Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a partly sunny day with a high temperature of seventy-degrees.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission meets today from 9:30 to 10:30 a.m. The agenda is available online.

Yesterday was a great day for American ingenuity: Sept. 8, 1930: Scotch Tape Starts Sticking. Wired recalls the product’s introduction –

3M begins marketing the first waterproof, transparent, pressure-sensitive tape after employee Richard Drew figures out how to coat strips of cellophane with adhesive.

Initially sold by the St. Paul, Minnesota, company as a moisture-proof seal for bakers, grocers and meatpackers, the product quickly got repurposed during the Depression by money-strapped consumers who used the tape as a cheap home-repair tool.

“Cellophane Tape” picked up the “Scotch” tag, according to legend, when a St. Paul car dealer became annoyed because the cellulose ribbons originally only had adhesive on the borders. Slagging 3M (known in those days as the Minnesota Mining & Manufacturing Co.) for being stingy, he invoked Scotland’s penny-pinching reputation and dubbed the product “Scotch tape.”

The name stuck.

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a sunny day with a high temperature of sixty-seven degrees.

There will be a meeting of Whitewater’s Tech Park Board today, from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. The thorough, detailed, informative agenda is available online.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls the end in 1958 of an odd — very odd — ordinance of Janesville, Wisconsin:

1958 – Janesville Women Belly Up to the Bar
On this date the Janesville city council voted 4-2 to finally end a paternalistic and discriminatory ordinance that prohibited women from drinking at the bar. Since the end of Prohibition in 1933, women had been banned from being served while standing at the bar in Janesville taverns. [Source: Janesville Gazette]

Picasso was decades ahead of Janesville:

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a windy day with a high temperature of sixty-seven degrees.

The City of Whitewater’s Common Council will meet tonight at 6:30 p.m. The agenda for the meeting is available online.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recounts that on this day in 1977, Wisconsin’s first judicial recall election took place:

1977 – Wisconsin’s First Judicial Recall Election

On this date Wisconsin’s first judicial-recall election was held. Dane County citizens voted Judge Archie Simonson out of office. Simonson called rape a normal male reaction to provocative female attire and modern society’s permissive attitude toward sex. He made this statment while explaining why he sentenced a 15-year-old to only one year of probation for raping a 16-year-old girl. After the recall election, Simonson was replaced by Moria Krueger, the first woman judge elected in Dane County history. [Source: Initiative & Referendum Institute]

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a day of scattered showers and a high of sixty-four degrees.

It’s Spirit Day at Whitewater Middle School today.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this date in 1783

Paris Peace Treaty Signed

On this date the Paris Peace Treaty was signed. The treaty demanded land, including Wisconsin, be ceded from Britain to the United States. Two years after the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, American and British delegations met in Paris to formalize Britain’s recognition of the United States of America. The treaty articles were drawn up on November 30, 1782 and formally agreed upon on September 3, 1783. [Source: University of Oklahoma, College of Law]

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for Thursday calls for thunderstorms with a high of eighty-one degrees.

The History Channel reports that on this day in 1969, a major convenience for American consumers made its appearance:

On this day in 1969, America’s first automatic teller machine (ATM) makes its public debut, dispensing cash to customers at Chemical Bank in Rockville Center, New York. ATMs went on to revolutionize the banking industry, eliminating the need to visit a bank to conduct basic financial transactions. By the 1980s, these money machines had become widely popular and handled many of the functions previously performed by human tellers, such as check deposits and money transfers between accounts. Today, ATMs are as indispensable to most people as cell phones and e-mail.

There was, however, an even earlier version, pulled for unpopularity:

In the USA, Luther George Simjian has been credited with developing and building the first cash dispenser machine. There is strong evidence to suggest that Simjian worked on this device before 1959 while his 132nd patent (US3079603) was first filed on 30 June 1960 (and granted 26 February 1963). The rollout of this machine, called Bankograph, was delayed a couple of years. This was due in part to Simjian’s Reflectone Electronics Inc. being acquired by Universal Match Corporation. An experimental Bankograph was installed in New York City in 1961 by the City Bank of New York, but removed after 6 months due to the lack of customer acceptance. The Bankograph was an automated envelope deposit machine (accepting coins, cash and cheques) and it did not have cash dispensing features. The Bankograph, however, embodied the preoccupation by US banks in finding alternative means to capture core deposits, while the concern of European and Asian banks was cash distribution.

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a day of thunderstorms with a high of eighty-one degrees.

Whitewater’s Landmarks Commission will meet tonight at 5 p.m. The agenda is available online.

On this day in 1974, a milestone in aviation: an American SR-71 made the trip from New York to London in less than two hours. Wired describes the event and plane –

On a flight to the Farnborough Air Show outside London, Maj. James Sullivan and Maj. Noel Widdifield fly the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird from New York to London in 1 hour, 54 minutes, 56.4 seconds. The 1,806-mph flight still holds the transatlantic speed record between the two cities.

Developed during the middle of the cold war, the Lockheed SR-71 was designed as a reconnaissance aircraft that could fly fast enough to avoid being shot down by Russian aircraft or missiles. Initially developed as the A-12 for the CIA, the aircraft evolved and adapted many times in its more than 30 years of flying.

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a partly sunny day with a high temperature of eighty-nine degrees.

Whitewater’s Common Council will meet tonight at 6:30 p.m. for a budget planning session. The agenda is available online.

At the Huffington Post, there’s a story best read in the morning, rather than at night: “U.S. Grappling With Bedbugs, Misusing Dangerous Pesticides.”

Of all things, America now faces a bed bug plague. It’s a return of a bed bug plague, really, and more intractable than before, as this generation of insects is resistant to many ordinary pesticides. One often associates bed bugs with the Great Depression, and by coincidence, we face them now while in the grip of a great and lingering recession.

Here’s one of the species we confront:

Good morning,

Today’s Whitewater forecast calls for a slight chance of thunderstorms and a high temperature of eighty-six degrees.

At Wired‘s science column, there’s just the story for a Monday morning: Dancing Parrot Boogies Better With a Partner.

Snowball the dancing parrot doesn’t just bob to the beat. The YouTube sensation, who proved last year that humans aren’t the only species that got rhythm, gets his groove on better with a dance partner.

“It’s not just an automatic response to sound,” said neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego. “It’s concerned with bonding.” Patel presented new research about the boogieing bird Aug. 24 at the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition in Seattle, Washington.

For the famous sulfur-crested cockatoo, it’s about bonding with his human caretaker, Irena Schultz. Snowball became an online celebrity in 2007 after Schultz, who runs the Bird Lovers Only Rescue Service in Indiana, put a video of him dancing to “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys up on YouTube.

Two papers in Current Biology in May 2009 showed that Snowball — plus a total of 14 species of parrots and one species of elephant — move rhythmically to music in a way that other animals don’t, demonstrating that dancing is not uniquely human. The ability to dance could come from a connection between the auditory centers and the motor centers in avian and human brains, which allows for speech and lays the foundation for synchronizing our bodies to music.

Here’s Snowball in action:

Link:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid90402333001?bclid=90190339001&bctid=594239584001

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a sunny day with a high of eighty-two degrees.

Today’s Comment Forum topic — “10 Favorite Reads of All Time (including books, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, etc.)”

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this date in 1878, the typewriter was patented:

On this date Christopher Latham Sholes patented the typewriter. The idea for this invention began at Kleinsteuber’s Machine Shop in Milwaukee in the late 1860s. A mechanical engineer by training, Sholes, along with associates Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, spent hours tinkering with the idea. They mounted the key of an old telegraph instrument on a base and tapped down on it to hit carbon & paper against a glass plate. This idea was simple, but in 1868 the mere idea that type striking against paper might produce an image was a novelty.

Sholes proceeded to construct a machine to reproduce the entire alphabet. The prototype was sent to Washington as the required Patent Model. This original model still exists at the Smithsonian. Investor James Densmore provided the marketing impetus which eventually brought the machine to the Remington Arms Company. Although Remington mass-marketed his typewriter begining in 1874, it was not an instant success. A few years later, improvements made by Remington engineers gave the machine its market appeal and sales skyrocketed. [Source: Wisconsin Lore and Legends, p.41]

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a sunny day with a high of seventy-six.

Tomorrow’s Friday Comment Forum topic — “10 Favorite Reads of All Time (including books, graphic novels, comic books, magazines, etc.).”

This Saturday, from 8 AM to 4 PM, there will be a Garage Sale Fundraiser for the Whitewater League of Women Voters, with free LWV 90th Birthday cupcakes, at 230 S. Cottage St., Whitewater. The sale items include “Great assortment of household and miscellaneous items: a FREE piano (needs work), partial penguin collection, and don’t miss the many vintage movie and other ads from the 40′s and 50′s and boxes of vintage magazines.”

The New York TImes recalls that on this date in 1920 the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was declared in effect:

The half-century struggle for woman suffrage in the United States reached its climax at 8 o’clock this morning, when Bainbridge Colby, as Secretary of State, issued his proclamation announcing that the Nineteenth Amendment had become a part of the Constitution of the United States.

The signing of the proclamation took place at that hour at Secretary Colby’s residence, 1507 K Street Northwest, without ceremony of any kind, and the issuance of the proclamation was unaccompanied by the taking of movies or other pictures, despite the fact that the National Woman’s Party, or militant branch of the general suffrage movement, had been anxious to be represented by a delegation of women and to have the historic event filmed for public display and permanent record.

Secretary Colby did not act with undue haste in signing the proclamation, but only after he had given careful study to the packet which arrived by mail during the early morning hours containing the certificate of the Governor of Tennessee that that State’s Legislature had ratified the Congressional resolution submitting the amendment to the States for action.

No Suffrage Leaders See Signing

None of the leaders of the woman suffrage movement was present when the proclamation was signed.

“It was quite tragic,” declared Mrs. Abby Scott Baker of the National Woman’s Party. “This was the final culmination of the women’s fight, and, women, irrespective of factions, should have been allowed to be present when the proclamation was signed. However the women of America have fought a big fight and nothing can take from them their triumph.”

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a sunny day with a high temperature of seventy-five degrees.

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skGQ0fVx75o

On this day in 1944, Allied forces liberated Paris from four years of Nazi occupation. The New York Times reported on the allied triumph at the time —

….On all sides the liberating French and Americans were greeted by hungry Parisians, made with joy, who had fought alone against the German oppressors since they were called to arms last Saturday.

General Leclerc, hero of the Fighting French in the North African campaign, was in the forefront of the battle, leading the tanks to the rescue of patriots who had been fanatically calling for help as the Germans fought back throughout the night.

Those on the outside had heard the electric cry over the radio, “To the barricades!”- historic call to arms of the French Revolution- which testified to the plight of the patriots.

Soon fighting raged throughout the city, along the Place de la Concorde, before the Chamber of Deputies, toward the Hotel des Invalides, as Americans and French drove the Germans from their barricades and buildings converted into fortresses.

An Associated Press correspondent, who was with the first American troops to enter Paris, said the Germans were holding out on both sides of the Seine along the Champs-Elysee, the Place de la Concorde, the Quai d’Orsay, the Tuileries, the gardens of the Louvre, the Madelaine, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate and the Hotel Crillon-Coislin.

Another Associated Press correspondent reported earlier that an Allied column, driving due east toward the capital, had stormed into Versailles, ten miles from the center of the city.

The Germans were driven from many strategic parts of the city by the combined onslaught of the French military and the fury of citizens fighting for their liberties, and themselves fell back behind barricades for a last ditch stand.

Lieut. Gen. Joseph-Pierre Koenig, Commander in Chief of the French Forces of the Interior, announced in a communique that all the main official buildings and most of the highways were now under the protection of General Leclerc’s Second Armored Division….

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a day of isolated thunderstorms with a high temperature of eighty degrees.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this date in 1970, a dark day in Wisconsin history, a bombing at UW-Madison killed researcher Richard Fassnacht:

1970 – Sterling Hall Bombing on UW-Madison Campus

On this date a car bomb exploded outside Sterling Hall, killing research scientist Richard Fassnacht. Sterling Hall was targeted for housing the Army Mathematics Research Center and was bombed in protest of the war in Vietnam. The homemade bomb (2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate soaked in aviation fuel) was detonated by the New Year’s Gang, aka Vanguard of the Revolution, who demanded that a Milwaukee Black Panther official be released from police custody, ROTC be expelled from the UW campus, and “women’s hours” be abolished on campus. The entire New Year’s Gang fled to Canada the evening of the explosion. Four men were charged with this crime: Karleton Armstrong, David Fine, Dwight Armstrong, and Leo Burt. All but Burt were captured and served time for their participation. Leo Burt remains at large.[Source: On Wisconsin (online PDF) Summer 2005]

See, also, 40 Years Later FBI Still Hunts Alleged Bomber.

Good morning,

Today’s forecast for Whitewater calls for a dense fog and a high temperature of eighty-three degrees.

Whitewater’s Community Development Authority will meet today, at 4:30 p.m., at the 1231 Innovation Drive, in a construction trailer at the site of Whitewater’s eleven-million dollar publicly-funded project. The agenda for their meeting is available online. The members of the CDA will tour the site. Everything they’ll see is being built with money better spent on other and genuine needs.

On this date in 1775, King George III proclaimed the American colonies in a state of rebellion against his rule. The text of the Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition appears below:

Whereas many of our subjects in divers parts of our Colonies and Plantations in North America, misled by dangerous and ill designing men, and forgetting the allegiance which they owe to the power that has protected and supported them; after various disorderly acts committed in disturbance of the publick peace, to the obstruction of lawful commerce, and to the oppression of our loyal subjects carrying on the same; have at length proceeded to open and avowed rebellion, by arraying themselves in a hostile manner, to withstand the execution of the law, and traitorously preparing, ordering and levying war against us: And whereas, there is reason to apprehend that such rebellion hath been much promoted and encouraged by the traitorous correspondence, counsels and comfort of divers wicked and desperate persons within this realm: To the end therefore, that none of our subjects may neglect or violate their duty through ignorance thereof, or through any doubt of the protection which the law will afford to their loyalty and zeal, we have thought fit, by and with the advice of our Privy Council, to issue our Royal Proclamation, hereby declaring, that not only all our Officers, civil and military, are obliged to exert their utmost endeavours to suppress such rebellion, and to bring the traitors to justice, but that all our subjects of this Realm, and the dominions thereunto belonging, are bound by law to be aiding and assisting in the suppression of such rebellion, and to disclose and make known all traitorous conspiracies and attempts against us our crown and dignity; and we do accordingly strictly charge and command all our Officers, as well civil as military, and all others our obedient and loyal subjects, to use their utmost endeavours to withstand and suppress such rebellion, and to disclose and make known all treasons and traitorous conspiracies which they shall know to be against us, our crown and dignity; and for that purpose, that they transmit to one of our principal Secretaries of State, or other proper officer, due and full information of all persons who shall be found carrying on correspondence with, or in any manner or degree aiding or abetting the persons now in open arms and rebellion against our Government, within any of our Colonies and Plantations in North America, in order to bring to condign punishment the authors, perpetrators, and abetters of such traitorous designs.

Given at our Court at St. James’s the twenty-third day of August, one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, in the fifteenth year of our reign.

GOD save the KING.

Good morning,

Today’s forecast for Whitewater calls for a slight chance of thunderstorms with a high of eighty-three degrees.

Jazz singer and activist Abbey Lincoln passed away over the weekend. Allison Keyes recalled Lincoln’s many accomplishments:

Abbey Lincoln, the legendary jazz singer who believed in singing as a political act, died Saturday in Manhattan. She was 80. An actress, artist and composer, Lincoln created music ranging from avant-garde civil-rights-era recordings to the equally powerful but more introspective work of her later years.

Her 1960 collaboration with jazz drummer Max Roach, We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, put her voice smack in the middle of the soundtrack of the civil-rights movement. In “Triptych: Prayer/Protest/Peace,” Lincoln literally screams her anger. But that’s not how she started out.

Village Voice jazz critic Nat Hentoff supervised the recording of the Freedom Now Suite and watched Lincoln transform from a sultry nightclub singer into a more sophisticated artist. Hentoff says Lincoln was a sometimes self-deprecating woman with a ready, sardonic wit, and says her death is a huge loss to a jazz community that doesn’t have musicians like her anymore.

See, Remembering Jazz Singer and Activist Abbey Lincoln.

Keyes’s tribute links to Lincoln singing Driva’Man, and here’s another song from the same album (We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite), Freedom Day:

Good morning,

Today’s forecast for Whitewater calls for a day of patchy fog with a high temperature of eighty-one degrees.

Over at Wired, there’s a story about an American milestone, from 1859:

1859: Mail is carried by air for the first time in the United States.

On a hot summer day as the temperature soared toward 91 degrees, John Wise stood at the town square in Lafayette, Indiana, waiting next to a balloon named Jupiter. Even for a balloon enthusiast and a well-known aeronaut, it was a big moment.

Wise was set to carry what would be the first U.S. airmail. A postmaster had handed him a bag with 123 letters. Destination of the balloonist and his precious cargo: New York City.

Delivering letters by air had been attempted before. There had always been carrier pigeons. And in 1785, a balloon flight from Dover, England, to Calais, France, had carried mail.

Wise’s attempt was to be the big event for the United States. Wise, who was 51, was also hoping to set a record for the longest balloon flight. He took off at 2 p.m.

But the weather wasn’t on his side. He found that the wind was blowing southwest, not east. Still, he went up to 14,000 feet. But five hours — and just 30 miles later — Wise gave up and landed in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

The mail had gone partway by air, but was ignominiously put on a train to New York City to assure the swift completion of its appointed round.

The Lafayette Daily Courier mocked the flight as “trans-county-nental.”

This Friday, August 20th, the Friday Comment Forum will feature a cinematic topic: “Your 10 Favorite Films of All Time.” Picking just ten isn’t easy, but it’s a fun challenge….

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast for today calls for a mostly cloudy day, with a high temperature of seventy-seven degrees.

The City of Whitewater’s Common Council meets tonight, at 6:30 p.m. The agenda is available online.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls a historic moment, from 1936, that’s still evocative today:

1936 – Wisconsin Issues First Unemployment Check

On this date the state of Wisconsin issued the first Unemployment Compensation Check in the United States for the amount of $15. The recipient was Neils N. Ruud who then sold it to Paul Raushenbush for $25 for its historical value. The check is now at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Wisconsin was the first state to establish an Unemployment Compensation program. [Source: Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development]

There’s something very American the re-sale of this check. Here’s a copy of it:

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a sunny day with a high temperature of eighty-one degrees.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this day in 1900, Wisconsin saw an auto race in Racine:

On this date the city of Racine hosted its first automobile race. The competitors were A. J. Horlick in a Locomobile and Robert W. Hindley in a Winton. The race started at 11 a.m. in front of the Grand Union Tea Co. store on Main St. The course was over the 14 unpaved miles to Western Union Junction (Sturtevant) and back. About a mile outside town Mr. Hindley overtook a stalled Mr. Horlick who up to that point had been ahead. Horlick was able to continue the race, but it was Hindley who was declared the winner. [Source: Racine History Timeline]

More information about the manufacturers of the competing automobile companies is available online. The Winton Motor Carriage Company continued production until 1924, and the Locomobile Company of America produced cars until 1929.

I don’t know which models raced in Racine in 1900, but here’s an 1899 Winton Stanhope:

The Winton Motor Carriage Company had, in 1910, advertising for its cars that was optimistic even to this day:

Good morning,

Whitewater’s forecast calls for a sunny day with a high temperature of ninety-one degrees.

On this day in 1899, Alfred Hitchcock was born. Eighty years later, the New York Times recalled his life upon his passing:

In a characteristically incisive remark, Mr. Hitchcock once summed up his approach to moviemaking: “Some films are slices of life, mine are slices of cake.” The director of scores of psychological thrillers for more than half a century was the master manipulator of menace and the macabre, and the leading specialist in suspense and shock.

His best movies were meticulously orchestrated nightmares of peril and pursuit relieved by unexpected comic ironies, absurdities and anomalies. Films made by the portly, cherubic director invariably progressed from deceptively commonplace trifles of life to shattering revelations, and with elegant style and structure, he pervaded mundane events and scenes with a haunting mood of mounting anxiety.

In delicately balancing the commonplace and the bizarre, he was the most noted juggler of emotions in the longest major directorial career in film history. His distinctive style was vigorously visual, always stressing imagery over dialogue and often using silence to increase apprehension. Among his most stunning montages were a harrowing attack by a bullet-firing crop-dusting plane on Cary Grant at a deserted crossroad amid barren cornfields in “North by Northwest,” a brutal shower-slaying in “Psycho” and an avian assault on a sleepy village in “The Birds.”

Here the trailer from North by Northwest. It’s dated, but interesting, and the film is fantastic —

The Friday Comments Forum will be on holiday today, but back next week. Many thanks for your contributions, and the feature will be resume with a new topic on next Friday.

For today, there are more posts on the way.

Good morning,

Today’s forecast calls for a high of ninety-one degrees.

The Wisconsin Historical Society recalls that on this date in 1939,

1939 – Wizard of Oz World Premier — in Oconomowoc
According to the fan site, thewizardofoz.info, “The first publicized showing of the final, edited film was at the Strand Theatre in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin on August 12, 1939. No one is sure exactly why a small town in the Midwest received that honor.” It showed the next day in Sheboygan, Appleton and Rhinelander, according to local newspapers. “The official premiere was at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood on August 15, attended by most of the cast and crew and a number of Hollywood celebrities.” [Source: thewizardofoz.info]

Here’s a video about the casting of the witch in the Wizard of Oz:

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qHaIO0LU38

Time has proved that Hamilton was a good choice.

Good morning,

The forecast for Whitewater calls for a chance of thunderstorms today, with a high temperature of eighty-six degrees.

The Wisconsin Historical Society notes that on this day in 1919:

On this date the Green Bay Packers professional football team was founded during a meeting in the editorial rooms of Green Bay Press-Gazette. On this evening, a score or more of young athletes, called together by Curly Lambeau and George Calhoun, gathered in the editorial room on Cherry Street and organized a football the team. [Source: Packers.com]

I’ve posted about cycling, and about the opposition of some fans to doping in cycling, and their efforts to root it from the sport. I very much support their efforts. In the New York Times, there was a story that describes the dislike some fans have for doping. In Cycling Fans Root for Dopers to Get Caught, Robert Mackey writes that

As a remarkably entertaining edition of the Tour de France comes to an end this weekend, some of the most passionate fans of professional cycling are paying less attention to what’s happening in the race than they are to news of a federal investigation into the allegation that Lance Armstrong engaged in systematic doping to win it on seven previous occasions.

That is at least in part because some of the best-informed fans, who maintain remarkably detailed and active Twitter feeds dedicated to sharing information about performance-enhancing drugs, remain convinced that some of the top riders have found ways to cheat and avoid detection.

Among the most knowledgeable and entertaining of these feeds are the ones written by the obsessive, recovering fan who use the Twitter handle Cycling Fans Anonymous, an English woman who calls herself Festina Girl, and the bike racers and cartoonists Andy Shen and Dan Schmalz who write as NY Velocity.

As my colleague Ian Austen reported in May, their suspicions are shared by scientists who have demonstrated that a technique known as microdosing could allow cyclists to use the blood-boosting drug EPO, which changed the sport in the 1990s, to “gain a significant performance advantage” while still passing all of the tests currently administered.

I follow Cycling Fans Anonymous on Twitter, and they cover the doping controversy in cycling closely (as much a brief tweet can do). These fans want a clean sport, an honest sport, and they deserve one.

There are videos at the GazetteXtra.com and WalworthCountyToday.com that show how those online publications are making clever use of the web. First the videos, then a few remarks.

At GazetteXtra.com, community blogger Glen Lloyd has a new video about Ronald Reagan and his connection to the Janesville-area Rock River:

Here’s the second, posted at WalworthCountyToday.com, from an AP story at Fox 6 News, showing a case of McNugget Rage:

The videos are different, but they illustrate the contrast between these local publications and others nearby. Only the websites of the GazetteXtra.com and WalworthCountyToday.com show a real understanding for the web, and for what it can do.

The nearby Daily Union site has nothing so lively, of such range. I doubt they’d show a viral video, in any event. It might not seem serious to them, perhaps. In this, they would ignore the variety on the web, limit their traffic, tie themselves to an oh-so-serious but stodgy coverage of events, and reflexive support of public officials. (On the print side, I find it hard to see how an afternoon newspaper has any longterm prospects. If the much livelier Capital Times couldn’t make it in print in Madison as an afternoon paper, I don’t see how the DU can stay an afternoon paper in Jefferson County.)

The website of the formerly-local Whitewater Register is shared between several papers in the Southern Lakes newspaper chain. There’s a video posted there as of this morning, but the link for it points nowhere. The website looks less polished than what an ordinary person could accomplish in a weekend.

Finally, about that McNugget video: the customer’s drunk, but is there something about being drunk that makes McNuggets irresistible? I’ve never heard of a sober customer with such a craving.