One day in Cleveland

These are all stories that appeared in the Plain Dealer on November 14. All items are about Ohio.

New inmate denied Xanax prescription, dies in custody
41 people charged in child porn sting
10 year old shoots and kills 11 year old sister using their 15 year old brother`s gun
85 year old man kills wife
250,000 car-related jobs endangered in Ohio
Ohio Department of Transportation contemplates closing major Cleveland bridge for two years
National City (a Cleveland bank) sold on the cheap; job losses expected
Mayor plans to balance 2009 budget
Paramedic sentenced for stealing patient credit cards
30 year old man sentenced for six rapes
Bus driver exits bus to get gas; bus careens down hill and hurts 13 kids
Hinge salesman ex-Marine pilot recalls kamikaze attack in WWII
34% increase in Ohio unemployment applications over one year; benefits shrink
Forest City Enterprises continues plan for Brooklyn Nets stadium
Kosher beef shortage caused by immigration sting in beef plants
One in 417 Ohio homes in foreclosure; this is a drop of 30% from last year
CEO of A. Schulman (a plastics company) makes $2.3 million
Cavs win six in a row
OSU women`s basketball expected to be good this year
All Things Cleveland exhibit opens in a Tremont gallery. Polka, kielbasa, sauerkraut, and the song "Bernie, Bernie" at opening; refers to the long-extinct POC beer, "Pride of Cleveland," a nickname for Pilsener Brewing Company beer, whose brewery closed in 1984
Indians logo in an obituary (in lieu of a photograph)
Names in obits: Alma, Rose, Shirley, Josephine, Mattie Pearl, Loie, Brindusa, Flora, Ginger, Virginia, Dorothy, Delphine, Maxine

Obits, redux

There were a lot of generalizations in the last post. I thought I'd get some data and include some qualitative analysis. This is from today's Plain Dealer. It skews older than it seemed to me yesterday. No kids.


Age of death / number of people
0-20s / 0
30s / 4
40s / 1
50s / 5
60s / 10
70s / 10
80s / 15
90s / 10
unlisted / 15
total / 70

unlisted age breakdown by my subjective impression:
young / 1
middle aged / 4
old / 9
?? / 1

youngest: 35
oldest: 97

number of obits with pictures: 38
of which are of white people: 22
of which are of black people: 16

Cool names: Sil, Snookie, Papa John, Cachon, Tick, Top, Tino.

Some details about people:
-wife of 61 years
-38 year old Navy vet who worked for the post office
-ex-nun with 10 grandkids
-Holocaust survivor
-literacy educator
-principal
-artist/lawyer
-veterans of World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq I

The obits

Being, for better or worse, a child of my parents, I am an avid reader of the obituary section of the paper. The Irish sporting pages. Yeah, maybe it's morbid, but it's a rare opportunity to read about just people. Not in the sense of living-lives-of-righteousness (which might be the case), but in the sense of being the people you see on the bus.

Anyway. In the Plain Dealer, the obituaries very frequently include pictures. Moreso than in any paper I've ever read. It's humanizing. It's also interesting--a lot of the 95-year-olds who've died are accompanied by recent pictures of them. But just as many feature pictures of them from their youths. For women it's often wedding pictures, few of which feature smiles. They seem serious. This shit is not for joking. (More of them smile in the old-age pictures.) In their young-version pictures, the old guys often have military portraits or elaborately combed 1950s yearbook hair.

The worst part, though, is that people seem to die really young here. Today there was a picture of an infant--she didn't have enough hair to have a bow, so she had one of those ruffly elastic bands around her bald head. (Infant mortality in the US is .65% according to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; in Ohio it's .73%. And, holy shit, for black non-hispanic women in Ohio, it's 1.48%. That seems insane. Imagine if one in every 75 people you know had a sibling who died as an infant.) A few days ago a three year old was in the obituaries. And before that there were others.

In Cleveland, apparently it's not rare to die around age 50. Even more alarmingly, a not insignificant number die in their teens, twenties, or thirties. Teenagers. Seriously. The paper rarely lists a cause of death, so it seems like an inexplicable pandemic is spreading. What makes these people die? Crystal meth? Gunshots? Car crashes? The whole thing makes me want to shop at that Mexico City store where all the clothes are bulletproof.

Miguel Caballero it is.

PS--Highly worthwhile to poke around that web page.

Help.

A letter to the editor in the Plain Dealer on Friday:

Is this Cleveland or Sodom?

Is Cleveland so hard up for money that we need to push aside our morals and integrity and vie to host the 2014 Gay Games (Plain Dealer, Oct. 16)? Are we condoning homosexuality by courting this event? It's bad enough that gay marriages are being legalized.

I'm sure that I am going to upset a lot of people, but I'm sorry. I'm no Bible thumper, but please tell me where in the Bible it says that men are to be with men and women are to be with women? If there is such a passage in the Bible, then I will gladly shut up.

-Juanita Solis, Cleveland


Interestingly enough, on the Plain Dealer website, the letter is called "Cleveland should let Gay Games go elsewhere."

On the upside, the Plain Dealer endorsed Obama.

Even less about Cleveland

I know, I know, the blog is supposed to be about Cleveland. I know I've been shamefully neglecting our nation's 40th largest city (in 2007). (BTW--I'm not alone in this neglect. Cleveland was the 33rd largest US city on the 2000 census. Its population has dropped 8.4% in those seven years. Ouch.)

Sorry, but I've been out of town a lot.

Last weekend I harvested a bumper crop of apples in New Jersey and saw my much-missed friends in New York.

This weekend I'll be in New Mexico.

Up next: New Hampshire? It would round out the news.

PS--The Plain Dealer included a recipe today for croissants in a can with chocolate chips slapped in the middle. Wrote it out as a recipe and everything.

Food bitching

Not "the food is bitchin.'"

I did get a decent bagel at Bialy's. An ex-New Yorker guy I met informed me that, no, I didn't get "a" bagel. I got the only bagel in Cleveland. The rest are the dreaded bread ring.

Today I paid $6 for a bottle of Sriracha. I was delighted to be able to do so. The store SOLD Sriracha. This is most certainly not a given.

I found some tortillas. Alas. They were mass-market corn tortillas that turned out to have wheat in them. And a whole bunch of other weird shit. Manny, the tortilla conglomerate guy, has gone to the dark side.

There are no local apples that I have seen, despite an article in the Plain Dealer reporting an epic apple harvest this year. Ok, I'm still figuring it out and all, but damn. Sell me an apple from Ohio! I'll buy it!

And speaking of the Plain Dealer. It is really a good paper. Solid international coverage, a lot of local news, and much, much more actual content than, say, the Chicago Tribune. It even has comics! Did you know that "Mary Worth" is still being published? No "Phantom" though. And it has a gigantic classified section every day.

But. But. There is a food section called "Taste." It is full of food abominations.

They include a story about and recipe from a woman who makes a vast amount of tomato sauce in her garage. The article includes a long disclaimer about how this recipe JUST MIGHT give you botulism. According to the government or some other such clowns.

Got a lot of zucchini on your plants this year? (You have a huge back yard. Duh. What do you think your $800 a month is paying for? Just that three bedroom house?) "Coat slices with a paste of garlic, olive oil, and ketchup, then grill and chop. Toss with cooked pasta tossed with a little oil, then dress for a room-temperature salad with feta cheese, kalamata olives, parsley, and a simple vinaigrette." Ketchup. On zucchini. With pasta. Ketchup with olives. Ketchup with feta. Ketchup?

Perhaps the most indicative of the tenor, though, is a recipe I read. I quote.

Homemade Skillet Meal Seasoning Mix

2 cups powdered milk
1/2 cup dehydrated onion
3 tablespoons beef or chicken bouillon granules
2 tablespoons garlic powder
2 tablespoons onion powder
2 tablespoons dried parsley
2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 1/2 teaspoons salt
1 1/2 teaspoons ground black pepper

Add that shit to a pound of ground beef and some egg noodles. Maybe some canned mushrooms! Eat up, Cleveland!

It's my theory that they spell out the measurements because if you gave a rat's ass about your mouth--and therefore knew the abbreviation for tablespoon--you wouldn't be making this.

Then I looked in the Plain Dealer archives. They have an article about how mustard is good on hot dogs.

Help!