A story from the Inland Press-Enterprise this morning reports on the changes to the Route 66 Rendezvous cruise regulations and how they’re getting “mixed reviews.”

But, looking closer at the complainers and the changes, there’s not much of a controversy at all with the San Bernardino classic-car festival.

There’s one fellow who grumbled about the Rendezvous providing assigned parking spaces for cruise participants. In previous cruises, he was able to park with 10 friends as a group. But this year, only one of his friends filed an application in time to get an assigned space next to him.

Next time, have your buddies turn in the paperwork on time, dude.

Then there’s the news that police will enforce a long-standing rule against drinking alcohol in public. So it wasn’t a rule change at all, but added enforcement to an existing one.

One fellow lamented the fact he couldn’t bring his own cheap beer, but popped a top on a can and started drinking anyway.

I know cops well enough that they’ll leave drinkers alone if they’re discreet, and this will probably be the case here. But if a drinker is blatant about flouting the rules and becomes obnoxious after downing a few too many, police will bring the hammer down.

Somehow, I think these rules changes won’t affect the Rendezvous’ attendance one iota. Count on another 500,000-plus for the weekend, depending on weather conditions.

For wall-to-wall coverage of the Rendezvous, go to the San Bernardino County Sun’s site here.

Here’s something I didn’t know — if it wasn’t for a car accident on Route 66 near Davenport, Okla., in 1948, Les Paul might have never come up with the inventions that changed pop music.

According to the Daily Oklahoman:

The injuries he suffered nearly ended his career and put him flat on his back in Oklahoma City’s Wesley Hospital for almost a year. It also gave him a lot of time to reassess his music and his life.

“I’m lying there in the hospital really a mess, so it was a question of whether I was even going to make it,” Paul said in a recent phone interview from his New Jersey home. “Of all the injuries I had, the worst was my right arm.”

Doctors at first told him the arm might have to be amputated. With that possibility in front of him, Paul set to work in his hospital bed, drawing up plans for a guitar synthesizer that could be played with one hand.

At the time of his accident, Paul had already been tinkering for two years with those new-fangled tape recorders developed by the Germans in World War II, and during his hospital stay, he began making in-depth notes on technical innovations that would perfect the overdubbing and multi-track recording techniques he had already begun to invent. [...]

“I got a long time to think about it,” he said. “I changed the whole concept, that I was going to switch and I was going to have Mary be the singer, just the two of us, and create this whole new kind of music. And so it happened. That was such an asset to me, to be disabled so badly that it forced me to stop doing everything and think about it. And in thinking about it, I changed my whole life right there.”

As for Paul’s arm, a specialist was able to fuse it at a right angle, enabling him to play again.

The story is part of the documentary DVD, “Les Paul: Chasing Sound.” And Paul is still performing all this years later, at age 92.

The Route 66 town of Chenoa, Ill., was awarded a $300,000 grant to help convert an aging three-mile stretch of the Mother Road into a bicycle trail, the Bloomington Pantagraph reported.

Officials hope the portion of Route 66 will become a part of the Route 66 Bike Trail, from Chicago to St. Louis. U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin made the announcement Thursday.

Supporters envision a time when the completed Route 66 Trail will connect with local bike paths like Cook County’s extensive biking system and Constitution Trail, a popular linear park created from a former railroad right-of-way through the Twin Cities. [...]

“What we know today is that people are already biking Route 66,” added Dick Westfall, manager of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources greenways and trails section. “The concept for the Route 66 Trail is to create momentum so local trails like Chenoa’s can get off the ground and gain some ‘oomph’ from being a part of a larger system.”

Donovan Gardner, 75, a Pontiac city councilman and long-distance cyclist who chairs the Route 66 Trail Executive Committee, has witnessed what trails have done for local economies in neighboring states like Wisconsin and Missouri.

“Some of those communities wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for a trail,” Gardner said. “People stop, eat, shop. … It’s a significant part of tourism and economic development.”

The more, the merrier.

UPDATE 9/14/07: The Pontiac Daily Leader has a few more details about the Chenoa trail itself:

Durbin of Springfield helped the city get a $297,000 grant for the 2.35-mile, 12-foot wide bike trail through the city. The projected cost is $780,000, and at least the first phase of construction is expected in spring 2008.

The trail will have a two-foot gravel shoulder, an eight-foot-wide main trail and a two-foot asphalt shoulder. Brian Fisher, an engineer with the Farnsworth Group who designed the trail, said the gravel was a cost-saving measure.