Plan Your Escape Route During Citywide Fire Drill

A tipster sends along this great citywide activity we’re supposed to do tonight.

Tonight, the Philadelphia Fire Department will be coordinating a citywide home fire drill to highlight the importance of developing and practicing your home fire escape plan and installing smoke alarms throughout your home or apartment.

At 7:30 PM, fire apparatus sirens throughout the city will sound in all neighborhoods indicating the start of the city wide fire drill which all Philadelphians are urged to participate in by putting your own escape plans to the test.

Great, my first fire drill since sophomore year of college! I’ll participate, so that makes one, but I don’t know if anybody else will be interested.

The Incredible, Edible Bob Brady

Knox has been having those spaghetti dinners for a while. Maybe Bob Brady can’t match that, but he certainly could give out “Bob Brady” pretzels. Or maybe he can get “BRADY” spelled out with cheesesteaks? Quick, somebody call Geno’s!

Pictures [Bob Brady Works]

Brew Pups!

I have a new favorite lawmaker. (Read: I finally found a lawmaker I like.)

He’s State Senator Ken Jacobson of Washington:

State Senator Ken Jacobsen is introducing a bill that would allow Fido into pubs.

The brew pups would have to be leashed and well behaved. The Seattle Democrat says he got the idea after sitting in a popular bar and seeing cold, shivering dogs forced to wait outside for their owners.

All together now: Awwwwwwww…

Update: Related: Druid’s Keep in Northern Liberties.

Photo by hendrix designworks

Remaking The ‘Inquirer’ (To Lose Lots Of Money)

One of the best things a newspaper can do is solicit reader input on what to do with the newspaper. I don’t mean figuring out how to more involve the community for those who volunteer input or feedback or comments or whatever, I mean a thing like the Inquirer did recently: Ask readers what they’d do if they owned the paper.

Why is this such a good idea? Because the results are almost always hilarious, with ill-informed ideas, ridiculous rhetoric, and — of course — accusations of both liberal and conservative bias. Take the Inky article: It reported on the “more than 100″ letters the paper got.

Here’s how good it was: The suggestion to put a popcorn machine in the newsroom was the best one. My favorite suggestions happened to be the ones accusing the paper of liberal bias, not because the paper isn’t biased liberally (I don’t really know), but their ideas were amazing: “I would fire half the reporters and editors for news and sports, and hire a like number of conservatives.” Yes, that Bob Brookover, always injecting liberal bias into his Eagles recaps! (The other good liberal bias letter was the one saying he’d replace the paper’s staff with the Evening Bulletin staff. I’m not sure how their one staff reporter will put out five sections a day, though.)

But, the best suggestion by far attacks the one thing standard in most newspapers: Astrology. It comes form a worker at the Edelman Planetarium: “If I owned The Inquirer, the first thing I would do would be to remove the astrology column and replace it with the real thing: a column on the night sky and modern astronomical discoveries.”

Oh, wait: “In the middle of the front page I would write a paragraph of 250 words, once a week, on jokes (clean jokes), gags, situation comedy. Everything would be clean and no filth.”

There you have it, people. As much as asking for these suggestions is one of the best things a paper can do — and, to be fair, some of the suggestions were fairly level-headed — one of the worst things a paper can do: Actually implementing them.

If I were in charge of The Inquirer… [Inky]