Category: Today’s Report

Turkish Restaurants are popping up all over! For years the only Turkish in Cleveland was at the Anatolia Cafe in Cedar Center. But things are changing — quickly! I took the kids and our current Iraqi student guest Mustafa to a fairly new restaurant, Dervish, in Avon last night. Had a really great time. I’m not…

Rany Jazayerly: Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus. A lot of folks have pointed to this article. I think there’s a little bit of “Hey, look: There’s a dermatologist who normally blogs about the Kansas City Royals and here he is writing a long piece about 19th century Middle East history. Weird!” Anyway, it’s…

Slate: How Many Americans Can’t Swim? Perhaps half of them. And a vast majority of most poor and minority groups. Slate: Why Do Foreigners Like Fanta So Much? Very interesting history of the product. Did you know it was created by the Nazi arm of Coca-Cola in the 40’s? Or that it was used to…

Scientific American: Australia’s common wombat could soon be uncommon. The Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombat population is down to a hundred or so, and has been endangered for years. Now apparently even the “common” wombat is losing population — mostly by getting run over by cars on the highway. Consumer Reports: Teen defensive driving school improves confidence,…

ZDNet: Oracle rebrands Java, breaks Eclipse. Obviously this is fairly amusing. The reason that Eclipse was checking the rebranded “Company” value was to work around a different Java incompatibility. It’s pretty clear: the Java team at Sun (now at Oracle) has done far more to destroy the concept of “write once, run everywhere” than the…

NY Times: Botanical Gardens Look for New Lures Here’s another article that mentions the recent financial tribulations of the Cleveland Botanical Gardens — although this time the problems are implied rather than the focus of the article. It does put the issue into a broader context though: Many similar organizations are having to scramble for money,…

Man, I just never seem to get around here anymore! Ahh well. A couple of links caught my eye today: Henry Blodgett: My Kids Are Addicted to my iPad I totally believe this story. In fact, it sounds like Henry is probably underestimating the extent of the problem. The Frati do not currently have an iPad.…

Some bummer neighborhood news: Kmart is closing our local store. Here’s the article in the Plain Dealer. Not that Kmart is a great chain, or that this store is anything special, but this situation is a perfect example of the problems Cleveland faces. With the population declining pretty much everywhere in the city, if a…

In the comments to this post there are a lot of suggestions of language learning sites and software. Much insistence that they are all better and/or cheaper than Rosetta Stone. Both seem possible. Rosetta Stone is OK, but it’d be easy to imagine something more effective. And one thing for sure: It’s expensive! Here are…

When I was a kid we did a lot of traveling including some big trips to Europe while my dad worked over there, but also trips down south and out west. One of the things I remember most about those trips was taking pictures. We took half-frame slides using an Olympus Pen-F. This was a…