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I have finally figured out the dilemma of how to finance our three major league sports teams. And it could cost you nothing. Or you could be as generous as you wish.
The answer is not the taxing way of today; but the charity way of tomorrow. And our noble past.
The way Cleveland has led the nation since the beginning of the 20th Century.
The charitable way.
Give, give and give.
We should call upon the good will of our corporate and civic community to establish the United Way of Sports.
Pancake breakfast on Public Square. Corporate sponsored dinners at the Renaissance. Collections of dimes and nickels at schools.
Let the spirit fly. We know the drill. We invented it.
If we can beg for the city’s many social service agencies why not beg for our sports teams. Certainly they wouldn’t reject free charity.
The United Way brags about its ability to raise “money for the health and human services” of our people. Why not the same for our beloved Continue Reading »
I wrote this letter to Lawrence Block this morning:
Dear Mr. Block,
I just finished your latest Bernie Rhodenbarr and, as always, I wish the tale had continued longer.
Elmore Leonard was famous, at least among writers, for suggesting that his particular skill was to know when to “leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” I think that one of your particular skills is knowing how to make those parts unskippable.
I found more of such passages in “Counted Spoons” than usual and I was much happier for that discovery.
In particular the descriptions of Button Gwinnett, the original title of “The Curious Life of Benjamin Button,” the existence of apostle spoons, Meyer Meyers—not to be confused with Meyer Meyer (or, for that matter Major Major)—and so many other minute details that delighted me so much.
Gabriel García Marquez told The Paris Review in 1981 that:
[I]f you say that there are elephants flying in the sky, people are not going to believe you. But if you say that there are four hundred and twenty-five elephants flying in the sky, people will probably believe you. One Hundred Years of Solitude is full of that sort of thing. That’s exactly the technique my grandmother used. I remember particularly the story about the character who is surrounded by yellow butterflies. When I was very small there was an electrician who came to the house. I became very curious because he carried a belt with which he used to suspend himself from the electrical posts. My grandmother used to say that every time this man came around, he would leave the house full of butterflies. But when I was writing this, I discovered that if I didn’t say the butterflies were yellow, people would not believe it.
I confess that I had a difficult time not fact checking the story until 24-hours after I finished the book. I made a little side bet with myself trying to determine which bits were real and which were telling details that created the reality. I mostly, to your credit, lost.
Finally, did the genesis for “Counted Spoons” arise from learning about Gwinnett? From a discussion about “Benjamin Button?” From seeing apostle spoons at the Met? A passing play on Meyer Meyers vs. Meyer Meyer? Or none of the above?
In any case, thank you again for a great afternoon reading.
Do all you can to make today a good day,
Jeff Hess
Nathaniel Rich writes:
…most students didn’t know what to make of his music. I certainly didn’t. It was obvious that he was playing flawlessly pieces of astounding difficulty and complexity, but only the other musicians on stage and his instructors were fully able to appreciate his talent. After one performance, a classmate, struggling to formulate a response to what she had heard, told Charlie that she “liked” his music, but admitted finding it “pretty weird.” “Weird,” Charlie repeated, nodding in approval. He thanked her. “That,” he said, “is the highest compliment you could’ve given me.”
I think he sensed her bewilderment—and mine—because he went on to explain that his personal mantra was to “make it weird.” Weird, he said, meant surprising, unexpected, unusual, new. Weirdness was the quality he sought when he listened to music, and also when he watched movies, and read books. All great art was weird.
I’ve bought too many magazines, attended too many workshops and own too many books, all on the subject of writing, to not understand a very simple truth about story telling: the Magic is in the details.
Mya Gosling’s delightful condensations of the plays of William Shakespeare are a perfect example. She is able to reduce the greatest works of literature in the English language to three cartoon panels and fewer than a couple dozen words because the stories are that simple. I would argue that Gosling really only needs two panels: the first, showing who is happy (in the case of Hamlet, for instance, his uncle Claudius) and the second, showing who fucks that up (the ghost of Hamlet’s father).
The Magic came when Shakespeare filled several hours with poetry and prose that allowed the audience, for that brief time, to transcend their very existence.
That is what a writer does.
Since the Marietta Times does not publish a Sunday edition, what was your favorite story this week? What story did the Marietta Times not report or under-report this week?
This week, the Associated Press exposed a secret program run by the U.S. Agency for International Development to create “a Twitter-like Cuban communications network” run through “secret shell companies” in order to create the false appearance of being a privately owned operation. Unbeknownst to the service’s Cuban users was the fact that “American contractors were gathering their private data in the hope that it might be used for political purposes”–specifically, to manipulate those users in order to foment dissent in Cuba and subvert its government. According to top-secret documents published today by The Intercept, this sort of operation is frequently discussed at western intelligence agencies, which have plotted ways to covertly use social media for ”propaganda,” “deception,” “mass messaging,” and “pushing stories.”
If the first thought that entered your head was “oh, this is Cuba, not the United States, our Constitutionally created government would never do this to us,” then you need to get your head examined.
These ideas–discussions of how to exploit the internet, specifically social media, to surreptitiously disseminate viewpoints friendly to western interests and spread false or damaging information about targets–appear repeatedly throughout the archive of materials provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Documents prepared by NSA and its British counterpart GCHQ–and previously published by The Intercept as well as some by NBC News–detailed several of those programs, including a unit devoted in part to “discrediting” the agency’s enemies with false information spread online.
The documents in the archive show that the British are particularly aggressive and eager in this regard, and formally shared their methods with their U.S. counterparts. One previously undisclosed top-secret document–prepared by GCHQ for the 2010 annual “SIGDEV” gathering of the “Five Eyes” surveillance alliance comprising the UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the U.S.–explicitly discusses ways to exploit Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social media as secret platforms for propaganda.
Maybe when the stocks for Facebook, YouTube and Twitter begin to plummet, and the billionaires see their bank accounts dwindle, then elected officials will begin to do the jobs they were elected to do–to protect the Constitution of the United States–and stop running in constant fear of losing the next election because a terrorist attack happened on their watch.
If there was ever a reason for one-term-and-you’re-out term limits, this is it.
Still not convinced because you don’t use all that social media stuff that the kids use? Do you stay at hotels?
One of the programs described by the newly released GCHQ document is dubbed “Royal Concierge,” under which the British agency intercepts email confirmations of hotel reservations to enable it to subject hotel guests to electronic monitoring. It also contemplates how to “influence the hotel choice” of travelers and to determine whether they stay at “SIGINT friendly” hotels. The document asks: “Can we influence the hotel choice? Can we cancel their visit?”
Previously, der Spiegel and NBC News both independently confirmed that the “Royal Concierge” program has been implemented and extensively used. The German magazine reported that “for more than three years, GCHQ has had a system to automatically monitor hotel bookings of at least 350 upscale hotels around the world in order to target, search, and analyze reservations to detect diplomats and government officials.” NBC reported that “the intelligence agency uses the information to spy on human targets through ‘close access technical operations,’ which can include listening in on telephone calls and tapping hotel computers as well as sending intelligence officers to observe the targets in person at the hotels.”
The GCHQ document we are publishing today expressly contemplates exploiting social media venues such as Twitter, as well as other communications venues including email, to seed state propaganda–GHCQ’s word, not mine–across the internet…
The Superintendent of Cleveland Public Schools or the Editor of the Plain Dealer…?
Financial struggles plaguing millennials
BrAva ‘Mom Prom’
Peoples Bank Theatre awarded $500K from state
Artists bond over memories
Home health aide sentencedWhat is your opinion of people who have tattoos?
Does is seem odd to you that the three men asking hundreds of millions of tax dollars from the public never even appear before the public or its representatives?
It seems outrageous to me. Farcical.
They take us for Moe, Larry and Curly. In other words dumb.
Suckers who will pay their bills for them. Suckers who will do so endlessly. And they show no appreciation for the gift.
Jimmy “The Chiesler” Haslam has apparently made a practice of treating people as he does business in his trucking business – as suckers.
It comes naturally with Dan Gilbert. Been doing it all his life.
And Larry Dolan has a family history to live up to. Cable dollars.
But who are the real suckers. We who keep electing politicians who don’t even insist that the three owners come to the table and Continue Reading »
Open for Spring
Crazy car chase
Historic discovery
Bids sought for oil, gas leases on city land
Church began in a garageShould students be banned from wearing hoodies in school?
I’ve written fairly extensively on abandoned Walmarts, we have one in Cleveland Heights now, but Nancy Warner has captured a desolation and abandonment from a previous century and of a more deeply personal kind.
Wandering through the old buildings on the windy countryside was, for Warner, an almost spiritual experience. Warner, who lived in Nebraska until she was 20, said photographing helped her rediscover a connection to the area. “The light on the edge of a curtain could trigger some sort of feeling or memory for me,” she said. “It might not have even been a conscious memory, but it was something that happened, and I’d have an emotional reaction to it. That’s what I would then try to recreate with the print when I’d get into the darkroom.”
I don’t need to go to Nebraska to find abandoned farmhouse, there are plenty of them where I grew up in Washington County. There is a melancholy beauty in the structures that Warner photographed because they represent the will of people who sought a space, a tract of land, where they could build an identity and a purpose.
There is nothing remotely beautiful about an abandoned Walmart because all the vacant and crumbling building represents is the greed and pathological need to accumulate more wealth from selling cheap plastic crap from communist China.
Good morning Marietta.
I’m from Marietta though I moved to the northern terminus of I-77 back in 1984 and have lived here now longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. Thanks to the Internet, I’ve stayed in touch and reading the Marietta Times online has been a habit I’ve maintained for a long time.
On Wednesday, 26 March, that stopped when the Ogden Newspapers erected a paywall around the paper. I was prepared, actually enthusiastic about, buying a subscription so that I could continue to read and discuss what was happening in my hometown. I didn’t, or perhaps I should say, have not yet, paid for a subscription because the Times won’t tell me what the price tag is until I turn over my personal information for their data mining.
I’ve decided to conduct an experiment in conversation. For at least a week, maybe longer, I’ll post a brief note each morning containing the local news headlines and extend an invitation to Times’ readers to read their own copy of the paper and comment on those stories. My usual rules for commenters, be civil, apply and for first-time commenters, know that I’ll be vetting your initial comment and that can take me an hour or two because I do have a day job.
Today’s headlines include:
Child abuse
Farm vs. science: GMOs in our food
Blizzard bags help schools make up lost time
Heroin bust follows wreck
Public service awards presentedHow do you think you would do in math classes today?
Comments are not restricted to just these stories. Any story published in the Times is fair game.
One of the weakest arguments favoring the sin tax is the whining of Cleveland Council President Kevin Kelley that the city would have to pay out of its general fund for whatever the teams want.
Bullshit.
Kelley, new to leadership, keeps moaning about “his” budget and that it will be the only fallback if voter say “No” to a 20-year, $290 million (based on latest monthly sin tax collections of more than $14 a month).
(You may have noticed Mayor Frank Jackson playing The Shadow again.)
Ever hear of a renegotiation, Kevin?
The city budget will be the only alternative, Kelley keeps saying, for payment for the needs (or should we say desires) of the tenant teams.
Nonsense.
This is the only situation where the tenants dictate the terms of their tenancy. And Kelley seems to enjoy the deception. He certainly Continue Reading »
So, my hometown newspaper, the Marietta Times, went behind a pay-wall a week ago.
I was at first supportive of the move, small-town newspapers have a tough row to hoe, and financially supporting the paper made sense since I was reading stories everyday and often engaging in the conversation by contributing to the comment threads associated with the news stories.
As much as I tried, however, I couldn’t get a simple answer as to how much the subscription would cost me and precisely what the formatting would be unless I submitted my personal information for data mining. (Can you imagine shopping some place where the ask for your credit card before telling what the prices are?)
Times‘ readers have contacted me to discuss the evolution and one of the aspects that seems to have motivated the Times is, surprising to me, the need to better control the comments on the stories. One correspondent wrote to me that:
…both Ogden [the actually owners of the Marietta Times are based in Wheeling, West, by gawd, Virginia JH] papers are making some changes. They began thinking in this direction because of the unpleasantness after MLK Day involving a blatant racist who used no less than eight fake-identities before finally getting bounced. …the end result will probably be the gradual purging, ‘er elimination of ALL comments by summer). Like you, I will certainly not miss what we Irish call “blather,” but I still support Voltaire’s oft-repeated saying about “defending your right to say it.”
I’m pondering whether or not there is an opportunity here for Have Coffee Will Write to provide an open, but moderated, forum where Times‘ readers could comment on stories. I’m going to put the idea out there in Marietta and see what happens.
Here’s what I have in mind. I’ll post a daily, open-forum post on HCWW with an invitation to comment on headlines in that day’s Marietta Times. The comments will be moderated, just as all comments on HCWW are, but anyone who has read my blog since its inception in 2004, knows that I’m pretty liberal with permissions. I rarely ban anyone unless they are just plain assholes.
I’ll post the Not The Marietta Times in the morning, and continue to do so for a week, and see if any one bites.
[Roldo sent me this piece at 1352 on Monday,31 March, after I went “Thinking.”]
Many citizens of Cuyahoga County should be ashamed of themselves.
They are not alone, however.
They contribute to a totally out of balance society. Likely without even giving it a thought.
This trivial thinking leads to community squalor all over America.
Isn’t Detroit just a perfect case.
The Detroit Tigers just signed baseball’s best hitter Miguel Cabrera to a new eight year contract worth $30.25 million a year. Meanwhile, the city is bankrupt and its people deep in poverty. Really shameful.
You should think about these matters when on May 6 you go to vote on the sin tax to support the owners of three major league teams here.
What you do contributes, whether you believe it or not, to Cabrera’s income.
Your “investment” supports not only Cabrera but the salary scales of many professional ball players in addition to their very much richer “owners.”
They skate on your nickels and dimes. And the $290 million Issue 7 insures to them for 20 years.
Kobe Bryant $61.9 million (figures with endorsements). LeBron James $59.8. (with a Cleveland assist), Drew Brees $51 million. The list could go on to 30 baseball, football and basketball players paid more than $20 million a year.
You contribute to those outrageous salaries when you thoughtlessly say yes to heavy public subsidization of the sports business.
It’s time people gave some serious thought to what they want to support in their civic life.
It’s difficult to do when the news media constantly ply us with propaganda about the successes in the city.
They would not spend as much time and effort on the real needs of the city.
You can see that when people regurgitate for the camera the answer to what we should be doing with our public dollars.
Fix the potholes.
As if that was the real problem of the city.
From my sophomore year at Ohio University. Oh gawd, the hair…!
[Roldo sent me this piece at 1230 on Saturday, 29 March, after I went “Thinking.”]
Can we see into the future?
Sure we can.
When County Executive Ed FitzGerald indebted Cuyahoga County residents to build a $270 million, 600-room hotel, a reasonable person would tell you that he put taxpayers in a perilous position.
I said it then. I believe it now.
The hotel, to be constructed where the Cuyahoga County administration building once stood indebts taxpayers with financing a hotel. It also required the County to move its offices.
The heavy financing comes at a time when the County pols are asking voters to authorize another $290 million for sports stadiums, for expensive riverfront and lakefront subsidies and a costly Public Square revamping.
Do they believe everyone’s pockets are overflowing with excess money?
Do they understand that much of Cleveland suffers from a poverty of income and spirit?
Here’s what two academics in the Wall Street Journal recently wrote about Baltimore, which also built Continue Reading »
Like everyone, I get gushes of sewage in my spam box everyday, and occasionally I go down there to muck out the filth so that I can make sure that the filters haven’t inadvertently trapped an important communication.
The other day, this bit of stupidity popped up from a lying sack of shit who might, or might not, actually steal people’s money by lying about abilities that she cannot possibly possess.
From: Tara the Psychic Medium [mailto:TarathePsychicMedium@acbyd.com]
Sent: Saturday, March 29, 2014 09:09
To: ******@havecoffeewillwrite.com
Subject: Want to know your future let me help you
Now, if Tara, or whoever the spamming waste of human genome might be, actually possessed the ability to see the future, the subject line would have read: You want to know your future and you want me to help you.
How do you know anyone claiming to be able to speak with the dead, move objects with their mind or predict the future (and don’t let you know up front that their performance is an illusion by billing themselves as a magician) isn’t a grifter?
Easy, they make the claim.
[Roldo sent me this piece at 1230 on Wednesday, 26 March, after I went “Thinking.”]
City and County politicians are trying to put Cuyahoga County residents in a box on the sin tax.
They are counting on voters to be gullible and a credulous news media to do the selling job, aided by a million dollar ad campaign.
However, I think they have finally outfoxed themselves by taxing themselves into a box – there are too many tax hikes for the public to swallow.
The sports tax is the biggest one.
On the May 6th ballot there will be tax levies, in addition, for schools or cities in Shaker Heights, Pepper Pike, Maple Heights, Seven Hills, Parma, Strongsville, Brooklyn, Olmsted Falls and Bedford Heights. Residents will be taxing themselves at home. It hurts.
In the near future there will be other tax hikes, including renewal of the cigarette tax for arts and culture, not to mention yet unknown tax needs.
But the big push will be to aid, without clear knowledge of neither how the money will be used on these sports facilities nor what other needs they’ll require thereafter. It’s a blank check deal.
I was on the Mansfield Frazier radio (WTAM 1100 Sundays) show twice recently with Cleveland Council President Kevin Kelley.
Kelly’s argument reflects the false reasoning of the teams and the Greater Cleveland Partnership. (You may have noticed numerous TV ads running day and night. You will find once contributions have to be reported Continue Reading »
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