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Friday, July 11, 2003 |
i feel like a roadrunner
The NY Times has a nice story today, A Truck With a Life of Its Own, about a man whose old beater truck became a community resource.I've lost count of how many people have keys to my truck. It's more than a dozen, maybe twice that. Every Saturday, when a couple of thousand minivans, sport utility vehicles and station wagons visit the town dump, discharging trash, recyclable plastic, cardboard and the like into designated Dumpsters, my truck is likely to make several appearances. And any day of the week, someone might take it to pick up a new grill at Sears or a load of lumber at the Home Depot.
When I last visited Portland, I stayed with a friend-of-a-friend who participated in Flexcar, a program where you could pay a fee and get access to a pool of cars for shopping trips, etc. I'd love it if the car sharing movement
Very practical. Before Lucy's workplace moved and she became a commuter, we used to get by with the occasional rental of a van for tasks like getting ready for summer (we'd buy peat moss and such for the garden, lumber, haul stuff to the dump, etc., all in one day).
with a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spot
Mike Ivey thinks that "Chains won't bind State Street".
If national chains find downtown Madison an attractive place to do business and want to invest here, I say - in the words of George W. - "bring 'em on." Independents who say they can't afford the high rents on State Street will find their own niche, creating hip "off-State" business nodes to be searched out by the trendiest urbanites.
Who knows? Maybe having a Crate & Barrel or Eddie Bauer Home Store on State Street would attract a few more whitebread visitors to the downtown where they might even expand their world by tossing a coin into the case of a long-haired fiddle player.
Madison is one of the few cities with a healthy downtown left in this country, yet somehow we should repeat the mistakes of the past and drive out everything unique in favor of making our downtown look like Schaumberg.
And how the heck did The Capital Times end up with a reporter who can approvingly quote George W. Bush at his most idiotic? "Bring 'em on"?
