Yes, Seriously

He gets points for the USB Jesus Fish!

(Wondering if the car has Rich Corinthian Leather.)

Ye Olde Pollyng Place 2012

Where I voted this morning in Hamilton County, Ohio. (No lines here, but it’s a big building…lotsa people inside.)

Southgate House Revival

Well, since M—–l has flown the coop*, I guess it’s my responsibility to register cautious optimism regarding the reincarnation of Southgate House in Newport, Kentucky.

I’m not ordinarily a fan of clubs, and there are a bazillion ways (yes, I counted) that live music can go awry. It’s remarkable that I saw a lot of shows (no, I haven’t counted) at the old Southgate House, and enjoyed all of them. I would really, really like the new venue to match that success rate.

Plus, I hope parking doesn’t suck.

__________

*If you’re not familiar with this blog, that’s a reference to a fellow Cincinnati-area blogger who hung up his blogging gloves. (You didn’t know blogging had gloves, did you? It also has support garments, but you probably don’t want to read about those.)

Unusable Door Thursday 6/21/2012

The Most Exaggerated Business Name Anywhere Ever

Unusable Door Thursday 3/8/2012

And now, the conclusion to the previous episode of Unusable Door Thursday.

We had just been introduced to a door which, were it opened, would deposit one onto a sloping rooftop.

What must that arrangement have looked like from the outside?

Here you go.

It seems we have a lonely little five-story tower, fully equipped with elevator and staircase, all set to service its doorways out into…thin air.

Evidently the tower was erected in anticipation of a parking garage—but then someone realized a surface lot would be more than adequate, and called off completion of the garage.

The secret: these structures serve a hospital that was largely converted into administrative offices in 2000. And it would seem administrative offices generate a lot less automotive traffic than hospitals. So, the lonely little tower may have been a waste of funds, but at least they didn’t build the whole damn garage.

Sexist Double Deckers

Mt. Storm Visitor

Recently the office gang had lunch at Mt. Storm Park in Cincinnati. A surprise guest appeared:

Mt. Storm Park affords a view of the Mill Creek Valley—which, while not the most picturesque place on earth, makes for a striking vista.

HUGE BLIZZARD!!!

Here is the shocking aftermath of the HUGE BLIZZARD that blanketed Cincinnati over the last 24 hours, nearly killing EVERYONE!!!

Huge Blizzard 1

Okay, to be fair, the property managers there did a nice job of cleaning up. But still, we weren't exactly inundated. Scenes like this were more representative:

Huge Blizzard 2

Yep. That's what schools and businesses all around the Tri-State shut down for.

I thought Cincinnatians had a growing self-awareness of local snow hysteria. Perhaps not.

Maybe we're that way because our snowfalls are so rarely dramatic, we root for each pending storm, hoping it will be A Big One. But it almost never is.

Hmm. Isn't that like being a diehard Cincinnati sports fan?

Peter Bowes

The morning of December 4, 1979 was cold in Cincinnati. My dad had the thermostat rigged to lower the temperature at night to save energy. Some mornings I would sit over by the register to enjoy the blast of heat as the furnace brought the temperature back to normal. That was one of those mornings. I was in the sixth grade.

The night before, the local news had broken in with an announcement that some people had been killed at a Who concert downtown at Riverfront Coliseum. The news seemed bad to me, but I think I believed it wasn’t that unusual. I had an image in my mind of rock concerts as abjectly chaotic events where all kinds of horrible violent things happened on a regular basis.

For some reason my mother was concerned about a young man from our school named Peter Bowes. She just thought it seemed like the kind of thing he might attend.

I remember seeing Peter Bowes exactly once, when he went with us on a trip to Cowan Lake. He was a few years older than my older brother. His father was one of my dad’s work colleagues and part of my dad’s daily ride pool.

So, that following morning, while I warmed up by the heat register, my mom came into my room. She was crying. She said Peter Bowes had been killed at the concert.

I don’t think I knew what to say. “Oh, really?” were the words that came out–not in an apathetic sense, but in a “Holy shit” sense.

In all, eleven people had been killed, crushed as the crowd pushed toward the doors trying to get the best seats.

I remember when my mom went to visit the family. I think she brought some food.

“Festival seating” was justifiably excoriated in Cincinnati after that, and probably in much of the event business. Cincinnati banned it.

A few years later when The Who became a favorite of mine and my brother’s, there was a tension in that enjoyment, a somber undertone of what had happened when a crowd of people were too eager to hear it.

A few years later I attended my first rock show: we saw Yes at that same venue. It bore little resemblance to the mob scene I half-expected–in part because my impression was so distorted, in part because the band was rather less testosterone-fueled, and in part, probably, because the memory of what had happened at that place was relatively fresh.

More time has passed than I like to acknowledge. I’m older than the guys in The Who were then. Ned Criddle, one of the older kids who accompanied us to see Yes, has since passed away, and so has my brother (neither loss having anything to do with any concert). Riverfront Coliseum is now the U.S. Bank Arena.

I’ve never forgotten the date.