How Did They Determine That It Was Dog Poop?

Someone's mad at a Cleveland councilman and ransacked his car. The story makes clear that it was feces from a dog that was left around the car.

Wonder how they figured that out?

Another Wonderful Decision That is Oh-So-Very-Cleveland

So the newspapers are full of articles about how, with rising fuel prices, people are not only opting for more fuel-efficient vehicles, but also opting for public transportation.

It's even happening here in Cleveland.

So what did the GCRTA decide to take its first step towards last night?

Yep, you guessed it...both raising fares and cutting service.

Having spent too much of my life in traffic jams in the San Jose area in the early 2000s, an area that was not able to foresee future needs for public transportation, I can only scratch my head at this decision.

While it's perfectly clear what their situation is today (the RTA budget is currently only funded 20% by fares), this is ridiculously short-sighted on their part.

As one of the posters beneath the article noted (and his slightly incorrect facts notwithstanding), it makes it more expensive for a group of friends near a rapid station to take the train downtown to an event in the evening driving and parking.

A Sound Sleeper Am I

It's been an eventful week down here in the hood.

Last week, we had a power outage after a lightning strike.

Then last night, there was a fire at the now-defunct Club Corbo (formerly Corbo's Golden Bowl).

I can see the place from my backyard, so certainly one would think I'd have heard the fire trucks around 1AM last night, but I snoozed right through everything.

In fact, when I walked by CC this morning. I saw a news truck out across the street, but thought they were setting up for some shot about Guarino's 90th Anniversary celebration or something. There was a little bit of a burnt smell in the air, but I kind of forgot about it all until someone asked me about the big fire at work.

On the bright side, I felt very well-rested when I entered the salt mines this morning!

Google Maps Streetview Adds New Cities...Including Cleveland!

A few years ago, A9, Amazon's search engine, introduced a streetview-like functionality.

It was the first step on a path towards an application that everyone knew would be cool.

Well, it just got cooler with the folks from Mountain View adding the following new cities the other day.

• Albuquerque, NM
• Anchorage, AK
• Austin, TX
• Cleveland, OH
• Fairbanks, AK
• Little Rock, AR
• Madison, WI
• Nashville, TN
• Rockford, IL
• Richmond, VA
• Spokane, WA
• St. Petersburg, FL
• Tampa, FL

Below are a few shots from our fair city. Give it a try yourself!
Quicken Loans Arena, downtown.
Corbo's Bakery, down the street, that I walk by every day.
My old school apartment in Minneapolis.

So, waxing nostalgic about the old days, Barenaked Ladies' The Old Apartment came to mind. It's set to Gilmore Girls footage...which is always cool.

Enjoy!

LeBron's Image

This is one of the very few sports-related postings you'll find here.

LeBron James is on the current cover of Vogue magazine with someone named Gisele Bundchen.

I guess she's famous for being good-looking...or she should be.

Anyway, the imagery struck more than one person as being both unoriginal and just a bit distasteful.

I feel inclined to play the Obama speech underneath here, but am too lazy.

You get where I'm going. Don't you, bro?

Shame on You, Musings Author!

Well, I did it. I went across the street to my polling place and voted for Hillary Clinton on what is a very icy night here in Cleveland. Now that I think of it, the weather outside brought some kind of poetry to the moment.

The reader can decide if it was too cynical of me, but I've been able to rationalize it to an acceptable level here. If I were entering into a process that I believed to be completely pure, without primary actors who sometimes think long-run, not short run, and who never, ever showboat for the sake of other sorts of PR victories, I couldn't have done it.

Would Hillary be ashamed of me for doing this?

When Ted Comes to Town

Hope you had yer daughters locked up.

Senator Ted Kennedy was just up the street from me this morning at the Fairhill Center in Cleveland campaigning for Barack Obama.

I'm guessing it was just a run-of-the-mill rally but I'll check to see if they post up a video over at C-SPAN's wonderful resource, Campaign Network, later on.

I also have a friend at work who's one of these activist types, so she may have brought her kids out there to be indoctrinated, er, educated this morning.

Either way, it gives me an opportunity to shamelessly post up a joke that seems to get recycled every election cycle since the Internet has been big.

Take a look at a sneak preview of the closing day of this summer's DNC convention in the Mile High City...

7:00 pm Opening flag burning.
7:15 pm Pledge of Allegiance to the U.N. in Spanish.
7:20 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
7:25 pm Nonreligious prayer and worship with Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton.
7:45 pm Ceremonial tree hugging.
7:55 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
8:00 pm How I Invented the Internet — Al Gore.
8:15 pm Gay Wedding — Barney Frank presiding.
8:35 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
8:40 pm Our Troops Are War Criminals — John Kerry and John Murtha.
9:00 pm Saddam Memorial Rally — Cindy Sheehan and Susan Sarandon.
11:00 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
11:05 pm Collection for the Osama Bin Laden kidney transplant fund — Barbra Streisand.
11:15 pm Free the Freedom Fighters from Guantanamo Bay — Sean Penn.
11:30 pm Oval Office Affairs — William (Bill) Jefferson Clinton.
11:45 pm Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
11:50 pm How George Bush Brought Down the World Trade Center Towers — Howard Dean & Rosie O'Donnell.
12:15 am ' Truth in Broadcasting Award' — Presented to Dan Rather by Michael Moore.
12:25 am Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
12:30 am Satellite address by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
12:45 am Nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Nancy Pelosi.
12:50 am Speech and toast by Hugo Chavez to the departure of 'The Great Satan', George W. Bush.
12:55 am Hillary proposes a toast to our 89 million new Democratic Mexican voters.
1:00 am Ted Kennedy proposes a toast to the extinction of the Republican Party.
1:05 am Coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton.
1:30 am Ted Kennedy proposes a toast.
1:35 am Bill Clinton asks Ted Kennedy to drive Hillary home.

Now I Can't Get the Themesong for "The Monkees" Out of My Head

Today's PD on the attention that Northeast Ohio is going to get from the Prez candidates.

And...another issue of local interest below that. Some other local company should have worked harder to get him, don't you think?

Man Tan Williams Coming to Cleveland

Brian Williams and the NBC Nightly News is coming to Cleveland today to produce a segment, to be broadcast tomorrow, on the Cleveland Clinic, which is a medium-distance walk or a short drive from where I live.

They're highlighting its status as one of the world's premier medical research facilities and what a huge chunk of our local population the CCF employs. According to the Plain Dealer, he should be staying in town and broadcasting from the Flats tomorrow night.

I might just have to tune in!

Jacobs Field...A Biblical Place?

Not being a big sports guy in general, I sat down to watch my second Indians game of the year last night. It seems that when I choose to watch, weird things happen.

While the season is not over yet, as the Indians are up 2-0 in their ALDS series against the evil Yankees, their season has been somewhat bookended by odd weather events.

The first game I watched was the regular season opener against the Mariners, which had to be put off till later in the season due to freak spring blizzard that screwed us up this year.

Last night when I tuned in, we had another plague-like event landing on Jacobs Field...bugs!

I live about five miles from downtown Cleveland and did not have any big problems at home, but the field was overcome by "Canadian Soldiers," which are these little bugs that apparently only live a day and don't have mouths (so they can't bite).

I could not find a good closeup picture, as they showed on television, how these little buggers were covering players' skin, but it had to have been very distracting!

Anyway, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that my Cubbies can come out of their 2 game deficit against the D-backs when they return to Wrigley this evening, but my failure to commit has left me with two teams I can root for this post-season.

Leave it to the Plain Dealer

As both of my loyal readers know, I really have it out for the Plain Dealer.

If only it were made of softer paper, they might be able to lure me into a subscription so that I could get a fresh roll of toilet paper delivered to my doorstep every morning.

Anyway, August 19 has become one of my favorite days of the year.

Why, you ask?

Because it's the day after the Feast of the Assumption street fair/festival ends here in Cleveland. I live just a half block off of ground zero and while my block doesn't have an exceptional amount of riff-raff running around, it does congest the whole area.

I like it for a short time and I'm happy that it brings in some business for the neighborhood, but beyond that, I'm glad when the circus leaves town. The ground-shaking fireworks marked its end last night around 10:30 PM.

So this morning, I thought I would share a bit of it with folks and find a photo gallery online...since I was too lazy to shoot and upload any myself.

Our good friends at the asylum known as the Plain Dealer have one up, but this one, in particular, caught my eye.

No matter how devoted a Catholic one might be, is is at all appropriate to display an image of her, and draw attention to the Virgin....right above your crotch?


Anyway, the gallery is mostly from parade day and doesn't really show that, beyond a nice parade (that actually goes right in front of my house) the rest of it is just a regular old street fair with beer gardens and that famous Italian delicacy....Gyros.

Cleveland Councilman Mike Polensek...Our Hero of the Day

Cleveland City Councilman Mike Polensek is making a bit of a name for himself and I'm proud to post his story up here.

The 11th Ward Cleveland native was fed up with a punk in his neighborhood who has been causing a lot of problems 
there,most recently an arrest for selling crack near a convenience store in the neighborhood so he decided to write him a little letter.

Rather than dance around the issue, Polensek referred to the recipient in the letter as a 'crack dealing 
piece of trash' and closes with a bid to 'go to jail or the cemetary soon.'

Predictably, the recipient's mother has turned this into a racial issue (the letter, you see, also referred to the youngster as 'dumber than mud' and, mud being dirty and black, the letter was clearly a racially-inspired death threat) and is calling the well-known arbiter of truth, Rev. Albert Sharpton, to intervene.  He's proven himself very good at sniffing out bigotry in siutations like this.

I hope this young man gets his life back on track, I really do.  But I have to believe that if I was causing this much ruckus and someone in my community gave me the finger, I would hope I'd have enough decency to, at the very least, shut the hell up instead of trying to turn MYSELF into the vicim!

While I don't pay as much attention to local politics as perhaps I should, this was a refreshing story for me.  Too often around here, people move out to the suburbs and let this city go to the rats.   It's a real shame because if more people inside the city of Cleveland would be willing to stand up and do the right thing now and then, rather than spinelessly pandering to thugs and idiots, the city might be able to reclaim a little bit of its once-proud reputation.  Instead, it remains a well-kept secret that this is not that bad a place to live at all.

FWIW, this is not the first such letter that Polensek has penned.

Welcome to Cleveland! Just Leave Yer Fireworks at the Pennsylvania Border!

As I write this, I'm making a mental note to be more careful the next time I want to light off some Black Cats!

Last night out on the West Side, a Cleveland firefighter decided to blow off some caps of his own...and ended up killing three people and wounding two others because they were 
making too much noise with fireworks.

He's on suicide watch at the City Jail.

There's This Flu Thing Going Around

I heard about a mildly amusing use of mapping software this morning on Buzz Out Loud, CNET's podcast of indeterminate length.

You can go to whoissick.org, put in your symptoms, then do a search on your area to see how many other people share your ailments.

It's not the most amazing thing I've ever seen, but thought I would pass it along.

It does invite the potential for some fun messing around with people (could we spoof a major outbreak of diarrhea after a Browns loss?) though.

Billy Joel in Concert

Just got back from the Billy Joel concert this evening in Cleveland at Quicken Arena.

It was a solid show and aside from Goodnight Saigon and Matter of Trust, I heard pretty much everything I wanted to.

As we were sitting there, though, I kind of realized that Billy is the TGIF of the music world.  TGIF is a good bet for dinner.  The food is tasty and filling.  It's entertaining in its delivery, but it doesn't challenge or surprise you much.   And while they may put a whole ice cream scoop of sour cream on your nachos....they're still just nachos!

Just about the same can be said for this show and other bootlegs I've heard of his shows over the years.  Billy does what we paid him for.  The music is nothing all that magical, there are no extended jams or better musicianship than you would find in any run of the mill good band.  But I enoyed my time there and left with a good feeling.

My only regret, as the one who ordered the tickets, was failing to take into account the fact that a woman with us is, uh, altitudinally challenged.  Brainiac Dan bought floor seats.   Sorry, AT!

Billy does seem a bit old for some of his antics on stage and he's an attention whore even compared to other performers, but I don't want to be too much of a downer on the show.  He played his heart out (even through some speaker troubles early on) and delivered what I paid for.

Below is tonight's setlist and then, because I missed it, a video of Goodnight Saigon, which I believe is pulling footage from his classic Live from Long Island concert video.

Angry Young Man
My Life speaker troubles, so they ended up doing over the 2d half after a Spinal Tap joke
Everybody Loves You Now
The Entertainer
Vienna
Allentown
Zanzibar
New York State of Mind
Moving Out (Anthony's Song)  dedicated to "Imus"
 ->  which was odd because the camera then flashed to the only woman on stage, a black saxaphone player from Gary, IN
Stand by Me tease into Innocent Man
Don't Ask Me Why
Always a Woman
Keeping the Faith
River of Dreams
Highway to Hell    AC/DC cover by the roadie Chainsaw
We Didn't Start the Fire
Big Shot
It's Still Rock and Roll to Me
You May be Right

E*Only the Good Die Young
E*Scenes from an Italian Restaurant
E*Piano Man

Easter. The Other Winter Holiday

Picture courtesy of Thomas Ondrey of the Plain Dealer.  This was from yesterday's annual Easter Egg Hunt in suburban Chardon.  I wonder if that's on government property? ;-)

Last Saturday, I cut the grass.

Last Tuesday and Wednesday, I comfortably wore shorts to work.

By Thursday, I was wearing long johns (and regular pants, thank you).

Yesterday, I cleared out a little snow, but it was pretty discretionary and more a function of wanting to get outside in the crisp air.

Now, I just came in from shoveling no less than 6-7 inches of snow that have fallen since last night.

It's starting to get a little bit silly around here.

Leave the Gun. Take the Cannoli.

While I've always been into movies like Godfather and Scarface, I'd not put much effort into reading non-fiction about it.  

This changed when I picked up Corn Sugar and Blood:  The Rise and Fall of the Cleveland Mafia, by Rick Porrello.  It's a quick read history of the Cleveland Mafia.

Porrello, a Cleveland-area cop, is a descendent of one of the two major 'families' in the corn sugar wars that ended up causing a lot of death and destruction in Cleveland during Prohibition.

The other major group in these wars was the Mayfield Road Mob, which was based out of Cleveland's Little Italy section where I now live.    It's got money, gambling, bootlegging,  sliced necks, sex, people getting shot, bombs going off....  all the things you kids love.

While it's certainly not the most amazing prose I've ever laid eyes on, I really enjoyed reading about events that happened at places near where I now live.... and some of which I walk by every day and can see from my living room window!

One thing I found out through a little more research is that the head of the Cleveland Mafia for a time in the late 70s lived in a house that is still just 3 doors down from me.   He died in prison in the 80s after a RICO conviction.

Luckily, this Porrello seems to have found his calling and I've picked up another one of his books, about the murder of Cleveland hood Danny Green.  More about how they blew up the Irishman in a later post.