Afternoon Brew: Kings of the Greasy Pole, Card-Carrying Socialists, Not Dying Alone, a Lottery Lawsuit, and a Robbery at a High-Stakes Poker Game
He carries the Constitution, not a socialist card. Good afternoon, Cleveland. Here’s some stuff to read while you make sure you didn’t forget to pitch in for the office lottery pool this week. — A guy is suing 22 people he worked with because they won the lottery in a pool that he usually contributed…
Cleveland’s Latest Eco-Friendly Project Lacks One Key Thing: Money
Cleveland may be on the verge of approving legislation that would require all future street construction to get friendlier to the environment — and especially to bicycle lovers. It’s called the Complete and Green Streets initiative, and it’s winding its way to city council after a summer of committee debate. “The bicycling community has been…
The Quality of Cleveland Life Report
Your guide to thriving in fabulous Cleveland. The Future of Trash: City of Cleveland launches “Automated Waste Collection and Curbside Recycling Program,” marking subtle shift from the previous program, in which Clevelanders automatically dropped their shit on the ground. LYFAO: Painesville schools superintendent calls sign depicting internet catchphrase “You Mad Bro?” at football game racially…
Legislators Review Submissions for Redistricting Contest
A couple months ago we updated your process servers with info on the efforts of one good government group to cut through the bullshit, venal and self-serving partisan pattycake that is congressional redistricting in these United States circa 2011. The Ohio Campaign for Accountable Redistricting is currently holding a contest to let interested individuals design…
Former Browns Running Back Caught Driving 147 MPH
Chris Jennings’ tenure with the Cleveland Browns was short and lackluster. He played in 9 games in 2009, got cut by the Browns in 2010, and failed to make the 2011 New York Jets. A skill-set that lacked speed and an inability to remain healthy were two of his biggest problems. But he did manage…
John Kasich is a Steelers Fan, Taunts Browns Fans (Updated)
John Kasich explaining why Ben Roethlisberger is really a good person. Update: All you can ask for a man is to grow, to learn from past mistakes, and to constantly work toward being a better person. No matter how small the progress, it’s worth noting, which is why we’d like to point out that while…
Ohio to Fight Rabies; Michael Scott Approves
The face of rabies. NewsNet5 reports that the state of Ohio is taking its lead from Michael Scott and will attempt to protect you from rabies. While a Michael Scott’s Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Pro-Am Fun Run Race For the Cure benefit was briefly on the table, Ohio instead opted…
Here’s a Naked Man in the Back of a Police Cruiser After Being Arrested for Being Naked
Did your Labor Day weekend involve some streaking and the precarious and dangerous situation of sitting naked in the back of a cop car on a seat that is probably stained, bacteria-ridden, and covered in bodily fluids? No? Then you have to get yourself on this guy’s level: 21-year-old Gregory Pankuch was arrested by Alliance…
Concert Review: Tedeschi Trucks Band at Jacobs Pavilion
About three songs into the Tedeschi Trucks Band’s set Saturday night at Jacobs Pavilion, singer Susan Tedeschi introduced her husband to the crowd: “Making up new sounds on the guitar every night — ladies and gentlemen, Derek Trucks!” After the applause died down, it was no mistake who the star is. “To me, a lot…
Happy Labor Day, Cleveland
This blog will be celebrating Labor Day with some afternoon Tribe baseball and assorted meats on the grill. Maybe a beverage or two also. Fine, definitely a beverage or two also. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed your holiday weekend as much as we have, whether it’s been filled with festivals and air shows or video games and…
Afternoon Brew: HIV-Positive Woman Spits at Bar, a Flag Fight at Burger King, a Snapple Fanatic, Case’s Cleveland Video, and Parole Denied for Akron Mom
Good afternoon, Cleveland. Here’s some stuff to read while you decide whether you’ll need four or five cases of beer to make it through the holiday weekend without leaving the house. — A woman in Canton made a scene at a bar when she started spitting at patrons and telling them she had AIDS. (WOIO)…
Black Keys Announce New BlakRoc Album
The Black Keys announced on YouTube that there will be a followup from BlakRoc, the boys’ side project where they play original music and hip-hop artists come in and rap and sing over tunes. The first version was super cool, and looking at the lineup for Version II, we’ve got high hopes again. Slated to…
First Anti-SB5 Commercial Premieres Tomorrow
The time has come for TV commercials from both sides in the SB5 debate as we trudge along toward November. This is the first one from the anti-SB5 camp. It premieres tomorrow, but here it is online first.
International Sex Tourism, Car Theft Rings Busted in Ohio
Cleveland’s not just home to simple, small-time crimes like bribing a building inspector or receiving free tiki huts while being commissioner. It’s also at the center of two international crime busts in the last week. First: “Operation Hot Wheels,” which brought down an organization that rented cars in Michigan and Ohio, drove them into Canada,…
New Machine Gun Kelly: “Wild Boy”
“Wild Boy,” a new Machine Gun Kelly track with Waka Flocka Flame, was posted last night. Are you ready for a healthy dose of Steve-O and Kurt Cobain references? Of course you are. As Miami New Times writes about MGK: He’s the type of gangster that’ll fuck your shopping trip up with a Twitter-fueled flash…
Man Arrested for Having Sex With Inflatable Raft
Men have all kinds of sexual kinks and fetishes. Combine that with moments of obsession and desperation, and men end up sticking their penises in all sorts of weird, inappropriate places. Exhibit A: Anyone who’s ever slept with Renee Zellweger. Exhibit B: 32-year-old Edwin Tobergta of Hamilton, OH, who was caught having sex with an…
Cleveland Ranked 6th Manliest City
The newest batch of sketchily researched and haphazardly assembled city rankings are out, this time from Mars Chocolate North America on the manliest cities in America. Because everyone knows that if you’re an expert on stuffing nougat into chocolate and other confectionery achievements, you are an expert on the finer points of being a Man.…
Ohio’s Change-Up on Prison Sale Stuns Grafton
There’s good news in Grafton. Employees of the Grafton Correctional Institution heard the news in a chapel. It was the answer to prayers that many of them had already given up on. “It was deathly quiet. Nobody could believe what we heard. Nobody knew what to say,” says Bobbie Peters, who heads up the Ohio…
Afternoon Brew: Smoking in Bars, Dead Husband’s Tattoo Speaks, An Honest Woman, and a Manhunt
Good afternoon, Cleveland. Here’s some stuff to read while you mourn the end of the Tribe’s playoff chances. — Ohio claims that business is not down in bars after the smoking ban took effect. What they didn’t study was how much business is up in bars that surreptitiously still allow smoking. (NewsNet5) — A dead…
Ohio Asks For Help in Preventing Carp Invasion
As it stands currently, an electric barrier is all that stands between the great scary Asian carp and the Great Lakes. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers installed the barrier while it ponders what to do next. In the meantime, they’re working on a study, due in 2015, on the best way to keep the…
Study Shows Cleveland Traffic Slow in All the Places You Already Know Cleveland Traffic Is Slow
Hey, you, Mr. Commuter in the beige Camry — did you know that during rush hour, traffic gets kinda slow at Dead Man’s Curve? Or at the I-71 South/I-480 split? No, you didn’t? Well, now you know, thanks to a study from NOACA (Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency). What does that group do and why…
Rocky River’s Market Gets New Chef, Menu
Owner John Owen has hired a new chef at his Rocky River restaurant Market (1137 Linda St., 440-799-4292), which opened almost exactly one year ago. Chef Jon Frommeyer has replaced opening chef Rob Geul. “We weren’t getting it right in my opinion,” says Owen. “There are a lot of good places to eat in this…
Group Files Suit to Block Kasich’s Sale of Prisons (Updated)
Here’s John Kasich eating corn, because why not? Update II: The details have been announced. Get them here. Ohio will only sell one of the five prisons. *** Update: Ohio today will announce which companies will get to pony up the cash to buy and run five of Ohio prisons. As the original item below…
STO Still Confused About Who the Indians Are
Everyone makes mistakes. This one was just particularly egregious and entertaining. From the post-game of last night’s Tribe win:
Ohio’s Public Employee Salary Site Crashed On Its First Day
Government agencies aren’t used to building a website that is overwhelmed with traffic. Usually, the hits and pageviews can be counted on one hand, but when you provide a comprehensive database of all of Ohio’s public employees’ salaries, that’s like thrusting the cutest picture of the cutest little kitten or a video of a Miss…
Putter’s Progress
Golfer Luke Chisolm (Lucas Black, who has a good swing), pushed to excel since childhood by his ambitious dad (shades of Tiger Woods), has a humiliating meltdown during his tournament debut. He hits the road and crashes into a fence in golden-hued Utopia, Texas, where he’s rescued by Robert Duvall on horseback. Rancher Johnny Crawford,…
Afternoon Brew: Syphilis Up in Cuyahoga County, BBQ With Wife’s Clothes, Search Public Employees’ Pay, Portage Tea Party Changes Acronym
Good afternoon, Cleveland. Here’s some stuff to read while you slap that guy in the office who is taking Thursday and Friday off and has said, “Today’s my Friday,” once too many times today. — If you’re burning your wife’s clothes on the grill, telling cops you’re “having a barbecue” when they come to ask…
Ohio Teacher Had Naked Images Captured Off a Stolen Computer She Bought by a Tracking Company, Can Sue
52-year-old substitute teacher and widower Susan Clements-Jeffrey had no reason to expect anything but complete privacy as she sat naked in front of her computer back in 2008 chatting and exchanging images with her former high school sweetheart who was in Boston. Well, she’d have to trust that from her spot in Ohio, the man…
Recap: Touch’s Farm-to-Table Supper
The first thing they teach you in Critic School is to eschew hyperbole. After all, if everything is “the best” or “the finest,” you not only give readers reason to doubt your critical judgment, but by the time you run into something that really is extraordinary, you’ve used up all your adjectives. So we won’t…
Football Players Penalized for Honoring Dead Teammate During Game, Subsequently Lose on Last-Second Play
The Ohio High School Athletic Association and the refs who worked the Walsh Jesuit vs. Louisville (OH) game last Friday night are under heat for a pivotal late-game decision. Louisville had just scored what appeared to be a game-winning touchdown with just over a minute left in the fourth quarter to go up 26-24. Two…
Kevin Coughlin Doesn’t Believe in Global Warming
We know there are some of you on the other side of these interwebs who will read this and agree with GOP Senate candidate Kevin Coughlin when he says the science is sketchy on global warming. It’s certainly not coming out of left field for someone on the right of the aisle. But it’s news,…
Teachers and Students Can’t be Facebook Friends, Dayton Schools Says
Down in Dayton, the city’s public school system is putting a moratorium on Facebook friendships between students and teachers, a move that is so head-smackingly obvious it’s fairly disconcerting no one’s put a rule like this on the books already. This is the first instance in Ohio of such regulation. The new policy also says…
Mitchell’s Ice Cream to Take Over Vacant Moda Spot in Ohio City
The Moda nightclub building was a black spot on Ohio City when it was open, the scene of fights, drugs, and crowds that drew countless complaints from residents. Then the owner was put away for laundering money and the building sat empty for years, a black spot in a whole new way. Efforts to open…
‘Lost’ Actor Matthew Fox Accused of Assaulting Woman (Updated)
Update: Heather Bormann, the alleged victim in the drunk Matthew Fox assault incident, visited the prosecutor’s office Tuesday morning to press for charges to be brought against the actor, who wasn’t arrested at the time of the alleged assault. Bormann told Fox 8, “Right now it’s considered a civil matter and that’s why he was…
We Get Mail
But Did He Like It? You clueless a-holes think this is funny [“Chasing Casey!” August 10, 2011]? You thought the dumb hicks of Cleveland would get a kick out of an article about how a murdering scumbag might be in town? You are the lowlife pieces of shit that make our city look bad. As…
Concert Calendar
Farewell Flight Farewell Flight have spent the past few years on the road promoting their debut album, which was originally made for a label that folded before the record came out. But things are finally looking up for the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania quartet. After some tweaking here and there — including re-signing with their old record…
Home Movies
Blood Simple (Twentieth Century Fox) The Coen brothers have made better movies — Fargo, The Big Lebowski, No Country for Old Men. But it all starts here with their first film, a 1984 modern crime-noir about a guy who hires a hit man to kill his cheating wife and her boyfriend. But, as these things…
CD Review: Aliver Hall
(aliverhall.com) Aliver Hall build skyscraper songs that cement classic rock to granola grooves. The Akron quintet’s debut album bridges five six-minute free-flow rock jams with six instrumental segues that vary from funk to blues to punk. Long-haired architects Alex Hall and Jim Tauscher lead the band with crisscrossing guitars and vocals, carving out compositions that…
CD Review: Glen Campbell
There’s more than just a hint of poignancy to Glen Campbell’s latest album. The 75-year-old singer was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, and Ghost on the Canvas is the final record of a career that stretches back more than 50 years. And he’s going out strong, covering Jakob Dylan, Robert Pollard, and Paul Westerberg, and…
Union Jacked
It’s been more than 10 years since Rage Against the Machine released an album, but guitarist Tom Morello is still kicking up shit as the Nightwatchman, his folksinger alter ego who has more in common with Woody Guthrie than the punk and metal bands that influenced Rage. Back in February, Morello led a protest concert…
CD Review: Tom Morello: The Nightwatchman
With Rage Against the Machine, Tom Morello set his leftist politics to a visceral mix of punk and hip-hop, eventually couching the sloganeering with a thundering ’70s stomp in his later project, Audioslave. In 2003 Morello returned to his political roots, getting his Woody Guthrie on as the Nightwatchman. On World Wide Rebel Songs, he…
Risky Business
We haven’t produced a dead playwright yet!” So says Clyde Simon, artistic director of Convergence-Continuum, a near West Side theater company with a clear mission for mounting challenging modern plays. And while not all groups eat risk for breakfast as lustily as Con-Con, Cleveland Public Theatre, and Theater Ninjas do, there are some juicy treats…
Whistle Stop
Most Americans know Swedish indie rockers Peter Bjorn and John from one song. If you’re thinking of a song other than “Young Folks” — the most infectious tune to include whistling since “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard” — then you’re not like most Americans. But Writer’s Block, the 2006 album the song sprang…
Stay In!
TOP PICK – BOOK David Bowie: Starman (Little, Brown and Company) There are plenty of Bowie bios out there, but this deep read by Paul Trynka is one of the best. The former Mojo editor interviews hundreds of people who helped shape Bowie’s career over the past 40-plus years, including key collaborators and ex-boyfriends (yep).…
Local Band in Focus
Meet the Band: Ryan Sheridan (vocals and guitar), Mike Donzella (bass), and Bob Young (drums) Making Their Dreams Come True: Gossip Culture boast a nostalgia-heavy sound that’s “a mixture of ’80s synth-pop like New Order, Daft Punk, and the blue-eyed soul of Hall & Oates,” says Sheridan. “I suppose at one point Hall & Oates…
On View This Week
At the Cleveland Artists Foundation: A Body of Work Twentieth-century humanists made a great noise over their rediscovery of the body; but from looking at the works of Cleveland painter Shirley Aley Campbell, you’d never know it had gone missing. The Cleveland Artists Foundation is showcasing a retrospective of her work entitled The Way of…
License to Chill
There are two ways to go with spy movies: the blowing-shit-up route of the James Bond series, or the more cerebral path taken by thrillers like The Manchurian Candidate. Guess which way The Debt, starring Dame Helen Mirren and directed by the guy who made Shakespeare in Love, takes. The movie starts in 1997, when…
At the Arthouse
My Night at Maud’s Director Eric Rohmer’s 1969 breakthrough has all the elements that would mark his career: uptight guys, free-spirited women, and lots of people talking about some very deep things for a really long time. In My Night at Maud’s, a devout Catholic ends up spending the night with Maud, a recently divorced…
Dead Run
The plane touches down early on Monday morning, March 12, 2007. He spent the weekend steering jetliners up and down the eastern seaboard, but on this flight the 44-year-old pilot is now a passenger on his ride home. Once his feet are back on Cleveland soil, he begins his drive east to Newton Falls in…
CD Review: Beirut
In the four years since his band’s last album, Beirut’s Zach Condon has scaled back his boozy Balkan folk music to a finely tuned stroll through a gypsy carnival. Actually, it sounds more like the day after the carnival pulled out of town. Still building his songs on a shaky foundation of woozy accordions, saloon…
Get Out!
Thursday | 01 Funny Stuff Mike Polk at the Improv Cleveland comedian Mike Polk has been a busy guy this summer. Besides captaining his Lakewood kickball team deep into the second round of the playoffs, he developed an affinity for Boston Sidecars and bought a cat “in an effort to teach myself how to love.”…
Re-Joyce
It’s been two and a half years since chef Pete Joyce opened his ingredient-driven, Mediterranean-flavored Bistro on Lincoln Park. The time has come, he says, to do a little retooling. “We’ve been wanting to make some changes for a while now, and August is historically a slow month,” Joyce explains. “The timing was right.” The…
Drink of the Week
Now that we’re mostly clear of summer’s 100-degree-armpit conditions, patio drinking is back on the schedule. Leading the pack of great places to get sauced in the shade is the Fairmount, well-known among East Side drinkers for its high-powered cocktails crafted by booze scientist Tom Mullady. Secreted out back is the patio, a high-walled amphitheater…
Last Year’s Model
The wife and I had just returned home from a particularly egregious meal when I spotted something on Facebook that flew me into a rage. A talented Cleveland chef posted a giddy update on his forthcoming restaurant — a concept that was still in need of a home. Why would that optimistic tidbit cause so…
Afternoon Brew: New Calvin & Hobbes, Still More Flash Mob Crap, Fitz vs. Husted, and Al Bundy Gets a Star
Good afternoon, Cleveland. Here’s some stuff to read while you get mad at us for tricking you with that headline. — “Bill Watterson Writes, Illustrates, Shreds New ‘Calvin And Hobbes’ Strip Each Morning Out Of Spite.” (The Onion) — At least a few folks in Elyria want city council to make a law against flash…
