Jeff

Actually its the old Vistula pix that have got me interested....this sounds like a fascinating old neighborhood !

....yet there are quite a few sprawly german villages in Germany....eurosprawl. Its international. Back in the 1950s and 1960s and early 70s people where writing books and proposing solutions to sprawl. The Costs of Sprawl came out in the early 1970s, Gods Own Junkyard in the 1960s, and so forth....30 years on, sprawl continues...tho the sprawl we have nowadays is much more "planned" and tidied-up. Good comment about geese as suburban pigeons. They also disrupt traffic here, too, as cars stop when geese are crossing the road. One can get a ticket for running them over.

^ Kenyon? Congratulations! What was your major. Kenyon is actually known out-of-state, in part for the Kenyon Review literary magazine. I have heard it has a great campus, too.

Sparks needs to change his nick from "Drexel Dave" to "The Walnut Hills Wild Man"

.....for what its worth, an opinion piece from the Dayton City Paper An Idle Progression to a More Liberal Dayton By Valerie Burba This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Dayton Lesbian and Gay Center’s (DLGC) annual Pride Fest celebration. Once again this year, one of the DLGC’s Pride sponsors, the dance club Masque, will kick off the festival featuring its own dynamic concert series from June 1-3, comprised of 1980s pop singer Tiffany, comedienne Margaret Cho at the Schuster Center, and dance singer Amber, respectively. Saturday, June 3 will also feature the DLGC’s outdoor Pride march and rally at downtown’s Courthouse Square, followed by Masque’s after-party festivities and outdoor street carnival. Other area gay clubs such as Cell Block and The Stage Door will also celebrate Pride Fest with festivities including performances from local entertainers.

Interesting discussion I've always wondered how one would determine the low water mark in the 1700s. Surely surveys from back then could not have been that accurate. I recall reading about the litigation of the 1970s and 1980s on the boundary line. This was actually pretty serious buisness back then as this was one of the things Kentucky was using to try to stop the construction of a nuclear power plant in Indiana (Marble Hill, between Madison and Louisvill), since the outfall of this plants was beyond the historic low water line, thus would have required a Kentucky environmental permit. It also had some issues in terms of boat docks on the Indiana side. Technically, though your housboat was tied up on the Indiana shore, if it was on a pier or dock that extended out into the river a bit it could have been in "Kentucky".

Actually, in a state that has six major urban areas (if you consider Dayton, Toledo, & Akron as major) it is suprising to me the GOP does as well as it does here....Ohio politics should be more like Michigan or PA or even Wisconsin, where the Dems are competetive....

Actually Frankfurts beers are Hennigner and Binding. Licher is also a semi-local beer, from the rural area north of the city. The speciality in Frankfurt is a type of hard cider called Apfelwine, or "Appelwoi" in the local dialcet....if one is in the area one should try it.

After reading this article Im even more convinced, one way or another, Blackwell will win this fall.

There is are some good accounts of voting machine as a way of discouraging voters. This one was particularly good... At liberal Kenyon College, where students had registered in record numbers, local election officials provided only two voting machines to handle the anticipated surge of up to 1,300 voters. Meanwhile, fundamentalist students at nearby Mount Vernon Nazarene University had one machine for 100 voters and faced no lines at all.(139) Citing the lines at Kenyon, the Conyers report concluded that the ''misallocation of machines went beyond urban/suburban discrepancies to specifically target Democratic areas.''(140) So by the time the Mnt.Vernon Nazarene students had all voted and the machines where sitting mostly idle Kenyon students continued to stand in line... One just has to wonder about the impartiality of the County Board of Elections in that county...or in many other counties.

I dismissed all the talk about stolen elections and election irregularities here in Ohio as just so much sour grapes coming from tinfoil hat territory...water under the bridge..... However, this detailed article from the most recent Rolling Stone (which has pretty good political commentary even if their rock journailsm is a bit tired) is making me wonder what really went on here in 2004. Was The 2004 Election Stolen...the article footnotes its sources and ties together all the things that where happening in Ohio. Heres an excerpt with graphic, dealing with irregularities in heavily GOP rural and suburban southwest and west Ohio: VIII. Rural Counties Despite the well-documented effort that prevented hundreds of thousands of voters in urban and minority precincts from casting ballots, the worst theft in Ohio may have quietly taken place in rural counties. An examination of election data suggests widespread fraud -- and even good old-fashioned stuffing of ballot boxes -- in twelve sparsely populated counties scattered across southern and western Ohio: Auglaize, Brown, Butler, Clermont, Darke, Highland, Mercer, Miami, Putnam, Shelby, Van Wert and Warren. (See The Twelve Suspect Counties) One key indicator of fraud is to look at counties where the presidential vote departs radically from other races on the ballot. By this measure, John Kerry's numbers were suspiciously low in each of the twelve counties -- and George Bush's were unusually high. Take the case of Ellen Connally, a Democrat who lost her race for chief justice of the state Supreme Court. When the ballots were counted, Kerry should have drawn far more votes than Connally -- a liberal black judge who supports gay rights and campaigned on a shoestring budget. And that's exactly what happened statewide: Kerry tallied 667,000 more votes for president than Connally did for chief justice, outpolling her by a margin of thirty-two percent. Yet in these twelve off-the-radar counties, Connally somehow managed to outperform the best-funded Democrat in history, thumping Kerry by a grand total of 19,621 votes -- a margin of ten percent.(181) The Conyers report -- recognizing that thousands of rural Bush voters were unlikely to have backed a gay-friendly black judge roundly rejected in Democratic precincts -- suggests that ''thousands of votes for Senator Kerry were lost.''(182) Kucinich, a veteran of elections in the state, puts it even more bluntly. ''Down-ticket candidates shouldn't outperform presidential candidates like that,'' he says. ''That just doesn't happen. The question is: Where did the votes for Kerry go?'' They certainly weren't invalidated by faulty voting equipment: a trifling one percent of presidential ballots in the twelve suspect counties were spoiled. The more likely explanation is that they were fraudulently shifted to Bush. Statewide, the president outpolled Thomas Moyer, the Republican judge who defeated Connally, by twenty-one percent. Yet in the twelve questionable counties, Bush's margin over Moyer was fifty percent -- a strong indication that the president's certified vote total was inflated. If Kerry had maintained his statewide margin over Connally in the twelve suspect counties, as he almost assuredly would have done in a clean election, he would have bested her by 81,260 ballots. That's a swing of 162,520 votes from Kerry to Bush -- more than enough to alter the outcome. (183) ''This is very strong evidence that the count is off in those counties,'' says Freeman, the poll analyst. ''By itself, without anything else, what happened in these twelve counties turns Ohio into a Kerry state. To me, this provides every indication of fraud.'' How might this fraud have been carried out? One way to steal votes is to tamper with individual ballots -- and there is evidence that Republicans did just that. In Clermont County, where optical scanners were used to tabulate votes, sworn affidavits by election observers given to the House Judiciary Committee describe ballots on which marks for Kerry were covered up with white stickers, while marks for Bush were filled in to replace them. Rep. Conyers, in a letter to the FBI, described the testimony as ''strong evidence of vote tampering if not outright fraud.'' (184) In Miami County, where Connally outpaced Kerry, one precinct registered a turnout of 98.55 percent (185) -- meaning that all but ten eligible voters went to the polls on Election Day. An investigation by the Columbus Free Press, however, collected affidavits from twenty-five people who swear they didn't vote. (186) In addition to altering individual ballots, evidence suggests that Republicans tampered with the software used to tabulate votes. In Auglaize County, where Kerry lost not only to Connally but to two other defeated Democratic judicial candidates, voters cast their ballots on touch-screen machines. (187) Two weeks before the election, an employee of ES&S, the company that manufactures the machines, was observed by a local election official making an unauthorized log-in to the central computer used to compile election results. (188) In Miami County, after 100 percent of precincts had already reported their official results, an additional 18,615 votes were inexplicably added to the final tally. The last-minute alteration awarded 12,000 of the votes to Bush, boosting his margin of victory in the county by nearly 6,000. (189) The most transparently crooked incident took place in Warren County. In the leadup to the election, Blackwell had illegally sought to keep reporters and election observers at least 100 feet away from the polls. (190) The Sixth Circuit, ruling that the decree represented an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment, noted ominously that ''democracies die behind closed doors.'' But the decision didn't stop officials in Warren County from devising a way to count the vote in secret. Immediately after the polls closed on Election Day, GOP officials -- citing the FBI -- declared that the county was facing a terrorist threat that ranked ten on a scale of one to ten. The county administration building was hastily locked down, allowing election officials to tabulate the results without any reporters present. In fact, there was no terrorist threat. The FBI declared that it had issued no such warning, and an investigation by The Cincinnati Enquirer unearthed e-mails showing that the Republican plan to declare a terrorist alert had been in the works for eight days prior to the election. Officials had even refined the plot down to the language they used on signs notifying the public of a lockdown. (When ROLLING STONE requested copies of the same e-mails from the county, officials responded that the documents have been destroyed.) (191) The late-night secrecy in Warren County recalls a classic trick: Results are held back until it's determined how many votes the favored candidate needs to win, and the totals are then adjusted accordingly. When Warren County finally announced its official results -- one of the last counties in the state to do so (192) -- the results departed wildly from statewide patterns. John Kerry received 2,426 fewer votes for president than Ellen Connally, the poorly funded black judge, did for chief justice. (193) As the Conyers report concluded, ''It is impossible to rule out the possibility that some sort of manipulation of the tallies occurred on election night in the locked-down facility.'' (194) Nor does the electoral tampering appear to have been isolated to these dozen counties. Ohio, like several other states, had an initiative on the ballot in 2004 to outlaw gay marriage. Statewide, the measure proved far more popular than Bush, besting the president by 470,000 votes. But in six of the twelve suspect counties -- as well as in six other small counties in central Ohio -- Bush outpolled the ban on same-sex unions by 16,132 votes. To trust the official tally, in other words, you must believe that thousands of rural Ohioans voted for both President Bush and gay marriage. (195) The article also has quite a bit of coverage on the urban county voter irregularities as well. But this "Twelve Suspect County" twist makes alot of sense to me, who is famliar with Democratic vote rigging in heavily Dem places like Chicago of the first Mayor Daley....its these places, where the GOP candidate is going to win big anyway and Democrats are few and far between, where you can get away with ballot box stuffing of various forms, since theres no one around to really challenge it. Big majorities for the Republican candidate in heavily Republican counties? So what else is new? So no one pays attention to the vote there.

The lighting effects are pretty amazing. Actually the largest central station in Europe used to be in Frankfurt Am Main..the Hauptbanhof. Dated from the Wilhelmine era One main station in Frankfurt. Berlin was more like Chicago..it had multiple stations. Two famous ones Anhalter Banhof Lehrter Banhof

Group’s donation to help with school building project Lima News, 5/24/06 The Mom and Dad’s Club at Allen East schools wanted its fundraising efforts to impact as many pupils as possible. And the group certainly will with $40,000 going toward helping with construction costs of a new concession stand, restrooms and locker rooms at the district’s new building being constructed. “By doing this, we will, in our feelings, hit the most kids,” club President Tom King said. “We’ll hit the band, football, baseball, softball, track, soccer. It is the biggest impact we can do right now.” King presented a check to the school board at its Tuesday meeting.

Ironically Shaker Square and Shaker Heights are good examples of urban design and neighborhood planning, integrated with mass transit. And the Terminal Tower complex is (to me) a pretty good example of urban design, fitting a monumental buidling complex onto the cities central public space.

Woah...a bit more extensive than I thought. Actually this plan sort of sucks. Read the small print. 1900 to 2000 parking spaces, with most of the site being taken up by "parking drives and landscaping". Essentially a "suburban solution"...replacing an inner city neighborhood with a hospital surrounded by parking lots (albeit nicely landscaped curvy parking lots).

What always puzzled me about Lake Erie is why there are no large (or even small) cities on the Canadian side. Not even a Lorain or Sandusky. @@@@@@@@@@ But nice to see some good press on Cols, which really deserves it, too. Though I agree with Dffly about that "third largest gay enclave in the US" comment...well..maybe for Ohio its the gay mecca, but I think it probably isn't even that for the Midwest.

Or maybe a TV show..the Cleveland Sopranos. Did you ever surf into that Youngstown mob site? I think its down now, but it was quite an intro for me to a side of Y-town I knew nothing about. @@@@@ I was stalked once from a gay bar....actually followed home on the interstate. I managed to lose the him but he ended up ringing doorbells to try to find out where I lived or if I would open the door for him. That was my first year in Dayton...after that I realized the queens in this town really have issues.

The problem is there are sort of two things going on with this issue...a legtimate economics issue or concern about illegals driving down or holding down wages in a certains of the economy and also a xenophobic "they're not like us" sentiment. I think we should all be a bit honest about this, and call out this "they're not like us" sentiment as being unfounded and more than a bit prejudiced....there is no reason the illegals cant assiimilate, or their kids assimilate, or to suspect them for not being good "citizens" (in the larger sense of the word) or workers. Statments like this: ..I can not support. So what if the "face" of America changes? It has always been changing.

...well sort of....the uncool/unhip strip of East Third and vicinity in downtown Dayton You might recall this thread I posted about the old "Furniture District"...a fringe downtown area of small-scale retail, pawnshops, cheap theatres, corner stores, and walk-up apartments...and how urban renewal came in to sanitize this area and remove it all. Well, some of this character still remains, only a block though....sort of a taste of what parts of downtown Dayton perhaps was like before being eaten away by parking lots and demolitions and sterile blockbuster development... Cheap Novelties, as in those Ben Katchor comics I like...a joke shop: That's where we'll meet/ you and me/ on the dark side of the street/ I remember going to planning forums on downtown, where people spoke up for a "family freindly" downtown... Petra Food Market. One of the small retail things one finds on this block.... A dying breed...cheap downtown apartments...I lived in a place like this when I was in Sacramento... Homosexuals! Oh my! yawn...familiar scene to me.... Drinking in Dayton....a toast! (...to something or other)... Capping off the night with some rock (but in the Oregon, not on East Third)

The older folks here will remember the 1970s, which was another era when rising fuel prices impacted society. One of the big impacts of the "oil price shock" was via inflation, as the high oil prices drove up prices in other things as well, due to transportation costs and the cost of things made with oil (which is a lot of things). The focus here on this board is more on transportation, but oil price shocks will have a real broad effect on the economy at large. Another interesting thing was that in the 1970s, the "energy crisis" dovetailed into a few other social movements such as the environmental movement and the back-to-the land movment and the interest in doing something about urban srprawl (even back then), via what was called at the time "ecological planning", as well as the release of "The Limits to Growth" (based on the fact there are finite resources), so there was quite an interest in alternative energy and conservation and new ways of doing things (like the interest in light rail and mass transit as well as energy efficient housing and so forth). Nowadays we might be in a worse situation due to the nature of our society seems to be less open to change....we seem to be more in denial now than we where back then about energy shortages.

Community without propinquity...this means the "communities" these people (actually most people) belong to are not geographical, but based on their churches, workplaces/proffessions, and kinship. About as geographical as it gets is the communities formed by K-12 schools, and even this is not necessarily geographical if the kids are going to private schools.

There is a series of events this weekend at the VA. A few pix from Saturday There was a mass decoration of graves by the Boy Scouts, but families did their own decorating, too.... There was various re-enactment things going on, including a Civil War re-enacement camp. This was a Vietnam and Korean War era display, put together by a former Army medic, so there is a medic theme to the exhibit.

Some pix from earlier in the year and this weekend from the Dayton VA...the old "National Soldiers Home" (and military cemetery). Built for Civil War veterans orginally (union vets), it was a popular destination in the 19th century for Daytonians and beyond You can take an online virtual tour of the home via vintage old pix and postcards. Here is what it looks like today. The entry gate (with fairly interesting carvings on the pylons) During the 19th Century people arrived via a steam dummy railroad, which was later supplemented by a horsecar. The horsecar was replaced by two electric streetcar lines. Here is the streetcar station and loop for the Home Avenue Street Railroad...now abandoned: The steam dummy became a freight branch line and no longer comes on to the grounds. The grounds. Most of the orginal victorian era soliders home structures are now gone, but the grounds are still nice. It was the lavishly landscaped grounds that acted as a public park for Daytonians...a place to go for a Sunday excurison: Some of the older buildings and grounds visible here Gazebo and old building Reconstructed gazebo Some original buildings: Various types of single-family housing..the managment of the home (the Commandant, Chief Surgeon, etc) lived on-site..this would be like officers housing in a modern military base Their are various types of "barracks" (dormitories and group quarters) for the veterans on site. The place is also the site of a big VA hospital, too. Two chapels...the Catholic chapel: ...and the Protestant chapel, which is probably the architectural jewel of the complex: The chapel overlooks the Military Cemetery ..the centerpiece of which is this monument.

I remember Wiedeman beer. Also something called Erlanger, but, despite the name, it was from Philly. Then some breweriana for the others mentioned ...and I like this promo poster for Burger beer..... Its Happy Hudy Time! (from the Sign Museum. Hudepohl beer signs where around in the old neighborhoods of Lexington, too, as they drank all the Cincy beers down there)

...a Brazilian Benihana? Eva Christian, though Croatian, had her first restaurant not in Dayton, but in Germany, either in Nurnberg or Erlangen or thereabouts. The Cafe Boulevard was sort of the American version of her German place. Cafe Bouelvard was also one of my favorite Oregon places, and I'm looking forwad to this new venture of hers. Latin American cuisine sells in Dayton, as proven by El Meson and the numerous Mexican places around town (there even used to be an Argentinian place in Oakwood). This should be a pretty interesting restaurant, if only for the cuisine.