Sidewalk Introduces Yost To New Crowd

Well, with 2012 now safely in the rearview mirror, it's time to finish up our look at what was up, and what was down, in the year just passed …

Down. The News & Record's website. The website isn't "down" in the technical sense that it can't be accessed – it is up and running.

But I mean the site is down in the sense of, like, what in the world is going on here?

Their old website was a pretty nice one, and the layout made a lot of sense to me, but now I go to the News & Record website and I'm just like, Whaaaa?

I can't figure out how to search for anything or how to do anything else on the site for that matter.

Plus, now, if you want to leave a comment on the News & Record site, you have to give them your full name and full Social Security number, your mother's maiden name, the day, month and year of your birth, as well as the security code for your ATM card. I mean, what's up with that?

Up. The county's giant new jail. The jail was originally expected to open in December 2011, and the Sheriff's Department held a grand opening ceremony in mid-June – however the new facility only finally began taking inmates in late August.

Way down. Available parking in downtown Greensboro. Only Guilford County would build a giant new jail in a downtown area that's already strapped for parking, refuse to plan for one additional space to go with the new jail, and then inexplicably sell a giant county-owned parking lot right across the street from the jail virtually assuring that there will never be any good parking options for the new jail.

Up. Sidewalks and four-way stop signs in Greensboro. In 2012, the City of Greensboro continued its obsessive-compulsive mission to put sidewalks along every road, dirt path and vacant strip mall within the city limits. Likewise with four-way stop signs.

As I pointed out earlier this year, the city is currently having a mad passionate love affair with sidewalks, which is perhaps surpassed only by its crazy love for four-way stop signs. The three of them – the city, the sidewalks and the four-way stop signs – need to just go to a motel and get a room and leave us taxpayers out of it. If four-way stop signs can be all the rage, then why not three-way love affairs …

Up. The amount of riff-raff on my street. 2012 was the year the city's sidewalk people finally got to me and my street. A few months ago, they slapped a Port-O-Potty in front of my house and, then, they showed up a few days later with bulldozers and large concrete trucks with giant spinning cauldrons. When they left, my grass was gone and a new sidewalk was in its place.

Before that, no one ever used to walk in front of my house; however, now, every time I look out my front window, I see a constant stream of the worst dregs humanity has to offer walking up and down the sidewalk to and from who knows where.

For years and years, before the sidewalk arrived against my will, I could work in my yard in peace. However, now – and this is no joke – when I work in the yard, people walking up and down the sidewalk see me and they walk around the front picket fence, walk up my driveway and come up to me while I'm raking or whatever, and they ask me for money.

I'm like: Really? You mean that, now, thanks to the City of Greensboro, I can't even mow or rake my yard on a Saturday afternoon without getting hit up for money?

I mean, you expect that when you're in a shady area of downtown on a Friday night, but, come on, not when you're in a shady area of your yard. A man's home is supposed to be his castle. Thanks to the city, I now need to build a moat.

Down. Big Bird and Elmo. At the start of 2012, it would have been hard to imagine that, by the end of the year, these two lovable Sesame Street characters would have become two of the most politically divisive and polarizing figures on the national scene, but that's exactly what happened: In 2012, both Big Bird and Elmo found themselves at the center of storms of controversy.

Way up. Etch A Sketch. When I was growing up, this was my iPad. Sad but true.

After a run of popularity decades ago, this humble child's toy – which first hit the scene in July 1960 – laid low for years and years as kids turned en masse to video games and iPods for their entertainment.

However, on Wednesday, March 21, 2012, Mitt Romney's senior campaign advisor pulled the long-forgotten toy from the ashes of obscurity with a single off the cuff

remark comparing Romney's shift from the primary race to the general election to that of shaking an Etch A Sketch and resetting it.

As soon as he made that comment, suddenly, Etch A Sketches were everywhere and selling like hot cakes – you know, I mean, if people knew what hot cakes were and, if hot cakes were actually a thing that sold really well.

Shares of Ohio Art, the company that makes Etch A Sketches, skyrocketed. The company's stock price more than doubled in a day, giving the previously obscure toy maker its largest intraday share price increase in over 30 years.

Up. NFL refs. Before the referee strike in the National Football League, NFL commissioners were probably saying to each other, "Look, who needs them anyway – any Joe Blow with a whistle and a striped shirt can be a ref."

However, after being forced to watch Lingerie Football League reject refs (no kidding) blow call after call, league officials got antsy. Then, in late September, the replacement refs cost the Packers a win on a prime time nationally televised Sunday night game and in no time the NFL officials were pleading for the regular refs to come back harder than a starving man begging for hot cakes.

Down. The ACC. As someone who's still upset about the addition of Florida State to the league in 1992, you can well imagine that I'm not very pleased with the vast changes in the league that took place in 2012, which saw the loss of Maryland as a member and the addition of Louisville. The situation was so crazy that, two months ago, there were even rampant rumors Carolina was leaving the ACC for the Big 10.

Anyway, not only is Carolina staying and Louisville going to be a new member, the ACC has now announced that in 2014 the league is adding 323 new teams. Starting in 2014, conference rivals that used to play each other twice a year in a home and away series will now only play each other once every 52 years.

Also, starting with the entry of the 300-plus new teams, the ACC tournament will last for 23 straight days in February, with back-to-back games running simultaneously day and night in eight separate locations across the country. In addition, in order to make time for all the games, each ACC Tournament game will only be four minutes long.

Up. Candidate gaffs and mistakes. For some reason I'm not sure of, gaffs by political candidates seemed to be way up in 2012 compared to 2011.

And I mean on both sides of the island and at all levels of government.

Not that 2011 didn't have its share.

At the end of 2011, you had Rick Perry seemingly high on something, sounding giddy like a drunken schoolgirl, and his bizarre exhibition was surpassed in weirdness only by the Herman Cain ad's zoom-in close-up of Cain's campaign manager huffing on a cigarette.

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Then at the very end of 2011, Romney – who was trying desperately to capture the imagination of the young voters – made a reference to "Lucy in the chocolate factory."

Look, he's a zillionaire and you're telling me he can't afford Showtime so that he could perhaps toss in a Homeland reference instead of a reference to a black and while television show that went off the air almost a half a century ago?

Yet despite all that went on in 2011, 2012 still beat out 2011 for political gaffs. There are simply too many to go into but, just to hit on a couple of major ones, in 2012, Obama said, "You didn't build that," and then, in the first presidential debate, Obama looked like he thought he was taking the entrance exam for a mime school rather than trying to win a presidential debate.

And of course, in 2012, it came out that Romney had once said he didn't care about the 47 percent.

I could go on and on, but I think you can recall a lot of these on your own.

Down. Smoking and freedom. Right around the start of the year, after persistent badgering from the Guilford County Department of Public Health, the county's last openly pro-smoking bar – Gate City Billiards in Greensboro – threw in the cigarette butts. After a long and valiant fight against the law that went into effect in January 2010, the club finally began enforcing the ban earlier this year.

But you know who doesn't have to obey the no-smoking rule: rich fat cats at country clubs. The state's anti-smoking law makes an absurd exception for country clubs, which is, I'll bet, where most of the politicians who passed the law go when they aren't busy telling others how to live their lives.

If you're going to have laws that take away people's rights, you should have laws that consistently take the same rights away from everyone – the pool players and the golfers, the rich and the poor, the people passing the laws and the common man.

Down. John Edwards' reputation. Here's a guy who, not all that long ago, was a serious contender to be president of the United States, but who was lower than low in May 2012 during a long, drawn-out trial that was very good for food vendors in downtown Greensboro but not so good for Edwards' reputation.

Edwards' escaped a jail sentence; however, in light of all the negative testimony, his reputation didn't escape.

During the trial, his own attorney was like, "Men and women of the jury, we freely admit that Mr. Edwards is a womanizer, a liar and a low-life cheat who abandoned his wife during her battle with cancer for a woman who's not even really all that hot. We're not denying he's a sleazebag – we're just saying that doesn't mean he committed campaign fraud."

If you think about it, it's really sad, because that's what was being said about him by the guy on his side.

Even after the trial was over, Edwards couldn't just slink away a defeated man: He had to make a statement on the steps of the courthouse, in which – to the fascination of a nation – he brought up his love child with his mistress.

Up. West Market Street United Methodist Church. Speaking of the Edwards trial, this church sits right next to the federal courthouse in downtown Greensboro where the trial took place. Senior Pastor Dave Melton gave up his prime parking space so the church could rent it out to a California-based news show for the length of the trial. The church also let the reporters turn part of the church into a broadcast studio and began charging them for the space.

I went in there one day and a whole dining room looked like the set of Newsroom: It was just green screens and cameras and all sorts of television equipment. The church made thousands and thousands of dollars that went to help feed the needy.

Meanwhile, the City of Greensboro was only making $5 and $10 a day from the giant satellite trucks that lined the streets downtown and prevented handicapped people and elderly voters from curbside voting during the primaries.

Of course, The Rhinoceros Times also could not figure out a way to monetize the trail either – though the World Headquarters of The Rhino Times did become the place where the elite of the national print media set up shop and operated out of for the duration of the trail. The Rhino did get recognized in a tweet for that hospitality.

Down. The Dark Knight Rises. Look, I liked the first four hours OK, and then, the next two hours, not so much, and, for the final three hours I was just ready to get out of the theater.

If you don't know, the dark knight is Batman and The Dark Knight Rises is the mega hit movie of 2012. Now, to me, it's really strange that this movie is called "The Dark Night Rises," yet, in the movie, Batman spends 90 percent of the time either flat on his back or moping around with a cane in a bathrobe saying he doesn't have the heart to fight for anything anymore.

Down. General Petraeus. My how the mighty have fallen. I read Macworld regularly, so I know that Gmail isn't secure; however, in 2012 it became clear that the head of the Central Intelligence Agency thinks Gmail is a very secure means of communication indeed.

Petraeus assumed his Google account was safe because he had a really secure password – "secret."

I also heard that Petraeus used to keep his PIN, which is "1234," written on the back of his ATM card so he wouldn't forget it.

I'm just saying …

OK, so that completes our look back at the past year. Now let's turn our sights toward what will hopefully be a more economically robust, better and, well, overall luckier year – despite the fact that it contains the number 13.