free to be: audio outlaws

I was reading the Cleveland FREETIMES newsprint NEO-wish-fulfillment edition (the one featuring the Mafia plot to kill Dennis Kucinich) and happened to notice an ad on the back for "Audio Outlaws." The advertisement for auto-audio featured cleavage offset by two huge speakers and a subwoofer and mentioned a 600-watt amp. I think that's a lot, but I'm not really expert in that market.

The point I wanted to make is that, obviously, these merchants know that they are selling product to make people "outlaws," that is, people who break the law when they use the product. They flaunt this in their very name. They also know that enforcement of the noise ordinances is weak. They also know that if enforcement picks up, because of the "outlaws"'replacements of the confiscated boomboxes, they'll sell more product, for a while.

Is it possible to levy a nuisance tax on this kind of business, first of all?

This summer has been sort of noisy. It adds to the stress; you get no real peace, even at 3 in the morning. For those of us in town, it creates a siege mentality, or the incipient stages of PTSD. Businesses like Audio Outlaws know they're parasites, and they revel in it.

Second, is it possible to make them a party in some sort of lawsuit? Ill-gotten gain should not stay put; it should be recovered and redistributed. We need to take our neighborhoods back, and that includes recapturing some of the equity stolen in the past. If they rob us of our peace and quiet at our homes, they also reduce the value of those homes across an enforcement area, and we need to take our money back.

hidden amenities: Mayfield Country Club

GolfStyles Ohio Edition -- Private Matters: Mayfield Country Club, An American Classic.

I came across this today when somebody sent me a free magazine subscription, and I thought the story of the course's beginnings was interesting:

Mayfield is one of those great places that’s nearly hidden in the middle of a thriving metropolis. “Most people don’t even know it’s here,” Wood says.

It began with Mayfield’s founder, Samuel Mather. Along with 300 charter members, he acquired a 235-acre plot of forest and farmland along the then-unpaved Mayfield Road in the early 1900s. In 1909, under the leadership of Benjamin E. Bourne, Malcolm B. Johnson and W.H. “Bertie” Way (who was the former Euclid Club head pro and a man who designed several other courses in the area), the building of the golf course began. “Bertie Way was the first golf professional and the architect,” says Wood. “Mayfield was a spin-off of the Euclid Club that was in downtown Cleveland. It had been designed by Bert Way (the first nine) and a second nine belonged to John D. Rockefeller. He wouldn’t let the members play the second nine holes on Sunday because he was religious. So they went to the end of the trolley line and bought a piece of property and hired Way to design and be its first pro.”

On July 15, 1911, Mayfield Country Club opened its doors. Prominent members of the time included Cyrus Eaton, Harvey S. Firestone and Dr. George Crile, co-founder of the Cleveland Clinic Foundation. In the next two years, Way’s contemporary, Donald Ross, came to Mayfield to install the bunkering, which largely remains to this day.

Way was head pro at Mayfield for 51 years, during which time the club hosted the 1915 and 1919 Western Opens, the 1920 Women’s National Championship, the 1927 Ohio Women’s Championship and the 1929 Women’s Western Championship. The 1990 Women’s Ohio State Amateur Championship was also held at Mayfield. Legendary professionals such as Chick Evans, Walter Hagen and Byron Nelson all played there.

In 1935, a swimming pool was added, something new for country clubs at the time. With the growing popularity of curling, the club added first an outdoor sheet, and later, a state-of-the-art indoor facility. Platform tennis was added in the 1960s. In 1987, a cross-country skiing program was inaugurated.

Two fires have destroyed Mayfield clubhouses, and the last one was rebuilt in 1948. In 2001, the club added a new dining room and put an addition onto the clubhouse for casual dining and a fitness center. There are locker rooms for men, women, junior boys and junior girls.

But the central lure for Mayfield is the golf course. “It’s an old-style golf course where the nines don’t come back,” Wood says.

assets, not liabilities

Cleveland Foundation seeks a remedy - cleveland.com --Gloria and I attended the annual Foundation meeting late yesterday afternoon. The PD recounting of the event at the link is decidedly weak, or insipid. I wonder if the reporter was actually there? Perhaps the Cleveland Foundation will make the text or a podcast available at their site some time. Their plans need to get into the public consciousness somehow.

Ronn Richard's talk addressed a lot of the community issues we've had in the BFD and MTB dialogue these past two years, and did so in a way designed to give hope, but the high point of the meeting was the Gries Lecture series talk by Bill Strickland from Pittsburgh. Bill actually does great things, working with what he's got and what's he's given, from the middle of a neighborhood. From the way he describes it, from the days of "the riots," it sounds a lot like Hough. The slide show and commentary were excellent, and his ideas about people as assets and not liabilities, neighborhoods, divine providence, purpose, and working with what's available were exceptional and simple. It's an incredible and inspiring story he tells. Google will help fill in the blanks.

bring in the guilds: recognizing excellence and value

Psychobilly Democrat: Why Should I Buy American? -- Good points made by our friend Jason and his commenters about what really constitutes "American-made," where you can find value for your car dollar, and why we need to be critical of blind sloganeering. We need to focus on the many benefits that accrue to the local community from foreign investment and from American-made products sporting foreign names. It's time for enlightened self-interest. It's time to forget the paid propagandists who have been pushing the union agenda, to benefit the unions first at the expense of the community. They've had their run, during the second wave. Now, in the third wave, it's time for guilds, where excellence is the thing that distinguishes the member, not the ability to enter collective bargaining and to strike.

33

Touring Warhol’s Space, and 32 Other Art-History Sites - New York Times -- Of the 33 NYC places where artsy and hip started, bloomed, and flourished, the "33 spots around the city where art history was made", I wonder how many had tax-abatement, got county dollars by harnessing smokers, or were intentionally located in preexisting, institutionally ordained art districts. What do you think? Which is the tail, which is the dog? What's wagging around here? If I recall, back in the day it used to be enough for a place just to be cheap, cool, and relatively hassle-free.

freakonomics road show visits Youngstown

YSU News Releases--Just a reminder that author and economist, economist and author Steven Levitt appears tonight in Youngstown. They seem to be getting excited about it--

First, the obligatory Staubaugh listing:
http://www.stambaughonline.com/content/view/70/

Then Janko mentions the appearance along with lots of background and pictures:
http://shoutyoungstown.blogspot.com/2007/03/tofflers-take.html

And then, two days ago, the Vindy has Levitt angering "liberals and conservatives alike." I guess they're trying to create some common ground, in a backhanded way, and raise the level of excitement based on controversy.
http://www.vindy.com/content/local_regional/321498358234966.php

Personally, I would like to be going over there today to cover this as a Meet.The.Bloggers engagement, but we couldn't make the connections. This is a good series, and the participants need to have their content posted in the perpetuity that MTB brings to the community dialogue. This isn't just about Youngstown, and it's not just about our region; this is a huge discussion, and can become huger quicker if we share. The knowledge economy starts now and grows exponentially, once we begin to share openly and freely.

YSU, through the income from an endowment established by Paul J. and Marguerite K. Thomas, established the Colloquium on Free Enterprise in 1981. The Colloquium is a series of lectures or workshops by recognized leaders in business, economics and finance for both the public and academic community.

"a kind of reciprocity emerges"

The text of Pope Benedict’s message for the 41st World Communications Day - Catholic Online: Back at the end of January, the new pope reflected on the role and shape of communications in the world today. His reflective comments made me think about the changing nature of my own consumption of information, the emergence of the Meet.The.Bloggers phenomenon, and the idea that there are just some ideas whose time has come, and they come to us all simultaneously, with a slightly different personal perspective to each. The bold emphasis is mine.

"The complex challenges facing education today are often linked to the pervasive influence of the media in our world. As an aspect of the phenomenon of globalization, and facilitated by the rapid development of technology, the media profoundly shape the cultural environment (cf. Pope John Paul II, apostolic letter “The Rapid Development,” 3). Indeed, some claim that the formative influence of the media rivals that of the school, the church, and maybe even the home. “Reality, for many, is what the media recognize as real' (Pontifical Council for Social Communications, “Aetatis Novae,” 4). 2. The relationship of children, media, and education can be considered from two perspectives: the formation of children by the media; and the formation of children to respond appropriately to the media. A kind of reciprocity emerges which points to the responsibilities of the media as an industry and to the need for active and critical participation of readers, viewers and listeners. Within this framework, training in the proper use of the media is essential for the cultural, moral and spiritual development of children. How is this common good to be protected and promoted? "

If you would just substitute "community" where you find the word "children" above, I think the reflection holds together. In a certain way, aren't we all just children after all?

a new tax, because universal coverage isn't free

Insurers slice rates on health premiums - The Boston Globe--Interesting story in the Boston GLOBE about Deval Patrick tuning up Mitt Romney's mandatory health coverage. There is no magic here; there are no miracles. From the pricing I see in the article, this is pretty much a market rate, and it feels a bit on the high side. I see no subsidy or benefit of volume pricing. I wonder if this is more of a welfare plan designed to support the Massachusetts health industry than it is universal coverage to spread risk fairly and bring about an improvement in public health.

Also, I would like to know from the journalist (Jeffrey Krasner can be reached at krasner@globe.com) the cost of opting out, in dollars, for the same hypothetical people for whom they quote the premiums. That would be balanced reporting. These paid writers need to start earning their keep and not leaving it up to the public dialogues of the blogosphere to extract the facts and frame the issues as they should be framed.

We need to start talking about truly catastrophic insurance coverage to cover the big bills, cash-only fee-for-service care with uniform price schedules for most other procedures, and public-health-clinics for maintenance and wellness programs. If we want to have a health tax, then instead of putting it off soley on the people, we can also put it off on anybody who sells things that make us fat or sick or crippled--vendors of soft drinks, stores that sell cheap plastic shoes, smoking supplies (again), fast-food emporiums, publicly traded corporations who load foodstuffs up with preservatives to prolong shelf life or stretch things out with high fructose corn syrup to maximize profits, dealers who sell raggedy used cars--in short, anybody who now profits from selling a product whose health benefits to the buyers have been reduced to increase the bottom line.

alternative investments and a moral imperative

For Yale’s Money Man, a Higher Calling - New York Times -- Here's a good read about a guy who revolutionized portfolio management in general by looking beyond the traditional mix of stocks and bonds, making Yale's endowment the standard against which all others are measured. The article also gives you a glimpse of the philosophy behind Yale, and an idea of why so many Yale graduates focus on quality of life issues and wind up in positions of public service. Around here, a cataloguing of Yalies who serve includes the Morrison brothers, Ed and Hunter; David Pogue; Sherrod Brown; and Oliver "Pudge" Henkel. On a national level, we have Garry Trudeau and Sir John Templeton, William F. Buckley and Bill Clinton, George Pataki, and the current president and his most recent competitor. It seems to be an interesting school, and Mr. Swenson has made it possible for everybody who qualifies to receive an education there. It's a long article, but take time to read the whole thing. Here's the section on the move to alternative investments:

Yale has every reason to want him to stay. After joining the university’s investment office when he was just 31, Mr. Swensen moved Yale’s portfolio away from a strict menu of stocks and bonds, favoring instead more diverse instruments like hedge funds, commodities like oil and timber, and private company investments.

That strategy revolutionized endowment investing, and other schools have followed suit. Mr. Swensen’s track record and his growing cachet have helped Yale attract donors who believe that their gifts to the university will be well deployed. Although his two books, “Pioneering Portfolio Management” and the more recent “Unconventional Success,” have helped raise his profile as an investment guru, he remains ambivalent about promoting himself. He notes that there are thousands of university professors who have also forgone more lucrative careers to put their skills to work in the academic world.

Hunter Morrison unchained

Meet the Bloggers » Midtown Brews: Hunter Morrison--I first became acquainted with Hunter back in the late 1970s; I was recently arrived back in town from Atlanta, a newly minted Realtor with a focus on older properties, hanging out with all the young visionaries promoting Ohio City, downtown living at The Park & The Chesterfield, the reintegration of Hough, Clevelanders for 1,000 Families (Garrett Brodhead), adaptive reuse, and all the other cool things that were happening in Boston and Baltimore. Then, Hunter fell silent for a while, but now he's back, and he's speaking the truth, embellished only by a happy turn of phrase every now and then. This podcast of our February 1st sit over at Webtego's conference room is something we all must listen to, and then listen to again. There's history, hubris, and a glimpse of the future of the region.

Mentioned are his directorship at the Center for Regional Studies, David Sweet, Youngstown State, George McKelvey, the Hough Development Corporation and Kucinich, the planning award garnered by Youngstown 2010, "co-convening," the condition of Youngstown prior (peeling paint, bad attitude, and no place to go but up), Urban Strategies out of Toronto, and the vision statement of Youngstown, which entails the extraordinarily liberating effect of accepting that they're a shrunken, small city. There's also the I Will Shout Youngstown blog, the European experiences from Newcastle and from Dresden, and the idea of dying and reviving cities aligned with the idea of dying and reviving gods in our culture, along the lines of Sir James George Frazier's Golden Bough. I think that somewhere around here comes mention of the old Cleveland networks and David Hoag, Alton Whitehouse, and Joseph Gorman, and a distinction made between the old hierarchical and the new networked structures. Then come Jay Williams, Tim Ryan, Alvin Toffler, and phrases like "a buzz going on," "anomaly of the comeback city," "take the dreams and boil them down to the deals," "you've got to celebrate your successes," "megapolitan areas," "the commutership," and what happens when "the 'me' gets replaced by the 'we.'" He also talks of Jim Rouse and Faneuil Hall, Hope 6, the exploitative history of milltowns and the steel industry, black boxes, identity, Volney Rogers and the first metroparks, intrinsic value, the concept that "retail follows rooftops," values, authenticity, being very siloed and very parochial, and Tim Ryan's basic question of "Who are we collectively?"

There's incredible value in this podcast. There's also passion, concern, and a bit of outrage. This is one of the more significant offerings of the MTB "portfolio"--make sure you listen to it soon.

like a tumor

Clinic, city consider new Euclid Ave. traffic plan--Like a tumor, the Cleveland Clinic just continues to spread and to grow, now wanting to take out a chunk of Euclid Avenue itself. It's already been the urban renewal shill to take down a whole neighborhood, and now it wants to become a "campus" and sprawl across and overlay the existing grid of streets. ("A Clinic spokeswoman would not comment on specifics, but said the hospital wants to calm not only traffic but also the patients, employees and other pedestrians who now face an unfriendly swath of cars and concrete. "--how ghastly!)

I view this as the height of arrogance and a clear signal that they just have too much money. It's time for a redistribution. We want our money back.

The Clinic already has its own bus system (RTA's not good enough for its employees) to shuttle Clinic commuters who opt to drive to work from remote parking to their jobsite.

It already has constructed enclosed walkways from building to building (like those things we had for the kids' hamster habitat) so that Clinic commuters need never set foot on a Cleveland city street, yet alone be breathed upon by a native Clevelander, one of those quaint figures down on the sidewalk.

It's figurehead has the hyper-preppie name of Toby.

It just has too much money, and not enough sense not to press it's luck. It's grown fat on us, and now it wants to take yet more. Let's start saying "no" to any more incursions from the Clinic into our public spaces and our public purse, and let's start taking back our money, and our heritage. We've had our pockets picked long enough.

hot tips sink ships

Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Deutsche Bank are among the major Wall Street banks that were sent letters last month by the Securities and Exchange Commission as part of a broad examination into whether bank employees are leaking information about big trades to favored clients, The New York Times reported.Trading ahead of client orders, or front-running, has long been an issue on Wall Street. But the latest S.E.C. investigation appears to have a new twist: Rather than examine whether a bank is trading ahead of its own client by using knowledge of the customer's trade, the scope of the investigation will allow regulators to see if banks tip their valued customers who then go trade at another bank, making the paper trail harder to detect. Go to Article from The New York Times>>

The Krum Kult [sic] of Personality

Last Thursday I mentioned we had a great day with Meet.The.Bloggers, and it started in the middle of the afternoon down at the Akron-Canton Airport (CAK) where we talked to two other bloggers, Fred Krum (View from 1228' at http://www.akroncantonairport.com/person2.htm) and Kristie Van Auken (It's a Trip at http://www.akroncantonairport.com/person1.htm). We met Kristie in September at the Akron Marketing Association presentation we gave on business blogging, and she said we just had to meet Fred, because he was a genius, and an early adapter, and could therefore understand implicitly what we were trying to do with MTB. She was right.

The podcast of the interview will be posted soon, but I wanted to alert you to it, and how Fred began years ago to combat the rap that CAK was a place to find "small planes, high fares, going nowheres." We sat in a newly revamped terminal that just felt good, and found out about the values available from carriers such as AirTran and Frontier, and the great fares to great places like New York City, Boston, Atlanta, Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Fort Myers. Fred focuses his staff on providing a "great experience" replicating best practices, and partnering with the best that there is. He is clever and raised by Jesuits and uses phrases such as "a charisma bypass" alongside sayings such as "the only thing that brings freedom is discipline." He points to the fact that CAK may be a market-maker for low-priced fares in this region, and that it has "made commuting possible" between this area and Florida, and perhaps even NYC. One CAK early innovation is something sensible they call "the cell phone lot." Gloria uses the phrase/slogan "a better way to be best," and we go on to the fact that CAK is an extension of the Akron/Canton Chamber of Commerce and does some heavy local advertising promotion, unlike Hopkins where we get all the national ad things we see everywhere else we go. The CAK brand is also its philosophy ("A Better Way To Go"), and they acknowledge that the first rule of leadership is "You gotta get excited." There's no doubt that free wifi is one of the first things to implement in a place that wants to attract and serve the public, and the session wraps with reiteration of the first rule of life: "You gotta know what you want and then go after it."

This session is a short course in leadership, service, public relations, and promotions, all integrated and timely and on time, too.

Our next stop that evening was at Midtown Brews, hosted by Jeff Fridman and Webtego, to talk to Hunter Morrison. And speaking of brews, CAK has Great Lakes Brewing Company as a showcased, featured business partner & vendor.

I don't quite get it

The Chris Matthews Show--I got up early this Saturday morning, 0630, zero dark thirty, to watch the Chris Matthews show; I've been watching Chris perform since I arrived at Holy Cross in the fall of 1964, finding him a year ahead of me and holding forth daily in raucous and impassioned discussions in what we called "the caf." The 1967 Purple Patcher tells me that--

"Caf" is an abbreviation for

a) a place to sit and watch other people sitting and watching,

b) a room where you can hear lunch-room theologians, boasting casanovas, budding leftists, and "Caf rats" discuss the importance of Polynesian Frog Worship,

c) an enameled chamber designed by the architect of Madison Square Garden's washrooms,

d) all or none or some or any of these

Most don't know that Chris owes much of his style to dead Jesuits. But, I've digressed. But, what the heck, it's Saturday. Anyway, what struck me as I listened to this week's gathered pundits extrapolate political data in order to game the primaries in February of 2008, a full year away, was that we were focusing on something that's a mere whistle stop on the way to the main event in November of 2008, and that's a very long time to be talking about these same aspirants, and a long time for them to be playing to the audience of potential voters. Can't we talk about something else for a while, like what is do-able and achievable here and now, and not after somebody gets elected in 2008 and into office in 2009?

The other, more pernicious aspect of these campaign-horse-race shows is that the candidates, whom we've not yet elected and may never elect, have more ability to form the public dialogue and to sway public opinion than the people we've elected already. Are we being fair to ourselves to take ourselves out of the present and focus on a hypothetical future? Let's get some work done for a change, and stop talking about what might happen, if only somebody gets a chance to implement their ideas, and if only they work out as advertised. Let the aspirants be known by their deeds, not by their promises. Let them be known by their works.

Which begs the question: Does any real work ever get done by people in the political arenas, or do we all just talk about it, as we slide into an abyss we refuse to talk about?

Gypsy Beans lives the life, walks the walk, talks the talk

Gypsy Beans & Bakery in the Gordon Square Arts District in the Detroit Shoreway Neighborhood (Cleveland, Ohio)--I just clicked through the MTB ad network to this new website and was heartened to note, on their home page, that they're advocates of what Uncle Norm has tagged as "local production for local consumption."

Please note they also offer free wifi, but you have to ask them for access first. Only after that can you do what the suburban commuters do in Tremont: Go park in the lot, use the free wifi, and not buy anything from the merchant. We first ran into this freeloader, freerider phenomenon over at Scoops last year.

There's no mention of wifi on the Gypsy Beans site right now, but I'm sure that will be forthcoming.

if I ran the city, the series, #7: shoveled walks

I was out shoveling snow this morning and decided to do a little more than I had to and proceeded to clear the walk in front of the boardup next door. The pre-dawn Denison neighborhood looked great, as though everything were occupied again by people who were neat and industrious and considerate, people who had values and pride and self-respect, just like back in 1983. I also made it possible for my neighbors to use the sidewalk without slipping or sliding or struggling with an irregular frozen surface.

One of my main complaints for the past few years of my taking early morning walks around the city is that the public walkways are nearly impassable. Sidewalks on bridges have huge piles of snow and ice, and I feel like a mountain goat getting across. The sidewalk in front of and to the side of the church at 33rd and Denison is usually very unwelcoming because they shovel only from the parking lot to the church door, and I feel there sometimes like Don Ho or Dick Blake (sans clack stick, of course), doing slick dance routines with both feet firmly planted just to keep my balance.

I also was thinking about the recent TIWIDT move by Wendell Robinson, prompted by Jeff Hess and Henery Hawk, to do good deeds to raise the level of good karmic vibrations around these parts. Then I started thinking about how it's really never too late for anything, even to become a Boy Scout, and help people--as a pre-teen, I'd always been too terrified of their rumored circle activities to join.

Now, if I ran this city, I'd do what they do out in Bedford, for instance, and have a guy run around the whole city on some sort of little scooter/plow and keep all the sidewalks passable. But since I don't live in a city that puts the functionality of its own citizens first and doesn't seem to care too much about its own appearance, all I can do is to fill the gap until help shows up. And, I can do this by keeping my own space clear and also helping clear the areas that probably won't get cleared--in front of the boardups, in front of older peoples' homes, in front of the properties of the benighted investors who have been to Carleton Sheets seminars and taken them seriously.

I feel better already, and my arms are getting some tone back, and the neighborhood looks great.

Next on the agenda: overnight parking