Various Monday Morning Reportorial Oddities

We're greeted by a pair of reportorial oddities in this morning's Standard-Examiner.

First, on the section B front page we read that a world-renowned Olympic gold medalist will be in town tomorrow, to promote the Peterson/Godfrey land-grab. Tomorrow morning, Park City's own Jim Shea "get a close-up look at the location of the proposed multimillion-dollar 'resort' at Malan's Basin." In addition to looking over our legacy Mt. Ogden parkland, he'll hobnob for a while with Chris Peterson, on Chris's via ferrata (Italian: rock-climbing for pansies.) Later on (6:30 p.m.,) ace reporter Schwebke reports, Shea will be on hand to deliver a motivational speech at the Ogden amphitheater. In the unlikely case you've forgotten, gentle readers, Shea medalled in 2002, in our personal favorite Olympic sport --- skeleton.

Standard-Examiner news sleuth Schwebke also managed somehow to get a couple of classic pre-speech "teaser" quotes out of gold-medalist Shea:

"I want to be supportive of all visionaries in Utah," Shea said in a phone interview. "Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. There is a lot of smoke coming out of Ogden... " Shea said.

Shea definitely said a mouthful there, we think. He apparently knows a lot already... about Ogden city politics.

In the event that a few of our gentle readers may have inexplicably lost track of Jim Shea in the intervening years since his stirring 2002 Olympic triumph, they can rest assured that he's let no grass grow under his feet. A quick google search reveals he's now earning a little extra cash in the twilight of his Olympic career, milking a few extra bucks as a featured speaker for Brooks International, a haven for washed-up genuine sports stars and athletic also-rans-for-hire, on the lucrative American motivational speech stump-circuit. Yep, he's right there on their 'medal-winner" speakers' list.

Anybody wanna hazard a wild guess about who will be ultimately picking up the tab on this?

A Standard-Examiner page A-1 oddity also caught our attention. Ogden City's own management director, Mark Johnson, commutes to work at City Hall in a 8500-lb+ 10 mpg City-owned HumVee H2, we learn this morning. We won't belabor the point, but we think it fitting and proper that at least one member of Mayor Godfrey's "million dollar brain trust" is "upfront" enough to drive a car that truly reflects the city administration's mega-big-government, mega-big-spending, resource-wasteful spirit and mentality. We won't however say a word about possible personal psychological implications of this personal transportation choice, although we cannot resist incorporating this pithy quote from the preceding link:

"I too assume that someone driving them is an ass or compensating for something. A friend of mine wanted to put a note "Dude, sorry about your p****" on the windshield of a Hummer, but she was only 5 ft tall. I boosted her up :)."

Finally, we're linking to a thought-provocative Deseret News opinion piece, which quite rightly asks the question: how is it possible that the original golden spike, a rendition of which will soon circulate around the world, impressed on the newest commemorative U.S. quarter, remains languishing in some obscure California museum? Now that the State of Utah will be getting all this free publicity, shouldn't we be agitating support to bring the spike back home? What a fine centerpiece it would be for a new railroad museum, as the DNews's Lee Benson seems to suggest. Isn't it really time for us to get moving forward on this?

The floor is open, gentle readers.

What's on your gentle minds today?

Update 5/15/06 1:17 p.m. MT: In the most recent development, the odd story about Mark Johnson's odd vehicular prosthesis has now been apparently picked up by the AP wire service.

Update 5/18/06 9:58 p.m. MT: We had a sneaking suspicion that the Standard-Examiner editors would make additional hay with the Mark Johnson HumVee story. In the event any of our readers in out-of-the-way places missed today's editorial, you can check it out here.