Bring on the Germans. Now!

The ALDI stores popping up around town are impressive. No wonder the Euro is kicking our greenback's butt if this is an indication of how much better they can run a "low end" grocery store compared to American companies. We Intowners need to quickly implant into the right people's heads that downtown Birmingham would be an ideal spot for one of their stores.

Why such a glowing words, you ask? If my reading of the people I'm often around is correct I'm out of step with many of you reading this in my grocery shopping. Ninety to 95% of the time I shop at Wally World or Piggly Wiggly not the food coutour haven these days, Publix. It saves me a lot of money and is overall not a bad shopping experience except that that I know I'm feeding the BeAsT itself, supporting its regressive employment practices and the questionable product sourcing practices. For now, however, I can't ignore those low, low prices and continue to put money into the coffers of the world's largest corporation. Shopping at Piggly Wiggly is a way to assuage my guilt and keep a few dollars local, but the difference in prices is great and thus far I haven't been able to verify that they pay their employees any better than Wal-Mart (WallyW). Enter the Germans with a solution to my conundrum: ALDI.


ALDI's got a nice selection of different brands than I can find anywhere else and they have them at really good prices. Yesterday I bought a bottle Shiraz wine for $3.50 and there were these frozen chicken asiago hot pockets that have a complexity of taste that remind me of a good restaurant that were about $2.00 a box! Add to that that they start new employees at $10 to $13 an hour! (You can work at WallyW for years in store management and not hit $10/hour, I'm told by a former manager.) Add to that they have a very active (almost to a fault) program for encouraging recycling, one of my hot buttons. Add to that ALDI stores all have a small size that can fit into a lot of different areas. Which is why they need to be downtown. In upcoming weeks I'm going to look into how we can let the good folk at ALDI know that downtown Birmingham would be a great place to reach Intowners. What do you guys think?

YES.WE.CAN!

Up until this Tuesday I have not been able to make to any of the Yes We Can! townhall style meetings going on around the city. Luckily the programs organizers are persistant in keeping these meetings going and I made it to one at the library on Oporto Madrid (beautiful building). I'm glad I did.

There was only a small group there, no suprise. Unfortunately only the most intersted in Birmingham's future are going to take time to go to these things. Pretty much everyone there currently served in some type of leadership role in their current life.

Interesting new ideas were shared. Two of the most interesting to me were creating schools with dormitories creating a residential system for public school students. WOW. Hadn't thought of that one in the past, but I believe it's worth a good review of costs and benefits. Another was a deeo more affordable entertainment options for families. There's opportunity for neighborhoods to be more aggressive in doing things like "movie nights" which could help with this.

Many things were shared in the hour and a half long meeting. I'm going to the one on today (7-17-08) at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church on Martin Luther King Blvd. Meet me there.

Intowners and the media have "Something" To Say...

Mr. Langford's "Something" has begun. The inaugurations have been done, tax proposals made, job cuts been suggested. Intowners and the press have "something" to say: Mostly it's "We don't like it."

Randomly overheard (and paraphrased) comments heard over the past few weeks:
'I like the free computers for school children program. Too many kids graduate
with no skills."

'I don't understand why Larry went about asking for this tax increase without
going to the people first. Everybody knows we the city will need more money
to do the things we need to do. We need to be raise property taxes because
they're too low.'

Much of the press is negative:
John Archibald: Langford takes city to La-La land

Kyle Whitmire: "The Loquacious Larry Langford"

Things have begun to happen in the city that were held up by the previous administration. Kyle Whitmire calls our new mayor Leapin' Larry. He's jumping for sure and the rest of us are waiting on the second foot to drop.

Sage Advise...

Somebody's trying to give people travelling Intown a message. Given how much of disease is caused or made worse by stress, I'm thinking that whoever is responsible for the new signage going up on the 6th Avenue side of Children's Hospital may purposely be leaving this work partially finished. To see this look toward the hospital when you are in front of Magic Johnson's Burger King on 6th Avenue.

Here come the leaves again..

To get the correct effect of the title you must hear Annie Lennox circa The Eurhythmics in the 80s singing "Here Comes the Rain Again" in your head. Wiki says she's been called the greatest white soul singer in the world. Perhaps that's why her song so channels my feeling of the blues when I think about The Fall. Her song is what I heard yesterday when I had the urge and the energy to fire the first salvo against the "Rain of the Nine Trees", as this years war against the nine trees in my yard shall be called. Somehow the annual ritual of of keeping my yard clear of the previous years growth is a tad more fun to think about when Annie's voice is ringing in my head. Actually the words from the song transpose well too:

"Here comes the (leaves) again/
Falling on my head like a tragedy/
Falling on my head like some new emotion"

I've made a promise to myself: this year they will not get more than a couple of inches thick in my back yard. That's the best I can do. My emerald zoysia grass makes me lazy in the summers because it is soooo low maintenance. Whoever's considering new sod needs to get some of that emerald zoysia.

Tell me some of your fall yard ups and downs.