Hey. Welcome back. It’s time for our weekly therapy session. I’m not sure if I’m the therapist and you’re the patient or you’re the therapist and I’m the patient. Either way, it has been a good match. Let’s keep meeting like this.
Mark Ferguson, best known as a defense attorney, is chair of the county’s “jail committee,” a committee that for some reason has drifted from jail talk to “let’s build a new courthouse” talk.
Last time we heard Ferguson’s name in these pages he was then-Parkville Mayor Nan Johnston’s attorney for her DWI and then, after that,, was hired by the City of Parkville when city officials–which included Johnston at the time–thought they might need a defense attorney in the aftermath of their handling of public records and subpoenaed items.
Despite a lengthy investigation and I’m told a request for charges (statement of probable cause) against at least one city official being sent by the sheriff’s department to the county prosecutor’s office, no charges were ever filed.
FYI, courthouse insiders will tell you that the judge pushing the hardest for a new courthouse to be built outside of Downtown Platte City is Judge Ann Hansbrough.
Even some folks who work in law enforcement think Hansbrough’s idea to turn the existing courthouse into a juvenile justice center is absurd. That much space for juvenile court proceedings in a county the size of Platte? Ridiculous.
“It would probably be the largest juvenile justice center in the United States. You’d have to go to Chicago to find one even close to that size,” one law enforcement source tells me.
Here’s a little inside baseball look at how this column is handled. I’ll sometimes write paragraphs that are in the initial draft of my column–which is usually written on Tuesday nights–but they don’t make the final version in the paper. My proofreader, who shall remain nameless, gives the first draft of my column a good gander late Tuesday nights. When Wednesday morning comes I sometimes (actually almost always) make tweaks and adjustments, sometimes replacing multiple sections and multiple paragraphs that my proofreader already gave a thumbs up. I will cut those sections and paste them to the side of the page in our design software for potential future use.
Then in a later week when I have less than normal to say, I’ll sometimes go grab those discarded paragraphs and stick them in that week’s Tuesday night draft. Occasionally this process is repeated multiple times involving the same paragraphs.
My proofreader has a real job and is not available at my every whim on Wednesday mornings to check late-in-the-game changes. She often assumes the version she read on Tuesday night is the version that’s in the paper. I know this because when she gets the paper in her hands on Wednesday evening she often never even bothers to read my column. (And that’s hurtful, but we’re not here to talk about my feelings).
Anyway, recently I tucked a few paragraphs that had been discarded at the last minute in previous weeks back into a Tuesday night draft. My proofreader was all over it.
“Hey, you’ve already used some of this material,” she said.
“Au contraire,” was my response, in kind of a “gotcha” tone of voice.
“Why are you talking like a douchebag?” was her response to my response.
Anyway, this has been a lot of words to tell you there’s something in this particular column that has been included in the draft–then pulled in the final version–multiple times. Like, so many times it may have actually ended up getting printed and I just don’t remember. And I’m not going to go research it right now. Gonna risk it for the biscuit. If you’re reading something in this column for the second time instead of the first, I apologize.
When roundabouts first became a thing I was not a fan. My feelings have changed significantly. Or as the politicians like to say, my opinion has “evolved.” Those things are the bomb, a real boost for traffic flow.
And as the experts point out, the tight circle of a roundabout forces drivers to slow down, and the most severe types of intersection crashes — right-angle, left-turn and head-on collisions — are unlikely.
Anyway, my apologies to roundabouts for my previous harsh comments.
The late comedian Donnie Baker didn’t like roundabouts. Donnie once said: “Roundabouts are basically crop circles that have been paved over.”
One time when I was 18 I mistakenly went to an old school barber and ended up with a haircut that looked like a crop circle.
It was brought to my attention in a text conversation with my middle daughter that the year Taylor Swift and I had our extensive two minute conversation backstage at Sandstone was 2007, not 2005 as I previously reported. I apologize to myself for the error.
This is like the third or fourth week in a row that Taylor Swift is getting a mention in this column. Have I become a Swiftie?
(Get Swiftier with the publisher at ivan@plattecountylandmark.com)