Gorgeous Victorian home lovingly restored and pampered with all the room you’ll need for your family or your lifetime treasures. One of London’s grande dames in a prominent neighborhood, this spacious two-story has loads of updates since 2007 (kitchen remodel, bathroom remodel, new wetbar, siding and foam insulation, insulated windows, master bathroom remodel, ceiling fans throughout). Decorating scheme recalls the grandeur of a century ago blended with all the amenities expected by modern-day homeowners. Distinctive leaded glass windows, inviting front entrance with beveled glass and sidelights, four beautiful fireplaces, tons of woodwork, working pocket doors, window seat in huge bay window, second bay window in dining room, beautiful burrelled oak built-in china cabinet in dining room, butler’s pantry, wine cellar, and great “man cave,” mother-in-law suite or college student room. You’ll love all the closet space, expansive front porch, loads of storage in full attic and basement, fenced yard and detached two-car garage. Unparalleled curb appeal, beautifully landscaped lot and super neighbors! AND THE PRICE HAS BEEN REDUCED AGAIN!!!

For your personal showing of this beautiful home, call Lisa Jackman at (614) 619-9295 or (740) 852-6446.
www.BuckeyeRealtyGroup.com

THE FACTS: Two-story Victorian, built in 1895, 3,384 square feet, central heat & A/C, lot size: 66 x 165, 4-5 bedrooms, 3 full bathrooms, 3 living areas, formal dining room, dining in kitchen, large inviting foyer, 4 original fireplaces, working pocket doors, window coverings, chandeliers

For more photos of this wonderful home, click on this link:

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Maggie van Ostrand

I expect most moms have their own 7 Deadly Sayings but, just in case you want to compare notes with mine, here they are.

1.  On a slovenly room: How many times are you going to step over those dirty jeans before you pick them up?

2. On whining, such as “OMG, the prom’s tonight and I’ve got this huge pimple … ” That should be the worst thing that ever happens to you.

3. On abject misery: Give up your pain for the poor souls in purgatory. They’ll get out sooner.

4. On a way to make me shape up: Do you want me to tell your father about this?

5. On a mini skirt: Are you really going out like that?

6. On bad behavior: Just wait until you have kids of your own.

7. On how she apprehends a transgression: I’ve got eyes in the back of my head.

Along with my dad, she would sometimes spout off with:

If a job is once begun,
never leave it till it’s done.
Be the labor great or small,
do it well or not at all.

I especially loathed that poem, partly because it took so long to hear. I never wanted to hear it again in my entire life. I hadn’t realized back then how much and how subtly it influenced me. I learned that lesson in the most embarrassing way: when my own daughter was encouraging me to stop procastinating, she said the hated poem and she said it imitating me, as I used to imitate my mom. Nonetheless, hearing it once more, I was forced to complete my tax returns.

The worst thing about mom’s sayings, and that dreaded poem, is that they were usually right, and they always worked.

When school officials have sought an ally in the battle over school finance legislation, or in local efforts to stir up support for a multimillion-dollar bond issue for capital improvements, this newspaper has always been there. When public school students have excelled in any number of sports and academic competitions over the last few decades, when school nurses have wanted to announce vaccination requirements, when school administrators have wanted to promote parent/teacher open houses, when local merchants have wanted to congratulate students on their many successes, when Rotary Clubs have wanted to acknowledge their school’s student leaders … The Record and other weekly newspapers like it in other towns like this one have always been there.

Laurie Ezzell Brown

That is why it is even more puzzling that the Texas Association of School Boards would be on the leading edge of a movement among tax-supported entities to circumvent the state’s public notice laws. Or maybe it’s not so puzzling.

You see, there are things most school boards really want the public to know about their students and their schools. They are the stories and images that fill the pages of most community newspapers from Labor Day through Memorial Day each year, and which most publishers welcome as the vital news and information they know their readers count on finding inside the pages of each week’s edition.

We could stack up a long line of witnesses — including parents, students and most notably, our school trustees and administrators — who welcome the newspaper’s ability to shine the light on their educational efforts and would willingly testify to how essential it is to the business of raising the next generation of leaders.

There are other things, though, that some school boards would prefer the local newspaper not report, like low TAKS scores or high dropout rates, errant teachers or contentious school board meetings or principle-less principals or — heaven forbid — school trustees who flout open meetings laws and violate the public’s trust. But even most of them would admit — however grudgingly — that there’s no better way to stir up a hornet’s nest than to land on the wrong side of the local newspaper editor.

That is because this country’s community newspapers are the only media that report the important news of their hometowns — day in and day out, win, lose or draw, and even when hell occasionally freezes over.

Community newspaper reporters are the only reporters who attend darn near every meeting of the school board (or city council or county commissioners or hospital or water board) — or who notice when an agenda is not published or public matters are discussed behind closed doors or public officials talk out of both sides of their mouths … and who have the chutzpah to write about it.

Community newspaper reporters are the only reporters who stand on the sidelines of all those football games — even the occasional junior high or junior varsity game — and feel their toes numb as they compile stats and snap too many pictures in much too poor light of the winning touchdown or the losing dropped pass.

Community newspaper editors are often the only members of the public who are there to quote elected state and national officials when they show up for town hall meetings, or who will hold their feet to the fire editorially when some legislation they favor offends local sensibilities or common sense — and more often, both.

They are the burrs under the saddle that provoke discomfort when they call attention to the fact that the board room is only large enough to accommodate the school board and superintendent — and not the public that hires and fires them — as we have done. They are also often the champions of small rural schools when Gov. Rick Perry blames superintendents for causing a $27 billion budget deficit that a sadder but wiser former state comptroller once correctly warned would be the inevitable result of bad legislation backed by the very same governor.

Community newspapers are often reluctant to sing their own praises, and rightly so. The camera should only rarely be turned inward, and then only when it merits the reader’s attention. This is one such case.

Public notice is too often viewed as the media’s cause. It probably is, but only because we are the ones the public — by its own default — has sent to do the job. They had better be damn glad someone is doing it.

In HB 400, carried by House Public Education Committee chair Rob Eissler, the Texas Association of School Boards and their member districts are trying to remove the mandate to post important public notices — of financial condition, performance, tax rate and budget adoption — in those very same community newspapers to which the public and school trustees and administrators so often turn for information and advocacy. They wish to post notice instead on their websites and at physical locations in the district.

They are undermining this state’s public notice laws under cover of the current budget crisis, claiming it is about saving money. It is not — nor is this their first effort to do so. Most school districts spend less than 1 percent of their annual budget on all public notices — not just these. And while that is a piddling amount of money to school districts, it is often the life blood of community newspapers like ours, which are called upon to do so much more for which they can never be compensated.

We urge the public, the school district, the teachers and parents and students and administrators and school board members: do not let public notice be removed from the community newspaper on which you rely and on whose vigilance and well-measured support you can always depend. Please make a phone call or write a letter in support of public notice in your community newspapers, and in opposition to HB 400.

Laurie Ezzell Brown is editor and publisher for The Canadian Record in Canadian, Texas. Her column is reprinted with permission.

Maggie van Ostrand

Questions were raised by my kids who viewed the event and thought there would be “at least 100 other people watching this, right mom?”

Questions from our kids can drive a mom insane because it’s humiliating to have to say “I don’t know dear,” when moms are supposed to know everything. It’s no longer enough for them to know we really do have eyes in
the back of our head, now they want answers, too.

“Mom, what’s a troth?” I thought it was a lazy troll (troll + sloth = troth.) My daughter had to wait another full day before I had time to find out that when we pledge our troth, we are pledging fidelity. Seems like overkill to
me, since they had already pledged to “forsake all others” and keep one another “only unto him/her.” Poetic and lovely, but redundant. Not wishing to editorialize, I just told her “fidelity” and to look it up.

Prince William and Princess Catherine

The kicker question which required research was “What’s that square in the floor that everybody is walking around?” I wanted to know that as well and learned that it is the burial place of The Unknown Warrior from World War I. In that hallowed spot upon which not even kings and queens may trod, lies an unidentified British soldier killed on the battlefield during World War I. He was buried in Westminster Abbey on November 11, 1920. There are many graves on the Abbey floors, including Chaucer, Dickens, Austen, both Bronte sisters, Kipling and, well, you get the point, but The Unknown Warrior’s is the only grave which is forbidden to step on.

Thanks to the Internet, I was able to answer the questions of my curious kids, all questions except one. We just cannot figure out why everybody calls the bride Kate with a K when her full first name of Catherine is spelled with a C.

MADISON, Wis. – A Wisconsin newspaper editor demoted after writing a column that offended advertisers has started a legal campaign to get her job back, saying she is taking a stand for editorial independence.

Autumn Drussell

Autumn Drussell filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Rights Division seeking to be reinstated as editor of the Stoughton Courier Hub. Drussell said she is standing up for journalism at a time when struggling small newspapers are especially susceptible to advertiser influence.

Months after being named editor, Drussell wrote in a July 2010 column she was shopping more at low-cost big box stores because of the economy. She suggested that local businesses needed to improve customer service, stop badmouthing their areas and appeal to frugal customers, advice offered at a chamber of commerce luncheon she attended.

The column upset some of the newspaper’s advertisers in Stoughton, a city of 13,000 people, including hardware store owner Jim Gerber, who warned he would stop advertising until the economy improves.

“I will stop short from calling for your job — Walmart and Target need your money,” he wrote to the paper.

Days later, Drussell was called into a meeting with the general manager of Unified Newspaper Group, which owns the weekly and other newspapers in the region. Drussell, 35, said she was removed as editor and asked to sign a document agreeing not to write opinion pieces and be on probation for 90 days.

Unified is a division of Dubuque, Iowa-based Woodward Communications, Inc. Company officials did not respond to e-mail and phone messages from The Associated Press seeking comment.

Drussell, who works for the paper as a reporter and page designer, said she was baffled her bosses did not support her.

“I just don’t want what they did to be precedent-setting,” Drussell said. “It used to be that people at newspapers with an opinion were protected. Because of the constraints newspapers are under with the economy, it sounds like that’s not the case anymore and that’s starting to go away. That’s scary to me.”

A week after her column, the paper published an editorial urging readers to shop locally and acknowledging Drussell’s opinion left “many of our best supporters feeling betrayed.”

“While there were some legitimate points to be made … we as a newspaper erred in allowing those ideas to be overshadowed by the implications that local businesses should simply ride it out while residents shop at big box chain stores,” the editorial read.

Not everyone was upset with Drussell, the paper’s associate editor since 2007 and editor since May 2010. City, school district and hospital leaders sent a letter to the company praising her work, Mayor Donna Olson said.

Drussell’s gender discrimination complaint notes she was demoted while a male superior, Jim Ferolie, who reviewed the column, wasn’t disciplined. Ferolie declined comment. Drussell is seeking back her job, lost wages and attorney’s fees.

Stephen Ward, a University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism ethics expert, called her demotion draconian and chilling.

“It really sends a signal that only certain ideas are legitimate,” he said.

***

EDITOR’S NOTE: Have you noticed how it’s a one-way street? If what is written in the newspaper makes an advertiser happy, is the editor or reporter promoted or given a bonus? Heck no! Why? Well, for one reason, have you noticed that the powers-that-be only seem to hear about it when the advertisers are unhappy? When they’re happy, the advertisers usually keep it to themselves, so those same powers-that-be don’t hear about the good stuff, for crying out loud! (Of course, ad reps are quick to come to the defense of advertisers with the assumption that advertisers demonstrate their happiness by spending money for more ads. Okay, it’s hard to argue with that.)

At what point does a newspaper stop being the voice of the people – the conscience of the community – and become a mouthpiece for advertisers? Have you noticed how the local daily newspaper in London, Ohio, has emerged as the public relations outlet for anything and everything the Madison County Chamber of Commerce spoon feeds it? Admittedly, a good chamber of commerce is important to a community, its business climate and its quality of life. Conversely, an impotent chamber of commerce is merely a drain on the belt-tightened budgets of local businesses.

What should readers think about a newspaper that cows down to its advertisers? What has happened to freedom of the press and journalistic independence? Merely publishing press releases that show up in the newsroom is an easy way to get the newspaper out each day, but is it really a newspaper one really wants to read or that serves our community? Where’s the integrity that was the cornerstone for great newspapers? Do newspapers – particularly small-town community newspapers – now just concentrate on bolstering their bottom line, scheming to see how much money they can siphon from their advertisers as corporate bean counters handcuff their editorial department from reporting the news or daring to express a comment which might upset an advertiser?

Then there’s the occasion centered in Burleson, Texas, where spineless corporate types from Graham, Texas, and Denver who cowered in the corner like frightened children after having been strong armed by the Burleson mayor, the superintendent and the human resources director for the Burleson Independent School District and two members of the Burleson ISD school board who complained that the newspaper wasn’t sugar-coating its coverage of school issues, and when disgruntled former and current employees at the Burleson Star whined about the way the publisher did exactly what the powers-that-be mandated: Make budget and get rid of employees who were dead weight or were the reason for internal turmoil.

By the way, for those who think the Internet is a reliable source for news, blogging and most of the unsolicited crap found in cyberspace is not really news, no matter how they dress it up. It’s usually the skewed opinion of someone who doesn’t have a real life and who thinks they can do as good a job as a professional journalist. But when those who live and breathe community newspaper are put on a leash and unable to do what they do best, the only way you’re going to get your “news” in the not-so-distant-future is through those unreliable blogs. Is that what you want? Let your opinion be known. Email us at OurCommunityNewspaper@gmail.com

Julie Kay Smithson and Wiggles

My familiarity with March weather is from the perspective of a Buckeye, an Ohioan in the United States of America. In this part of the world, March is a tempestuous siren, a flirt bringing balmy weather one day and a slap-in-the-face with snow and ice the next. Wind can be a beast that seeks to peel one’s warmth away with its bonechilling fingers.

Days lengthen, nights grow more brief, and the powers that be tell us we are “saving” daylight when we have a 23-hour-long Sunday.

Birds arrive from sunnier climes and set up housekeeping, always on the alert for “cheep wrent.”

At this point in time, winter brooks no interference from spring, though the snows don’t last like they did just one short month ago. Icicles and snowmen vanish, to be replaced by green sprouts coming up through still semi-frozen ground.

It’s fair to say that, while April may be fickle, March in Ohio can be a real weather scoundrel with April tagging along behind!

Maggie van Ostrand

All is not lost in networkland. In an effort to liven up the otherwise snooze-worthy Oscars for next year’s telecast and bring back the millions who dozed off right after Kirk Douglas’ earlobes presented Best Supporting Actress to Melissa Leo, Charlie Sheen has been hired to host in 2012.

Celebrities attending the annual event will be encouraged to wear their own jewelry, buy their outfits off the rack, and say how they really feel about attending. It is felt that women viewers might favor hearing celebs respond to the hackneyed question, “Who are you wearing?” with “WalMart.” Actresses, now referred to as “female actors,” will be asked to butt out and be photographed only from the front. Celebrities will continue to walk the carpet, which will be green in an effort to attract Westminster Dog Show viewers.

Because of the conventional mid-show sag where awards are given out that nobody outside the industry has any interest in, the second half of next year’s show will be co-hosted by Sheen and Jerry Springer, the theory being that bad taste is better than no taste at all.

Julie Kay Smithson and Wiggles

My first two years of school were in houses, because the housing subdivision north of Dayton, called Huber Heights, outpaced Wayne Township’s school capacity. In second grade, our teacher became ill and was replaced by Mrs. Dora Hobbs. As little kids, we only knew that our teacher was sick, and Mrs. Hobbs helped us in many ways that she may never have known.

I brought home glowing reports to my parents about how beautiful Mrs. Hobbs was & how kind she was to all of us. Then Mom attended a PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) meeting and returned home in tears. She told my dad, “Honey, Mrs. Hobbs is a physical wreck! She is crippled from polio, wears very thick glasses & barely gets around.”

All I knew was that Mrs. Hobbs cared, she loved us — and that memory remains strong as ever, 51 years later. It is my hope that this dear woman — who worked full time teaching youngsters at a time in her life when her health might well have kept most people home — would be proud of the curly-haired, blue-eyed student that told her parents about the beautiful Mrs. Hobbs.

Each of us has a precious memory of one teacher that stays strong throughout our lives. What’s yours?

Maggie van Ostrand

First a few reminders: Salary for a House member is $174,000, not counting perks, one of which is called their “allowance.” This is a euphemism for lots of extra taxpayer money ($900,000, commonly called “almost a million”) given to them for office supplies and salaries for almost 20 loyal underlings. They get about $250,000 (commonly called “a quarter of a million dollars more”) for office expenses (what, that wasn’t covered in their ”allowance”?), including travel (we’ll bet they don’t go Economy and we also bet these might include golf trips). You don’t even have to be alive to get this money, as evidenced by the late Robert Byrd’s continuing salary of $193,000 even after he’s been in the ground since last June.

We the People aren’t crazy about learning that Senators get even a bigger allowance for their office expenses … more than $3.3 million. Each senator is given $500,000 to hire up to three legislative assistants. If they’d only learn to type for themselves, that taxpayer money could support ten taxpayer families. Let us now get to our simple Top 10 Items, to wit:

10. Take away free healthcare for members of Congress and see how they like it.

9. Take away non-profit (no taxes) status from churches. This is real separation of Church and State. God would likely appreciate that money going to the people.

8. Take away taxpayer-paid security and benefits from retired Congressional members. If they’re honest with the people, they won’t need security. This should also discourage so many crooks from running for office.

7. Remind Congressional members they are already in the top 5% of American wage earners. What, you mean to say they themselvesare the ones they want to continue giving all those tax breaks to? Really???

6. Take away diplomatic immunity for foreign diplomats and make them pay for their parking like the rest of us.

5. Charge each member of Congress $1,000 every time they address someone they loathe as “My esteemed colleague across the aisle … ”

4. Take away the mansions Congressional members live in and give them a small apartment in D.C. Don’t forget, they have another mansion in their home state. Right now, they are entitled to almost 9,000 sq. ft and as many offices as they want in their home state … not to mention $40,000 for furnishings. Use their empty mansions for the next Super Bowl.

3. Take away Congress’ $3,000 in tax deductions for expenses outside their home district. Are you kidding? Is that over and above the taxpayer money given them for expenses? And you want to take away our deduction for mortgage interest? What???

2. Take away Congressional members’ free franking privileges. Having taxpayers pay for postage soliciting more funds from the taxpayer is insulting to us.

1. Take away the make-up and hair people who service members of Congress, especially the person who tapes open Nancy Pelosi’s eyelids.

Sincerely,

We the People