Friday, June 06, 2003

College hoops weblog PostingUp.net has an analysis of the lawsuit filed today to keep Big East universities from bolting to the ACC. Don’t get your hopes up, fans of the old school. Key line: “There simply is no merit to this lawsuit.” 4:52:18 PM    comment []

June 6, 1944. If you ever have a chance to visit this place, go. When you see the cliffs over the beach, you’ll wonder how anyone made it ashore. When you see all those white marble crosses (and the occasional Jewish star), you’ll be humbled. 10:26:30 AM    comment []

Forbes says Greensboro is a boring place to be single – it has a low ratio of single people, limited job growth, and a low “coolness” index.  Sounds about right to me. As someone who left at 18 and returned at 30 with a pregnant wife in tow, my beloved hometown has always struck me as a great place to raise a family. The one thing Forbes credits us with, a decent restaurant scene, is the one bit of nightlife that matters to me.   But Greensboro could do some things to ameliorate its boring image. The fix that fixes everything else is to create a vibrant economy to replace the textile-based model that drove us through most of the 20th century. We’re trying, and although I see a lot of middle-aged white men chasing their middle-aged white tails, I’m hopeful we’re making progress.   The best thing we could do to attract jobs would be to tout our great public schools – oh, wait, first we need to fire our insane county commissioners and vote in some people who will focus on turning our school system into one of the best in the country. That would do more to help our economy than almost anything else imaginable. It’s an attainable goal, too, but we have to want to do it.   In the meantime, there are signs of hope.   One is downtown, where Greensboro is about two clubs, three restaurants, and a couple of hundred apartments/condos short of critical mass. Just $5 million or so in private investment could push us over the top — we’re that close to making the old business district a real destination.   Cool happens in increments before it explodes, and little things are going on now. The neo-hippy troupe converting the old junk shop down by Undercurrent may or may not succeed in creating the “artists’ collaborative” they envision, but that’s the kind of thing we need to reclaim those great old buildings, one by one. The City should be doing everything possible in terms of tax policy, parking rules, etc. to encourage such activity.   Our universities are critical to the economy and to the development of a cultural (and countercultural) scene. UNC-G has a serious arts program. A&T is starting to creep into the consciousness of White Greensboro. The more these two cooperate with each other and the business community, the better – and both have leaders who seem determined to do just that. We need to quit looking for ways to build a youthful culture from scratch and focus on the very real assets we've got.   On the cultural and lifestyle front, Greensboro has the best contemporary art collection in the southeast and a coliseum that gets killer shows. We’ve got a really nice Revolutionary War battlefield that needs to be part of the historical-tourism circuit. That’s a start.   And with some vision – how’s that ACC Hall of Fame coming along, Grubar? – we could do a lot more. On the marketing side, Greensboro should emphasize its appeal to young families – great parks and rec facilities, for example. Single people like that stuff, too. If you throw in the other opportunities – pro and college sports as well as the arts -- within a 1.5 hour drive in the horizontal city of the I-85 corridor, from Raleigh to Winston to Charlotte, you have something worth talking about.     Or, we could just run a bunch of articles in our local arts papers whining that we really are cool, really, the way we usually do. 10:13:37 AM    comment []

JD Lasica is back with a vengeance. “Last Thursday, without warning, enameco pulled the plug on my domain, for reasons I've never been able to ascertain.” He’s making up for lost time with all kinds of chewy stuff, including this tasty link to an article about better journalism through blogging. 9:55:10 AM    comment []