RiverViewer

I'm away from a computer most of the day (photo thread to come!), so if someone else can post for me, it would be appreciated!

I completely missed this story before...that's a very cool mixed bridge...I'm guess river traffic goes on the north side of the island, and hence the arch there to make a larger channel? Too bad they didn't include a pedestrian-only area that permitted foot traffic access to Blennerhassett Island...tie it into the Buckeye Trail...now that would have rocked... Oh, and let me guess - it will end up being called Robert Byrd Bridge or something?

Oh, and that's Memorial hall, right?

Great shot for trivia...I was thinking of trying some too-zoomed-in type shots - like, a distinctive feature taken out of its context... Cincinnati Kid has photos, hopefully he'll give us another! EDIT: Cincinnati Kid was way ahead of me! Sorry!

No idea...how about the 20th Century Theater in Oakley?

From wikipedia: In 1998 reporters Russell Carollo and Jeff Nesmith would win the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on dangerous flaws and mismanagement in the military health care system, a series very relevant to its readership because of the presence of Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in neighboring Greene County.

I believe John was another picture-free player...Don, do you have another to keep things going? Or anyone else?

^Yep - in that gravel lot, right near where that one set of steps comes out - the ones that start on Elsinore in that retaining wal... You're up, Mr. Don!

If I was to hazard a guess I'd say Hyde Park? I'm actually looking for a bit more specificity...but it's not Hyde Park anyway...

Dude, you're rockin' out...you nailed Kendall's park picture too...plus this gives me a chance to get back into the action when I can't figure pictures out!

CinCity, I believe you were photoless, right? If so, let's see who can pick this tree out:

Damnit, I lived in O'Byronville too! Of course, south side of Madison, with the parking behind...ach... 1989 Madison, but CinCity found it...

Ah, the 12-hour hint? Still doesn't help me, alas...

Old Montgomery?

Er...how exactly does it take away that heart? What is this heart-ectomy mechanism? Having a couple hundred folks drive to the square, leave their car, and start walking to Hyde Park's assorted destinations - that's bad? Because I can tell you in ten years of living in Cincinnati, I think I've actually gotten a spot on the square maybe once. Every other time, it's park in the lot behind Teller's, or on some side-street. A lot of times I've gone to the square without having to walk around the actual frickin' square at all. Seems to me the valet service opens the heart of Hyde Park Square up to many, many more people. Not that there aren't arguments against it - but to pretend valet is a less person-dense use of some spaces on the square is just head-in-the-sand stupid.

Probably because the bullpen has been bad enough to be comical...maybe because some of the arms got worn out, or the pitchers got figured out...but the bullpen we had in April and May, which was phenomenal, became as bad as they get in June and July. It's recovered to being fairly competent, but we can always use another arm. Take two guys with a 50/50 shot of being effective, and you end up with a 75% chance that one of them will work out...and we gave up a player to be named later or cash? Seems like a good deal...

How about along Delta?

Thanks for jumping in, keeping us moving! Of course, I don't know the answer, but this is a good reminder - I absolutely love the curbside beautification stuff we have around town...little spots like this add a ton to the beauty of the city...

I guess I'm just sad/upset over the wasted medium that is television news. It had so much potential... No doubt...and it still has that potential - hopefully someone will still find the right formula, the right implementation. But in the end, being well-informed has got to be the responsibility of the citizen...and for the first time in history, the citizen actually has the tools at his disposal to do exactly that... Wait, hold on a second...wha...? C-Dawg, we just went knock-down drag-out for two pages, and ended up basically hashing things out? This is the internet, that ain't supposed to happen! We're supposed to degrade into a flame-war, not see each other's points of view!

Regarding the FCC: I completely agree that its rules, its reach and its oversight are examples of poor policies poorly executed. All I'm saying is that, assuming there ought to be some rules (and while I pretty much disagree with that, I don't think it's an unreasonable position), someone's gotta set them. And the best place to have those rules set are by the people, through their elected representatives...I wish they did a better job at it, but as they say, democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others. I've listed a dozen foreign newspapers I have 24/7 free access to (which list doesn't begin to scratch the surface), and you still keep telling me I have fewer voices available to me than I did when we got the Medina County Gazette, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, WWWE, WHK, and channels 3, 5 and 8. Somewhere, C-Dawg, we're having a failure to communicate. I suspect the root cause of our argument here is that you believe TV news was a good source of information until it was corrupted by sinister, evil men in the late 1990's; I believe TV news has never been worth a squirt of piss, except for its flashy pictures and its immediacy. I believe radio's always been a better medium, since it's generally more long-form and more word-o-centric (sorry, couldn't come up with the right word) - but that it's still a single speaker at a time, temporal, impossible to analyze at length, and filtered through editors, business owners and sponsors. I believe newspapers are by far the best source of those three - but even in their heyday, even at their very best, they were only subject to internal fact-checking (an almost funny proposition, if skew and bias is the concern), they've always served some non-news purpose, and they've always filtered through an editor's desk. Yes, they'll tell you where the fire was; but in choosing what stories to run, what prominence to give them, what reporters to assign to what stories, what editorials to run - you could spend twenty years and have all those decisions made for you by the same set of a dozen white guys. This was the good old days? This was some noble apex of journalistic quality? Really? I believe the answer is that no, our politicians will not cave into those interests, because they wouldn't want to, and because the pressure against it would be far too strong...but then, I am generally an optimist... The fact that educated people can become the most spectacular morons is nothing new. Just because you know a lot of stuff doesn't mean you're actually thinking. Hell, a lot of the cultural elite in Europe thought Nazism was a brilliant new philosophy, and believed democracy to be a failed experiment - the world needed bold dictators, like Mussolini and Hitler and Stalin...smart people can be really, really stupid, or really, really impractical, or really, really heartless...again, unfortunately, it's nothing new...

No doubt, the situation could be healthier. But we should bear in mind that the internet is still in its infancy. And if you read intelligent people writing at length about fields in which they're experts, I think the analysis you get is far, far superior - especially when you bear their biases in mind. For instance, the law prof blogs are an incomparably superior source of analysis of legal issues than a 3 minute recap of arguments by Nina Totenberg (whom I dig). They have extended debates between blogs, are generally very civil, remarkably informative, and very open to opposing points of view. I've never seen legal analysis remotely superior to The Volokh Conspiracy in any old-school media. And the same is true in many other fields - science, military, medicine... Politics has always been and will always be packed to the gills with screeching fearbots. I can't stand cable news shows for exactly the reasons you outlined. But there are lots of sites out there that give thoughtful, if partisan, analysis to politics. It's harder to find them, but they're out there, they develop thoughts and arguments in long form - and there are no filters. And just as important, instead of getting a cut from Bush's speech, you can read the whole transcript. Instead of hearing a characterization of Kerry's proposals for Iraq, you can read them and digest them yourself. And you can fact-check them, and discuss them with others. My basic point is, if you read a variety of sources, understand some basic history and some basic science and some basic statistics, and then think for yourself, you'll be well-informed. That hasn't changed. The only thing that's changed is that today, the "variety of sources" has exploded, from typically a half-dozen, to millions. That doesn't mean you don't still need to understand history, science and statistics, and be able to think for yourself - of course not. But it seems like we're blaming the absence of the latter qualifications on some shortcomings of the first qualification, and that just doesn't make sense to me.

Wow - thanks for posting that! I've driven past a few times lately, but it's been hard to judge progress driving 25 mph around a curve! And I always forget to check the webcam...

^Ach, if you think we have high standards, you haven't seen nearly enough of my threads! Besides which, any new eye is always welcome! Just take pictures you think are interesting, and you can bet a bunch of us will find them interesting as well!

^Indeed. Fox News, the internet, talk radio...and I think it's awfully healthy. As long as folks are aware that any one source is not dependable, that every source has a bias, an agenda, that everyone is selling you something. That's always been the case, but we haven't always had a million salesmen - we've had a half dozen. So that half dozen I had access to spent a little more on reporting, had an editor that tried to account for his own bias - well, dandy, thanks! I'd much rather have one editor at the Plain Dealer, one at the Medina County Gazette, and three networks deciding what I need to know! That was such a better system, because they were focused on being unbiased, don't you see!

"Newspapers have always been in the newspaper-selling business" - that's actually not the case. During the early days of the republic, newspapers were largely in the "party organ" business. Yes, they wanted large distribution - but they were financed by folks interested in supporting this candidate or this party or this camp within this party - not in making money off advertizing or off selling the papers. I don't know when that changed to the "newspaper-selling business," which it obviously did at some point - but the early history of newspapers in this country was a lot more like the Daily Kos and the Rush Limbaugh show than anything else...