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Archive for November 7th, 2011

Brown Is The Right Color

Posted in Humor, sports, tagged , , , on November 7, 2011 | 1 Comment »

I haven’t written about the Cleveland Browns lately.  There’s a reason for that.

I’ve been busy, and you can only watch so much crappy football.  Eventually you realize that life is too short to spend even three hours watching the latest version of the “new-look” Browns bumble and stumble their way to another embarrassing butt-kicking.

Any true sports fan knows that the Browns are not named after the color, but after Paul Brown, their first, and greatest, coach.  Lately I’ve come to realize, however, that brown really is an appropriate color for a team that stinks and plays like dirt.

One of these days, the sports gods will smile on Cleveland again.  It’s not going to happen this football season, unfortunately.

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Day Of Reckoning

Posted in Ohio, Politics, tagged , , , , , on November 7, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Tomorrow is Election Day in Ohio, and the hoo-hah about Issue 2 finally will end. Unless there has been catastrophic polling failure — or Ohioans have been misleading pollsters for chuckles and giggles — Issue 2 will be defeated and the old collective bargaining rules applicable to public employees will be reinstituted.

Both sides have poured huge sums into the Issue 2 campaign, and anyone who regularly watches the news has seen more Issue 2-related ads than they care to remember.  The ads haven’t exactly been objective treatments of the relevant issues, either.  We had some friends in from out of town over the weekend, and after seeing countless Issue 2 commercials they were totally mystified about what Issue 2 was.  The only thing they knew for sure was that a yes vote or a no vote would effectively mean the end of civilization as we know it.

Whichever way tomorrow’s election goes, I suspect we haven’t seen the last of public employee-related initiatives on the Ohio ballot.  Those who want to cut government spending naturally are going to want to focus on public employee salaries, benefits, and jobs — and this election has shown that public-sector unions won’t be shy about mounting petition drives and spending significant sums to protect those salaries, benefits, and jobs.

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The Mumkin Gambit

Posted in Columbus, tagged , , on November 7, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Ever heard of a “mumkin”?  In our neighborhood, they are everywhere, because the local schools have decided that students should sell the “mumkins” as part of a kind of fund-raising project.

A mumkin isn’t related to a munchkin.  Instead, as the photo accompanying this post reveals, it’s a pot of mums stuck in a plastic jack-o-lantern planter.  Of course, it’s really more than that.  It’s a means for public schools to try to raise more money from their communities.  In this case, I’m not sure that the revenue generated by the sale of the mumkins is even devoted to a specific project.  My sense is that the proceeds just go to the school to use for . . . whatever.

I’m sure that whatever company grows the mums and makes the “mumkin” planters and then markets them to schools as a fund-raising device is happy that the New Albany schools decided to sell their product.  I don’t blame the kids who are out selling what their teachers have told them to sell, either.  Kids are supposed to listen to their teachers.  However, I think it is unseemly for our local schools to send students out on the streets to sell things, no matter how much money those sales might generate.  What’s next?  How often will the schoolkids in our neighborhood be asked to go door to door?

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