The 2011 Name of the Year bracket is out. Now we know there are actually people named Stonegarden Grindlife, Dr. Loveday Conquest, and, improbably, Heidi Hohl.

Hat tip to Scott for the link.

Ever come down five minutes too late to move your car for alternate side parking only to find the Sanitation Department has slapped on one of those stickers that’s totally impossible to get off without leaving scratch marks and a sticky residue on your window? Councilman David Greenfield hates that too, so tomorrow he’s planning on introducing legislation to ban the stickers, saying fines are plenty for parking scofflaws. He asked the Daily News, “It’s a pretty punitive form of punishment. I mean, what’s next? We’re going to start slashing people’s tires when they don’t park on the correct side?”

– Jaya Saxena, Gothamist.

I’m all for publicly shaming bad drivers and maybe even bad parkers too, but I agree that it’s a little extreme to make driving and parking more difficult — by blocking vision — for those who forget to move their cars for alternate-side parking.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for street cleaning, but I lived for four years on a crowded block that apparently required cleaning four days a week. Whenever I kept a car there — thankfully not all that often — I constantly had to juggle my schedule to make sure I could move it at the appropriate times. Huge pain in the ass.

Plus it was hard enough to find parking in the area that everyone basically just double parked on the opposite side of the street for the two-hour street-cleaning stretch. If you were parked on the side that wasn’t getting cleaned between 11 and 1 and you knew you had to drive somewhere at noon, you had to plan ahead of time to move your car to the other side of the street at some point before 11, then double park it at 11 so you could actually get out when you needed to. And it’s like, I got stuff to do besides shuffling my car around.

I think the people who do deserve scarlet letters for driving are those that try to go through the E-ZPass lane without an E-ZPass. Nothing on the windows, just maybe a bumper sticker that says “I SUCK” so that other drivers will know not to follow that person into an EZ-Pass lane next time.

The Internet is abuzz this morning with something someone said on talk radio. I haven’t traced it all the way back to the source yet — I’m in Miami and I’ve got plenty else to do. But in response, I tweeted this:

I got a few responses. Some pointed out that criticism of sports talk-radio is no different from the teeing off on newspaper columnists that I frequently endeavor in this space. I never said it was. I choose to read the newspaper every day. I find it a convenient way to catch up on the local teams while I’m commuting. And I find it entertaining.

I choose not to listen to sports-talk radio — at least not very often and only if I’m feeling masochistic. I don’t fault anyone who does. If it offers you some value, by all means, keep listening. I just wanted to remind everyone that there is always a choice, and I believe a certain level of discourse is best left ignored. Plus, like I said, there’s music on.

Others said that sports-talk radio drives a lot of the conversation I respond to on this site. That might be true. But to that I guess I’d say: Who really cares? With sports and sandwiches and dinosaurs and everything else, there are always plenty of angles to discuss. If they are or aren’t driven by one medium, they’ll be driven by another.

But I’m curious.

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