Memnison Journal

The last GM plant in Dayton / Moraine City shuts down, where my Dad, Mom and Granny worked (when it was a Frigidaire plant (they shifted to pickups and SUVs in 1979)).  The local officials are trying to figure out what to do next, and the workers are cut adrift.   As are the plant’s myriad [...]

Dayton officials say that an entry they put in a pile of stuff for a possible Obama-signable economic stimulus package for local jobs wasn’t supposed to be there - an initiative to get hookers off Dayton streets.  I can’t imagine the sort of jobs something like *that* would generate locally.
Wait, maybe I could.  *shudder*

Cops in a small town outside Dayton, Ohio, got a report of a strange man sitting in a running car that was stopped in a driveway.  Coming up to the car, they found that the passenger seat was filled with a full beer keg, and the drivers side was filled with a very drunk man [...]

Looks like the Ohio DOT is finally getting rid of the US-35 traffic lights in Greene County between Dayton and Xenia.
When I was little, there were two seriously weird expressways-with-traffic-lights situations in the area - on US-25 / I-75 north of the city in Northridge, not far from a home I had on North Dixie [...]

An outfit back in my hometown in Dayton, Ohio, called “Excellence in Motivation” (they’ve been setting up employee incentive programs for 15 years for big companies) just laid off about 15% of its staff…first layoffs ever.
Various reports are coming in to me of layoffs and hurry-up-and-retire efforts at Adobe, where the new CS4 suites and [...]

Ohio Department of Transportation has a whole bunch of map information online; some of them are in MrSid versions, and some in TIFF.  If you need help with those, ask, and I can recommend converters.

Their basic state (and localities) maps are here.  You can also request a printed map for free online.
The historical maps, in [...]

I’ll sit down and go over the Presidents Thang in a day or so.  Right now, I’m busy fishing the big Digital Organization, to be followed up with more organizing tricks tomorrow.  So I’m Really Busy As Heck with that stuff. 
Meredith had a good deal from Sinterklaas, with lots of pepernoten / kruidnootjes and [...]

Probably of utterly no interest to most of you, but there’s been a recent series in Daytonology on the development of the east side of Dayton, which is my home town.  I spent - well, from 3rd grade till I graduated from college on that side of town, and it’s the Olde Home for me, [...]

I’m actively interested in your poisition on this matter.  Feel free to sound off inside *politely*.
My own struggles on this:

…but I do feel for the workers.  GM and Chrysler are in talks for a merger; the ‘keep-on-selling-light-trucks-and-hummers-and-sit-on-CAFE-standards’ stuff that they’ve been running since the oil shock of the 1970s has finally caught up with them.  Nobody’s buying anything that resembles a gas-guzzler, if they’re buying cars at all right now.  Alternative-fuel cars are something [...]

Going back to my response posts,  I want to stress that I never assume that anyone voting against Obama is a racist, or that Republicans are racists, or that either on the Republican ticket is a racist.  I know better.
I’ve lived with serious racists, had racism and sexism used against me and mine (you do [...]

Recently, a good friend of mine who I disagree with politically laid out his concerns and objections around the present electoral cycle. I started to reply as a comment to his posting online, and then I quickly found that what I was saying was waaaaaay too long winded to work as a comment. For [...]

I’ve posted here about a kid who was killed by a drunk driver outside of Dayton; the guy was convicted of aggravated vehicular homicide.  He was just sentenced to five years in prison.

Neat piece from the BBC about a trainer in London who helps actors with their American accents. My everyday speech is a standard US Midwestern one, but my real base accent is a Southwestern Ohio (oh-hi-yuh) one. I beat it out of me in college by aiming at a cultured Canadian [...]

In a recent posting, I discussed a drunk driver who hit and killed a kid getting off the school bus - in the kid’s front yard.  A Dayton, Ohio jury found the dude guilty of aggravated vehicular homicide, and another such case is now up in their courts, about a hit and run where the [...]