Poor Richard's Scorecard

And Coming Later This Week, Sports Coverage of Just the Second Half of the Villanova-Robert Morris Game

WHEN I was on my college paper, I was assigned to review a school production of The Odd Couple, but because it opened after our deadline, I watched a dress rehearsal to write the review. Yesterday's Inquirer came perilously close to that shoddy level of professionalism.

Remember 'The Franklin'? Atwater Kent Gets Its Rebranding Right

You're forgiven for thinking that the Atwater Kent Museum of Philadelphia is a repository of old radios. It's actually the city's history museum, founded in 1941 thanks to the largess of the inventor and radio pioneer after which it is named. Is it any wonder the current leadership thought some rebranding was in order?

Phodder: Someone Please Tell Vince Fumo That His Diet Is Now Bread and Water, Not Whine and Cheese

• As if Vince Fumo's lawyers weren't sufficiently tone-deaf, now they're bitching about his country-club prison being too far away for his family to visit. Dude, it's, like, jail. It's supposed to be hard.
• Make you a deal, Philadelphia Media Holdings: I'll support your "Keep It Local" campaign for the Inquirer, the Daily News, and philly.com if you give me more local reporting instead of the reams and reams of wire copy I now have to wade through.
• The recent 40th anniversary of Woodstock elicited several breathless, overhyped stories in the Sunday Inquirer recently. For the 40th anniversary of the Internet, readers got merely a wire-service analysis buried in the Tuesday business section. And papers wonder why young people aren't reading.
• Curt Schilling's musings about a political run surely must originate in his belief that it isn't fair for Jim Bunning to be the only loudmouth psycho Republican ex-Phillies pitcher in the Senate.
• I'm glad I'm still young enough to see the cultural value of the Fringe Festival to the city. And I'm glad I'm now old enough not to have to convince myself that I have to go. | PRS

Phodder: For a Guy Who Doesn't Wield a Paint Brush, Timothy Rub Is Earning a Lot of Notice from the Art Press

Happy birthday, America! ... Wow, did the Inquirer spend an awful lot of column-inches on the incoming director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. ... The Phillies had no compunction about punting Brett Myers to Lehigh Valley last season to straighten out his head and let him play through his fog without hurting the club; at what point do they start thinking about the same tactic for Jimmy Rollins? ... Discussions about shunting Interstate 95 away from the Delaware River waterfront in Center City to open up that vastly underused area for much-needed development are long overdue. Yet I worry about the algebra: Massive public-works project + Philadelphia = epic corruption. It would make Boston's Big Dig look like a Boy Scout meeting. ... The city's postponement of parking rate hikes is all well and good, but doing something about the crippling cost of doing business would have greater long-term impact. ... The saturation coverage of the double murder at the Piazza at Schmidt's again raises the question of why we don't pay such attention to all victims--including, say, the ones who aren't noted figures on the local club scene. ... Brian Boucher arrives, Mike Knuble departs; I don't like that math. | PRS

Phodder, a collection of brief thoughts regarding some of the week's happenings in and around Philadelphia, appears Saturdays in Poor Richard's Scorecard.

May Andrew Wyeth Rest In as Much Peace as He Lived

The Inquirer's obituary of the painter Andrew Wyeth, who died Friday in Chadds Ford, included this passage, referring to his popular success but critical indifference:

Some years ago, an article in Newsweek described him as "a great illustrator but a minor painter," to which Mr. Wyeth replied, "Probably I am. What's wrong with that? It doesn't bother me any."

His unique aesthetic vision made critics uncomfortable because they could not easily pigeonhole him, and it probably misled many of his admirers. He appeared to be a realist who used common and easily understood visual language, yet his best paintings are complex amalgams of storytelling, symbolism, memory and deep emotion whose themes are not nearly as obvious as they might seem.