I’m definitely not a fan of the current incarnation of Indiana’s standard license plate. The Back Home Again green has colors bother me, but the field and house in the middle of nowhere design falls into way too many midwest stereotypes. The state has announced that there are new plates for next year, and we can vote on which one gets stamped. This new plate is only replacing the green plate. The new In God We Trust design is unfortunately here to stay.

Each of the new designs incorporates the state flag in some way and has a more neutral color scheme. Voting opens tomorrow and will run through April 18. The winning plate will be announcd in May and put into production next January. Personally, I’m a fan of three of the plates: all but the straight blue.

I’ll be voting for the top-left plate with the rotated torch. Just because I like it, though, don’t think I’ll be giving up my Purdue plate.

One of the glories of childhood for most people was getting out on the baseball field and playing whether it be in an organized league or a sandlot. It meant sliding into first just to get dirty. Unfortunately I had to give up my professional baseball career and become a blogger instead since since I didn’t like getting my uniform dirty and was allergic to grass. Even if I wasn’t much of a player, I’ve always been a fan of the game and look forward to opening day each year.

Technically the 2007 season started last night with the St. Louis Cardinals getting putting their World Championship pennant up at Busch Stadium. Unfortunately they didn’t play like champions losing to the Mets 6-1.

I’m personally not a Cardinals fan, so I will be following my New York Yankees and you should too. Donny Baseball, Evansville’s own Don Mattingly, has been promoted from the Yankees hitting coach to bench coach for the team. Yankees manager Joe Torre’s contract is set to expire at the end of the year, and it’s generally thought that if he doesn’t renew his deal, Mattingly will become the manager of the greatest sports franchise in history. Not bad. As for the team, they still have the highest payroll in the majors, but whether that will bring another world championship remains to be seen. Everyone has hopes in April: even Cubs fans.

If you’re wanting to watch some live baseball, but don’t want to drive three hours to St. Louis why not head to a USI or UE game? UE has a 19-11 record with two months to go in the season. USI is also doing well with an 18-9 record.

photo courtesy of sonnysonny

Happy Monday. Here’s what going on around town today.

• It looks like the poisonous dog food that has been sweeping the country has hit the Evansville area. Claudia McGinn lost her 2½-year-old cat, Casey, after feeding her one of the tainted meals a few weeks ago. Animal owners around the country are reporting kidney failure in their pets, which is caused by rat poison that got into the food during the manufacturing process. If you have dogs or cats, make sure you are checking to ensure you aren’t feeding them any of this bad food by checking the list of recalled foods.
• The Easter Seals Telethon was a success once again this year raising over $880,000 for the disability center. Easter Seals works with children with physical and mental disabilities as well as offering rehabilitation and job training for adults.
• Got a pet pothole in town? The Vanderburgh County Commissioners will be meeting Tuesday to discuss the high priority roads that need to be fixed this year. Unfortunately, the number of roads in need of attention far outweighs the budget allocated for repairs ($1.3 million). There’s still hope though as commissioners may ask the County Council to appropriate more cash to the road rehab project. Maybe Commissioner Troy Tornatta will blog about the meeting and it’s results.
• It’s not exactly Macworld, but we are getting a military vehicle convention in 2009. The convention chose Evansville from it’s list of possible venues thanks to the LST 325 warship. The convention will be located out at the 4-H Fairgrounds mainly, but will have events scheduled on the LST. Louisville’s Spirit Of Jefferson will also make the trip over for a dinner cruise.

photo courtesy of carpeaqua

Welcome! Today, April 2, is our official launch day and we’re glad to have you. You will probably notice that we’ve been writing for a few days, but held off on notifying the press until today in order to get any kinks in the system out. Now that those are out, a formal introduction seems necessary. It’s Evansville is a Website about our town of Evansville, Indiana.

It’s about local events. It’s about community issues. It’s about local restaurants. It’s about culture.

I’m Justin Williams, the editor of It’s Evansville. I’ll be covering things most of the time. I have lived in Evansville my entire life, save for a five year stint in West Lafayette to get a degree from Purdue University. After graduation, I came back to Evansville to start a technology consulting company and to write. Besides writing software, I also write books. You can pick up my Rails Solutions, my first book, at Barnes and Noble in the technology section. My second book, Mac OS X Leopard: Beyond The Manual, is still being written and will be released when Apple releases Mac OS X Leopard.

Why we’re doing this

It’s Evansville was created to fill a void in town that has been bugging me for a while. While we have a newspaper, free entertainment guides and not so free magazines, there isn’t a great online resource for Evansville. Each of those entities have a Website, but they aren’t exactly tailored to online reading.

I wanted a site that was often updated, quick and easy to read. I wanted to be able to read about stories that are of interest to me as a 20-something in town without having to sift through story after story about the Evansville school board or national news that I could get at another site. When I want to go out on the weekend, I don’t want to see a listing of all 26 places in town that are having Karaoke night: I want to know who has live music, whose playing and when are they getting on stage. I wanted to know what cultural events are taking place in town during the week and on the weekends.

That’s what It’s Evansville is here for. We sift through all the media sources and aggregate the material, digest it and then translate the main points into a few paragraphs.

Besides covering news and events in town, we are planning to have original content such as interviews with local people of interest, a selection of great Evansville photography submitted by our readers and more. Our first local interview will debut later this week.

How you can help

We try to find all that’s going on in town on our own, but it always helps if our readers submit news tips. Whether it’s an event you are hosting, a new story you want to bring out attention to or a suggestion for a topic or individual to cover, send us an email at tips@itsevansville.com and let us know. By submitting tips, you are not only helping us do our job, but you’re letting us know what you want to see on the site. We are listening.

We like attaching photos to each of our post, so if you’re a photographer, you can submit photos to us at the same address above, or if you’re a Flickr user you can just tag your photos with itsevansville and you may see them associated with a future post.

You can learn more about how to contribute to It’s Evansville by reading our post on the subject.

Finally, if you are a local business that’s looking to reach a targeted audience, why not advertise with us? This site is funded 100% on advertising, and it’s ability to grow will depend heavily on our ability to attract advertisers. Since we are a freshly launched site, we have no metrics to go on at this point, which is why we are offering advertisers extremely low introductory rates to get the ball rolling.

If you’re interested in learning more about advertising opportunities on the site, check out our Advertising page or just send me an e-mail.

Give us feedback

The site is not 100% ready (we’re still waiting on our finalized logo), but the content will be coming daily. Read what we’ve already posted, follow what we write for a few days and provide us feedback on what you want to see. We’ve already got a post up as part of our Ask It’s Evansville series that asks what you want us to write. Tell us! Your feedback will help shape the site going into the future.

Thanks for stopping by.

photo courtesy of cogdogblog

It’s that time of year where aside from sniffing and sneezing from all the pollen, you are required to see at the local farmers planting their fields with the corn and soybeans. You may notice that there’s a bit more corn being planted this year though. In fact, its a national trend, according to the Louisville Courier Journal.

US Farmers are planting the most corn since World World II thanks to demand for ethanol-based fuel. US farmers are expected to plat 90.5 million acres of corn this year, which is a 15% increase over last year. Indiana will of course be a part of this boom planting 13% more corn this year. As any economist will tell you, when demand is high, so is the price. Farmers will certainly reap the benefits. Usually during harvest season the price of corn starts to drop as there is far more corn available than needed by the buyers. This year, with prices staying relatively steady, farmers should be able to pad their wallets a little easier than in previous years.

Ethanol, if you don’t know, is all the rage because it is mixed with gasoline to reduce the consumption of fuel and, thus reduce air pollution. Per unit volume, Ethanol burns 30% less energy than gasoline. You’re most likely going to be hearing a lot about the fuel additive in the coming months because of the upcoming Iowa Caucus, the early indicator of who is getting nominated as their party’s presidential candidate. Iowa, as you can imagine, is the largest producer of corn, so candidates will be talking about this important topic up to the January 14th caucus.

Ethanol production is not without controversy. Many have said that Ethanol doesn’t really save the consumer any money compared to gasoline because of the cost of producing ethanol. Additionally, the energy savings cancel each other out when you take into account how much energy is spent on producing the ethanol versus the amount of energy used by the product.

photo courtesy of i am jae

It’s sunny with a high of 74 in Evansville today, so rather than stay inside watching television, get out and do something. Here’s a few suggestions.

• University of Evansville has a free Jazz concert at 4pm today at Wheeler Concert Hall.
• If you’re looking for a pregame to the Jazz concert, UE’s Theater Department is also putting on its last’s staging of Shakespeare’s The Comedy Of Errors from 2-4 pm at Shanklin Theater (also on campus). This is the last production of the spring semester season, so if you’re itching for some academics in tights, you’re running out of time. Tickets are $12.
• If you’re looking for some edutainment, the Koch Planetarium is showing The Sky Tonight at 3pm. The Sky Tonight is a star show that examines the bright stars, constellations, visible planets and the moon. Admission is $3.
• If scheduled entertainment isn’t your thing, go for a walk down at the Evansville riverfront and check out the construction downtown.

• Indiana lost more jobs in February than any other state, save for Ohio according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• Mexican Consulate officials visited Evansville Saturday to issue consular identification cards and passports. The cards are used by Mexicans living outside of their native country to not only prove their identity, but also help the US keep a database of immigrants. Take a look at that article’s comments to see the typical Republican talking points spew out right on your screen!
• The 30th annual Easter Seals Telethon is today. It will be on WEHT from Noon to 6pm.
• Garrett Matthews wrote a wonderful column on Phap Pham, the owner of Vietnamese Cuisine, one of my favorite new east-side restaurants.

photo courtesy of carpeaqua

It’s Evansville is a small site run by a single guy (so far) so we need your help. Obviously we can’t be everywhere at the same time, so we want you, our readers, to help us out.

The first, and most obvious way is to send us an e-mail. You can send your tips about local news, events or anything else you think is relevant to tips@itsevansville.com. If you’re a bit shy and don’t want us to know who you are, you can always use the anonymous tip box in our sidebar.

Are you a photographer? We want to see your photos. On all of our posts, we like to associate a photograph or other type of image to help bring the story together. When at all possible we choose to use a photograph taken around the city of Evansville or taken by an Evansville photographer. Using photos shot by other photographers around town not only brings attention to your photographs, but it also let’s you be a part of the It’s Evansville community.

The best way to share photos with us is Flickr. Flickr lets you upload your photos and share them with friends and the worldwide Flickr community. If you are a member of Flickr, you can tag your photos with itsevansville and we’ll see it and possibly use it.

Anything you give us, we give credit for.

Obviously It’s Evansville is in its infancy, and we’re still gaining our footing, writing style and what not. We’ve shown a few of our cards with our coverage of news, weekend activity listings and Evansville 911. That’s not all we want to have on the site.

In fact, we have been working behind the scenes to schedule interviews with local musicians, artists and other interesting types to share their life and passions with you. We’re also planning to do reviews: theater, restaurants, movies, music, wine, etc. We may even do an audio or video podcast in the future.

Our ideas, while well intentioned, aren’t as important as knowing what you’re interested in seeing and reading. Are our ideas in tune with what you expect and want from It’s Evansville? Let us know. If they aren’t, what would you rather we cover? What will make you keep coming back to read out content? Help us tailor the future of the site.

What do you want us to cover?

Evansville is a relatively safe town compared to others, but we don’t go without our own little crimes here and there. Evansville 911 will be a recurring features on the site where we’ll cover some of those crimes.

• A man flipped his white Chevy Lumina on Akin and Taylor after leading cops on a chase around town. He was being pulled over on suspicion of a fictitious license plate.
• Robert L. Henderson, accused of stabbing his wife &amp song as well as molesting a 13-year-old, has received plea bargain. In exchange for pleading guilty to charges of a Class B felony aggravated battery and one count of Class B felony child molesting he will only serve 30 years in prison.
• Remember that attorney allegedly moonlighting as a meth head we told you about earlier this week? He’s out on bond, and subject to court ordered drug tests while he awaits trial.
• Ryan Seaton had an busy Friday. He allegedly started his day by breaking into a home where he was confronted by the homeowner. He fled to another house where he stole a van. Apparently Seaton decided the van wasn’t hip enough, so he tried to trade it for another car unsuccessfully. Once the Vanderburgh Sherrif’s caught up with him, he tried to take one of their guns, but was bitten by a police dog. He’s now in jail.