Photo essay: What NA's robber barons want, versus what NA's future really needs.

The robber barons are set in their ways. They have trouble with changing times, and they want to keep things the way they are.

Thes best way to keep things the same is to make people afraid. The robber barons are good at that.

But the robber barons are stuck in the past. Young people in New Albany want the city to be livable, and if it isn't, they'll take their talents somewhere else.

For the generations to come, our streets are designed to be used by all of the city's residents, not just the robber barons.

It's all about this relentlessly factual document. Not unexpectedly, not many of the robber barons have bothered reading it.

Maybe, for once, it's time for the robber barons to bone up and think ahead.

Rant: On design committees and old fartedness.

There needs to be a new rule.

For any “design” committee of any local organization that purports to be doing something remotely civic, or “for the community” – especially when accepting public money in any form – and also having 50% of its members over the age of 50, all of the committee’s “design” decisions must be presented to a Youth Committee of randomly selected teenagers and young adults, so that the old folks can have their latest solemn masterpieces of 1960s-era Readers Digest respectability publicly mocked before foisting them on the rest of us.

It rankles this 53-year-old realist that so often, persons my age or older make "design" decisions bound inexorably by their past-date stylistic prejudices. They may be volunteers, and they may be working hard ... but working hard isn't the same as working smart, and working "old" is even worse.

Just saying.