald Avenue, so why hadn’t the city done something to prepare for it?
The City Council talks about planning and future transportation needs all the time; this was a problem that everyone knew was coming.
Bike lanes and sidewalks are fine, but the overwhelming majority of human travel in Greensboro is done by private automobile. How could the Greensboro Department of Transportation do nothing about this foreseeable problem?
There was one other part of the article that I found fascinating: “Cut through traffic involves the misuse of neighborhood streets by motorists …”
I found out I “misuse” streets all the time because I don’t take the main thoroughfares. I thought the streets were for motorists to use. I had no idea that I wasn’t supposed to drive into a neighborhood unless my destination was in that neighborhood. In fact, I have already complained to several city councilmembers because most of the traffic on the street where I live is not by residents of the street but by people who mistakenly think the streets are for transportation and don’t realize that the street is for the sole convenience of the residents of that street.
If this is indeed the case that people are not supposed to drive down streets where they don’t live or to visit someone who does live there, the Greensboro Police Department is going to have an enormous enforcement problem. I know most of the traffic on my street is cut through traffic going to or coming from Cornwallis Drive. It made sense to me, but according to the N&R this is misusing the street, evidently because it is using one street to get to another street. I can’t even comprehend what, according to this definition, it means to properly use a street.
*****
Say Yes raised over $30 million in Guilford County by promising to offer last dollar scholarships to all the high school graduates of Guilford County Schools. It turned out they only did that for one year because they were something like $300 million short of the money they needed.
At that point, Say Yes said that it would have to pull back and only offer last dollar scholarships to students who met the financial criteria, but that it wouldn’t affect the core of the Say Yes program, which was wrap-around services.
So Say Yes picked 12 schools to run a pilot program for wrap-around services. Nobody seems quite sure what wrap-around services are, but whatever they are the pilot program was supposed to start in the spring of 2017. Now it is the fall of 2017 and even the pilot program for wrap-around services hasn’t started yet.
If wrap-around services are the key to the Say Yes program, why didn’t Say Yes start there first? And why, two years after Say Yes came to Guilford County, isn’t there even a pilot program?
Finally, someone at Say Yes should explain why a nonprofit foundation has money in the Cayman Islands. Say Yes isn’t what it claimed to be, but the question is, what is it.
*****
There is a lot of controversy about monuments to Confederate Army officers. If the country decides that it wants to erase the United States of the Confederacy from the history books, someone should be considering closing down the railroad that links Greensboro and Danville.
The Confederacy wasn’t much into infrastructure, spending most of its money on the war, but the Confederate government did build this railroad linking Greensboro with points north. It was extremely controversial at the time, but if the goal is to erase the Confederacy from the history books, protestors might want to get out and start tearing up some tracks because this railroad was built by the Confederate government and then used by the Confederate government to flee from Richmond to Greensboro.
