Summers sez: The two-way street project I've been recommending for 12 long years may finally be starting.

I'l believe it when I see it.

Meanwhile, the reporter surely intended to write it this way: "Elm Street and Spring Street between State and Vincennes streets."

The program provides for the conversion of these streets to two-way traffic:

►Market Street from First to Vincennes streets.
►Elm Street from Spring Street to between State and Vincennes streets.
►Pearl Street from Elm to Main Street.
►Bank Street from Oak Street to Main.

NA Confidential has been advocating two-way streets since at least 2005. We'd like our congratulatory plaque to be placed at 1112 East Spring Street, please -- facing toward the house if possible.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

New Albany to begin conversion of one-way streets to two-way, by Sheldon S. Shafer (The Courier-Journal)

Seven years since a study first proposed the initiative, the city of New Albany, Indiana, is on the verge of beginning the conversion of several of its key one-way downtown streets to two-way traffic.

Preliminary construction work, including some borings and pavement markings, is starting this week, New Albany City Engineer Larry Summers said in an interview Monday.

The $1.9 million contract — all federal money — signed with Ragle Inc. calls for completion of the street conversions by Sept. 30, he said.

A title impossible to ignore: "Death at the Elvis Museum."

Before directing you to a very serious article, I must explain what I was listening to just days before I read it.

I've always been a fan of Neil Finn and his various musical aggregations, including Split Enz and Crowded House.

The latter group's third album was released in 1991, and is considered a masterpiece by many, although the received wisdom is that Finn's decision to release a song from the album called "Chocolate Cake" as the first single doomed its reception in America.

 ... By all accounts, Crowded House (over the objections of management and label) insisted that the first single, and the album’s lead-off track, be the surreal dance song “Chocolate Cake.” The Finn/Finn collaboration was a tongue-in-cheek attack on Americans and their obsession with excess and celebrity. “Chocolate Cake” took potshots at everyone from Tammy Faye Baker to Andrew Lloyd Webber (“May his trousers fall down as he bows to the queen and the crown”). The joke wore thin quickly.

“‘Chocolate Cake,’ in hindsight, may well have undone us,” Neil Finn said. “It started off as a live song, which was tremendous fun to play. But as a first single a lot of people were put off by it. It was confrontational, which was good in a sense — people either loved it or they hated it. But maybe it gave an impression of the album which was quite remote from what the album actually was.”

As regular readers can easily imagine, I've always liked "Chocolate Cake" precisely because it sends up "Americans and their obsession with excess and celebrity" -- and no such effort could be truly complete without a reference to Elvis Presley. Accordingly, the song's third verse (after the bridge) includes this line: "I saw Elvis Presley walk out of a 7-11."

It is followed by a muffled but fully audible "moo."

I'm guessing that the sentiment and tone of "Chocolate Cake" would not have appealed to the late Paul McLeod, curator of Graceland Too and collector of all things Elvis. McLeod's shrine is the setting for a story of two lives ... and two deaths.

Death at the Elvis Museum, a "long read" by Brandon Harris (The Guardian)

Paul MacLeod may very well have been the most famous Elvis memorabilia collector of all time. He was certainly the stuff of regional legend, a gun-toting, mile-a-minute talker with a questionable relationship to the truth. In his early 70s he was still an imposing man, with slicked back white hair and a gleam in his blue eyes that let you know he had long ago lost his mind, or at least wanted you to think he had. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, he offered tours of his home, Graceland Too, an 1853 antebellum house at the corner of Gholson Avenue and Randolph Street in Holly Springs, Mississippi. He did not have the vintage Elvis memorabilia necessary to be taken seriously by other collectors, whose circuit of conventions he shunned. The real draw of Graceland Too was not the Elvis-themed rugs, mugs, calendars, curtains, videos, limousines, and trading cards that he had spent a significant portion of his life collecting. It was Paul MacLeod himself.

Of Johnny Main, peanut butter & 'nanner sandwiches and pink slips.

Huh? What was that?

I couldn't quite make out what you were saying over the roar of displaced semi-trailers thundering along Spring Street.

Say it again?

Oh, yes; right. You want East Main St. to feel more residential.

"The goals of this plan were to reduce vehicular speeds in this former state highway, and you can kind of get a taste of it now. It's still functioning as a state highway, even though it's been a city street for three years now, and provides for safer pedestrian crossings," said John Rosenbarger, spokesperson for the New Albany Public Works project.

Funny, isn't it?

So do we.

Ignorance is neither bliss nor amusing. At least it shouldn't be.

There's a guest column in the Tribune today.

That’s a lot of lettuce in the House, by Sylvia Griggs.

I always believed the Democratic Party was progressive, but some recent news has me puzzled. Voters put a woman in charge of the House, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), and she heads to the kitchen — the so-called traditional environment for a woman. Mother Pelosi seems to be saying, I know what’s good for you, and you’re damn well going to like it!

As part of her “Green the Capitol” Initiative, the House is getting a kitchen and food service makeover.

The columnist's argument goes something like this: It isn't progressive to eat food with names the columnist can't pronounce, especially if these names have "international" origins; presumably, politicians should eat peanut butter 'n' nanner sandwiches instead, just like the all-American, dead Elvis; and if there are any concepts in cooking and cuisine to which the columnist hasn't yet been exposed -- sustainable fishing, for instance -- these are to be derided as something unfamiliar to her, and thus worthy of trashing.

Imagine how much more edifying the piece would have been had we been informed as to what these names and concepts mean, and how they may or may not be important in the larger scheme of things.

What am I missing? How does one's own ignorance about a topic qualify as knee-slapping humor?

Given that one of the Tribune's other guest columnists apparently fancies herself as some bizarre sort of Ann Coulter clone, reading the local newspaper of late is reminiscent of Pink Floyd's magnum opus, The Wall.

Hello, hello, hello ...
Is there anybody in there?