Eli Hodapp’s large collection of words.

Uprgrading to Apple’s OSX 10.5 Leopard operating system has mostly been pretty awesome. Safari 3 is great for just about everything except browsing web sites which use those nasty flash-launched pop-unders that its popup blocker doesn’t catch. Usually I browse ad-ridden sites like the Naperville Potluck in FireFox with an onslaught of ad-blocking plugins. This morning, while working on Old Man Hodapp I loaded said site up in Safari to not lose my FireBug selection.

 Ugh. The only thing worse than obtrusive web advertising is web advertising that exploits browser popup loopholes and proceeds to spawn flash ads on every page load.

Actually, I take that back. They could have sound. 

I guess I’m happy the noise meeting yesterday beat out the MySpace page dedicated to Lisa Stebic.

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Jake Griffin of the Daily Herald-

Police said that while the law states music shouldn’t be heard more than 100 feet away, they aren’t testing at the 100-foot mark and writing tickets.

“Most tickets were written after being able to hear the music from 190 to 500 feet away, and it was mostly the bass levels,” Cmdr. James Bedell said.

The city’s current downtown amplification laws were passed in 2002 based on recommendations from a panel of downtown business owners, residents and city staff.

“It’s a good neighbor ordinance,” said Dick Dublinski, development services team leader. “It’s common sense and meant to protect everyone downtown.”

(Full Story)

Emily McFarlan of the Naperville Sun-

“Since July 13, we have not had a single live band, and our patio sales are down as much as 33 percent. That’s even though this has been the best weather all summer,” Potter’s owner Andrew Trasatt said. “That’s a very qualitative number.”

(Full Story)

I suppose I’m obligated to blog about this even though this story is becoming quite the wet noodle.

“Dance Naperville / Shut Your Yap Hodapp / One man’s bad decision should not be the responsibility of all men to change. / Live and let live. / If you don’t like the music… Don’t move to it.” (Photo: Naperville Sun)

Apparently some time last week the Naperville Sun received a mysterious anonymous package on their door step which disappointingly enough turned out to be these shirts instead of someone’s severed head or something equally mysterious.

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Posted by “Chris” on the Naperville Potluck blog today:

“For the record Eli, I think you are being completely ridiculous. I’m not going to “take the hook” as you say and compare you’re overzealous religious pursuit to drunk driving, capital punishment or any other legal debate, those are real issues. I would like to point out that because of people like yourself and Ms. Stella Liebeck (of McDonalds coffee fame) we now have to have Warning Labels on toliet bowl plungers (I’m not even going to mention Mr. Roy Pearson and his $54million pants at a local dry cleaner in DC).

When are people going to start taking responsibility for their actions and lack of common sense? If I trip on a crack in the sidewalk, I’m not going to sue the city; I’m going to look around, see who is laughing at me, laugh at myself, get up, brush myself off, and go on with my life. It really is that simple, if you don’t like what Don Imus said, change the radio station channel. IT’S THAT SIMPLE!!!

We have bigger issues in this country to deal with, PLEASE Eli (and all of Eli’s fans), put your energies in a direction that makes a difference for a real issue.

And for the question of people not joining in on your reindeer games as opposition, we have this thing called APATHY.

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So I’ve either struck a nerve with a lot of people in the city of Naperville or this week has just been eerily devoid of all Stebic updates and other more interesting news. Either way, my video was “featured” (for lack of a better word) in the Naperville Sun’s editorial today-

“Music noise OK downtown, just cut back on Sinatra
July 29, 2007

You would think that if someone wanted a quiet place to live, he wouldn’t choose an apartment above a restaurant in a downtown full of other restaurants.

After all, Naperville has tens of thousands of places to live, including scores of apartments that aren’t above restaurants downtown.

But that’s not the way human beings do things.

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This was posted by “Andre” earlier today, in one massive block of text on the Naperville Sun’s Naperville Potluck blog comments. I added the paragraph breaks because my “enter” key is fully functional and I decided I’d give him a hand.

“While I respect that Eli has an opinion and the right to some reasonable amount of noise that he should have to deal with, I think he is a little unrealistic in his expectations. Naperville has become somewhat of the city away from the city. Hundreds of people pour into downtown Naperville weekly to take part in, what most people consider, decent nightlife without having to go to Chicago. With all that money that people spend, comes some noise, some bad behavior, and some inconvenience.

Get a clue! You move into a “DOWNTOWN” area, you’re going to have to deal with noise and people. It’s common sense. Yes there is a noise ordinance and yes it applies to Rizzo’s as well as everyone else, but at what point does someone has to be smart enough to realize what they’re getting themselves into before they do it. I assume the convenience of living in downtown Naperville is a luxury for Eli. The walking distance to coffee shops, retail stores, restaurants, bars, etc… doesn’t come without a price.

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Hot off the presses!

I suppose I can officially scratch “Be on the front page of the Naperville Sun.” off my list of things to do today. Read more about the story here or check out the related entry on the Naperville Potluck blog. One thing I’m not looking forward to is the inevitable tsunami of phone calls from everyone I know telling me I’m in the paper at about 7:15 AM.

Here’s the email that started it all:

To whom it may concern,

In the interest of not repeating myself, I’ve simply attached the two emails I sent to the Naperville City Council, ONE YEAR AGO. Since then, nothing has changed. To my knowledge, none of the issues with the noise level or Naperville’s metamorphosis in to some kind of drunken paradise after sundown have been addressed. A year later, I’m wondering if maybe the city just doesn’t -get- what I say when I explain to them how loud it is down here at night.

So tonight, I made the following video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVykLWpR9HQ (Note: Link no longer works.)

It’s a little over five minutes long, and features video from multiple locations in downtown Naperville exhibiting exactly how ridiculous it is after hours.

The Naperville Sun obviously cannot publish a video in their newspaper, but I’m wondering if any of your reporters would be interested in the invitation I’ve previously extended to any interested city official in coming over to my place to see exactly how charming Naperville is at night? It’s really quite amazing.

Regards,
Eli Hodapp

This was sent to the Naperville Sun, with every single relevant city official on the CC list and the two emails I had sent a year ago about this exact issue detailing exactly what the noise ordinances state. Six hours later I received a response from Peter Burchard, the city manager.

A few days later I took the video down because it had served its purpose and the only thing it was accomplishing was collecting comments from angry drunken frat boys. But… since the Sun published the video, I guess I will too.

I was also on 95.9 “The River” this morning, more about that here.