Peoria Illinoisan

I planned to recap the year in the Peoria Blogosphere, but after taking an hour to go through my own history, I quickly realized that it was much too daunting of a task, so here are a few highlights, as I see it.

All links are to me unless otherwise noted.

January:

• PeoriaDad goes bye-bye
• The Peoria Chronicle debuts
• Chase Ingersoll wins the Golden Cockroach Award [PollyPeoria]

February:

• Name This Peoria Landmark debuts
• The Journal Star takes Bill Dennis’ advice and begins to publish eyecandy.
• Pammy quits. [Lollygaggin]
• Pammy changes her mind. [Lollygaggin]
• Peoria has it’s first murder of 2006, with little fanfare. [Peoria Pundit]
• Jaywalking becomes a hot topic [Peoria Pundit]

March:

• District 150 has a plan for a new school at Glen Oak Park.
• BU heads to the sweet 16
• Kiss Maplewood Ave goodbye. [Peoria Pundit]
• A tragedy strikes my family

April:

• The Peoria Park Board is accused of violating the Open Meetings Act. [Peoria Chronicle]
• Cubs sweep the Cardinals. It was all downhill from there.

May:

• VONSTER is banned. [Peoria Pundit]
• Lyn Howard gives up politics and starts a new career as a used car salesman.
• Drunken Deck Man (an all time favorite post at the P.I. household) [Scott Janz]

June:

• Pepe Taco reopens
• Arabs invade Pekin
• The Peoria Playhouse Challenge [Eyebrows McGee]
• The Most Balsy Peoria Bloggers are named. [O’Brien’s Briar Patch]

July:

• Bradley buys Maplewood Ave houses for $500,000 ea.
• Eyebrows McGee comes out- on TV. [Eyebrows McGee]

August:

• The “Midwest Ambiguous Museum of Miscellany” asks the public for a real name.
• Billy gets hacked for peace
• Chef Kevin changes his name to No.9 [Chef Kevin]
• PeoriaDad says hello. [Give Me a Bouncy ‘C’]
• Eyebrows McGee is accused of being un-American and is told to “Go Back to Boston” [Eyebrows McGee]

September:

• Museum Square asks the public for a name (again). [Peoria Chronicle]
• Peoria Park Board erased some important tapes [Peoria Chronicle]
• The 1st Peoria Crime Forum is held. [Scott Janz]

October:

• Huh? VONSTER opens his site to comments.
• Peoria Public Library considers some changes.
• The Cardinals… well, we all know what they did. [Peoria Chronicle]
• Sadly, Midwest Confidential may change to the Conferderate Confidential.

November:

• I meet a crazy lady on crack
• The last Arbor is torn down.

December:

• Snow.
• Park Board votes against District 150 and for Glen Oak Park [Peoria Chronicle]
• Will the Keller Branch railroad tracks be torn out for a bike trail? Maybe not. [Peoria Chronicle]

On my to-do list: Call FEMA to see if my living room qualifies for federal disaster assistance.

I find the news of James Brown’s death to be somewhat upsetting. I’ve spent many nights listening to James Brown through my headphones and many more jamming on the stereo. Live At The Apollo ‘62 continues to be one of my favorite albums and is consistently ranked as one of the greatest and most influential albums ever recorded.

As the AP story says: “Brown was to rhythm and dance what Bob Dylan was to lyrics.”

Classic live performance of Please, Please, Please:

12 Angry Men is absolutely the greatest movie ever made; I will delete any comments to the contrary- ok, I probably won’t delete your comment, but I will strongly disagree…

My wife was gone for the night, so I thought it’d be fun to watch it with my 6 grader, and there was no way in heck that she was going to convince me to watch “RENT“.

Mrs PI’s response to my movie selections: “You made her watch WHAT!?”

Name This Peoria Landmark #114

This took me way to long to write- certainly longer than I imagined, so it deserves a link. Anyway, who knew that there were 6 Peorias in the US? Peoria IL, IA, and OK are related to the Peoria Indians. Peoria TX and AZ were founded by fellow Peoria Illinoisans. I have no idea how Peoria, CA came to be.

She’s teaching Dr. John Carroll that right now, and doing a damn good job at it, if I do say.

Update: After three responses, apparently Dr. Carroll doesn’t have the cojones to ackowledge Eyebrows McGee. Instead he has chosen to ignore her and argue about mis-spellings. Heck, she even offered up $20 bucks!

Update 2: Quoting Tony: “Oh good grief his wife responds to Eyebrows instead of him.”

This is pathetic. Time to move on…

The silent majority had their hopes dashed last night with the rejection of a new school at Glen Oak Park.  Is it over?  Hardly.

Pjstar: “District 150 Superintendent Ken Hinton said the vote means “another part of the community is going to get the school.”  He said Glen Oak Primary School will not close, and he isn’t interested in using the primary school site for a new school.”

Sounds like sour grapes to me.

It continues:

Ken Hinton: “…there’s always the chance that Park Board members could change their minds one day.”

“This is how they feel now.  This does not mean that in the future they would not reconsider or change their mind.”

After giving hope to the possibility of Glen Oak School site, we find out now that he was only giving us lip service and the current Glen Oak School site was never an option.  He’s still going to push for the park site.  By continuing to focus on Glen Oak Park and denying any consideration of Glen Oak School, he’s effectively cranking up the heat and apparently will keep it up until someone cracks.

This is Ken Hinton’s legacy and he does not want to lose the battle.

1. They’ve got a very shiny new web site.  It looks more professional than the old one, though the news stories are a little harder to read against the background color and I constantly have to re-adust my eyeballs that keep moving to the left.

2. The quality of the streaming audio has improved big time, plus the Country 1290 which used to play in the background is gone.

I watched as you brainwashed your wife.
I watched as you called your 100lb wife fat.
I watched you surprise your wife on her birthday with a “practical” minivan.
I watched as you bought yourself a two seat sportscar.
I watched as your worried wife call the cops to file a missing persons report, only to find out later that you had scored some coke.
I watched as you called the cops in retaliation on your “missing” wife who was shopping for Christmas presents.
I watched the bullshit meter go through the roof whenever you spoke.
I watched you cheat on your wife with a woman 25 years younger than you.
I watched as you abandoned your wife and kids.
I hear that your 22 year old girlfriend is pregnant.
I also hear that you are getting married.

Way to go, buddy.

The subject of NTPL post #106 was the Glen Oak Park Lagoon Parapet & Cannon. After surprising a few commenters with the news of its demise, I spoke to a few others and soon realized that the news was not well known.

C.J. Summers spoke for all when he said: “They’re tearing out the parapet?! What the h*** is wrong with the PPD?”

Believe it. It’s true.

The Cannon named Arapiles will be relocated to an undetermined location.

I was speaking with a new neighbor of mine who recently moved into town.  He doesn’t buy the paper, nor does he know much of the history or politics in town, but after a living here for a few months, he had some questions.

Simply put, he wanted to know what was wrong with this town?  You can’t walk anywhere and the neighborhoods change between safe and crime ridden in the blink of an eye.  His realtor didn’t want to show him anything in the older neighborhoods until he insisted.  Why is that?  I explained that there are many studies, plans, and grandious ideas to which he asked why doesn’t it seem that any of these plans are being implemented?  I said some were, some weren’t, but mostly those in power choose to largely ignore the recommendations.  I cited Museum Square as a good example.

That took him to the subject of the riverfront?  Why isn’t it the central attraction in this town?  It’s the most valuable asset this town has, yet there’s nothing down there.  A parking deck with some closed up restaurants and a Walmart on the other side?  Who in their right mind would allow a Walmart to be built on the riverfront?  While I suggested that things were improving, albeit at a snails pace, and there are some good people trying to do good things, I completely agreed that the deck and Walmart were horrible ideas.

Having only lived here for a few months, he generally likes the town and the people he’s met, but he sees Peoria as totally disjointed and gets the impression that we don’t really care about our older neighborhoods or taking advantage of our best assets and that really baffles him.

I had an album that always skipped at a certain point in a song. I had listened to it so often that it just became part of the song, even though it wasn’t right. When I eventually bought it on CD and got to the song in question, my brain was briefly confused because it was expecting the ’skip’ which didn’t happen. It took awhile to get used to hearing it correctly.

After several years of hearing Ken erroneously say “The Pioneer Parkway”, I had a similar experience today.

Well, not exactly…

This week’s Theme Time Radio Hour episode #33 is one of my favorites; it’s called “Countdown” and was introduced as “the top ten best songs, as voted by you- the listener.”

While that’s hardly true either, here’s the list:

10. Ten Commandments Of Man - Prince Buster
9. Nine Below Zero - Sonny Boy Williamson
8. Eight Men, four women - O.V Wright
7. Seven Nation Army - The White Stripes
7. Seven Nights To Rock - Moon Mullican
6. Six Pack To Go - Hank Thompson
5. Five Long Years - Eddie Boyd
4. I Got Four Big Brothers - Maddox Brothers & Rose
3. 3 x 7 = 21 - Jewel king
3. We Three - The Inkspots
2. It Takes Two - Marvin Gaye & Kim Weston
2. Tea For Two - Joe Mooney
1. One Irish Rover - Van Morrison
1. One Love - Bob Marley
0. Zero Willpower - Irma Thomas

Ok, there were a few ties, and as he says “here at themetime radio hour, our top ten list doesn’t end at number one, we go all the way to zero.”

A typically eclecitic playlist incorporating his love of varied musical styles- reggae, country, blues, motown, rock. It’s all here. On a personal note, I can attest to Bob’s love of Van Morrison’s “One Irish Rover”. He followed up Pancho & Lefty with that song during his 1989 concert in Peoria.

addendum: The best part of the show is not nescessarily the songs themselves, but Bob’s commentary in between them. If your religious beliefs don’t prohibit bootlegging, you can download the shows in their entirety [here].