Yes, it’s true. I work for a company that employs some very creative people, some more creative than others. Our designer Connie McGhee has a reputation for making incredible, fun gifts for our Secret Santa gift exchange each year, and this time she drew my name.

I knew when I saw the front cover of her creation that I was going to love it, and I did. I feel a little narcissistic writing this, but her gift is a twelve-month calendar featuring me as twelve different celebrities. All hilarious, some funny and some a little disturbing. If you’re looking for a Friday afternoon laugh and some impressive work in PhotoShop, look no further.

In case you missed Tennessean columnist Larry Daughtrey’s take on Gov. Bredesen’s once-reluctant embrace of open government, here’s a snapshot:

Bredesen opened up the state budget process, and it is no longer a big issue on Capitol Hill. When Bredesen became mayor of Nashville, he told reporters the other day, “I was flabbergasted and appalled at how you had to do business (in public). It just seemed to me almost impossible to hire people and do business. ‘I’ve come to realize you can work in this environment.’Yes, it has a substantial load attached to it in terms of how efficiently you can make decisions, but in the end government just works better if you come down on that side of it.’

What is a big issue on Capitol Hill these days is an effort by some local officials to go in the other direction — to change state law so they can meet in secret to talk about hiring and firing, pay raises and scandals.”

In a state not far removed from Operation Tennessee Waltz and a nation where political scandals are a spectator sport, who does it benefit, beyond those directly involved, to roll back sunshine laws? I don’t think it helps the general public, and at a time when transparency continues to increase in importance, I agree with Newscoma and others that a step in the opposite direction would definitely be backward and a bad move for Tennessee.

State Senator and former Lt. Gov. John Wilder, whose three decades at the helm of the State Senate ended dramatically in January, can’t be excited about this typo from opponents of plans to build a meeting hall at the Governor’s Mansion:

Surely the people energized on this issue could go on and on all day about the veracity of the claims made in the ad. But here’s one thing we know is wrong: The phone number listed for Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey.

The number listed there … is actually the phone number for former Lt. Gov. (now Sen.) John Wilder’s office. We just got a call from Wilder’s office to say they’re being flooded with phone calls from people who saw the ad.

The correct number for Ramsey’s office is [615] 741-4524.

Wilder lost his status as Speaker of the Senate (and Lt. Gov.) despite his strong desire to retain the title. This isn’t a pleasant reminder of that defeat, but it may be a relief to Wilder that he isn’t having to address the calls intended for current-Lt. Gov. Ron Ramsey. Whew.

After months of uncertainty and turmoil, it’s nice to see the meter swing slightly in the other direction for the Preds. The team announced today that it has signed the franchise’s all-time leading scorer, its very first draft pick David Legwand, to a six year, $27 million deal. Here’s a slice of the official line from the team’s news release:

“This is the first step moving forward under new ownership and is a sign of commitment, a desire to win and a desire to keep the core of our young team together in Nashville,” said [General Manager David] Poile. “David Legwand continues to improve and take on a larger role each season.  He is entering the prime of his career, and we feel that he is becoming one of the league’s most complete players.”

There’s plenty of cloudiness remaining about the Preds’ long-term future in Nashville, but it’s encouraging to see a hint of stability return to the roster.

Retired NHL player Igor Larionov, a former Detroit Red Wing and Soviet national team member, will be in Nashville next Tuesday (December 11) to promote his “IL” brand of wine. Larionov will appear at Frugal McDoogal’s and will sign wine bottles from 3 to 5 p.m.

Larionov was one of the very first Russian-born players to defect and play in the NHL in the 1980s. As a Soviet player, he centered the team’s famous “KLM” line. Some experts project that Larionov will be elected to the Hockey Hall of fame next year.

If you don’t have tickets for the 2007 Music City Bowl, you might have to pay a steep price to get them. Take your chances on eBay, where two seats for the match between Kentucky and Florida State are listed for as high as $1,300. I think I’ll watch the game on ESPN instead, but I’m pleased to see strong support for the bowl.

I had a great time this morning at the first Nashville Geek breakfast at Noshville. Here are a few things I learned:

• Dave Delaney has a good reason to tweet about Guinness beer: He lived in Ireland for the better part of four years. He may or may not be a social networking pioneer (without realizing it at the time), but he’s definitely a fellow 80s BBS survivor. Thanks for setting things up today, Dave.
• Cathy and Cal Evans both manage to work out of their home and get things done. Wow. Their secret: headphones.
• Laura Creekmore and I have comparable love-hate relationships with our respective Treos.
• Paul Schatzkin wrote a book about TV pioneer Philo Farnsworth that Aaron Sorkin isn’t crediting as a source for his new Broadway production The Farnsworth Invention.
• Kelly Stewart is looking to unload his Barcamp Nashville business cards. You’ve been warned.

Thanks, everyone, for a fun time today. See you next time.

The Nashville Homeless Power Project officially launched its its book, Homeless Power: Our Stories of Survival and Struggle, at a party at the Metro Courthouse last night. A lively and diverse crowd assembled to check out the book and shed light on the challenges faced by the city’s homeless citizens.

The book is a collaboration between NHPP and the Vanderbilt Human Rights and the Arts Project intended to raise funds and educate the public about homelessness. It is available for a donation of $20 via an order form on the NHPP Web site.

One NHPP member (first photo above, at right) who is homeless addressed the crowd. In an emotional and impassioned speech, she expressed gratitude and joy at seeing so many local homeless residents “get their own voices out” rather than having others speak for them. She advocated for more affordable housing and higher wages as much-needed solutions to homelessness.

Several Vanderbilt students who have directly participated in the book’s development (second photo above) presented NHPP with a framed poem compiled from quotations from the many stories the book features. The students read the poem aloud, and the selections were powerful. Here are a few:

• “Homelessness is not a crime.”
• “Every day I wake up wanting to get off the streets.”
• “People look at us like we are nobody, nothing.”
• “Pretty soon we’re invisible.”

Homelessness has been a controversial and politicized topic of late, especially as it relates to recently remodeled Church Street Park and to the anti-panhandling ordinance that the Metro Council recently deferred. Regardless of one’s opinions on homelessness, its impact and possible solutions, though, I think it’s fair to concede that there is plenty of work left to be done. The support services and available options for people who are homeless, while much improved in many ways compared with the past, aren’t enough to solve the problem, if it can ultimately be solved. I’m in favor of any reasonable initiatives that can make housing easier to attain and maintain and lead to fewer lives lived and lost on the streets.

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Rick Atkinson gave remarks and answered questions last night at the Nashville Public Library. Atkinson spoke as part of the ongoing MP&F Speaker Series and promoted his latest nonfiction book, The Day of Battle. The book makes the case for the significance of campaigns in Sicily and Italy in undermining Germany’s power during World War Two. Atkinson discussed the book and current and historical events during the event. A pair of his comments stood out to me as memorable and insightful:

• “World War Two is bottomless. There will always be more to discover.”
• “You can tell a lot about a man by the way he writes to his wife under stress.”

Atkinson discussed the revelation that Gen. George Patton slapped two soldiers within one week in 1943. Forty reporters kept the incidents secret for months out of respect for President Eisenhauer, despite their disdain for Patton. Would that ever happen today?

When asked to compare writing about current events, such as the Iraq war, with writing about decades-old events, Atkinson said, “Everything is right there in front of your face [when covering news as a journalist]. There is very little perspective. What you see, hear, taste and feel becomes part of the historical record.”

Atkinson spent every day for two months alongside Gen. David Petraeus with the 101st Airborne in Iraq. He contrasted the experience of writing in the “inverted pyramid” style of journalism, which emphasizes urgency but lacks the time needed for thoughtful perspective, against writing narratives about “real history” much farther in the past. For example, Neil Sheehan’s A Bright and Shining Lie, which he described as the definitive history of Vietnam, was published 15 years after the war ended. A history of the Iraq war, he argued, will have to wait not only for an end to that conflict but also for sufficient time to pass for historians to consider the events “from a distance.”

Atkinson cited an alarming statistic: Historians have made the case that only 29 years of recorded human history have been entirely free of war. Most of the assembled crowd, he observed, was not alive when any of those years took place. It’s worth making the distinction that several attendees in the room were senior citizens, and judging from their questions to Atkinson, most of them had direct combat experience or plenty of memories of loved ones who served during wartime. If there’s any credibility at all to that sobering figure, that’s a powerful argument for doing more to achieve peace … in the Middle East and everywhere else.

Is recycling a ton of consumer waste something that an individual family should brag about?

The Curby program has proved wildly popular with some Nashville residents who brag of having up to three of the green, 96-gallon carts to fill with paper, aluminum and other recyclables for monthly pickup …

In Nashville, Curby came to homes automatically, and the convenience has made it a recycling method some love. “We have three containers and they’re usually full,” said Paul Brown, a retired minister in the Green Hills area. “I think the program ought to be used, if it can be.”

I am a frequent recycler, and I want to see our citywide recycling rates increase. Wouldn’t it be better for all of us, though, to find ways to divert as much of our household garbage as possible, from both the trash can and the recycling bin? Consider what one blogger and many others have to say about recycling as a last resort:

When I first started this project, I quickly learned that recycling was really not the be all and end all. It takes up a lot of energy, causes pollution and only uses a small percentage of the material, landing the rest in land fill. Our society uses it as an easy way out- the more you recycle the better, but it’s not so. It’s best to just not get (or even better, create) the packaging in the first place. Recycling is good as a last resort, after reducing and reusing, but we use it as a salvation. This is old news. I’ve talked about it before and people as a whole are becoming more aware of the recycling myth.

I support continuing our current Curby program, but I see it as a beginning, not a long-term solution. Though it might be politically untenable at present, I’d love to see our city follow the path blazed by Austin, if not Seattle (as mentioned in The Tennessean story linked at the top of this post). Why shouldn’t we charge people by the amount of waste they generate? Isn’t that capitalism at work?

As expected, the Commodores have indeed cracked the AP men’s college basketball Top 25. Vanderbilt is #23 in that poll and #25 in the ESPN-USA Today poll.

The most entertaining part of this news is the comment thread on The Tennessean story about the ranking. Sure, the battles between the ‘Dores and the Vols are (sometimes)  intense on the basketball court and the football field, but the gloves really come off when Web-savvy fans debate which school is more pathetic for issuing commemorative DVDs of its accomplishments. As The Office’s Jim Halpert might say, there are no winners to this argument, but oh yeah, “There are losers.”