Category Archives: The Peoria Chronicle

The Peoria Chronicle

What’s Up With The Chronicle?

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Just for fun, I decided to log into my Peoria Chronicle blog again after being away for many years. I updated the theme and started reading the first few months I was blogging in 2005. That was quite the trip down memory lane. My son was born in 2005; now he’s 17 and a senior in high school. My youngest daughter who was two in 2005 is now a sophomore at the University of Iowa. And my oldest daughter who was five in 2005 (the one I blogged about getting her first bicycle) is a Bradley University graduate and is in Switzerland for the fall.

I read about all the places that closed in 2005: Hunt’s, Vonachen’s (the first time, when they became Bud’s Aged Steaks, which didn’t last long), Ben Franklin in Peoria Heights, Famous Barr (which became Macy’s, which then left the mall completely).

When I first started blogging, I wrote a lot more about my personal life. As time went on, it got more newsy and less personal. In fact, I got some personal threats when writing on certain subjects which made me decide to guard my privacy more and more as time progressed. Eventually, I was too busy to blog anymore.

I’m still too busy, actually. So I’m not going to be blogging very much. But I might throw up a post or two now and again, for old time’s sake. The things that got me started blogging way back in 2005 are still the things that make we wish I could take it up again now: When I read or hear news in Peoria, I’m left with more questions than answers. I just saw a report on WMBD-TV the other night about the Illinois Report Card. The reporter quoted the state superintendent of education as saying, “The report shows we are absolutely on the right track.” Yet the Wall Street Journal just published a shocking article on Illinois schools that reported, among other horrific stats, that “in 2019 7% of black third-graders in Rockford were reading at grade level, 11% of Hispanic third-graders in Elgin and 8% of black third-graders in Peoria.” But our local news channel is content to post a link to the report card and a quote from a bureaucrat that is clearly trying his hardest to get some lipstick on a pig. The reporter evidently didn’t actually read the report card or have enough curiosity to ask any follow-up questions. Everything is hunky-dory here.

Why can’t we have a more robust press? Why can’t we have investigations into why the schools here are letting down our children so miserably, just to name but one topic that warrants further scrutiny? Are people really that apathetic? Or are they just ignorant? I’d like to think it’s the latter, and that if they were more informed, they’d pick up their pitchforks and demand better. But I fear that it’s the former, and that no amount of information will inspire anyone to do more than shrug their shoulders and lament that “you can’t fight City Hall.”

One thing is for sure: A robust press can’t rely on free citizen journalism. It needs people who can work full-time on rooting out corruption and forcing a light on things that our bureaucrats would rather we not see. Is there anyone out there still interested in paying for this kind of service? If the Journal Star suddenly rose from the ashes like a Phoenix and started actually caring about real journalism again, would people pay for it? Or would they keep turning to Google News and other aggregation services to get their news for free?

Maybe someday after I win the lottery, I’ll have the time and resources to do more. But for now, I still have kids to put through college and food to put on the table–something that keeps getting more expensive these days. If you have any ideas on how we can (in practical ways) be the change we want to see, I’d love to hear your comments.

The Peoria Chronicle

So long for now

60 Comments

Everyone goes through changes in life. When I started this blog, my kids were very young, not even in school yet. My work situation was more stable and predictable. And everything was new and exciting as far as blogging goes. I’ve been doing this for six and a half years, and I think it’s obvious that I’ve been losing interest in it. Blog posts are not as in-depth, and posting has been more sporadic.

I’ve always avoided writing a “good-bye” post because, frankly, bloggers never really say good-bye and mean it. They’re back in a few days or a few weeks, unable to contain themselves. A moody bunch are we. So I’m leaving myself an out. I’m going on a sabbatical, if you will, and we’ll just see how it goes. If I don’t miss it and life seems to go on just fine without it, I won’t be back. If I find that I’m restless and can only find my rest in blogging, I will be back.

Now my kids are older and involved in more things, and I have a lot more responsibilities at work. The bottom line is, there are a lot more demands on my time, and so the time has come to bid a fond farewell to this hobby, if I can. I’ve enjoyed it, and maybe someday I’ll return to it. Maybe sooner than I think. And we can all have a good laugh about it, like we do with Emtronics when he quits every few months.

But if this ends up being good-bye, I just want to thank everyone who has been so supportive of me personally and this blog. I intend to leave the site up so the old posts will still be accessible and you can continue to comment on them if you wish, at least until everyone abandons it and there’s no more traffic, at which point I’ll probably take it down.

Best wishes to everyone, and so long … for now.

The Peoria Chronicle

Site issues

12 Comments

Several of you have mentioned that you’re getting messages on Internet Explorer that my site is trying to run some sort of script that is slowing down your computer or otherwise causing problems accessing this site. First, I apologize for the problems. I’ve been unsuccessful trying to debug this problem myself, so I have now turned to an expert. However, it will probably be a day or so before he can look at it. I just wanted you to know that I’m aware of the problem and am trying to get it corrected as soon as possible.

One of things making it hard to debug is that I don’t actually get any of these messages that are being reported to me. When I look up the site using either Firefox (my preferred browser) or Internet Explorer, it loads just fine. So, I’m working blind, so to speak, in my efforts to fix the issue. Thanks for your patience and understanding.

City of Peoria, The Peoria Chronicle

Blog interrupted

46 Comments

I’ve closed the comments on my previous post because it looks like any constructive discussion that might have taken place there has been exhausted, and now I’m getting a number of racist comments. I’ve tried to delete the worst of them; if I missed any, I apologize.

As you all know by now, the previous post was picked up by The Drudge Report, and the increased traffic to my site led to my blog being shut down. Just so you know, there was no government conspiracy or censorship going on. My blog is hosted on a shared server, meaning other websites and blogs are hosted on the same computer, and when I got over 300,000 hits that first day I was on Drudge, it used up all the network connections to that server. That meant that I was hogging the whole server and not allowing any traffic to the other sites, which is technically a violation of the terms of service. Thus, my hosting company shut down my site.

I could have gotten the site back up sooner if I had moved the site to a virtual private server or took some other action to increase my bandwidth. But let’s face it, my blog is a local blog, not a blog of national interest. So I just waited it out, and within a couple of days my traffic counts were pretty much back to normal. My hosting company was very understanding and got the site back up as soon as traffic died down. It took a few days; thanks for your patience.

I’ve been taken to task somewhat for publishing the previous post. All I can tell you is that I consider Paul a reliable source. He was an eye-witness to the event; police radio traffic confirmed that there were calls about a disturbance on Thrush that evening, and so I went with the story. Despite subsequent attempts to discredit Paul, his description of the events that night have been corroborated. True, not all neighbors heard racial threats being yelled, but some did.

There is no dispute from anyone that there was indeed a large group of kids going down Thrush, stopping traffic, running on lawns and porches, and making a lot of noise at 11:00 at night. I would submit that this is unacceptable behavior regardless of what they were yelling. It is not “kids being kids,” and I don’t believe we should condone it, even tacitly. If you had a family with small children, this would be very disturbing. It certainly does not make anyone want to move into the area and raise their family there. This issue needs to be addressed, not swept under the rug or brushed off with unsubstantiated accusations of exaggeration.

As far as the national exposure, I did not seek it out, and I didn’t find it particularly helpful. It appears that there are some who are claiming that there are race riots going on throughout the country, and my post was supposed to be proof that it’s happening here, too. Nobody locally has said or intimated such a thing. My interest in the story was purely local. My regular readers know that I’ve expressed concern over the City Council’s cutting of police protection and other basic services while raising taxes for expensive, needless capital projects. This story was relevant to those concerns.

The Peoria Chronicle

New year, new theme

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For 2010, I thought I’d change to a new WordPress theme. This one is called “Atahualpa” and I think it’s more readable than the old theme. Plus, it has a rotating header image, so each time you reload the page, you’ll randomly get one of five different images of Peoria. I’ll probably add more in the future.

Let me know what you think of it, and especially if you have any problems with it. You can e-mail me by clicking here.