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Author: Bill Cash

Political

Election night update 2

Chris Matthews: Congressman Bob Barr, let’s talk about Republicans in these toss-up races, how is it that Republicans are picking up these seats so well these days?

Bob Barr (R-GA): Well, I think the big news is Republicans are starting to pay attention to the local politics in the area and I want to say something that Tip O’Neill once said, and he didn’t say it as a Democrat, he said it as a political leader and that is all politics is local and the Republicans are learning to pay attention to what is going on locally.

Matthews: Congressman, let’s try it with one word.

Barr: Local.

Political

Election night update

You just missed it on CNN: George McGovern telling Alan Simpson that since Mondale and Lautenberg are back, maybe THEY should also run for office again.  And Simpson goes, “Hey, we’re tanned and toned, ready to go!”

City life

Columbus gets her arches back

Well, I had the pleasure of attending a rather unusual party last night.  As you might have heard, Columbus used to be famous for its lighted metal arches over High Street.  (According to the legend, Columbus was known as Arch City into the fifties.)  These arches were downtown and probably made a walk through the city rather attractive, and I think they must have nicely complemented the linearity of what was a great shopping and business street.  The arches were taken down, and I don’t know why.

Now Downtown has declined, but my neighborhood has been resurgent for twenty years.  Local business leaders and politicians have talked forever about getting new arches on High Street in the Short North to bring back that cool landscape and feel.  Last night, they finally put one up.

I was annoyed on my walk home to find that the street was being closed.  How many construction projects must I endure?  This counts as the sixth in a year and a half, with that disastrous fiber-optic project as the worst.  I went upstairs and made some dinner.  I kept looking out the window, though, and realized that the first arch was going to go up right outside my building.  Then my buddy Marc called and we talked about it.  Eventually, he wheedled me into agreeing to meet him so we could watch it go up.

I noticed the mayor out on the street holding champagne glasses, so I decided it was a good time to uncork a nice Australian red, which I dumped into a couple of plastic cups.  (If the mayor can violate the open-container law, so can I, right?)  Then I headed downstairs to stand in the street like everybody else.

“Everyone” was there.  By everyone, I mean a good chunk of the local shop owners, city politicians, and urban design/planner types.  Dorothy Teater was there, and she chatted amiably with Mayor Coleman.  (I was one of the six people who voted for Dot when she was up for mayor in ’99.  I’ve always felt sorry for her since she had to be county commissioner with Arlene Shoemaker for so long.)  I recognized the Rigsby’s owner, the guy who owns my building, some of my mom’s clients, a real estate agent, and a lot of others, and I got to meet some new people who I’m sure I’ll never remember.  There were also a lot of construction workers, contractor/suits, Rigsby’s diners, local residents, and half-drunk yahoos from the Short North Tavern.

It was cool.  The thing looks more round than I expected.  The arches have to be tall enough for semis and buses to pass under, even at the curbside lanes.  (Let’s hope they’re big enough for trains, too, eh?)  I figured it would look like some jungle-gym crossbar, but it was elegant.  The “light bulbs” are actually unbreakable plastic knobs that let light out via fiber optics.  They say they can do any colors except red, amber, and green, since these are the traffic light colors.  So for Independence Day we can have purple, white, and blue!

The mayor cried “photo op!” and gathered round a lot of workers and contractor types for photos and videos.  Then he said, “Let’s have the city people up here!”, by which he meant City government workers but which the half-drunk yahoos interpreted as themselves.  Coleman made a toast to “the future of Columbus, which is exemplified by the dynamism of this neighborhood!”  OK, Mr. Mayor, you never were a great speechifier, but you got a lot of “woos” and applause.  (“Take it to the next level!”)  Then a crane lifted the arch slowly into position.  Then the mayor stared at it for a while and then announced “I’ll be back in ten minutes!” and ambled off in the direction of the Tavern.  He never came back.  I toyed with the idea of being the first civilian to pass under the arch but, fearing further pedestrian challenges to the police, decided to content myself with being one of the first.

The rest of the evening I spent finishing the wine and complaining with all of the Short North Democrats about tomorrow’s election.  It made me feel good to live in a real community, which has civic leaders, business boosters, and a lot of residents.

It was a little anticlimactic actually, since they never turned the first arch on.  I thought it would be awesome to see it snapped into position and then illuminated, but that didn’t happen.  In fact, Marc said he noticed later they’d taken it back down.  No matter.  This morning two were up and they looked great.

Culture

Upcoming TV events

The first Ohio gubernatorial debate will be televised on a number of stations around the state on Tuesday at 7pm.  On those occasions when I say politics is my favorite sport, this is the sort of thing I’m referring to.

Sting Forever premieres October 19th on BBC America.  I think we all know what to do here.  Click here to write the British Ambassador in protest.

Curb Your Enthusiasm continues to run on HBO.  It’s not TV, it’s HBO.  If you liked Seinfeld, watch this show, or just borrow the tape from me.  Indescribable but rapidly becoming my role model.

Work life

Musical interlude

I work out at the Nationwide gym. It’s a great deal, um, it’s free, you get personal trainer help on demand, fitness testing, and they have lots of great machines and free weights. (No pool.) Plus, everybody wears little name tags, so it’s easy to figure out who people are.

The only bad thing about the gym is the music. For the longest time, it was 100% oldies. Well, I remember all of the oldies because they were drilled into my head, driving around in the big conversion van in 1983. Unfortunately, these are only bad oldies… like, C-list oldies. “Hey there, Georgie girl,” the “down on South Street” song, “Everyone knows it’s Wendy,” and maybe they’ll play “Sign, sign, everywhere a sign.” Oddly, the Beatles and Elvis are entirely missing from the Nationwide Wellness Center Oldies Canon.

I strongly suspect cheapness. Are obscure oldies cheaper than mainstays?

However, the last couple of weeks I’ve noticed a totally new sound. A grating, bizarre sound. It is now some kind of tribal dance music. Or occasionally a deep moody bassy song with a drum machine gone berserk. At first, I was really happy it wasn’t The Shirelles. But then I realized, hey, I don’t recognize a damn one of these songs — what’s going on? It’s got to be some kind of corporate techno! The dead giveaway, really, was this strange “California wild” female vocalist who comes in on, like, every single song, singing weird lines like “Ready, steady, go, hold my hand now!” or “One I two want three it yeah!” Honestly, is there no justice in this world?

Political

Independence Day

July 4th has come and gone. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. As always, different people celebrate it in different ways: my brother celebrated it with foreigners in a basement club in Sydney, my friend Amy near the wildfire zones of Colorado anguished that there would be no fireworks, and the rest of my family, of course, did absolutely nothing. (At least, if they did, I wasn’t invited.)

For my part, I spent July 3rd (the traditional fireworks date in Columbus) right where I want to be, sitting on the curb on Broad Street by Veteran’s Memorial. As I explained to my odd band of co-celebrators, the lights twinkle and reflect in the glass of the Huntington building across the river. In years past, the police strung up sawhorses and depended on the good order of citizens not to go onto the bridge, since it could be dangerous to stand there. This year, there were chain link fences holding us back and a rumor that the bomb squad would have to sweep the bridge before we could cross it.

So, times have changed, and I find myself uncomfortably in a sober minority of people who take our new reality very seriously. In the last year, I’ve heard many people make tasteless jokes about terrorism, which I just can’t laugh at — because it’s real. I guess, as at funerals and in war, people have to break the tension in one way or another, but some things hit too close to home to say. I call for dignity.

I hope you enjoyed your holiday. The rest of the weekend stretches out ahead…

City life

The New Dispatch

Well, I just got my copy of the Sunday Dispatch, and it includes a six-page section on the changes we can all expect tomorrow in the Monday paper.

I was initially upset that the paper is being redesigned (are you surprised?), but it doesn’t look that bad. Other than the fact that the paper is getting two inches narrower, the changes should be OK. The Dispatch is so urban cool, because they suggested that it would be easier to manage during a morning bus commute — despite the fact that only about 12,000 people do that on a regular basis. Thank you, Dispatch!

Finally, I should like to use this space to settle an argument that has been raging for some time, and I’d like to do it by saying, “I win.” :) To explain, many people have said that a newspaper has no “cover,” only a “front page.” The first page of each section is also just called a “front page,” these people say. Well, if you’ll look throughout Section I today, you’ll note that the Dispatch calls it a “cover” again and again, thusly siding with me. Please don’t question my news-reading abilities.

Culture

Entry zero

Welcome to this, the first of many web log entries. I am very happy to be here! This is being set up as a bit of an experiment for me. I’m not planning to write one of those web logs that tells you what I’m eating, wearing, listening to, thinking about, looking at, etc. (This is my life, not The Truman Show.) But, I will write if I have something to say and if I decide I like the web log format. So let the comments fly and I promise I’ll do my best to keep you entertained.