How could you live in Brookings and not be aware that a three-block chunk of Main Avenue is about to be torn up?

I’ve just had two calls from residents – and a visit from one of our employees – who all wonder why we haven’t run anything on the front page about something called “Streetscape.”

“It’s important, Curley,” one woman told me. “Why haven’t you guys printed anything about it? Do you know they’re going to take down the traffic lights and rip up the streets?”

For me, each of those comments qualifies as an “omigod moment” – the sudden realization that nobody is paying any attention whatsoever to what you’re doing, and all the hard work you’ve put into creating an informative and entertaining community bulletin sometimes just evaporates into the ether.

It doesn’t mean a tiddly.

To my ignorant callers – whom I suspect were part of an orchestrated campaign to get even more anti-Streetscape publicity on the front page of the Register, let me point out that we have run DOZENS of front-page stories, pictures, illustrations, editorial commentaries and letters to the editor about the Streetscape project.

Could we have gone into more detail in some of our stories? Sure, but what’s the point if your readers aren’t getting the basic facts in the stories you’ve already run?

If you subscribe to the paper and you remain unaware of what’s going on with the Brookings Downtown Streetscape Project, I’d strongly suggest:

1. You’re way overdue for a visit to your optometrist;

2. You sue your third-grade reading teacher;

3. You get more for your money out of the paper by actually reading it.

Of course, I also know that the people who “haven’t heard” of the downtown renovation project and demand that we start reporting on it aren’t going to read this, either, so my little rant will fall on deaf ears – or blind eyes. My insults, like all those previous Streetscape stories, will just vanish into the ether.

For the loyal few who do read the paper, be assured that we will continue to report on the Streetscape project and will run pictures later this month when they rip up Main.

On the front page.

The takeaway message here is that if you’re going to be an informed citizen of this community, you’re going to have to do some of the work yourself. We do the heavy lifting for you, but you have some personal responsibility for staying on top of the local issues. Don’t expect to be spoon-fed.

There are dozens of sources of good information – our free Web site and our by-subscription E-edition; the school district, Chamber and Downtown Brookings newsletters; a half-dozen good online sites through the BrookingsSD.com portal; local radio; the City Council’s cable telecasts; and best of all, your daily community newspaper.



It could be I’m a little testy from semi-starvation. (I’m dieting.) But even as the tweety birds are building their nests in my garage, I’m still trying to get over that #%!$$! winter! Time speeds up for an aging Baby Boomer, but I swear this was the longest winter in a lifetime of long winters. And a cool, wet spring is prolonging the agony. It may take a few more months – probably just before winter begins anew – to get rid of the residual pains of nearly terminal cabin fever.

Gimme some heat! Let me see some green leaves!

As I researched an editorial the past week, I visited the Web site of the profane, often crude and sometimes hilariously funny Larry the Cable Guy.

Larry had a few comments about the winter we’ve suffered through, and he probably speaks for a lot of us:

“It's finally getting warm. I'll tell ya what – this winter I was as frustrated as (CENSORED). It was one of the coldest ones on record. It even snowed in Florida ... But finally it’s warming up, so much so that a polar bear at the zoo begged me to shoot him. Anyway, that's what I told the cops!”

“The only bad thing about it getting warmer is you'll have to hear Al Gore make his ‘human-caused global warming’ speeches. Where was that sumbitch when we were (CENSORED) with ice scrapers two weeks ago when we should have been having an enjoyable time outside gettin' light-headed from blowin' up our swimming pools?

“I don't know what the C-O-2 level is, but the BS level is higher than Amy Winehouse at the Grammys. This dude goes into hibernation from November through April, and then after everybody is done digging outa snowdrifts and blow-drying icicles off oranges, he talks about how we're fitting to burn up.

“NASA said the temperature over the last hundred years has gone up 0.74 degrees. Has anyone really gone outside and thought, ‘Call me crazy, but it feels three-quarters of a degree hotter than it was last year!’

“Thank God for that 0.74, or the winter would have really sucked!”



Ken Curley is the cranky managing editor of the apparently unread Brookings Register; Larry the Cable Guy is the television cable installer persona of the richest, most successful cornpone humorist in America. today.