Herald's Chicken: Herald Balks at Reporting

To judge by this week's edition of the Herald, it's a slow week for non-news, and probably will be next week, too, which makes our job at Herald's Chicken somewhat less entertaining. But we're about to go on vacation too, it's Labor Day after all. So we won't hold it against the crack team of leg men and news hens of the Herald if they've gone on vacation and put the paper on auto-print, or have switched from investigative reporting to serving up public service announcements. This week, for example, we learn that a jazz festival will debut, an African art celebration will commence, a big bike ride will take place, as well as an ice cream social.

Oh, yes, and the Co-op stole a new general manager from the Piggly Wiggly in Sheboygan.

In more prosaic developments, we learn that the University is "balking" at easement protection pertaining to a group of buildings on 56th and Drexel. Let's put the issue of easements aside for a minute, to focus on the balking. There is far too much balking going on in Hyde Park, and most of it perpetrated by the Herald. "University balks at easement protection," runs this week's headline. Just a few weeks ago, it was "Residents balk at park high rise." Would the copy editor please go down to Powell's and get a thesaurus.

Moving on to the op-ed page: we also confess to some disappointment that the letters have been a tad bit less insane these last few weeks. A few local communards seem to be whooping up a movement to storm the Bastille that is Hyde Park Bank, demanding not the keys to the castle, but the return of the missing clock that, well, belongs to the communards, after all.

"Truly," writes the author, expressing the most fundamental contradictions of barbecue Bolshevism, "the building is private property, it lacks landmark status and management can deal with it pretty much as it will."

And so the point is? "We want the HP Bank clock back."

Management replies: "Why yes, and here is your rattle, too, and your stuffed bear. Of course, now which box did we put that in, and what were we thinking? All this will lead to is a scream fest ("community meeting") full of angry old biddies and their husbands yelling at us about our private property and capitalism. Ah hah! There it is; quick, can someone get a ladder and put this back up there?"

Before pulling the chicken off the grill for the week, as folks head to the beach, or to our magnificent Point, basking in its late summer decrepitude, crumbling slowly into the lake like those beautiful nostalgic paintings of mossy and broken Roman arches, we'd like to signal the second in a row of letters from disgruntled seniors upset that 1) it's hard for an old guy in a wheelchair to get down to the water, and 2) darn those cops for busting the swimmers!

We'll leave it to the Point Savers and their Landscaping Consultants to explain to the seniors why 1) they can't use the Point, because it's more important to keep it picturesque and crumbling than accessible to and safe for seniors, and 2) what those "SAVE THE POINT" bumper stickers really mean is "POLICE THE POINT," because the new police state is a direct result of the Point Saving campaign.

Who would have thought that all the efforts of Hyde Park's favorite landscape architect manqué would bring on the bike cops and their totalitarian reign? Ah, the ironies -- when our preservationist and activist community lands grandma in the paddy wagon.

To the Savers, if not the saved: this is what you petitioned for ... now you've got it!