diaspora

:?

You monster!

Taking Montgomery to Tennessee to Reading is just fine and takes about the same amount of time. It's not terrible, it's just frustrating. I live 8 miles from work and it takes 25 minutes? I could leave earlier and it'd take about 15, but i'm not good at getting up that early.

Driving up Ridge sucks. My commute to downtown is about 25 minutes with about half of that time being from Ridge/Montgomery to 71. I am hoping for the Kennedy Connector to finally happen to cut down on some of the traffic.

DirecTV. We had to cancel because our reception was so bad. We'd been good customers for years (separately and together) and were sad to have to switch to cable (especially TWC) and I overlooked the fact that their install guy was awful and drilled holes in the side of our house and ran cables across the floor and really made a mess of things.. Turns out that we still had a balance on the account when we called to cancel...so, we paid that. They decided that since we paid the outstanding balance we must want to keep the service and never disconnected us. We went ahead and got everything going with TWC. Turns out they didn't disconnect us and only did so after our account went beyond the limit. Now they've sent us to collections for a service we weren't even receiving. Screw DirecTV and NFL Sunday Ticket and MLB Extra Innings and NHL Center Ice and the March Madness package (like i said, we were very good customers). Time Warner has been great...my only complaint is that i don't get G4.

Devil's Night was a phenomenon from the 80's...so, not quite 10-15 years ago. Dennis Archer put a pretty significant stop to that by the late 90s. Watch the PBS show "Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City" that was on a little while ago. Fantastic (i believe Mr. Boyle is interviewed) look at infrastructure and some of the issues facing Detroit and the US as a whole. The perspective of Spanish government officials is interesting; they discuss how the US infrastructure system was to be envied in the 20th century and yet now it is to be pitied.

Detroit is huge. That's the main issue, too much service area, not enough tax base to cover it. It's not a magic bullet, but i think it's a good start. Do this and maybe shut down and totally reorganize the schools? might help.

the Dutch seem to like it.

I might have to check it out. Maybe when the wife is off doing something else.

The scariest movie i remember seeing was Event Horizon. More of a sci-fi movie but really just weird and creepy. I'm not a big fan of the "jump out and shock" type of horror...more of the psychological, creepy, weird, scare the crap out of you kind.

I only moved to Ohio about 3 years ago, so i don't have the historical frame of reference. I have heard from neighbors that things were worse a few years ago. I would have expected things to trend downwards after the financial meltdown but so far haven't seen anything to speak of. If Robison is actually the border, i'm not sure what issues dmerkow is talking about. Right along Woodmont looks worse than it is and Dryden isn't all that great, but Robison is a nice street and so are Orion, Arrow, Grand Vista, O'Meara Pl, Pandora/Ashwood. We frequently walk through this part of the neighborhood.

When my wife and i were looking we saw a few houses we really liked on Ashwood. I thought the neighborhood there looked ideal. We decided on a different house, but i don't think we would have regretted buying on Ashwood. There is a dumpy two family on the corner of Woodmont and Woodford. That isn't characteristic of the neighborhood, though.

I live south of Montgomery and east of Ridge. I don't have any kids yet, but we plan on staying in this house even if we do. We aren't sure where we would send them. I'm a big proponent of Montessori and with the newly opened Montessori school we may go there. If we don't like that one, we would probably get our kid into Sands. Last resort would probably be to send them to Nativity. I think Mapleleaf is a decent street between Lester and Ridge. I'm not sure about west of there.

Where is the boundary between Pleasant Ridge and Kennedy Heights?

We bought there a couple years ago because it's good house for the money and you can get a good yard and it's still pretty close to everything. commuting via bus is pretty easy with the 2X. Molly Malone's, Gaslight, Everybody's Records and a comic book store did it for me.

I disagree. I think the model scenes in the first movies are a lot better than a majority of special effects using CGI. My issue with CGI is that it typically was so obviously different than the rest of the film. I've heard that some of the new stuff (like in Avatar) is basically seemless...and i'm sure those technologies will get better (like in the new Star Trek) but a lot of times directors don't make it gritty enough to look real.

Let's not forget who the commissioner is and where he came from...Gary Bettman, former VP of the NBA...sent to the NHL in order to destroy it. A task in which he has been largely successful.

Football can still be played with just a football and a few friends. you can play catch with just two, you can have a game with 4...football doesn't need to be about pads...but kids can play tackle without them pretty easily. The last tackle game i played without pads was in college.

It's true that hockey is not going to be as popular or maybe as accessible to the country as a whole like the NBA. It's a simple matter of economics. all you need to play basketball is a ball and and a hoop which are available everywhere. Hockey is much more costly and mostly unavailable to huge swaths of the country. I'd contend that the NBA is not the second most popular, i think it's still the NFL and MLB in those slots. The NHL is hampered by their unfortunate deal with Versus which (although available on almost all cable systems) is still second fiddle to the larger networks that actively promote their product (the NBA). NHL is still available on NBC on Sunday afternoons. It doesn't help that NBC is a terrible sports network, though. Personally? i am not a fan of the NBA. Removing defense and allowing BS continuation fouls and skewing the game so heavily in favor of a few stars is really obnoxious. I'll take the NCAA any day of the week.

what seems to be the problem with Postal Service?

"pain in my ass between Cincinnati and Detroit" Being from Michigan most people accuse me of dropping interior "t" sounds...so, i sort of say it like "date-in" but without much emphasis on the T...more so than in "Day-in" but not a lot.

I'd agree that Bloodsport is his best 80's style action movie. But, JCVD blows it out of the water in terms of actual quality. Last night Cool Hand Luke was on TCM...Great movie. Second best Paul Newman movie behind Slapshot.

Comedy: Caddyshack / Ghostbusters Drama: Schindler's List, 12 Angry Men, To Kill a Mockingbird Suspense: Jaws Sports: Slap Shot Action: Predator Sci-fi: Robocop Keanu Reeves: Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure Jean Claude Van Damme: JCVD Musical: West Side Story

Dave Eggers has some amazing books, i'd recommend: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius - autobiographical. What is the What - story of the Lost Boys of the Sudan Zeitoun - about a Syrian-American business man in New Orleans after Katrina *his books can be labeled as "fiction" in that they are based on true events and the recollections of the people that are the central characters of the stories. He calls them fiction so that while the story is mostly accurate, sometimes things are compressed, etc...to allow for the story to continue. (also to avoid people taking it all for straight fact and getting lumped in with liars like James Frey).

i wasn't advocating breaking the law...just hoping that more people could start asking and putting pressure on to get them to set a distributor. i don't want to have to drive to Lawrenceburg to get beer.