GCrites

Yes. Like pre-Trustbust and post-2000 us.

He's certainly better at playing politics than a Tea Party automaton that marches himself and his party right off a cliff.

There's lots of asking questions out loud in that article, but unfortunately, I'd say the answers to all of them are merely, "corruption". Calling it pork is merely sugarcoating the pure corruption that is going on.

I'm starting to see a real pattern of DINOs in Cincinnati politics. The R's extreme right-wing and the Tea Party have destroyed their brand so badly, especially in cities, that the only way for them to get a foothold is to manufacture DINOs such as Cranley and The American Dream Dusty Rhodes or even quasi-independents such as Slitherman. These people prey on under-informed voters (targeting minorities for sure) that think, "D is good!" without questioning what's going on. They won't be able to do it forever, but it has worked so far. People will start figuring out what's going on -- after which these DINOs and the local Democratic Party as a whole will suffer greatly.

Yes. We talk on here a lot about people bolting Cincinnati for better transit options, but bolting isn't near the problem in Cincinnati that it is in Columbus for example. Or the problem it is in NEO, but up there it's more due to the lack of job opportunities rather than Columbus' problem of people thinking the city is too dull. In Cincinnati, it's really tough for people to give up the good-paying white collar jobs that people find though their personal networks or their co-ops at UC. For many in Cincy, there are simply too many good jobs available through family, a friend or acquaintance from high school, "Uncle Procter" or other solid channels. Bolting for a city with good rail transit is often a serious gamble for a Cincinnatian. Meanwhile, if you are really from the Columbus area, there's about a 40% chance that you are from south of I-70 or someplace like Newark where your personal network consists of nearly 100% blue-collar workers. If you're taking the gamble of seeking white-collar work, you might as well shoot for a city with rail transit since you are already shooting in the dark. And that's why the Fortune 1000 companies are apathetic about the streetcar -- they've already got an army of smart Cincinnatians available who one or even several trusted people internally can go to bat for saying, "I know this person. They will do a good job." Or they already know the candidate can do a good job because they've co-opted there 3 times already! Meanwhile, in Columbus it's like "Well, we'll see if this total stranger from a city with no jobs will work out." when they hire someone young and new.

That's what I was thinking. He fits the type perfectly. Believe it or not, in Columbus in the late '80s and early '90s the local news followed Charlie and Tom Luken pretty closely as in, "Look at the kind of nuts they have running things down in Cincinnati." So even when little GCrites80s was 10 years old in the frozen tundra of Columbus he knew the name Luken. Of course, there wasn't any of that kind of material there with Qualls or Mallory. And this is when we had a flamboyant mayor of our own (believe it or not) who brought an auto race Downtown and tried demolishing the old Ohio Pen on his own with a bullzoder to get the Arena District started early amongst other things. I'm sure we're going to start hearing the name Cranley on the news up here very soon.

I like to call this the MTV halo effect MTV took a lot of heat in the '80s, especially before they began showing Yo! MTV Raps, for showcasing few black acts. Then you get to about 1993 or so and 50%+ of the music on the network was black. Racists exploded, including the one fan in the Metallimania video on the previous page that was boasting of his recent gun purchase. And as teens are wont to do they began emulating the looks and attitude of the popular music of the time which, of course was a black look. In the '90s, if you were young you still had to be on team mainstream or you're out. What is a disservice to teens and other young people today for historical accuracy and also anywhere from slightly racist to very racist is the whitewashing of the '90s to make it look like grunge ruled uber-alles then everybody went straight to post-grunge alternative like Bush, Fuel and Silverchair. Finally, they wrapped up the '90s with New Radicals, Fastball, Blink 182 and Britney. No, no, no. If you were under 22 in those days it was rap, rap, R&B, rap, early '90s dance music, rap and rap. If you were into anything else you were weird, no matter how many records it had sold. Ma$e was more important than the Beatles and 2Pac was bigger than God.

Aw, nobody likes them. High school girls maybe; that's about it.

Columbus to Gainesville, 898 miles. Columbus to Lincoln, 813 miles. Columbus to Lexington, KY, 189 miles. Columbus to Indianapolis, 176 miles. Bloomington (IU) is another 40 miles SW.

Not just for the sake of change but to keep themselves in a job. So many of these dumb experiments at companies that come and go (like the third drive-through window at fast-food joints where they merely handed you your condiments) are the work of dead weight coming up with "innovations" that are just busywork.

Yes, there was a time when stuff would show up on a linear basis and you wouldn't miss anything. But those days are long gone.

Perhaps a move to the SEC could help that... ... ... OK, just waiting for the letter bomb or someone to spray some SARS in my window.

What can you do when you schedule a team that's good when you book them but sucks by the time you play 'em? Or gets crippled by sanctions?

The FCC stopped enforcing the Fairness Doctrine in the late 1980s. That's what opened the floodgates on all this toxic News Entertainment rhetoric. Any equal time provided by the media is merely voluntary.

Now that's '80s slang if I ever heard it! You gotta hold your nose when you say it.

The '80s-early '90s Miami Hurricanes football team made that cool.

Is Ohio State that good or is the Big Ten that bad? I really can't tell. 49-0 so far against Purdue with about 10:00 to go in the 3rd. This year's OSU team treats the conference like early-season, mid-major punching bags.

Looks like teens are losing interest in Facebook. You can't really blame them. Facebook forces people into networks where everybody they know including mere acquaintances finds them almost immediately. People of all ages they want and people they don't want. Then they're stuck with everyone paying attention to everything they do and judging them at an age where they don't always do everything right and their peers often lack tact. Plus, they get dragged into things they don't necessarily care about from the adult world such as constant baby/kid pictures, political rants and self-promotion. Of course, it's a major no-no socially to avoid someone on Facebook or not respond to friend requests. And going private is seen as shady. Twitter and Snapchat at least have some degree of anonymity available if you so choose, and it's more difficult for every single person in your town to see everything you do on those sites. They are also simpler. On the other hand, I think one reason young people really got into MySpace is that they could express themselves a little more on their profiles, no matter how glitter-trashy and buggy that wound up being. Teens really like to shove their interests and passions in people's faces in order to "make an impression". Facebook's dull, singular design might not be able to keep their attention for long, and is why they have started treating it a just another interface to touch base with rather than some place where everything happens. The limitations placed on Facebook by adults and scrutiny by people's entire network have been exposed by the existence of these other, simpler sites. Here's an article on how Facebook is losing the interest of teens: http://techcrunch.com/2013/10/30/facebook-teens-drop/ Personally, I log in only when necessary now. The people I haven't had to remove from my feed for Republi-ranting too much have mostly gone baby/kid/vacation/nu-country-"concert" picture-only except for like 3 people. It's not that I am against the site per se, but rather my friends have stopped producing content that is compelling to me... ColDayMan's content is OK, though! Maybe I should add more of you guys because you talk about crap I actually care about.

They know that the suburban and exurban subscriber base likes Cranley. They're afraid they'll sell fewer papers to those people if they endorse who they actually agree with on the issues.

^I really liked Justice for a long time and still dig the riffing, long songs and guitar solos. But it kinda wore off after a while. Since you've spent a lot of time in NYC, Justice probably speaks to you a little more since grimy, angry, hard-to-digest sounds just sound better in the city. Even if you didn't live there when it came out. Like how Asia sounds better to people who are always in new buildings (Columbusites) than to people in cities with a lot of graffiti. Metallica had toured Europe at least a couple of times by the time Justice had came out, and I think the cold, half-crumbled, wet, still-rebuilding industrial and artsy cities had an effect on them and their sound going into Justice. Death Magnetic really worked, but somehow I get the feeling that we're not going to hear that sound from them again. It wasn't a very big a seller because Metallica had used up everyone's patience.

We might actually be talking about two different stores. The one that moved to Northgate was really small and moved in like 2008 while the much bigger one with the arcade games that moved down from Fairfield, Arcade Legacy, is still there as far as I can tell from up here in Columbus. Their Facebook page was updated earlier today. I wonder if they will move when Bass Pro bolts.

This is also why I maintain that Kill 'Em All is the best Metallica record because they didn't try to get above their raisin'. It's direct, to the point, all about cool riffs, killing people and reading the Bible to you nearly verbatim. A Tygers of Pan Tang record for pissed-off American teens. For many years I really thought For Whom the Bell Tolls from Ride the Lightning was totally boss, but now I realize it's just weird. "Hey lookie what we can do, first a bass part that sounds great only when Cliff Burton plays it live and improvises off of it and on no other situations because it's too chromatic" then a riff, then the end of Fairies Wear Boots, then a four chordy, Judas Preisty part for the verses, then a riff of our own under the chorus then we end it with an unpredictable part. And did they mention it's about a BOOK? It's just a bunch of parts, not a song.

After Metallica finished Master of Puppets, they spent most of the rest of their career desperately wanting to become Advanced even though they are incapable of it. Hence the winding storylines of the Justice record and songs like Shortest Straw and Harvester of Sorrow that don't make any sense, really, even if you have been told what they are about. Then the Black Album comes along and it's obvious that the band wanted to be the thinking man's pop metal band, ala Queensryche but less operatic. Then the Loads hit and Metallica wants to be your alt-country hard rock band in yet another attempt to be Advanced. Years later, St. Anger tried to be a Dylan and Neil Young-esque weirdo series of sketches using nu-metal as a base. Failure again. Then one real metal album that sounded great because they stuck to where they actually excel followed by Lulu, an overt attempt at becoming Advanced by working with one of the most Advanced of all Lou Reed. But of course, Lulu only made Reed more Advanced while making Metallica even less so. While Metallica are rich, they are not uber-rich and recently they put up $20 million of their own money making a 3D concert film (nearly every Metallica album must be accompanied by a live home video or album, though their best one consists of bootleg footage from '83 to '86) that was an immense flop in theaters. It has jeopardized their personal fortunes.

Anybody who lived through the '80s and the first half of the '90s remembers Burnouts. Burnouts smoked a ton of pot and most other drugs were also A-OK. Burnouts also loved metal and beer. Here is a totally unknown VHS-quality documentary from the '90s called Metallimania about Metallica and thier fans. Starting in part 2, you meet some burnout fans that succeed in making you feel totally uncomfortable and make the people from Heavy Metal Parking Lot look like teddy bears. Also, you see the '90s phenomenon of anybody acting serious for more than a minute or two totally getting their balls busted. The band members interviewed, including all of Metallica, Jim Martin from Faith No More, Tom Araya from Slayer, Rob Halford (with the band Fight at the time), a post-Kyuss pre-Queens of the Stone Age Josh Homme and even Madonna knew the game and took the piss the entire way through. Personally, I found it difficult to constantly come up with all the BS material people expected from males at the time -- though most of my friends weren't metalheads, being serious for more than three sentences was considered unacceptable at the time it seemed. Despite the big names in the tape and the extremely popular subject matter it has remained totally obscure. It has only managed to average less than 500 views on Youtube per segment after being on the site since 2011. Metallimania may be the most extensive showcase of burnouts ever made. Here's part 1, but the good stuff doesn't really kick in until part two.

Yea I bet that went over great. About as good as the proposed NASCAR track there.