"I think Cleveland is a good place. Inner city is rough, but the outskirts is real beautiful, and great schools there. Plus my family, my mom and my sisters, they're all in Cleveland, so it's easier for me to be there than anywhere else." This quote, from an excellent Free Times interview with Charles "Wish Bone" Scruggs, of Cleveland-roots, Grammy award winning, multi-platinum rap trailblazers Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, sings the woes of a place branded as a "Shrinking City", where even the urban hard-core Thugs chose the 'burbs over the 'hood. The result of such out-migration, and downright defection, as is the case with all the other members of Bone, is the subject of a series of art exhibitions and related events taking place over the next month, all over town... which event sponsor Kent Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative (CUDC) introduces by pointing out: "In 2005, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that Cleveland had lost nearly 20,000 residents in just five years. The city’s population of 458,684 was the lowest in nearly one hundred years." Starting Friday, April 20, 2007, at 4:30 PM, with a lecture at CUDC, explore what it means when a city loses its Bones...

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Claes and I were picking up Evelyn at the University Circle Arabica Sunday around 5 and I heard one of my favorite sounds flowing over from my favorite area spot - the Barking Spider - roots jazz. I knew who I would find there... the finest roots jazz musician I know in town, George Foley... so we headed right over. George plays and sings, solo and with many area musicians, in every imaginable combo, all over town, and it is always a fun, uplifting and inspiring experience.

Learn how the arts can change everything...from an individual to a nation!  Young Audiences invites you to hear two dynamic and engaging speakers on Friday, April 27th:

	Sir Ken Robinson, a senior advisor for education policy at the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles and expert in the development of creativity,education and the economy. 8:30 a.m., the Hyatt Regency Cleveland at the Arcade.   FREE.
	Aaron Dworkin , accomplished violinist and the founder of The Sphinx Organization, which works to overcome the cultural stereotype of classical music, and to encourage Black and Latino participation in the field.  12:00 p.m., Jacobs Field Terrace Club.  The cost is $25 and includes lunch. Registration required.

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What a spiritual day. The global global warming insight is starting to hit the fan, as it is becoming clear who are the terrorists of this world... polluters who will live to learn they lived "their way" to kill millions of the most impoverished people on Earth. It is good for humanity to have a new world of terrorists to consider, as we seem so quick to ignore mass-murderers. I always think about this around "Opening Day" in Cleveland, as so many in NEO celebrate ignorance of genocide. There was a disturbing little "editorial", er "column", by Cleveland Plain Dealer spiritual adviser Regina Brett about her attempts to summon an idol, St. Jude, to save from damnation the Cleveland baseball team known by the European name for the slaughtered native people of the Western Hemisphere - "the Indians" - seeking for our region redemption from damnation. Sorry, Regina, but you can't fool Mother Nature.

YES - this is a huge story... the State of Ohio is suing Sherwin Williams and other paint manufacturers over the public nuisance caused by lead paint they sold here over decades... the state is joining five Ohio cities in this battle for our citizens - this case could very well take over the battle for the cities - very exciting times for our down-trodden state.  It is exciting to see the new Ohio leadership in action, after so many years of poor performance by past administrations.

I received an informative email this afternoon from Richard McDougald Enty, Planning Team Leader, Programming & Planning Department, Greater Cleveland Regional Transit Authority, about some of their Transit Oriented Development initiatives and vision. It is very exciting to see this as an active subject for discussion and planning here. I am a strong supporter of Transit Oriented Development and consider it the core foundation on which we should rebuild the City of Cleveland and surrounding suburbs.  Here is the vision from RTA:

It is a great pleasure to have our original Drupal developer Derek Arnold back in the server seat for REALNEO and all tech things 7gen (shown here at my favorite wifi and human friendly coffee house in town, Talkies). Besides already cleaning up months of tech messes, less than two weeks back on track, Derek is now in Sunnyvale, California, as probably the only NEO representative at the Yahoo sponsored OSCMS (Open Source Content Management System) conference, the Drupal Performance and Scalability Seminar and the Drupal Hackfest - March 22-25, 2007. We've been touching base while he is there and it is clear he is learning lots of great insight, spreading NEO love in the open source world, and showing all that we are serious about making this a real open source domain (and I mean realneo and this region, in that).

A Spring Suzuki Workshop will be held at the Windermere United Methodist Church on Euclid Avenue, from April 9 - 13th, in East Cleveland. Our guest faculty will be Arvilla Rovit.

  Arvilla Rovit has Bachelor's and Master's degrees from The Juilliard School where she studied with Heidi Castleman, Misha Amory and Hsin-yun Huang.  A graduate of the internationally acclaimed School for Strings Teacher Training Program (New York), a two-year apprentice program in Suzuki Pedagogy, and having attended numerous Teacher Training Workshops, Ms. Rovit is Suzuki Teacher Certified to teach violin and viola.  Her Suzuki viola teachers have included William Preucil, Sr., and Betsy Stuen-Walker.  Upon graduating from Juilliard Arvilla was awarded a Special Award for Achievement by Drs. Marilyn Pearl and Norman Roland.

A unique opportunity to explore a piece of Cleveland’s lakefront - As part of an ongoing process to promote an appreciation and stewardship for Cleveland’s ecological systems and natural resources, the Dike 14 Environmental Education Collaborative will sponsor the:Cinco de Mayo Migration at Gordon State Park area of Cleveland Lakefront State Park (E. 72 St. and N. Marginal). Last hike begins at 11:00 AM and ends at noon.

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As a core group of innovative urban planners and developers move forward creating a new way in East Cleveland, it is exciting to look back along the main street that brought us to today, and that will take so many deserving citizens past those with little insight who have driven so much of this region into poverty. Looking back, and forward, here is a powerful set of perspectives from CIA graduate and Kent Urban Design graduate student Joe Stanley, of NEO Main Street, from two years ago, under a former administration. Now, under Mayor Brewer and his staff, redevelopment of this community is underway  - thanks for your vision and keeping the faith, Joe!

"ITS A NEW DAY IN EAST CLEVELAND"

How many people in NEO could have an uplifting, inspiring and positive documentary film made about them - how many people in NEO would come out looking all good... great? "Citizen" Ed Hauser is surely unique to Northeast Ohio, having stood up to many other "citizens", including NEO community and government "leadership", in a 9-year fight for what Ed felt was best for all in the community. The documentary "Citizen Hauser", about Ed's battle, which officially led to victory on March 02, 2007, has aired on public television in Northeast Ohio - an outstanding work by Blue Hole Productions - will be featured with other short films at the Cleveland Film Festival, as posted below.

Let's make this a victory party!

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This was tucked away in the Cleveland Plain Dealer Business section today, straight out of Associated Press, without any local perspective - yawn, how boring is this subject. Well, over the next few months expect to see it is not so boring!

For the second consecutive year, East Cleveland Mayor Brewer met with Meet the Bloggers today for a very candid and fascinating discussion recorded on audio for Meet the Bloggers podcast, and on video for other Internet release in the future. I was pleased to participate and found the discussion and Mayor Brewer's insights remarkable. I believe the other participants agreed. I'll post a comment here when the podcast is posted on Meet the Bloggers and you should be certain to listen! For now, some thoughts from this morning...

As my first post since realneo.us became realneo.org, I'd like to propose a program of Intergenerational guitar classes, I believe Charlie Mossbrook will be happy to instruct. There should be a suggested payment for the class, to compensate Charlie. I'd love to see the classes held in East Cleveland - perhaps the Helen Brown Center or MacGregor, or both. The class would be open to all ages from say 12 up. I believe the only other thing we would need is guitars - so I guess we will need to ask for donations.

Thanks to Susan Miller for pointing out an important article in the 02/03/07 Plain Dealer regarding the war to eliminate lead poisoning in our region by 2010 - an outlandishly aggressive objective, as Cleveland ranks among the top five cities nationally for lead poisoning. In 2004, St. Luke's Foundation funded what has been the most important collaboration ever for the future of Northeast Ohio: the Greater Cleveland Lead Advisory Council (GCLAC), aligning over 80 agencies and organizations at local, regional, state and federal levels toward the common objective of lead eradication in our region within the next three years. On February 1, 2007, St. Luke's brought together the leadership of many other foundations for the expressed purpose of convincing as many foundations as possible to join them in funding the next three years of GCLAC initiative. The article states the objective of raising $3 million from foundations to leverage for far greater support from government sources.

Thanks to an anonymous donor, East Cleveland has received some excellent equipment to start setting up a pilot proof of concept wireless broadband mesh network in some part of the city - location to be determined. The donated equipment is from a similar proof of concept deployment in Washington, D.C., and includes several commercial wifi antennas and routers and cabling to set up a small multipoint demonstration network, running the open source CUWiNWare mesh application and wifiDOG contained portal application, all routing to the city of East Cleveland's open source Drupal community portal, at http://eastcleveland.org. All this, combined with other digital divide bridge programs there, makes East Cleveland approaches to information technology some of the most interesting in America.

 About three weeks ago, I received the first "Letter to the Editor" in the history of REALNEO. Lots of people send me press releases and event info and tips on cool content, but never has someone sent an opinion editorial to be posted for them (probably because REALNEO is open for anyone to create an account and post content and comments themselves). The letter to the editor was titled "Lead Paint - You Are Idiots" and was received from someone named Kim Falk (he authorized publication of his name) and the email address was from Sherwin Williams. A little googling and I learned he is an employee there - a very enthusiastic and loyal one, to be sure... he was responsible for Sherwin-Williams donating paint to help in the repair of the Pentagon after 9/11. So I was not surprised to read he is protective of his company in defense of them being sued over lead. Still, I was intrigued by the language he uses in his editorial, published below.

University Circle Celebrates MLK Day - JANUARY 14 & JANUARY 15
Celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in University Circle. On Sunday, January 14, and Monday, January 15, many University Circle institutions will offer free or discounted admission and special programming for visitors. UCI will provide free shuttle buses on January 15.

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What a great rebirth for Ohio. Sunday night, Ohio swore in our new Governor, Ted Strickland, and within 24 hours he vetoed the corporate and lobbyist planted, corrupt, anti-consumer, anti-American substitute bill 117, which was made to order for scam businesses to harm citizens. As Strickland states, " I will not allow this legislation in its current form, which drastically undermines current consumer protections, to go into effect during my administration." A Plain Dealer article on the veto reports " Strickland also said the curb on suits against manufacturers "prevents cities from being able to seek justice on behalf of their citizens."" "Our new Attorney General Marc Dann, who, like Strickland, is a Democrat, said he would "vigorously" defend the governor's veto." The PD article highlights the fact that the Republican lawmakers who were responsible for the corrupt SB117 are acting as lawyers and judges now, and that they plan to waste Ohio taxpayer money fighting our Governor... " State Sen. Tim Grendell, a Chester Township Republican who voted for the bill, also said the veto is void because the governor acted outside his authority. He said members of the legislature and trade groups were likely to sue over the veto." Go for it... concerned citizens are certain to defend Governor Strcikland, and those legislators who think they can keep acting corruptly under our new leadership will quickly be eliminated from office, as suggested in a previous article on SB117 by Plain Dealer columnist Sheryl Harris, which provides "a list of the Northeast Ohio legislators who voted to curtail your consumer rights". In the new Ohio, such corruption will not be tolerated. Read more about the veto below.

Building blocks for bridging digital divide in East Cleveland 

In a recent article on bridging the digital divide in NEO, "It seems time to open up the OneCleveland network vision of Cleveland Heights, to see if there is value for others", I mentioned "An example of a progressive community building a mesh broadband network environment is found in Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network (CUWiN), which is a world- leader in such grass-roots broadband community service and technology. That is a model we are exploring in trying to help residents of underserved communities of East Cleveland and Cleveland secure access to broadband services, as carriers have underserved their neighborhoods, and poverty there is a significant issue."

Well, I was pleased to start the first work-day of 2007 with the correspondence posted below, from the Executive Director of CUWiN - globally celebrated community computing expert Sascha Meinrath - who is helping us center in on a viable model for East Cleveland and other undersupported urban neighborhoods in the region to bridge the digital divide here. Read on, as we are clearly on the right track and farther along than anyone may imagine. I'll add related insight and next steps as they develop.

Source: Environmental Health Watch 

In a link on Brewed Fresh Daily today (which has really stepped up to create awareness about lead poisoning in our region), I found an interesting article on former Plain Dealer Cincinnati Reporter Bill Sloat's blog "The Daily Bellweather" titled "U.S. EPA Wants to Fine Midwest Landlord $$$$ Over Lead Paint", which illustrates one of the important steps essential to the eradication of lead poisoning in our region - ENFORCEMENT. In "The Daily Bellweather" report, regarding the EPA, we see "Earlier this month, the agency's Midwestern regional office moved to slap a $52,724 penalty on a landlord for failing to warn tenants and buyers that homes and apartments may contain health hazards from lead-based paint."