Judging by the phone call I just recieved from the Tumor headquarters, there’s a rip roaring party going on over there. AT just gave me his famously curative recipe for a screwdriver. It involves counting and some basic arithmetic.. Sadly I lack orange juice, so juicy juice will have to do. Cheers!
My dearest wife’s parting words this evening were, “I won’t be home too late.”
Ah well, I let her out the door. What am I to expect?
Hive mind, Oh Hive Mind, what sayest thou?
Should I call the repairman, or buy a new dryer? The machine is ten years old or more and I don’t care to fix it myself. Tell me what you think, Hive Mind.
Warning….
Don’t let your copper tubing get yanked.
Because copper is 100 percent recyclable and selling scrap copper can be lucrative, thieves will target the material when the price increases.
Indeed.
A copper thief or thieves hit the Knox County Library System’s Howard Pinkston Branch sometime over the weekend and caused enough damage to force the facility to close for repairs.
The thief or thieves raided four of the building’s five air conditioning units.
“There was not a bit of copper left in them,” said Mary Pom Claiborne, communications administrator for the library system. “I don’t know why they did not take copper from the fifth one.”
This is going to cost Knox Co tax payers $15,000.
No Fellini market for Oak Ridge.
When asked if Aldi had given a reason for withdrawing its proposal, O’Connor said, “No, although there was some discussion about a site-preparation issue.
“They just wanted to be community friendly.”
I can’t rent grocery carts and buy weird off brand stuff on my side of town now? Poo.
Theres all this big mighty talk about getting big mighty businesses into Oak Ridge, like Target, and Aldi (for what its worth).
They throw incentives at these big businesses, like tax abatements or funky financing, they use city resources to get these things off the ground, and they bend over backwards. None of that is necessarilly a bad thing, because big businesses are, well, big, and tend to make money and taxes and good stuff like that.
However, this town apparently doesn’t do anything in the way of fostering small businesses. I’m thinking of some of my favorite places in town, like the Time-Out in Grove Center, or J & M’s butcher shop, or Jefferson Drug Store, or Razzleberry’s Ice Cream Lab. These places lend flavor in town, as well as providing a bit of retail tax and bringing shoppers into locales like that.
In talking with some of the folks who run these joints, I hear the city is at best indifferent, and at worse downright belligerent towards the needs of small businesses. Insanely high deposits for utilities, poorly slow response times for the same utilities, including the police dept (the fire dept in town I’ve never heard anything bad about, to the credit of fire chief Mack Bailey, despite his, uh, dropping the ball with the fireworks everywhere but Scarboro).
The town does have a chamber of commerce, but for small retail that really doesn’t do anything but suck up a $200 fee and provide a plaque (or a sticker on the window). Its for networking, but networking with other business owners isn’t what these people need. It might work well for doctors and lawyers, but for a dude running a deli, or a butcher shop, it ain’t much.
And doctors and lawyers can take care of themselves, thanks. Its the people working 12 hour days to keep their business open and in their name that I respect, and these are the people that Oak Ridge needs to take to heart, because people with that kind of dedication and drive are valuable.
So, what to do?
I’d love to see Oak Ridge really get serious about small business. It’d be bitchin to maybe have a group of officials tasked with fostering and assisting small businesses. It’d be even super bitchin’r to see the city set aside some of that mighty IDB money to trickle down on places opening up in Jackson Square, or Grove Center, or anywhere in town to help set up, and get a business through that first year.
We can get a Target anywhere. Where else can we get a Tank burger, or eat ice cream next to a life sized anatomically correct (trust me, Pigpen’s checked) pig next to the Playhouse?