Milestone Day

Happy Feel Good Friday. The end of the week is a real good time to go poking around for news that may have been missed. Did you hear the one about the statue of Willie Nelson? Yeah, it’s a 10% larger than life-size bronze statue in his musical home of Austin, TX. It will be placed on Second Street near the entrance of the new Austin City Limits studios downtown. And that’s just part of the honor; Mayor Lee Leffingwell is proposing renaming part of Second Street between Trinity and San Antonio as Willie Nelson Boulevard. It’s an honor usually reserved for prominent residents who have passed on, but in this case, the Austin City Council will vote on the proposal at its May 27th meeting.

Montgomery Gentry was recently given the 2010 Academy of Country Music/The Home Depot Humanitarian Award, and that means that a new KaBOOM! playground will be built in their honor. Artists get their choice of where they’d like to put the playground, so leave it up to Eddie and Troy to let their “friends” (fans) decide. By over 65% of the popular vote, the new playground will be build in Lexington, Kentucky sometime in the fall.

Sammy Kershaw is making a second run at the office of Lt. Governor in the state of Louisiana. He first ran in 2007 and collected 30 percent of the vote, even though he was a late addition to the ballot. At the time, he spent much of his two month campaign trying to convince voters that his bid for office wasn’t a joke. “I’m sick and tired of guys who just use that office as a steppin’ stone to get to the governor’s mansion,” he says. “That’s all they do. So they get in there and they waste that office is what they do, for four years — sometimes eight — waitin’ for that governor’s mansion. So what needs to happen is a guy that’s really serious about that job [gets elected], like me.” Sammy intends to promote Louisiana as an entertainment destination, to promote arts education in schools and to encourage conservative values, including pro-life, pro-gun and pro-marriage platforms.