TMZ has learned that Academy Award winning actor Morgan Freeman, 71, has been injured in a serious car accident in Mississippi.
Cops tell us the “Dark Knight” star was in a one car accident around 11:30 PM last night north of the small town of Ruleville. He was airlifted from the accident scene to a hospital in Memphis, Tenn. Were told alcohol is not suspected as a factor in the wreck…
This sign - seen at the Anderson Days festival last weekend - shows just how far they go out in that Cincinnati suburb to push their family values.
Sent from my BlackBerry.
The "big ball," as it's called, means double runs for the offense in the third inning. For us, it's meant double trouble.
God, we’re bad. Last night we lost 17 to zero, marking our fifth straight kickball game without a win.
Our team - Kara Thrace & Her Special Destiny, named by Team Captain James Czar - has lost other games by as many as 30 runs, though we came close once and only lost by one. That means our record is 0 - 5 with three more weeks to go.
Despite our haplessness, it is still a ton of fun. So far, I think our team’s average age would be much higher than the all the other teams we have played. In fact, someone quipped that the only way we may win is if a mysterious disease begins to spread throughout Cincinnati - and it only effects people under 30 years old.
We will play again next week at Lunken Playfields (map) in the Columbia-Tusculum area (attached to Lunken Airport). Check out the league schedule and come out and watch us lose. It’ll be a hoot!
Here's our hapless crew, some of the members of KARA THRACE & HER SPECIAL DESTINY
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.]
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.
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.
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.
