Spiffing up for eclipse visitors

Dear Mahatma: Is the state not going to do any cleanup before the eclipse? The entrances and exits to the freeways are filthy. The medians have paper and trash all over. Before company comes, don’t you clean house? It’s embarrassing. — Dinah

Dear Dinah: Eclipse? What eclipse?

Ha! We already have four pairs of eclipse glasses, having been at a presentation by Hendrix College’s Ann Wright, physicist and all-around smart person.

We took physics in high school. It was a debacle.

Ellen Coulter, media communications manager for the Arkansas Department of Transportation, was kind enough to address this matter. Trash. Not physics.

She tells us that ArDot maintenance crews are working extra on each shift, sweeping highway shoulders and picking up litter along major highways and interstates in the path of the eclipse.

ArDot has also encouraged its Adopt-AHighway groups to do a litter pickup before the eclipse on April 8.

Coulter asks — and we implore — the traveling public to not contribute to the trash problem, a problem which perennially aggravates readers of this column.

Dear Mahatma: I wonder if our fair city has such an ordinance. It used to bug me when I jogged or walked and would encounter a vehicle on the sidewalk. — Old Friend

Dear Old: Thanks for sending a news story from San Francisco, where parking enforcement people are on a mission to ticket people whose driveways are so short their vehicles obstruct part of the sidewalk.

Only a cynic would suggest the enhanced enforcement has anything to do with the generation of revenue.

But we digress.

The cities of Little Rock and North Little Rock have ordinances that prohibit obstructing a sidewalk. They get that authority from Arkansas Code Annotated 14-54-104. Under that statute, cities of the first class may “regulate the use of sidewalks, and all structures and excavations thereunder, to require the owner or occupant of any premises to keep the sidewalks in front or alongside the premises free from obstruction … ”

Dear Mahatma: Is this legal? — Observer

Dear Observer: Thanks for the photo of the BMW with a license plate that reads QQ GT654.

Our “research” indicates that’s a German license plate issued to a member of the armed forces of the United States.

Vanity plate: PMS4EVR. Our correspondent advises all others to “keep your distance.”