Good News Monday Week 4: tightropes, solar, and stair climbing

It’s still pretty easy to find good news. However, the bad news sorta got in the way of sharing right away.

  • Kobe Bryant’s and his daughter, Gianna’s, and seven other passengers died in a helicopter crash. Some coaches, some students, some parents. All with grieving families.
  • A new corona virus, 2019-nCoV, claimed more victims. As of this writing, 2700 people became ill and 81 died. There are many forms of corona virus. A cold is caused by a corona virus and so is SARS. Remember SARS? There’s not much is know about this one. Like a cold, it can be contagious before the infected person shows symptoms. To keep it in perspective, the flu resulted in 8200 deaths and 140,000 hospitalizations in the USA already this season.
  • The impeachment hearing….. (nuff said.)

Now the good news.

On the local level: District 158 is going solar.

By March Huntley School District 158 will flip the switch and do their part in addressing climate change. This change is projected to save the district $4.2 million dollars in energy costs over the next 20 years.

That’s a slice of the good news on the “going green” effort. There’s more.

Illinois saw,,, a surge of community solar farm projects seeking renewable energy credits, which developers can use to support the construction of solar arrays statewide, in 2018.

The state received so many applications that it had to perform a lottery to determine which projects would receive benefits first.

Northwest Herald

On the national level: She’s 75, and a step ahead of her competion

Marsha O’Loughlin will compete in the Verticale de la Tour Eiffel, a race up 665 of the Eiffel Tower’s steps. Marsha is one of 131 participants. She is ranked 1st in her age category (duh!) and 76th out of all women who compete in a sport called tower running. Amazing.

Marsha lives in a retirement community in Denton, Texas. She modifies some of her training to save her knees. That answers a question I had. I understand that to mean she still has her own knees.

“People seem impressed with me… I don’t think what I do is a big deal. It’s what I’ve been doing for years.

The Wall Street Journal
Marsha with Heather Conover at Dallas Vert Mile Reunion Tower Heather.
I got this photo from Marsha’s Facebook Page. She has the Share feature enabled.

On the international level: The art of tightrope clowning is alive and well

Jungwoon Woo is studying to be a professional tightrope clown. Tightrope clowning is South Korea’s “Intangible Cultural Property No. 58.” Jungwoon Woo is the only one studying this almost lost art, known as jultagi.

I don’t know about you, but I love the idea of having Intangible Cultural Properties.

Even though this video was created on YouTube in December 2019, I saw it this week, and it still makes me smile. For that reason, I’m counting it as one of this weeks Good News stories. Take a look and tell me what you think.

What good news do you have to share this week?