Creepy Crap for a Halloween Weekend

Not only will you have a chance to shamble your zombie stuff at the Cincinnati Zombie Walk downtown tonight with an after party at the Mockbee, you can also pedal your zombie stuff in a Zombie Ride from Wesleyan Cemetery to Newport 10/29/10.
The Cincinnati Shakespeare Company will be staging Dracula Friday & Saturday at 7:30 & Sunday at 2.
This is the stage version John Carradine made famous.
Haunted Queen City walking tours Friaay & Saturday starting every hour from 7:30 - 9:30
Rally for Sanity Midwest Adjunct will be on Fountain Square from noon to 3PM
State of the Matter will continue in Northside from noon to 3 on Saturday.
The Enemy Within: Terror in America 1776 to Today all weekend & beyond at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center 11 - 5

Lying By Omission
Tea Partiers support smaller government, lower taxes & a strong military with a strong foreign presence.
Ron Paul, in his bid for the Republican Presidential nomination in 2008 had a fund raiser on he anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, 12/16/07. (link). Many consider this to be the beginning of the Tea Party Movement.
By August of '08, however, the Tea Party of Sarah Palin & Glenn Beck was not exactly what Ron Paul had in mind. (link).
Does smaller government sound good? sure Lower taxes? great
But how?
The Tea Party claims it has no social agendas to pursue.
So what do they want to cut in spending to reduce taxes? Not the military.
So, let's look at what holds the Tea Party, whose candidates are "you", together. By examining this, we can get an idea of what their policies will be in shrinking the government.
About 11% of the population identifies itself with the Tea Party. This is a bit smaller than the Black or Latino population.
It's predominantly white - in line with the US population.
A little over half make $50k or more per year - about the average but well above the American median income.
Members are 48% Republican, 28% Republican leaning & about 8% Democratic - nationwide it's more along the lines of 30% Republican & 35% Democrat.
It's membership is 81% Christian - about in line with the nation.
The majority, 57%, consider themselves "Christian Conservatives", about twice as much as the average American at 22%.
They are 85% opposed to gay marriage, about twice the national average.
They are 65% anti-choice opposed to 45% nationwide.
They are more than twice as likely than the national average (25% / 11%) to think the government favors black people over white.
Looking at these samnesses & differences from mainstream society where can we expect to see government shrinking?
It is likely they will find some shrinkage in reducing services they see as benefitting black people.
They will likely work to create a tax structure more attractive to their financial base like regressive sales taxes over income taxes.
Actually, it is likely Tea Partiers will want to expand government to pursue it's religious agendas forcing churches to not marry gays & forcing doctors to not perform abortions & forcing young girls to be disabled or die from bearing the unwanted children conceived by brutal incestuous rape. Dunno if they will shrink funding for dealing with the orphans or disabled mothers.
I fear they, like organizations like HSUS will be wolves in sheep's clothing. Their insistence that they are average Joes when in reality, like animal rights advocates, they are a minority. The fact Rush Limbaugh plays prominently in both groups is disconcerting.
They claim to be angry with Washington & the status quo but support several candidates who do indeed represent the status quo but are staunch supporters of the religionist agenda that permeates the Tea Party.
Their not being up front about this is essentially, lying by omission.
The Tea Party appears to be nothing more than another rebranding of the old Moral Majority & Silent Majority of the past - groups touted as a majority but never more than a very vocal minority emboldened with a strong & potentially dangerous streak of zealotry.

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Jim Tarbell's Ad

Jim Tarbell has been walking a pretty lackluster campaign. Tarbell is pretty impressive when he gets fired up, but his normal demeanor doesn't do him much good as he is generally a kind of slow moving, slow talking guy who will think things through before talking. That is - he doesn't shoot from the hip with half baked ideas - an attribute the local paper likes about his opponent. Well, sure, it makes more news. I am sure the tabloids were crushed when Michael Dukakis didn't get elected president so we could watch his wife self destruct in the check out lanes at the grocery but is that how we should choose our representatives?
Tarbell has a nickname of Mr Cincinnati. great How's that play in the various townships? This ad would have been greatly improved with pictures in the background showing various highlights of the county. On his FaceBook page he has some really bad cell phone shots of a few places around the county that are about unrecognizable. Most people want vibrant color pictures. People depict their opponents in monochrome /flat color in their attack ads for Pete's sake. The recording is weak, the lighting is uninspired & the camera angle could be better. He sounds like he is talking to a camera.
I guess we might as well start getting used to GOP tool, Kid Monzel...

Enquirer Skewers Candidate They Endorse
The Enquirer's AdWatch pretty much dismantles Chris Monzel's aattack ad on Jim Tarbell in the Hamilton County Commissioner race.
But still they endorse him?
With endorsements like these, how much should we value their other endorsements?

Is Chris Monzel a Good Representative ?
ex-Cincinnati Councilman David Crowley (D) introduced an "Environmental Justice" legislation that was narrowly passed with Monzel, a Spring Grove Village resident, in opposition. Councliman Berding (I) has introduced an effort to repeal the legislation & Monzel is in support.
FWIW, I think it is bad legislation & should be repealed.
On 10/26, in the City Council Quality of Life Committee, the president of the Spring Grove Village Community Council spoke out in opposition to the legislation's repeal citing how the neighborhood's environmental quality has suffered significantly in ways that the legislation was intended to prevent in the future.
Is this how Monzel would represent his community in the future?
Or will the "Son of the Suburbs" be leaving town shortly after he becomes a Hamilton County Commissioner?
I think it's safe to say Cincinnati will not be represented well with Monzel as a commisioner.

OK, aside from telling the Black Panther dude that the US has always been a "land of the free", what, exactly, is gained by having a guy swear an oath on a book he doesn't believe?
I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth & nothing but the truth, so help me, Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The Zombie Side of Sears

Accessorize like the living
Tone while you lumber
Brain stains be gone
Sears dicked me on a washing machine / dryer deal about 19 years ago so I refuse to do business with 'em but their Halloween Zombie promotion is pretty good.
Complete with videos, a zombie gift guide & an undead Twitter feed. The zombie treadmill is probably my fave.

Does COA T Support Tax Dollars for Parochial Schools ?
Why does COA T want you to not vote for Denise Driehaus? On 10/22 the COA T blog gives us this:

"Denise Driehaus voted not once but 3 times FOR $60 MILLION in cuts to state funding for Catholic Schools"

Does COA T arrogantly believe that the Protestant Christians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Wiccans of Ohio should pay for their elite Catholic Schools when they don't even want to pay for their own kid's tuitions? Given the financial woes of the state, is this what we should be spending money on? Seems like they should admire her courage & fiscal conservatism. But, no - she's a Democrat & COA T is just a mouthpiece for the Republican party & apparently, the Roman Catholic church.
Remember this on November 5.
And there's more!
In the same article they admit to siding with the ACLU, the right to lie in political speech & big, intrusive government that tells women what they can & cannot do with their own bodies (AKA slavery).
If anybody ever tells you COA T is libertarian, rest assured, they are not.

Halloween Sex Toys ?

The Succu-Dry - Sex-In-A-Can!
While the Blogging Isn't Cool staff ~cough cough~ is somewhat acquainted with sex in THE can, this sex in a can is something new. The new SuccuDry is, well,,,,,
weird
Maybe we can get the manufacturer to send a case of the things & we can evaluate it's merits.
hmmmm

More Crap To Do in Spooky Northside
Land Between the Cemeteries
The Ghosts of Northside Tour
Sunday, October 24 at noon.
Visit the final resting places of some famous Northsiders, including the fantastic monument of Jacob Hoffner, Johann Caspar Bruckmann and others with tour guide Dianne Brake, Spring Grove Docent. Meet at 11:45 at the parking lot by the Spring Grove Offices
$2 admission for adults, free for children under 13.
The walking tour is about one hour and encounters some hilly terrain.
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State of the Matter
October 23 - 30 in Family Friendly Northside
Glass Blowing in Hoffner Park noon to 4 on the 23rd
Flame Working at Prairie Galleris 2 to 4 on the 23rd & 24th
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Halloween Pumpkin Party & Bake Sale @ Happen Inc. 10A to 5P
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Harvest Festival Community Potluck @ MoBo / Village Green 5 to 7 on the 24th

Don't Vote ?

A Republican Latino organization in Nevada, Latinos for Reform, produced an ad urging Latinos to simply not vote because Democrats didn't pass an immigration reform bill in the last 2 years.
Be careful what you wish for...
The network, Univision, refused to air the ad. Instant gratification & shameless partisanship aside, is not voting a good solution?
If you simply don't vote, the politicians write you off. If you make a protest vote for the "other" corporate party, like a Borg drone, you get absorbed into their "continuum". A protest vote or an earnest vote for a 3rd party won't matter much today but the more of these votes registered, the more attention the corpo-parties will take. They have already gone to great lengths to restrict ballot access & debate eligibility in an effort to silence dissent.
You have to vote to make any difference. I am not sure what happens if a ballot is entered empty but that might be an option, too. In the last presidential election I voted for a lot of stuff but I left the presidential options blank. Did anybody notice? beats me
Thing is, if you are not counted, you don't count.
Here's an English version of the ad FWIW.

Attack of the Vegan Zombies

Living in a neighborhood of neo-hippie vegans that's sandwiched between two good sized cemeteries, I have often wondered how these people would fare in the inevitable Zombie Uprising. I thought Attack of the Vegan Zombies might explore such a situation.
It did not.
It would have better been titled something like The Wrath of Dionysus or something. It is much more about sorcery than traditional Zombism.
It is a decent effort brought in for about $35k by Richmond, VA independent film maker Jim Townsend.
The plot embraces tried & true elements like horny young people, people holed up in a house, disagreements about how to deal with matters & so on. The adult acting is ok, the kids, well...
The sorceress mother is actually pretty good.
The plot involves a spell to improve the harvest at a vineyard that goes awry & the vines take over with a hankering for people who become "Zombies". Actually they become more like maenads, the worshippers of Dionysus, Greek god of the vine. The female lead, played aptly by Christine Egan, is even named Dionne. hint hint
Of course the guys gotta get Zombified /maenaded, too, so...
All in all, a fun movie. While Zombieish, it also has a strong supernatural thing going on, too, that is not normally seen in Zombie films.

Looks like COA T got caught sitting on their hands. The result? Sue for taxpayer dollars. COA T regularly can't win in the normal electoral process so it needs to go for lawsuits & misrepresenting ballot issues all done while taking advantage of the local Republican press.
Hughes High School students were bused on school time in non-school (church) buses to the HamCo BOE to vote early. At the BOE they were presented with Democrat sample ballots by an independent person. Apparently COA T wasn't aware of this operation & weren't able to pass out their own literature, so a desperate Tom Brinkman (R), who knows he has little chance in his campaign against Dusty Rhodes, has had COA T's lawyers sue CPS.
Free money, free publicity, hell, even I hate CPS, so it gets people all worked up.
If the school had requested sample ballots to show the kids in the school, I don't know how that would go. Political nuts would probably swarm out of the woodwork like the religious nuts do over sex & religious education.
I am assuming the woman who handed out the sample ballots just happened to know about the event because she is ex-CPS & probably has casual associations with current CPS folks.
Frankly, the non-school buses concern me a little more than anything else in this story.
I do not think COA T is trying to suppress the vote as Mr Griffin suggests. In that event, they would be having the ballots destroyed while crying voter fraud.
I think a better lesson for the kids might have been to simply have them collect sample ballots & their "I Voted" stickers to prove they voted on election day.
Voting on election day brings citizens & neighbors together & helps build community. If there is a plot, I would say it's by the people who promote absentee voting in an effort to keep people isolated & unaware of differing points of view. Or that COA T & the Cinti NAACP have a mutual agenda of destroying public schools so they can better control the brainwashing of society. But that's just my paranoid rambling.

Fishwrap (R) story here.

I'm not terribly impressed with Ayn Rand. I find her to be a pretty simplistic reactionary. The people who worship her seem to be pretty fucked up & as miserable as the characters in her books. In this segment she speaks to some kind of Goldwaterian issues that tend to fly in the face of some of her modern neocon adherents.

The Missiles of October

All day long I was thinking there was something significant about this date.
duh
This is the anniversary of the day in 1962 a U.S. photo reconnaissance plane spotted missile bases under construction in Cuba. That is, the beginning of the "Cuban Missile Crisis".
It was probably one of the hottest battles of the "Cold War".
Read the Wiki article here.

Raising Taxes
Gannett published an article that made it into the Fishwrap's print edition but was relegated to a USA Today page (as opposed to the online NKY Enquirer pages) about the political campaigning regarding Stickland's raising (or not) of taxes.
In the article it states

"as a difficult budget negotiation raged, Strickland's preferred alternatives dried up"

Stickland's alternative was, of course, allowing slot machines at race tracks. This plan was blocked by a number of church groups including the Ohio Council of Churches and the United Methodist Anti-Gambling Task Force and a group led by COA T co-founder & CCV ally Tom Brinkman called Let Ohio Vote.
Let Ohio Vote, heavily funded by a Virginia organization, New Models, collected signatures for a ballot referendum on the issue & then handily withdrew the ballot.
The head honcho for New Models was a Republican who also worked for Sarah Palin. Brinkman served as a state representative as a Republican.
The governor, unable to patch a deficit hole with slot machine revenue postponed a planned tax cut. Rev John Edgar of the United Methodist Anti-Gambling Task Force said this or even a tax hike would be preferable to slots.
So is the Democrat governor to blame for a tax hike or, more to the point, not giving us a tax cut? Or is it result of a small group of politically savvy Republican theocrat obstructionists?

101010

Spring grove Cemetery is hosting another annual Cruise In with cars dating back to before those ancient days of 1985.
There will be grub, a guided "Cemetery Cruise" at 6 PM, mini tram tours and a vintage hearse exhibit.
Sadly, Kim Falcon is not scheduled to attend.
Be there or be square.

Captain Lust


popular sea chanty
PTL for the intertubes.
Back before VCRs & DVDs & such, porn was a little more professional. There were actually "stars", stories, direction, production values (ok, all borderline) and they were distributed through the theater circuit in the traditional way. Captain Lust was one of those movies. Produced in 1977 it told the tale of two rival pirate crews, one a crew of nasty men commanded by the evil Captain Lust (and the evil Cuntessa) & another, a crew of pirate women (with hearts of gold) led by some handsome captain dude, in a race to find a hidden treasure. Captain Lust has an advantage, however, in that he actually has a treasure map. The map is tattooed onto the penis of an idiot monk, Brother John and to read it he must be erect. To facilitate this they kidnap a nun and.....
The movie has it all. action, drama, passion, romance, & saucy pirate songs!
My friends & I decided to go out to the New Moon Drive In (now a mustard distribution facility) to see the movie. We had had a keg party the night before & had not finished the keg (yeah, we were slackers), so we loaded it into a van, packed up some lawn chairs & went to the drive in.
We hoisted brews, sang along with the choruses & laughed at the close ups of genitalia on the 60 x 30 foot screen.
It was a memorable evening. Good friends, stale beer, overbuttered, oversalted popcorn, pirate songs & smut. What could be better?
Anyway, the industry didn't think much of archiving their work so when video tape & later DVDs came along Captain Lust seemed to be lost.
One notable actress from the movie, Sharon Mitchell, said many fans recalled the movie fondly for years. She ended her career in porn after being viciously raped. She went on to get a PHD in sexuality & started up the AIM Healthcare Foundation that helps performers in the porn industry deal with physical & mental health issues.
Anyway, in searching for this movie I did find a picture of a DVD cover but it was on a Russian website. Getting adult movies shipped to Cincinnati can be dicey, anyway. Finally, I found it on a torrent site & I am downloading as I type. At 1.2 KB/s (more like a trickle), I should have it sometime in mid October.
YAY!
Anybody up for a pre-Halloween screening?
In my basement.
With the windows blacked out?

Northside House Tour

Sunday, October 3 marks the 20th anniversary Northside House Tour. XIII in fact. yeah, don't try to do the math....
This year's tour is less focussed on restoration & more on renovation. 12 buildings in all, the tour includes a store that had to be completely gutted to create a single family home and a church that once hosted a wedding on motorcycles and now houses an IT firm.
Most of the homes on the tour were remodeled by the owners, some pro, some not. One house was remodeled by CNCURC who has refurbished a few houses in Northside as well as built a couple LEED certified homes on a previously troublesome corner.
The tour runs from the east side of the neighborhood to the west & there are free vans to negotiate some of the longer walks between buildings. The route is about 2.4 miles & there are a lot of steps. There are also a lot of great views.
Tickets can be purchased at the door at The McKie Recreation Center, 1655 Chase Avenue on the third for $18 or today for $15 at:
Shake It Records
Taykor Jameson Hair Salon
North Side Bank & Trust
Building Value
and online here
Happen Inc., a family art organization, will be open & will be distributing wind chimes made by the kids to the first 50 - 75 people. CAIN & The Family Enrichment Center will also be open.
St Bonifave church is on the tour (after 1PM) and will be hosting an organ recital at 4PM.
As usual, there's plenty of good eats in Northside with brunches at Melt, Take the Cake, Honey, Ko Sho, The Comet, and Sidewinder Coffee & Teas. Later, The Comet & Mayday will be open with their regular menus & the Comet Bluegrass All Stars will be playing at The Comet around 8.

I Got a CGI On You

The Daily Mail tells us that Jessica Alba does not really appear naked in the new smash hit movie, causing race riots across the land, Machete. She is rally wearing utrou & it has been magically removed with CGI for the movie. Ms Alba claims she is too shy & proper to appear naked in a move. But she does appear naked, so.....
In my experience, however, it is a lot easier to robe a person than to disrobe a person, so I'm actually wondering if she was, in fact, filmed naked & the supposedly pre post production shots are actually post production shots released to save face.
Not that she needs to. Alba isn't the greatest actress in the world but she doesn't have to parade around naked to put on a good show. Just give her a gun & she's good to go.

South Fountain Porch Festival

The third annual South Fountain Porch Festival is Saturday from 9AM - 2PM on S Fountain Ave. between Clark & Liberty in scenic Springfield, OH.

Noose Son story here.
More on the area here.