Stuart Blog 2

I need to

2009-02-26T22:03:00.000-08:00

think of some more vulgarities.

For the

2009-02-26T21:15:00.001-08:00

love of all that's holy!

this

2009-02-26T20:09:00.001-08:00

sucks!

why isn't

2009-02-26T20:06:00.001-08:00

this working?

testing againg

2009-02-26T14:04:00.001-08:00

testing sgirsginet'inetih'o

testing subscribe2

2009-02-26T13:37:00.000-08:00

and wp-o-matic
and who knows what else.

Rube goldberg would be proud.

test

2008-12-25T18:40:00.000-08:00

I hope there aren't still people subscribed to this blog.

test test test test test

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test test test stets tg erigherioghueriog

test

2008-12-24T13:16:00.000-08:00

testing rssfwd.

test

2008-12-19T20:10:00.000-08:00

test

stu_spivack on Snipd.com on 10-6-2008

2008-11-05T00:10:00.001-08:00

stu_spivack on Snipd.com on 10-6-2008

Another test

stu_spivack on Snipd.com on 10-6-2008

2008-11-05T00:06:00.001-08:00

Testing.

Yesterday's dinner

2007-11-02T07:18:00.001-07:00

This is a picture of the banana cream pie at Moxie

These lamb chops were one of the day's specials.

This butternut squash soup had delicious chunks of squash and shrimp.

Lamb Chops

2007-11-02T07:12:00.001-07:00

testing

2007-02-18T12:30:00.000-08:00

41.11609 -83.175173

2006-12-31T15:39:00.000-08:00

How easy is it to use Google Docs to publish to a blogger blog?

Bagels with Sarabeth jam and Organic Valley cream cheese

Well, it's pretty easy, I guess. But WriteToMyBlog makes it simple to import images from flickr.

Also I keep aligning the photo in the center and every time it saves my progress it gets pushed over to the right. Weird.

Miles Farmers Market

2006-12-31T14:56:00.001-08:00

Miles Farmers Market is not a gourmet shop. It's a grocery store but it seems to be the area's go-to spot for exotic or premium foods. I first resolved to explore Miles Market when I heard that they carried Zingerman's gelato . I finally did explore Miles Market after I heard that they carried H&H bagels. A chance to particpate in Food Destinations #4 may have provided just a little extra bit of motivation, too.

A nice bagel is enough for me to call it a day and declare a winner but the breadth of Miles Market's stock is impressive in every department. Want some butter? How about beurre d'Isigny? Plugra? Goat butter? Ghee? All available, amongst several others. Chocolate? I've grown accustomed to seeing Scharfen-Berger but I was pleased to see Vosges Haute Chocolate. I'm only sorry that I didn't document the mind-boggling array of salts, olive oils and honeys.

What goes with those bagels? How about some Sarabeth jam? Markets throughout the region have acres of aisles devoted to jam and they're packed with fancifully shaped bottles of extravagantly priced jam but I never saw Sarabeth's until I visited Miles.

My visit to Miles Market was more than just a shopping trip. I was surprised many times by products that I'd only read about amongst other unfamiliar products that I'm sure offer yet more delightful surprises. A gift certificate to Miles Market would be a gift that I'd be happy to receive and proud to give.

Hazelnut gelato - delicious

Some prepared food. I see crab pretzel bread

They have little cups of hot sauce for their sandwiches. That's a detail that appeals to me.

Cheese!

Note the house made croutons in the foreground.

Bread from a neighborhood bakery

Tom-yam gung

2006-12-04T22:09:00.000-08:00

We prepared this delicious soup at a dinner party slash cooking class. Tom-yum gung is one of the most emblematic dishes in Thai cuisine. This version turned out wonderfully. The shrimp were plump, juicy and flavorful. The broth was full of flavor, too. The central note is provided by lemongrass, a common motif in Thai cooking, and the taste is filled out with another common Thai flavoring - fish sauce.

The soup itself was delicious but I also enjoyed the experience. I was able to learn about food, eat a well thought out menu full of delicious food and share it all with other eager food enthusiasts.

Galangal is another important component in this dish and another common Thai ingredient. It was difficult to locate. The evening's organizer had to arrange to have it mailed by a family member.

Fish sauce is made from fermented anchovies. Squid brand is a strong flavored brand and is recommended.

Tracking down kaffir lime leaves is frequently another chore for USian cooks. But our host fixed that problem. This little fellow is a kaffir lime tree.

Palm sugar

These kaffir lime leaves weren't from the tree pictured above. The chef remove the stem that runs through the center out of habit. The leaves are removed before serving.

The lemongrass is bruised to release the flavor.

This is the plated soup. It was delicious. There are very few restaurants in the US that give Asian food the type of treatment that's given to French or Italian food. Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be an audience prepared to pay a premium for fresh, quality ingredients. But whenever and wherever some courageous restauranteur is willing to the lead the way then I'll happily seek them out. This soup demonstrates that the results are worth the effort.

Serves 8-10 as a side dish

8 cups or 2 quarts of vegetable or chicken stock

5 stalks lemongrass, trimmed and bruised

6oz galangal ginger crosscut into coins

6oz fresh ginger crosscut into coins

10-12 bird chilies, stemmed and bruised whole

6 kaffir lime leaves, stemmed

1/2 pound oyster mushrooms, stemmed

1 medium yellow onion, thinly sliced

1/2 pound fresh medium shrimp peeled and deveined

2 medium tomatoes, cored and cut into wedges

1/2 cup fresh squeezed lime juice

1/4 cup fish sauce or more to taste

2 tablespoons sugar

1 tablespoon chili in oil (nam prik pow)

Fresh sprigs or leaves of cilantro for garnish

Place first 4 ingredients into a large pot and boil for 10 minutes. At this point you can strain and discard ingredients. Or for a more authentic approach, leave all ingredients in broth and continue to add chilies, kaffir lime leaves, oyster mushrooms and onion. Bring to a boil and let cook for 5 minutes. Turn down heat and add shrimp and tomatoes, then remove from heat. Add remaining ingredients and garnish individual servings with cilantro. The flavor of Tom Yum should be an equal balance of all flavors; sweet, salty, sour and spicy.

Optional: A sous chef from one of the country's best restaurants. This might be as hard to find as the galangal but it's highly recommended. It comes in handy when too many of your other cooks get tipsy.

This soup was only the beginning of a wonderful meal. It was perfectly matched with several other iconic Thai dishes. (Recipes are available for several. Please click the picture.)

Whether you're inspired to reach for the stock pot or the yellow pages, I hope you'll find a delicious tom-yam gung for yourself.

So how often do I eat at Siam Cafe?

2006-11-11T10:53:00.000-08:00

This often:

Scroll up so that you can see the week that begins with Sunday, August 20. That five week span captures my most concentrated period of Siam Cafe indulgence. At least, recently. This widget only goes back in time 10 meals.

Test

2006-11-10T12:20:00.000-08:00

Just testing BlogMailr.

Tamarind (?) fish soup. Delicious.

2006-11-02T08:07:00.000-08:00

P1040110 Hosted on Zooomr

Dine and Dish 7 - Like a virgin

2006-10-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

Choosing something new was easy. Lola was Cleveland's most anticipated restaurant opening in my memory and perhaps for as long as a couple of decades. Chef Michael Symon originally opened Lola many years ago in Tremont, a neighborhood long on history but experiencing an extended rough patch. Lola was an important part of a revitalization of the neighborhood. The area is now home to many of the city's most popular independent restaurants, many of our galleries and has a nice mix of charming old housing stock and newer buildings.

Lola closed in that location and was quickly replaced by Lolita but everyone's greatest expectations were reserved for the new incarnation of Lola in a new location. Lola's grand re-opening was far behind schedule. The new space is much larger and has a more "downtown" energy. Everyone oohs and ahhs over the beautiful alabaster bar. It makes a grand first impression. The new location is on East 4th Street which gives Symon and Lola a chance to participate in the revitalization of yet another Cleveland area. Luxury lofts in an old wig factory, a martini bar bowling alley and the House of Blues music venue are all nearby.

The beef cheek pierogi is one of Chef Symon's whimsical tributes to the hearty ethnic culinary tradition of Cleveland. We like our pierogis. This beef cheek pierogi was full of beefy flavor.

Chef Symon spent time studying with Mario Batali and has since featured charcuterie at Lolita and now at the new Lola. This lamb was delicious. Very light and very lamb-y. Isn't the bread adorable? I want to see a whole loaf. It's also delicious.

This grouper was fantastic. It was as good as any fish that I've ever had: crispy outside, moist and buttery inside, full of flavor.

French toast with bacon ice cream? Yup. It was very nice with more of that delicious tiny bread. I don't know whether this is an intentional tribute to Heston Blumenthal. The pastry chef is Cory Barrett whose resume includes Tribute in Chicago.

lobster corn dogs. mustard creme fraiche.

pork sausage, pickled fennel.

A great salad is a sign of a great restaurant. It shows that no part of the meal is considered as an afterthought. Nice peppery arugula, flavorful nuts, creamy cheese.

Ordering poultry is a risky proposition even, I've found, at very highly regarded restaurants. And recently I've grown wary of foie gras. It's so wonderful that it's hard to pass up and equally disappointing when it isn't prepared to the standards that it deserves. This squab was moist and full of flavor. The squab is corned - rubbed with salt and spices and allowed to absorb these flavors for a while before it's cooked. I first read about this technique in relation to Zuni Cafe. Salting prior to cooking is important for flavor but it can draw moisture out of the meat. But Chef Rodgers at Zuni salts the meat hours or days before which allows time for the moisture to be redistributed back to its natural place. Chef Symon uses this technique on the lamb, squab and steak. I can vouch for the results on the squab, I've heard raves for the lamb and personally, I'm very excited about trying the steak. Yet one more thing I've grown hesitant to order.

Delicious pear sorbet with brown butter pear and gorgonzola and walnut cake.

lola-pops. chocolate, hazelnut and sea salt.

Considering the quality of the squab, the foie gras and the grouper I have to say that Lola lived up to all the hype. Chef Syon said they'll start making changes to the menu in several weeks so I've got my work cut out for me. There are so many things that I want to try before they're replaced. Lola is a wonderful new addition to the Cleveland culinary scene.

sidenotes

2006-10-10T11:52:00.000-07:00

Weird. This didn't work several months ago. Then it didn't work a few minutes ago and now it works. I'm glad that it does because sidenotes are neat and really suited to my meandering, pretentious prose style.

I think it looks even more impressive when there are two of them.

burgers and ice cream

2006-10-10T08:46:00.000-07:00

Hungry? Try some delicious frozen custard. Find a Rosati's location near you. Ready for dessert? Try the best cheeseburger in the world at Swensons. Find a location near you.

Zuni Cafe

2006-09-21T09:22:00.000-07:00

The Martin campaign's appropriation of a photo by Jeff

2006-09-20T07:06:00.000-07:00

Jeff (Yellow Dog Sammy) accuses the Martin campaign of misusing one of Jeff's photographs.

I'm still not sure that this is a misuse according to the terms of the license. I browsed through the (semi-official?) wiki for Creative Commons. It didn't settle the matter for me but it did address another lingering question that I've always had about Creative Commons: the licenses are irrevocable. Once you've thrown it into the commons, you can't yank it back. It may turn out that this is relevant here.

It's been said, more than once as I recall, that this episode is indicative of the deplorable, unworkable state of politics in the United States. I may agree but I think I have a different perspective. Lefty bloggers are leveling harsh accusations and doing so in broad generalizations. The stated or unstated attitude is that Republican politicians, Righty bloggers or even conservatives are scoundrels and not amenable to rational discourse. The Righty blogosphere may be a minefield of vitriol (I wouldn't know) but no individual of any ideology should let that debase their thinking. The real danger to civil society is when more and more people feel such contempt for those that they disagree with that they disengage from the dialogue.

I think that the effort expended here (by all of us) in defending his intelectual property would be better spent addressing the substance of the ad in question. The ad lies? Then explain how and tell the truth. I'm aware that this has already been done but frankly it's been completely overwhelmed by the copyright issue. As I said before, while it's clearly an author's right (which may have been abdicated in this case, but...) I think there's something unsavory about enforcing a Creative Commons license this way.

Corricella a Procida

2006-09-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

Photographed by agedsenator

Work!

Sept Visitors 42 9-9-06

2006-09-15T09:23:00.000-07:00

Sept Visitors 42 9-9-06
Originally uploaded by superape.

Test

2006-09-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

2006-09-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

testing dappit

2006-08-17T21:17:00.000-07:00

Teddy K

2006-07-19T19:37:00.000-07:00

Sen. Edward Moore Kennedy is not my senator. Senator George Voinovich and Senator Michael DeWine are the senators from Ohio. The representative for Ohio's 11th congressional district is Representative Stephanie Tubbs Jones.

Industrial ecology

2006-06-29T23:47:00.000-07:00

The Machine in the Garden | Metropolis Magazine | October 2000

I get a whif of heaven when you travel past my doorstop

2006-04-19T20:16:00.000-07:00

Mr. Brisket, where's your theme song?

Guerilla gardening

2006-04-15T20:35:00.000-07:00

Inspired to do a little learning once more by the Urban Repair Project blog.
Guerilla gardening

Walking

2006-04-05T21:39:00.000-07:00

Well, I was obviously going somewhere with this post but it's languished in the draft folder for too long. As it is, there are some interesting links. That will have to be enough. I'm afraid I no longer have anything more to offer this scraggly pup but a kick in the rear into the bright light of the blogosphere.

Wundersmanner - that caught my attention and set me on a google adventure. I started by trying to capture the associations that occured to me before they escaped: flaneur and psychogeography.

Then there was the guy that walked every street in Manhattan. The woman who mapped London by walking its 3000 miles.

A manifesto for the New Walker. After you've read that click through to browse their "mis-guides."

Outside Lies Magic

Googling wandersmanner only turned up one worthwhile site but that site led me to some interesting sites.

Kymerica Huh?

The idea of Dickens prowling the streets of London demands further investigation. London Prowl.

Broadway Free Library

2006-03-02T12:28:00.000-08:00

Broadway Free Library
Originally uploaded by stu_spivack.

That's a very powerful image. In 2006 hardly anyone would consider it remarkable that society subsidizes access to knowledge for it. Everyone's accustomed to "free" libraries. Sadly, the dream of universal access to vast stores of accumulated knowledge is far from realized and is in retreat on many fronts.

Intellectual property wars probably had very little to do with why this library was abandoned. Still, I'm ambivalent at best to see a beautiful stone sign proudly proclaim "FREE BOOKS" over a building that won't have them.

Of course, if you've seen any substantial portion of my photostream you may be surprised at my lack of enthusiasm for a new restaurant. Let me just say that there are lots of restaurants that come and go. While I've yet to see anything to suggest that this one will be mediocre, I've yet to see anything suggest that it will be good.

Enough pessimism. It's a sharp building and best of luck to the owner and to his neighbors.

Dine and Dish - Small plates

2006-02-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

Thanks for joining me in a new episode of Dine and Dish. I'm looking forward to reading about your many fabulous meals. I hope my account will be an inspiration for your own new dining adventures.

Episode Six of Dine and Dish has taken the theme of small plates. To satisfy this theme I chose to eat at the Flying Fig. I'd also heard that they had recently added small plates to their menu and that had already put them back on my to-eat list. It's a long list so it wasn't until Dine and Dish that I finally got around to it. (Yes, there's actually a list.)

Welcome to the Flying Fig:
Despite the amatuer photography, it's a charming and attractive restaurant in a fabulous food neighborhood. It's just across from Cleveland's amazing West Side Market. It's in the Ohio City neighborhood which is home to great Lebanese, Puerto Rican, Greek and soon Vietnamese restaurants in addition to Cleveland's local champion of sustainable agriculture, Parker's. Flying Fig is right at home here. It's a good, local restaurant that emphasizes fresh, simple cooking.

Gnocci and scallop:

Tapas, as you are no doubt now aware, are a centuries old Spanish tradition. Their origin lies in a law designed to control the drunken behavior of carriage drivers. Tapas were required so that they wouldn't drink on a full stomach. Bar keepers served light snacks on small plates that their patrons would carry around on top of their drinks. Hence tapas from the Spanish for top(1). Or they were used to keep flies out of your wine(2). I guess no one really knows. In any case, their original purpose may be long forgotten but in their modern incarnation they're a carefully evolved solution to the problem of what hat your wine needs to wear.

Fast forward several hundred years and tapas are one of the latest answers to the never-satisfied modern search for What's Next? Instead of a carefully evolved repetoire of items whose tastes are well suited to small portions you have chefs serving their own ideas just like before - only smaller. (Wikipedia:"They are often very strongly flavored with garlic, chillis or paprika, and sometimes swimming in olive oil." Sounds like something well suited to being enjoyed in small portions, no?) Instead of a munching on a snack while socializing with friends and throwing back some booze, diners are stacking up plates to make room and racing from dish to dish before they get cold.

Tapas, like mezze, izakaya snacks and dim sum are all delicious but each one has evolved inside of its own traditional service and when they're served some other way they're not likely to be enjoyed as much. Of course, Flying Fig has a bar so it's my fault for sitting in the dining room and eating six small plates while nursing a coke with my nonagenarian grandmother and her lonely big plate of cod. It's my fault but I don't think I'm the only one and I imagine there may be people wondering exactly why they aren't having fun like the lithe Andalucian model shown on the cover of Gourmet magazine holding a plate of olives perched on a wine glass. I've left Lolita on several occasions with a similar feeling but it's only after this recent meal that I think I've identified the problem. Restaurants, many at least, are struggling to adapt snack cuisines to the dining room and unfamiliar diners are confused.

I've only had small plates type meals a couple times and there are only a few restaurants that offer it in Cleveland so I'm speculating wildly. I welcome your correction or corroboration in the comments. Tapas and izakaya are certainly drinking snacks; however, what are the traditions that surround mezze?

Beef Carpacio and Braised lamb:

None of these dishes share any connection to any nation's traditional small plate cuisine that I'm aware. This isn't to say that they weren't very good. The short rib, for instance, was delicious.

Braised short rib and Fried tofu:

Next time I go, or when I try the small plates at Firefly, I'll get a couple small plates instead of an appetizer and then I'll order a regular entree. The short ribs are a regular entree at Flying Fig and I highly recommend that you go there and try them.

Molten chocolate cake:

Bloggers in Amsterdam

2006-02-03T10:29:00.000-08:00

Bloggers in Amsterdam

Why not?

elsewhere

Blogging event at Ingenuity Festival? Hello?

2006-02-02T02:26:00.000-08:00

Honestly, if I were a blogger from anywhere else I wouldn't spend a second thinking about coming to the Ingenuity Festival. We're talking about getting other people to come to CIF but we aren't talking about CIF itself. If we can't be bothered to blog about it then why should we expect someone to miss work, buy plane tickets, reserve a hotel room and disrupt their life for it.

Reviewing the notes from blogger meeting at Great Lakes Brewing Co. only reinforced my concern. Most of the ideas seem like we're trying too hard to be cool. Too hard to be interesting. A collaborative novel? Why? A big video screen with a stream of blog postings? Why? Not because we think it's compelling art but because, well, we're tagging along with an arts and technology festival so quick let's think of some techy art thing. These both feel awfully familiar, by the way. Are any of the people suggesting these ideas artists for the 355 non-Ingenuity days of the year? In either case, I think they should ask themselves if they're stretching for ideas to fill a percieved need for art or whether they actually feel a need to communicate something with art.

It's not clear to me that this blogging meeting ins't the only reason that any NEO bloggers are interested in CIF at all. They certainly don't seem intersted enough to talk about it.

Having just complained that all we're talking about is atracting people to something that we ourselves don't appear to be interested in, I guess I have to admit that this discussion seems to have disappeared, too. I follow BFD faithfully and I just scanned Gloria Ferris' blog. What's happening?

I have one more painful question.

Unless I'm mistaken, if this project is successful the highlight of the event won't be a technological wonder. It will be a discussion. What issues about blogging would you like to talk about? There are lots of people talking about blogging. This discussion is naturally being conducted in blogs but also in articles and books and in conferences. So, which blogs (or blogging scholars) do we read when we're looking for insightful discussion about blogging? If we aren't typing over one another suggesting answers to this question then I wonder if we're really the right group to be organizing a blogger conference in the first place.

Anyway, I've got a couple ideas. That is in addition to the obvious one of selecting a panel of experts. I'll put them in a subsequent post. Is anyone interested?

Re: Babies and Bathwater in Callahan's Cleveland Diary

2006-01-11T10:36:00.000-08:00

Re: Babies and Bathwater

It's my understanding that Russo is more than just a participant in these Meet The Bloggers events. He's an organizer, right? No politician should support a forum where they're only probably going to be treated with respect. Brown and his campaign may not honestly be concerned with the civility of the MTB forum. They may be angry or bitter. But a rational mistrust of MTB is perfectly reasonable based on what I know. And MTB and the NEO blogosphere should be very concerned about that.

Meet the Bloggers tempest

2006-01-10T09:55:00.000-08:00

Tim Russo spewed obscenity. Apparently this isn't questioned by anyone and I can't imagine what reasonable defense there might be. The myriad other issues being analyzed in such great detail by the NEO blogosphere are all distractions. I'm curious about Brown's role in the original incident. It would certainly have a bearing on his fitness for office but it shouldn't have any bearing on Russo's place in Meet The Bloggers. A journalist, or a blogger with journalistic aspirations, shouldn't be dragged into yelling and obscenity. An assistant of Brown's called to cancel. The assistant was polite and made it very clear that the Brown campaign valued the goals of Meet The Bloggers. I can't think of one reason to fault the Brown campaign in this incident. Running for office should involve engaging in civil discourse about issues. When someone has shown that they can't be trusted to communicate that way there's no point in showing the courage to face them.

Whatever Brown's culpability, his judgment will come in the voting booths. Russo's should come before this ridiculously unprofessional behavior tarnishes the credibility of Meet The Bloggers. If Tim Russo is involved in Meet The Bloggers then I think that I may cancel, too.

tags: cleveland, politics, blog, journalism

Tracking wifi sites in Cleveland

2005-12-31T11:50:00.000-08:00

Has anyone ever noticed the newspaper vending machine database that I have in my blog side bar? I'm afraid to click on it. I'm sure it stopped working months ago. It wasn't really easy to set up. It must have taken half an hour not including hours trying to find the necessary tools. Now with the explosion of google maps, creating a database of Cleveland Wifi locations should take about a minute.

Here's some data to get the ball rolling.

Here's a list of several tools many of which are appropriate to varying degress. Take a look. I went through the entire list and experimented with all of them. Tagzania was the first one that I tried and ultimately it was the easiest and most appropriate. Incorporating it into the CleveWiki Project will involve embeding the map on a CleveWiki page (as I did above) and providing a link to Tagzania. Embedding the map on Clevewiki isn't something that came be done by a peon wikier. The same as embedding Upcoming.org events, it requires an iframe tag or a javascript tag. Both of these tags are prudently excluded from the wikiverse. An administrator will have create a special page for the map. Once that's done, people use the tagzania interface to add hotspot locations. The data will be automagically current at CleveWiki.

Of course, there's no reason to wait for CleveWiki admins to make the arrangements. Go straight to Tagzania and start adding hotspots now. Add them from the three lists linked above or, even better, add others that you know about. Your house, maybe? In order for them to show up on the map in this blog entry it's necessary that you tag your tagzania submissions with "cleveland" and "wifi".

Sorry, your browser doesn't support iframes.

tags: wifi, cleveland, clevewiki, map,googlemap

Local reviews II

2005-12-30T08:48:00.000-08:00

Thinking about the CleveWiki project motivated me to articulate precisely what I'm looking for in a review aggregator.

Open data. My data should be mine. I'll post it and you'll scrape it. That way several aggregators can have access to a combined and much larger pool of reviews. They'll compete for eyeballs based on how well they package the data.
Open data. The data should come out as freely as it goes in. That way users, or some clever third party, can layer one aggregator's reviews on top of another. For instance movie reviews with restaurant reviews and then organize it all spatially on a map.
Weighted rankings. I want to be able to see a list of restaurants rated highly by people who I feel have a record of discriminating taste that matches mine. This could be done automatically by a feature similar to Amazon's "Users who purchased this book..." technology or it could be done explicitly. Users could mark other users as trusted. However it's done, searches could be ordered by community rankings, trusted user rankings or personal rankings.
Tags. I find tags useful. They are a great balance between flexibility and ease of use. No matter how well thought out a categorization scheme is, there are some users who will think differently and appreciate different categories.

When I system combines these simple things I think we'll see a wonderful complexity emerge. Imagine doing a search for local public theater events and then displaying the results on a map next to the locations of all the Italian or Puerto Rican restaurants in the neighborhood that have been highly rated by a trusted circle of reviewers.

CleveWiki quickies

2005-12-29T23:28:00.000-08:00

I mentioned del.icio.us in another post as a way to help keep track of the web presence of various Cleveland organizations. It may take some work to integrate del.icio.us into CleveWiki. In the mean time, there's plenty of valuable information there to be stolen.

Cleveland : I've got a somewhere between 400 and 500 web sites for galleries, libraries, theaters, dance troupes, singers, authors, etc... Feel free to copy this wholesale.

In particular, over 200 of those are restaurants, markets, bakeries, confectioners, etc... Whoever's in charge of the restaurant category may be interested in these.

Chef Moz should be a great resource for CleveWiki. It's data is available for free. It might also be a good way to contact more helpful volunteers. The Cleveland restaurant section is edited by Sadukie and ZiggyDaMoe.

ChefMoz is a part of the Open Directory Project. I'm not sure that ODP is still under active development but their outdated data is still a wonderful resource. There's a page for Ohio Colleges and Universities. There's a page for Cleveland news and media.

Plugged In Cleveland already has a restaurant database with over 2000 entries. They also have a well populated events database and classifieds and rental listings.

Here's one last item for the inspiration bank: the Chicago Learning Guide.

Tags:cleveland clevewiki community portal wiki local

A concern about CleveWiki

2005-12-29T21:56:00.000-08:00

Wow! Lawrence.com is the best. (True dat!)

Lawrence.com is a well designed community portal. It looks inviting. The layout is intuitive. The information is well organized and accessable. It all seems very well thought out. I've only examined it for a short time but I've been impressed on occassion by attention to detail. It's all developed with a free and open source web framework called Django. For another example of a great site built with Django take a look at KUSports.com.

NYWiki is really cool. It was hard to resist getting sucked in by very interesting article titles. But it doesn't have an events page. SeattleWiki has an events page. It's a (blank) flat text listing of events with no search or organization. A community portal is a very ambitious web project. Having the proper tools is a necessary prerequisite for success. Web frameworks like Django are built to make it easy to do exactly what CleveWiki is trying to do. When I look at Lawrence.com and KUSports.com I see what I want to see in a community portal. The long term frustration of trying to bend and shape MediaWiki into the community portal that Cleveland deserves may make the short term frustration of taking a step back for perspective a very worthwhile price.

There's a lot of enthusiasm for CleveWiki. I'm very enthusiastic about the project myself. CleveWiki has a lot of very valuable momentum. That's why I think that in the short term CleveWiki should continue exactly as is. I think it's important to begin thinking about this issue but I also think it's important that time is taken to allow for indepth analysis and discussion. In the mean time, CleveWiki's wonderful volunteers will be creating great content for use in whatever system is eventually chosen.

Django just happens to be the first web framework that I saw. It looks very impressive but I plan to try and find out what other options may be available.

Backfence

Tags:cleveland clevewiki community portal wiki local

Local reviews

2005-12-29T12:46:00.000-08:00

Another obvious component for a community portal will be a merchant database. I've been very determined to keep track of local restaurants online. Spatial organization and tagging were more important to me than rankings and reviews or other features so I moved from one mapping site to the next. I finally settled on something called Tagzania. Before Tagzania, I tried mygmaps, gmaptrack and I'm sure several that I'm forgetting. After I started using Tagzania, I tried CommunityWalk, JotSpot Tracker and Ning's Restaurant Reviews with Maps. I stuck with Tagzania mostly because it does what I need but partially because I felt locked in by the effort I'd already sunk into it. I currently have nearly 120 Cleveland area food businesses catalogued on Tagzania. (I do think about some things that don't fit in my mouth, by the way.)

But this isn't a reasonable long term solution for the problem of sharing restaurant reviews. For such a database to be really useful, reviews and rankings are necessary.

Kritx, Judy's Book, Yelp, DinnerBuzz, Zipingo and Lopico are all trying to aggregate user contributed reviews as the core of their business model. This is, of course, in addition, to Amazon's yellowpages and Yahoo's yellowpages which allow users to add reviews. These are just the ones that I found in a two minute search. I'm sure there are many more. And the best is yet to come. It is widely anticipated that Google is going to rollout search portals for cars, reviews, events, real estate, etc... Oodle is a newcomer to the so-called "vertical search space". Good luck to them avoiding being crushed between Google, Yahoo! and Amazon.

There were 12 user contributed reviews posted on Judy's book for the Cleveland area just today. I was very surprised to see that. Unfortunately, Judy's Book doesn't seem to accept the open philosophy that's required in CleveWiki but it does show that users are enthusiastic about sharing their information.

Kritx, Yelp and Dinnerbuzz all seem to "get" the open philosophy. One big advantage of Kritx is that it will collect your review from wherever you keep it. It relies on microformats. Users post reviews in their own web spaces in a format that a computer can uderstand but at the same time is easy for human's to generate and to read.

Kritx appears to be in a very early stage of development. Yelp and Dinnerbuzz both seem to be more developed. Yelp has the advantage of covering all categories of merchants in addition to restaurants. Yelp also appears to have ambitious plans for future growth. Dinnerbuzz frees your data up in an RSS feed and it's stored in the hReview microformat. Yelp also offers RSS feeds.

My recommendation would be a mix of kritx and dinnerbuzz. Working with kritx will be great for users who want complete control over their reviews. They can post reviews on their own blogs and they'll be perfectly prepared for web 3.0 when vertical search engines suck and aggregate all of their content. In the mean time, others can use Dinnerbuzz without worrying about a web space to store their reviews.

It's a lot more work than just setting up a wiki page called ClevelandRestaurants and letting everyone loose. That's okay with me because I don't really have the expertise to do that work anyway. But I hope that someone will decide that the work is really worth it to create a richer more useful experience at CleveWiki.

tags: cleveland clevewiki community portal wiki local

Some tools for the CleveWiki

2005-12-29T12:43:00.000-08:00

One of the first components of the portal will be an events system. I recommend Upcoming.org. There's an API so events can be entered programmatically. There are RSS feeds and iCal feeds so events can be extracted and manipulated conveniently. Upcoming.org has first-mover momentum and now that they're under the Yahoo! umbrella I think that we can count on them to be available and actively developed for the foreseeable future. Zvents doesn't really seem to be aware of Cleveland but they have a lot of nice features. Eventful has the advantage of being pre-populated with a large database of bigger events. There's no reason the CleveWiki couldn't use a combination of these services.

Craigslist offers RSS feeds. I think they permit use of the RSS feeds for non-profit purposes.

Del.icio.us is a great way to keep track of the web presence of different. I have several hundred web pages catalogued: museums, galleries, theaters and, of course, resaurants.

Rock Hall
Originally uploaded by Edge of Dementia.

downtown_from_bridge
Originally uploaded by sky_sailor.

Library Detail 2
Originally uploaded by Brian in Cleveland.

DCP_6845
Originally uploaded by stu_spivack.

Flickr already has hundreds of great pictures of Cleveland. Flickr is an easy way to store and organize pictures and integrating them into CleveWiki from flickr would be simple. When you're using flickr for location specific pictures then the next natural thing to think of is geotagging. Geobloggers is taking a rest but you can get an idea of what I'm talking about at flyr.

Using existing resources on the web is crucial to the success of CleveWiki. It doesn't force users to duplicate their efforts to provide content. It generates rich content by letting users go about their regular web ways.

Tags: cleveland clevewiki community portal wiki local

Cleveland Wiki

2005-12-29T10:35:00.000-08:00

I've been seeing more Cleveland events pop up on Upcoming.org recently. I hope the Cleveland Wiki people take advantage of existing resources rather than compete with them. The difficulty in creating a community portal isn't technological. It's social. The crucial element is to get a critical mass of participants. I'm concerned that if this new effort isn't undertaken intelligently, it's most significant effect will be to suck critical attention from other fragile, nascent online community loci. Hopefully, the CleveWiki project will move in exactly the opposite direction. The opportunity exists to leverage the existence of a wide variety of new and exciting tools to create something that could be very useful for the city.

I don't think that the goal of the CleveWiki should be to become the source of all Cleveland content. It's most valuable purpose could be as an aggregator. I don't want to add all of my event data to Upcoming and then have to add it again to CleveWiki. Then add all of my restaurant reviews to DinnerBuzz and then have to add it again to CleveWiki. I want to be come to CleveWiki and search for public theater productions. When I've chosen my entertainment for the evening, I want to see it on a map presented alongside all nearby and highly rated Italian restaurants.

Fully implementing my ideal portal probably isn't possible right now. But the tools to do it are currently being built. The design philosophy of the CleveWiki project should be to be prepared. The critical component of this philosophy will be openess. Allow users to create restaurant reviews on their own websites and suck them in to CleveWiki. Allow users to post their event data where they want it - at Upcoming, on their own blog, etc... Then suck it in and mash it up with the restaurant reviews and present it all on a pretty map.

Here are some example "almost there" implementations:
Yahoo! demo, Alkemis Local, Mashupcoming, Microsoft Local Live and MashMap.

The CleveWiki does have a carefully planned and precisely articulated philosophy, right? I think that before they move ahead they should. Openess and cooperation should be the project's foundation. Once this has been established, they should make an exhaustive search of what's already being done to organize Cleveland related information. Find all of the people working independently and organize them. Consider all the different tools and choose the ones that will help these people the most. Rushing ahead without doing that is more than a waste. I fear that it may be very harmful.

Unfortunately, it's far beyond my technical abilities to suggest large steps towards my ideal community portal but I think I can offer several useful suggestions. I've decided to break that up into two additional posts: one devoted to a merchant database and another devoted to an events database and several other miscellaneous items.

tags: cleveland clevewiki community portal wiki local

A study guide for my last post

2005-12-20T23:47:00.000-08:00

As a companion to my cheese rant, I offer these links as context:
The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town:BLACKBERRY PICKING (James Surowiecki)

Last month, though, it became clear that a patent-infringement case
could force the BlackBerry’s manufacturers, a Canadian company called
Research in Motion, to kill the service in the United States by the end
of the year. Then the BlackBerry will become the quintessential symbol
of something else: a patent system that is out of control.

"The Creative Remix" is a fascinating one hour radio programming devoted to the issues of intellectual property and remixing in music, literature and the visual arts.

Hopefully, I'll dig up some more links soon

Warp with a side of woof

2005-12-13T17:52:00.000-08:00

All minds quote. Old and new make the warp and woof of every moment. There is no thread that is not a twist of these two strands. -Emerson

Warp and woof. I love those words. But it's not the imagery that makes this quote powerful. It's the message. No one owns ideas because no one's innovation is theirs alone and seperate from the entirity of the overarching human dialogue. Mozart was a genuis but he was reacting to his context and building on all of the generations that had come before him. The founding fathers understood this, too:

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. Jefferson

They gave exclusive rights to inventors not because the inventors had any "natural right" to their idea but for the "benefit of society." Innovators take risks to turn ideas into technology that may be of benefit to society. In recognition of this risk, society grants them temporary exclusive rights.

Anyway, somewhere along the line someone coined the phrase "intellectual property" and now everything is bent out of shape. Everyone thinks that every idea they have is completely independent of their interaction with society and is theirs in the same way as their hats. That's impossible. It's just not how human minds work. But that is how I came to be in a restaurant in Woodmere explaining to a friendly police officer that the owner of a restaurant named Taza had stolen my camera.

"And Taza said let there be coagulated milk protein. And there was coagulated milk protein. And Taza saw the protein, and that it was good. And Taza seperated the protein from the baked dough. And Taza called the protein Cheese and the dough Pita. And evening and morning were the first day."

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody....

Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line between the things which are worth to the public the embarrassment of an exclusive patent, and those which are not. Jefferson

Society has decided that the pharmaceutical industry could not survive without "the embarrasment of an exclusive patent." That's reasonable. Pharmaceutical reseach is expensive and risky. By the same logic, society has never extended similar protection to chef's and their recipes. It's a well settled matter of law that recipes are not subject to the protections of our intellectual property regime. I think that's pretty reasonable, too.

They don't take risks the same way that inventors do. This isn't a subtle judgment. It's an obviously true fact: chefs don't need the protections of our intellectual property regime. How do I know? Because I just came home from having one of the best meals in my recent memory. Because I've eaten only a couple meals at home in the past two months. Because I've sampled food traditions carried here from across the entire globe and all of this was possible in an environment without these extra restrictions. (Of course, it's not just tinpot chefs pushing consumers around. From the pharmaceutical industry to the music and film industries, this is a huge and growing problem that isn't getting nearly the attention it's due. Maybe, I should have chosen something other than cheese to get quite this lathered up over?)

I was taking pictures. The proprietor came over and demanded that I stop. He was accusing me of stealing his ideas. He made it clear that I either stopped or that we would have to leave. Not only was his position insulting, but his demeanor was aggressive and bullying. His attitude made the decision easy. Unfortunately, that didn't satisfy him. He demanded that I erase the pictures that I had taken. When I protested he grabbed my camera and passed it to a coworker. When the police officer came, he immediately instructed the staff to get my camera. After they dawdled, he asked more assertively.

Imagine any other "creative worker" trying to enforce that kind of policy. Imagine if a fashion designer insisted that you get his permission to take photographs of his work. Now imagine two dozen guests at your Thanksgiving feast craning their necks, desperately trying to read the lable on their shirts lest they have to undress so that they can find contact information for their shirt's designer. I'm sure the designer would be happy to extend his permission to photograph your great-grandmother... for a small monetary consideration. Now imagine the fashion designer telling the police officer that he worked very had on these designs. (This is the legal principle of the first sale doctrine.)

(Obviously, these two situations are slightly different. The restaurant is a "quasi-public" space and the owner can refuse service and demand that I leave. On the other hand, there's no reasonable expectation of privacy for the staff or the patrons and certainly not for the food. Even in the face of this difference, I think my parable is instructive. Also the chef's behavior seems more reasonable because it's almost possible to think that the chef could successfully manage to protect his "trade secrets" this way. Of course, this security is an illusion.)

Enough public policy. How about some hard nosed business? What's the best case scenario for a restauranteur who imposes this silly policy? An overwhelming majority of his customers don't even notice. Then every once in a while he insults the very type of customer who would otherwise have been his biggest asset. This is, after all, a customer so interested in the food that he takes pictures of it. Then one day, a real industrial spy comes by but the proprietor doesn't even notice because, honestly, what kind of dumb ass industrial spy actually brings a regular camera? The spy gets all the information that he could ever have wanted and opens up what eventually becomes a very successful restaurant in another part of town. The original proprietor doesn't ever figure it out because most of the information that the industrial spy really needed was already available at the public library.

The worst case scenario is that the police end up coming and telling you fetch the camera you stole.

Millions of people watch Emeril and Rachael Ray but the food service industry has just as much to fear from the Food Network as the the home construction industry has to fear from Bob Villa and Norm Abrams. Restaurants don't make money off recipes. They couldn't because the same recipes, or better, are freely available anyway. Some make money by offering simple food conveniently. Others make money by getting to the restaurant at four in the morning to simmer stocks, bake fresh breads and argue with the fishmonger because the last delivery was almost imperceptibly better than the current delivery. And some succeed by setting their food in an environment of the finest art, the softest chairs, dazzling furnishings and elegant serviceware none of which you'll have to clean.

When I was eating at one of the best restaurants in Las Vegas, the staff wheeled the bread cart over so that I could take a better picture. They were curious about my photography but no one seemed worried that I was going to run Joel Robuchon out of business with my personal renditions of foods so complex I can't even spell them for you. Then when I came back home, one of the best chefs in Cleveland very generously gave me two recipes to help with my Thanksgiving preparations. Look out Moxie! I've got my sights set on you. Smart restauranteurs do this as part of treating their customers with respect and friendly chefs do it to share the joy of cooking.

I've always been tickled by the fact that McDonald's has a hamburger university. I'd love to take a look at the thousand page instruction manual that they have for their managers and franchiese but which is guarded like the President's nuclear codes from others. My point here isn't that restauranteurs should hold cooking classes for their competitors. I only hope that people would give more thought to when it's important to hide or share information and that we all understand that things are frequently better when we share. Also, I think we can all agree that yelling and grabbing are right out, no?

So the labneh was pretty good, but the pita was disappointing. The zatar spiced oil and the kalamata olives weren't worth eating at all. I have some pretty pictures of the jibneh. (That's the grilled cheese.) It really looked very good. I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to eat it. Fortunately, it's a traditional dish served at hundreds of restaurants in countries across the world so I'll probably find it somewhere soon.

Tagged: food, restaurant, dining, cooking, intellectualproperty

Dine and Dish 5

2005-12-03T08:46:00.000-08:00

I was delighted to see Dine and Dish back for episode five but I was a little skeptical about the theme. Don't get me wrong. I like the entire spectrum of Asian food but Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Malaysian, Filipino, Thai and Vietnamese food all in the same month? That's a lot of eating and I'm not sure how many fellow food bloggers will be up to it. However, never one to back away from a challenge I plan to give it my best shot.

I don't even have time to describe it all so for now I'll just concentrate on a recent Chinese food adventure. C&Y created a big splash in Cleveland when it debuted. It challenged the other authentic Chinese restaurants in Cleveland to strive for a higher standard. Their Chinese New Year celebration was one of the best meals I've had in a long time. And it exposed Northeast Ohioans to a lot of items they'd never seen before. After some mysterious and extended downtime, C&Y is back and Cleveland is eager to know if it will live up to its own reputation.

In two visits since they reopened, my favorite dish so far has been the chicken noodle soup. Flavorful broth, tender chicken and tasty noodles:

A lot of the original interest in C&Y was generated by their soup dumplings:

I also tried some of the dim sum items. Fried tofu with chicken, bbq pork dumplings and steamed pork dumplings:

Desserts at Chinese restaurants get an undeserved bad reputation. I like them. Especially after one-too-many too clever by half, yet mysteriously bland Western desserts. This is nicely eggy and mildly sweet:

The attention that non-Chinese language speakers get at C&Y is far superior to that at Cleveland's other authentic Chinese restaurants. The staff was generally able to explain what I was eating and even offered suggestions. The menu on my previous visit was completely determined by the proprietor: beans, kidney and pork chops among other things.

After consuming dessert number one I realized that I'd promised to bring home something for my father. So I stopped at a Chinese bakery for his lunch and my dessert number two. And desserts numbers three, four, and five through ten. Superior bakery offers many savory items and I bought my father a chicken puff pastry and a curry beef bun. What's pictured here are only the desserts that I ate on the way home.

Cream puff:

Winter melon paste cookie (someone kindly noted in my flickr photostream that these are called wife pastry?):

Almond cookie:

Melon cake:

and Fillipino rice cake:

The bread for the buns is all the same and various toppings or fillings are inserted or applied. The bun is chewy and delicious. It's a bread instead of a traditional Western style cake. Taro bun:

The delicious (very) butter cream bun:

And the mocha cream bun:
.

But my favorite was the simplest. A little (or a lot of )butter and some sugar. The sugar butter bun:

Anyway, thanks for visiting. I'm looking forward to reading all of your entries. And I'm definitely looking forward to Dine and Dish 6. Here's hoping that we don't have to wait as long for it as we did for episode five.

Finally, thanks to Sarah. It's a wonderful idea and I appreciate all the hard work you must put into it.

menu - draft

2005-11-23T20:19:00.000-08:00

One Laptop Per Child

2005-11-05T18:00:00.000-08:00

One Laptop Per Child is an exciting project at MIT. The goal is to design a laptop suitable for distribution in the developing world and distribute it widely and at an affordable price. The project has accomplished a lot in terms of the design of the laptop. It's rugged. It has mesh wireless built in. The idea is that data will be primarily stored on the network so the laptop doesn't have a hard drive. They are powered by a handcrank. They use a special low-power display.

In the first year, the goal is to distribute between five and ten million at a per unit cost of $130-$150. They would be distributed largely in the developing world. In the second phase, the goal is to distribute over 100 million. Presumably, economies of scale would drive the cost down to $100. Distribution would be widened to include schools in the United States.

You can read more in depth review at WorldChanging.

It seems obvious that Case could offer a lot to MIT's One Laptop Per Child project. In turn, the experience would be great for Case's engineering and computer students. And when the project began distributing laptops domestically the collaboration would put Cleveland at the front of the line.

The value of this to Cleveland's public school students would be immense. Familiarity with technology is practically a shibolleth in our society. Students in our country are seperated by the oft-noted "digital divide". Students in the suburbs are prepared for college and high paying jobs that require familiarity with computers and students in the cities are left behind.

Roland Fryer at the City Club on November 2

2005-10-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Brewed Fresh Daily comes news of an interesting event at the Cleveland City Club. From cityclub.org:

Roland Fryer, a 27-year-old assistant professor of economics at Harvard University, will speak about the racial student achievement gap and what to do about it.

I'm dusting off my neglected membership to attend. Here are the details. And more.

Before you go, you should read two things. The first is "Still Seperate, Still Unequal: America's Educational Apartheid" by Jonathan Kozel. It's in the September issue of Harper's.

A teacher at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx once pointed out to me one of the two white children I had ever seen there. His presence in her class was something of a wonderment to the teacher and to the other pupils. I asked how many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. "I've been at this school for eighteen years," she said. "This is the first white student I have ever taught."

The author travels across the country visiting schools whose demagraphics mirror this anecdote. His visits illuminate an America fundamentally indistinguishable from America at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson .

I had made repeated visits to a high school where a stream of water flowed down one of the main stairwells on a rainy afternoon and where green fungus molds were growing in the office where the students went for counseling. A large blue barrel was positioned to collect rain-water coming through the ceiling. In one makeshift elementary school housed in a former skating rink next to a funeral establishment in yet another nearly all-black-and-Hispanic section of the Bronx, class size rose to thirty-four and more; four kindergarten classes and a sixth-grade class were packed into a single room that had no windows. The air was stifling in many rooms, and the children had no place for recess because there was no outdoor playground and no indoor gym.

In another elementary school, which had been built to hold 1,000 children but was packed to bursting with some 1,500, the principal poured out his feelings to me in a room in which a plastic garbage hag had been attached somehow to cover part of the collapsing ceiling. "This," he told me, pointing to the garbage bag, then gesturing around him at the other indications of decay and disrepair one sees in ghetto schools much like it elsewhere, "would not happen to white children." Libraries, once one of the glories of the New York City school system, were either nonexistent or, at best, vestigial in large numbers of the elementary schools. Art and music programs had also for the most part disappeared. "When I began to teach in 1969," the principal of an elementary school in the South Bronx reported to me, "every school had a full-time licensed art and music teacher and librarian.^"

These stories expose as truly shameful the arguments of those who speak of "personal responsibility" as the solution the urban achievement gap. (The article gets worse by the way. Even more enraging and more depressing. You should find it.)

The second thing you should read is the profile of Fryer in the New York Times.

He [Fryer] entered graduate school at Penn State University, and it was there, early on, that he realized the power of economics to study race. ''We learned all these powerful math tools that were very deep, very insightful, and were being used to solve -- you know, silly problems, frankly,'' he says. ''At the same time, you'd look on TV and see people literally yelling at each other about affirmative action, bringing up anecdotal stories of one white guy who lost his house and his wife and his kids. The whole debate could be turned by bringing in some horrible travesty. And I thought, here's the exact way that these tools should be used.''

This is the one thing that I wish I could imprint on the mind of every person in this country. Our society has lost respect for facts. Facts have been replaced with perspectives. Everyone believes that economics, biology and sociology are all in the realm of opinion. "Blacks underachieve because of their environment" and "Blacks underachieve because of their nature" are no longer hypothesis to be analyzed and investigated. They're opinions so yours is as valid as mine is as valid as the professor's. And it's no wonder that no one bothers to go to the library to educate themselves before they decide on the validity of the various hypotheses.

There's a mountain of material in the library but I think that any "personaly responsibility" peddler should make their first fact finding expedition to the schools that are profiled in Kozol's article. He did mention one in Cleveland. It was a school named in honor of Martin Luther King and it was mentioned alongside schools named after Rosa Parks and Langston Hughes. *wretch* If you have faith in your neighbors you'll decide that this is the result of ignorance. And if you're more cynical you'll call this ignorance willful. Whichever, are there facts which can be marshalled in reponse? Is there an intellectually rigorous case that this country hasn't shamefully abandonded its responsibility to generations of children?

Kozol's article suggests strongly that a new and more earnest round of enforced integration is necessary. I'm not sure what Fryer's opinion is on this specific subject. The connection, as I see it, is more general. The Kozol article is just the most dramatic description of the problem that Fryer studies that I've read in a long time.

I've only touched on the Dubner article in the Times. It discusses both Fryer's work and his life both of which are more than interesting enough to make the article a must-read.

Wireless Nomad

2005-10-25T10:38:00.000-07:00

Should I keep posting these? I mean really... Everyone reads BoingBoing, right?

Still, it's interesting and even a little exciting. The map to your left displays the coverage of a cooperative internet service provider in Toronto called Wireless Nomad. They provide a basic level of access for free and their paid residential program is $30.

Tags:elsewhere, wifi, cooperative, ISP, internet

Fixing the internets

2005-10-24T19:53:00.000-07:00

Some time ago, I came across a blog called Hotel Bruce. It looked like it might have been interesting but I never found out. You see, it didn't have an RSS feed. Well, now it does:. Just don't tell Bruce.

Next!

Neighbornode

2005-10-24T19:40:00.000-07:00

My recent post on Fon, the Spanish peer-to-peer internet service provider, drew out a commenter who pointed out a similar project right here in Cleveland: Tremont Wifi. I've always wanted to know more about Tremont Wifi. How many homes have wifi access? What are their current plans? I couldn't get any of this information from the web site.

Prompted by that comment, I hunted done yet another similar project I'd seen a while back: Neighbornode. Neighbonode provides technical assistance to neighborhoods that want to provide community Wifi. Their website is unfortunately no more informative than the Tremont Wifi homepage. They seem to have established dozens of hotspots across the country but it's unclear whether they're currently growing or whether any of their neighborhoods consist of any more than a single hotspot.

Feature creep

2005-10-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

Two more completely worthless features have been added to this blog. If you look to your right, you'll see that my sidebar now contains a record of the links that my visitors are following. Well, you might see it. You'll have to look carefully. It's small because I don't really have visitors.

The other feature is yet another testament to the popularity of Stuartblog2. Now posts show a record of how many other blogs are linking that specific item. If you're having trouble finding it, I recommend that you do a page search for "0".

Share WIFI, build a WIFI Nation

2005-10-22T18:18:00.000-07:00

Share WIFI, build a WIFI Nation :

There's a company in Spain that's creating a peer-to-peer internet service provider. To clarify, this is not P2P over existing internet service. Rather, it is an ISP whose bandwidth is partially provided by customers. This is a brilliant idea. I'm sure it's not original. I've been aware of it for some time and I can't believe that I came up with it on my own. Nonetheless, it's a brilliant idea and it makes you wonder if something is really going to come out of it. The entrepeneur in charge has a track record of success.

While this is a commercial venture, I wonder about the possibility of deploying this sort of service as a cooperative. Commercial or community, I'll tag this one "don't hold your breath." Verizon broadband costs $50/month. How much would this cost? A fraction, surely.

Tags: elsewhere

BBC NEWS | UK | Councils could seize empty homes

2005-10-22T18:15:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS | UK | Councils could seize empty homes: "He added: 'Poorly maintained empty properties are magnets for vandals, drug users, squatters and even arsonists.

'Bringing empty homes back into use reduces opportunities for low level anti-social behaviour.'"

That's a good enough reason but it's far from what I would consider the best reason. If you didn't like the recent supreme court decision regarding eminent domain then the thought of this happening in the United States may make your head explode. I think it deserves some real consideration.

Tags: urban

The Tangled Banks

2005-10-20T12:13:00.000-07:00

I went to the Cleveland Blogger Meetup. Thanks, George, for organizing it. I enjoyed both the company and the food.

First, we briefly discussed the idea of tagging. I don't think anyone needs to wait for a standardized tagging system. Start using tags that mean something to you and organization will emerge. I don't think it will take very long for de facto standardization to emerge around the most useful tags. "Cleveland", for instance.

I think someone mentioned the idea of aggregating Cleveland blogs. I don't see the advantage of having one Cleveland feed. Subscribing to individual blogs in Bloglines is as easy as can be and gives me precise control over what gets my attention. For those who may still prefer a common feed, George added a feature to the sidebar of Brewed Fresh Daily: Recent NEO. Unfortunately, it's not subscribable and it only tells you who's updated but doesn't give a preview or even a title.

Since I'm using blogger I've got a limited selection of tools. Wordpress has a variety of plugins that make aggregating fairly easy but I've got to rely on the kindness of strangers who are willing to host a web service. With that in mind, here are some toys that I dug up over the past few days:

The Cleveland Zeitgeist is a tagcloud generated from about 20 Clevelandish feeds. Right now Cleveland (or, rather, the very small sample that I randomly chose) is interested in corned beef. And it wasn't even because of me. I created an aggregate feed of a different group of Clevelandish feeds: preview, rss. Here's another one with a different group of blogs: preview, rss. And here's a search that covers me, Brewed Fresh Daily, Callahan's Cleveland Diary, Democracy Guy, Cleveland Canvas and Tremonter:

I think the most interesting idea was the suggestion to have a roving review of the local blog community. (I'm still getting used to the word "blog". "Blogosphere" may take some time.)

I remember the original Carnival of the Vanities. It has no homepage but you can follow it at the founder's blog. And I wanted to follow the Tangled Bank but it slipped away. Now there are far too many to keep track of. There's an economics one that looks interesting.

Tags: cleveland, blogging

CS Monitor: How Computer Maps Will Help the Poor

2005-10-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

How Computer Maps Will Help The Poor

Industrial arts club

2005-10-10T18:23:00.000-07:00

Reigniting Sparqs

A toy for the Civic Innovation Lab

2005-10-08T18:05:00.000-07:00

Ning is a very promising new project from Gina Bianchini and Marc Andreesen. Mr. Andreesen is credited with inventing the web. This is from the faq:

What is Ning?
Ning is a free online service (or, as we like to call it, a Playground) for people to build and run social applications. Social "apps" are web applications that enable anyone to match, transact, and communicate with other people.

Our goal with Ning is to see what happens when you open things up and make it easy to create, share, and discover new social apps. These might include for any city, your own take on Craigslist...for any passion, your own take on Match.com...for any interest, your own take on Zagat...for any event, your own take on Flickr...for any school, your own take on the Facebook...for any topic, your own take on del.icio.us...for any mammal, your own take on Hot or Not or Kitten War.

You choose the app, decide for whom it's most relevant, create the categories, define the features, choose the language - or just clone an app that's already up and running on Ning - and be on your way.

I hope Ning lives up to its potential. It's going to depend on developing a community of competent programmers who develop clone-worthy apps. It's not going to grow based on a community of people like me whose computer skills are taxed by finding "your city" and replacing it with "Cleveland". I went to Ning because I wanted to do a very specific thing. I wanted to clone some existing app, sprinkle in a little Ning-salt and a little Ning-paprika and end up with a prediction market for Cleveland themed propositions. It turns out that to do that, I still really need a working knowledge of computer programming.

I did end up with something though. In fact, I ended up with something far more interesting than what I ever could have imagined before Ning. It wasn't a prediction market. I guess you could call it an idea exchange. This is Ning's reality. Ning's potential is that smarter programmers continually contribute apps closer and closer to what I need until I can clone my beautiful market.

Do you think that the right sort of user will embrace Ning? What does Ning offer them that they don't have programming PHP applications on their own servers? (It's times like these when I wish my blog actually had readers.)

Creating a prediction market was an idea that I hadn't really thought through. I'm not sure now why I thought it would be interesting to anyone but me in the first place. Maybe it's for the best that I ended up with the idea exchange. If it's publicized and widely adopted there's a possibility it might be genuinely useful. Please allow me to introduce the Cleveland Idea Bank Web Posterboard.

There are several idea exchange sites and I don't really have in-depth experience with any of them. I'd be very interested in hearing some success stories. Has a cyber idea bank ever cultivated an idea that grew into a meatspace implementation?
Since Sliced Bread
global:ideas:bank
Why Not?

Now I'm off to see see if I can't kludge together an prediction market. Isn't it enough that I'll be entertained?

ning
cleveland

Ingenuity for the other 361 days of the year

2005-10-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

One of my primary disappointments with the Ingenuity Festival was that their was no organized way of discussing it. (Was there?) Art is more meaningful when we have an opportunity to see it from someone else's perspective. There needs to be a way for Ingenuity spectators to congregate and discuss the projects on display and more generally the topics of community, of art and of technology.

It would be relatively easy to create an ad hoc online community discussion.

I'm suggesting this de-centralized approach because it suits the way that I participate on the internet and I hope that it will be convenient for you, too. It's easy because it's just an extension of what I already do. I already store articles that I've read on furl. I already bookmark sites that I visit on del.icio.us. I already post thoughts and ideas on my blog. Now when one of these activities is related to the Ingenuity Festival I can use a tag to associate the two and anyone can easily track and read everything. With coordinated tagging, you can have all of your thoughts, links and pictures automatically aggregated into the same pool and just as readily available to anyone who's interested. And just because I use blogspot, del.icio.us, furl and flickr doesn't mean that you can't participate with some other software. Let me know and we'll figure out how to integrate it.

I'll start by discussing some places where you might create your Ingenuity content and then I'll mention a couple easy ways to keep track of it - all of everyone's various sources in one place.

Cleveland bloggers should start tagging blog posts that discuss Ingenuity. Adding this snippet to your posts:
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/ingenuitycleveland" rel="tag">ingenuityfestival</a>
will collect all blog posts that discuss the festival at this url:
http://technorati.com/tag/ingenuitycleveland
More info about technorati tags.
and you can subscribe to it here:
http://feeds.technorati.com/feed/posts/tag/ingenuitycleveland

If I see a project's web site that might be an inspiration for Ingeneers then I tag it with "ingenuitycleveland" on del.icio.us:
http://del.icio.us/stu_spivack/ingenuitycleveland

If others tag likewise then the community's collection of links will be here:
http://del.icio.us/tag/ingenuitycleveland
And you can subscribe to it here:
http://del.icio.us/rss/tag/ingenuitycleveland

I've also started an archive of documents that I think may provide some perspective on the Ingenuity Festival. These come in two distinct categories: 1)Blog posts that are explicitly related to the Cleveland Ingenuity Festival. (Incidentally, I hope the organizers know that the general reception for the festival was far less enthusiastic than the reviews in the local press.) 2)Articles about projects that may be inspirational.

My archive is here:
http://www.furl.net/members/sspivack?category=452245

If you join furl and add your documents to the topic "ingenuitycleveland" all our saved items will be collected here:
http://www.furl.net/furled.jsp?topic=ingenuitycleveland
And you can subscribe to it here:
http://www.furl.net/members/rss.xml?topic=ingenuitycleveland

If you took pictures at Ingenuity Festival 2005 hopefully you've already added them to the Ingenuity Cleveland pool on flickr. In any case, please consider tagging them with "ingenuitycleveland".
Subsription link:
http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=ingenuitycleveland&format=rss_200

Cyberspace is really convenient but the real world is fun. I know that there are Cleveland blogger meetups. This group would be a natural base for an Ingenuity meetup group. Next year we could have a meetup lunch or dinner on each day of festival. We could meet in one large or several small groups and share our insights into the meaning and significance of that days events. And all over a steaming bowl of noodle soup. I posted one very premature event announcement here just for the purpose of demonstration:http://upcoming.org/tag/ingenuitycleveland/

And now, as promised, an easy way to keep track of everything. I've created one blob rss feed of all these sources. Subscribe by clicking here:. If you're not into RSS yet, you can just bookmark that page and view the feed there.

This should be a good start to building a community that thinks about the Ingenuity Festival year-round. This de-centralized discussion might be augmented with a more traditional online community: a Yahoo! or Google group. I think a wiki might be a good idea.

ingenuitycleveland

Britain, UK news from The Times and The Sunday Times - Times Online

2005-09-29T12:08:00.000-07:00

Escape the jams with a driverless bus straight to your door

elsewhere

openhousenewyork - home

2005-09-25T19:32:00.000-07:00

Open House - New York

elsewhere

dorkbot

2005-09-21T23:41:00.000-07:00

Dorkbot

elsewhere

Test

2005-09-18T20:11:00.000-07:00

Test

^{Powered by RingSurf}

Zombies descend upon Erwin Center - The Daily Texan - Top Stories

2005-08-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

Zombies descend upon Erwin Center - The Daily Texan - Top Stories

$40 a Day

2005-08-20T15:18:00.000-07:00

Welcome fellow food bloggers. I'm sorry that there isn't more here for you to browse. Until now I've only used this space as a memory aid and web sandbox. The main repository for records of my food adventures is flickr. At least for the near future, that's probably how things will stay. Dine and Dish 4 was immensely fun and I have no doubt that I'll be back for Dine and Dish 5. In the mean time, I'm afraid all I can offer is my flickr stream. I have well over 1,000 pictures and I think I cover a broad range of interesting food.

My first meal was at Monica's Caribbean and Hungarian restaurant. Yes, Caribbean and Hungarian. Check out the menu if you don't believe me. The jerk chicken was spicy, tender and full of chicken-y deliciousness. The complimentary butterflap bread was warm, dense, sweet and equally delicious. ($9.50 + tax and tip = $12)

Uh, just ignore the pseudo-food spread that was served with the bread. Not everything is perfect at Monica's but I look forward to returning. Judging from my first experience there are certain to be many other excellent items. Guyanese chicken chow mein? Guyanese fish stew? This was a real find. I'll just have to learn to ignore partially-hydrogenated oil spreads and uninspired salads.

My visit to this restaurant was pleasant for more reasons than the food. East 185th is a charming, natural, warm, historic neighborhood right on the Great Lakes. Its relaxing atmosphere seems further from the hustle of Cleveland than its short distance would suggest.

Our next stop is a transplant from just down the shore. Clevelanders of a certain age look back with great fondness on food and fun at Euclid Beach Park. It was Cleveland's Coney Island.Fairways, coasters, rides, games and fair food. On this very day in 1964 the Beach Boys played at Euclid Beach Park. The Euclid Beach Park Nuts are trying to bring back some small bits of that era. They want to set up an original carousel and others are trying to save the Humphrey Mansion. (It doesn't look very grand right now.)

In the mean time, we'll have to settle for popcorn and frozen custard. East Coast Custard has a number of stores. Shaker Square is far from the shore but happily it's much closer to me. Shaker Square is another great place to enjoy a meal and walk around. The National Register of Historic Places recognized the beauty and charm of Shaker Square in 1976. There's a movie theater and nearby Larchmere has bookstores, antiques and more. There's fire, a favorite of mine since it opened five years ago and Boulevard Blue, a promising newcomer but neither are really appropriate for our theme.

East Coast Custard aims to evoke memories of long gone summer nights with delicious frozen custard.

They may be appealing to nostalgia but they aren't coasting on it. The custard is excellent. The toppings are excellent. I've been there a half dozen times and I've always been impressed. All you see is a big white (melt-y) glob but I can assure you that this turtle sundae was perfect: the custard, the fudge, the caramel and the pecans - all perfect.($4, including tip)Our next stop was right in my back yard. Hot Sauce Williams has been a favorite in our family for as long as I can remember. I don't know how long the restaurant has been there but I remember my father bringing delicious ribs and chicken wings home nearly 20 years ago. I don't think the restaurant has changed at all in that time. Thankfully. This food is made just they way it should be made and the result is every bit as good as the most expensive food I've ever eaten. ($9.85, including two wings)
Unfortunately, my last visit didn't live up to my expectations. I hope I'm not the only disher that decided to visit some new places along with familiar favorites. What can I say? I couldn't resist the chance to try some new stuff. So I'm sorry, but I'm going to make it up to you three times over! First, I'll give you a couple recommendations for better Cleveland breakfasts. I don't want to give the impressione that I couldn't find four decent meals in the entire city. Try a breakfast buritto at El Tengo Taqueria. Breakfast, lunch and dinner, everything at this place is amazing. He has authentic and delicious food from Mexico and Central and South America. Or for more standard American fare, try Yours Truly. They've got great burgers and the breakfast food is fantastic.Second, the picture turned out just fine. You can pretend that the french toast was delicious.($12, including tax, tip, pancakes, fresh OJ and sausage links)And third, since I have $2 left in my budget I'll add a fifth stop to our tour: Amish fry pie at the North Union Farmers Market. The market is back at beautiful Shaker Square. My favorite vendor sells mostly dairy but also pork, grains, breads and pies. Yesterday, I noticed something new and had a strawberry filled Amish fry pie for breakfast. It was glazed and just generally delicious. And it was actually less than $2. ($1.50?)

I think that brings my total to over $39. As I said it was wonderful fun. How do I know that I'm going to be back for Dine and Dish 5? Because, I can't walk away from the keyboard without mentioning dozens of other restaurants that should have appeared in my "$40 A Day" day. Tongue and goat tacos, curry beef buns, pho, burgers... And how could I have led you on a tour of Cleveland without pierogies. And that Puerto Rican restaurant would have let me work in pictures of some great historic churches. We need to do this again.

I've got lots more to eat and I'm looking forward to both sharing it with you and hearing about your culinary adventures. Thanks for stopping in.

Can't Wait for a Book? Paris Can Help - Yahoo! News

2005-08-19T11:53:00.000-07:00

Can't Wait for a Book? Paris Can Help - Yahoo! News

Selling books in vending machines is a fantastic idea. I've had this idea for a long time. I'd fill it with a mix of liberal arts education style books and practical life guide books. One half literature and science and the other half nutrition, personal finance, etc... . I'd paint it yellow and black. I'm sure I'd hear from the Cliff Notes people but my intention is not to glom onto their brand but to evoke the image of caution tap. I'd call the chain of vending machines "Danger: Books". "The pen is mightier than the sword." Or something less trite... But certainly, the nutrition books would be dangerous to McD's and CocaCola and the finance books would be dangerous to Visa and Mastercard. And the literature and general science would be dangerous to any powerful group that would try to sustain its influence by perpetuating ignorance. Each book would be one small step for equality.

The internet is another weapon in this battle but it must be admitted that paper has always had and will continue to have advantages. Convenience is one, and an important one at that, but you can't overlook the simple power of the idea of a book. That idea has real substance. Libraries, of course, are another even older tool but when's the last time that you saw a library that was painted red and black. Maybe the vending machines should make some noise.

Walking with the camera

2005-08-18T11:28:00.000-07:00

A walking tour of Churches in the Tremont area. There are 14 churches along the path. It's 2.46 miles. The area is divided into quadrants by 90/490 and 71. This route covers the churches in the Northeast quadrant.

The Southwest quadrant has four more churches. They're all on or just off a one mile stretch of Scranton. The Northeast quadrant contains only one which is at the corner of W 25th and Monroe. This map includes positions for all the churches.

Here's a 2.15 mile stretch that runs mostly along Fairmount and Coventry. I travel it every week by car on my way to the Coventry Farmers market.

I think that today I'll photograph the section that runs along Fairmount. Hopefully, tomorrow, I can photograph a significant portion of the churches.

YATCN

2005-06-21T22:10:00.000-07:00

Lots of stand-alone, adult targeted classes. For example, a hands-on tutorial on computer maintenance. Or better yet, a class that leads students through the construction of a computer. The instructor would design a system and explain the various component selections. The instructor could charge a nice fee for a multi-session class and make a killing selling the parts. Other related classes would be available: Making a home media server.

More things that Cleveland needs

2005-05-12T18:10:00.000-07:00

Remix the art museum a la: Art Mobs

Things Cleveland needs

2005-03-20T17:51:00.000-08:00

http://www.chicagolearningguide.com/index.cfm
Done properly this could be amazing. Does such a thing already exist for Cleveland?

While we're on the subject of cool things in Chicago that Cleveland should copy, remember that community professional kitchen? It's a kitchen with professional tools and appliances and all the necessary certifications from the city required to produce and sell commercially. And it's available for rent by the hour. It's an incubator for small food businesses. It allows people to transition between cooking for lots of their friends and maintaining their own commercial kitchen.

Or this idea from SF? A mobile farmer's market. Farmer's markets are great but hardly anyone is aware of them. They'd be a lot more popular if they were loud, bright, shiny and stalked customers like prey.This is great for communities that are saturated by unhealthy food options. It would be a great opportunity for kids who could learn about healthy food as they worked on the truck.

Cleveland needs to use RSS and tags more. I can't go from site to site for all of Cleveland's cultural, civic, arts, food organizations looking for information. It's impossible to keep up. Some combination of rss and tags could make it easy to keep up with exactly what you wanted across the entire city. Blogs with automatic rss are nice but there was that website that provides rss feeds with or without an html presence. iCal, rsscalendar, technorati, del.icio.us... That beta calendar site that created a buzz recently? It would be desirable to have a web site act as a central repository for feeds. It would be pretty and it would be a hook for people who aren't in the system yet but it would be easy for Clevelanders to keep up with feeds and news without it.

cleveland

Newspaper vending machine

2005-01-29T16:40:00.000-08:00

I need a reliable newspaper vending machine location database.

More people need to start blogging.

2005-01-27T15:01:00.000-08:00

And I need to be the one who decides. To begin with, DJs should all blog about local concerts.

Food forum idea

2005-01-26T21:41:00.000-08:00

A Best-of page highlighting quality threads that have disappeared into the archives. I can think of the biographies that chefs offered as one I would be interested in digging up and dusting off.

Forum calendar, addition to

2005-01-26T13:38:00.000-08:00

http://www.rsscalendar.com/rss/feed.asp?e=11593&k=6968240043185f65f22097299b865f6b

Forum ideas, yet more

2005-01-26T13:02:00.000-08:00

I'm not sure how to implement a forum calendar. My first thought is to do this:
http://www.icalx.com/html/stuarts/month.php?cal=clefood

Another idea for forum events would be a local IMBB.
http://imbb2.lovesicily.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1

Food Forum ideas, more

2005-01-25T14:01:00.000-08:00

I think that a communal food forum calendar would be a good idea.

I also think that a communal food book database would be useful.

Suggestions for Food Forum activities

2005-01-25T09:36:00.000-08:00

1) Field trips to local producers and suppliers. We could get lessons on how to select, store and prepare their products. Good choices might be The West Side Market, North Union Farmer's Market, Coit Ave Market, or various local farms. After the lesson we could eat the visual aids.

2) Comparison tastings. Good choices might include hot chocolate, bacon, hot dogs, potato chips. Ketchup? Mustard? These could be mail ordered and tested in one location. Or we could caravan to local restaurants and taste test hamburgers, pizza, etc...

Resources for these events could include: Rosengarten Report,
Chowhound's Massive Potato Chip Rundown .

Good mailorder sources: The Grateful Palate
Zingerman's.

In some cases where it would be difficult to sample all of the candidates a sytem may be necessary to insure even distribution. Testers could predict how many samples they expect to taste and choose samples that they're specifically interested in trying. Remaining room for samples could be filled in randomly.

3) A continuation, or intensification, of the various restaurant events: C&Y, Lola's, etc... Any chef in the city would be happy to have a party of 30+ each willing to pay for a special, and specially priced, tasting menu. In addition to Chef Symon, it seems that Chef Brandt and Chef Bennett have an existing relationship with the forum. These would be natural choices but certainly not the only ones. There are plenty of restaurants outside of the continental/contemporary category. I hear magical tales of extravagant feasts at Bo Loong and Siam Cafe for wedding receptions. If they're really hung up on the marriage thing I am fully prepared to wear a veil and marry a pork bun. I'd be keen to try this at a sushi restaurant. For a large party of adventurous eaters the chef would be happy to reach beyond the range of traditional midwest sushi offerings.

Shared restaurant database

2005-01-23T16:30:00.000-08:00

This a way for us to easily create and share a Food and Wine Forum restaurant database. In fact, there's nothing really to set up. And in order for you to participate all you have to do is register at a cool web site that you can use for a million other things. It will just take a few minutes and then once you've done that it will just take a few seconds to add a restaurant to the database. And the database will have a lot of cool features. You can look at a list of restaurants on the Cleveland Food & Wine Forum radar. Or you can get a list of mexican restaurants. Or you can get a list of restaurants for a specific user. Or a list of restaurants given a four-star rating. And you can easily mix and match all of these criteria: all fish restaurants that stuarts has rated four-star. The system could easily be extended to cover recipes for those of us who cook or wine for those of us who drink.

The core of my scheme is del.icio.us. You'll need to register at del.icio.us to participate. Del.icio.us is a new way to bookmark websites. Del.icio.us lets you use tags to help organize the websites that you visit and want to remember. It sounds mundane but people have taken to it with religious zeal. That's partially because it does wonderful, amazing things for keeping track of web sites but also because people are imagining new things that it can do beyond simply keeping track of web sites. For instance, I'm soon going to start using it in place of my Amazon.com wishlist. The thing is, not only will I duplicate the functionality of Amazon.com wishlists, del.icio.us will instantly add wonderful, tag-magic functionality.

You have to use your imagination to really care about del.icio.us and tags. Or maybe you also really need to care about library and information science. Whatever. We care about restaurants and del.icio.us will help us keep track of restaurants that we're interested in and share them with our friends.

After you've registered, you can start bookmarking restaurants. Obviously you can't bookmark the restaurant literaly. Just bookmark the best stand-in that you can find. I'll illustrate the use of the database with some examples.

I'll start by adding El Tango Taqueria. I search for the restaurant on the cleveland.com restaurant database and I bookmark the results page with del.icio.us. I tag it with clefoodforumrestaurant. If you're happy here then that's it. It can be that simple. It is now available for all of the other participants to see. This address is for the list of all of the restaurants in the database: http://del.icio.us/tag/clefoodforumrestaurant . The address for a list of all of my contributions is: http://del.icio.us/stu_spivack/clefoodforumrestaurant .

The full power of the database is available when you take a minute to add more tags. For this restaurant I added the tags: lakewood, westside, ****, mexican and latin. "****" is a rating. The tags ****, ***x, **xx, *xxx should have obvious meanings. I use xxxx to signify that I've never been to the restaurant. "lakewood", "westside", "latin" and "mexican" should also have obvious meanings. Use as many tags as you can think of. Some day you'll be willing to travel anywhere on the west side and some other day you'll think that lakewood is too far. Some day you'll be happy with any Latin American cuisine and some day you'll specifically want mexican.

Here's a list of my mexican, four-star restuarants: http://del.icio.us/stu_spivack/clefoodforumrestaurant+mexican+**** . Here's a list of everyone's mexican, four-star restaurants: http://del.icio.us/tag/clefoodforumrestaurant+mexican+**** .

Honestly, the strength of the system is much more related to the bookmark than to the site that you're bookmarking. You could bookmark completely random web pages and this would still work pretty well. But I think there can be an advantage to carefully selecting the page that you're going to bookmark. Bookmarking entries in the cleveland.com database has some advantages. The page has helpful information like hours, phone number, address, etc... Also the cleveland.com database is likely to have any restaurant the you would hope to add. One drawback of using the cleveland.com page is that del.icio.us uses the title of the page to populate the "description" field for the bookmark and the title of the cleveland.com results page is worthless. Please remember to change the "description" field to something helpful manually if you're using this method.

Obviously, another option for the web page choice would be the official web page of the restaurant. For instance, Moxie, fire and Lola all have web pages. I just added a Lolita to the database. I used the tag "comingsoon" and I bookmarked Chef Symon's post to the forum. Perhaps the best would be to link to an entry in your personal web space. You could create an entry in your blog and bookmark that page. That way you could share extended comments or pictures. Your blog entry could also include a link to the restaurant's website or a link to a review in the Free Times. Blogging is beyond the scope of this explanation but I would like to mention that there are many free and easy to use choices. All you have to do is register. In fact, if you'e unwilling even to register at a free site there are websites that will let you put up small snippets of free, permanent content without even bothering to register.

Here's one bonus. Del.icio.us makes rss feeds available. If you have a personal web space you could take advantage of this to share the database or your portion of the database or whatever slice of your portion of the database with all of the visitors to your web site. It would look something like what you see on the right side of this page. The list only contains two restaurants right now so it might get lost in a jumble. The left sidebar also contains a list of movies and a list of books. On an unrelated note, if someone wants to fix my blog template so that this page looks slightly less horrible then that would be great. And if you don't have a personal webspace, rss is still the easiest way to keep track of the database.

This is my new system for keeping track of restaurants that I want to visit. I think if some of you joined in we could quickly compile something very useful and very interesting.

If you have any questions feel free to ask in the comments to this entry.

Sushi party

2005-01-15T18:17:00.000-08:00

I'm going to go to Kimo's for a sushi lesson. I'll learn how to prepare rice, nigiri, sashimi, rolls, etc... That way I can help when a friend throws a sushi dinner party. I wonder if I'll learn anything about tamago. It would be nice to have some vegetarian rolls:Oshinko (radish pickles), Kampyo (gourd), mint leaf & plum paste, burdock.

There are some things that we could buy prepared to supplement our homemade sushi: Dashi from The Souper Market. Soba salad from Trader Joes.

Questions for Kimo:
More material in different classes?
Cooking for one?

sushi

I spy something beige. Superbowl party.

2005-01-14T20:23:00.000-08:00

~~Is it a computer?~~

The whole point of this entry is to play with the new Technorati Tags feature. I guess the enry has to actually be about something then. Let's start again.

The Superbowl party planning is coming along quite well. I'm getting potato chips from Maui Potato Chips and Zerbe's Chips. I'm also excited about brisket and BBQ brisket from Mister Brisket. Also farfel, cole slaw, chicken breast and rolls. I have to remember to call Sokolowski's in a couple weeks to order the pierogi. If I have time, tomorrow I will call Archie's about the cake.

I tried to find something to link to "farfel". There is only very limited information. I guess it will be up to me to fill it out, if even just a little.

food, brisket, farfel, cake, chips, pierogi, cleveland

Yakisoba Shop

2005-01-06T23:41:00.000-08:00

Yakisoba Shop
Originally uploaded by Hideki+.

What's this button do?

quote. Macaulay.

2005-01-06T13:34:00.000-08:00

"The puritan hated bear baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators."

--Thomas B. Macaulay, 1800-1859

blog | Reviews index

2004-11-20T12:58:00.000-08:00

blog | Reviews index

I should never leave my apartment. I was in Minneapolis for a short vacation/long weekend, and when I returned I was greeted with toppling piles of packages and an inbox it will take me weeks to catch up with. But the good thing about returning was the final additions to my Thanksgiving magazine collection waiting in my mailbox.

So today debuts a new series on the blog, a look at what's good and what's freakishly bad in magazines. This month is on the Thanksgiving issues of cooking magazines. I have to say, I was disappointed. Usually Cook's Illustrated has an outstanding issue, but their "The Last Word on Roast Turkey" was pretty much replicated in every other cooking magazine. And their turkey recipe -- pretty much "brine, then rub with butter and shove in oven" -- left much to be desired. Eating Well on the other hand decided to ignore Thanksgiving all together.

Gourmet Magazine

Geared towards: Rich housewives with a personal chef and kitchen assistants.

Number of Thanksgiving menus offered: 1

Vegetarian options: 1

Levels of difficulty: 10. One side dish instructs you to make twenty “purses” of sausage wrapped in Swiss chard leaves. They even demand you make your own “Parmesan cloaks” for your poached pears with quince paste. Gourmet doesn’t even bother to help out with a detailed timeline or a pull out grocery list. And if you’re planning on making their menu, be prepared to shell out some money. You’ll need a lot of specialty items and expensive ingredients.

The vegetarian option is not much more approachable, with its main dish of Roasted Delicata Squash and Mushrooms with Thyme. They do not, by the way, offer a substitution for those who have never heard of Delicata squash.

Recipes I might consider using: Roasted Beet Risotto

Most helpful feature: The taste test of chicken stocks.

Most unreasonable request: Gourmet does love to complicate the simple. Their two page spread on mashed potatoes managed to make the most simple dish on the menu a lot more time consuming. Don’t boil the potatoes, they instruct. Wrap them in foil and bake them. Do not just add butter, milk or chicken stock. Anything you add to the potatoes must be preheated. And don’t even read the gravy article unless you want to spend a week perfecting your browning technique.

Recipes for leftovers: none

Wine coverage: Pairing advice for both traditional menu and vegetarian menu, price ranging from $9 to $32.

Other items they think you need: a $200 tablecloth from France.

Overall: As usual, the photography is top-notch and the writing is a delight – including Ruth Reichl’s remembrances of a mother who couldn’t cook a turkey to save her life. But the food seems about as cozy as a roped off room in a museum. This is an issue to sigh over and look at, but not cook from.

Cooking Light

Geared towards: People who can watch Rachel Ray’s shows on the Food Network without wanting to punch her in the face. Also, people really into yoga.

Number of Thanksgiving menus offered: 2

Vegetarian options: 1

Levels of difficulty: 6. Cooking Light tends to be more reasonable than the other cooking magazines. The recipes are straightforward, with little mention of garnish and no superfluous flourishes. The recipes are also conscious of time issues, calling for canned beans instead of dried and mentioning when dishes can be made in the microwave to save valuable oven and stovetop space.

In contrast, the vegetarian option sounds a little crazy. The main dish is Phyllo Purses with Roasted Squash, Peppers, and Artichokes. Until you have mastered phyllo, it will make you want to die. The dessert -- instead of pumpkin pie, which is vegetarian last I heard -- is a Chile-Lime Pineapple with Cardamom-Lime Ice Cream, possibly the least autumnal dessert in all of the magazines.

Wine coverage: No wine information other than perpetuating the myth that really expensive wine glasses will make wine taste even better.

Recipes I might consider using: Herbed Bread Stuffing with Mushrooms and Sausage

Most helpful feature: Interview with Rick Rogers, author of Thanksgiving 101.

Most unreasonable request: That I cook for family not only on Thanksgiving, but also have dinner for them on Wednesday night and leftovers prepared on Friday, a “casual dinner” of three courses on Saturday, and brunch on Sunday. And that I do yoga.

Recipes for leftovers: If you once used chicken in a recipe, why not just use turkey now?

Other items they think you need: yoga

Overall: Once you get to the recipes, they’re usually very good. But Cooking Light is more of a lifestyle magazine, and it can be frustrating to flip through a hundred pages of yoga, herbal nonsense, finding the perfect “green” bed for your dog, and “I’m sad. Is it my snack choice?” articles to get to the food.

Bon Appetit

Geared towards: People intimidated by Gourmet and frightened by Cooking Light’s intended audience.

Number of Thanksgiving menus offered: 5

Vegetarian options: 1 (Surprisingly, it’s positioned right up front, not hidden in the back like most of the other magazines.)

Levels of difficulty: 5 – 8. The large number of menus and the wide range of styles means you can mix and match to find the perfect menu for you. You can either go super fancy, small scale, or family-oriented.

The vegetarian option is the best I’ve seen this year. Simple, but well rounded, and not so obsessed with being arty that it no longer sounds like a Thanksgiving meal. It even suggests pumpkin pie as dessert.

Wine coverage: Suggests a range of Rieslings, none of them over $15.

Recipes I might consider using: Potato and Wild Mushroom Gratin, Thyme-Roasted Turkey with Fresh Thyme Gravy

Most helpful feature: Cranberry Daiquiri recipe. I’ll need about ten before the family gets here.

Most unreasonable request: A coconut dessert on Thanksgiving?

Recipes for leftovers: Making me look forward to the day after.

Other items they think you need: $90 mushrooms

Overall: The Thanksgiving issue is always their best, but Bon Appetit really outdid themselves this year. They have significantly cleaned up their designs, their recipes are enticing, and the variety is excellent. The magazine’s writing could be better, but when I want to flip through back issues to find something for dinner, I always reach for Bon Appetit before Gourmet or Cooking Light.

Everyday Food

Geared towards: People who have never cooked in their lives. Ever.

Number of Thanksgiving menus offered: 1

Vegetarian options: none.

Levels of difficulty: 2. They have turned their promise of “simple steps to a delicious (and doable) holiday” into “we’re going to talk to you like you’re five.” Their tips include “store [butter] in the refrigerator” and “check temperature periodically” to determine when the turkey is done. They don’t even take into consideration that you might not own a food processor, and their piecrust recipe (so simple!) does not include alternate instructions for making it by hand.

Wine coverage: Revelations like, “Before serving [white wine], chill for about an hour in the refrigerator.” No specifics on pairings.

Recipes I might consider using: none.

Most helpful feature: Detailed shopping list and timeline.

Most unreasonable request: That I be an idiot.

Recipes for leftovers: two

Other items they think you need: For a magazine for people who can’t cook, they sure do expect you to have every appliance known to man.

Overall: I know this is Martha Stewart’s magazine for people who are scared of cooking, but you could get better recipes off the backs of condensed soup cans. There has to be some middle ground between this and Stewart telling us how to make Christmas decorations out of our Thanksgiving turkey bones. Find some middle ground. Please.

Food & Wine

Geared towards: California residents with very large wine cellars

Number of Thanksgiving menus offered: 4

Vegetarian options: none

Levels of difficulty: 8. While F&W do provide a nice range of options for Thanksgiving dinner, each recipe seems like someone asked, “Yes, but can we just add one more step?” There are side dishes that call for making your own herbed butter, desserts with more than one ingredient that explains “Recipe follows.”

Wine coverage: A defense of chardonnay as a Thanksgiving wine, also a wine pairing for almost every dish.

Recipes I might consider using: Spicy kale chowder with Andouille Sausage

Most helpful feature: The division of the dishes. Each dish is categorized as a starter, side dish, turkey, or dessert, and then each of those categories is broken into “Five Days Ahead,” “Two Days Ahead,” and “Thanksgiving Day,” allowing the reader to plan out their menu based on how much advance work they want to do, or how much time they’ll have on Thanksgiving.

Most unreasonable request: The dessert options are Pumpkin Pudding with Candied Ginger Whipped Cream, White Chocolate Cake with Orange Marmalade Filling, and Frozen Hazelnut Mousse Cakes with Armagnac. No thanks.

Recipes for leftovers: none.

Other items they think you need: a brand new, redesigned kitchen

Overall: Food & Wine tries too hard to be Gourmet without having the quality writers when it should be aspiring to have quality recipes like Bon Appetit. However, they do offer the smartest information on pairing wine with your food, but manage to do it in an unsnobby way. Their series on the makings of an oenophile has been very good, and highlights their approach: less guy-from-Sideways, more the nicest guy who has ever worked at your neighborhood wine shop. If only the Food half of their magazine was like that.
Posted by Jessa Crispin | link

Dine Original 2004

2004-11-17T10:05:00.000-08:00

Blue Point: 1) Blue cheese, pecan, arugala salad.

2) Scallops, butternut squash

3)Creme brulee



Flying fig: 1)Duck quesadilla or calimari

2)Local greens salad

3)Chicken or hangar steak or halibut

My father and I have reservation here for friday



Johnny's Downtown: Different menu each day



Matsu: You can look at the pictures that I took to see

what I ate. They have two other options. One is a

sushi dinner : seaweed salad, sushi appetizer, sushi

entree. The other is steak and lobster.



Nighttown: 1)Duck breast with poached eggs or Caesar

salad

2)Salmon or chicken

3)Apple crisp or home-made eclaire



One Walnut: 1)Butternut squash flan or mushroom bisque

2)Salmon or duck or pork tenderloin

3)Cheese course or rasberry swirl cheesecake or

flourless chocolate tort.



Sergios: 1)Butternut squash soup or mussels or shrimp,

mushroom wonton

2)Skirt steak pomidoro(?) or thai angel pasta with

scallop or tilapia with ginger scallion sauce.

3)Guava tart or chocolate terrine or apple berry crisp



That Place on Bellflower: 1)onion soup or shrimp or

walnut, blue cheese salad 2) beef Wellington or

seafood lasagna 3) chocolate or cheesecake

This is a complete list of restaurants participating in Dine Original week, annotated with interesting bits of information that I gleaned from menus or reviews. This map of six of them may also be helpful.

Beach Club Bistro ,

Blue Point Grille They have a Caesar salad with white anchovies in addition to the steak and bouillabase.

,Boulevard Blue , Kobe burger. With 4 yr old cheddar. Truffle chicken breast.

Cabin Club They make their own mozzarela for a steak dish.

Delmonico’s. A $50 antepasto salad "tower"

Fire ,

Flying Fig review Sweetbreads. Mozzarela/tomato salad.

GameKeeper’s Taverne ,Gavi’s ,Grovewood Tavern ,J. Pistone Market & Gathering Place ,John Q. Steakhouse ,Johnny's Bar,Johnny’s Downtown ,

Matsu Japanese Restaurant , I talked to the host/owner person about Dine Originals so I'd feel guilty if I didn't show up. Besides the scallop/potato thing sounds very good.

Molinari's Everybody's got Kobe, I guess

Mom's, Moxie ,

Night Town , The bangers and mash here is excellent

Noggin’s Raw Bar & Pub ,

One Walnut One of Cleveland's finest and most highly regarded. Braised short ribs.

Pearl of the Orient ,Players on Madison ,

Sage Bistro Examining their menu just put them at the top of my list. Charcuterie plate!

Salmon Dave’s Pacific Grill Lobster rangoon. Probably sounds better than it tastes. Along with Cabin Club, Delmonico's and Thirsty Parrot this restaurant is associated with Blue Point.

,Sergio’s in Univ. Circle Brazillian food

That Place I remember being very impressed on a number of previous visits. The restaurant has gone through a lot of changes and I think it's time to see if they've recovered to the quality that I remember. They actually have a couple of salads that I'm interested in trying. Salmon. Russian egg.

Theory Appetizers:sweetbreads, rare olive oil poached tuna, butter poached lobster. Entrees: Kobe burger. Braised short ribs. Scene's best new restaurant of 2004.

Yours Truly

food, cleveland

Pages 1--3 from Untitled

2004-10-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

Pages 1--3 from Untitled

CLEVELAND 1 800 Gourmet
Adelphia Almond Roca
Almondina/ YZ Enterprises American Culinary Concepts Ohio Proud Pavilion
American Express Financial Advisors Ashly Enterprises
Aunt Gussie' s Cookies & Crackers B. A. Sweetie Candy Company
Ballreich Potato Chips Ohio Proud Pavilion Bamix ( Ocean Sales Ltd. )
Bertolli/ Tops Markets Bickford Flavors Ohio Proud Pavilion
Bon Appétit The Plain Dealer/ Bon Appétit Stage Bottega Del Vino
Bubba' s Q Catering & Sauces Ohio Proud Pavilion Bumble Bar, Inc.
Cabot Cheese CaJohns Fiery Foods Ohio Proud Pavilion
Cake Decors Chalet DeBonne' Vineyards
Chef Pascal Corp. The Cherry STOP ( Orchards' Harvest, Inc. )
Claire' s Folly Classic Wines of California
Clearwater Systems Cleveland Magazine
Cleveland Originals, Council of Independent Restaurants of America Cleveland Wine School
Colorado Prime Foods Cook' s Warehouse
Cooper' s Mill Cork and Grape
Cucina Pitrelli Ohio Proud Pavilion Culinaire Pavane Ohio Proud Pavilion
Dacor The Plain Dealer/ Bon Appétit Stage DeLallo Italian Foods
Dennison Pies Diageo Chateau & Estate Winery
d' marie Dr. Dan' s BBQ Products Ohio Proud Pavilion
En Masse Marketing Corp. Epic Roots/ Mache Salad Blends
European Gourmet Almonds Executive Sweets
E Z Breathe Fancy' s Candy' s, Inc.
Fisher Paykel Appliances Flavour Creations ( NSI, Inc. )
Food Masters Inc. 1
Food Network Fowlers Milling Company
Froehlichs Inc. Frog Ranch Foods Ohio Proud Pavilion
Gallucci' s Italian Foods Gecko Garys
Gertrude Lee Candies Giant Eagle
Great Big Food Show Retail Store Great Lakes Brewing Company
Health Craft Cooking Show Henkel Consumer Adhesives, Inc,
Herbal Delights Herold' s Salads
The Honeybaked Ham Co. I & K Distributor' s Inc.
Ian' s Natural Foods Integrated Marketing Services ( Bertolli/ Tops Markets)
James Tea Company Ohio Proud Pavilion Keystone Fruit Marketing
Kitchen Basics Kitchen Craft International
KitchenAid Laurel Run Cooking School
Leeners Lee' s Mustard Ohio Proud Pavilion
Lelolai Bakery & Café Lifeway Foods, Inc.
Lola Bistro & Wine Bar Loretta Paganini School of Cooking
Los Tios/ Tex Mex Gourmet MAC Knife
Mahas Falafil Marzetti
Melting Pot, The Menches Brothers Foods LLC
Metropolitan Market Mid' s Pasta Sauce
Miles Farmers Market Milo' s Whole World Gourmet Ohio Proud Pavilion
Minerva Cheese Factory, featuring AMISH GOURMET CHEESES Mrs. DeVaney' s Gourmet Foods
Mustard Seed Market & Café My House Seasonings
Narrin' s Spice & Sauce Nature Isle Tropical Gourmet LLC
Nature' s Path News Channel 5
Ohio Apple Marketing Program Ohio Proud Pavilion Ohio Beef Council
Ohio Department of Agriculture Ohio Proud Pavillion 2
Ohio Pork Producers Council Olympia Candies
Original Juan Specialty Foods Orlando Baking Company Ohio Proud Pavilion
Orlando Food/ Academia Orrefors Kosta Boda
The Pampered Chef Peanut Better
Peppered Palatte, Inc. The Plain Dealer The Plain Dealer/ Bon Appétit Stage
PM Companies Quaker Steak & Lube
Queen Jeanne' s Very Original Nuts Reinecker' s Bakery Ltd.
Robert Rothschild Farm S. S. Kemp
Seryrell' s Food Products Ohio Proud Pavilion Shearer' s Foods Inc.
Snow Brothers Appliance Soda Club USA
Specialty Food Marketplace/ West Point Market Splenda
Stancato' s Italian Restaurant Starbucks
Sur La Table Tastefully Simple
TNT Promotions TNT Promotions
Tone Brothers Inc. Tre Sorella
Vegetarian Times Viking Culinary Arts Center
The Virginia Diner, Inc. West Point Market/ Specialty Food Marketplace
West Side Market Tenants Association WNWV 107. 3 FM Radio
World Wide Promotions Zevro
ZIO Products Ohio Proud Pavilion 3

School funding: Textbook failure

2004-10-20T13:51:00.000-07:00

School funding: Textbook failure

School funding: Textbook failure
Court edicts, genuine efforts have not solved Ohio's problem
Sunday, October 17, 2004
Scott Stephens
Plain Dealer Reporter
Blame it on Harmon Stidger.

The Canton lawmaker, a farmer and physician, was chairman of the Ohio legislature's education committee in 1850 when he submitted a proposal to the state's second Constitution calling for a "thorough and efficient system of common schools."

More than 150 years later, Ohio still is trying to figure out what Stidger meant.
Eleven years of litigation produced four Ohio Supreme Court rulings, all calling for a complete overhaul of the way the state pays for public education.

Those rulings produced extra money for districts especially for the construction of schools. But state lawmakers and two governors largely ignored the real thrust of the rulings: Ohio's system relies too heavily on local property taxes, inviting huge funding disparities and making the quality of a child's education largely an accident of birth.

"Ohio is, perhaps, the most shameful example in the nation," said Jonathan Kozol, a teacher and social activist whose writings have chronicled the effect of funding inequities on children. "The entire system is archaic, undemocratic and ultimately unfixable."

That has not stopped the state from trying. Members of a 35-person task force appointed a year ago by Gov. Bob Taft a bipartisan mix that includes educators, business leaders, elected officials and union leaders generally agree they have made some progress.

The task force is expected to push a plan that would allow modest revenue growth for local school districts, meaning they would not have to constantly seek tax increases from voters.

The plan would also take aim at "phantom revenue" the shortfall between the rising property values the state uses to calculate how much money it gives a district and the actual revenue the districts collect.

The plan might include redistribution of the business tax on tangible personal property such as equipment, inventory, machinery and fixtures. It would also offer expanded tax relief for low-income elderly residents.

The group's most important consensus was philosophical rather than financial: the acknowledgment that poor children need more money than affluent children to reach the same academic benchmarks. That's significant in a state that suffers from one of the most pronounced gaps in achievement between white students and black and Latino children, many of them attending the state's poorest districts.

But the task force, which could issue its final recommendations as early as next month, has missed at least two deadlines and remains sharply divided on the fundamental question of adequacy that is, what constitutes a good education, and how much should it cost?

In fact, the failure of the task force to commission a study on that question could result in some members issuing a minority report in protest.

"We never did an adequacy study, so we're just kind of flying blind," said Sen. C.J. Prentiss, a Cleveland Democrat who sits on the task force.

Even if plan is approved, change probably far off

Political and economic realities also threaten reform efforts. The task force's proposal to tinker with the state funding formula, for example, would require both legislative approval and a voter-approved constitutional amendment.

"Even if everyone approves of what we're doing, it's going to take a while to phase it in," said Paul Marshall, the task force's executive director, adding the process could take six to eight years. "And not everyone thinks this is a good idea."

Already, several Republican legislators have vowed to fight any "Robin Hood" approach that would force wealthy districts to share revenue with poor districts.

"Taking from Peter to pay Paul is not a sensible school funding measure," said Rep. Jim Trakas, Republican of Independence.

But given the chances of finding new money, that might be a likely route. Taft's goal to include the task force's recommendations in his two-year budget proposal early next year is clouded by the prospect of a projected $4 billion budget shortfall.

Already, state funding cuts and voter rejection of property tax issues have resulted in the layoff of at least 2,000 teachers statewide and deep cuts in everything from transportation to extracurricular activities. At the same time, $344 million in base funding is expected to be deducted from public school coffers this school year and sent to charter schools one-third of them managed by for-profit companies.

Soaring costs for special education, health care, fuel, textbooks and compliance with the federal No Child Left Behind law have pushed strained school district budgets to the breaking point.

Once viewed as a potential savior, lottery profits for education continue to drop like a stone, falling from a peak of $714 million in 1996 to about $600 million this year or less than $1 million per school district. Analysts blame the drop on competition from other states.

And there is little hope legislators will extend the temporary, two-year, 1-cent sales tax increase, which is to expire in July.

"We aren't really very close to school funding reform at all in Ohio," lamented Jan Resseger, an education activist with the United Church of Christ. "It says something about us and it says something about our children."

Resseger is part of a growing grass-roots movement trying to push elected officials into action. Last spring, the Ohio Fair Schools Campaign drew more than 1,200 people to seven school-funding hearings across the state. The campaign is now trying to collect 100,000 signatures on a petition calling on the governor and legislature to reform school funding.

Likewise, the Ohio Education Association sponsored 33 public meetings around the state to discuss school funding.

Modern funding saga began with 1976 lawsuit

While Ohio has been struggling with school funding for most of its history, the modern chapter of the story began in 1976. That was the year the Cincinnati Board of Education filed a lawsuit asking the Ohio Supreme Court to recognize education as a fundamental right and to declare the state's funding system unconstitutional.

The effort failed, but the interest it sparked eventually led to the formation in 1991 of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding, an alliance of 275 school districts, many of them poor and rural. In December of that year, the coalition filed DeRolph vs. State of Ohio, a lawsuit named for schoolboy Nathan DeRolph.

DeRolph, now married and with a child of his own, attended school in Perry County, a Central Ohio county with five small school districts scattered along miles of rolling farmland and abandoned strip mines. To many, the county embodied the state's school-funding crisis.

In the Perry County village of Thornville, Somerset Elementary School was condemned in 1993 because bricks were falling from the sides of the building and the walls were bulging outward.

In 1998, Thornville Elementary School's third-floor hallway ceiling started to collapse under the weight of bat feces that had collected on the attic floor.

The schools in Thornville were part of the Northern Local School District, which ranked near the bottom of the state in most economic measures, including income, value of taxable property and per-pupil spending.

By any legal measure, the DeRolph lawsuit was a stunning success. In 1994, Perry County Common Pleas Judge Linton Lewis Jr. ruled in the coalition's favor and ordered the state to eliminate funding disparities. Appeals went up to the Ohio Supreme Court, which in 1997 agreed with Lewis and ordered a "complete system overhaul."

The court would rule three more times that, while some progress had been made, the funding system was still unconstitutional. But in its final ruling, the state high court dropped its jurisdiction over the case, leaving the victorious plaintiffs no way to enforce the order. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from the coalition.

"This is just unthinkable in a nation of laws," said William Phillis, the coalition's executive director. "They shut the courthouse doors on us."

Despite court rulings, disparities still exist

After more than a decade of litigation, reliance on local property taxes actually has increased, and disparities continue.

Schools in the affluent Cleveland suburb of Beachwood, for example, spent $17,735 per pupil in 2003, the highest in the state. The Pleasant schools in Marion County, a rural district 50 miles from the Statehouse steps, spent $5,856 per pupil that year, the least in Ohio.

Both districts get nearly the same base funding from the state, but Beachwood's rich tax base allows it to spend more than three times as much per pupil.

Still, even the wealthiest districts are forced to beg voters to raise taxes just to keep pace with inflation. Since this year's senior class entered kindergarten, Ohio's school and vocational districts have gone to voters with 5,471 tax requests, an average of eight each. In August, voters approved just 26 percent of the 103 school issues on their ballots.

More than one-third of the state's 613 school districts forecast deficits within three years.

The culprit, to many, is House Bill 920, a tax-relief law passed by the legislature in 1976 two years before California's infamous Proposition 13 property tax revolt.

In some states, such as New York and Pennsylvania, elected officials set the tax rates that generate money for schools. In Ohio, that's the job of voters, who must approve tax hikes to pay for their schools.

Homeowners and businesses pay annual property taxes based on the assessed value of their property. Property taxes generally increase every three years when new values are set. Before 1976, revenue to schools increased if real estate in a community appreciated.

House Bill 920 froze that revenue at the amount generated the first year a new tax was collected. So, if property values went up, the tax rate was rolled back to keep revenue constant.

It is a formula that hurts districts such as Sheffield-Sheffield Lake, a Lorain County school system of 2,000 students that is struggling to avoid fiscal calamity. Unless the community passes an emergency tax increase next month, the district will face a deficit of $1.5 million and a state takeover of its finances by next summer.

The district's revenue has failed to keep pace with the soaring costs of health care, fuel and books and supplies, Superintendent Will Folger said, and voters have continually defeated tax requests. It has been a decade since voters approved new revenue for the district, he said.

"A large part of our population worked in steel mills, on the docks or in the car industry, and this area has been hard hit," Folger said. "We're asking people to give up more of their money for the good of the schools. For a lot of people, that's a difficult decision."

Likewise, the funding formula penalizes the Berea School District, which includes the industrialized and retail-rich communities of Brook Park and Middleburg Heights.

The state guarantees every school district a base per-pupil amount, which is $5,169 this school year. That money comes from a mix of local property taxes and state general fund dollars. Districts with rich tax bases pay a larger share of that base amount; for districts with poor tax bases, the state picks up a larger share.

Berea, for example, gets about $950 about 18 percent of its base allocation from the state. Akron, by contrast, gets more than $3,100 about 61 percent of its $5,169 base.

In theory, that's a split that industrialized districts such as Berea should be able to afford. But tax abatement and other deals to attract and keep business can quickly dilute a rich tax base.

"I think the biggest issue is what businesses are paying in taxes," said Berea schools Treasurer Randy Scherf. "I think they need to pay their fair share to do business in Ohio."

Suburban districts with more-affluent residents have grumbled for years that they get a lot less back from state coffers than they put in. Residents in Orange, for example, paid nearly $62 million in state income tax for the 2001 tax year but received only $5.3 million back in state education money. East Cleveland residents paid in about $5.7 million, but got back $35.5 million.

"I live in a suburban school district, and we basically self-fund ourselves," said Rep. Larry Wolpert, Republican of Hilliard.

Wolpert, Independence Republican Rep. Trakas and two other GOP lawmakers are pushing their own reform package in the House. One bill would allow a simple majority of school districts in a county to seek a countywide tax issue and distribute the money proportionally. Another would allow communities to voluntarily lift H.B. 920. A third would eliminate phantom revenue, and a fourth would give fast-growing suburbs quicker access to state building money.

The lawmakers are not the only ones working on their own initiatives. Former State Rep. Bryan Flannery is asking voters to sign petitions to put his school finance plan on the state ballot in 2005. He would reduce reliance on local property taxes and make up the difference from a blend of sales, income and corporate taxes. His plan would also establish a committee that would decide an amount of money needed to fund an adequate education, and the state would be required to stick to that amount.

Not everyone has given up on the DeRolph ruling. School funding is an issue in three Ohio Supreme Court races, and at least two challengers pledge to reopen the case.

Phillis, the executive director of the school district coalition, said, "Conditions may have degenerated enough in Ohio where people will choose a new court."

© 2004 The Plain Dealer.

Sheffield schools bill state for 'phantom' funds

2004-10-20T09:12:00.000-07:00

Cleveland.com: Search

Sheffield schools bill state for 'phantom' funds
Sheffield schools say state shorts it cash
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Carl Matzelle
Plain Dealer Reporter
Sheffield Lake- In an attempt to convince state officials that school funding methods aren't working, the Sheffield-Sheffield Lake school board is billing Ohio's governor for money the district figures it was shorted by the state's funding formula.

Calling the district's approach "unique," a state funding expert said that other districts might follow Sheffield's lead, especially if education issues are defeated in November.

"Five other districts have sent bills to the state, but Sheffield is the first district to challenge state policy," said Bill Phillis, executive director of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy of School Funding in Columbus.

The bill was for $1.6 million - the amount Sheffield figures it was shorted for the last four years.

Sheffield schools Treasurer David Chambers said the district is challenging what some see as a flaw in the formula that deals with so-called phantom revenue.

The state believes that each district should collect 23 mills from taxpayers and deducts that much from the district's state aid.

But many districts, including Sheffield-Sheffield Lake, can collect only 20 mills locally. Voters have approved more, but the millage is automatically reduced by law to make up for growth in the tax base.

The difference between the state's calculation and the actual amount taxed is called "phantom revenue." Some lawmakers in Columbus have proposed eliminating it from the system.

Voters in the school district have rejected the last six attempts to pass a tax.

If residents don't approve a five-year, 8.95-mill emergency operating levy in November and a five-year, 7.81-mill renewal in next May's election, the district could be placed in state receivership before the end of fiscal year 2006.

More bad news arrived Oct. 12 from the state auditor's office, informing officials that the district's performance audit would not be completed before the November election.

"It's disappointing," said Chambers, who was counting on the audit to convince voters "sitting on the fence" that the district is really hurting financially.

To reach this Plain Dealer reporter:

cmatzelle@plaind.com, 216-999-4744

Neel Life Stories

2004-09-19T17:26:00.000-07:00

Neel Life Stories

Feature
Neel Life Stories
Alice Neel's portraits stripped her subjects bare -- often literally -- and expertly revealed their inner lives. On the eve of a Whitney retrospective, Neel's subjects reflect on sitting for a modern master.

By Edith Newhall

Probably no other twentieth-century American figurative painter developed as singular a style as Alice Neel. Her provocative portraits of art-world celebrities like Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsberg -- along with dozens of other people who caught her fancy -- made her the quintessential artist's artist. But broad public recognition of Neel's work was anything but immediate. Her portraits and dark social commentaries seemed hopelessly out of date during the mid-century decades of Abstract Expressionism; it wasn't until the seventies that Neel, who died in 1984, really began to enjoy success. Now, 26 years after her first Whitney retrospective, figurative painting is the artistic style of the moment and Neel, its most uncompromising proponent, is about to be fêted again. "The Art of Alice Neel," a traveling exhibit organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and opening at the Whitney on June 29, stands to reveal the painter not just as an idiosyncratic voice but an influential one.

A Picture Share!

2004-09-16T13:21:00.000-07:00

A Picture Share!
Originally uploaded by stu_spivack.

Cleveland. Little Italy.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet

2004-09-16T13:01:00.000-07:00

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