This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2014, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
After a shaky start with hiring a private contractor for road maintenance, it appears the snow removal problem in Cottonwood Heights may have been solved.
At least the roads are clear for now.
You might recall residents were pretty much stuck in their driveways for a couple of days after the private contractor, Colorado-based Terracare, was caught completely unprepared after the first major snowstorm of the year.
But now there is a different problem:
Car-swallowing potholes.
When Terry Palmer's daughter drove to meet her for lunch at Five Guys in Cottonwood Heights, she found herself driving along 1300 East in what appeared to be a war zone.
She hit two huge potholes, shaking her car so badly one of her hubcaps flew off. She saw it rolling away in the rearview mirror.
After lunch, the Palmers went back to the scene of the crime, about 6700 South, to look for the missing hubcap. They were excited to see a hubcap sticking out of the high pile of snow on the side of the road.
Alas, it wasn't hers.
Hunting further, they found another hubcap partially hidden by snow.
Nope.
Then another.
Nope.
Finally, the fourth hubcap they spotted in the snow was hers.
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May the force be with you • Perhaps it was karma, or perhaps a mischievous little trick from the leprechauns, but an unexpected and rather humorous moment occurred recently in the midst of the same-sex-marriage debate in Utah.
BYU law professor Lynn Wardle, the author and defender of Utah's Amendment 3, which constitutionally defines marriage as between one man and one woman, was a guest on Tribune multimedia specialist Jennifer Napier-Pearce's online Trib Talk segment Dec. 23.
He vigorously argued against U.S. District Judge Robert Shelby's ruling declaring Amendment 3 violated the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. Shortly after the ruling was issued, county clerks in Utah began issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
As Wardle argued against extending the right to marry to gay and lesbian couples, the ring tone on his cellphone went off.
It was "The Imperial March" from "Star Wars."
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Follow the yellow brick road? • Salt Lake County resident Dick Arner noticed a potential problem inadvertently created by the Utah Department of Transportation.
He noticed that as motorists approach the Salt Lake Valley driving westbound on I-80 in Parleys Canyon, a sign directs that slower traffic should stay in the right lane.
But the sign doesn't tell the drivers, particularly tourists coming into the city for the first time, that if they stay in the right lane, they will be forced onto Foothill Boulevard and off the interstate, whether they want to go that way or not.
He suggested to UDOT that the sign be moved a half mile west, which would be past the exit to Foothill Boulevard and solve the problem.
But nobody seemed to take him seriously.
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Back to the future • This gem was in a letter to the editor in The Tribune:
"The liberal spokesmen picture [health care reform] as (a) newfangled life raft which we can all cling to … Actually, it is only an expensive political tugboat which belches the smoke of our burning dollars as it tugs the … ship down the Socialist channel. There it will be anchored and chained alongside other rustic giants such as England and France to a lowly pier of second class medicine."
The letter appeared in The Tribune Jan. 25, 1965. It was referring to the proposed Medicare program that we now all take for granted.