Mini Poll Archive: 2006

Well used to controversy with its Mini-Polls, MayorSlay.com has decided to offer its readers a special opportunity to vote -- and carp -- on our own version of Time's Person of the Year. Help us name the 2006 St. Louis Person of the Year from this list of influential persons, groups, ideas, trends, and places.

In a sort of People's Choice Awards for the area's youngest artists, this week's mini-poll presents ten student-drawn cards from which you may select your favorite. Find out if you agree with Mayor Slay's pick for the offical winner -- and, if you want, e-mail your favorite card to your friends.

How do you think we ought to show off our beliefs in public places at this time of year? And, how do we respect others' rights not to share our beliefs? How do you feel about public displays of seasonal cheer, office parties, and the separation of church and state?

If you spent some part of the last week shivering in your home, or a week or so this summer sweltering in it, you may or may not agree that the Missouri Public Service Commission is fulfilling the letter of its mission. Start the buzz by answering these questions.

St. Louis has some of the best architecture in the country, and we are restoring and renovating some of its best parts. But, hardly any of it is modern or new. That could, however, be changing. Newspapers, magazines, and blogs have begun reporting the hopes and dreams of some local developers to build up, and up, and up.

Thanksgiving is a time for taking stock: counting blessings, family members, friends, marching bands, and — much less often — calories. MayorSlay.com hopes to capitalize on your calculating mood by asking you some questions about the country's — and the state's — economic direction and about your hopes and fears for the near future.

Take a good honest look at yourself in the mirror and let the rest of us know some of the more interesting things you see about yourself. As Mr. Hamlet said: Hold the mirror up to nature.

This week, MayorSlay.com begins a conversation about the present -- and future -- of technology by asking you to share your baseline views. Has rapidly-changing technology improved your life, or made it frustrating or difficult? Which new tech tools do you use most, and which do you shun? What technological advances would you like to see in the near future?

Political pundits are fond of saying that the only poll "that matters" is the final one on Election Day. With the political polls in both Missouri and Illinois swinging back and forth like the tail on a Kit Kat clock, that bit of campaign wisdom may be even more apt this year. So, MayorSlay.com claims absolutely no electoral significance for the answers to this week's Mini-Poll.

Scientists at Duke University recently announced that they have assembled and tested the prototype of a "cloak of invisibility." With reality beginning to catch up to science fiction, MayorSlay.com wants to use this Mini-Poll to calculate your feelings about the practicality, morality, and utility of invisibility.

With radio, television, and Internet as news media, is the periodically printed -- but perfectly portable -- paper still a relevant source of news? Tell us your news intake habits in this week's Mini-Poll, and we will disperse the results throughout the realm.

Scoundrels and saints come in hues of both Red and Blue. Share your opinions about human nature, political scandals, and the relative electoral worth of a good hair day.

Experts note that we often spend more time with our office mates each week than we do with our own families. So, MayorSlay.com — an interesting workplace in itself — has some questions to measure how well you get along, get ahead, or get by at work.

First seatbelts, then mandatory bicycle helmets, skiing helmets, roller blade helmets ... fines for smoking, drinking, and — at the end of the day — a law banning the sale of glazed donuts in New York City. What's your opinion of using safety belts in cars or in fashion?

Give us your thoughts about space travel, human aspirations, government priorities, Hollywood screenwriters, and about what the discriminating space traveler should eat while floating in space.

Debates on immigration — and immigrant — issues are heard in the ornate halls of Congress in Washington, DC, the more modest town meeting rooms of Valley Park, Mo, and — increasingly — in plenty of other places. Tell us how open or shut you think Miss Liberty's doors should be.

Face it: it's beginning to look a lot like football. What is it that you like about the sport; who are your favorite teams and practitioners; and what are your predictions for this year's champs?

There are compelling arguments to be made for — and against — almost every YES or NO answer in this week's poll. And we fully expect you to spend the long weekend making those good arguments and serving them up to your partners, children, and parents along with the pork steaks, hamburgers, and potato salad of the summer's last real BBQ.

MayorSlay.com wants to gauge your opinions on some back-to-work type issues, including retirement, retirees, compensation, ungrateful offspring, and the November ballot question to raise the state's minimum wage.

The upcoming release of New Line Cinema's blog-hyped Snakes on a Plane is sure to elicit phobias of many varieties. What is it that frightens you most? Is being scared silly an acceptable form of recreation to you? Do you run to -- or away from -- movies about things that go bump in the night?

What are your fondest moments of this past summer, and which will you try hardest to forget? Do any of them involve visitors? What have you vowed not to repeat next summer and what do you plan to do differently? Take our poll and let us know what summer has taught you this year.

Readers of MayorSlay.com live throughout the region. This week, we'd like to explore the Demographic Divide and ask some questions of City residents -- and other questions of St. Louis (and other) county residents.

With the Zoo in the news several times recently, MayorSlay.com thought it would be a good week to solicit and quantify your opinions about zoos in general, about our own famous St. Louis Zoo, and about some of the animals with whom we share our urban habitat.

With temperatures flirting with the 100 degree mark, we can really say that we're living in summer's Dog Days. MayorSlay.com has some questions for all our hot neighbors. Answer our Mini-Poll questions honestly and we promise not to tell you what the humidity is doing to your hair.

Pop icon/HD TV producer Dan Rather once said that Americans would put up with anything that didn't block traffic. This Mini-Poll will give you a chance to register your opinions on a variety of traffic and transportation issues.

MayorSlay.com has taken some of the (anatomically possible) polling suggestions that readers have sent us over the last several months and stitched them together into a veritable buffet of Public Opinion. Although we have, as usual, no motive beyond stimulating civic conversation for selecting the questions that we did, we look forward to your theories.

Start the holiday weekend off with a bang, and let us know what you think about our national holiday and how you will be celebrating it.

St. Louis has the top-rated public library system in the country. Do you use it? Are you getting your money's worth out of it? Should it be getting more of your money?

Where — exactly — is the moral plane? The basic principles of right and wrong may stay unchanged, but society's perception of which is witch can change with time and place. Witty Oscar Wilde said that "morality, like art, means drawing a line some place." That thought inspires this week's Mini-Poll.

Are you one of those anarcho-artists who hang out on Cherokee Street? Or the Loop? Or the Landing? Is Clayton your cup of tea? Do you remember listening to Barbara Streisand at a club in Gaslight Square? Or was it Duff's poetry night that drew you out for a cocktail in the evening? Take our poll and let us know what your place is in the St. Louis scene.

With Memorial Day now just another memory, it is (unofficially, at least) Summer. MayorSlay.com, which never takes a vacation, has some questions about your summer plans.

When Dan Brown wrote The Da Vinci Code, did he expect to create a flurry of controversy (for something other than his sometimes turgid prose, that is)? Should any work of fiction create such furor? Do you think there's any truth to Brown's tale? Is Brown attacking and undermining the tenets of a major religion -- or just writing a rip-roaring story?

St. Louis is one of those places where if you didn't have allergies when you arrived here, you soon will. Or that's what some say. How do you handle congestion — yours and others?

Although overall membership in unions has declined, unions remain very influential in some places, including Missouri. MayorSlay.com, like Franklin Roosevelt, unabashedly supports labor unions, but we also want to know what you think.

Today, more parents work and cannot welcome the little ones home. Sometimes, family members can help take care of kids after school. Otherwise, some children head to empty homes or, if we can afford it (and if it's available), to after school day care or structured activities. Life isn't as easy for kids or parents as it used to be. This change has consequences: some of them, likely, far-reaching. What should we do about it?

The start of a new season, the opening of a new landmark, the possibility that a good player will break one his sport's most hallowed records, and the return to the field of the National League's best pitcher and player all combined to suggest the topic of this week's Mini-Poll on MayorSlay.com: Baseball - the ritual described by Walt Whitman as "the American game."

Increasingly, we live our lives in the mirrored glances of traffic cameras, airport security cameras, ATM cameras, street cameras, web cams at construction sites, and store cameras. And all this raises some interesting questions about cameras, public safety, and privacy. Let us know what you think about being watched.

The midpoint of April — this very week — marks that moment in our calendars in which the sum of our unwilling withholding is supposed to equal the demands of an unforgiving government. You know that you deserve a break from poring over those tax schedules and forms, so take a few minutes and let us know what you think.

Was that a yard sign in your zoysia? Do you fib to the pollsters? What do you think about lowering the voting age? About requiring better identification? About the new high-tech voting machines?

April Fool's Day is celebrated around the world by the perpetration of practical jokes on friends, neighbors, family members, and co-workers, the aim of which is to embarrass the unwary. Tell us, as seriously as you can, what you think of April Fool's Day.

MayorSlay.com once again ventures into the deep waters of public policy — this time to ask your opinions about the police. No, not The Police of Rock & Roll Hall of Fame fame, but the men and women of the region's law enforcement agencies.

That most people don't think twice about the Mayor having a website suggests that the Internet has become as familiar to most people as a window into their own backyards or the aisle of a grocery store. To try to quantify this suggestion a bit, MayorSlay.com would like to ask you some questions about your own use of the Internet. How often do you use it? Have you ever used it to find a book, a song, a vacation, a car, or a boyfriend?

When it comes to public art, acquisitions are sometimes controversial, especially when the art is contemporary and the subject is open to interpretation. Other times, the art is popular with everyone, except — usually — critics. Is this a good thing for our communities? What standards should apply? Who should be picking up the tab?

With the traditional high school Spring vacation months of March and April just ahead of us — and the family vacation and summer camp months beginning to loom large — we thought we'd help you ease into the proper spirit of vacationing by asking your opinions on some holiday-related travel issues.

The international furor surrounding a portfolio of Danish political cartoons should be no surprise to any student of US history. Political cartoonists have informed and inflamed readers throughout our own history — and continue to do so today. MayorSlay.com would like to get your opinion on political cartoons in general — and some of the important issues raised by the Danish cartoons.

This week, St. Louis School Board president Darnetta Clinkscale and Superintendent Creg Williams presented St. Louis with a range of dramatic changes to the District, including smaller schools, longer terms, new classes, same-sex classrooms, and school uniforms. So, MayorSlay.com — always quick to spot a bandwagon — has decided to ask you for your opinions about a lunchbox full of possible reforms, including some of the ones already proposed for the St. Louis Public Schools.

The recent controversies over attempts to regulate noisy car stereos, indiscreet revelers, and raw milk sales reminded MayorSlay.com that there is no subject discussed at the Board of Aldermen that won't find fierce partisans on every side of the issue. We've skipped the obvious question of whether doggie or human misdeeds should be more sternly punished, but we'd like your opinions on pretty much everything else.

This week's Mini-Poll asks you to evaluate the performance of some of our region's household names; measure your satisfactions with how things get done; and pick a favorite local brand name. And, we throw in a Bonus Question that will have the White House on pins and needles.

Channeling the spirit Roone Arledge, MayorSlay.com skips right over all those painful questions about the Rams-less Super Bowl and asks you, instead, to share your thoughts about the upcoming Winter Olympics.

For this week's poll, we've taken the concept of the Golden Globe awards (obscure categories, unspecified nominating process) and applied it to some of the issues most usually discussed over draft beers at the Cat's Meow or the Cabin Inn — right before the fur flies and the Inn's lights go out. And the nominees are ...

Have highly publicized stories about innocent people wrongly convicted or about the passionate contentions of advocates that the race, gender, and income of the convicted person affect his sentence changed any minds about capital punishment? MayorSlay.com's Mini-Poll is not a scientific instrument, but it is — sometimes — a good way to start a conversation.

What should one think about a school district that has some of the state's top-ranked — and worst — public schools? Is it on track? Does it have the resources it needs? MayorSlay.com has the questions — and we want your answers.