Feature
Ready for 100 Columbus, a campaign to persuade the city of Columbus to commit to achieving 100 percent renewable energy by 2050 or before, is hosting an aerial art photography project on Earth Day.
Ready for 100 Columbus is launching its public campaign for 100 percent renewable energy with an aerial art project at this year’s Earth Day Columbus celebration.
Ready for 100 is a national campaign by the Sierra Club aimed at inspiring leaders in cities across the nation to embrace a vision of healthier communities powered by 100% clean energy. The Columbus campaign’s goal is to persuade the city of Columbus to commit to 100 percent renewable energy citywide by the year 2050.
The aerial art project will feature Columbus residents gathering in formation on the Scioto Mile greenway to spell out “100%”, which will be captured by a professional photographer with the Columbus city skyline in the background. The project will be held in conjunction with the annual Earth Day Columbus celebration, sponsored by Green Columbus on Sunday, April 22.
At this time of every school year, most seniors across the country are itching to bust out of high school and into their own independent lives. This feeling is commonly known as “Senioritis” and lucky for me, I haven’t spent the last nine weeks cooped up in a calculus class fantasizing about what comes after graduation. I’m on a semester long service learning project called Walkabout. It’s a project that develops the skills, attitudes and values of responsible adulthood. The test of Walkabout, and of life, is not what a student can do under a teacher’s direction, but what he or she can do as an individual. So instead of dealing with daily tests and assignments, I’ve been working for a local community radio station called WGRN.
The first memory I have of Wendy’s was in the mid 1970’s in Albuquerque, New Mexico. My mother told me of a new restaurant in Old Town that served square hamburgers. She loved that they had a salad bar – the old-style salad bar where you had the option of one serving or all you can eat, but everyone cheated. They served a delicious burger with fresh lettuce and tomatoes. It’s a good memory of my mom who was born in the country but called herself a “city girl.” She considered Wendy’s to be “city living.”
More recently in 2013, a friend of mine and local Columbus worker’s rights activist Rubèn Castilla Herrera gave a talk. He held up a tomato and contemplated, how did the tomato in his hand arrive in Columbus? Who picked it? He and his family were pickers of fruit and vegetables in his youth. He was working with an organization called the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and their struggle for justice in the fields and their goal for Fair Food. The CIW formed to combat the historical mistreatment of these farm workers in the work place.
It was fun.
Backstory: I've been taking February vacations in Puerto Rico 20 years now. Normally I'd leave 'round the beginning of the second week so upon return half of the most evil of months would be behind me. It'd bust up winter something wonderful, outflanking the blues and the winter blahs and often preserve my health. I usually don't get the flu when I do this. Usually.
But the urge came urgently on Thursday, February 1st. I was pedaling up the hill behind my house from the coffee shop when I snapped. Winter's teeth had me grinding mine. Inside it was Leon Russell's tightrope – one side hate, the other hope.
By the time I got to the top of the hill the decision was made: Puerto Rico or bust--now.
American Airlines had a $387 round-trip ticket in 2 hours and 5 minutes. My $422 travel voucher left over from Iraq took care of that. Yellow Cab got me John Glenn Space Monkey International airport with half-an-hour to spare.
I landed in San Juan 12:30 a.m. post-hurricane time. Ahhhhhh.....
Death of Steven Tyler Reed overshadowed:An 11-year veteran of the Columbus Police Department, Nathan A. Schwind, fatally shot 25-year-old Steven Tyler Reed on February 10 in a Hilltop neighborhood. Schwind and other police officers responding to a domestic violence complaint alleged that Reed ran away from the scene, then was involved in confrontation with them, according to news reports. This incident did not cause breaking news because it happened just hours after two Westerville police officers were killed in a separate domestic violence incident.
Did you know that in the first year of the Trump regime “anti-Semitic incidents” surged 57 percent, according the Anti-Defamation’s League (ADL) annual report. No Trump hyperbole, this was the single largest increase ever recorded by the ADL. Also on the rise are xenophobia, nativism, white supremacy, and neo-Nazism. In the most recent Associated Press poll, 57 percent of adults believe Trump’s a racist.
No one was incredibly surprised that Trump’s fan club, the neo-Nazi Patriot Front, was busy flyering down Indianola Avenue in Clintonville Monday, February 26 in broad daylight. Whenever local residents removed them, the flyers would soon reappear. The neo-Nazis have now flyered Clintonville four times in the last few months in addition to Hilliard, Worthington, Westerville, and Dublin. Clintonville activists and their allies made their values known with a large anti-racist demonstration Saturday, March 3, that drew about 60 people at the corner of North Broadway and High.
— Seven conservation groups have filed an administrative protest challenging a Bureau of Land Management plan to auction off 345 acres of Ohio’s Wayne National Forest for oil and gas fracking leases in March.
The protest, filed late Tuesday, notes that the leases would lock in dangerous fracking in the Wayne. Despite known threats from hydraulic fracturing, the BLM planned the auction using only a cursory review that avoids site-specific analysis of potential harm from fracking operations.
That means the public will have no information about pollution risks to streams, eradication of endangered species habitat and harm to nearby communities, which is required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Indeed, a very near and dear friend has declared: my death is imminent, be prepared. Hospice forthwith. All good things must pass. Great things will always be remembered. Now what the hell are you going to do?
Acorn Bookshop hasn't just been a great little bookstore to me over the years – it's been one of my favorite places on our troubled Earth.
I have a favorite rock I visit and sit upon in Puerto Rico every time I go, to watch the ocean breathe and roll at me and the sun turn orange before it blinks its eye goodbye for the night.
Between that rock and the Acorn Books towering history section or its art shelves, when I'm not home laying on my sexy couch that never denies my ass, those are my two favorite haunts.
"Bookstore George" Cowmeadow Bauman, owner and proprietor, occasional tuxedo-ed in-store showman and raconteur, my favorite Connecticut Yankee (even though he's from Pittsburgh), sat me down shortly after the New Year in the store's back-office. He gave me the news: the Acorn was closing.
I was literally ill the day after the presidential election of 2016, and two days afterward, I called in black. I still can scarcely believe the results, and often wonder if I’m in the Twilight Zone, on Candid Camera, or dead and in purgatory.
I watched the primaries, and I kept telling people the man who currently occupies the White House could not possibly win; his early supporters were a tiny minority of a minority within the Republican party. Of course with fourteen candidates in the race, there was bound to be winnowing out, and some of those names were not unexpected–e.g., Carly Fiorina. When the current president was the last man standing, I was still a long way from worried. After all, what sane, thinking person could vote for this man? He was–and still is–a liar, openly racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, misogyinistic, rude, incredibly thin skinned, a self-admitted sexual predator, public adulterer, thrice married–his evangelical supporters have some explaining to do–and just plain not nice. And that hair.
The US Supreme Court may be about to make a second Trump term inevitable.
The nine "Justices" have just heard oral arguments in an Ohio voter registration case. If their decision goes with Secretary of State Jon Husted, it would mean Republicans like him throughout the United States will be able to scrub from the voter rolls millions of citizens merely because they are suspected of wishing to vote Democrat.
In Ohio alone, millions of Ohio voters have tried to vote on Election Day over the past four presidential elections, only to find their names were erased from the pollbooks.
What's technically at stake is whether the federal government has the right to demand fairness in purging voter registration rolls. Or will the secretaries of the various states be free to purge whomever they want.
In other words, it's supposedly a "state’s rights" case.
But this is a country where an Attorney-General who fought for state’s rights to avoid accepting racial integration is now overriding the explicit choice of some thirty states to enjoy legal marijuana.