Dancin’ In the Streets?

After my lunchtime fiasco yesterday, I ended up rewriting the blog. I dropped an item saying I didn’t believe Mayor Willie Herenton would announce his resignation from that office to position himself for a run for the 9th District seat in the House of Representatives. I’m one day older and one day wiser.

Seriously?

Even as I watched him make the announcement, I wasn’t completely convinced, telling a coworker that I would believe he was leaving the mayor’s office for good unless I saw him carrying his boxes out to his car… His car, not the city-provided SUV with police driver.

For the sake of full disclosure, I’m not particularly a fan of Hizzoner. Demanding respect for yourself and the office you hold is fine. But he has had a tendency to let that slip into base arrogance. This city has too many problems to be divisive, and he has certainly been that.

He's the Mayor?

Having said that, I find myself impressed with his stated reason for leaving office. Holding one office while running for another does present the impression of a conflict of interest. It always bothered me when U.S. Senators would run for reelection to their seats while running for president or vice president.  If you’re crisscrossing wherever to run, you can’t be paying enough attention to the office you’ve already got.

I watched Herenton confidant Sidney Chism tell a TV reporter today that he’s certain the soon-to-be former mayor could rack up a 2-to-1 margin if and when he faces Steve Cohen in a Democratic primary for Cohen’s Congressional seat. I wonder. He only pulled 40% running against Herman Morris and Carol Chumney in the last mayor’s race.

When Hizzoner beat Dick Hackett in ’91, I’d been reassigned at WREG to the Health beat, so I was one of the few local reporters not providing election coverage that night. So I got to stay home and watch the coverage on TV. I remember the video of joyous Herenton supporters spilling onto Union Avenue in front of the Peabody Hotel to express their joy over the first elected Black mayor of Memphis. Fast-forward to today: I heard several people call for more street dancing in response to his resignation notice.

As I’ve opined previously, it is my fear that a Herenton-Cohen face-off could quickly devolve into an ugly race-baiting campaign, with either the challenger or his supporters promoting his blackness as the main reason he should get this new job.

Send Me to Congress!

I also have to wonder why someone who would be 70-years old by the time he took the oath as a Congressman would want to start all over at that point in life. Heck, his pension from the Memphis City Schools is already more than most of us get in salary; that would be enough to keep a lot of people happy.

Still, he announced last year that he was going to resign, even gave us a date then too. When it came down to it, he kept the job. He went on say the reason he ran in 2007 was to protect the city from Morris and Chumney.  Chumney has pretty much said she’ll run in any special election, and there’s no reason why Morris couldn’t do the same. And if you don’t know City Council Chairman Myron Lowery, lemme tell you, he really wants to be mayor. Really. And his temporary stay in the job when (if) Herenton resigns won’t slake that thirst. Why doesn’t the mayor think the city still needs protection from people he didn’t think were qualified 2 years ago? I still won’t believe he’s going to quit until I see him carrying boxes to the car.

Needless Expense

Swung by the Apple Store in Saddle Creek. They’ve got one of the iKids directing people into the iPhone line. It amazes me how popular those things are… most of the times I’ve been in that store, there always seem to be another line of people at the Genius Bar because of the problems they’re having with their iPhones.

Anyway, I had been there a few weeks ago to buy a Mighty Mouse for work. They use Macs, which is great, but the one at my desk has an older single-button mouse. I had gone to a 2-button mouse at home two Macs ago.  Gotta have that right clickability.

The Mighty only has one visible button, but the Apple folks have engineered the thing to work like a 2-button mouse… and instead of a scroll wheel, they’ve put a little ball on top that lets you scroll side-to-side, as well as up-and-down.

Look Ma, no wires!

So, even though I have a perfectly good keyboard and mouse, I fought through the iPhone crowd to get a wireless Mighty Mouse… as well as a wireless keyboard. It doesn’t have the number pad on the right… so instead of being a foot-and-a-half across like my old keyboard, this one is only 11 inches across. And they work through Bluetooth, instead of radio signals to a receiver that I had to plug into a USB port, like my old set up.

Didn’t need it, but I’m a sucker for the elegance of design that Mac offers.

The Thing that Cannot Be Named

I really don’t understand. Monday was lackluster as far as blog visits. Every day since, everybody and their mama has checked in. Seriously, more than 100 visits Wednesday & Thursday. Of course, I’ve gone on about my trivia issues every day since Monday. Since I like watching the little graph that shows blog visits jump up — trivia, trivia, trivia! It’s probably not the reason you’re checking in, but why take the chance?

EDIT: as of Friday afternoon, very light traffic. It’s probably more the day of the week, not trivia, that’s drawing views. Particularly high numbers on the last two Thursdays. Hmmm.