If you're on Twitter and aren't following Hon. Deaf Gahan, go there immediately and enjoy the shadow mayoral account.
Thanks for reading NA Confidential, where we enjoy reconnoitering the neglected periphery for uniquely local perspectives on life in New Albany.
These monthly compilations typically make use of a boilerplate introduction, but August 2018 will be an exception.
Neither NA Confidential nor its creator are configured to make money. I've resisted all temptations to monetize the blog, to run Google ads, or seek to find sponsors of my own. Consequently, I pay little attention to the statistics. This blog exists because you're entitled to my opinion, and my opinions torment me with an unimaginably painful sort constipation if they remain bottled up inside.
At several junctures in the past, page views have exploded for a particular post, and a bit of back channel observation usually suffices to see whether the numbers are legitimate, or boosted by spiders, bots and various other creepy crawlers. All things considered, the all-time peak for (mostly) verified page views came when Eric Morris was kind enough to give the blog an exclusive on his preview of Hull & High Water.
Here is how the "top three" all-timers look now.
To put 52,633 in context, there are less than 38,000 people living in the city of New Albany at the present time.
Simply stated, an amazing quintupling of readership, but a phenomenon made possible only through the unnecessary death of a wonderful young man, occurring just down the block from where he lived. It's bittersweet, and I'm conflicted about this top ten list.
Moreover, as I've been scrolling back through the purely sadistic month of August in New Gahania, with more tales from the dull Gahan clique's Corruption Junction than anyone could intelligibly begin to record, the inspiration for David Duggins' anchor branding logo finally makes sense.
New Albany's "brand" is an anchor because we're a ship of fools.
The August most-viewed list begins with ten "honorable mention" posts, before concluding with the Top Ten, escalating to No. 1. These statistics are derived from Google's internal accounting.
AUGUST HONORABLE MENTION (10)
419
As HUD's public housing smoking ban goes nationwide, Duggins and his merry elves pre-sign a ream of eviction forms.
Let's not forget the relaxation of mandatory drug testing for NAHA employees, as implemented somewhat curiously just as David Duggins came bounding up the front steps to assume his six-figure salary), it should be obvious that previously unattainable zealotry as it pertains to the junta's local enforcement of this nationwide public housing smoking ban might well result in displaced former residents and unoccupied units.
Or, Gahan's goal from the very start of the putsch. We don't have a compassion gap in New Albany. Compassion Chasm is more like it.
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433
Gahan belatedly rediscovers misplaced "pride," appoints Warren Harding Nash to the long lost Human Rights Commission, and disappears back into the bunker.
Cliff Staten (father of the current redevelopment director) will be joining Nash (current Board of Public Works and Safety president, spectacularly failed mayor and the father of a sitting council member) as Gahan's long delayed appointments to Dear Leader's intentionally moribund Human Rights Commission, coincidentally enabling the HRC's sudden resurrection just as the heat is starting to come down on Squire Adam's unresponsive Donnelly Democrats for not giving a tinker's damn about human rights.
If you believe that Warren Nash on the Human Rights Commission somehow differs from Scott Pruitt in charge of the EPA, please drop me a line.
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453 (tie)
PINTS & UNION PORTFOLIO: Beer Tuesday Talk & Taste, and Tabletop Tuesday; beer and board gaming starting Tuesday, August 14.
As often as humanly possible, I'll be upstairs at between 5:00 p.m. and at least 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday evenings, starting Tuesday, August 14.
This weekly event is strictly informal, and you need not be present at any precise time, just at any point within the window. It's not exactly a class, and there'll be no tests. However, there'll be a beer of the week; purchase one downstairs, bring the beer upstairs, and we'll talk it over.
The conversation might lead somewhere, or not much of anywhere at all. However, it's your chance to learn about beer styles and ask me questions.
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453 (tie)
Chicanery as always: City Hall gifts us with the 238-page draft zoning ordinance a mere 24 hours before two "public input" meetings. Rental property owners, turn to page 159.
It's almost as though Gahan's lickspittles don't want members of the public to have time to digest a document that if passed surely will mark the single greatest expansion ever of city government's powers.
In other words, if your idea of progress is David Barksdale wielding 238 pages of details in a daily crusade to coerce 37,000 residents into organizing the condiment bottles by size and purpose, then this complete absence of fair vetting time will be orgasmic.
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457
BEER WITH A SOCIALIST: Pints&union begins regular hours tonight, and there's a "luxuriant brunette brew" to help celebrate.
Last weekend's two "soft" opening evenings were helpful, and tweaks will continue to be made. Expect a few adjustments to the hours of operation during the first couple of weeks, and note that because the pub's kitchen hood was the very last item to be installed, edibles are still being dialed in.
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462
ON THE AVENUES: There's only one way to cure City Hall's institutional bias against non-automotive street grid users, and that's to #FlushTheClique.
Institutional bias helps to explain why Jeff Speck’s proposals to revolutionize our city’s street grid suffered a grim and meticulous death by a thousand belches and almost as many farts.
Speck’s plan was pruned again and again until the majority of design mechanisms intended to bring about the greatest positive change for the greatest number of overall users, whether behind the wheel of a car or navigating a skateboard, were left despoiled on the cutting room floor amid the laughter of Pinocchio Rosenbarger and David “Playboy of the Western World” Duggins.
Isolated in an otherwise untouched design vacuum, stripped of Speck’s ancillary buttresses, two-way traffic alone couldn’t have ever proven capable of transformation. It has been slightly helpful within its straitjacket, as tailored by the most intellectually deficient mayor in this city’s history, but it needs lots of help, beginning with one simply imperative.
Flush the fuckers, ASAP.
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496
A purely sadistic week in New Gahania, and even more tales from Corruption Junction.
Welcome to the increasingly rocky reign of Crooked Jeffrey.
Even Donald Trump had a better week than our increasingly out of touch, cash-obsessed and graft-ridden Ceausescu fetishist. I hear Joseph Kabila is a free agent; maybe with a bit of added TIF funding, Gahan can outbid LeBron's resurgent Lakers and put the idle Congolese strongman in charge of Fairview Cemetery.
Take it away, Mr. Gillenwater.
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501
SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Dogs caused the farmers market to jump the shark, according to germophobic jazz icon.
Speaking of animals, it seems the presence of dogs at New Albany's farmers market has single-handedly rejuvenated the newspaper's letters section.
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547
Not a single tree in this city has a chance so long as David Barksdale and Jeff Gahan wield the chain saws, and Freud would have a field day with the phallic symbolism.
Deforestation hinders the stormwater control effort, but let's not ignore how stupefyingly banal this message reads, although the mayor has a reasonable retort: "Do you really think I write the words my name is attached to"?
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570
Learn about the Taco Steve Recovery Fund at GoFundMe.
To know Stephen "Taco Steve" Powell is to love the guy, so consider a donation to help with his recovery from a broken hip. In terms of business, Steve has staff, and things are on a normal footing.
Here's to fast healing.
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668
GREEN MOUSE SAYS: What does it mean, this social media surge by Nick Vaughn?
Surely Vaughn is hinting at a campaign of some sort in 2019, and given the ongoing silence from presumptive GOP mayoral candidate Mark Seabrook, it would seem an advancing charisma gap is being preemptively addressed. Gahan's gotta go, but Republicans need to bring their A-game if they're serious about overturning Dear Leader's vast stacks of cash.
Energy and enthusiasm wouldn't hurt, "red wave" aspirants. Vaughn has both in abundance.
AUGUST TOP TEN
728
On John McCain.
By periodically standing up to our diminutive Trumpolini, McCain was praised by progressives even before his death, and termed by his ideological opposites to be the far better man; then again, I have discolored pocket lint of higher caliber than The Donald.
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740
If I devote two minutes to providing solid information about the house at 921 Culbertson, are they billable minutes? Can I at least get a Dewey button, or maybe one extra newspaper article per month?
Of course, the newspaper typically ignores neighborhood matters like this house until handed a prurient reason to send a stenographer -- maybe a fire, or a drug bust -- and there apparently isn't a coherent editorial policy governing such matters (perhaps Bullet Bill Hanson is afraid of insulting a slumlord who advertises), but you already knew this. Just imagine if they devoted a similar focus more often.
But here's the annoying thing.
It took me, a rank amateur, all of two minutes to find the information in the next three photos.
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797
Dead Man's Curve has killed, and it will kill again unless our cowardly ruling clique does its job.
Sorry, but we need to be blunt.
We can't possibly be progressive unless the truth about street safety for all users is told aloud, and make no mistake: if the speed-through status quo works for you, that's not progressive at all.
In fact, it's embarrassingly regressive.
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858
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to rant in a unique way about the jail tax.
It would be mighty helpful in explicating Gahan's myriad ethical shortcomings if the occasional sign of a pulse dimly emanated from the right, and not only the left, where as the rare social democrat (lower case, please) in the room, I tire of waging a one-front war against Team Gahan's larcenous stupidity.
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933
Seismologists record earthshaking Tree Board orgasms as Schoolmaster Barksdale's chain saw strikes again.
It's been a tough week if you're a downtown New Albany street tree.
When one of your brethren decided to strike a blow against car-centrism, it was inevitable that hostages would be taken, tried, sentenced and quickly dispatched.
No last meals or final requests, just those signature red plastic bands -- and the sound of chortling from Schoolmaster Barksdale as his trademark Husqvarna was lubed and revved for duty.
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1,102
Ooh, ooh, that smell: 5th district councilman Matt Nash, a key supporter of Jeff Gahan's colonial agenda, now is employed by the New Albany Housing Authority -- the mayor's personal colonial realm.
Naturally, we can expect Shane Gibson to ooze forward in a pool of cash-scented K-Y Jelly, arrogantly assuring us there’s nothing at all unethical, or suggestive of a conflict of interest, about just another councilman getting a federal government job.
Except Matt hardly is just another councilman, and it remains that every last decision-maker at the New Albany Housing Authority was put into place not by a clueless bureaucrat in Washington DC, but by toadies and bootlickers inserted into NAHA by Jeff Gahan himself, as charged with performing politically-motivated tasks precisely like this one.
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1,370
Mt. Tabor residents haven't finished yet, as Deaf Gahan faces a court date: "Eminent Domain Law Put to Test Against City of New Albany."
Welcome to NA Confidential's 13,000th career post.
The Green Mouse has received a press release: "Eminent Domain Law Put to Test Against City of New Albany," and it's a corker, but before we revisit the overreach that city officials refer as Mt. Tabor Road Restoration and Pedestrian Safety Project (is the phrasing totalitarian or Rosenbargerian?) let's recall an undisputed stone cold classic video clip from earlier in 2018.
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1,409
"Rev. Bernice Hicks, founder of Christ Gospel Church, dies."
I have neither the time nor the energy to devote to a detailed rendering of the religious quackery embodied by Bernice Hicks, who died a few days ago. However, we all deserve an obituary, even if it avoids the controversial bits.
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4,966
#LiveLikeMatt -- and how you can help Matt Brewer's wife and family.
The local newspaper of record provides coverage of yesterday's gathering of hundreds at the skate park on the riverfront. There's a plan afoot to rehabilitate the skate park, and Matt was involved as a consultant. It is slated to be called the New Albany Flow Park, which is nice enough, but it's a replaceable name since overtaken by events.
By community acclamation, it's now the Matt Brewer Flow Park, or some similar wording of explicit recognition. I strongly encourage local powers that be to endorse this naming notion without further delay. Bureaucracy can be damned -- we all know Matt's name needs to be on a facility of which we all can be proud.
Let's not settle for less.
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52,633
Last night a driver killed a skateboarder at 9th & Spring. His name was Matt Brewer, and he was one helluva guy.
The hardest thing in the world right now for me is to suppress my anger. I know there'll be time to channel this anger into something useful; it's just awfully difficult to avoid lashing out.
My friend Ryan Hammel wrote this at Facebook, and it is spot on. Matt was everyone's friend, and a valued neighbor of ours on Spring Street.
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