All posts for the month August, 2011

This round’s on Rashkis

Carwashes, sorting clothes at the PTA Thrift Shop, linking your VIC card at Harris Teeter – these are the school fundraising methods of the plebeian. Rashkis Elementary School teachers have a much more innovative way of raising money: selling alcoholic drinks at a party where students who are minors work as servers. Penny Rich told […]

Blessed

We survived an earthquake and a hurricane all in one week. We must, as they say in the South, be blessed. So I started thinking of all the things in my life for which I am grateful. Here’s just a smattering of what I came up with: I may never be able to open my […]

Shaking budgets like an earthquake

Yesterday’s earthquake got me nostalgic for the days when anything that went awry we could blame Bill Strom. Fortunately, Penny Rich seems a capable substitute. I’d like to move beyond the shenanigans of Rich, but darned if she doesn’t keep serving them up to me like prosciutto and melon on a doily-lined platter. After her […]

Why Pennygate matters

When I worked as a cashier in a grocery store, I was not allowed to check out my mother. Store policy. Thirty years later when my son worked as a cashier at a different grocery chain in a different state, the policy at his store was that cashiers couldn’t check out any of their relatives. […]

Pennygate

Ethics? Ethics, and transparency, for that matter, are for the little people, Penny Rich seems to believe. At the May 23 Town Council meeting, in which she petitioned council to lift the alcohol ban from 523 E. Franklin St., Rich argued that the former museum belonged to “all the people.” And by that she evidently […]

Park your stories here

Downtown San Francisco merchants, fed up that no one in authority in town listened to their concerns about how lack of parking was hurting their business, came up with an idea to get some publicity. They pooled their resources and held a contest for the most outrageous parking ticket story. The prize? The consortium would […]

No news

A few years ago, a fire in an apartment complex killed five kittens. The Chapel Hill News story listed the names of all five cats. Last week, a fire in an apartment off Weaver Dairy Road killed a 7-year-old girl. The Chapel Hill News didn’t bother to print her name. We had to go to […]

UNC ethics, part II

John Rhodes, a writer from Efland, contributes this report. Portions were previously published in a Chapel Hill News Guest Column on June 15, 2011. In 2007, the board that oversees UNC Health Care decided to purportedly “cut” $555,467 in executive bonuses. The board also purportedly reduced $834,753 in bonuses for 22 other managers. Yet the […]

Consequences

I suppose I shouldn’t be so hard on people in leadership positions. They’re probably too busy to think of the consequences of decisions they make. Like when Butch Davis, leader of the football program at UNC while it racked up nine or so charges of violating NCAA rules, offered his son a scholarship to play […]

Another UNC ethics scandal

John Rhodes, a writer who lives in Efland, contributes this report: While citizens of North Carolina and the rest of the nation go down an economic drain initially created by improper oversight in the real estate/finance market, there’s hope … at least for a few. Former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles is one […]