The owner is a smoker. In the past, she had circulated a petition before the decision was made on a previous smoking law. Right now, I respect the decision that she has made, and I am thankful that she was actually “able to make the decision”, rather than it being some law that “forced” her to do it. I would rather that any owner of a business make decisions about what can and can’t happen in their own business.

That being said, after I’ve had a week to think about it, I still think that this is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard of… maybe not “the” worst idea, but it definitely ranks up there.

There are about 8 or 9 bars, here in our small town. One of the busiest bars in town has only been open for a little less than a year. Ever since they opened, they have been a “smoking” bar. When they first opened, the place became very popular, and it continues to be the most popular bar in town. A wide variety of people regularly visit the bar… everyone from kids that go to college to the “biker” types to business people and even farmers that drive into town from the country. Ever since they opened, their business has not slowed down. It’s always busy, and most nights, there’s always some sort of fight… good times!

The bar in our hotel does not run any kind of specials (that I know of) and they don’t seem to do a whole lot to reach out into the community to pull customers in. Now, they are going to not allow people to smoke inside their bar. Last Monday night, there was a person that sat in the bar until about 9:30pm. He told me that “every single regular customer” that came in that night was a smoker. At this point in time, I can only imagine how this is going to turn out for them. I actually do not have access to their financial numbers, so I have no honest way to know how this will affect them in that section, but I have been working in the hotel for almost 8 years, so I should be able to notice any sort of differences in actual traffic.

They have already announced to all of their Facebook followers that they will be turning into a non-smoking bar as of April 1st (not a joke, by the way). They have talked to various people in the community, and the feedback that they have received has been positive. They have said things like “Great, now I’ll be able to go in there. It used to be way too smoky for me.” Honestly, unless it was a “really” busy night, the ventilation system handled the smoke pretty well, and it never actually smelled like smoke to the point of being even noticeable.

Here’s what I’m guessing will happen. For the first week or two, the traffic will stay about the same. It will not increase or decrease any noticeable amount. The people that the owner had talked to before making her decision will come in and have a few drinks. Over the next couple weeks, they will visit once or twice, each. After that, most of them will only visit the bar once or twice a year. After the first couple of weeks, there will be a noticeable drop in actual traffic. People that were “regulars” (the ones that were smokers) may come in to have a drink, but as soon as they realize that they will have to go outside of the hotel to smoke a cigarette, they will keep on walking. There will be a few smokers that may not have heard about the change that will light up a cigarette, and start looking for an ashtray. They will be told about the new policy, and they will become upset to the point of yelling. After about three or four months, the owner will realize that she may have made a mistake, and she will start having serious thoughts about changing it back to a smoking bar. That’s all they will amount to, though, is just “thoughts”. There is no way that she will admit to having made a mistake, much less admit that she is having those thoughts.

Like I said, I can only imagine, at this point, what will actually happen. I actually hope, for the owner’s sake, that I’m wrong, and that business really does improve like she hopes. I know that I’ll be keeping an eye on what I see, though.

It may take some time, but I think I’ll be able to post a lot more often, from now on.

The reason that I wanted to move away from the username is because of all of the old crap that is out there when you do a search for it. Most of the things that show up on a Google search are no longer available. I figure that, in time, that will all get filtered out, and head to the bottom of the results.

For now, as I set some more things up, some of the links may not work correctly. Soon, I’ll get all of the subdomains listed, and we’ll be up and running, again. I know that it’s been a while, but life and stress has taken its toll on me, and I think that I’m ready to get back into it, now that things have settled down, a bit.

Keep watching.

Rather than re-posting what Anna had written, or writing anything about it on my own, I immediately went to the JC Penny website and looked for their contact information. I called a toll-free number and was talking to a customer service person rather quickly (it was 5 in the morning, so I really didn’t have to hold, at all).

I told her that I was calling about the shirt. She had me describe the shirt to her. I could tell that she was looking it up, writing stuff down, or something. I explained to her that I “personally” didn’t have a problem with them selling the shirt. I also explained how I found the shirt, though, and was concerned that this could spread into a PR nightmare (I referred to it as a “shitstorm”) for them, once this started spreading out to Twitter and Facebook. She took my name and phone number and said that somebody would get back to me about this.

Right after I got off the phone, I did a search to see how far this had gone, already, and came up with hardly anything about it. There were a few links to the products page at jcpenny.com and not much else.

Well, within about three hours of me calling them, the shirt had been removed from their website. Of course, I’m not sure about how many other calls they received, but that was pretty quick. This morning (September 1st), I received a call from them, just after 9am. They thanked me for letting them know about it, and informed me that they were no longer selling the shirt.

Within the last hour, I decided to see just how far the “shitstorm” went, so I did a search for “too pretty for homework” on Google. To my surprise, there were over 300 results. Everything from large media sites to personal blogs had been in an uproar over this. There were 170 news articles mentioning this on Google News. An online petition had even been started, and had gathered more than 1000 signatures. JC Penny’s Facebook page was loaded with comments (both good and bad) about the shirt.

After thinking about it for a bit, I decided to write this post. I have a couple different thoughts about this.

Was the shirt sending a bad message? In my opinion, it was.

Should the problem have been noticed before the shirt was ever sold? Yes, unless JC Penny only has pretty girls working for them (j/k).

If social media was not a deciding factor in whether the shirt should remain for sale (if social media didn’t exist) would the shirt have remained on their website, for sale? Possibly.

If JC Penny was never directly called, would the shirt have been removed as fast as it was? How long would it have taken them to discover that they were the center of a shitstorm if nobody actually contacted them, and only used social media to voice their opinions?

Like I said, before, I don’t know how many other people directly called and contacted JC Penny about this. I only contacted them because I knew where this would go, once it hit Twitter and Facebook. I don’t have any loyalty to JC Penny, at all, except that they are the only place I can still seem to find Levi’s 501′s. I just hate to see anybody (a company or a person) blasted online for small mistakes, though. In the scope of everything, this was actually a pretty small mistake… too pretty!

Well, we headed out for about an hour, or so… driving north of town to get away from the light pollution. About two blocks away from our house, we had actually saw a green light flying across the sky. When we spotted it, it was almost directly to the west of us, moving at a pretty high speed toward the north, in what looked like a straight line. It seemed to get lower in altitude, and we ended up losing sight of it, by the time it got into the northeast part of the sky.

It looked like a solid green light with no “tail”. There was no good way for us to judge the actual distance, except that there were clouds in the sky and it seemed like we were able to see it clearly. It did not look like it was beyond the clouds, since the intensity of the light seemed consistent. As far as the distance of the clouds, though, it was hard to tell.

We did not get any kind of pictures or video of it. We were not expecting to see something that soon into our short outing, and the urge for me to drive as fast as I could to the north outweighed the thought of actually grabbing either of the two cameras that we had with us.

Of course, today, I did a few Google searches for what we might have seen, and realized that we may have seen something similar to what others (including our daughter) had seen on Tuesday. In that case (and likely this one) it was most likely a meteor. I also looked for videos that might be similar to what we saw, but after looking at a bunch of them, none of the videos that I saw online resembled what we saw.

Next time, we’ll have the cameras ready.

We’ll be taking two different cameras, since mine is not a very high quality. Both of the cameras are able to do video, so if we find any odd lights in the sky, I’ll link to the video, here.

I had a weird thought pop into my head, a few nights ago. What if every single star in the sky (each on the sun of a solar system) had a planet orbiting it that was able to support life? The thought isn’t too far-fetched. I mean, we haven’t been able to communicate with any of them, and the chances of them communicating with us is also pretty high. We have, however, had some strange things happen, here.

If each solar system had a planet that supports life, we are not as alone as we thing we are.

One of the most amazing videos that I’ve seen happened in February of this year. Multiple different people in multiple places, catching the exact same thing on camera.

It is made to look and feel like a sort of “stock market” where you can buy and sell shares of other people, and they can do the same for you. It looks like a lot of other people have been on it for a while, and are “worth” quite a bit.

I’ve only been on it for a couple days, and I’m already finding it highly engaging. Personally, I think that by using it, I will be more engaged on my blogs and other sites… except possibly Facebook.

You can join Empire Avenue by clicking here. By using that link, you should also get an extra 2000e (the “currency” that they use).

This post was made as a verification for this blog, and the verification string at the beginning of the post should be removed, shortly.

Within the last year, I started hearing more and more sirens around town, and I decided to buy another scanner in January. For the past eight months, I’ve enjoyed listening to what’s going on around town.

Today, our law enforcement center decided to make my $100 RadioShack scanner almost useless. They started scrambling all of their signals, and all I hear is an encrypted static sound. No police, no fire, no ambulance. The only thing I can still hear is the weather, the trains, and some local businesses.

Quite a poke in the eye to me… somebody that is usually up all night, including weekends, working at the north end of downtown… sort of an extra set of eyes and ears for them. Even as recently as a few weeks ago, when somebody was assaulted about a block away, I knew what was happening, and was able to be “on the lookout” for the guy wearing the red shirt and black shorts.

Now, I won’t even know if something that I should know about is happening at the other side of our parking lot.

I can understand (to a degree) why they’re doing it, but it makes me feel like I should “encrypt” the video from our 16 cameras (which I actually can’t) so that they can’t use it to help them anymore.

Our local police just lost a huge degree of trust from me by doing this.