spenser1058

And now, even Herbie is a believer! http://www.sportingnews.com/us/ncaa-football/news/kirk-herbstreit-ucf-college-football-playoff-national-championship-fiesta-bowl-lsu-sec/wlwr7ncqjqrs13i7wgyiziroz From the Sporting News

Nope, it’s a real thing. There’s also one on I4 at JYP. I applaud them for taking a little dig at themselves for the holiday.

Actually, the president of THE OSU is on record as saying we should look to expanding the playoffs. But, nevertheless, just keep trying to resist change and we’ll see what happens in five years (remember, five years ago you would have thought it ridiculous that UCF would be Florida’s highest ranked program and with an excellent shot at taking down LSU in two weeks (they said there was no way we’d beat Auburn,either and then changed it after the game to “they really didn’t care.”) Embrace change, jrs. It’s the only thing that’s inevitable.

I’m just thankful I can make my own with ingredients from my Publix at the Paramount and have some clue about what I’m eating. Nevertheless, when I was 20 and in a hurry I ate plenty of stuff that likely wasn’t very healthy (Krystals, anyone?). So this should be a boon to the bar district.

We need more Mystery Meat!

Wow, chain fast food AND a furniture store. If all those open as planned, that’s quite a jump for downtown retail. Kudos to whoever’s doing that redo of 20 N. Orange.

This column about what a dinosaur the bowls have become is right in sync with the UCF kerfuffle. An antiquated system falling apart at the seams that a bunch of folks (especially in one or two conferences) keep squawking about as “tradition” but which in fact looks totally out of place in the 21st century. https://thebiglead.com/2018/12/10/bowl-games-are-the-cigarette-lighters-in-cars-of-the-sports-world/ From the Big Lead

It’s interesting to ponder all the various owners downtown’s Plaza Cinema Cafe has had over the dozen years or so it’s been open. Now it has another one. By all accounts, it continues to do well in contrast to other similar urban theaters around the state. Also, this particular ownership change had nothing to do with the Orange Avenue location itself. Instead, Birmingham based Cobb Theaters has become CMX after its acquisition by Mexican-based Cinemex. Never a dull moment for perhaps Mayor Buddy Dyer’s greatest downtown retail accomplishment! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinemex

This year’s Morgan & Morgan billboard for Christmas: “When Grandma gets run over by a reindeer...”

*sings, “send in the cranes, there ought to be cranes, well maybe next year...*

Maybe that can be my new job after I retire!

I think mostly it’s the fact that Danny isn’t kowtowing to the idea that he needs to run around the country begging and scraping for the legacy programs to throw UCF their scraps like some have suggested Boise State did. Instead, he’s proudly announcing we’ve earned at least a chance to sit at the big boy table and if they choose to refuse us, recognizing there’s a third way. Why try to grovel our way into the Big 12 or whatever when our program is already building attendance and being televised on prime time and Game Day? We can be the prime movers in building an AAC that can’t be ignored rather than waiting on the Grumpy Old Men of the P5 to allow us our spot. That’s the new paradigm to me (and it’s kinder, gentler too!)

A point of personal privilege that doesn’t relate to Orlando at all but makes me sad: Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander announced he will not run for reelection in 2020. I worked on then Governor Alexander’s re-election campaign in 1982 and have followed his career ever since. He’s wise, has a gentle sense of humor, believes passionately in the Senate as an institution and most importantly, these days, is a true gentleman. He’s earned his retirement but he’ll be sorely missed. https://amp.tennessean.com/amp/2276521002 From the Tennessean

“The curse of interesting nearby neighborhoods.” It’s important to note that in the heyday of CSS, our Main Street districts simply didn’t exist and were wide spots in the road starting to decline. The exciting bar of the time was the Why Not Lounge up in Altamonte adjoining a Holiday Inn. Downtown was long since past its prime (the year Rosie’s opened, the Sears on Orange Avenue closed and Ivey’s wouldn’t be far behind). Because all the excitement was the new Fashion Square Mall and Sea World opening (not to mention awaiting the first run on Space Mountain), nobody gave much thought to downtown. Mayor Carl Langford didn’t see much reason to do anything different and showed up on “60 Minutes” to declare Orlando a “depressed area” to snag some federal funds. In that era, CSS seemed like a great idea. Little did we know that, just six years later, a new mayor told us our roots downtown could be restored. The idea of saving neighborhoods took hold and a sense of authenticity became the rallying cry instead of an ersatz Victorian tourist mecca that hardly represented the true past of Church St. At the time, I wasn’t much impressed and left to find “real” cities. By 1983, I was delighted to discover I could come back to my hometown and work with lots of folks to recover what was real (without the quotation marks) about Orlando. Like Xavier, I kind of like what we came up with and look forward to even more.

JRS, you remind me of someone at Sears in 1995 saying, “no need to worry about that Amazon thing, they’re just shipping books out of a tiny room in Seattle.” (A business column I recently read noted if Walmart had done the same things it’s done the past 2-3 years to stop Amazon 10-15 years ago, there’d be no Amazon to stop.) Or if Xerox had taken its PARC facility seriously at the dawn of the PC era, Xerox would be the leading tech company today, not a footnote. What matters is the trend. Let’s meet in 5 years or10 and see if everything is as it is now or, more likely, if the world has changed. Just for comparison sake: imagine if I told anyone in Florida in 2008 that by 2017 UCF would be the highest ranked program in the state and FSU wouldn’t be in the top 3. But that’s exactly where we are. Charge On into the Future, not the Past.