Melissa and Joe in Newport
Originally uploaded by hjoew
Enjoying a beautiful day in Cincinnati with the lovely Melissa. The weather is amazing for August. Low humidity, around 80 degrees.
Sent from my BlackBerry.
Melissa and Joe in Newport
Originally uploaded by hjoew
Enjoying a beautiful day in Cincinnati with the lovely Melissa. The weather is amazing for August. Low humidity, around 80 degrees.
Sent from my BlackBerry.
The Cincy Blues Fest is going on this weekend down at Sawyer Point. Doors open at 2:45 this afternoon.
Along with James Czar, I am the coordinator for communications. The fest has never had a organized communications before. Our first run through Friday night went pretty well.
We’ll be back there today doing the same thing. If you’re there, stop by the information booth and say hello.
Stopped down to Fountain Square around noon today to witness the cheese coney eating contest. It was a hoot.
As the contestants were taking the stage today, Fountain Square Managing Director Bill Donabedian asked each one why they were participating. The number one answer? Free lunch.
Wish I had thought of that. The winner ate 7 and a fraction coneys to claim the title of best coney eater in Cincinnati.
Grabbed this shot walking along Beechmont Avenue in Mount Washington on a recent spring evening. Since the weather broke, I’ve found myself walking the streets and sidewalks of this suburb-in-a-city neighborhood and often surprised by how much I like it there. It’s not downtown, no doubt, but with its town center and rather plentiful Kroger store, it’s a real nice place to be.
Fountain Square – especially with all this sunny weather lately – is looking great. I love the warmer months downtown the best.
Below is a recording of an uncut phone interview recorded around 6:45 a.m. today (4/18/2008) with University of Cincinnati Civil and Environmental Engineering Professor Bahram Shahrooz, PhD. Shahrooz is an expert on earthquake building design and earthquakes. I caught him at home about an hour after the earthquake that was felt in Cincinnati.
I apologize, but the audio is not perfect. I recorded it with my handheld digital recorder, which is mono and has fairly low quality.
Hamilton County and city of Cincinnati 911 dispatchers have reported several calls regarding the earthquake, but no reports of damage.
Cincinnati dispatchers said that several calls came to them this morning, many not sure what was going on. A dispatcher said that many callers thought a burglar was trying to break into their home. A Hamilton County dispatcher said many people thought there was an explosion, while others wondered if they were delusional when they felt their homes shaking.
The Hamilton County dispatcher I spoke to, who started her shift at 7 a.m. and is on her first day back after maternity leave. She said that those dispatchers who were already at the Hamilton Avenue communications center in Colerain Township were asked to clock-in early and man the phones because they were getting so many calls.
“If anything else weird happens today I am going to take that as a sign and go home and be with my kids,” she said, laughing. “I guess this is the thrill of the job.”
OK, folks, I’m watching the FOX19, which might be the problem. But instead of doing just a tiny bit of reporting about why this earthquake may have happened, they are instead taking phone calls and reading e-mails from viewers talking about what they felt. Who cares!
The Enquirer story posted at 6 a.m. gives little details that were available on the Internet seconds after the earthquake. This drives me batty! (Or, I suppose, you could just read Report This!)
Wikipedia has a pretty good (it appears) page on Richter scale magnitudes and what damage can be expected in such earthquakes.
When I was a kid I loved Kings Island. I can’t remember exactly what age I was when I first had a season pass to the Mason, Ohio amusement park, but I think I was maybe 10 or 11 years old. That would make sense, since I started giving my summers away to the YMCA when I was 13 as a day camp counselor – 20 years ago this summer – and would doubt I had time to go then. But maybe I did?
Anyway, I loved the place. I had several friends who had a season pass and we would go together often, usually just a pair of us at a time. If we had $10, that was enough for a large LaRosa’s pepperoni pizza and a coke for each of us and that would keep us satiated for the whole day. We would be running ride to ride, on good days going from nearly empty queue to nearly empty queue, literally getting on just about every ride without waiting. It was heaven.
During that time I remember riding the King Cobra – the roller coaster you rode standing up, which is now no longer at the park – for the first time and being completely nervous the whole time I was in line waiting for my turn.
So, as I often do, I found someone to talk to about my nervousness, just some random dude in line. I can still remember that guy (who seemed so much older than me then, but was probably just 14 or 15 years old) who calmed me down enough to get me on the ride and then asked me how I was doing when I got off. I actually liked it. Despite those adrenaline-driven feelings of euphoria, I would later have a recurring nightmare about the coaster derailing in the corkscrew portion of the ride, sailing off the track and landing in the thatch roof of the safari gift shop nearby. Guess I was still a little scared…
In the intervening years since my season pass days I have not been back to the park much, except for Winterfest, which I loved. It was sold to Paramount and became Parmount’s Kings Island, or PKI (which I always thought was lame), in 1993. The new owners promptly killed Winterfest and, thus, my interest in the place. I was getting a little older, too.
The few times I went back – usually when a friend had a free ticket – I left disappointed at how dull the place looked. The Festhaus no longer had the stage or its German theme (though the glockenspiel is still above the Festhaus’s main entrance, it’s appears to no longer work, with one of the little wooden people half out the left door – it looks awful).
They no longer serve sauerkraut and potato pancakes in the Festhaus. It’s LaRosa’s pizza and Panda Express, for God’s sake (I need to talk to management about that). The representation and acknowledgment of Cincinnati’s German heritage has been allowed to wither away, then was lightly painted over. But they still call it the “Festhaus.” I wanted to barf.
Let’s just say the Festhaus pissed the living shit out of me and I’ll leave it at that. (That feels better.)
Safe to say: The park just does not look itself these days. It is no longer well cared for anymore. Many of the buildings need paint, grass needs to be mowed, weeds pulled, mulch put down, pavement repaired. Light bulbs were burnt out throughout the park. The bathrooms were disgusting. And not trying to sound like an old geezer or anything, but, kids, it just wasn’t that way when I was a youngin’. It used to feel magical being at that place.
But Saturday was not all bad. Not at all. I did have a great time with my company, aside from the two operators at “Delirium” (which is a very thrilling, great ride, by the way – at the site of the former King Cobra roller coaster) who had their PA system cranked way too high and felt it fun to keep talking on it while we all plugged our ears.
I rode The Beast (by far my favorite ride) twice – once in the daytime and another at night, just as the fireworks were about to begin – and got to hang out with my cousin, Marianne, who is in town from Grenada, and three of The Post’s very cool interns.
Marianne and I stayed past the fireworks, grabbing some Graeter’s on the way out. The interns left earlier in the day. All told, it was a great day.
And I guess I will be going back to Kings Island this year. I have a season pass again. It was a gift from my parents – the whole family got them this year to go with my nephew and three nieces. I am looking forward to sharing Kings Island with them, hoping they will build some memories and get to be like their old Uncle Joe, remembering what it was like and what ride was where when they were a kid.