Howard Monroe And The Morning Show

And so we say sayanora to one year and aloha to the new.

On the one hand, I enjoy the New Year holiday because it gives us a chance to reflect on where we've been and what we've done. We can wipe the slate clean and symbolically start again. On the other hand, it always makes me recognize the passing of the years of my Life. Over the age of 50 you are decidely aware that there are things you won't ever be doing again. I don't think of myself as "old", but there are some aspects being "young" that will only be expereienced again in memory.

Haven't posted much in the past week here on the web site....and I'll be lying low for a couple of extra days. My old friend Doug Stephan siting in for me on the radio show for a few days. When we get back to bsuiness, we have a busy year ahead---Presidential election will dominate much of our time. Wheeling City elections are going to be interesting. We'll be doing more shows from our "Broadcast House South" studios in Moundsville. Heading to DC late January for a couple days from our nation's capital and that is the start of what will likely be a busy year on the road.

Be looking for the addition of "podcasts" from the radio show coming soon. Hopefully you make a point of listening on-the-air on here on the web "live"---but if you miss a show, we'll put some of the best stuff here on the site for you to listen to at your own liesure

Some exciting chamges coming throughout the rest of our broadcast day as well. Keep an eye here to the web site and I'll let you know what's happening.

Enjoy the day.

And Happy New Year!

It's always nice to find some pleasant holiday programming to watch or listen to.

Here at WVLY, we will have several Christms dramas on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. We will also feature stretches of continual Christmas music mixed wth some holiay stories.

I also call your attention to WLTV, Comcast Channel 14 in Wheeling and Moundsville. This public access feed is run by West Liberty State College. Christmas week you can watch some wonderful performances from the West Liberty Chorale department (these kids were in Italy for a week on a concert tour last summer---that's how good they are). The Moundsville Christmas Parade will be aired in a production made by the broadcast students at John Marshall High.

And of course, this week, as every week, you can catch ME on the "roundtable" segment of the At Issue show. West Liberty College President Rob Capehart interviews newsmakers and then he and I ---and other local journalists--kick around the stories of the week. It airs every Sunday morning at 11 and is repeated often through the week.

This week (and next), Wheeling newspaper Managing Editor John McCabe and I will talk about what we see as some of the big stories coming up in 2008.

It's a holiday week and The Morning Show will be on hiatus for several days. But when we return in 2008 we need to revisit the issue of the Wheeling tunnel debacle.

It is staggering to me that the construction company involved in that project--basically a failed project, more than a million over budget, and effectively shut down nearly a year after it was started with no end in sight--is now receieving more work from the State Hiway Department. And apparently Vellota Construction is arguing for MORE money for its work on the Wheeling Tunnels!

I won't belabor the point during these holidays, but we'll has it out when we return.

There MUST be a full investigation of what wrong with that project and someone MUST be held accountable.

Find a focus and follow through.

That's the best path to success for the City of Wheeling.

I like the latest idea on downtown development --as you can read in a post down below the idea is acually what I've been suggesting for over a year--but I have to hope that THIS time the follow through happens.

Some of the buildings which the City is now going to buy back and tear down had already been owned by the City just a couple of years ago. The City BOUGHT a bunch of property (they were called the "Zee Properties") with an eye to some downtown development. Purchase price $420, 000.

That idea fell through.

The City sold them to private individuals at reduced rates with the hope they would renovate and use them to spruce up downtown.

That idea didn't work.

Now the City is buying them back and planning to tear them down.

Any one of the ideas may have been good. But as near as I can tell little was done to stay focused on the plans and keep pushing for them to work.

Find a focus and follow-through.

That's the path to success for the City.

There are a lot of statistics and plenty of ways to interpret them. But the increasing volume of evidence shows the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. No matter what the right wing talk show apologists try to make you think, this country is being run by a small percentage of powerful, wealthy elite.

And it's getting worse.

The increase in wealth for top 1% of Americans was more than the total income of the poorest 20%.

Oh, and before the right wing spin machine kicks in, these numbers include the value of food stamps, welfare, and other government payments!

And because of the Bush tax cuts, the share of taxes paid by that wildly-getting-wealthier 1 per cent WENT DOWN.

That's right--the top 1% wealthiest of us had a huge increase their wealth---the greatest since 1928--and yet their share of taxes DROPPED.

New York Times has a good story on these numbers. And if you don't like The Times, click through to the CBO Report itself.

Folks come to our web site for a number of different reasons. Most just surf right in. That probably means you're listening to The Morning Show and have picked up the web site address as I mention it on air. Some come in from our affiliate radio shows...for example, we get a lot of folks who link to us off the Stephanie Miller web site, and some find us by doing a search on news stories that we have covered.

But this weekend I discovered a large number of people who came in after searching on terms like "Sexy women", "Pamela Anderson", and even "Dawn Wells shorts". Apparently the internet search engines have picked up on my posting below on the sexiest women on TV and are adding this web page to the search results.

Can you imagine the dismay of the guy who thought he was pulling up another page of the long-legged "Mary Anne" in her Gilligan shorts....and found MY bearded mug instead!

It's a story that broke, developed, and ended in not much more than 24 hours. Rich Rodriguez is leaving WVU and heading to Michigan.  The twists and turns were followed in detail all weekend long on our news partner's site WVMETRONEWS.com. You can surf on over there right now and get the latest news and follow-up.

Two big breaking stories this weekend.

The weather has everyone watching the roads. You can keep an eye on our WVLY Weatherbug just to the left on this page. Click it for a detailed look at the forecast, maps, radar, and more. Your current and detailed weather is always on the web right here. Looks like snow is in the plans, but maybe not as much as had been thought. And we still some flood alerts as well. My wife and I picked up our Christmas tree at the tree farm high on the hill above Bridgeport just as heavy snow began. A little slippery coming down the snow covered road, but by the time we got home it stopped. Hey, it's winter.

And in Morgantown, it's de ja vu all over again. Is Rich Rodriguez looking at the coaching job at Michigan? National reports have said so. Rodriguez refused to discuss it....even threatening to end the press conference if any one asked him any more about the rumors. It was just a year ago we thought this kind of thing was all over when the University reached a multi-million dollar deal with the coach after he flirted with the head job at Alabama. There is no better coverage of this story than that provided by our friends at MetroNews. We'll do frequent on-air reports, and you can keep on top of the story as it moves by checking often to WVMETRONEWS.Com

"Mrs. Peel, we're needed".

That was always part of the opening of the classic '60s spy TV show The Avengers".

I loved that show as a young boy. The beautiful Dianna RIgg in her skin tight leather may have had something to do with it, of course. But the whimsical approach to the James Bond genre, the British accents and lingo were just something special for the times.

I wrote a little about this down below when we looked at the top sexy TV Stars, and I began to remember more about the show.

It started as a spin off in the early '60s in Great Britian and was at best a mild success. Honor Blackmn was the original female sidekick, but she had been replaced with Rigg by the time the show came to America. Legend has it the character name "Emma Peel" came about because she was the "Man Appeal" or "M-appeal" of the series.

I wonder if I get a "taste" (as they used to say in The Sopranos)? A little piece of the action?

City of Wheeling paid a Pittsburgh consulting firm $70,000 to tell them what I have been saying on the radio for about a year now: best advice for downtown development is to clean it up and wait for something to happen

Sunday News Register details the new consultants' plan which basically involves buying the older, delipadated structures on Main and Market Streets, tearing them down, planting grass with benches and lights, and then waiting for a developer who thinks the land meets their needs.

Which is what I have been saying for the past year.

And, in fact, is what the City is already doing. Although it's not been publicly talked about much, my understanding is the City already has options on buying some of the structures on the proposed demo list.

The consultants go a little further. They encourage the City to buy the Capitol Music Hall and keep it as a centerpiece for downtown as well as continuing emphasis on the Heritage Port.

This concept seems similar to what is being done in Youngstown, Ohio. The Columbus Dispatch has been doing a series on "Cities on the Brink" and Youngstown seems to be taking an approach similar to what I have been suggesting for Wheeling: tear old things down and make green space, focus on what you HAVE and not on what you don't, and recongnize and embrace that you are a "shrinking city" which doesn't have to mean a "dying city".