What a great Brewers game to be at last night. The highlight was Ryan Braun’s double that turned into an inside the park home run and broke the game open. My “I’m good luck for the Brewers” streak continues. Celebrating a birthday today is none other than my very own wife and love of my life, Jenny. Happy Birthday!

• Mark Neumann announces he’ll be running as a Republican for Governor of Wisconsin today. The timing is smart as he preempts Scott Walker’s quarterly fundraising numbers. Neumann is clearly setting the table to position Walker as a “lifelong politician” with no private business experience. It will be interesting to see how that message resonates with Republicans.
• Idiots vandalize the Milwaukee County Parks system yet again. This time it’s Brown Deer golf course just weeks before the U.S. Bank Championship comes to Milwaukee. The folks at the Park Department have done a heck of a job to scramble and get the course in shape by next week. You can help by donating to The Park People for golf course repairs and to replant the trees that had to be removed parkpeoplemke.org or 414-273-7275.
• First it’s County Board Chairman Lee Holloway threatening to kill funding for the KRM as retaliation against Gov. Doyle vetoing a dedicated sales tax for Milwaukee County Transit, now the State Legislature is doing the same. Can we put the adults back in charge please? Seriously. On one hand, yes I’m just as upset as Rep. Grigsby and Rep. Colon about what the Governor did, but there’s got to be a more productive way  to go about this. Successful cities or States aren’t the ones who spend their time in a circular firing squad.

It was a great weekend to be a fan of the outdoors and the Brewers! The downside is it’s Monday. The upside is it’s a short holiday week. If you’re traveling as a result, say happy birthday to the modern American Interstate system; it’s 53 today!

• The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel isn’t the only newspaper resorting to embarrassing video productions in an attempt to be all “new media”, the Washington Post has jumped on board as well, with equally awkward results.
• Twitter annoyance of the day: “Re-tweeting” insightful quotes from well known business executives doesn’t make you a better business executive, it just shows that you’re an unoriginal business executive. Yes, Jack Welsh may be one of the greatest CEO’s of our time! But copying & pasting his quotes into Twitter doesn’t make you Jack Welsh.
• Another conservative Wisconsin weblog closes it’s doors. First it was James Widgerson, now it’s the “Badger Blog Alliance”. Regardless of political leanings, when it’s time to hang it up, it’s time to hang it up, and anyone who can recognize when it’s that time instead of beating a dead horse gets props in my opinion. Plus, it may make some room for some fresh new conservative blogger, which is a good thing.

Yay Friday. I was able to spend part of the day at Summerfest yesterday and took the family to the Big Bang fireworks as is tradition in the Cody household. Summer is here!

• Transit gets it’s funding in the next budget, the parks don’t. I’m very disappointed in the actions by the Assembly that caused the removal of the 0.5% potion of the sales tax that was dedicated for parks in Milwaukee County and the manner in which this entire budget process was carried out. Milwaukee County voters approved a combined transit/parks sales tax last November in part because the strength of the parks component. Now only one will get the funding that both were approved for. It’s like both of my kids applied for a scholarship for college and only one got it. Very disappointing.
• Oakwood park golf course is trying out “fast paced Fridays” today. As a golfer, I love this idea. As a golfer, I also hate this idea. One of the things I absolutely hate about golf is overly slow play. One of the things I also absolutely hate about golf is a ranger laying in to me because I’m playing “slow”.
• If you’re a national politician who has any kind of skeletons in the closet, today would be the day to come clean. Two politicians in two weeks have admitted affairs and Michael Jackson is dead. Your admission of guilt might make the news.. on page three of the Lifestyle section. It would probably get lost in the confusion.

At last night’s membership meeting for the Park People of Milwaukee, I was elected as the organization’s next President.

It’s a huge honor and I’m extremely excited about the opportunity to lead such a prestigious organization that does so much for our County Parks system. We’re a non-profit organization that has been able to send nearly $125,000 to the Milwaukee County Park system this year alone.

Like I said, I’m very honored to be able to lead the organization for the next several years and look forward to continuing to work with County Executive Walker, the Milwaukee County Board, Parks Director Sue Black, the Park People Board of Directors, our staff, all of our Friends Groups, and all those who are committed to a vibrant park system!

Tonight is the annual membership meeting for a non-profit group I’m very involved in, the Park People of Milwaukee County. We’re going to conduct a little bit of business and then have a social event (food provided!) to meet other parks supporters, leaders of various park Friends Groups, and leadership from the Milwaukee County Parks Department.

If you want to get out of the heat tonight and support our parks system, come join us from 6-8pm at the Greenfield Park pavilion (next to the cool waters pool). I’ll have some very exciting news after the meeting tonight to share, but if you come to the meeting, you can hear it first hand! :)

In the meantime, I put together this video for the Park People. Take a look and I’d appreciate any feedback.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, like many newspapers, is facing hard times. Layoffs, buyouts and a reduction in coverage of local news coverage are all results of the paper having to tighten it’s belt.

Apparently things aren’t so tight that they have to cut back on the important “egg frying on car” bureau however.

I wonder if any actual reporters who took a pay cut or lost their jobs did so with the understanding that the Journal Sentinel would continue to commit resources to this kind of frivolity?

It’s hot out! Ice cream cones will melt!

On this day in 1867, the first commercially viable typewriter was invented right here in Milwaukee by
Christopher Sholes. June 24th ushered in the modern era of cursing inanimate objects.

• Milwaukee Magazine has a profile on the Milwaukee County Parks system in it’s current issue and tries to make that argument that we should be trying to more like Millennium Park in Chicago, or the green space near the Calatrava at the Milwaukee Art Museum. Parks are different things to different people of course, but when was the last time you saw someone having a picnic in front of the Calatrava? It’s a beautiful green space to be sure, but it’s not a “park”. On the flip side of the MM argument: just a few weeks ago a friend was up from Chicago and commented several times how cool it was that we had some parks that were less of “attractions” and more places to relax. Again, parks are different things to different people, and Milwaukee Counties parks are anything but “dull”.
• Local idiot of the day:  A 42-year-old Milwaukee man with a blood-alcohol content more than four times the legal limit drove his daughter to school Thursday after partying all night long. “The driver said he went to a party at 10 p.m. and drank until he returned home at 11 a.m. He had a nearly empty bottle of whisky in his vehicle. His BAC was 0.34.”
• This sounds like a tax loophole that deserves to be closed. Of course developers are going to complain about it, but so what? We continue to have dropping tax receipts which puts pressure on other income streams or forces cuts to services, and the source is companies like Gander Mountain only paying $75 for property taxes instead of $50,000 because they planted a few rows of corn. An outrageous abuse of the system, good riddance.

The Brewers start a home stand tonight against the Twins and a few friends from Minnesota are rolling in to catch the series. I hope to be a good host and send them home disappointed.

Believe it or not, after the summer solstice yesterday, the days start getting shorter again. It seems like summer just got here and it’s already heading out the door? Happy Summerfest week!

• Milwaukee Magazine has published their “side“, if you can call it that, of the story regarding the time line of the Flynn/McBride affair. Attention will now move off the people involved as the skirmish between two rival publications heats up.
• This week marks the eighth year that I’ve been blogging. The first 14 months or so were (un?)fortunately lost when a database crashed back in 2002, which isn’t a real loss since, as was typical back then, I was saying a whole lot about nothing in particular and the focus of what I was writing  about was personal in nature. People change over time, and nothing is a better reminder of that than going back and reading some of the things I blogged about when I was 25.
• With Summerfest starting up this Thursday, it’s officially un-official vacation season. I’m looking forward to taking some time off over the next few weeks to enjoy time with friends and family. Oh. And to paint our house. Should be a blast.

Eugene Kane blogs today about the irrelevancy of blogging and asks, “The end of blogging?”:

Just a few years ago, citizen bloggers were all the rage. They were actually going to replace the mainstream media, remember?

The successful blogs in today’s media are actually pretty mainstream, particularly political blogs that are frequently cited by newspaper columnists or editorial writers. The days of solitary citizen bloggers sending their opinions out into the blogosphere to attract attention seem to be a thing of the past.

As this article points out, it’s more about Twitter and Facebook these days.

This is interesting - and incorrect -  on a number of levels. First, the hype about ‘citizen bloggers’ that reached it’s fever pitch just a year or two ago was inflated by the very same traditional media that’s now predicting it’s death. You couldn’t pick up a copy of the newspaper or periodical that wasn’t hyping how these “citizen bloggers” were going to change the world(!).

People who write weblogs that happened to be filling the considerable gaps in local coverage by the local traditional media never set out with the goal of being labeled some silly ‘citizen blogger/journalist’ tag. They did it because there was a need for coverage of local events the traditional media wasn’t willing to waste their time on.

Ironically, it was the very same traditional media who’s lack of  “real” issue coverage provided the opportunity for regular folks with weblogs to make a niche that was gushing over this new corps of average Joe/Jane reporters. In their race to sensationalize and exploit a pretty simple concept - average people taking more interest in their communities - they only continued to emphasize the ’style over substance’ mentality that was in part the cause of their own struggles and decline.

Secondly, about Twitter and Facebook… That’s either a gross misunderstanding of what those services do, or an admission that you have no idea what kind of role weblogs serve.

Twitter and Facebook - two services I utilize myself - are nothing more than tools. Useful and practical tools to be sure, but tools the same way that weblogs or email are. They’re different kinds of tools that fit different kinds of jobs. For someone to say weblogs are useless because Facebook or Twitter is “where it’s at” is about as ridiculous as someone stating that every screwdriver and saw in their toolbox was useless because they were momentarily pounding a nail into a piece of wood with a hammer.

Over the years, it’s become easy to identify people who talk about technology and emerging social networking & communication tools but have zero understanding of their utility because all those people share a common trait: predicting the death of one tool in order to justify their excitement/focus of the ‘next big thing’.

Listening to some ‘experts’ out there, e-mail has been ‘dead’ for nearly a decade. Yet it remains the most popular way for people on the Internet to communicate period. The same with weblogs. The same will happen to Twitter, and the same will happen to everything after that. In some ways, it’s the nature of people who don’t truly understand any of the ways these things can, do and will work in harmony as part of a complete tool box.

That’s because as impractical and limiting as it would be for me to have nothing but a set of hammers to be able to use in building a house or fixing my car, it would be impractical to rely solely on something like Twitter with it’s limits of 140 characters and limited reach.

How could I have gotten past the first sentence in writing my thoughts here if I had to rely just on Twitter? Or Facebook?

Of course, the inverse is true as well of weblogs. Sometimes a weblog isn’t the right tool for quick blurbs about where I’m at or what I’m doing as Twitter might be. Likewise, there are a million things that Facebook does that no weblog can ever hope match.

So when I need to write something that requires both thought and explanation unencumbered by length or word count, I’ll use my weblog just as when I need to change a spark plug, I’ll skip over the stapler or hex wrench and select the right tool for the job.

Or more likely, as I do today, I’ll continue to use the tools together to make the combined product more effective than any one could be on it’s own.

Finally, I get that perhaps it was just an off the cuff remark by Mr. Kane, who’s articles I enjoy in the MJS, and nothing serious was meant of it. But I also realize that his employer has gone all in first the weblogging craze, then the Facebook thing, and most recently you couldn’t open up a copy of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel without being forced to get the “Twitter angle” in every one of it’s stories.

Perhaps if they spent less time jumping from craze to anointed craze or spending resources on silly ‘tweet shows’ that add zero value to journalism where they show elderly folks “why the craze matters!” as a way of justifying their own attention to it, and focused more on, you know, reporting the news instead of capitalizing on a fad, they wouldn’t be slashing jobs left and right.

As for the answer to Mr. Kane’s question, “The end of blogging?”… Well, I don’t get into the business of making predictions in the world of technology, but I’d bet a small wager that the “citizen bloggers” like me are still here and still digging long after the Journal Sentinel has declared bankruptcy and closed it’s doors.

The Hoff notches his 14th consecutive save last night for the Brewers, Red Wings back in action tonight against the Pens, and mother nature still has the temperature turned to “Early Spring” instead of “Summer” here in Milwaukee…

• If you’re going to run a weblog, turn on comments. It’s kind of the whole idea behind weblogs… that readers can challenge you or post feedback on what you’ve written. If you can’t take the heat of defending the argument you’re placing on the Web, keep a diary next to your bed instead. Lobbing verbal hand grenades is easy and cowardly when you don’t allow any feedback on your weblog.
• I’ve been unfollowing people on Twitter at an alarming rate lately. As with anything new, the signal to noise ratio is a problem. But spamming twitter with news stories (Fox 6, looking at you) or the same plug for your PR company over and over (Rad!) isn’t really capitalizing on the medium, it’s exploiting it, and not in a good way. And as I said a few months ago, “Tweeple” who tweet about twitter is as boorish as bloggers who blog about blogging.
• While I’m on the subject of twitter, the trend of certain people forcing a prefix on everything with “Tw” is annoying. Just like the fascination of the late 90’s of prefixing everything with “E” (E-pets, E-toys, E-conference, E-banking!) Tweeple, Tweeciprocity, Tweetpresentative., Twsenator? All twannoying.
• And lest I sound like I woke up on the wrong side of the bed today and offer nothing but criticism, kudos to the city, county and state politicians who came together to come to an agreement on the County Grounds sale. Even if I don’t agree with the outcome, people on opposite sides of the aisle like Sen. Jim Sullivan and County Exec. Walker deserve credit for showing us that they can work together to get things done.

Despite the absolute fridgid temperatures, the first Thursday in June marks the beginning of one of Milwaukee’s most beloved weeky traditions: Jazz in the Park at Cathedral Sqaure.

It’s a great way to get out in an urban setting, kick up your feet, socialize with fellow Milwaukeans, and listen to some good music. When we lived downtown and before we had kids, Jenny and I would make as many of the Jazz in the Park events as possible.

We’d bring a light dinner, a bottle of wine, and hang out.

Starting Thursday however, those attending Jazz in the Park will have a little more room in their picnic baskets as you won’t be allowed to bring your own alcoholic beverages in anymore.

WISN summerizes nicely:

“For the first time, people will not be able to bring in their own alcohol to the event,” East Town Association Executive Director Kate Borders said.

Borders said the event isn’t going dry, but state law is forcing patrons to keep their personal stash corked.”We’ll be selling wine, beer and spirits on the grounds, and our prices will be extremely reasonable. People are going to feel that they are getting the same price here that would get if they bought it at a liquor store or a grocery store,” Borders said.

Just like a bar or restaurant, the event’s liquor license prohibits carry-ins.

Now this isn’t a new rule exactly. You’ve never actually been able to bring carry-ins, but the East Town Association who runs the event always choose to look the other way if people did so. Not anymore apparently.

As the event has increased in size and popularity, my perception is that it’s become less of a “Jazz in the Park” event for music and enjoying the ourdoors and more of a chance for 20 year olds to drink in public. Often, quite a lot. It’s one of the reasons we stopped going in fact even before we moved out of the downtown area 5+ years ago. It was less sit on the grass and enjoy and more crowded beer tent at the State Fair.

So some of that has probably forced the hand of an organization like the East Town Association who at the end of the day is on the hook for liability and insurance for the event. Also at play is the increased sponsorships by local wine companies and breweries who don’t want to pay a hefty fee to be able to sell their products at the event if everyone is allowed to bring in their own.

The real question is if the “wink wink” policy of carry-ins will continue, or if they’ll actually crack down as they’re saying. The people I’ve talked to about this seem pretty split down the middle. Some are cheering the move as a way to take the focus on alcohol while others are deriding the move and swearing they won’t attend anymore.

It will be interesting to see how it pans out for one of Milwaukee’s signature summertime events.