A week and a half ago 300,000 people were without power here. Traffic lights weren't working for days.
Today the power goes out again in large parts of Kettering, Centerville, and Beavercreek and people STILL DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO WHEN A TRAFFIC LIGHT ISN'T WORKING?!?! Seriously?! A week and a half ago NO traffic lights were working. How have people not figured it out yet?!
I'd like to thank Z-93/Fly 92.9 for simplifying my radio listening. Now when neither 103.9 or 94.9 have anything good on I no longer have to switch over to 92.9 to see if they have anything good. Now I can just know that it won't be good and instead just go straight to my cd player. It's also freed up a preset on my radio for RadioU.
I have to say, I'm quite impressed by The Greene.
Let me just get my negative thoughts out of the way first... 1)The actual shopping choices are overall too fashiony for my taste. 2)The garages kind of confuse me. The Beech Garage you can enter and go up one level and that's it. The Stroop garage on the other hand... you enter and... that's the only level, there is no up and down.
That's really all I've got negative-wise. I had something about the Theater having this big parking lot behind it but no entrance facing that parking lot but I've decided to let that go in the interest of letting them draw people in to the overall "Greene" rather than letting people just go to the theater and come straight back out into the parking lot.
All in all it's quite polished for something that's really only less than halfway done.
And this really was a new experience for me. I've never been to Easton Town Center, I'm really only familiar with the "traditional malls" and Newport on the Levee and I was really expecting it to be not too far off from Newport, but it's not even close. (Though I do think it could use a Gameworks.) Newport has a lot of the same kind of stores but The Greene being in the open air just adds a ton. You leave a store at The Greene and, unlike with malls or Newport, you're not heading to another store, you're strolling. You're not confined in this one building, you're on city streets and... in a park. I was also surprised by how it managed to draw me in. Strolling through the main plaza you can really forget where you are, you forget that 1,000 feet to your left is that same K-Mart that's been there for 20+ years and that behind you another 1,000 feet is that MotoPhoto that used to sit on the corner across from the wooded lot. You can really lose yourself there.
And it really is a destination, not just a place to shop. It's really ridiculously easy to just make a night out of it. Dinner... movie... ice cream afterwards... you're all set.
And the Cinema de lux 14 is pretty spiffy too. It's got its own bar/grill (which when I came in seemed maybe a little undersized, the tables seemed to be filled on the first night though I suppose it might lighten up once Bar Louie opens across the street). Saw Talladega Nights in one of the Director's Halls and the experience was very nice. A little lounge outside, reserved seating so I didn't have to worry about staking out Row G, Seat 6 30 minutes in advance, food brought right to your seat, leather seats, the believable threat that they'd kick you out for talking or using your cell phone... Very nice.
Geesh, I really shouldn't have this many thoughts about a place after one visit...
Today's entry:
Supreme Court justices should be elected; not handpicked by a president who then can call in this favor to help with his party's agenda.It's just one of the worst ideas ever and shows a complete lack of understanding of how our system of government works.
From the Dayton Daily News:
City officials held a closed-door meeting on Wednesday to discuss proposals to offer Cox Ohio Publishing to get the company to keep its Dayton Daily News editorial offices in the downtown core.The hush-hush nature of the deal was damaged somewhat when a city delegation tripped an alarm in some of the Dayton Arcade buildings when they took a tour without telling the Arcade's owner.
--DDN
Gee, I wonder how a 300+ word article in the city's only major newspaper will affect the hush-hush nature of the deal.
Though to their credit... the publisher of the Dayton Daily News would not comment to the Dayton Daily News for the story published by the Dayton Daily News about the secret negotiations between the Dayton Daily News and the city of Dayton to keep the Dayton Daily News downtown.
Can anyone follow the thread of logic in that last sentence? I can't.
Today's entry:
Maybe if George W. Bush had signed the Kyoto Accord to stop global warming, Hurricane Katrina wouldn't have happened.There's really no need to say any more.
This from the DDN's roundup of this week's HS Football matchups:
Both Carroll and Beavercreek are coming off great seasons, albeit by different standards. The Patriots advanced to the D-II state semifinals before losing to eventual state champion Columbus Brookhaven.... Beavercreek is coming off its best season in recent memory. The Beavers went 3-7 and lost a pair of one-point games. Creek was 2-28 the previous three years.*sigh*
The Dayton Daily News wants you to register with them if you're going to read their stories. That's a bit of a pain, but completely understandable. It's how they go about it that's simply infuriating. The system they have is completely bass-ackwards.
When you click on a story link and you're not logged in you're redirected to a screen with a registration form and a link off to the side directing you to another page if you've been there before and already registered. This SHOULD NOT BE! The users should be redirected to the login screen and presented with a link to the registration screen they need to use if they have an account.
The majority of users who go to view a story there are likely to have been there before and to already have an account. Forcing the majority of your users, and especially the dedicated ones that come back again and again, to waste their time and effort to click a link and load another page every time they log in is just unacceptable. It's bad practice. What's worse, they just redid the registration page and it's still the same damn thing.
I tried pointing this out to them a while back in an e-mail and they were quite obtuse about it. It boiled down to "Thank you for contacting us. We have a link to the login page on the registration form."
I visit their site daily and every damn day I have to see that registration page and click the link to log in. It's a waste of my time and the time of every person who visits their site more than once.
It seems a "rare, life-size" X-Wing Fighter resides in Dayton and it can be yours for as little as $40,000.
One square mile of Downtown (including Courthouse Square and Fifth Third Field) now offers free wi-fi though the official kickoff isn't until this weekend. If things work out they hope to be able to expand it into the rest of the city.
Personally it won't do me much good but it's still a good idea. Hard to argue against something that will make Downtown more attractive and costs the city nothing.
The Dayton Warbirds are switching leagues (from the United Indoor Football Association to the National Indoor Football League) a week after they were supposed to have played their first game.
The Dayton Warbirds switched leagues Thursday, going from the United Indoor Football Association to the National Indoor Football League. The team still plans to make its debut April 2 against an opponent yet to be named.Shortly after noon, the Nebraska-based UIFA issued a press release announcing the Warbirds' season had been suspended Wednesday in a vote of the league's directors. No reason was given. Dayton's first home game had been postponed March 17 because of safety concerns in the Ervin J. Nutter Center.
--DDN
If the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency has its way, Miami Valley drivers won't have to undergo E-Check after this year.Ohio EPA Director Joe Koncelik said Tuesday the agency is recommending that the Ohio legislature drop E-Check in the Dayton and Cincinnati areas when the contract with Envirotest expires at the end of this year.
...
The test will continue in Northeast Ohio. The Cleveland-Akron area has some of the highest ozone levels in the country, and the state is under a federal mandate to keep vehicle emissions testing in that area, the state EPA said.The agency will recommend that the test be modified there, however, so cars that are four years or younger will be exempt from the test. The current rule exempts cars two years or younger.
That's good news for Dayton and Cincinnati residents but I still have to think that there's a better way to do things in the Cleveland-Akron area.
It makes it so much easier to find morons.
President George W. Bush and his supporters are supposed to be Christian. Yet, the reason I most often hear for supporting Bush's plan to privatize Social Security is this: People want to keep "their own" money. C'mon, folks. Have you forgotten the parable of the loaves and the fishes? When we share, there's plenty for everyone. When we hoard, there is never enough.First off, the "parable" of the loaves and fishes wasn't a parable. It was a miracle. It's called a miracle because those things don't happen in the normal course of events; they require God's intervention.
Secondly I'd suggest that the caller/writer refer to the "parable" of the Soviet Communism. It goes something like this: "When people are forced to share it would take a miracle for anybody to have enough."
They've managed to come to the "Let's add an 'X' to the beginning of the word and be cool" game only 10 years late. It's like the stereotypical uncool father trying to prove to his kid that he's hip, he's with it... tucka tucka tucka....
And while we're at it, the third Letter to the Editor warrants a reiteration of Friday's post on what I think of this type of overzealous, fanatical, dogmatic anti-smoking demagoguery.
You don't need to call/write in to the Dayton Daily News and call them irresponsible EVERY BLEEPING TIME they show or refer to someone smoking!
I'm not a smoker, but this constant griping couldn't be more annoying. People smoke. We don't need screeches of "Won't somebody think of the childen!?!" every time that that fact is acknowledged and followed by anything short of "second hand smoke kills 53,000 non-smokers a year".
And let's not even get started on the idiot who thinks the DDN shouldn't do a story on pipe smoking because crack addicts use crack pipes.
What the bleep happened to the snow storm?! This is the sorriest excuse for a snow storm I've ever seen. I'd barely even classify it as a dusting. (Though I suppose it'd probably still be enough to throw Raleigh, NC into chaos.)
The city gained a new $2 billion corporate citizen — and some of its history — on Tuesday when MeadWestvaco Corp. agreed to sell its paper-making business to a New York investment firm that will base the new company in Dayton.Cerberus Capital Management L.P., a private holding company with more than $14 billion in assets, will pay $2.3 billion for the as yet unnamed new company. The transaction is expected to close in the second quarter.
Cerberus, formed in the early 1990s, owns a variety of companies including Georgia Pacific Lumber, Fila Sportswear, Formica, Alamo Car Rental and Mervyn's Department Stores.
MeadWestvaco, with 30,300 employees, has 900 in Dayton. The paper-making business, with $2.3 billion in annual sales, will have 6,300 employees, including 200 in downtown Dayton on Courthouse Square. The other 700 employees will remain in Dayton with MeadWestvaco, according to spokeswoman Donna Cox in Connecticut.
I wasn't happy to see Mead merge with Westvaco and set up their headquarters in Connecticut so I see this as good news.
The employees seem to be upbeat about the announcement.
Dayton Public Schools will open an all-girls school next fall and an all-boys school in 2006, joining only a few public districts in the state to offer single-gender programs. ... Ohio Department of Education spokesman J.C. Benton said there are "very few" public districts in the state now offering them. Toledo opened the first all-girls public school last year. There are four all-boys public schools in Ohio."In many respects this is a test for us," Dayton school board president Gail Littlejohn said.
...
Students in single-gender schools perform better, have better attendance, lower dropout rates and assume greater leadership roles, district officials said. Research also shows that male and female students "learn in different ways."
At the very least it's an interesting idea. I'd rather they experimented with stuff like this than simply sticking with a failing system for the sake of inertia.
The snow switched to sleet late, keeping the height down but greatly increasing the weight. 13" total. This storm dropped more snow on the Dayton area than any other storm on record. A level 2 snow emergency here at home, and a level 3 where I was supposed to be working today kept me at home today.
Funny ep tonight, lot of Dayton stuff.
Not very realistic though. Everybody knows Dayton-area tornados hit Xenia and not downtown.
"Dayton: 2 exits of fun!"
I've been watching some documentaries on the Wright Brothers tonight and what really got my attention was the inventiveness, entrepreneurship and courage of those involved in the race for the First Flight. These people were pretty much doing this all on their own. They didn’t depend on government programs to design a flying machine. They didn’t wait for an association to come up with standards for what a plane should be. They got out there, built their own planes and flew them themselves. They were in it as much for the pride of inventing it as anything else.
There was real danger in flying those first flights. Quite a few people died in the early days. The third official passenger of the Wrights, Lt. Thomas Selfridge, died in a crash where Orville Wright himself was the pilot. Many of the best pilots on the Wrights’ exhibition team died trying to do the others one better. You don’t see the daring and spirit exhibited by those early pioneers much these days.
You certainly don’t see it in places like NASA where an accident shuts down the entire program for years. Where you see it is still with the little people. Not the big government departments, not with the multi-billion dollar corporations, but with the likes of the creators of SpaceShipOne who yesterday achieved the “first manned supersonic flight by an aircraft developed by a small company's private, non-government effort.”
True innovation doesn’t come from million or billion dollar government grants. It doesn’t come in regulations on an industry. It comes from the thirst for discovery and adventure in those willing to take the risks.
In a time where any sacrifice at all is seen as too much, where 500 men is seen as too high a price to liberate 26 million people, where we’d rather do just about anything but go back to the moon or on to Mars, maybe now is the perfect time to rediscover the sense of daring, ingenuity, and sacrifice shared by those first pioneers in flight.
Yep, 100 years since the Wright Brothers and we've been to the moon, have flown faster than 3 times the speed of sound, and can transport over 500 passengers over 7,000 miles.
And no matter what North Carolina or their stupid quarter tries to tell you, the true birthplace of aviation is Dayton, Ohio.
This time in Dayton.
A Dayton police officer tries to subdue a man and then the man ends up having a heart attack. He was then rushed to the hospital.
...
Witnesses say he was trying to break into a car, so they called police.When police got there, he was sitting on a porch, and that's when the struggle started.
The struggle ended with an officer with a black eye, and his suspect having a heart attack. Police had been able to handcuff him, then restrain his ankles.
--WDTN-TV
Cincinnati, Youngstown, and Cleveland the 17th, 18th, and 19th most dangerous cities respectively, with Dayton 7th and Columbus 6th in the 500k+ category.
Go Ohio!
Tomorrow a man will be executed for brutally murdering a woman less than 2 miles from where a 5 year old me was living at the time.
Now I'm not all gung-ho about the death penalty, but I have no qualms with this case. I have serious concerns about it being applied when we can't be 100% sure the suspect did it. In the cases where there is DNA evidence, clear eyewitness evidence, or a confession however I see absolutely no reason why brutal murderers should be kept alive longer than it takes for the legal system to be certain of their guilt.
David Brewer lured the wife of a friend to a motel, raped her (though he claims it was consenual), drove through six counties while she held a sign reading "Help Me Please" out of the trunk and then strangled her until her neck snapped and then stabbed her 15 times and slit her throat. He later confessed to his wife and to police. This ended a woman's life and ruined the lives of those who loved her and I have no problem with him being executed tomorrow.
Were there any room for ambiguity however it would be a different story.
