Cigarette butts await Sunday morning strollers in downtown Geneva

When the state banned smoking in restaurants, bars, bowling alleys and other public venues, those of us who don't smoke were happy to be able to go to these places without inhaling someone else's smoke and ending up smelling like a burned inner-tube.

No one wanted to treat smokers like lepers or outcasts, but they make terrible health decisions and it wasn't a good idea to expose others to that atmosphere.

We knew it would lead to another troubling and quite ugly scenario - cigarette butts piling up in ashtrays atop garbage cans, or on sidewalks and in gutters outside of these places.

It's left city crews with a nasty cleanup task, especially after busy weekends.

We walk past EvenFlow, at the corner of Third and State streets in Geneva, most Sunday mornings with our dog. We cringe at what awaits those planning on spending a little time downtown during the day. Even the plant pots outside EvenFlow are filled with cigarette butts or an occasional beer bottle.

"The city is in charge of the ashtray receptacles, cleaning them out, as well as the sidewalks," city spokesman Kevin Stahr said. Property owners pay a special service tax to fund the city's job of cleaning these areas up on a regular basis, Stahr added.

"After a weekend, there is probably a little more to clean up than, say, during the middle of the week," Stahr said.

We've had a good time at EvenFlow on the occasions we stop in there, and we're glad the smokers are outside. But one would think every smoker in the western hemisphere was using the area outside EvenFlow on the weekends.

It's not the only place in the Tri-Cities dealing with this. City staffs have a nasty cleanup task at places that specialize in weekend entertainment, and we should be glad they stay on top of it as best they can.

So this thought has crossed my mind: Has anyone invented a "cigarette butt sucker" that could clean this up in a matter of seconds?

It worked before, right?:

In attending events or having dinner years ago at the former Al Capone's Hideaway restaurant in what was then known as Valley View, alcohol was surely an option with those dinners.

Maybe I'm not fully grasping the difference now that new owners are seeking a liquor license while trying to fix up the property and reopen the place in unincorporated St. Charles Township as the Hideaway 64 restaurant. But there's a snag in that request, as the county wants more time to study the impact on the neighborhood.

If it worked fine for years in the past, what would not make it work now?

Or did it not work "fine" all those years, considering a famous gangster first used the place to hide when things weren't going just right in the big city?

Leaping into it:

I will enjoy this Leap Year in 2016 for its extra day in February - as long as no one tries to explain the math behind it.

The history part I get - that Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus made astronomers monkey around with the calendar to fit certain festivals and stroke their egos.

But the math? Forget it.

They say Leap Years are any year that can be divided by four, except if they can be evenly divided by 100, then they aren't. So 2100 and 2200 won't qualify.

However, if they can be evenly divided by 400, then they are Leap Years, such as 2000 and 2400.

And if you have any idea what any of that means, you are far better in math than this lost soul.

All of this dandy information is probably available on a Google search, but it comes to me courtesy of the Kane County Farm Bureau.

The 'new' Corfu

My wife noticed the new ceiling fans and, of course, my attention went right to the TVs placed high in the corners of the room for the first time.

It was the remodeled Corfu restaurant on the east side of St. Charles. We hadn't been to this favorite place in some time, probably since my mother-in-law passed away and we no longer had to take her for what seemed like a weekly dose of chicken stir fry.

In any case, the modern improvements were nice. And the food remained quite good and reasonably priced, two factors that have always lured us.

dheun@sbcglobal.net