Round-up, 11.11.09

A few items I wanted to highlight today:

Library scores $606K grant. The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded the City a $606,500 grant for energy efficiency and conservation. The grant money will be used for the upcoming Downtown Library project, bringing the total construction fund to $6,606,500. Kudos to Library Director Gene Fischer and his staff for nabbing the grant.

Breakdown of pension situation. Rick’s Blog has an excellent post up detailing how the City’s unfunded pension liability developed. As we’ve said, the problem stems from a 1997 decision in which City staff convince City Council to reopen the general pension plan. The financial impact of that decision was grossly understated.

Believe in a Better Pensacola deposits. Jeff DeWeese has today released the most recent donations received by the pro-charter group Believe in a Better Pensacola. The donations, totalling $1,150, range in amount from $50-$400 and came from Corbett Davis, Barry Beroset, Laura Keene, DeeDee Ritchie, Richard and Betty Hooton, and John Beroset.

Vonnegut on Armistice Day. On this November 11, now called Veterans’ Day, previously called Armistice Day, I will reprint perhaps my favourite passage from one of favourite books by one of my favourite authors, Kurt Vonnegut:

I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.

So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.

What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.

And all music is.

— from Breakfast of Champions (1973)