Ohio Supreme Court Justice Leaving to Focus on Veterans Issues
Justice Stratton Last summer, we wrote about the debut of Cleveland’s veterans courts, one of a number of such courts being launched around Ohio to help low-level offenders who had served in the military access services to help keep them out of the legal system in the future. That included health care, substance abuse, and…
WRUW Does NOT Hate Hippies!
The pre-Memorial Day Hessler Street Fair, which took place last weekend, is mecca to the tie-dyed, sandal-wearing, granola-eating crowd. The two-day festival takes place on a brick-paved street in the middle of the Case Western Reserve University campus, whose old homes and apartments — miraculously not razed to build yet another gleaming new classroom building…
Old Lakewood McDonald’s to Become Nature’s Bin Addition
The folks who fought the incursion of a McDonald’s in central Lakewood have resoundingly lost their battle: The historic Detroit Theatre is being reduced to rubble to make way for Ronald’s empire. But there is some poetic justice to be had: The new McDonald’s on Detroit Avenue spells the end of the old McDonald’s tucked…
All the Downtown Cleveland Cops Are Now Only Policing the Casino
Early word on Cleveland’s glistening new Horseshoe Casino is over-whelmingly positive, based on an in-depth analysis of giddy morning TV news shows and that tingly feeling city leaders get from seeing white people downtown at night. But a different version of the casino’s impact is emerging among cops charged with patrolling Dan Gilbert’s new funhouse…
The Quality of Cleveland Life Report
Your guide to living in fabulous Cleveland. Cuddly Li’l Killing Machines: Ohio removes the term “pit bulls” from its law against vicious dogs, in essence putting the breed on equal legal ground with all other dogs. Pit bulls statewide hailed the move with a toast of slobber-water and a dinner of human limbsand noses. QB…
Scene Intern Sacrificed for Staff, Survives Anyway
Justine Stump, first of five scheduled summer interns, so presumably expendable. Following are the adventures of Scene interness Justine Stump of Kent State University. In her first week on the job, she was invited to join other members of the media in rappelling off the 17-story DoubleTree Hotel downtown. The publicity stunt was part of…
Drunk, High, and After Peeing Your Pants is Not the Time to Hit on a Cop
Whether she was playing coy, or not so coy in this case, and trying to use her womanly charms with the cops to wile her way out of a DUI arrest, or whether she, as you’ll see below, had enough substances in her blood to elicit pure honesty, a 32-year-old woman pulled over by Westlake…
Former AG Marc Dann Opens Up to Politico About Life After Scandal
Marc Dann’s stint as Ohio Attorney General pretty much serves as a How-To on sinking a promising political career in record time. After rolling around the Ohio Senate in the early 00s, the Democrat won the state’s top lawman seat in 2007 — only to lose the gig a year later after his affair with…
Kenny Lofton Tells Chris Perez to Shut Up
Indians closer Chris Perez said some things about Indians fans the other day. You might have heard. Yesterday, Kenny Lofton went on 92.3 The Fan and stood up for the Wahoos in the stands, and even those not in the stands, basically telling Chris Perez to shut up in the process. Old No. 7 knows…
Ask DoubleTree to Deliver You Some Free Stuff Today
DoubleTree is over in Willard Park today giving away chocolate chip cookies and other stuff until 5 o’clock, which is reason enough to get up from your cubicle and walk over there and ignore your boss and that thing he just told you to do. It’s part of the hotel chain’s “Little Things Project,” which…
Casino Saturation, Something to Think About
The new casino in Toledo will throw open its gilded doors May 29, the second of Ohio’s four gambling palaces to open. Toledo is a short 90-120 minute drive from Cleveland, just 30 minutes from Detroit, and 45-60 or so from Windsor. That’s a lot of casinos in a relatively small area. Detroit is already…
Here Are Some Suggestions for the Med Mart’s New Name
Over in his weekly round-up of pithy news items, the Plain Dealer’s Mike McIntrye has an quick-hit about the possibility of renaming the Med Mart – or, ahem, as it officially stands now, the Medical Mart and Convention Center. Turns out, the business suits behind the project are sweating over the name, worrying the existing…
Ticket Giveaway: Talib Kweli
Brooklyn rapper Talib Kweli is currently rolling through the country with his Prisoner of Conscious Tour. It stops at the Grog Shop on Wednesday, May 30. We have a pair of tickets to the show. Want them? All you have to do is leave us a comment with your favorite Kweli cut, and yeah, it…
Chump of the Week: James Daniel Hits Girlfriend With Frying Pan
Hitting your woman? Terrible. Hitting your woman with a frying pan? Next-level scumbaggery. Hitting your woman with a frying pan in front your kids? Doesn’t get much worse. That’s the card James Daniel III punched this week during an incident in Akron, according to Newsnet 5. We’re pretty sure each of those listed actions buy…
Ohioans Don’t Think Cleveland’s a Very Good City
Public Policy Polling asked Ohioans to give their opinion about the state’s biggest cities and Cleveland did not top the list. Hell, it wasn’t even in the top three. Youngstown, in case you were wondering, occupied the low end of the favorability spectrum, which sounds about right to anyone that isn’t from Youngstown, and probably…
Fox 8 Discovers Akron Meth Squad
Over on Fox 8, reporter Dave Nethers has a great exclusive story on a group of Akron police officers who work the meth beat. The station road shotgun with these dedicated cops while they toured the city sniffing down illegal and dangerous labs . . . hold on . . . this sounds familiar .…
BRGR 9 Now Open, Here Are Some Quick Thoughts
BRGR 9 is the latest in what seems to be a resurgence of delightful lunch options in the Warehouse District — Barroco and an Indian place are set to debut soon; El Guero already swung open the doors. Today was day one for the new joint in the old Zdara space on W. 9th. As…
Video: Kyrie Irving is ‘Uncle Drew’
Kyrie Irving’s new Pepsi MAX commercial. (Via WFNY)
Ed FitzGerald Acknowledges Possible Run for Governor
The rumors about Cuyahoga County Executive Tommy Carcetti taking his talents from the shores of Lake Erie to the Ohio Governor’s mansion have been around ever since Carcetti jumped from lowly city council to Mayor of Baltimore. Wait, that’s not right. Oh yeah, County head Ed FitzGerald has had his name attached to a possible…
Austin Radio Producer Breaks Akron Grad’s Fist-Pumping Record
It’s been less than a week since James Peterson set the Guinness World Record for Jersey-style fist pumping in Akron, and the record has already fallen. Nooooooooooooooooooooo. Can’t Akron have just one thing, world? Just one thing? Ray, a producer on “The Bobby Bones Show” in Austin set the new record — 17 hours and…
Citizens Try to Interview Frank Russo
Frank Russo is out and about these days, shopping for new glasses or drinking wine or whatever it is a government witness with an impending sentencing date does while he waits for the cuffs. Everyone else targeted by the Feds in the Cuyahoga County corruption scandal, however, are in jail. Russo’s a fascinating subject, and…
Don’t Leave Your Phone Behind at a Crime Scene
Fun with the police blotters this afternoon from Richmond Heights. A man employed the always ingenious ruse of lifting some merch from JC Penney only to try to return the stolen clothing to the store for cash. An employee, wise to our brilliant thief’s plan, handed over a gift card for store credit (over $140),…
Cleveland High Schooler Writes About Being Accepted to Harvard
You get better jokes out of ridiculous crime stories and anything having to do with Dennis! Kucinich, but it can beat you down. Some good news is in order every once in awhile, which brings us to David Boone, a Cleveland public schools high schooler who was accepted to Harvard. Boone participated in Minds Matter,…
Does Washington Want Kucinich? Does Anyone Care? (Updated)
Cleveland Memory Project “Washington? I think it’s that way.” Update: Dennis! Kucinich has finally put all the rumors to rest. He will hang up his Congressional exclamation point at the end of his term and will not be seeking the seat in Washington state. A portion of his email that went out this afternoon: Because…
We Get Mail
One Last Jab at the Occupiers Occupy Cleveland is not an occupation just because it starts with the same five letters! [“Occupy Cleveland Releases Official Statement on Anarchist Wannabe Bridge Bombers,” at the Scene & Heard blog.] Get a real job! Scott Lemieux Casino Gold As someone who grew up in Cleveland and has worked…
Rosavelt’s New Deal
How often can you say that a band’s reunion album is better than anything it released the first time around? Most of the time, those comeback LPs turn out to be ego-stroking rehashes of what the band did so well the first time — think about the Stooges or Dinosaur Jr. or even Steely Dan.…
Wishes Granted
When he received a coveted artist grant from the Community Partnership for Arts & Culture in 2009, Laurence Channing felt obliged to pay it forward with a body of work honoring the region that had rewarded him. So Channing, the retired director of publications at the Cleveland Museum of Art and a longtime landscape painter,…
Savage Love
Dear Dan: I’m stumped. In the novel Fifty Shades of Grey, which has been the subject of much discussion due to its controversial subject matter (a young woman gets involved in a BDSM relationship), the term “canning” is used numerous times. Despite my best efforts, I cannot find a definition for this practice. Who else…
On View This Week
Cleveland Artists Foundation: Black and White. An overview of painter Edwin Mieczkowski’s geometric abstractions focuses on the artist’s colorless works from the 1960s and relates them to his later, more colorful works. The shift represents a hypnotic, almost computational regularity of forms to more jittery, happenstance arrangements. A reception will be held Friday, May 18,…
On the Home Front
On The Home Front Matt and Carolyn LaWell are nearly a month into a summer-long baseball odyssey that won’t land them back in Northeast Ohio till late July. And when they get here, they’ll be … catching a few baseball games before gassing up the Element and heading east to continue their odyssey. Not interested…
At the Arthouse
The Uninvited The Cinematheque’s “100 Years of Paramount Pictures” series offers movie fans plenty of opportunities to see all sorts of quiet classics from the studio’s vaults on the big screen, where they were truly meant to be viewed. (As visionary as he was, Cecil B. DeMille probably never anticipated people watching films on their…
A Jewel in the Rough
We’ve all learned from books about the days of African-American slavery. But in Gem of the Ocean by August Wilson, the time is 1904 and some of the characters onstage were alive during those dark days before the Civil War. That fact alone makes Gem, the first chronological installment of Wilson’s sweeping Pittsburgh Cycle, a…
CD Review: Best Coast
Bethany Cosentino’s odes to teen life have always betrayed commercial aspirations more upwardly mobile than those of her peers. With aid from producer Jon Brion, the Best Coast frontwoman sheds her punkish moxie on their second, high-gloss album, while expanding her sonic palette to include strings, multitracked vocals, and Phil Spector’s castanets. But Cosentino’s feel-good…
On Stage This Week
Sondheim on Sondheim: The Music and the ManSomewhere in a penthouse overflowing with Tonys, Oscars, Grammys, and a Pulitzer Prize, Broadway’s greatest living composer is looking down on Cleveland and smiling. And what is there about our little town that makes the great Stephen Sondheim (Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, Company, Into the Woods, and plenty more)…
Extra Cheese
Melt Bar & Grilled, the local dining sensation that’s swept the food-TV nation, has announced plans for a fourth location, slated to open mid-October in Mentor. Far-east diners can look forward to the largest Melt to date, with seating for 140 inside and another 40 to 50 outdoors. The look and feel — a sort…
CD Review: Willie Nelson
Some of the “heroes” of Willie Nelson’s latest album, who either collaborate with the music legend or contribute songs to the project, seem sorta dubious: two of his sons, Sheryl Crow, Coldplay. (Though we totally get Snoop Dogg, who joins Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, and Jamey Johnson on “Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I…
800 Beers
With more than 15 local breweries pumping out craft beer across the region — though admittedly it seems there are 37 of them on West 25th Street alone — it’s no surprise that the annual International Beer Fest at the IX Center has enjoyed wild success. What could be better, after all, than 800 beers…
Culture Jamming
TOP PICK Prototype 2 (Activision) In this sequel to the 2009 video game (for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and PC), a revenge-minded soldier looks to get even with the monsters responsible for wiping out his family. So he wanders a post-apocalyptic NYC (of course), with shape-shifting abilities and a large arsenal of weapons. The…
Concert Calendar
Eve 6 It’s not unfair to lump in Eve 6 with the countless other faceless “number” bands they graduated with. But unlike Finger Eleven or 3 Doors Down, these California rockers’ generic alt-blare has some distinction, thanks to Max Collins’ wobbly voice and ridiculously wordy wordplay (“your heinous highness broke her hymen”). Plus, the tongue-twisting…
Love and Baseball
Chugging along the back roads of Florida between Fort Myers and Lakeland, Matt and Carolyn LaWell are trying to explain why they quit their jobs and put their lives on hold this year to take a 152-day road trip across the country to see 120 minor-league baseball games. But as they do so, the conversation…
Home Movies
Chronicle (Twentieth Century Fox) Chronicle has all the ingredients of a sci-fi quickie targeting teen audiences looking for a little weekend escapism: Three high-school pals stumble into cosmic telekinetic superpowers, which they document with a hand-held camera (just like The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, plus dozens of other movies you didn’t see). It’s only…
CD Review: Cornershop
Cornershop must have really enjoyed working with unknown singer Bubbley Kaur on last year’s collaboration album Cornershop and the Double ‘O’ Groove Of. The British band’s eighth LP features different singing partners on each of its 11 tracks. But unlike the somewhat tuneless 2011 outing, Urban Turban packs its songs with pop hooks, dance grooves,…
Instant Bayou
When a restaurant can fill your belly and shift your paradigm, that’s a good thing. So kudos to Jezebel’s Bayou, a new southern-style restaurant near Shaker Square. The paradigm in question was alligator meat: I nearly busted a jaw the last time I bit into a piece, so I was in no hurry to repeat…
Film Capsules
Darling CompanionWriter-director Lawrence Kasdan had a hand in two parts of Star Wars’ holy trinity, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Big Chill, and Body Heat, but this is his third horrific film in a row. Diane Keaton stars as a (what else?) shrill and manic menopausal housewife who can’t stand her doctor husband (Kevin…
Pure Torture
It was only a matter of time before Sacha Baron Cohen would have to retire his style of guerrilla filmmaking. After the success of 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and the relative non-success of 2009’s Brüno, sneaking up on people with a camera and smacking his genitals…
STREET SENSATIONS
For 17 years, Robert Tanner was better known as Gyro Bob, operator of the beloved food cart that served Kent’s hungry — and often tipsy — masses till long after last call. It’s been his life since he was 19. But these days, Gyro Bob has gone mobile: He traded his cart for a full-sized…
