The most accident-prone intersection in Springfield is at 1900 West Monroe Street where the corridor to the boardroom crosses the corridor to the superintendent’s office. There was yet]]> Have you ever thought about how much Freddie Mercury’s Queen owed to the works of Gilbert and Sullivan? You have? Okay, we’ll talk about something else.The other day State Rep. Bill Mitche]]> Maybe it was the recent election of Richard Nixon to the White House that left me looking to the past rather than to the future in 1974. That was the year I published Honest Abe’s Honest Almanac]]> Making one’s address a condition of employment is one of those latent viruses that reside in the American body politic, and which flares up in full-blown symptoms every few decades. Residency re]]> I am told that radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi believed that sounds never die, and that if one could somehow catch up with old sound waves one could hear sounds made years, even centuries, ago. As The]]> At last, we can all feel safe when we take our credit cards out in public again. In September, a federal judge in San Francisco fined a Taiwanese company $500 million and sentenced its former presiden]]> When it comes to their health – and eventually, everything does – Americans’ motto is, “Too much is never enough.” That phrase ought to be printed on every test report, e]]> Central Illinois farmland doesn’t usually return a fat harvest until the fall. These days it’s doing so all year long. Sales prices for prime farm acreage around Springfield rose roughly o]]> There is no shame in quitting a race you know you can’t win. Lance Armstrong’s shame is the many races he perhaps should have quit rather than win. It was apparently to prevent unsavory fa]]> A seven-member team of urban paramedics known as a Sustainable Design Assessment Team recently spent three days touring Springfield’s city center, greater downtown Springfield. They were charged]]> A few years ago, the executive director of the National School Boards Association said, “In a democracy, school boards are the closest thing to the ground.” “Like dandelions in a law]]> I left one question unanswered when I wrote recently that the Horace Mann Educators Corp. building in downtown Springfield was one of four in the capital city designed by a world-famous architecture f]]> A few weeks ago the nation was briefly distracted from the work of buying, stealing and subverting this year’s elections by the release of a report from researchers at the Kennedy School of Gove]]> Schools, conventionally, seek to train the minds of their young charges. The problem is that it is not only their minds that show up every day in the classroom. Their bodies, their attitudes, their ex]]> As I write, the jury is still out on Rod Blagojevich. The coming verdict in his second trial for behaving like an Illinois governor will settle for now the question of his criminal culpability. Other ]]> Who would have thought that Petula Clark would turn out to be an urban policy seer? Perhaps you saw the SJ-R report about the “Sustainable Design Assessment Team” brought in to advise on h]]> To build or not to build, that is the question. The answer will depend not on the review of high school facilities needs underway at School District 186. It will be determined by the voters — appropriately, if you are concerned about democracy, inappropriately if you are concerned about education.]]> A while back – a long while back – I undertook to write a smallish book about a large topic, the history and culture of Illinois. I was certain that after more than 30 years spent reading,]]> In a recent column (“Keeping Springfield weird,” April 25, 2013) I tried to explain why Springfield’s built environment strikes so many visitors as off-putting. I mentioned as likely]]> Thus the “Great Refrigerator Roundup.” Under this pilot program, CWLP hopes to encourage customers to unplug up to 3,600 pre-1993 refrigerators and freezers by providing a $50 rebate for each machine retired, recycled and replaced by a machine that has earned the “Energy Star” efficiency rating.]]>