The Rhino Times Schmoozefest returns Thursday, Feb. 22 from 6 to 8 p.m. at Four Flocks and Larder at 433 Spring Garden St. Free snacks and beer and wine while supplies last for those who sign in and wear a name tag.

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Thinking about the recent City Council retreat, I realized that I have been involved in a lot of business meetings where priorities had to be set and decisions had to be made. Not once in all of those meetings was I asked to put a dot beside what I thought was important.

It makes me think of the joke about new car salesmen who, on slow days, made side bets on what they could get the customer to do. Like $20 to get him to get in the trunk and another $10 if you can get him to agree to let you close it.

That’s my take on the dots. The city staff has bets on what they can get councilmembers to do. The person at the school board meeting years ago who got school board members to put dots on their own foreheads probably won the jackpot.

Instead of dots, I think at the next retreat the city councilmembers should throw darts at a board with the priorities on them. Whatever priority gets hit with the most darts is the priority for the year.

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Greensboro bigwigs talk a lot about marketing and branding. How about helping people find the place? Coming back to Greensboro from the Piedmont Triad International Airport, you reach a fork in the road with this signage overhead. Every time I see it I think, “I don’t want to go to High Point, Martinsville, Winston-Salem or Asheboro; how do I get to Greensboro?” I have learned through trial and error that to get to Greensboro I have to go toward Winston-Salem and Asheboro, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how anyone is supposed to know that from these signs. Can’t the powers that be in Greensboro get signage from what everyone calls the Greensboro airport to Greensboro? It doesn’t seem like too much to ask. For more on this, see Scott Yost’s column on page 23.

 

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Because of construction on both sides of the street, North Greene Street, which is normally four lanes, was narrowed to one lane recently. What’s amazing is that the traffic wasn’t bad. You would think that reducing the available lanes in the middle of downtown Greensboro by 75 percent would cause some traffic problems, and it may between 5 p.m. and 5:15, but the rest of the day traffic flowed like normal. It’s an indication of just how much excess capacity our forefathers built into the downtown streets.

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Harley Davidson motorcycle sales are down. The reason seems obvious to me. Baby boomers already have a Harley in the garage that they haven’t ridden in a while, so they don’t need another.

It was a huge boon to Harley when all of these guys who always wanted one of these big loud bikes discovered they could afford one. But I imagine that could have contributed to the current downward trend in sales. When I see a Harley rider get off and then take his helmet off, I expect to see gray hair, and usually do.

I imagine sales will spike in a few years when kids go out and want to buy a bike just like the one their granddad used to ride.