ABULAFIA :: Zeitgeist






2 0 0 4 > NEXT JANUARY 04 JANUARY 03 JANUARY 02 JANUARY 01 2 0 0 3 DECEMBER 04 DECEMBER 03 DECEMBER 02 DECEMBER 01 NOVEMBER 04 NOVEMBER 03 NOVEMBER 02 NOVEMBER 01 OCTOBER 03 OCTOBER 02 OCTOBER 01 SEPTEMBER AUGUST 02 AUGUST 01 JULY 02 JULY 01 JUNE 02 JUNE 01 MAY 02 MAY 01 APRIL 02 APRIL 01 MARCH FEBRUARY JANUARY WEDDING			J A N U A R Y 3 1 , 2 0 0 4 Inside Bundled in blankets, I tried to breathe and stay human with much kind care from Amy. J A N U A R Y 3 0 , 2 0 0 4 To Akron Zion A.M.E Church parking lot, Eighteenth and Bryden Road, Olde Towne Cold & cough I sat at my desk bundled in coat, hat and gloves; still cold. With a deep, unpleasant cough. Section C Planning J A N U A R Y 2 9 , 2 0 0 4 Choir rehearsal Bexley afterwards Olde Towne streetscene at night It's snowing again Samuraing I taught him to multiply single numbers & now on 20 sheets he put times tables for the numbers 1 - 20. I have no idea how you would make a 3-year-old do this if he did not want to any more than I know how you could stop one that wants to ... [p47 -- seeing if any of the earlier pages read better with heat] ... We are now sitting in front of Bellini's Portrait of the Doge. L is reading Odyssey 18, consulting Cunliffe at intervals -- infrequent intervals. I have been looking at the Portrait of the Doge -- somebody's got to. [p132 National Gallery ] J A N U A R Y 2 8 , 2 0 0 4 The gallery hallway Upstairs Early deadlines This week were painfully early. I managed to stumble home and fall into bed. Ice Everywhere; It is. J A N U A R Y 2 7 , 2 0 0 4 Home again. Deficits as far as the eye can see Power Rangers \| Josh Marshall \| New Yorker As Fareed Zakaria observed last year, after speaking to government officials in dozens of countries around the world, almost every country that has had dealings with the Bush Administration has felt humiliated by it. America isn’t powerful because people like us: our power is a product of dollars and guns. But when people think that America’s unique role in the world is basically legitimate, that power becomes less costly to exert and to sustain. People around the world have respected and admired American power because of the way America has acted. If it acts differently, the perceptions of American benevolence can start to ebb—and, to judge from any public-opinion poll from abroad over the last year, that’s essentially what has happened. When it comes to political capital, too, this is an Administration with a weakness for deficit spending. Maybe it was the lack of heat Now I am enjoying it -- The Last Samurai. And now the Alien spoke & its voice was mild as milk, and it said He's just a baby. And J.S. Mill said: In the course of instruction which I have partially retraced, the point most superficially apparent is the great effort to give, during the years of childhood, an amount of knowledge in what are considered the higher branches of education, which is seldom acquired (if acquired at all) until the age of manhood. And I said: NO NO NO NO NO And Mr. Mill said: The result of this experiment shows the ease with which this may be done, And I said EASE & he resumed implacably, ... Page 109. Enough strands have come together and actual characters and people seem to be emerging from out the vortices. Clarification and elaboration The call letters listed on the radio push buttons are labelled WOSU, WHKC, WLW, WJR, WTAM, WCOL, WHIO, and WBNS. WOSU, WCOL and WBNS are familiar Columbus stations. WLW has a very strong AM signal out of Cincinnati, and still makes the ratings charts in Columbus today. The other stations I had never heard of, but simply assumed that they must be Columbus stations as I didn't believe that WOSU, WCOL or WBNS were ever high-powered enough to be picked up anywhere else and so must indicate a Columbus-centric machine. WHIO is out of Dayton. WHKC broadcast Columbus Red Bird baseball games in 1934, 1945 and 1946 and is listed as a Columbus broadcaster. The call letters were used from 1979 to 1984 by a station in Indiana. WJR is out of Detroit. Possibly another WLW type AM station? WTAM is out of Cleveland. It has fallen prey to Clear Channel. So only one of the stations I was unfamiliar with was a Columbus channel, though they certainly ring Columbus and make the radio appear intended for use in Columbus. Dinner at Lemongrass With Chris Boring and David The zuchini chicken was actually not bad. I survived. (Until someone at the table next to us had something brought over with a very strong odor that I just didn't want to smell). After Bank One and JP Morgan ... Huntington 'growing again' with deal for Unizan Bank \| Business First Columbus' Huntington Bancshares Inc. has agreed to acquire Unizan Financial Corp. of Canton in a $587 million deal, the companies said Tuesday. ... Unizan has about $2.7 billion in assets, far under Huntington's $30 billion. Huntington was the Columbus area's second-largest bank in 2003, based on area deposits, according to Business First research, and it operates 56 branch offices in the area. Unizan was the area's 10th-largest area bank and runs 11 branches in Central Ohio and 45 overall. Did Huntington demand a discount over Unizan's horrible name? Could Unizan think of no better way to get rid of it? Questions they probably won't answer. The storm, still continuing It stayed warm all night, or at least above 0°, so there was little ice on the streets this morning. It is getting colder now, but snowing rather than sleeting or anything worse, and a lot of the standing water had time to dry up before it froze. J A N U A R Y 2 6 , 2 0 0 4 The storm, continued Amy says Akron is seeing ice storms, but for all the dire forecasts here, there has been very little violent weather. Bryden Road, Olde Towne East an historic neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio The welcome glow of the lamp in the upstairs window of this home appears inviting, but it will take someone a lot of work to actually make the house live up to appearances. There is currently an industrial-sized dumpster on the front lawn and it is being filled up fast. The neighbors have long mowed the lawn and repaired the fence in the back to discourage transients and looters -- they, and the rest of the neighborhood, hope for an imminent renewal. Ice, back yard The furnace, continued The $290 part may not be necessary, after all. And the original thermostat is now controlling the furnace admirably, handling such challenging assignments as cycling it off with aplomb. Or at least simple competence, which is really all that is asked of it. The temperature all over the house has evened out considerably now that both furnaces are working. Antique radio From Mike on Saturday. The front has pushbuttons with old Columbus stations' call letters on them. Some are recognizable, some I have never heard of before. WHIO? No one today would design a radio so specific to the Columbus market, and radio stations change their call letters so often that no one can keep up anyway. Bahamas Brad forwards pictures from his and Erika's recent diving trip. Something to dream about while trying to keep warm. Photos J A N U A R Y 2 5 , 2 0 0 4 The storm Much snow, but no sleet or freezing rain so far. Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church Eighteenth St. & Bryden Rd., Olde Towne East, a neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio At least someone was enjoying the weather: From the Mennonite house down the street, some of the kids were "skiing" behind a car. The story links Another reason to dislike Wal-Mart Lock-in policy has some Wal-Mart employees steamed \| NYT / Dispatch The Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart subsidiary, had locked its overnight workers in, as it always did, to keep robbers out and, some managers say, to prevent employee theft. As usual, there was no manager with a key to let Rodriguez out. The fire exit, he said, was hardly an option — management had told the overnight workers that if they ever used that exit for anything but a fire, they would lose their jobs. The reason for Rodriguez’s delayed trip to the hospital was a little-known Wal-Mart policy: the lock-in. For more than 15 years, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, has locked in overnight employees at some of its Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores. ... "It’s clearly cause for concern," said Burt Flickinger, who runs a retail-consulting company. "Locking in workers, that’s more of a 19th-century practice than a 20th-century one." Heaven forbid we should try for this century. Wal-Mart may have the best prices, but the nearest Wal-Mart to me is so maddening, crowded, impolite, and divorced from anything local that it makes it easier to accept paying higher prices for commodities to retailers that don't quite so thoroughly destroy community. Surprise! Walls work both ways Neighborhood adrift \| Dispatch City officials knew when they closed gates in the new Franklinton floodwall that some other areas on the ‘dry side’ could be flooded. Early this month, dozens of South Side homes and businesses were swamped. After weeks of blaming nature, city officials now acknowledge a failed storm-water pump might have caused the worst flooding in Franklinton in more than four decades. For 29 hours during the worst of a 4-inch rainstorm this month, Utilities Director Cheryl Roberto said, one of two pumps that were supposed to pull water from the west side of the Franklinton floodwall sat idle. Meanwhile, water erupted from sewers inside the $129 million floodwall, swamping more than 60 homes and a dozen businesses with raw sewage and storm water. Translation trouble at top-level talks BBC "Once, the Foreign Office plagued 10 Downing Street, back in the mid-1980s, for Mrs Thatcher to see the visiting president of the former French Congo - a well known Marxist and Communist. ... "The President arrived and was shown up to her drawing room and sat down opposite her, and she leant across, fixed him with a baleful glare and said, 'I hate Communists'. "The poor French interpreter, rather shattered by this not exactly courteous introduction to the conversation, rendered it something like 'Prime Minister Thatcher says that she has never been wholly supportive of the ideas of Karl Marx', which I thought was a pretty brave attempt in the circumstances." But think how much more economical Thatcher's choice of words were! So just whose domain is it? Jimmy Breslin \| Newsday For over at City Hall, a builder and politicians and other thugs were on the lip of a great civic endeavor: They were going to buy the New Jersey Nets basketball team and bring them to a planned, marvelous glass-walled arena in Brooklyn. To make room for the arena, they would sweep the land clear over the Long Island Railroad tracks at Atlantic Avenue and Flatbush Avenue, and part of this would take the building at 475 Dean Street and all in it, the violin studio, the architect's homes, the families living there with their first children and everything ahead of them. The claim is that the land can be condemned under eminent domain. This is a way for the government to take land for needed undertakings. The Verrazano Bridge, for one. But this time they want to take 71 buildings on 10 acres and more than three blocks. This would throw out 864 residents, including 200 people who work in their homes at things like violins, canvas stretching, architecture, photography, painting. They make gentle so much around them, and their government wants to replace them with a basketball team that has a player named Jason Kidd and would be a nice addition to Brooklyn, if you had them in an arena someplace that disturbed no human beings who contribute a lot more to the world than a foul shot. The idea of replacing people for a basketball court is so insane that of course it brought me right back to the Corona houses — the Corona 69 — who were going to be displaced by an athletic field for Forest Hills High School. The 69 residents had a meeting at the Corona Volunteer Ambulance Hall and it was at a point when they had no chance, the courts and the thieves had it wrapped up. Then a fairly young, unknown Court Street lawyer named Mario Cuomo walked into the hall and said he would represent them. Soon, he had legal paper flying and motions causing dizziness in courts. The city lawyers were sick to their stomachs. Church sends Christ into cold Jimmy Breslin \| Newsday The worst of winter fell onto the city and hunted through the streets for the helpless, for the defenseless, for anybody too poor to have a roof. ... They were in a palace away from the cold, the most famous church of the Catholics in America. It is supposed to represent the Lord's religion. On this cold night, one of the ushers said that the church closes at 8:35 p.m. Exactly. ... "Nobody can stay?" an usher was asked. "Church closes," he said. In the last row on the left side, a man stirred, then sat bolt upright. He put on a blue wool hat and lifted a backpack that he carefully put on. He had two heavy shirts to fight the cold. He started out. People were coming from the darkness on the side aisles. Soon, the church was empty. Christ slipped out of a pew and followed the other homeless people out of the church. The ushers and cops didn't have the slightest idea who he is, and nobody running the huge church he was leaving knows anything about him, either. They claim they do. They say they pray to him and try to act in his behalf. Last night, he was asked to leave and go out into the cold, just like any of the other homeless. "Watch yourself out there, it's getting very slippery," a cop said to all of them who looked like Christ, and one of them was. Photography link Sean Kernan Sadly, going away Iconomy Precious Jesus And the conversion of Paul. On the way in, I asked Lotte, one of our older parishioners, if she was surviving the cold. She said (no irony, truthfully), she loves it, this is her kind of weather. Over half a century in Columbus and she still has a wonderful German accent. > JANUARY 04			L I N K S AAA Abulafia Boardwalk Bread CHN Christ Lutheran Church NCCHS Neighborhood Research Institute Old Oaks Olde Towne Polyphony INTP Business First Business First Daily Edition Call and Post Columbus Alive Columbus Dispatch Columbus Free Press Columbus Post Communicator News The Daily Reporter Inner Art The Lantern The Other Paper Suburban News Publications Short North Gazette NBC4 Columbus WSYX 6 10TV WBNS ONN BBC World Service CNN Christian Science Monitor The Guardian IndiaTimes Newsday New York Times StarTribune Washington Post Washington Times AfricaPundit William F. Buckley Jr. Command Post Crooked Timber Daniel W. Drezner John Ellis David Frum Hit & Run Instapundit Mickey Kaus Joshua Micah Marshall The Note OxBlog Virginia Postrel Wes Pruden Regions of Mind Jim Romenesko Andrew Sullivan Volokh Conspiracy Day by Day Doonesbury Ted Rall Peter Steiner Tom Toles Tom Tomorrow Rob Pegoraro Matt Drudge Cronaca Languagehat Language Log Open Brackets PaleoJudaica Arts Journal Communication Arts Mooch Bluejake Blue Ridge Blog Candid Colors Coincidences Conscientious Dublog Ecotone Wiki Found Magazine Lightningfield London and the north Maps and territories Mysterium Smoky Mountain Journal Sean Kernan Brody Neuenschwander Cheryl Holtz D.U.I. Studio Columbus Underground Forgotten Ohio Illicit Ohio Midnight Exposure Ohio Exploration Society Ohio Lost Acme Art Company Ballet Met CCAD Columbus Arts Columbus Arts Festival Columbus Metropolitan Library Columbus Museum of Art Columbus Symphony Dialogue Franklin Park Conservatory Glass Axis Music in the Air Opera Columbus Thurber House Wexner Center City of Bexley City of Columbus Columbus City Council Columbus Police Columbus Public Schools OTENA egroup OTENA-NIC egroup OTENA-tours egroup OTENA-trustees egroup Old Oaks egroup Ohio Parsons Blockwatch egroup