Thanks Chris. Thanks Todd. Now I can get that case of beer I've had my eye on.

Worst Drivers in the Tristate ?
Living in a border community, especially a 3-way border community, rivalries arise. A common one is, who is the worst goram state for driving? The debates are endless but Car Insurance Comparison has given us the answer.
Kentucky
By a landslide. At #7, they are in the top 10 worst states in the country. Contrasted against Ohio, which at #41 is the top 10 best states for drivers. Indiana is somewhere in the middle because, as we all know, Indiana is average average average…..
Of course, if you look at their numbers, the rankers don't even follow their own numbers, so Ohio & Indiana might be in an eternal quibble, but manoman, Kentucky, where people stop at the end of entrance ramps because it's always easier to merge into 60MPH traffic from a dead stop? No question. Stick to horses, guys.

Whither the Southgate House ?

The closing of the Southgate House is kinda sad, the fact the people behind it intend to continue on in a new location is good news, not specifying a new location doesn't fill my heart with confidence.
While it's great to have the big union entertainment like the Reds, Bengals, Ballet, Symphony & Opera and the BOC passing through the Aronoff & GestapoBend are great, it's the smaller places that offer innovative & creative types a venue that really mark a community as a cultural leader.
Last year marked the 25th anniversary of the avant-garde arts organization Art Damage. They celebrated with an eviction notice. A number of small theater groups like ETC & Know seem to be going strong but the music scene of 1980s Cincinnati are sorely missed. Not the actual local acts so much as the venues & promoters that graced Bogart's & The Jockey Club. Bogart's has turned into….. - nothing good. The demise of The Jockey seemed to have helped spawn The Southgate House.
Sill, The Southgate House ballroom just wasn't really big enough to host a lot of acts. Hope those guys can find a good new location that's a bit bigger so they can thrive & keep the Cincinnati region on the radar of upcoming bands well into the future.
UPDATE: the Fishwrap unravels a sordid tale of family intrigue
HT to Cincinnati Blog & Each Note Secure

OTR - Highest Income Inequality Tract in America
I have read the McClatchy article, Highest income-inequality tract in America is gentrifying twice & I don't get it. It's a little weirder than Stadium tax rebate favors wealthy, which is, duh, just a fact.
FWIW, the wealth distribution should be a little smoother in OTR in time. Middle class people will follow the wealthy but pretty much nobody follows the poor. In fact, the poor have been leaving OTR for years. While the article points out the neighborhood is predominantly poor they don't do much to point out it is predominantly vacant. Anyway, I guess the Liberals© have to wail about something.

Cyber Monday
Black Friday
Buy My Stuff !


Cincinnati Iconography.

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SOPA is Bad

Anonymous Commenting

The Porkopolis Fishwrap has announced it will "end anonymous commenting" by forcing would be commenters to register with FaceBook.
Anybody who follows the comments knows who the regulars are & what to expect from them. I imagine it can be pretty shocking for someone who isn't used to the wholesale sociopathy that is SW Ohio to read the comments on an article about their kids or local school or charity. That's ok. They probably wouldn't have returned to the mosh pit anyway.
UPDATE: yeesh around 1,400 comments - 98% negative.
Anyhoo, if you don't want to participate in an online dialogue on local current issues the FishBook way there's lots of other choices.
For example:

• Building Cincinnati
• Cincinnati Beacon
• Cincinnati Blog
• The Cincinnati Monocle
• Cincinnati Black Blog
• Cincy Streetcar
• City Kin
• City Beat
• C.O.A. .T.
• The Daily Bellwether
• Fuck Yeah, Cincinnati
• Look Everybody - A Blog!
• Losantville
• The Over the Rhine Blog
• 5chw4r7z
• Urban Cincy
• Visualingual
• And for a more comprehensive list:
   Cincy Bloggers

Springfield Navistar Plant Adds Production
Springfield's Navistar plant will absorb production from the recently closed Union City, Indiana plant. No new jibs but the recently recalled employees can be a little more confident in their jobs. Employment at the plant has gone from a low of 300 people to now looking at 1,000.

Noose Son story here.

Derek & the Dominoes Music Hall 11/26/70

Earlier in '70 there was the Midsummer Rock thing at the baseball stadium with Iggy Pop, Traffic, Alice Cooper, Mountain, Grand Funk, 10 Years After.....
WTF happened?

Black Friday is for Wusses
On Friday, 11/25, people will be up at the crack of dawn, armed with big bank credit cards, camping out at mall, shopping center & big box chain stores in a sort of bizzaro world anti-OWS movement.
And What are you going to get? Sure, maybe it's cheaper but it's still just the same old uninspired Chinese gizmos & gadgets…..
Don't worry, Blogging isn't Cool has a solution (as usual)SHOP NORTHSIDE
Sleep in. Go out & have a leisurely breakfast in a bright warm dining room full of friendly folks at Take the Cake, Park Chili, The Blue Jay, Sidewinder, White Castle….
Beats the hell out of Slim Jims & cold coffee in the stark pale glow of a neon sign while sitting on cold damp pavement as the bitter November winds howl through your bones.
Then let the shopping commence. Wouldn't dad love a 75lb fryer from Restaurant Equipment Outlet? And installation is a snap with the help from the crack crew Bill's assembled at Ace Hardware. Show mom how much you love her with a ♥ MOM ♥ tattoo from Skincraft. Your sister who lost her job & is getting evicted January 1? Check out the survival gear at Northside Surplus. Your 17 yr old niece who just got her 6th drivers license suspension? How about a Metro Card from Ohio Check Cashers or a refurbed bike from MoBo Bicycke Co-Op? Your creepy alcoholic chain smoking uncle? How about a nice shiny headstone from Schott Monument? Got an animal lover in the family? Maybe they'd be interested in something from Whitman Taxidermy. Or how about a new website for grandma & grandpa from Ella Net?
Don't let your sugar levels drop while you shop! Refresh yourself at Melt, Ko-Sho Japanese Restaurant, The Painted Fish or Picnic and Pantry, to name a few.
And when the shopping orgy is over, kick back at the Northside Tavern, Junkers Tavern, The C&D, scarf down a burrito at The Comet or grab a pie at The Don's Pizza Lounge.
Seriously, camping out on private property can be unpleasant.These guys will not pepper spray you if you shop at their stores.

• Ace Hardware
• Artisan Custom Tailoring
• Autobahn Craftwerks
• The Blue Jay Restaurant
• Bonomini Bakery
• Building Value
• The C&D
• Cappozolo Typesetting
• The Chameleon Club
• Chicken Lays ann Egg
• City Iron
• Cluxton Alley Coffee Roasters
• The Comet
• Darou Salam
• The Don's Pizza Lounge
• Ella Net
• Fabricate
• Family Dollar
• Ginger's Bar
• HazelGlas
• Honey
• Junkers Tavern
• Ko-Sho Japanese Restaurant
• Mayday
• Melt
• Midwest Furniture
• MoBo Bicycke Co-Op
• NYPD Pizza
• Northside Bar
• North Side Bank and Trust
• Northside Tavern
• Northside Surplus
• NVISION
• OMS Photography
• Ohio Check Cashers
• The Painted Fish
• Park Chili
• Picnic and Pantry
• Prairie
• RPK Design
• Restaurant Equipment Outlet
• Schaeper's Pharmacy
• Schott Monument
• Sidewinder Coffee & Teas
• Shake It Records
• Skincraft
• Stephanie's Hair Options
• Stonecraft
• Take the Cake
• Taylor Jameson Hair Salon
• Thunder Sky Inc.
• Tri State Appliance
• UDF
• White Castle
• Whitman Taxidermy
• Wireless Technologies

Ralph Nader Meets Pat Buchanan

2 political minds that might strike a person as nemeses, actually have a lot in common in this exchange on C-Span's Book TV as they discuss Buchanan's latest book which I previously covered. Nader is infinitely more intelligent (and mature) than James Edwards of The Political Cesspool.
I'm gonna have to read this book I guess.

Kennedy Assassination on WLW

And, to get an idea of what was going on that day @ 5AM

Listening to these broadcasts is really strange. I remember a bunch of this stuff going on but I never put it all into one time period. I also distinctly recall JFK being shot in the late morning on a sunny day. wrongo…..
As my old boss, Hank, once said, "Memory is a dangerous thing".

CGI on WCPO ?

Or is this just old video? Where the hell did all those people come from?

The Munsters
again…..

Great, NBC wants to do a remake of The Munsters using the writer for the fairly lame show, Pushing Daisies.
Why?
The Munsters idea wasn't s good as the cast with 3 pros, Yvonne DeCarlo, Fred Gwynne & Al Lewis. Gwynne & Lewis had been in Car 54 prior to the Munsters.

What possible team can the TV network assemble to pull a 1 hour show off? And who in the hell is going to replace this chick?

Ohio - Smoking Capitol of the North
A recent survey concluded that about 26% of Ohioans smoke, putting it in line with Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri and other southern states. No northern state comes close. And, yet, we have public smoking bans in effect almost everywhere. Should we really be persecuting such a large minority of the state's population? Is it the conservative thing to do? Where is our smaller, less intrusive, business friendly state government on fixing this?

Noose Son story here

Zombie Lake

A low budget movie from 1980 about a French town full of slow moving, bloodless, nudists who can't shoot worth a damn and wind up getting terrorized by a squad of Nazi amphibi-zombies.
Really it oughtta be called something like Swamp Nazis or Lake of the Living Dead or something as this semi-organized squad of undead Nazi soldiers can move, have some reason & don't eat people. They are more like really sloppy, green vampires.
Who live in a lake.
The whole walking around at the bottom of the lake in uniform thing is kinda cool. Probably the best part. Well, that and the gratuitous nudity…..
One quibble - back in WWII, when the French resistance fighters slaughter the soldiers & throw their carcasses into the lake, one Frenchie steals a dead soldier's boots. Subsequently, as they shamble-march (no shamble-goose-stepping) through the streets of the town, nobody is barefoot.

Happy Friday !

Graham Bond Holy Magick
Bond, a Brit, got into mysticism around 1970 and, having deep roots in American music, made a couple albums that married R&B, gospel, Soul, Psychedelia & Golden Dawn mysticism emphasizing Kaballah into a weird & wonderful mess.
No clue where the video came from.

Ohio & The Movies
A new website that has received a lot of web press is devoted to promoting Ohio & Ohioans that have been on TV & in the movies. Music videos, I guess, don't count. Actually a lot doesn't seem to count. Dean Martin, Jonathan Winters, the Gish girls, John Holmes, Theda Bara, Doris Day, Mike Douglas, Ron Jeremy, Paul Newman, Martin Mull, Jerry Springer & Roy Fucking Rogers don't count. Light of Day, Vamps, Howard the Duck, Ferndale 2 Night, Airborne, Traffic, Harper Valley PTA, 6 episodes of Route 66, (5 in Clevo), Stranger Than Paradise, Cornhole, Thankskilling, The Dead Next Door…..
forget it.
heck, a Wiki search
or IMDB comes up with all sorts of stuff.
oh well, HDDs are like Doritos, we'll just make more.

Enon Firm to Expand - Create 50 Jobs
State Support a PITA
seepex Inc., a manufacturer of fluid pumping equipment, is embarking on it's 4th expansion in 15 years.

We manufacture and export world class product, we do not export jobs," said Kamran Mirza, seepex director of business development.

Seepex has seen an 18% annual growth over the last few years. One of the industries seepex sells to is the gas industry so coveted by the Kasich administration. But they say the state has not held up it's end of the bargain regarding aid for jobs. The business friendly administration keeps coming up with more and more hurdles & reversals. The owner, Mike Dillon, says he will only take some state incentives to purchase some equipment.

Springfield Noose Son story here

For more on natural gas extraction, see Gasland