The Cincinnati Stadium Screw Job

Another article discussing the crazy public subsidies for professional sports stadiums features Cincinnati:

When voters approved a sales-tax increase to pay $540 million toward stadiums for Cincinnati’s professional baseball and football teams almost two decades ago, city leaders promised lower property levies and a business district along the Ohio River.
The tax relief hasn’t materialized as pledged, said Todd Portune, a commissioner in Cincinnati’s Hamilton County. Instead, the county government is grappling with annual stadium expenses totaling at least $43 million this year, including debt service, county documents show. Residents have seen a public hospital sold, mass-transit investments postponed and little private development near the stadiums that didn’t involve additional public subsidies, Portune said......
In Cincinnati, Bengals owner Mike Brown took control of the team in 1991, after the death of his father, Paul Brown, a Hall of Fame founder and coach of the Cleveland Browns, who in 1967 headed an ownership group that acquired an expansion franchise in the American Football League. The Reds are owned by Robert Castellini, who led a group that bought a team after the 2005 season that was then valued at $270 million. The team is now worth $680 million, according to a data compiled by Bloomberg.
In the 1990s, each team began pushing for public funding to replace Riverfront Stadium, which opened in 1970 and was shared by both organizations. In March 1996, Hamilton County voters approved a half-percentage point increase in their sales-tax rate to fund the football and baseball venues as part of an effort to revive the area along the Ohio River.
Paul Brown Stadium opened for the Bengals in 2000 and Great American Ball Park opened for the Reds in 2003. The stadiums are about a half-mile apart......
Public costs for Cincinnati stadiums now exceed $1 billion in 2010 dollars, according to Long, the Harvard professor, who tabulated expenses for stadiums for a book titled “Public Private Partnerships for Major League Sports Facilities.”
The NFL stadium proved particularly costly, according to Long. Paul Brown Stadium was the second-most expensive public deal of any U.S. stadium, according to her data, with the public paying $706 million, including land, infrastructure, maintenance and tax breaks. It trails only Indianapolis’s Lucas Oil Stadium. Taxpayers also spent about $489 million on the Reds’ Great American Ball Park, according to Long’s data.

And not only has Mike Brown screwed Hamilton County taxpayers (and the IRS), he's been a complete asshole while doing it, and the Bengals have failed to win a playoff game since he took over the team.

An Abandoned Subway AND an Abandoned Streetcar?

Cincinnati may have both:

As Jalopnik recently reminded us, Cincinnati is home to the "largest abandoned subway system in the United States." Construction of the planned 16-mile system began in 1920 and halted in 1925 when the initial funding of $6 million ran out with the project not quite halfway done. Almost a century and a few failed revivals later, two miles of unused tunnel still run below Central Parkway, one of the main roads through the city.

If Cincinnati isn't careful, its in-progress streetcar system might face a similar fate. Whether or not to finish that project was at the heart of the city's recent mayoral election. Stop-construction candidate John Cranley emerged victorious, and earlier this month the city council put the 3.6-mile project on indefinite pause despite about a half-mile of track already laid.
It can't stay on pause much longer. The Federal Transit Administration, which issued Cincinnati roughly $45 million in funding for the project, has asked for a decision on the project by the end of Thursday.
The big issue for Cranley and the city council is whether local taxpayers should be on the hook for potential operating costs. The new mayor has said he's willing to let construction continue if private donors come up with enough cash to pay for the first 30 years of running the system — a figure that's reportedly around $80 million. The auditing firm KPMG is expected to release results of a cost analysis sometime today.

Geez, they've already spent about 25% of the construction cost.  This would be a very good thing for the redevelopment of Over-the-Rhine and I really hate the idea of the city killing it.  But, as the story notes, there's 2 miles of abandoned subway under Central Parkway, so just about anything is possible. 

Stagg Bowl Matchup Set

Mount Union squeaked by North Central, 41-40, while UW-Whitewater got by Mary Hardin-Baylor, 16-15, to advance to the Division III championship game.  This is the eighth matchup between the two schools in the championship game in the last nine years.  The only exception was last year's matchup between St. Thomas and Mount Union.  It is also Mount Union's ninth straight appearance in the championship game, their 16th appearance in the last 18, and their 17th in the last 21.  That is a pretty ridiculous run.

The Genealogy of Baseball Teams

An awesome print at History Shots:

 One close-up:

A little background:

The New York Yankees started as the Baltimore Orioles. The Minnesota Twins were once the Washington Senators. But not before they were the Kansas City Blues. And the Cleveland Indians? To some, they'll always be the Grand Rapids Rustlers.
Pro-baseball has seen its share of relocations, new names, and disbanded franchises, enough to confuse even the most history-obsessed fans. Thankfully, information designers Bill Younker and Larry Gormley have mapped it all out for us in one incredible infographic.
Gormley tells us it took over 1,000 hours to put together. The final result is an end-all reference guide for when your friend doesn't believe the Detroit Tigers really have always been the Detroit Tigers (established in 1894), that Brooklyn couldn't stop renaming its team (before the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, they were, at various times, the Trolley-Dodgers, Bridegrooms, Robins, and Superbas), or that the Newark Peppers were a real thing.

 More cool charts they sell here.

The Double Bird

Charles Pierce gives a beautiful description of Marcus Hall's two-handed salute to Michigan fans on Saturday:

In the second quarter of what already had been a carnival of a first half, Michigan had just scored to take a 21-14 lead. Ohio State's Dontre Wilson fielded the kick at his own goal line and ran it back 16 yards. However, deep in the pile, ill feelings mysteriously arose. Family relationships were disputed loudly. Within seconds, a WWE card broke out. Helmets flew, as did at least one punch. An exaltation of penalty flags took wing. By the time the game officials had finished approximating who had done what to whom, and whose mothers had been most grievously insulted, two Ohio State players and one Wolverine found themselves dismissed.
"I was disappointed in that," Ohio State coach Urban Meyer grumped afterward.
(It is devoutly to be hoped that the Buckeyes followed the direction of their governor, John Kasich, regarding the letter "m" and remembered to call people "otherfuckers" in the scrum. These are the things I worry about.)
One of the expelled, offensive lineman Marcus Hall, was particularly exercised. He slammed down his helmet. He kicked what I can only hope was the bench. And then, as he was being led off into exile up the tunnel, Hall enthusiastically flipped off the Michigan crowd with both hands. This being Thanksgiving weekend, there were a lot of people out there watching with nothing in their hands save beer, and nothing on their hands but time. Within two minutes, Hall's gesture had been GIF'ed approximately 9,678 times. This guaranteed him the kind of instant fame only the Internet can provide. It also guaranteed that Marcus Hall never will have to pay for a meal in Columbus for the rest of his life — whether he and the Buckeyes play for the national title or not. He demonstrated vividly that he don't give a damn for the whole state of Michigan. I know I'm supposed to be outraged by this, but I can't be. That would require me to be a TV drone and worry about things like The Image Of The Sport. Hell with that. Marcus Hall lived the dream of every Ohio State fan since the series began in 1897.

I love the part about otherfuckers, even though I find Kasich's recommendation to be a stupid bit of demagoguery.

Ohio Catfish Species Declared Extinct

Scientific American:

Hope has been exhausted for the Scioto madtom (Noturus trautmani). Unseen since 1957, the small catfish has now been listed as “extinct” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, following decades of fruitless searches. The madtom was the only extinction out of more than 430 species updates published to the Red List last week.
Even when the species was alive, sightings of the Scioto madtom were rare, possibly due to their blink-and-you’ll-miss-them size (between 35 and 61 millimeters). Sightings of the species were recorded only 18 times; each happened within a single stretch of Big Darby Creek, a tributary of the Scioto River in central Ohio. Little was ever known about the fish’s ecology or behavior.
Its rarity, however, was enough to get the madtom protected under the U.S. Endangered Species Act back in 1975. Biologists then spent years looking for signs of the fish and information on how to protect it. “No other fish has been searched for more persistently by researchers in Ohio than this species,” according to the Ohio Department of Nature Resources.
In 2009 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) published a review of the Scioto madtom’s status (pdf), writing that the species—which, like the five other madtom species in Ohio, depended on shallow, fast-moving waters with a lot of gravel and silt substrate—probably disappeared “due to modification of its habitat from siltation, suspended industrial effluents and agricultural runoff,” as well as competition from another madtom species that had moved into that region of the stream. The review concluded that the long amount of time since the Scioto madtom has been seen meant it no longer met the definition of an endangered species, “and therefore delisting the species due to extinction is recommended.” The FWS has yet to take that step, but the IUCN responded to the recommendation and has now finally declared the species to be extinct.

Never heard of it, but if I come across one, readers of this blog will be the first to know. There is hope:

Another madtom species, the northern madtom (N. stigmosus) went unseen for 31 years until ichthyologist Milton Trautman, who discovered the Scioto madtom, found two of them elsewhere in Big Darby Creek.

Still, I won't hold my breath.

An OSU-Michigan Tradition

Bob Wojnowski's OSU slamfest:

As thousands of scarlet-nosed Ohioans truck into town, clogging the White Castles, it’s important to remind our friends of a couple rules.

■No. 1, Tasers are not toys, not even after 16 beers.

■No. 2, we strictly enforce BYOPP (Bring Your Own Porta-Potty).

Thankfully, our state gets two shots at the unbeaten Buckeyes this year, and the Wolverines could use the help. I’m not saying they’ve been playing possum, because that sounds like a jab at the second-most popular Thanksgiving dish in Ohio. But maybe the 7-4 Wolverines cleverly saved all their good plays — you know, the ones that go forward — for The Game on Saturday.

The hope is, Michigan at least can soften up Ohio State with a series of glancing body blows, and then Michigan State can finish the job next week in the Big Ten championship game. The Spartans made a horrible miscalculation and clinched early, so they’ll warm up Saturday by whacking the Gophers in front of a tidy gathering of family and friends.

If you think Michigan, a two-touchdown underdog, is afraid of Ohio State, ha, you don’t understand this great rivalry. First of all, once you’ve rushed for minus-69 yards in back-to-back games, you’re not afraid of any embarrassment. And second — and I mean this in the most-respectful way — Ohio State is in the midst of the worst 23-game winning streak in college football history.

Am I being too harsh? Not really. I’ve done investigatory work with my assistant — the talented Ms. G. Oogle — and in this 23-game stretch, Ohio State has precisely one notable road victory — in overtime against Wisconsin last year. This season’s slate includes the standard Big Ten wrecks, as well as the likes of Buffalo, California, San Diego State and Florida A&M. Cripes, why not just complete the cupcake run and schedule Florida?

Considering how bad Michigan has been recently, this is a pretty impressive effort. Of course, he ends up picking OSUto win, 24-9.

The Voice of the NYC Subway

This makes me wonder who the lady was who said, "Welcome to Riverfront Stadium. Cans, bottles and alcoholic beverages are not permitted to be brought into the stadium. Welcome to Riverfront Stadium......."

Kahn's Big Red Smokeys

Thanks to the generous assistance of commenter Brian, who shared this link, I have this classic bit of Cincinnati Reds history:

If only I could come up with the soundtrack to go with it. (if it isn't playing, click on it)

Ray Mancini on the Duk Koo Kim Fight

The BBC interviews Ray Mancini on the fateful fight 31 years ago this week:

On 13 November 1982, reigning WBA lightweight world champion, Ray 'Boom Boom' Mancini was due to defend his title against challenger, the South Korean Kim Deuk-koo.
In Mancini's words it was going to be an "action fight" in front of a 15,000-strong crowd at Las Vegas's fabled Caesar's Palace venue. Millions more were tuning in at home on TV.
It was a fight that Mancini went on to win but his opponent suffered fatal injuries that would cause great controversy and change the sport.
Thirty-one years on from that fateful night, Ray Mancini talks about the fight.

The video is at the link (no embed feature).  More on the fight and its impact here.

Election 2013

I've got to say that the breathless overage of fatass Chris Christie and the battle between "Bring Back Anti-Sodomy Laws" Ken Cuchinelli and"I'm as crooked as the day is long" Terry McAullife distracts me from things in Tuesday's election that I consider more important.  First off, my township had a competitive election for the first time in over 30 years.  We have gotten two new township trustees (out of three) within 6 months.  That is a sea change, but I think we'll have a peaceful transition (especially considering I was drinking beer with all three upcoming trustees this evening).  Besides that, you have the Chamber of Commerce beating the Tea Party candidate in Alafuckingbama.  Honestly, I feel funny rooting for the business interests in that Battle Royale.  I generally curse the business folks, but the tea partiers are so insane that rooting for the rick fucks seems like the wise choice.

Overall, though, the most interesting story to me, other than the local township trustee story, is the Colorado secession story.  In the end, 6 of 11 counties voted to leave Colorado to form their own state.  However, in a population of 350,000 in the 11 counties, the 6 couties that voted yes had a population of less than 33,000.  That is your clueless rural vote in action.  Some of these counties were losing population from 2000 to 2010, but they think it is in their best interest to vote to leave the state that has taxpayers from other parts of the state funnel money to them.  What the fuck?  I don't get it.  There's a lot more analysis I'd like to do on this vote, but honestly, I'm just too lazy to write it up.

23 Years

October 20, 1990:

Damn, I'm old.  Damn, I hope the Reds win another one during my lifetime.

Rural Americans and the Federal Government

From the support the Tea Party gets from rural areas, you would think the federal government has done nothing but take money from rural folks and give it to poor minorities in the cities.  However, rural areas have long been been beneficiaries of government programs, and not just farm programs.  One example got mentioned today in an NPR interview with Simon Winchester, the author of The Men Who United The States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics, and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible:

There's an irony I want to mention ... I write about the bringing of electricity to rural America and the role that the government played in the 1930s with the Rural Electrification Administration and very moving stories of farmers who never had electricity finally getting it. The first place in America to get electricity courtesy of FDR was out in the sticks, in Western Ohio — the 8th Congressional District, which is the district today represented by John Boehner. John Boehner — I don't want to get into a political fight here — is an archetype of "against big government," and yet the district he represents benefited hugely from big and wise government in the 1930s.

That's right, he's talking about my county and my rural electric co-op:

The earliest of millions of electric cooperative poles installed with funds from the federal Rural Electrification Administration was set by Miami Rural Electric Cooperative (now Pioneer Rural Electric Cooperative) in Piqua, Ohio, on November 14 (1935).

There are a number of other examples, but for some reason, rural Americans prefer the myth of self-reliance to the reality of communal support.  I am afraid that idiots like Jim Jordan, Tim Huelskamp and Steve King might cause the non-rural majority of the country to take actions to remind rural areas of how dependent they really are on the rest of the country.  That would not be a good thing.

Wiedemann's Comeback

I tried my first Wiedemann's Special Lager since its return from the dead.  Not too bad.  Here's a little background:

Heileman later sold the Evansville brewery to a management-led investor group, which acquired the rights to make Wiedemann and other Heileman labels as part of the deal. When the Evansville brewery closed in the 1990s, production of Wiedemann Bohemian Special Beer was shifted to Pittsburgh Brewing Co. But it also ran into financial problems. The company filed for bankruptcy reorganization in late 2006, and it ceased production and distribution of Wiedemann beer.
The brand’s sudden disappearance from store shelves was noticed by Jon Newberry, a local beer enthusiast and former home brewer who managed to save a few remaining Wiedemann bottles and cans for posterity.
By 2007 when Wiedemann Bohemian Special Beer disappeared from the market, other local beers in the Cincinnati area were making a comeback. In 2011, the Newberrys decided it was time for Newport’s famous Wiedemann’s fine beer to make a comeback of its own. The Newberrys enlisted brew master Kevin Moreland at Cincinnati-based Listermann Brewing to develop a new Wiedemann’s recipe that would bridge the gap between George Wiedemann’s fine Bohemian-style beers of old and the new craft beers that were again making a name for Cincinnati beer. The result was Wiedemann’s Special Lager™, a crisp and flavorful lager in the Bohemian tradition. The beer, which is relatively low alcohol compared to heavier craft beers, is brewed with several kinds of barley malt, including specialty pilsner and Munich malts that are used in many craft beers. Aromatic sterling hops provide a zesty punch. It’s a thirst-quenching, light-bodied beer designed to drink when you’re having more than one, maybe more than a few.

Nice work, Mr. Newberry and Mr. Moreland.

Restaurant Auction Brings Crowd

A longtime Dayton restaurant, the Stockyards Inn, held a liquidation auction of furniture, decorations and antiques.  Among the items sold was an old painting of a hog:

Wilson Bunger drove to the auction from New Madison in part because he knew a century-old painting of a hog that hung on the wall of the restaurant would go up for sale. The 82-year-old Darke County resident said the hog in the painting belonged to his grandfather, who sold breeding stock. His grandfather had commissioned an artist to paint the hog and to have it hung in the restaurant sometime between 1910 and 1920 as advertising of sorts for his business, since a working stockyards was located across Springfield Street from the restaurant for much of the 20th century.
Bidding on the painting reached $4,000. And Bunger outbid everybody.
“I wanted to keep it in the family,” he said.

The auctioneer's photo doesn't look like the photo of a $4,000 painting:

Another interesting item was a photograph of the old stockyard across the street:

Look at all those Herefords.  You won't see that high of a percentage of Herefords at any stockyards today.   Finally, the oldest kegerator I've ever seen:

Looks like you'd be cutting ice in the winter and storing it in the ice house to use that thing.

Don't Give Up The Ship

Jeff St. Clair visits a bicentennial re-enactment of the Battle of Lake Erie at Put-in-Bay, and remembers Oliver Hazard Perry:

Two hundred years ago today, a young U.S. naval captain named Oliver Hazard Perry penned the words, "We have met the enemy and they are ours ..."
Perry's remarkable victory over the British changed the course of the War of 1812, and a full-scale re-enactment — the largest sailing re-enactment ever attempted in the U.S. — recently commemorated the anniversary of the win in the Battle of Lake Erie.

America had brashly declared war in 1812 to stop the British from kidnapping U.S. sailors to man the Royal Navy and to settle trade issues. A year later, the war against the world's leading superpower wasn't going well.
It was from Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie's South Bass Island that Perry sailed out to meet the British on Sept. 10, 1813.
Historian Walter Rybka — one of the planners of the re-enactment — says the 28-year-old Perry threw himself into battle. "Perry was, first off, phenomenally brave and determined, but he was damn lucky," Rybka says.
Somehow Perry survived two hours of hellacious fire that killed or maimed 75 percent of the crew on his ship, the Lawrence.
"His last gun had been knocked out of action on the starboard side, his rigging was cut to pieces, he could not maneuver, he could no longer fight. There was no point in maintaining an action because his men were just going to get slaughtered the rest of the way," Rybka says. "Right at the moment the wind fills in ..."
And that's when Perry hopped into his longboat and under heavy fire, rowed to the Niagara, a Great Lakes warship. Rybka says Perry brought along his battle flag, emblazoned with the words, "Don't Give Up The Ship."
"But the only way to do that was to give up the ship and go to the next one," Rybka says. "The real motto was, 'Don't Give Up.' "
The battle was a turning point in the War of 1812. America had lost Detroit and much of the Northwest Territory. Rybka says if Perry had given up the ship, the Canadian border would have been much farther south.
"I think Michigan probably would have been lost to us and maybe Wisconsin as well," Rybka says.

More on the battle here.

Steal Number One

From CBS Sports:

Reds prospect Billy Hamilton has been one of the best base-stealers in minor-league history since being drafted out of high school in 2009. A September callup this season, Hamilton made his Major League Baseball debut Tuesday night.
It gets better, though. Hamilton -- a pinch-runner -- stole second on Yadier Molina and then scored on a Todd Frazier double. The Reds went on to win, 1-0, and creep to within 1.5 games of the Cardinals for the top wild card spot.

Hamilton has done a lot of that, and there should be a lot more to come.

Troy Rock City

Well, the big show is over.  Our small county seat managed to host reportedly around 30,000 folks, and from what I saw, almost everyone did a great job.  The drinking downtown didn't cause much trouble, and should help convince the city fathers that we can do other family-friendly events which include alcohol.

I saw almost no trouble, and what I did see was the work of security and not a concertgoer.  I was standing by the edge of the stage and watched a couple of asshole security guards start yelling at a guy at the fence, grab him and pull him over it, then drag him past me and called over a local cop I know and tell him they wanted the guy thrown out of the concert.  The cop talked to the guy a while, while his significant other was standing there crying, then sent them on their way.  I came up to the cop and asked him what actually happened, and he said the security guys were being assholes and he told the couple to just go someplace where the rent-a-cops couldn't see them.  They lost a prime spot by the stage, but, other than that, they avoided getting railroaded by the security thugs.

After the show ended, we headed downtown, and I got to have a run-in with the rent-a-cops.  We wanted to head down a side street to a local bar where my cousin was playing, but they had gates blocking it off.  The security guard was standing in the middle of the crosswalk, and as we got to the building corner, I slid the gate sideways and we walked through.  I was about fifty feet down the street when she saw us, and she yelled that under no circumstances were the bicycle gates to be moved.  I yelled back that I was sorry, but my sister and her friends laughed and said that was the most insincere apologies they had ever heard.  We laughed about it the rest of the night.

The event also highlighted an engineering issue in our telecommunications system.  For large parts of the day, the Verizon wireless network was overwhelmed.  I know that happens quite frequently at sporting events and when big events like the Boston Marathon bombing or the September 11 attacks occur.  It is a lot different than the old land line system.  Here was their design reliability standard:

While POTS provides limited features, low bandwidth, and no mobile capabilities, it provides greater reliability than other telephony systems (mobile phone, VoIP, etc.). Many telephone service providers attempt to achieve dial-tone availability more than 99.999% of the time the telephone is taken off-hook. This is an often cited benchmark in marketing and systems-engineering comparisons, called the "five nines" reliability standard. It is equivalent to having a dial-tone available for all but about five minutes each year.

 The mobile system is also designed to high reliability standards, but is easily overwhelmed:

Mobile networks have bandwidth that is more than sufficient 99% of the time. However, when disaster strikes, the decentralized nature of the network means that whole geographic regions can be knocked out by increased call volume. Whenever the generous-but-finite bandwidth at carrier site buildings are strained, users are prevented from making voice calls. Because SMS text messages take up far less bandwidth, mobile carriers instead encourage users to text message each other. As Pica put it to Fast Company, "text requires less dedicated real-time capacity than voice. Data networks including LTE and EVDO were not impacted due to the nature of the way data systems are used."

Engineers are working on improving reliability amongst large crowds and in emergencies:

 It is possible to build redundancies into America's mobile phone infrastructure which would allow the easy placement of phone calls during crises. This would, however, be massively expensive and carriers would likely pass the cost onto customers. In a 2007 Computerworld article, reporter Todd R. Weiss discovered that adding regional redundancies to mobile phone networks is not economically feasible. However, mobile providers can temporarily boost coverage in areas where they anticipate trouble such as football games and music festivals. They can even take away mobile coverage--San Francisco public transit provider BART famously had carriers block wireless signals in order to prevent demonstrators from organizing after a homeless and mentally ill man was shot by BART police....
Two engineers at AT&T, Bob Mathews and Gary Chow, have devised a method of temporarily boosting mobile phone capacity at sporting events and concerts. AT&T's multi-beam antenna uses a special setup of narrow beams spaced 20 degrees apart, mounted at special events, to boost network traffic capacity up to 500% in order to deal with large crowds. The multi-beam antenna has already been tested at the San Diego Comic-Con, Coachella, and the Super Bowl. The pair helped develop the antenna in response to what they saw as a “telecom Moore's law,” wherein data traffic consumption regularly doubled every two years.

I would anticipate that smart phones really play havoc with the system at such times.

But back to the events in Troy, I was really proud of my community, the people who worked to bring it together, and all the visitors.  Everything went extremely well.  I was amazed at how many folks I see day-to-day who were hanging out at the back of the crowd where I was.  It is good to be at home:

Wagon Wheel

The city of Troy is catching Old Crow Medicine Show, followed by Mumford and Sons, amongst many acts today.  Should be entertaining.

A Big To Do

Well, Troy's British Invasion is here.  Mumford and Sons brings their Gentlemen of the Road show to our corner of the world.  It ought to be a hell of a good party.  It just bugs me that you can't get the city fathers to do anything involving alcohol in public, but some Limeys come along, and they shut the whole town down and let 'em sell beer anywhere.  Hopefully, this is just the icebreaker we need.