Pork-n-Wings

Enough already about what I’m thinking. Let’s pick your brain using the following multiple choice exercise.

The national economy will improve:
1. as the housing and commercial building inventories reach more normal levels sometime around 2015.
2. when Obama is re-elected in 2012.
3. when Obama is defeated in 2012.
4. when China begins to “invest” in the U.S. after leaders there realize the only way they get paid back is to start making in the U.S. the stuff they sell to Wal-Mart.
5. when pigs fly.

Fort Smith’s population growth was 7.4% between 2000-2010, less than the growth rate in the U.S., Arkansas and Sebastian County. If the city is to improve its growth rate in the next decade:
1. those who believe in our potential must become more vocal than those more comfortable with the security of yesteryear.
2. we’ll need to build a NASCAR-approved track at Chaffee Crossing.
3. city leaders should legalize the original business at Miss Laura’s.
4. we should raise several million dollars a year to create and pay for a TV spot during the Super Bowl.

Interstate 49 will be completely built through all of Arkansas:
1. when pigs fly.
2. when someone from the Fort Smith area is elected U.S. President.
3. just about the time technological advances end the need for auto transportation.
4. when a persistent Fort Smith area delegation gets funding to build the road from the Chinese.

College football creates a playoff system:
1. after Vegas figures out a way to make significantly more money with a playoff system than the bowl system.
2. when pigs fly.
3. when the heads of the other conferences believe the only way to end SEC dominance is with a playoff.
4. after pro football “sponsors” college football programs as part of a sanctioned process that creates a farm league system.

Speaking of football, a football program at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith:
1. will play at a new The City Wire sports complex on the Arkansas riverfront in downtown Fort Smith.
2. is created when pigs fly.
3. will see former Arkansas Governor and Congressman Steve Womack as the team’s first coach.
4. will see its first season opened with a singing of the national anthem by 50-year-old Lady Gaga.

In 2020, the new voter-approved motto of Fort Smith is:
1. “Life’s worth living in Fort Smith if you liked the way life was lived in the 1950s.”
2. “Relieve yourself on us, where our airport bathrooms remain the cleanest in the world.”
3. “Welcome to Fort Smith, where you never know when one of our super-friendly TSA agents will be a Hooter’s Girl.”
4. “Deals, deals, deals!”
5. (This is a trick question because the world ends Dec. 21, 2012.)

The first ever Oscar-nominated movie filmed entirely in the Fort Smith area:
1. is yet another remake of “True Grit,” with Rooster Cogburn played by 45-year-old Justin Bieber.
2. will require the simulated destruction of Fort Smith’s last remaining post office.
3. is a documentary about how the founders of The City Wire succumbed to the pressures of success by resorting to a disturbing reliance on Italian operas, sipping Maker’s Mark and a $1,000-a-week collection of anything touched by Oral Roberts.
4. is a movie about pigs flying.

The best thing to happen in the Fort Smith area between now and 2020:
1. occurs when the form of Fort Smith government changes to mayoral-council, with Alyse Eady elected the first mayor under the new system.
2. is that Ozark becomes the music festival capital of the U.S.
3. is when those who believe in our potential become more vocal than those more comfortable with the security of yesteryear.
4. results from an aggressive socio-economic development collaboration between business and civic leaders in Northwest Arkansas and the Fort Smith region that causes impressive growth in Crawford County.
5. is when the UAFS bioengineering lab creates flying pigs.

Sometime in the next few years:
1. folks in the Fort Smith area will succeed in renaming the Janet Huckabee Arkansas River Valley Nature Center the William O. Darby Arkansas River Valley Nature Center.
2. life in the Fort Smith area will be the subject of an episode of “The Simpsons.”
3. many preeminent journalists around the world in gather in Fort Smith for a conference focused on how The City Wire is destroying responsible journalism.
4. the opening of the new U.S. Marshals Museum will include a song and dance number about flying pigs performed by scantily-clad former Arkansas Governors Mike Beebe and Bill Clinton.

Please feel free to submit your answers as a letter to the editor to the Times Record. They’ll print your answers when, well, you know when.