+5
With city and state budgets in tatters, gas at $4.30 and low-brow cheese-doodle dreck dominating pop culture, the Fund for the Arts brought in an astonishing $9 million for the year — a cool million more than last year. Everyone from individual donors to corporations to our friendly local robber barons made sure Louisville’s longtime support for the non-library arts continued. We can all look forward to some Giacomo Puccini to wash down our Miley Cyrus.
0
Metro Louisville approved an $820 million bones-bared budget for the new fiscal year, capping a week of partisan genital waving. The budget includes $17 million for land development of the controversial Center City project, which hopes to lure tourists to generate tax dollars to help fund ever-glitzier tourist traps, lather, rinse, repeat.
+1
In a special session that was special in the way special-ed kids are special, the General Assembly agreed on a bill to bail out the state’s broken retirement system. The deal will balance the retirement books by reducing benefits, requiring future state workers to contribute 1 percent more to their healthcare and delaying retirement from the previous “300 months after sixth-grade graduation” to “until such time as the first gray pubic hair appears, as determined by state inspectors as mandated in KRS 943.38901.”
-1
When Pensacola, Florida, defense attorneys working on an obscenity trial used Google Trends to show that Pensacola pervs were searching for all manner of nasty stuff, the resourceful journalists at New York’s Silicon Alley Insider (HYPERLINK "http://www.alleyinsider.com/"www.alleyinsider.com) decided to find out which American city was most likely to search for obscene material. The result: We’re Number One! Louisville ranked first in searches for George Carlin’s famous “seven dirty words.” Of course, maybe some of us just wonder what they mean.
World-classness: +5
