News Welcome to a One-Alt-Weekly Town

Posted by Joe Tone on Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 10:19 AM

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News Al Franken heads to Shaker Heights for Senate fundraiser

Posted by Joe Tone on Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 7:08 AM

"What? There's no direct flight to Shaker Heights?

In an election year, celebs who ordinarily couldn’t locate Lake Erie on a map suddenly seem to find our humble swing-state mecca irresistible. A few months ago, Don Cheadle stopped by to support Barack Obama, and even Sean Penn has stopped by, to lend some Hollywood credence to Dennis Kucinich regularly scheduled ego-stroking. Next week, it’s Al Franken’s turn. Franken, known for his comic genius as Stuart Smalley on “Saturday Night Live” and his progressive radio show on Air America, has finally switched over to the dark side of politics, officially making him way less funny than he used to be. He’s running for a U.S. Senate seat in Minnesota, and quickly learning that trying to be a politician is way harder than just making fun of them. ...

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News With help from Supreme Court, Alex Arshinkoff keeps sweaty paws in Summit County politics

Posted by Joe Tone on Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 11:31 AM

It’s a good thing we never participated in one of those celebrity death pools. Although we’re pretty sure British soulstress/black-tar-heroin-fan Amy Winehouse isn’t going to make it through the summer, our track record might suggest otherwise. Take Alex Arshinkoff, for example. The Gayest Straight Guy Ever™ has ruled the Summit County GOP with an iron (and diamond-studded) fist for three decades now, using his unnatural gifts for fundraising and back-room political chicanery to keep Republicans afloat in heavily Democratic Akron. ...

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News Highland Heights demotes Mark Joseph, the sergeant who yapped about teen suicide attempt

Posted by Joe Tone on Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 10:34 AM

"Hosing your dad's career is educational and fun!"

Something tells us Peter Joseph has been grounded indefinitely. Perhaps even had his driving privileges revoked. The son of Highland Heights sergeant Mark Joseph, Peter gave Dad an early Father’s Day present a few weeks back when he posted on his facebook page that a schoolmate had attempted suicide. To make matters worse, the kid divulged his source unprompted, prefacing the info with, “As many of you may know, my father is a police sergeant in the city of Highland Heights and he gets the whole scoop on most things.” Yo, son: stop snitchin’. ...

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News Voting machines eyed by Cuyahoga County are lousy, expensive, and probably mean to old people

Posted by Joe Tone on Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 2:14 PM

"Did you hear that? My machine just called me 'liberal swine!'"

As Cuyahoga County election officials muddle through the now-familiar ritual of picking new voting machines for the November election -- we hear it's a big one -- there’s a creepy feeling of déjà vu to the proceedings. Let’s go to the instant-replay booth: First, we had the Diebold touch-screen machines, which were so bad that one upstanding citizen took it upon himself to beat one up. Then, in March, we switched to the old-fashioned optical scanners, which were fine, except they didn’t allow ballots to be scanned at the actual polling place. Now the state is forcing the county to buy new machines that will read ballots on site. ...

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News Shawshank Redemtion: The Reunion

Posted by Joe Tone on Tue, Jun 17, 2008 at 11:26 AM

It was 15 years ago this August that the film crew for Shawshank Redemption first came to the Mansfield Reformatory to begin shooting. The filming was a rare prime-time moment for the sleepy Ohio town. So a few years ago, Bill Mullen, who owns the Sandusky lumberyard where many of the movie’s woodworking scenes were shot, decided it was time for a reunion. Mullen contacted Castle Rock about the idea last year. Executives were excited, he says, and sent him contact information for many of the extras who appeared in the film. And on the weekend of August 29th, about 1000 former workers, grips, actors, and fans will arrive in Ohio to tour the facilities where the movie was shot, and exchange memorabilia and stories from the time – of which there are many. ...

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News Pissed about the port? Tonight’s a rare chance to scream about it

Posted by Joe Tone on Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 2:23 PM

In May, Scene took a long look at the mammoth undertaking that would be moving Cleveland’s port from the Warehouse District to East 55th street, freeing up downtown waterfront property for frothing-at-the-mouth developers. At a glance, it sounds like a good idea. But this is a project that has all the ingredients of another Cleveland city-planning disaster. Think Euclid Corridor—tons of hyperbole, cronytastic maneuvering, decades of delays, and, of course, a steadily inflating price tag, predicted by some experts to end up at double the city’s initial $600 million estimate. ...

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News Scene wins 17 Press Club awards, snags extra free drink tickets

Posted by Pete Kotz on Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 2:19 PM

Photographer Walter Novak racked up his usual pile of awards, taking home five.

The Press Club of Cleveland held its 30th annual Ohio Excellence in Journalism awards ceremony in Westlake on Friday, and Scene came home with a serious stack of hardware (plus more than its share of free drink tickets). This rag won 17 awards, ranging from features to food reviews and photography. Here’s a list of the winners, in no particular order...

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News Egyptian pope “breaks thigh,” headed to Cleveland. Must be the pork

Posted by Joe Tone on Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 7:56 AM

Pope Shenouda III: conduit with God and BBQ aficionado.

With all the bad news coming out of Cleveland lately, it’s nice to know the city can still attract A-list tourists. Case in point: Pope Shenouda III. Shenouda, known to his friends as “the Nood,” is the 85-year-old leader of the Coptic Church, a minority sect in Egypt. According to the L.A. Times, the pope slipped on a carpet in his home on Monday, breaking his thigh bone in the fall. After lying on the floor for eight hours in what we can only imagine was excruciating pain (the Pope doesn’t have a personal assistant?), his Holiness was loaded onto an Egyptian air-ambulance for the transatlantic flight to Cleveland. ...

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News Mad Money’s Jim Cramer praises a green Cleveland

Posted by Pete Kotz on Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 5:19 AM

This man is not nearly as obnoxious as originally thought.

You may not realize this, but Cleveland is way ahead of the green curve. So says Grist.org, a Seattle environmental group that ranked Cleveland one of the 12 most green cities in the country. Seems we have more community gardens than most, and most of our new housing has been deemed “energy efficient.” We’re second only to Los Angeles in the number of new construction units that are officially certified as “green” by LEED-ND, a non-profit that rates new homes on their eco-sustainability…

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News The horror! Coke product found on Oberlin campus!

Posted by Pete Kotz on Thu, Jun 12, 2008 at 5:10 AM

Drink this at Oberlin, and you're supporting murder

With its ultra-liberalism and eco-consciousness, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of all the things that Oberlin College is officially against. Take Coca-Cola. Since 2004, the school has officially banned all Coke products from campus due to the soda company’s alleged human rights violations in Colombia. In 2001, the International Labor Rights Fund filed suit against the company, claiming it hired death squads to murder, torture, and kidnap union leaders at its South American bottling plants…

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News Cuyahoga county commissioners: You mean we don't have an endless supply of money to waste?

Posted by Pete Kotz on Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 1:36 PM

Tim Hagan offers up kids and old people to take the brunt of the county's belt-tightening.

King Jimmy Dimora and his Cuyahoga County commissioner pals have never been especially thrifty guys. They had no qualms about blowing more than $35 million on the Ameritrust complex, a collection of vacant, asbestos-filled buildings that they soon realized they couldn’t afford to rehab. And they’re eager to dole out $1.3 billion for a new Medical Mart and convention center — civic investment tools that have been failing in other cities for years. But now that they’re faced with spending up to $13 million on new voting machines for the November election, they’ve suddenly become penny-pinchers. Turns out, they were already budgeting to be $13 million in the red this year, and — wonder of wonders — they can’t afford to dig themselves deeper in the hole…

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News Local sex-shop chain Ambiance rubs its giant profits in our depressed faces

Posted by Joe Tone on Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 7:41 AM

Lindsay doesn't mind if you can no longer afford Death Cab tickets.

Your average Clevelander lives in a house worth $12,000 and dropping, is stuck in a $500 Hummer lease, puts on a suit to sit in a park for eight hours a day so that his wife won’t know he’s been laid off, and is considering eating the family Golden Retriever. You’d think the double-sided dildo budget would be pretty much dissipated. But according to a regional sex-shop chain boasting of boom times, you’d be wrong. Ambiance, the sex boutique with seven locations in Northeast Ohio, is bragging that “sex sells in a slow economy.” Apparently May was a good month for the company, with sales up more than 20 percent from the same month last year, and its website numbers improved 44 percent. These are statistics sent to us from an Ambiance rep named Misty, though, so take them with a grain of salt. ...

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News Kucinich wants to impeach Bush, because what else would Congress do with its time?

Posted by Joe Tone on Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 3:47 PM

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