15 AUG 07: HOW LOW WILL YOU GO?

The homicide count stands at 20. Detectives had to work on another shooting case from Monday night. So when Columbus Council held its weekly meeting Tuesday, one issue clearly brought more media attention than any other - how people wear their pants.

A woman told Columbus Council it's time to go after people who wear sagging pants in public. We try to keep this blog G-rated - so I will resist the urge to make any "crackdown" puns.

The woman says people who wear pants too low in public should receive tickets for indecent exposure. The timing of this idea is very interesting -- because city pools are closing, making it hard to balance things out with women's swimsuit checks.

WRBL taught me the proper street term for people who wear jeans with waistlines below the waist. It's "sagging." If this is banned in Columbus, we could lose any chance of ever hosting the Screen Actors Guild Awards - since they're called the SAG's for short.

The Frank Chester Recreation Center already is taking action on this issue. It has a policy that anyone wearing sagging will be ordered to leave. Of course, would you want to wear sagging basketball shorts in a game - when one jump for a rebound could bring them down completely?

(There's another way recreation centers could enforce this clothing policy. Make people in sagging clothes do pull-ups - first with their jeans, then 25 times on an iron bar.)

City Manager Isaiah Hugley seemed to like the idea of banning sagging in public. But City Attorney Clifton Fay warned any rules might have to be limited to public property - since in private, how people wear their pants might be considered a "freedom of expression" issue. That's been true for decades in parts of Alabama. It's called mooning....

The older I've grown, the less of an issue this has become for me. Almost all of my pants and shorts are NOT in danger of sagging below the belt line. Most of them are so tight that I tend to wear a belt only to church services - and that's only so I don't look inappropriate.

But I subscribe to the theory that clothing should be worn as long as decently possible, to save money. A few pairs of running shorts have lost their elastic in recent years, so I've attached safety pins at the waist at jogging time. That way I "close the gap" - in a way I usually don't, around faster runners on the Riverwalk.

By the way, I wouldn't be surprised if WRBL's report on this issue brought some complaining phone calls. All the people who talked about sagging were African-American - as if that's the only ethnic community which wears pants that way. Some white people actually do follow the example of Eminem.

E-MAIL UPDATE: This message reached us last week, but we weren't able to provide an answer until Tuesday night....

What happened to the radio ratings. Did they get blocked again? Are there any Format Changes on the horizon?

I'm sad to report the Columbus spring ratings came out Tuesday - but were blocked from public release AGAIN. This makes three "embargoed" reports in a row. You'd think the WRCG managers would accept their low numbers by now....

The latest embargo means we'll go at least two years between radio ratings reports for Columbus. Without some numbers, it's hard to say if any station will make changes - but if I were guessing, I'd say WIOD-FM "The River" might become a full-time sports talk station. That would free WEAM-AM to run public service announcements 24 hours a day, since it runs them for hours at a time now.

We were able to check the Montgomery radio ratings Tuesday, and couldn't help noticing what happened to Bear O'Brien's new station. WBMA-FM had a big jump in listeners last fall, but lost one-third of them in the spring. So it appears he was a Plasma-pa-Loser.

Here's one more e-mail, about that "man who sleeps with dogs":

Richard, the guy from Hurtsboro, is he really a Constable or is he just full of constant bull?

If he lived in a metropolis instead of the sleepy little town of Hurtsboro, his head would explode! Didn't Mel Gibson portray this guy or someone with the same amount of paranoia in Conspiracy Theory?

R.J. Schweiger really is a legitimate elected Russell County official. And we should note right here - this complaint was NOT signed by Hurtsboro's Mayor.

(Without realizing it, this writer may have found the real reason why R.J. Schweiger keeps living in what he calls a "swill pail" of a town. There's just the right amount of bad stuff for him to handle. Phenix City politics might be a case of overload.)

Now some quick notes about other Tuesday news items:

+ WRBL reported Deputy Bill Thrower has been named Muscogee County's new interim Coroner. But the report left out one critical detail. Is he a right-handed Thrower or a left-handed Thrower?

+ The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Michael Vick's attorneys are working on a plea bargain. Oh no - are THEY going to testify against him at the dogfighting trial, too?

+ Columbus High School catcher Chase Weems finally signed a contract with the New York Yankees. In fact, he did it live on the 6:00 p.m. news - but he may have waited too late in the summer, because the Yankees have gained on the Boston Red Sox without him.

+ Instant Message to all teenagers in Opelika: Please learn a lesson from Tuesday's evening news. The only TNT you should have in your bedrooms is the cable channel - and I'm not really sure you should have even that.

COMING SOON: A new neighbor picks up an old, tired habit....

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