GCrites

Yes, that too. Lots of adults playing those sports as well. And competitive runners all over the place.

Naw, the NFL wouldn't work here. Columbus is not a football town as people think. It's an OSU town. There's not nearly the high school football madness that you see in Cincy or up north. If Columbus was as football-mad as people think, the streets would flow red with the blood of Bengals and Browns fans slitting each others' throats. Instead, there's all of a sudden a bunch of Steelers fans around (didn't see that when I was a kid), with fans of a smattering of other teams such as the Colts, Packers, Redskins, Raiders, Eagles and Jets. There's 5 other teams within a 200 mile radius. Mainly though, Columbus is a hobby and interest town. Tons of people race/mess with cars, hunt, play paintball, golf, have boats, do hobby store stuff like R/C cars/planes, model trains and slot cars. There's also lots of motorcyclists, gamers of all types, horse people etc. Other cities all have that stuff, but the degree to which they happen in and around Columbus is astounding. In almost all the things that I mentioned, Columbus has the largest support system for them in the state or in some cases the entire region. In Cincy, it seemed like all that stuff took a back seat to the Reds (not just watching them, but thinking about them and their history) and, to a lesser degree, the Bengals. It's probably about the same in Cleveland. Buckeye games are mostly on Saturdays when the weather is crappy.

The entire city of New York is probably "functionally obsolete".

Winburn and Sam Malone came to my house one day. At the time, I was playing Urban Strike for the SNES a lot. The main bad guy in the game was a crooked dictator named Malone and he was plotting to blow up the World Trade Center using a nuclear bomb. Of course, that game came out in '95, but it was all I could think about at the time.

I hate awkward remodels on college campuses. It's been done way too many times. I think Marshall had the most bad examples I've seen, but UC had a couple that I can remember.

And, pretty much any development takes years to fill. Malls were about the only developments that opened reasonably full, but those don't get built any more.

Yet another round of excellent pix from a ninja poster.

^A lot of those social programs' costs are exacerbated by suburban development patterns, obesity, an unhealthy populace and lack of mobility.

Not when each new administration destroys all the work of the previous one, throwing away all the time, money and effort spent.

People have a tendency to think that Kentucky and West Virginia would be overall more conservative states than Ohio, but those two states are often able to come up with intelligent solutions for their issues that aren't so "hard line". The sentiment that I always picked up from people in those states is that Ohio politics is a zoo, even post-"Mess in Frankfort".

Are they more afraid of that, or more afraid of this?

All lies, the Continent and 161 was the actual Alex P. Keaton party zone.

OK, I finally figured this out after years of going bonkers. It was not a rail subway at all; it is a pedestrian one... and it's still there! Something like this might not be all that interesting in Cincinnati or even Huntington WV, but it is here. It runs under High Street at Clinton Heights Avenue/Brighton Road. Here it is on Google Street view: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=3336+n.+high+st.+columbus+oh&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x88388c592bce27e7:0x215a79c80d0c5d68,3336+N+High+St,+Columbus,+OH+43214&gl=us&ei=W_d4TqXuOOjhsQLu4YyvDQ&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=image&resnum=1&ved=0CBoQ8gEwAA

Thanks, I try my worst. :laugh:

Look at him grovel like Starscream does when Megatron has his cannon pointed at him.

I'm not an expert on spas, but if it's associated with AVEDA, it may be a franchise. Franchisees often aren't hands-on experts in the franchises they own, or it could be someone in his family's thing. I can't really speculate. But a pro-streetcar guest editorial that was fake would be outside of the Enquirer's, stance on the issue. Unless they are throwing a few bones here and there in order to appear balanced.

That was a smart piece. Basically, the same arguments were made against the Pontiac GTO within GM as are made against the streetcar. In the '60s there was already a popular grassroots movement of kids taking the high-horsepower engines out of the company's "big cars" (such as the Impala) and putting 'em in their smaller and lighter "intermediate cars" such as the Chevelle. John DeLorean at Pontiac wanted to give people that option right from the factory in order to keep from losing sales to used cars or a competitor that offered the option first. But, he had to sneak around within Pontiac to actually get the car on the market because the clueless management at Pontiac didn't want to listen to what the youth market was demanding. Young people were salivating at the possibility of purchasing this automobile, but it was still kind of a secret option since Pontiac was sure it was going to fail. The author's brother tried to purchase one from his local Pontiac dealer in Covedale but the salesman would not sell it to him because he thought the GTO was pointless. Jake Sweeney across town had a GTO and didn't refuse to sell him a product that he desired, so Jake Sweeney got his money. GTOs were on the sales floors a mere fortnight before Pontiac figured out that the GTO was actually becoming a huge sales success and would eventually change the image of the entire company for the next forty years. All those closed-minded curmudgeons had to eat bags of crow as they put their best marketing and advertising people (including Jim Wangers, whose book, "Glory Days" I have read) on the project. Not only that, the GTO would create a youth culture obsessed with howling V-8s, huge burnouts, aftermarket performance parts and later, restoration -- all made in America. Even the hippies loved it. What makes the piece important is that it explains the demand for the streetcar in a manner that the demographic that is most vehemently against the streetcar (45-70 year old conservative suburbanites/exurbanites) can understand. The article is about a time frame that makes them climax, the non-hippie side of the '60s. But here's the rub: The author and most of his family, including his son who moved to Chicago for better transit, are "car guys". That means that they actually know how cars work and care about them. So while transit-haters drive cars yet know nothing about them, they are the ones fighting the hardest against anything that doesn't involve tires. Which takes us to the bigger picture... A lot of these clueless anti-transit right wingers think they know a lot about cars simply because they are Republicans... as if joining a certain political party can teach you the complex relationships of a car's various systems. I'm sure they've changed a tire or jumped a battery before, but most of them have spent their lives driving bland minivans, SUVs and sedans -- trading them in after they got four years old and started needing maintenance that they didn't know how to perform. And if you "know about cars" simply by being on the side that isn't going to "take them away", then by proxy you must know about transportation. And to them, the streetcar is merely a transportation project rather than an economic development one. And even if they do recognize that it is an economic development project they don't think it will work because they themselves don't want to live in that part of town. On the other hand, the most sinister ones know that it will work and are trying to kill it for reasons previously discussed in this thread. Business doesn't have the luxury that politics does regarding giving people what they want until it's too late.

It's lip service.

This building is so big that, believe it or not, there are still businesses operating in parts of it even after the collapse.

They call 'em "Jock Sniffers".

Both advertorials and "Special Advertising Sections" give me the yucks. The difference between them is easy to spot for the educated and the suspicious, but others have a hard time making the distinction. I'm starting to see them a lot more in generalist magazines (ones that don't get into the nuts and bolts of things too deeply) such as Popular Mechanics and Motorcyclist than in the past.

Portsmouth is the king of this.

"Stimulus" and "infrastructure" sure are big words. A good one-syllable four letter word is right up the "we're broke" right-wing-opposition crowd's alley.

I bet many of those are for positions for which the current labor pool as a whole is underqualified. Much as the same way a military is equipped to fight the last war after it has ended, our labor force is equipped properly for the careers of a generation ago since it takes a while for society to recognize the need for a skill then train and educate people for it.

Columbus is a top 5 city for playgrounds according to USA Today/Weekend. I don't know if this means anything, but apparently cities with large gay populations have good playgrounds. Cities are listed by city proper population. San Francisco (pop. 805,235) Columbus, Ohio (pop. 787,933) Hartford, Conn. (pop. 124,512) Orlando (pop. 238,300) Auburn, Wash., (pop. 70,180) http://www.usaweekend.com/article/20110902/HOME02/110902001/Where-playgrounds-are?odyssey=tab|topnews|img|Frontpage