Monday Morning

1. I never went to Comfest once when I lived six blocks away. We were always out of town that weekend. We finally visited this year, and I now believe the hype.

2. Lots of Psychology researchers are ambivalent or even mildly hostile about MSM reporting on their work. Professional societies have tried to argue to their members that disseminating knowledge is a duty and that the responsibility to ensure the accuracy of that information rests upon them, but you see crap like the press/public interplay on the IQ/birth order story, and you start to see the individuals' points.

3. According to BlogNetNews readers, Blue Bexley is the 7th worst blog out of 90+ Ohio blogs in the history of their ranking system (sharing a bottom 10 with Redhorse and Pho, actually). Thanks y'all for taking the time to vote :)

4. The site re-design left "The Neutral Zone Trap" without a link category. I'm going to have to fix that. It's a hockey blog, but there are more hockey blogs than politics blogs in Columbus, and it's the only one in my RSS. It's entertaining and well-written. She recently compared American hockey fans to John Zorn fans, to which I can only say, it is unclear whether she means fans of the avant-Knitting-Factory-bleater John Zorn, or the grindcore-Torture-Garden-screamer John Zorn?

5. Speaking of politics blogs in Columbus, let me know if you know of any that I can/should link to. Columbuser and I can't continue trading traffic indefinitely. Especially once everybody figures out that we're both just Matt Naugle.*

Enjoy your week.






(*decoder ring - don't read if you like to enjoy punchlines - Matt Naugle is a right-wing blogger. He's every negative blogger stereotype personified. Recently, there has been speculation that Mr. Naugle is blogging under other names at other blogs. Some of this is quite plausible, some less so. I have a lot of respect for most of the speculators, and I understand that sometimes speculating is useful for speculation's sake, but I've been called out by "Brian" since before most of them knew he existed. Say what you will about Columbuser, but it's not Naugle.)

Hearcel Craig/ FB^4 (Friday Blue Bexley Baby Blogging)

As has been noted before, Baby Charlotte has a favorite Columbus City Council member, and it it turns out some meanies are trying to get rid of him on a picayune technicality. Now, I understand hardball and all that, but if anyone makes Charlotte revert from:




Back to:





they'll have to deal with me.

I've got a question for Senator Dodd. You?

Jerid at BSB has scored an interview with a real live candidate for President of the United States. Not one of the current front runners, but certainly not a sideshow, either. I'm guessing that Senator Dodd's staff, which has some of the top blog-related talent in the campaign, sees an opportunity to capitalize on the attention paid to the incident between Jerid and the Obama campaign this week.

The big opportunity, however, is ours. We've got a pretty direct conduit to a powerful Senator, who has the potential and ambition to be more than that. Jerid is soliciting questions from Ohio bloggers and Ohio blog readers that he can pass along during the interview. Specifically Jerid would like to see Dodd address issues that are specifically or especially relevant to Ohio.

If you've got one, leave it in the comments here or at BSB, or email me, or Jerid. I'll start:

Senator Dodd - As Ohio loses industry, we're left holding a lot of contaminated land. The problem is not just with the private sector - three miles from my house there's a decommissioned Air Force manufacturing plant that has been a proposed Superfund site for more than a decade. In southern Ohio, there's talk of creating jobs by importing nuclear waste to join the native waste at an under-utilized DOE uranium enrichment site. Can the federal government pursue an environmental policy that emphasizes decreasing future pollution in the form of global warming without losing sight of the need to clean up the messes that have already been made?

C'mon, everybody's doing it...

Bill Minckler is running for mayor of Bexley.
Matt Lampke is running for mayor of Bexley.
Eugene Weiss is running for mayor of Bexley.

Before I had a chance to comment on that last one, it turns out that

William Harvey is running for mayor of Bexley.
I found this out by reading about David Madison - For the first time since the height of Disco Fever,

David Madison is not running for mayor of Bexley.

Here are some numbers. In 2006, 4806 people cast ballots at Bexley polling places in the November election. Approximately 1508 cast absentee ballots (estimate methodology upon request). So, we're looking at 6314 Bexley voters, representing a 65% turnout, in an even year/non pres. election. Making one of those big U & Me type of assumptions, I'll assume that turnout dropoff from the lack of top-ticket races will be approximately offset by turnout increases due to competitive mayor/council races.

The upshot? Our next mayor could get into office with fewer than 1600 votes. With a couple more names and a more typical odd-year drop-off, we could easily see a winning total with three digits.

This could certainly get very interesting.

As far as actual comments go, I know next to nothing about Mr. Weiss. Mr. Harvey has served on the Main Street Redevelopment Commission, a body which has overseen some real improvements. In true blogger tradition I'll welcome Mr. Harvey to the campaign by highlighting one of the most grammatically awkward quotes of 2007:

However, the synagogue would not have windows. It would be a large stone structure that some commission members feared would not mesh with the rest of Bexley.

"My initial reaction when I first saw the pictures was 'Wow, no amount of trees are going to soften that,'" commission member William Harvey said.

It's okay, William, sometimes graphic depictions of architecture rob me of the speech faculty myself.

And Finally, for those keeping score at home, William Harvey is a registered Democrat, whereas Eugene Weiss is listed as unaffiliated with the BOE.

Post #250

I wanted to mark this arbitrary milestone with a good post, one which highlights my personal style, wrapping lots of links from disparate sources into a data-supported narrative focusing on Central Ohio politics, with dashes of goofiness and targeted outrage for flavor.

But it's been a week since my last post, one of the most widely commented upon that I've done here, and the self-imposed pressures of the follow-up and the milestone, along with the day-to-day stuff (both fun - new mp3 player, and not so fun - updating my resume) seem to have rendered me mute.

So, instead of a highlight, a just-as-typical exemplar: The don't-stop-coming-to-the-blog-I'm-still-actively-posting post. The yes-I-know-there-are-now-threefour-announced-candidates-for-Bexley-mayor and yes-I-know-there-is-a-republican-running-for-Columbus-mayor but I-will-talk-about-the-former-later and I-can't-decide-if-my-talking-about-the-latter's-clownishness-paradoxically-chips-away-at-the-assumption-of-clownishness post.


More whimper than bang, but it's not the end of the world.