Little Italy has always been core to my REAL NEO experience. From earliest childhood memories,  my family has always had many meals at various Little Italy restaurants, each year, as well as picking-up an occasional pizza (where else in NEO but Mama Santas or Valentino's... well, do try the Gelatoria at Fairhill). I also love getting Lemon Ice and other goodies at Corbos. with their unusual greeting of "Leave the gun, take the cannoli"... as authentic as life gets, in NEO. Last night, I noticed Corbos moved next door to their old home, to a remodeled new space (much as Prestis did, a few years ago) Little Italy has always been a great hyper-local neighborhood, where people live, work, eat and socialize together within, and interact well with the world without. There's always lots of private rehab and strong entrepreneurial business activity here, off the Med-O-Mart grid. Which makes me ask you, what matters to the hyper-local economy in your neighborhood, and how is that doing.

One great thing about a gravel driveway is you can hear them coming.

This afternoon, Claes and I were chilling at home in East Cleveland, minding our own business, when we heard that crunch of rocks under heavy tires. Then the slam of a car door, and heavy feet on the front porch... another drive-by had arrived. It's been happening regularly since we started renovating the house on Roxbury, late last Summer.... especially on a beautiful day like today.

I thought I'd share some reflections after just spending Cinco de Mayo facilitating dialogues around regional economic development in Akron, Ohio.  I, like so many other colleagues who have participated in various phases of the Voices and Choices process had my fair share of reservations and issues with various aspects of the two-year, multi-million dollar investment and experience.  While I found great value in working hard to facilitate regional dialogues with a healthy mix of participants representing diverse demographics, I learned firsthand how difficult it is to drive meaningful outcomes from such activity.  I, like so many others, was very candid about the many difficulties endured and faced during the process - perhaps the most prolific of which was a failure to have the mechanisms in place to capture the heightened energy and activation of the masses in an effective and timely manner to drive meaningful and positive outcomes.  A candid conversation I had today with Advance Northeast Ohio's communications director, Chris Thompson, completely validated my feelings, as he was in complete agreement on this point.  I laud Chris for such candor and really appreciated his astute comments. 

Welcome to The Star Market and Cafe! What would make you walk, ride and drive out of your way and stop here? When? Why? Now is the time for Star Neighborhood Development to reinvent a blighted urban convenient store into a community asset. But how? That depends on you. What will you support here?

Jeff Buster certainly demonstrates "Why Citizen Journalism" regularly, with his impactful and important reporting and photojournalism on many matters of hyper-local, regional and global importance, on REALNEO, followed by the world. Today, the Cleveland Plain Dealer followed Jeff's lead investigation of a disgraceful, failed development in University Heights, "UNIVERSITY SQUARE MALL PARKING STRUCTURE - CLOSE IT NOW?" The PD's Patrick O'Donnell writes "University Square battles empty storefronts, parking garage problems", offering a very different set of perspectives on all matters related to this failure, while completely validating all construction-related observations first revealed by Jeff, a lifelong construction professional.

As we begin a new Spring - a new beginning - what are you doing to green your republic?

Corsair, a private pot of money and investors that seems poised to bail out National City, is an interesting development, but if you're concerned about housing and local investment, where is the encouragement for the future in a bank that got into this mess, at least in part, through poor lending practices and weak management oversight on home lending?

"It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,

I just received this message from New American Dream - follow that link for a nice webpage on spring cleaning. One of the great disasters of our consumer economy is the proliferation of dangerous household construction practices, lifestyles and cleaning processes, and harmful products in use in and around our homes on a daily basis. In renovating our historic house in East Cleveland, Evelyn and I have made all living spaces as toxin-free as possible, and we certainly intend to keep it that way in maintaining it. I think the following message offers some good advice - I don't endorse any of the products mentioned, as I don't know anything about them...the make-your-own approach mentioned here is more my style.

What does tomorrow look like? For Fritz Haeg it is a place where rather than waste precious natural resources on vanity-scapes like the ubiquitous front lawn we learn to work with the earth and find both beauty and functionality in personal and social investments such as his  “Edible Estates”. It is a tomorrow that includes architecture as a way of relocating animals to their natural habitats. Haeg will discuss his work as an architect, designer, educator, curator, artist, in short---visionary, as well as his ideas about an alternate model to the artist as isolated creator.

fritzhaeg.com
NY Times
Metropolis
www.cia.edu/tomorrow

Location

April 1st is "Energy Wasting Day"

A Great Idea, and A Great Video...

http://www.energywastingday.com/

Location

Coal Power's Deja-Meltdown

By Denis Du Bois

03/12/08

The government's futuristic "clean coal" power project has joined the long list of scuttled coal plants. The death spiral of coal energy is reminiscent of the 1980s popular blockade of nuclear plant construction. Investors and even the Bush administration are backing out.

On March 12, 2008, Cleveland Plain Dealer deputy editorial page director Kevin O'Brien published a snide, pointless editorial taking the position global warming is over-hyped. His conclusion is a Russian scientist predicts the world is entering a new Ice Age, which trumps Global Warming, so do nothing about Global Warming. I googled the Russian scientist O'Brien references - Oleg Sorokhtin - and came across a February 25th National Post column, by conservative Canadian columnist Lorne Gunter, to which O'Brien's March 12th column is so similar as to be plagiarism, in my book.

There is a need for the thoughtful people of Northeast Ohio to speak up loud and clear - sound an alarm - about environmental issues here, and our impact here on environmental issues worldwide.  We should do this in our everyday life, and we should participate in community efforts to speak in harmony about saving planet Earth. One way to shout-out that "This is a state of global emergency" is to become an "Alarmist". As posted on REALNEO here, for this April 11, at 11 AM local time, for one minute, and each 11th of the month thereafter, at 11 AM,  Alarmists declare, "We need to set off the world's alarms. Join in. It could be the alarm on your phone, in your home, in your car. You could gather some friends to make some noise. Organise a flash mob. Schedule a company fire drill. Borrow a vintage air raid siren... Be creative. Raise the alarm." So, people of REALNEO, how should we sound the first Alarmism minute?

Location

I attended the KennedyConCenter meeting this morning - held before the scheduled meeting of the Cuyahoga County Board of Commissioners.  

All the TV cameras and paper reporters were there.   Big news was afoot!

Each of the last two winters, Cleveland Plain Dealer writer Kevin O'Brien wrote that it sometimes snows in Cleveland so there is no global warming. His latest scientific position on this is posted on Cleveland.com here (and included below). O'Brien is such a strange writer I cannot tell if he is kidding, but in the interest of good public information it seems important for all people to consider what O'Brien published in the Plain Dealer and discuss if it is intelligent, misleading, incorrect or perhaps true. Who has an informed position on global warming and what O'Brien writes below?

Thought For Today....

Found in the current issue of Metropolis magazine...

Climate Watchers Place Own Big Bet On Alaska's Thaw
March 7, 2008; Page B1

Every winter since 1917, people in Nenana, a village 55 miles southwest of Fairbanks, have wagered on the exact moment that the ice breaks up on the nearby Tanana River. For the 450 townsfolk, the annual Alaska ice lottery, called the Nenana Ice Classic, is a financial lifeline that offers some their year's only employment. Winners last year shared a jackpot of $303,272.

On April 3, 2007 there was a discussion about the proposal for a new Cuyahoga County Administration building here on Realneo.   Around that time I had read a letter written by Tim Ferris which suggested that the present County Administration building was originally built to be expanded upward.   Today I add the photo above to confirm that the building was intended to be continued upward – you can see the columns projecting right up through the roof on both the main Administration Building and the Annex building.  I’ll bet if you removed the copper flashing from the top of the columns, there would be a plate with bolt holes already in it, ready to accept the steel columns for floors 5, 6, 7, etc.