So I was on the phone with an old aquaintance in LA just now, and we were talking about my brother who died at 58 of a heart attack and he said , "Tim Russert died today".

And here it is: A Personal Remembrance from the Detroit Free Press BY JOHN SMYNTEK • FREE PRESS STAFF WRITER • June 13, 2008

 A few weeks ago I had dinner in the little farm house (photo above) located in the lovely green rolling hills North of Pittsburg – all because of Realneo.     I hadn’t seen my friend for about 40 years when an email came in a few months back.  

You know what they say about a "new mouse trap"...that there is always a new wrinkle, and a new way to make an improvement.    

When I worked downtown, I used to ride the bus with an editor from Webster's New World Dictionary (little known secret--the editorial office is located in Cleveland).  His job seemed perfect to me.  He got paid to read newspapers from all over the world and to compile definitions.  This came to mind as I read the latest word release from the Oxford English Dictionary.

Not only does the PD take on golf, Page 1 - front and center But Scene pitches in (sorry) with a story on the changing face of highschool baseball.

Good neighbor Gloria finds out that Positively Cleveland is a members-only club.

Peter Lawson Jones did a good job on Bob Conklin’s “In the Spotlight” TV talk show on Ch. 15 within the hour.

He appeared without his Republican opponent for County Commissioner who apparently ducked the questioning, and who also didn’t send a surrogate, according to Conklin.

Maurice Small is the most economically and ecologically sensible planner I know.

Joe Stanley, Sudhir Kade and I have been brainstorming with City Fresh's Maurice Small about "I GRO EC" - Independent Green Republic Of East Cleveland. City Fresh already operates a Fresh Stop at Huron Road Hospital - which Maurice reports is doing great - and is active in community farming in East Cleveland. Recently, we've been discussing City Fresh having an involvement converting Brown's Convenient store into a pilot City Fresh Market, which could offer a paradigm-shifting model for bringing local food, farming and their economies into very needy urban neighborhoods, in very innovative and important ways.

The newspaper business, as readers here probably know, isn’t what it used to be.

The economic crisis for newspapers now will be felt strongly in Cleveland.

Top Plain Dealer executives – Publisher Terry Egger and Editor Susan Goldberg -  told worried editorial staff members yesterday that the business climate is so bad that the paper plans to cut 35 pages a week from its news pages and 20 percent of its workforce.

Here’s an item that should be thoroughly described in tomorrow morning’s Plain Dealer.

  Let’s see if the PD gives us ANY   description about what the public cost of this will or could mean given the desire of Mayor Frank Jackson, Marty Sweeney and the Plain Dealer to keep the public fully informed about public business.

Get your schooling, get your job, get married and have a dog. If you plan any outings with your pooch, you'll need a vehicle, so Honda launched a dog car website: Honda Dog just for the occasion.

My friend and all-around pundit, Lissa (she speaks Italian), pointed this out to me--the Cultural Gardens are alive with song this summer.  

Last week, the kids were treated to a magic show from a fabulous neighbor in Brooklyn Centre.  Now, I have more than one "seer" in the group of kids in this neighborhood, but one family, especially,  has become the resident "genius" family in the 'hood ranging from little Lily on up to her brainiac brothers, their mechanically-inclined father and their fierce supermom, the defender of the clan. 

Share my lovely 1917 home in Cleveland Heights with me. I have a little mixed breed watchdog named Phoebe. I work at home for a small arts-nonprofit. My politics are on the left (waay left), and I prefer classical and jazz music, but more often than not, just the sounds of the great outdoors.

Here is Bill Moyers this weekend at the FreePress Convention in Minneapolis.

No one can say it better, no one can say it with as much knowledge, no one can say it more inspirationally.

Give yourself 40 minutes to hear about telling the truth to power and where the news media are  today and our responsibility for its future.

James Levin (seated) with the Brew Crew at Carnegie Hall - photo by Sandy Kish

To follow the jobs loss data, cited in item below, here’s a quick update on a couple of our onerous Cuyahoga County regressive taxes and what  they cost us monthly.

For your May payments, citizens & taxpayers, to support the Browns Stadium, used nearly exclusively (what 9 or 10 days a year) by the billionaire Lerner family, we paid $5,544,424 in May alone. Since switching the stadium "sin" taxes for the baseball field to the football field in August, 2005, we’ve paid a whopping $39,249,696. Always nice to help billionaires. The Lerner family pays a measily $250,000 in annual  rent and the city pays its insurance bill of some $125,000.

I’ve always called George Zeller the scariest man in Cuyahoga County.

The reason, George - really a gentle man - has the always troubling numbers on jobs and job losses for this area and the state. He’s been collecting figures on jobs and unemployment for years, now via Cuyahoga County government.

Today's Midtown Brews & Meet The Bloggers Land Bank open conversation will be featured on Mogulus channel grid. Thanks Mogulus! http://www.mogulus.com

If you're interested in having group meetings about Drupal in the Cleveland area, please show your interest by signing up on Meetup.com:

Drupal Cleveland Meetup

This was just listed as a small note on the side of the front page of the PD business section the other day...

Click on the "Wind Energy Video" link in the green box on the right hand side of this page: