JohnFrat.us

• Urban Farming! There’s a very nice post on the Green City Blue Lake blog that includes Joe Cimperman’s enthusiastic rundown of some other ideas and upcoming legislation in this area. One item in particular is interesting: A partnership between the OSU Ag Extension and Blue Pike Farm (72nd between the Shoreway and St. Clair) on a handbook for young urban farmers. And speaking of Blue Pike, it looks like they may be trying to expand their CSA this year. Apparently their beets and carrots are the best in town.
• Convention Center: First of all, here’s the official website for the project. Some very generic architectural renderings there. I hope the actual architects do a more distinctive job. And here’s an item by Steve Litt that clarifies the financing. There have been a lot of complaints that the property ends up being owned by MMPI for 20 years and then switches to county (instead of city) ownership. I actually think this is a major advantage. After all, as the owner of the property MMPI will have massive incentives to make sure the facility is marketed and maintained well. And the fact that the county ends up eventually owning the thing (rather than the current owner, the City of Cleveland) is huge. There’s absolutely no way that Cleveland should have to maintain a regional asset like this.
• The Atlantic: How the Crash will Reshape America. A massive piece by Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) that goes into great detail about how he views the probable outcomes for different parts of the country. As always, he has nothing encouraging to say about Cleveland. It’s pretty clear he believes it’s fortunes will continue to decline since apparently there’s nothing interesting about Cleveland and cities like it. One item from the article was surprising to me: Apparently Jones Day, the massive law firm based in Cleveland, now calls Washington DC its “headquarters” and Cleveland only its “founding office”. This seems like a pointless slam, considering that this situation is only due to the fact that the current Managing Partner happened to lead the DC office when he was promoted. Is the “headquarters” going to move again when he retires?

• Bill Callahan: Big banks declare moratorium, file 25 new Cuyahoga foreclosures on same day. Bill’s definitely on the case here. I’m wondering what possible explanations these guys will come up with. I’m sure they’ll be interesting reading. On a related note, PNC (aka National City Mortgage) announced a similar moratorium today. I really hope they are not just posturing.
• NY Times: My Kind of Normal. Judith Warner writes about some people that sound incredibly familiar to me.
• NY Times: The Obama Comedy Crisis.

I see comedy entering a more difficult, more painful era. For the past eight years of Bush and Cheney and the intern years of Clinton, we were pretty much stenographers. Come Jan. 20, comics and writers will actually have to make up satire instead of relying on cut-and-paste inanity lifted directly from political speeches and off-the-cuff remarks of the newsworthy.

• NY Times: Are Academics Different? Prof. Stanley Fish tries to determine where to draw the line between academic freedom and simply screwing around and wasting everyone’s time. As usual there are a lot of folks in the comments who claim there’s almost none of that “wasting everyone’s time” stuff going on. I wish they’d say which specific colleges they’re talking about, so we can make sure we get those added to our kids’ short list.

• NY Times: In Web Age, Library Job Gets Update. A profile of New York elementary school librarian Stephanie Rosalia and all the new skills necessary in that position. In this age of Wikipedia, I particularly liked her trick of using this site to force kids to recognize reliable and unreliable sources.

• More Convention Center Stuff! Tony Coyne had a nice piece in the paper today that again tried to show how completely non-secret and non-speedy the Convention Center site selection process has been. I’d forgotten about some of those earlier discussions. While Tony mentions the Cleveland School District’s infrastructure problems as derailing this initial push for a new (or substantially expanded) Convention Center, a quick look back at the Plain Dealer archives indicates it was was actually the massive failure of a District levy in May of 1994 that really squashed discussions about raising taxes and selling bonds for other less critical items. (The other projects that were to be funded by these bonds? “Great Waters Aquarium; the Great Lakes Museum of Science, Environment and Technology; the renovation of the Stadium; the rehabilitation of Euclid Ave.” As we know now, the most vital of these turned out to be the “renovation” of Browns Stadium to the tune of $300 million.) And did you know we spent $30 million in 1988 to renovate the Convention Center? Doesn’t seem to have bought us much. Next time: Who will own the Convention Center?

• NY Times: Cycling Enters Electronic Age. Electric shifters for racing bikes. One of the most interesting parts of this article for me was the discussion of the prices for this high end gear. What makes a shifter worth $2400? We looked at a lot of different shifting parts when we were volunteering down at the Bike Co-Op this year and they are all remarkably similar. Even this electronic version apparently uses exactly the same mechanism as the standard mechanical type.
• NY Times: The No-Stats All-Star. A profile of defensive star Shane Battier of the Houston Rockets by Michael Lewis (Moneyball).

• 

  Old Convention Center Proposal

  Convention Center Stuff: Lots of good info today on this. First of all, the great Cleveland Mag Politcs Blog, MMPI and the Mall 2, Forest City & Cleveland Partnership 0. It’s pretty clear that MMPI was the only party in this mess that did their homework. And from Steve Litt: Medical Mart presentation makes convincing case for the Mall. Again, the presentation given by MMPI must have been quite impressive to quiet down some of the folks who were yelling last week about the supposed “speed” and “secrecy” of this decision. The only real issue outstanding is whether or not you really can build on the existing Convention Center foundation or not. One thing brought up in the comments to Litt’s article was the “no columns” design proposed several years ago to the original Convention Center Facilities Authority. This would have used a dramatic cable stay system (as seen in this rendering) to eliminate pillars on the convention floor entirely. Seems to me this might reduce the weight requirements on that existing foundation. In any case, I think it’s a great design idea and I’d wonder if it would significantly change the cost of the building.

• Dell: They’ve finally announced that new XT2 Tablet. As I mentioned in an earlier entry, the fact that this is based on a standard Intel chipset is automatically a huge improvement over the woeful XT. Speaking of the XT, Dell’s also blogging about driver updates for it. Weird.
• Brand New: Yellow/Roadway’s new crappy logo. (As usual on Brand New, make sure to read the comments.) This has got to be one of the worst branding hack-jobs ever. What a disastrous logo redesign. The old Yellow logo in particular was fabulous. And this is just layered on the foolish choice to rename the company with an anonymous three-letter-acronym. Was there something wrong with calling the combined company Yellow? Or Roadway? What an ignominious end to two of the best known brands out there.

• More Urban Farming: On the heels of Cleveland’s recent relaxation of zoning rules, Lakewood’s also looking at allowing residents to raise chickens.
• Ned Hill and Fran Stewart: The New City Beautiful. The “old” City Beautiful movement was about placing monumental buildings in park-like settings. Think Cleveland’s or Washington DC’s Malls. Gorgeous, but not very practical, and certainly not about making someplace great for everyday life. Hill and Stewart would like to start a new movement that creates and guides urban neighborhood design by using the lessons learned about how successful urban neighborhoods — like Georgetown and Beacon Hill — actually work.

• Mary Beth Matthews: The 200 Day School Year. Gov. Strickland recently proposed extending the school year in Ohio. This particular part of his education plan has obviously hit a nerve with teachers. I’ve now heard from several teachers (and spouses of teachers) on Strickland’s plan and read a bunch of letters to the PD editors and they’ve all latched onto this specific item. It’s pretty clear that one of the main reasons people choose to be a school teacher is the schedule. Anyway, Mary Beth teaches at my son’s high school here in Cleveland. She reports some of the reactions that she’s heard in the teacher’s lounge. It’s interesting that the suburban teachers are saying things like (and I’m paraphrasing), “That longer school year might be appropriate for those urban kids who don’t have anything better to do in the summer, and probably need the extra help, but my suburban kids need to go to camp/vacation and really don’t need the extra time in class anyway.” And the urban teachers are saying (again a paraphrase), “That longer school year might work in the suburbs where the buildings are all air-conditioned and the kids actually get something out of school, but our buildings are all run-down and the kids will bake and they won’t be able to pay attention anyway.” From the outside, it feels to me like there’s an awful lot of self-justification going on. It’s OK to say that one of the reasons you’re in the game is because of the schedule.

• Writer’s Beat: Profit & Loss/Profitability & Liability : How Books Make (or Don’t Make) Money. Anna Genoese dives into great detail — with real numbers — about how the publishing and bookselling business works. For example, did you know that bookstores can get all their money back on unsold books just by sending them back to the publisher?