WHAT… THE… FUCK…?!?!
1157 by Jeff Hess
13 August 2008
13 August 2008
13 August 2008
A SENSORY FRIENDLY STAR WARS…
1044 by Jeff Hess
When I’m wearning my educator hat, one of the tasks I perform is to work with students who have a variety forms of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Because of that role, I’m on the mailing list for The Autism Society of Greater Cleveland.
This morning I got an email announcing a sensory-friendly showing of Star Wars — Episode II: The Clone Wars at 10 a.m. on Saturday, 23 Augustt at:
Ridge Park Square 8
4788 Ridge Road
Brooklyn, OhioGeneral Manager Paul Gellott
216.749.0260
What is a sensory-friendly showing? It is a showing where:
The auditoriums will have their lights brought up, the sound turned down, and we will not start the films with a pre-show or trailers. Additionally, audience members may get up and walk around, talk, sing, etc.; in other words, our “Silence is Golden” policy will not be enforced unless the safety of the audience members is questioned.
I’m looking forward to attending, observing the adaptations and learning how I might alter my own teaching style.
13 August 2008
WHAT THEY SAID…
0949 by Jeff HessOther Internet experts in the United States said the attacks against Georgia”s Internet infrastructure began as early as July 20, with coordinated barrages of millions of requests – known as distributed denial of service, or D.D.O.S., attacks – that overloaded and effectively shut down Georgian servers.
12 August 2008
12 August 2008
11 August 2008
WHAT THEY SAID…
1856 by Jeff HessNow the McCain camp knows full well by now that that sentence [A Tax Increase On Anyone Earning More Than $42,000 A Year.] – spoken, not printed, in the ad – is an outright lie. Such a tax hike is not in Obama’s platform. The basis on which the claim is even made is bogus, as even Fox News has conceded. But McCain pushes a bald lie to give a smidgen of substance to an otherwise entirely personal negative ad.
What do you call a Republican who is happy to lie directly to people’s faces? John W. McCain.
11 August 2008
ROLDO ON FANNIE…
1734 by Jeff HessRoldo Bartimole emailed this to me this afternoon.
Fannie Lewis – A Cleveland Original and a Treasure
By Roldo Bartimole
Fannie Lewis didn”t have a degree from Harvard University but her common sense wisdom could often exceed the judgments of the Ivy League learned.
I can”t count the hours I spent with Fannie at committee and Council meetings over 20 or more years. I do know she took up a lot more of my time than I wanted. She could go on and on and on.
Yet there were times during those long disputations when Fannie – that”s what most people called her – would zero in smack on the problem everyone else was dancing around.
The last time I saw Fannie Lewis was at a hearing more than two years ago.
I wrote: “Fannie often displays the wisdom of a hard life lived.”
And she did live a hard but productive life.
At the time I wrote, “I approached her as we both waited for an elevator. Age has caught up on her. I”m not sure she recognized me at first. She is bent by time but that”s physically. I believe she still could win re-election in Ward 7 even if she had passed. (And whoever runs to replace her better wish there isn”t another woman with the name Fannie Lewis.)
I went on: “I told her that I wished I had kept a record of her truisms through the many, many years I”ve observed her at City Hall. She simply smiled.
“She had spoken another gem that afternoon.
“Fannie told the standard lineup of suits at the table when millions of dollars were being discussed (for the Wolstein Flats project),
“”A hammer hurts whether it hits you in the hand or the head.”
“The context was about the power and damage of eminent domain.”
Fannie could be a tiger and she could be a gracious comforter. She knew when to be one of the other.
I always said you needed a visa to get into her Hough 7th ward. She controlled it that tightly and not always graciously. She didn”t appreciate competition.
During one long six-hour discussion as Council leadership tried to give Gateway boss Tom Chema cover, Fannie summed up what they were trying to do with disgust:
“Stevie Wonder can see what”s goin” here,” she said.
At another long meeting about two parking garages the city eventually built for Gateway, Lewis had trouble with the demeanor of then Council President Jay Westbrook and Finance Chairman Jim Rokakis. They gave little time and much disgust to protesters who wanted to speak against the proposal.
I wrote that Westbrook “gave Lewis a look of condescension, asking her if she had finished in such a manner that the question took the tone of a put-down.”
Lewis was having none of it. “Quit being facetious with me,” she told Westbrook and then “caught him where it hurt, his past.” Westbrook had been a radical when he entered Council. “You and I came into this Council screaming about the same things (corporate rip-offs of public money).” Then she had a warning, “Don”t play me cheap.”
At the same meeting Lewis predicted what would and did happen with the garages built for Gateway – huge losses for the city in the millions of dollars each year.
Lewis, brought up on farm land, summed up the eight pieces of legislation used to complete the parking deal: “This ties up the city like you tie up a hog.”
Fannie Lewis was a Cleveland original and a treasure, especially for Cleveland”s poor.
11 August 2008
10 August 2008
10 August 2008
JOUNEY TO THE CENTER OF THE EARTH…
1030 by Jeff HessThe science is sound, the goal audacious. The cost; astronomical. I remember the feeling of wonder at the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo missions. Nothing else in my lifetime has approached that awe.
Yet, for all his courage and vision, who, less that a century later, remembers Shackleton? And just short of forty years after Neil Armstrong pulled rank on Buzz Aldrin and became the most famous human to blow his shot at immortal words, what infinitesimal portion of humanity believes beating the Russians to the Moon was more important that kicking their butts in hockey at Lake Placid?
It is easier to get to the moon than it is to lift the poorest one-fifth of the the World’s population out of devastating poverty. President John Kennedy said:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
He was right. We must to the hard things.
9 August 2008
9 August 2008
$2/DAY.. $60/MONTH… $720/YEAR…
0928 by Jeff HessThat doesn’t seem like much, specially compared to what my cigarette habit used to cost, but that’s about what I’m paying for my coffee house habit. It’s actually a little more than that because, like this morning, I buy food as well and it all adds up.
Now, as I continue my personal journey Going Out From Egypt, I know that I can put that $700 to better use someplace else.
Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to stop at the bank later today and take out $44 in singles. That’s $2 per day for the rest of August. I’m going to put the money in an envelope labeled Coffee Houses and stick in one of the cubbyholes on my desk. When I feel the need to hit a coffee house, I’ll take out $2 and spend it there.
At the end of the month, any money left over will go into a second envelope until I have enough to open a dedicated savings account. Then I’ll take out another $2 per day for the next month and start the process all over again.
I’m not giving up coffee or coffee houses. I just want to drink more coffee at home where I’m writing; and to make my coffee house times less routine and more mini-holidays.
8 August 2008
MY COMMENTS…
1057 by Jeff Hess7 August 2008
5 August 2008
HOW THE HELL DID HE GET CREDENTIALED…?
1912 by Jeff HessTim Russo makes me rethink my trust in Barack Obama’s Secret Service detail.
5 August 2008
WHAT THEY SAID…
1342 by Jeff HessMichael Grunwald wrote:
How out of touch is Barack Obama? He’s so out of touch that he suggested that if all Americans inflated their tires properly and took their cars for regular tune-ups, they could save as much oil as new offshore drilling would produce.
Gleeful Republicans have made this their daily talking point; Rush Limbaugh is having a field day; and the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled “Barack Obama’s Energy Plan” to Washington reporters.
But who’s really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now.
Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.
In fact, Obama’s actual energy plan is much more than a tire gauge. But that’s not what’s so pernicious about the tire-gauge attacks. Politics ain’t beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse smears.
The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis – the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming.
It’s a pretty simple concept: if our use of fossil fuels is increasing our reliance on Middle Eastern dictators while destroying the planet, maybe we ought to use less.
5 August 2008
5 August 2008
WHAT THEY SAID…
0910 by Jeff HessThe normal remedies for economic downturns are necessary. But even an adequate stimulus package will offer only temporary relief this time, because this isn”t a normal downturn. The problem lies deeper. Most Americans can no longer maintain their standard of living. The only lasting remedy is to improve their standard of living by widening the circle of prosperity.
The heart of the matter isn’t the collapse in housing prices or even the frenetic rise in oil and food prices. These are contributing to the mess but they are not creating it directly. The basic reality is this: For most Americans, earnings have not kept up with the cost of living. This is not a new phenomenon but it has finally caught up with the pocketbooks of average people. If you look at the earnings of non-government workers, especially the hourly workers who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, you’ll find they are barely higher than they were in the mid-1970s, adjusted for inflation.
