After dining for more than a semester at Gertrude Sellards Pearson, Courtney Rellihan has learned an important lesson: Stay away on Sundays.
“They have days,” the Prairie Village freshman said, “when I just don’t want to eat there.”
Rellihan and other Kansas students could be eating more delectable cafeteria food soon, because KU Dining Services is planning to start a system which would let students share recipes from home with the dining halls.
The program hasn’t been formally implemented yet, but Nona Golledge, KU Dining Services Director, said it is one of the services’ “goals” and will likely be finalized later this semester or in the summer.
When the plan is finished, students would be able to go to the KU Dining Services Web site to submit a recipe. A menu committee would look at all the submissions and decide if it could make the meal. If a student’s dish is chosen, it would be named after him or her.
“The idea gives a bit more engagement and enjoyment for our customers,” Golledge said, “which is what we want to do.”
The Gertrude Sellards Pearson dining hall already asked students to share recipes during a homemade cookie contest earlier this year. Golledge said KU Dining Services has also collected cooking ideas sporadically in the past.
When the dining halls start incorporating students’ recipes into their meal lineup, they will be following the example of other college cafeterias. According to an Associated Press article, universities such as Georgia, Harvard and Connecticut are using the dishes to cure homesickness and create more variety. KU Dining Services’ motive for collecting recipes is to give students more freedom to choose their food.
“Everyone wants to participate and have more input into their meals,” Golledge said. “It gives them more of a connection.”
One possible problem with the proposed plan is that it might not supplement health food programs at KU such as “Better Bites.” Ann Chapman, Coordinator of Nutritional Health at the Wellness Resource Center, said home-cooked meals likely would not be as nutritious as the healthy alternatives the dining halls serve now.
“Some people cook healthy at home; some people don’t,” she said. “The better options in the eating halls are already there.”
Although the home-cooked meals may lack the nutritional value of other available foods, the program could succeed as long as students such as Rellihan enjoy the new dishes.
“If they’re good recipes,” she said, “then it would be great.”
Bike riders don't want to share the road under proposed design plan
A new development code could change the design of roads in Lawrence. The design would focus on cutting down the need for cars. The problem is, the Lawrence Bicycle Advisory Committee isn't sure it will help bike riders. KUJH-TV's Mark Dent tells us why the design could cause problems.
The doping controversy disrupting the world’s cycling community means little to Lawrence riders. They face a bigger problem: Traditional Neighborhood Design.
Members of the Lawrence Bicycle Advisory Committee said Traditional Neighborhood Design will negatively affect biking in Lawrence.
Traditional Neighborhood Design is a new Smart Code for building proposed for Lawrence by PlaceMakers. PlaceMakers is a firm that creates regulations for the proposed design style.
This design plan promotes building residential, commercial and business areas in the same neighborhood.
One of PlaceMakers’ main goals is to help people rely less on cars.
“We want people to have more choices about how they get around,” PlaceMakers representative Jennifer Hurley said. “It’s about not having to be auto dependent.”
According to Hurley, Traditional Neighborhood Design benefits bike riders. It uses narrow, two-lane roads that use on-street parking and trees on the sides of the street to slow traffic.
This design differs from how most modern roads are constructed. At a recent city commission meeting, Bill Dennis, Director of Design for PlaceMakers, used the example of Clinton Parkway. He said cars go faster than the designated 45 mph speed limit because the road is too wide and straight. Dennis said that environment isn’t safe for cyclists.
Trent McKinley, member of the Lawrence Bicycle Advisory Committee, disagreed. He said PlaceMakers’ plans of on-street parking and especially narrow, two-lane roads could make biking dangerous.
“Sharing the road with a narrow lane creates its own set of problems,” McKinley said. “If you have two cars passing one another, and you’re riding with your tires in the gutter, it just doesn’t leave a lot of room. I would be concerned about bicycles and cars sharing the same space.”
McKinley said bike lanes make narrow roads safer. According to lawrenceplanning.org, Lawrence has 11.6 miles of bike lanes. Cyclists are in favor of bike lanes because they provide protection from traffic.
But PlaceMakers is unlikely to build the lanes on its streets.
“We’re not strong proponents of bike lanes,” Hurley said. “The streets should be civilized enough and safe enough for bikes to cohabitate with cars.”
Because PlaceMakers wants bikes to share the road with cars, it does not construct bike paths in its neighborhoods either. It designs small parks ideal for walking, not biking.
“I’d rather bike on a path,” McKinley said. “I think that’s more popular. The paths oftentimes are designed to tie recreational areas together.”
If the Smart Code becomes an option for building in Lawrence, it could harm Lawrence’s reputation as a strong cycling community. In 2004, Lawrence received a bronze-level Bicycle Friendly Community award from the League of American Bicyclists. Only 44 cities have received the award.
The award is based on five categories, including engineering. To have good engineering, roads must be designed to make space for bikes. Streets built using Traditional Neighborhood Design will create less space.
That wouldn’t bode well for Lawrence. Elizabeth Preston, League of American Bicyclists Director of Communication, said the city’s engineering was already “shaky.”
Of course, Traditional Neighborhood Design might not be all negative. According to Preston, Lawrence received excellent grades in the award’s category of driver/bike rider education. Based on those grades, it shouldn’t be too hard for cars and bikes to adjust to the Smart Code.
“They have a highly advertised ‘share the road’ campaign,” she said.
The city is scheduled to make more decisions about the Smart Code in two or three weeks. PlaceMakers has already proposed using Traditional Neighborhood Design downtown, at 19th and Haskell and several other locations.
Drive-thru businesses take different roads to success
Grab your keys, open the garage door and hop into the car. You’re going for a ride.
Hungry? Need to run some errands?
Don’t worry; you’ll get everything done. Just make yourself comfortable. You’re not getting out of the car anytime soon.
From money and food to weddings and liquor, Americans receive all kinds of services from drive-thrus.
“Convenience is the most important thing,” said Phil Lempert, consumer trends correspondent for the “Today” show. “People also love their cars. They feel more protected. When you’re in your car, you have the power.”
Lawrence residents can’t buy alcohol or exchange vows in the car, but they can use drive-thrus at banks, laundry cleaners, drug stores and restaurants.
These businesses attract people to their drive-thrus with different strategies. Scotch Fabric Care Services, a Kansas laundry cleaning company, gets business because it has been around for more than 40 years. Fast-food restaurants explore new technology to keep their numbers up, and banks market to the young crowd to increase business at their drive-thrus.
The strategies have worked. Fast-food restaurants nationwide earn 70 percent of their profits from the drive-thru. Scotch Fabric Care Services gets 90 percent of its sales from the pull-up window, and bank customers across the country complete about 39 percent of their transactions in their cars.
Count Maggie Taylor as part of that last group. Taylor likes quickness. The 21-year old KU student text messages, e-mails and talks on her cell phone. Lempert said Taylor’s generation, which wants everything immediately and avoids personal confrontation, is partially responsible for the popularity of drive-thrus.
At ATM drive-thrus, customers pull up, deposit or withdraw, and drive away without having to get out of their car or deal with another person. Taylor uses a drive-thru ATM every other week.
“It’s faster and convenient,” she said.
Before people like Taylor encountered drive-thrus on every street corner, Lawrence citizens actually had to go inside to pick up laundry. Scotch Fabric Care Services changed that in 1964.
“Back then it was certainly a rarity,” said Scott Shmallberg, owner of Scotch Fabric Care Services. “It was for the post-World War II generation. Drive-in restaurants and theaters were catching on, and people were infatuated with their cars.”
That forward thinking helped Scotch grow. Now 14 of Scotch’s 21 locations in Topeka, Lawrence and Kansas City have them. On average, those with drive-thrus have 60 percent higher sales. Shmallberg said Scotch’s longtime presence has kept its profits up despite drive-thru competition from Pride Cleaners. Scotch has six Lawrence locations compared to Pride Cleaners’ two.
Owners of fast-food restaurants wish they only had one drive-thru competitor. Nearly every restaurant has a drive-thru, but the competition doesn’t make them less successful. Of the $142 billion made by the fast-food industry each year, $99 billion comes from the pull-up window.
You can find several fast-food chains all within a mile of each other on 23rd Street in Lawrence. The McDonald’s and Taco Bell on 23rd each get about 80 percent of their sales from the drive-thru, above the national average of 70 percent. Burger King and Wendy’s are slightly below that average at about 60 percent.
Drive-Thru revenue based on the 70% national average Statistics from yum.com, mcdonalds.com, burgerking.com and wendys.com
To keep drive-thru traffic high, some McDonald’s and Wendy’s restaurants on the East Coast have started outsourcing drive-thru orders to a separate ordering center. With the new technology, no one at the restaurant takes the order. Instead, a person at an order center receives it and sends it back to the location the order came from. The system is supposed to increase drive-thru speed and decrease the number of workers.
“Call centers create a great opportunity because drive-thrus are staying open longer,” said Darren Tristano, managing director of Technomic Information Services, a Chicago-based company that consults the food industry. “Restaurants will tell you that it will make it faster, but it’s also about cutting cost.”
None of the fast-food chains in Lawrence outsource their orders, but Tristano said the practice should be more common in five or 10 years. New improvements at restaurants in Lawrence include a double drive-thru lane at the McDonald’s on Sixth Street and video screens that ensure order accuracy at all the Wendy’s and McDonald’s restaurants.
Banks, cleaners and restaurants use different ways to keep their drive-thrus popular. But as long as Americans desire convenience, drive-thru lines should stay long and profits should remain high.
“People don’t like to stand in line,” Shmallberg said. “They get fidgety and anxious quickly. If they’re in the car, they stay comfortable. Walking 30 or 40 feet is too much of an effort.”
Television has taken on an MTV, BET image the last few weeks.
Rapper Cam’ron told everyone to stop snitching on “60 Minutes." Common said all women were princesses on “Oprah.” Snoop Dogg’s explanation of how rapper’s usage of words differs from Don Imus’ played on several network news programs.
Their goal: to restore hip-hop’s image in the wake of recent criticism stemming from Don Imus’ now infamous words about the Rutgers women’s basketball team.
But they may be too late.
Long before Imus uttered his “nappy-headed ho” comment, rap, the music part of hip-hop culture, was in a downward spiral. After about 30 years of growth, rap sales nationwide decreased 21 percent from 2005 to 2006. Sales of other kinds of music in the same timeframe only went down 6 percent. Those numbers, from the Recording Industry Association of America, include compact disc and digital sales.
Lawrence rap, which is usually grouped together with Kansas City as one scene because of the cities’ close proximity and large number of venues in Lawrence, has also been affected. Sales have plummeted about 70 percent at one Lawrence music store since 2005 and crowds have decreased where rap artists play.
Theories for the drop off range from the increased prevalence of violence and sex that leaders are speaking against right now, to a lack of quality music, to a cyclical lull in sales.
The style of local rap acts differs from mainstream rap, but violent incidents that have been associated with hip-hop in Lawrence and a national focus on making hit songs, known as singles, rather than quality albums have created problems for the local scene.
“The last few years have been terrible for rap,” said Chuck “Jigsaw” Creekmur, co-founder and CEO of AllHipHop.com, a leading rap Web site.
Pick a Problem
You only need to look at the track listing on a few rap albums to see the presence of misogyny in hip-hop culture.
“The way they talk about women, the way they use the term bitches and hos and stuff, I think is a really sad commentary,” said the Rev. Leo Barbee Jr., pastor of Lawrence’s Victory Bible Church. “God has given us women to be an asset. To talk about them like that is to demean them.”
Imus’ comment may have sparked criticism against hip-hop, but studies and polls show people were tired of its association with violence, sexuality and drugs long before.
A 2006 study by the Prevention Research Center of the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation concluded that rap listeners are more likely to abuse drugs and commit violent acts. Half of all people surveyed in a 2006 AOL Black Voices Poll said hip-hop culture hurts American society.
That doesn’t mean rap’s declining popularity can be entirely blamed on some artists’ perceived negative messages.
“If people were sick of that,” said Sean Hunt, also known as Lawrence rapper Approach, “then the radio would stop playing it.”
Jason Agron, co-DJ for KJHK-Lawrence’s “Hip-Hop Hyp” show, said other genres such as country music exploit women and include violent messages too. He doesn’t think rap’s decline will be permanent.
“I think it just goes through phases,” Agron said.
Creekmur credits the decline to increased bootlegging and a lack of creativity in artists. He’s spoken with high school and college students and discovered that “vulgarity” isn’t the problem. He thinks it’s the popular artists’ inability to connect with listeners.
“It’s evident that the state of rap on the commercial level lacks depth and quality,” Creekmur said. “People just aren’t into buying rap music that seems forced or contrived. The consumers are speaking volumes by not spending their money.”
Local Hip-Hop Homicide
A Lawrence jury recently found Rashawn T. Anderson guilty of killing one man and injuring another outside a rap concert at the Granada last year. The two might not be his only victims. Anderson’s actions may have wounded the local hip-hop scene.
“With Lawrence, you have a really small town,” said Laura Watkins, co-DJ with Agron on Hip-Hop Hyp. “Whenever there’s something like the shooting, people are just like, ‘hip-hop, it’s all bad.’ That really damages it.”
Lawrence, which combines with Kansas City to have a strong hip-hop community, is experiencing a decline. Rap sales at the Love Garden, a downtown music store, are down 50 to 70 percent from two years ago. Kief’s Music, also downtown, is selling significantly less, although its owner couldn’t give an exact number. Both stores have large selections of Lawrence and Kansas City rap artists.
The Gaslight Tavern, which sometimes has live rap acts, gets half as many people for rap shows as it did two years ago. The Bottleneck has fewer rap shows than it did two to three years ago and is experiencing a similar decline in attendance. Only about 100 people came to see local rapper Archetype last week, about 1/3 of what the venue can hold.
Map of music venues and stores in downtown Lawrence. From Google Maps
An October 2006 incident involving the murder of Anthony Vital, better known as Clacc of the local group Da Bomb Squad, increased the connection between hip-hop and violence that had already intensified because of the Granada shooting. The negative vibes toward rap are evident on the Lawrence Journal World’s Web site. Citizens lit up the message boards with comments on the Granada story and Clacc story that blame rap for the violence.
But not everyone blames the recent violence for local hip-hop’s decline.
Most of the 50 plus rappers listed on lawrencehiphop.com as being from Kansas City or Lawrence local make music that lacks the misogynistic, violent themes common in mainstream songs.
“Our rap is completely the opposite,” Hunt said. “I’m the polar opposite of what would be considered misogyny.”
Local rap’s differences with the mainstream could actually be part of the reason it’s struggling. Rap listeners, Hunt said, have become obsessed with hot singles that have ready-to-sing choruses. The songs are perfect for purchasing on Itunes or for a ringtone. That’s why mobile phone and digital download sales have increased 98 percent and 71 percent respectively since 2005, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. The artists and record companies who make those singles, Hunt said, don’t always focus on making quality albums.
“The labels have a one track mind when it comes to rap,” Creekmur said. “They are looking for a smash hit and hope that can be leveraged into other platforms like ringtone sales.”
Don Imus didn't ruin rap music. Sales declined nationally and locally during the last two years. K-U-J-H TV's Mark Dent tells us why people aren't listening to rap music.
Local artists don’t have the luxury of heavy radio play that can translate into those sales. All they can do is market albums. So if a local artist makes a quality CD, it’s not likely to sell as much in an industry where popular singles sold as digital downloads attract the most listeners and buyers.
Keys to the Future
Watkins attended a Talib Kweli rap concert at the Granada about a month ago. She enjoyed the music and the atmosphere and never once felt unsafe. The only problem was she could hardly move. The place was packed. It was the second high-profile rap show that’s sold out this year at the Granada.
Was the concert a sign that rap is starting to find favor again in Lawrence?
“If more shows happen the way Kweli went with really positive energy and nothing bad happening,” Watkins said, “it’ll rebuild.”
Perhaps even better for local rap was that Hunt opened for Kweli. A sell-out crowd had a chance to hear him. It’s one of the many ways local rappers try to gain the recognition that can translate to higher sales.
Technology is another way. Area rappers such as Tech N9ne, Reach, Archetype and Hunt have MySpace accounts that feature their music. Some also have free Podcasts on the Internet. Hunt said he expects these steps will help area hip-hop sales increase when several rappers come out with new CD’s in the near future.
“All of us are working hard,” he said. “Over the next eight months, you’ll see what we’re talking about.”
Changes like those could help local sales bounce back, but an improved image for all of hip-hop could be an even greater benefit.
Russell Simmons, CEO of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network, responded to the criticism magnified by the Imus situation by calling for recording and broadcasting industries to ban “ho,” “bitch” and “nigger” in clean versions of rap songs. Clean versions of songs are the ones heard on the radio and TV.
The Rev. Leo Barbee, pastor of Victory Bible Church in Lawrence, discusses how the Don Imus situation could be a positive.
That ban’s not enough for some. The targeted epithets are already edited in most clean songs. Barbee said more drastic measures need to be taken to fix hip-hop’s negative effects on society.
“The Imus situation has made it become front page, and I’m glad it has,” Barbee said. “The community needs to rise up. I think if there’s an economic boycott it will make a difference. If there’s no money, they won’t make it anymore.”
Simmons, rapper Common and Kevin Liles, executive vice president of Warner Music Group appeared on “Oprah” two weeks ago to discuss the state of hip-hop. They said artists rapped about what they saw in their neighborhoods. Instead of worrying about fixing music, they said, people need to fix the poverty that influences the music.
Hunt said he’s worried about the apparent dissension between the critics of hip-hop and the members of the hip-hop community. He wants the two sides to come together. Then, rap music can get back to its old status.
“It’ll come back,” Hunt said. “But it’s not going to be one-sided. It’s going to have to be a compromise.”
This page contains an archive of all entries posted to Multimedia Reporting (Kuhr-Volek) in the Mark Dent category. They are listed from oldest to newest.
