The warm up for Mardi Gras Rhino Times Schmoozefest will be held at 1618 Midtown at 1724 Battleground Ave. in Irving Park Plaza on Thursday, Feb. 23 from 6 to 8 p.m. As always beer, wine and hors d’oeuvres will be served gratis to those who sign in and wear a name tag.
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I thought I must be really old fashioned because I was kind of shocked when City Councilmembers Tony Wilkins and Mike Barber were standing in the council board room talking very openly about their upcoming ED meeting.
Ads about ED pop up on my computer screen all the time and seem to always be on television when I’m watching with my mother, but I’ll have to admit that I didn’t know they had ED meetings and was wondering if they were anything like AA meetings where people told stories about their experiences.
After some discussion of the meeting Wilkins turned to me and asked if would be at the Economic Development meeting on Wednesday.
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Another bill repealing House Bill 2 was introduced this week and it looks like this one has the best chance of passing of those introduced so far.
But what is hardly ever discussed is that the problem is not the law itself. As far as I know not a single person has been arrested for violating the law. The problem that the law has caused is due to the boycott. North Carolina is being boycotted when states with similar laws are not.
An easy solution would be for those endorsing the boycott to decide that they have made their point in North Carolina and focus their efforts on another state. But that doesn’t seem likely to happen.
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I was in a drug store late one night recently. A black man walked in right in front of me and when the store clerk saw him, the clerk stopped what he was doing, followed the man and watched him. The clerk didn’t follow me or watch me, and a short time later an Asian man walked in and he wasn’t followed or watched either.
The store clerk was also a black man. The clerk may have had problems with the customer in the past or there may have been something about the customer other than his race that caused the clerk to follow him. There are a lot of possible explanations, but with all the public discussion of racial profiling, it caught my attention.
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As regular readers of this column know, I walk the trails around the lakes regularly. Sometimes I pick up trash, but not as often as I would if there were trash cans at the trail head. It would be so much simpler to dispose of trash picked up on the trail if I didn’t have to put it in my car and then remember to take it out of my car and put it in my garbage can at home.
It’s one of those little things that I just don’t understand. The city won’t allow people to fish from the bank, reportedly because bank fishermen and fisherwomen leave trash behind. So if the goal is a lakeshore without litter, why doesn’t the city provide someplace to deposit trash? It makes no sense to me and requests for trash cans at the trail heads have fallen on deaf ears.
Imagine, for instance, if the city complained about litter downtown but provided no on-street trash receptacles. It wouldn’t make any sense and I don’t see where this makes any sense either.
