Alumni Park looks nice, but what about all those primo parking spots that are never open?
Wisconsin Alumni Association
An artists rendering of Alumni Park, which you clearly can't park your car on.
Since sifting through dull newspapers, hyperbolic blogs, and overflowing RSS feeds for meaningful news can be an arduous process, News Net catches and compiles both the amusing and the significant reports that were overlooked over the work week. Here are some things to think about as the weekend begins.
• The Wisconsin Alumni Association announced another change coming to Memorial Union in the next few years: Alumni Park, a lakeside park that will replace the 70 or so metered parking spaces next to the Union Terrace. An extension of East Campus Mall, the park lengthens Library Mall’s green space all the way to the lake shore, with an outdoor classroom added in for good measure. Of all the announced plans, the removal of parking alone was met with instant grumbling from a vocal minority who proceeded to tell tall tales of frequently and easily finding parking spaces at the Terrace on a Friday night, a group that should really pool its money with angry sunset lovers to create an alternative plan—the Wisconsin Alumni Drive-In Sunset Viewing Ramp.
• Speaking of alumni, turns out that recently shit-canned Yahoo! CEO Carol Bartz has quite the pottymouth, liberally dropping f-bombs into her comments to the press about how the board of directors fired her over the phone this week in response to the web company’s stagnant growth in the last few years. Since Bartz is a UW-Madison graduate, it is distinctly possible that her response to the board was simply, “Eat shit, fuck you.”
• Mayor Paul Soglin took an ax to the city executive budget this week, notably proposing a cut in city funding for the Edgewater renovation project down to $3.3 million from $16 million. But remarkably, the Madison biking community came away pretty much unscathed. In fact, between $4.4 million budgeted for biking and pedestrian projects next year, and $500,000 set aside to conduct a study on how to coordinate and harmonize all forms of transportation in Madison, Madison bikers can look forward to improved bike lanes and less congestion from buses, cars, and pedestrians in the future. Damn, those bicyclists have powerful lobbyists.
• And now, a tale of two emails. The first came from Steven Krieser, a top aide in the state transportation department, instructing all DMV employees to only give free voter IDs to people who asked for them. Anyone who just asked for an ID without specifying its democratic purpose would be charged $28. The second e-mail came yesterday from Chris Larsen, a mail room employee in the Department Of Safety And Human Services who told all of his coworkers to warn friends and family members about the courting ritual necessary to extract a free voter ID from a DMV employee. Guess which one still has a job today?
• Further angering the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Governor Scott Walker announced that this week would mark the first of a weekly series of radio addresses designed as another pipeline directly into his inner sanctum, as if his YouTube videos and chili tweets somehow weren’t enough to assure us that everything is going great in the Governor’s Mansion. For those who don’t own a radio anymore due to the existence of iPods, you can download the audio files of each address on the governor’s website each week. The first hacker to replace an address with Orson Welles’ War Of The Worlds becomes a Madison-area hero for life.
