ocono.com

Some recent postings on Facebook have identified the Oconomowoc person alleged to have contracted the Swine Flu, and, tangentially, caused the closings at the Oconomowoc School District and and Pabst Farms YMCA.

Ocono.com has decided the public’s need to know about this information outweighs the privacy issues involved. We post this with the following caveats:

1. Just because it’s on Facebook, doesn’t mean it’s true.

2. We’re not going to name the person with the suspected flu. We don’t feel that someone’s alleged medical condition is any business of the public. However, we do believe that the YMCA has an obligation to respond to this rumor. We’ll keep you posted.

3. We also want to emphasize that this screen cap is not a person from our own Facebook friends list.  We managed to cajole a friend of a friend to grab us this screen shot. We’ve already deleted the source file, so don’t ask. We’re not going to tell you.

4. Swine Flu has a scary, scary name. Here’s an article from Reuters that we think offers some thoughtful perspective.

We just got word that the Oconomowoc School District has closed the Oconomowoc High School and Middle School for the next seven days due to a suspected case of swine flu.

We are certainly concerned about this development, however we can’t help but point out that the Oconomowoc District’s auto dialer’s outgoing message suggested that district parents should “have a nice day.”

Here’s the Oconomowoc Focus’s coverage of the story from April 29th.
Here’s the Google Map coverage.

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11ish a.m. Update: Here’s The Focus’ updated story from their feed. Oconomwooc High and Intermediate Schools closed until May 8.

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12:20 p.m. Another Update: YMCA at Pabst Farms to close due to Swine Flu concerns.

The last time Ocono.com shared a story with you from the Local Offline Newspaper That Has No Website, we got hit with a take-down-notice. So, this time, we’re only going to link to an online version that we found on Greater Milwaukee Today.

We were shocked (shocked!) to learn about an exciting new service that local businesses are using to “reach out” to their customers: Twitter.  Maybe you read about it on Ocono.com. Here. Or Here.   We’re pretty sure they don’t have official Twitter accounts at Local Offline Newspaper That Has No Website since they have no website.  Maybe they do. Let us know if we’re wrong. Send us a tweet. We’ll @reply you right up, tweeterino.

Forgive us if we engage in a bit of navel-gazing: We think it’s commendable when local businesses trying to take it to the streets and make themselves more accessible to the public by adopting emerging media, but we wonder if the whole Twitter thing might be a bit overblown. It’s easy and cheap to be accessible to the small fraction of the technoratti that have adopted Twitter as their preferred medium of information delivery, but that’s not really democratization, is it? I mean, what about the non-twitters who have needs of your firm’s information services? Let me ask you this, local businesses who are leveraging social media, are you equally willing to meet the needs of the non-Twittering public? If you have a Twitter account but not an 800-number, I think you’d better be taking a long hard look at your business plan, right?  We’re not saying your doing it wrong, but we hope you’ve really thought about it, and aren’t just social networking it up because you paid some consultant to tell you that social networks is where all the cool kids are.

Hey now, we can’t just be all about Culvers…. what about Golosi Gelato Cafe?

Joe Haas Media created this wonderful video to clue you in…

That’s what WITI says…

Proof positive that microblogging service Twitter has totally jumped the shark? THE REALTORS HAVE ARRIVED!

Proof positive that THE REALTORS have jumped the shark? This URL: http://guidemehome2southeasternwisconsinlakearealiving.com/

Although, one has to appreciate the realtor’s pluck. Since there is exactly _no_ good news to report on Oconomowoc’s Pabst Farms development, going out and manufacturing some shows some real initiative on Shorewest’s Part.

Nice work, Realtors! You have kicked it up a notch!

It’s perhaps too easy for outsiders and the technoriché to mock the death of the newspaper industry. I mean, standing with your foot raised triumphantly on the the boated, crow-pecked corpse of an sick animal doesn’t exactly ring of triumphant victory.

Even in our own little town, the two local papers, locked in a life or death battle for survival, are facing tough times. We’ve said this before, but know this: Oconomowoc will _not_ have two local paper’s at years end. Not in their current forms, anyway.

And that would be a shame, not only because we are very fond of at least one of the local papers, but because Oconomowoc could be deprived of classic WTF moments like this one:

Pictured at the top: Oconomowoc Enterprise from March 19: Headline: School Board agrees to ban alcohol from high school arts center. Below: Oconomowoc Focus  Board tables issue on alcohol at the new OAC.

So which one is it?

I made a phone call, and the Oconomowoc Focus has it correct. This should not surprise anyone.

Disclosure: I worked for the Focus and it’s publisher Lake Country Publications from 1999 to 2007.

If you’re the kind of person who shows their love of something by clicking on it, here’s you chance to click on a Downtown Oconomowoc institution: Fong’s Garden! Amy Lin, an heiress to the Fong Fortune, has set up this FaceBook Group so that you can click your love at Fong’s.

Click, friends, click! Click away the bad feelings left behind by a negative story about the restaurant produced by Today’s TMJ4! Click! Click for a clean and shiny Fongs! Write on Fong’s Wall and tell them how they have very large egg rolls and they are, in fact, quite tasty.

We’ve eaten at Fong’s more times than we can count. At one point in our career, our downtown office was literally across the street from the restaurant.

Here’s the deal, though. The crooked thing about Dirty Dining segments like the one levied at Fong’s by TMJ4 isn’t that they report on alleged health code violations at local restaurants.  The crooked thing about Dirty Dining Segments is that they imply that such healthcode violations don’t exist at every restaurant ever in the history of the world at one time or another.That restaurants occasionally get slapped with health code violations is a dirty, dirty fact of life.

Look, this is the only thing you can know for sure: Fong’s is certainly a restaurant, and it certainly is in Oconomowoc. And because Oconomowoc is a place that exists in the world, it has certainly had a health code violation or two from time to time. So has every other restaurant that has ever existed, ever. Trust em on this: If you knew the half of it, you’d never go out to eat. 

So, Boo on Dirty Dining and TMJ4, not for targeting Fong’s, but for running a regular feature about dirty dining in the exploitationish and sensationalish way that TV stations do. Boo on you, Dirty Dining.

Look, Oconomowoc is not known for it’s vast array of dining choices… (is it?) so if you haven’t been to Lemon Grass yet, now is the time.

No really, we mean it. The owner really wants you to stop by. He may have even emailed you. (See the full story.)

I’ve eaten at Lemon Grass, and I thought it was pretty darn good! Give them a try… tell them ocono.com sent you!

Does using Federal stimulus funds to design a replacement plan for a road that doesn’t need yet need replacing  make sense? Public Works Director Mark Frye thinks so.

"We looked at this as an excellent use of the stimulus funds," Frye said. "If they do say no, at least we have it engineered and ready to go."

We don’t know what to make of that. We’re not going to pretend to know better. This is the new Ocono.com.

We know a lot of people who have hit the economic brick wall these days, and we’re pretty sure none of the people we know work for highly-paid engineering firms that draft up no-bid construction plans for municipal contracts. Maybe we’re totally wrong about that. We don’t know. We’re just a couple of guys who love this city.   What would we know about running it?