I don’t talk about blog stats much - well, at all - because there isn’t really much to say. I average about 60 to 100 unique visitors a day - with random peaks and valleys - and that has been fairly consistent for several months. But a few weeks ago on April 17, when the earthquake hit Cincinnati, I received nearly 1,100 unique visitors. Woo-wee!

The earthquake woke me up so I decided to get on the computer and start blogging. Within 10 minutes I had made my first post and updated with more for the few hours after that. So, I got a barrage of Google hits on the subject. That was pretty cool.

Also, I’ve added a few widgets to the sidebar. A while back I added a Twitter widget (to go with the Flickr widget). Just a few days ago I added the Google Reader shared posts widget.

Twitter, if you haven’t discovered it yet, is a cool little application that asks the question: What are you doing? I update it as much as I can through my cell phone (either by sending text messages or using the phone’s Web browser) or by going to the Twitter Web site. Or my new toy: Twhirl.

The Google Reader is an RSS feed reader that allows me to read text (or a summary) and see some photographs from several Web pages at once in a single Web page. It also allows me to hit a “share” button that puts up the blog posts I think are worth checking out, which then appear on Report This! I highly recommend the reader - and checking out the posts I share.

I also added some Google ads to the sidebar as an experiment. I more or less just wanted to see how it worked and how quickly pennies added up. Turns out the only people making money off this blog is Google! Expect the ads to come down soon.

(Photo from October 6, 2007, Feeding Washington Park)

God bless them. Really. They mean well, but after this blog post and my first column in CityBeat, I still believe we are not seeing eye-to-eye on the cause and effect of giving away food in Over-the-Rhine’s Washington Park (and I would add to that: having a “church” service with loudspeakers so loud that windows shake in the building I live in across from the park). So, the good folks at Vineyard Community Church in Springdale (who give away food on Saturday mornings, provide some clothing and other assistance, plus send a van to pick up folks in OTR to attend Saturday evening church services) invited me to come along on a Saturday morning food run and witness first-hand (in this case, across the street from my house where I had been watching them before) the good they were doing. They believed I really didn’t understand. And they were wrong.

This week’s CityBeat column, this blog post, the past writings put me in the awkward position of being at odds with people who are truly, not only trying to do something good, on many levels they are. So, the question then becomes is just “doing good” enough? Or does the good you’re are aiming for actually have to have positive long-term consequences for those you are helping? And does the residual and indirect effects of your well-intentioned actions matter?

I’d say yes, but I think my pleas for understanding may be directed at minds that have already been made up or refuse to hear what I - and others - are saying.

I have an interest with things related to death - but not particularly death itself.

Spring Grove Cemetery and Arboretum is one of my favorite places to take photographs, “Six Feet Under” is one of my favorite shows of all time, I volunteered at Fernside: A Center for Grieving Children for many years (and still think it the best single non-profit organization in the Greater Cincinnati area, hands down). I get creeped out every time I see the Hamilton County Sheriff’s “meat wagon” driving around town with the deputy driving and the two blue jumpsuit-clad prisoner-helpers - one riding shotgun, the other in the back seat of the extended cab pick-up - going either to pick up a dead body, drop one off at the coroner’s office near University Hospital or heading back downtown to the Justice Center.

[It’s weird, but I never connected all those things together until just now decided to write this blog post, but it seems to work. Or not work, as the case may be.]

So, I was a little disturbed when I saw our old, good friend Maggie Downs‘ post on Bloggy Style about Costco’s product line.

This week’s CityBeat column is about Bill Brown’s Surveillance Camera Tour he gave Sunday to a mixed-age, mixed-race group of 18 people. I was told about the tour by a neighbor who found it on Brown’s Web page by accident, she said. It seemed interesting - and it was.

My neighbor also wrote a blog entry about the tour, of which Brown apparently took some no offense, having written is own summary of the tour.

Note: I do not “dawn” a coat and tie; I “don” it. Ooops.

Back in January, my girlfriend and I were the victims of an attempted robbery in Over-the-Rhine near my home. I wrote about it in my weekly CityBeat column.

It was a horribly devastating thing to have happen to us. We’re both very supportive of downtown and Over-the-Rhine and want nothing more than for those neighborhoods (and the entire city) to flourish. I’ve been living in OTR for nearly four years; for five she’s been a paramedic working downtown and in OTR caring for the sick and injured.

Needless to say, the gun and the kid who held it - who first just approached the car and asked us for the time - shook us both to the core. It breaks my heart how one incident can rattle the easiness I’ve felt down here since shortly after I moved from Oakley in 2004. It’s made me question things I don’t want to question. And as much as I hoped the feelings would subside, they have only slightly.

After the incident I did what a reporter does: I requested the dispatch communications, 911 tapes, dispatch and police reports.

Listening to them gives me chills. Around the corner from where the incident happened there were two fire units wrapping up a call. We drove to them and turns out she knows them (and I had met a few of them before, too). One of them put a call out on the radio that a firefighter had a gun pulled on them. Of course she was off-duty and I was with her, but those words broadcast over the radio sent , it seems, every police and fire unit in the city to us.

Seeing police car after fire truck and after bike cop after firefighter after police officer come to our aid was an amazing feeling. And despite their efforts, the asshole who ruined a, perhaps, ungrounded feeling of relative safety I had in my neighborhood, was never caught.

You can listen to the radio dispatch tape below. The 911 call, frankly, was too embarrassing to post and had little information on it. That’s because we gave most of the details about what happened to the officers who responded to the scene and didn’t end up telling the 911 operator. The call  recording basically is she and I not really listening to the dispatcher ask questions about what happened (we were distracted), while I string a number of curse words together to describe the feelings I had about just having a gun pulled on me. In other words, not much to hear.

powered by ODEO

(I have edited the tape down to about six minutes from about 18 minutes. I basically deleted dead air time to make the tape shorter.)

In my column in this week’s CityBeat, I comment on an issue that has been buggin’ the heck out of me (and quite a few others) for some time. That’s the lack of alternate transportation options - bike, scooter or just ease of walking (especially when you live in the urban center) - available to folks living in this region.

To learn more, check out the column.

It’s a great time of the year to be living downtown. I absolutely love the convenience of being able to go down to the Square, use the wi-fi and relax to the sound of the bubbling fountain - plus do a little people watching . A few nights ago I was down on the Square and captured this photo of the flower carpet, the fountain and the nifty LED facade on the ‘Lil Fifth Third building (and, on this night, a little Reds-watching - the game was on the big screen).

You can on the photo to be taken to a set with more photos from that night (and others).

I had a big week a few weeks ago. Not only did I sell out the art show, but I found out that I was CityBeat’s Best of Cincinnati 2008 pick for journalist of the year.

I’m quite honored by the distinction - even thought I did not know the category for best journalist existed - and especially because anonymous readers voted for me.

To those who took the time to fill out the survey and chose me, first off, thank you. I really am flattered.

I was so surprised, in fact, that when I attended CityBeat’s “Best of” party that I made a beeline for Editor John Fox. Even though he and I had spoken a few times that week about the column I write for the publication, he had never mentioned it to me.

Turns out he wanted it to be a surprise and that the contest wasn’t fixed. I actually got the most votes of any journalist in the poll. So, thanks again. You made my month! (Sorry I didn’t get this posted sooner. Had my blog not been on the blink I would have written about it when it happened.)

On a recent morning I found myself again in Fairfax. It was suggested I go check out Coffee ‘n Cream, a coffee shop and soft serve ice cream parlor along Wooster Pike. I did and was pleasantly surprised by what I found: A very attentive owner in an owner-operated coffee shop with good coffee.

I plopped down and proceeded to leech the Cincinnati Bell wi-fi from the Speedway gas station across the street (CnC’s connection was down) and got talking to Joe Schneider, the guy who owns the place.

When people find out what I do for a living I often get asked about how to get stories in the paper. Many times it’s an entrepreneur looking to find the hook that will get a story in the media and then loads of customers in their door. My first quip is usually that there is an easy way to get in the news - and a hard way. The easy way, of course, would be to make news - say, by robbing banks, or worse. For the record, I don’t recommend that. The hard way would be to convince some journalist that you have a story worth telling. (Granted, this is the old style of top-down story telling that I think is dying, so don’t think I’m completely forgetting myself here.)

I told Joe that he needed a hook. That would be something that makes his place special - a stand-out among the plethora of individually-owned coffee shops in the area who serve good coffee (though he serves soft serve ice cream, too, which I thought was kind of unique).

He then expressed his frustration that his “passengers” (he sometimes slips, calling his customers by what they called them at Delta Airlines, where he worked for more than 20 years before retiring) love his “splash sticks,” something that he has used for about two years. Then he pointed to an article in USA Today (the same paper owned by the parent company that owns the The Cincinnati Enquirer) that he clipped out and put on the wall. It was about Starbucks - with a location just about a half-mile down the road from him in Mariemont) - was finally getting to introducing the same thing. He said he has tried to pitch to local reporters who frequent his shop to do a story on his business - but no takers.

I can understand his frustration. I told him I would blog about his dilemma, let my readers know what a good coffee shop he is running and see if anyone else would link and/or write about it. It’s too bad that sometimes things like this are happening in our own backyard, yet we can’t find the space to fit it in our own local paper. I think just about every locally-owned business is worth writing about to some extent.

Things, to say the least, went a little better than I ever expected. As I blogged last month, I have always wanted to have an art opening for some of my photographs, but had never pursued it. So, in February when I was asked by a local art dealer to show my work at the United Way for a show called “Beauty Matters,” I was pretty excited.

The show ends today and I am proud - and a bit astonished - to report that I sold five of the six photographs I showed. That makes me the top-seller of any artist for this show. Only one of the pieces sold actually went to someone I know, too, which also kinda blew my socks off, and this person only figured out that I took it after he bought it.

I’m told by the curator of this show that this has every indication that I can now officially call myself an artist. It also, apparently, allows me to tell the photography instructor at UC who gave me a “C” in an elective photography class I took through the evening college several years ago (that I took to get an easy “A”) he can kiss my ass. I think I might do that in a letter to the dean, unless he or she (or the professor) reads this blog. Just e-mail me for my student number.