No, I haven't lost my mind. I know it's not February and I know that Halloween is this week.
But I don't want to pelt the city of Omaha and my hosts here with raw eggs. I want to give them a valentine, because I really like this city.
Late this afternoon I was sitting down in the lobby, waiting for Teri, the Cheeky Librarian, to come and pick me up, and I read the local paper, cover to cover.
I was a newspaper reporter in a past life, so I like to read local papers wherever I happen to be, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the Omaha World-Herald. Then I was chatting with James, the front desk person at the hotel where I'm staying, and he told me the paper is the largest independently owned newspaper left in the United States.
So there you go.
My favorite feel-good story in today's paper was one that ran under this headline: Boys will get valuable instructors: black men
You can read it here: Valuable Instructors: Black Men
There was an advertising supplement wrapped around the regular paper, and the supplement had a story on the pedestrian bridge to Iowa that I walked across with Teri and my friend Monica when I was here in June. That's a really great memory--we had a wonderful day together--and the story reminded me of that.
Here's what I wrote about the bridge in June: Nebraska Sights and Sounds
Then I read about one community college that is suing five others in the state over the division of state funds--sounds like all the colleges involved have given falsified numbers to the state at different times, and now they are going to duke it out in court, at public expense, of course.
The top story is a rather disturbing one about a woman who killed her best friend when she overturned a golf cart on top of the friend, who was her passenger. The woman was very drunk (no word on whether or not the victim was also drunk, which makes a difference, at least to me), but she will not be prosecuted, because of a technicality. (The woman in the golf cart was trespassing onto a golf course after hours, so she wasn't actually on a public road, at least that's the reason a local judge gave when he dismissed the charges.)
It seems to me that the judge could have ordered this woman to rehab, and then to attend AA for a year or two.
Places to Go, Things to See
A couple of places I plan to visit while I'm here (I found these in the paper):
A exhibit of children's pop-up books at the Joslyn Art Museum.
A "creativity space" called Kaneko in Omaha's old downtown. To learn more: The Kaneko
@ Jeanne Sather 2009.
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