Thanks to those who asked about my absence for much of last week. It was time for the annual Ogle father and son spring fishing outing. That trip was a big reason for trying to get the boat this spring that many of you suggested names for.
This year my dad, brother and I went to southeast Indiana’s Brookville Reservoir. It’s about 20 miles or so northwest of Cincinnati, just a stone’s throw (or two) across the state line.
It rained a fair amount like it did here, but we still had a good time like we always do and managed to put some fish in the ice box every day. The only thing I regret about the trip is that we didn’t make the effort and take the time out of our schedules to do it many years ago.
Spending that time together is one of the highlights of my year.
We had fished Brookville briefly in midsummer a couple of times before while camping nearby. But this was our first extended fishing trip there and thoroughly worth the 3-hour plus trip.
Brookville is a completely different setting than last year’s excursion to the northeast corner of Indiana. Although that series of lakes are all natural lakes carved out by the same glacier that left behind the Great Lakes, the shoreline is almost entirely developed with elegant vacation homes that are obviously a case of a can-you-top-this competition between the well to do.
Brookville on the other hand is a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers flood-control lake completed in the 1970s. It is over 16 miles long and the entire shoreline, minus a couple of state park beaches and marinas, is completely undeveloped and wild.
That scenery was certainly more to our liking than the extravagance on display we fished around the year before.
We co-fished with ospreys that were a heck of a lot better anglers than we were. We watched an eagle perched atop a singular dead tree soar off as we approached.
It was spring turkey season in Indiana too and every morning we could hear the gobblers calling in the woods as we fished.
I always wondered how some of the greatest minds in the United States, if not the world, could guide a country and society with so much going for it so deep in debt.
This week I discovered the answer. Actually it’s two answers.
The first is any contract or agreement with the government is neither binding nor what you thought it was.
The second thing I learned is that what is driving this country into debt is the math the government uses. You add by dividing and subtract by multiplying.
Was it just a few weeks ago that Bucyrus city officials were rightfully elated almost to the point of being giddy because the community had been awarded $2 million dollars of federal stimulus money? The grant was to go towards the downtown renovation project.
Combined with other state and federal grants it meant the city’s share of a project that is expected to cost about $4.9 million dollars was going to be just $400,000 give or take.
Not bad and it was a much-needed break by a community reeling from plant shutdowns and auto-industry related layoffs.
But now that elation has turned into bewildered incredulity because the money that the city will actually see has, for all intents and purposes, been cut in half. It’s not that the money Bucyrus will get is chump change, but it’s not what it was promised either.
And if stimulus money was supposed to create jobs, the projects Bucyrus had plans for with its own money – now having to go back into the downtown project – would have created or saved many local jobs. Now the stimulus money coming here will just do what was going to be done anyway.
But worse than that is no matter how you look at it, the federal government, through the Federal Highway Administration, is going back on a promise and commitment it made to Bucyrus.
Bucyrus had already been awarded nearly $2.5 million in a Small Cities Block Grant from the same federal agency, the Federal Highway Administration, to go towards the renovation project. That was before there had ever been any talk of stimulus money.
But once the name of Bucyrus and its project was placed on the list of communities getting first-round stimulus money, the Federal Highway Administration became a grant recipient and not a grantor.
The bottom line is the Federal Highway Administration is taking the stimulus money earmarked for Bucyrus keeping roughly half - ostensibly to put cash back into its grant kitty and give it to other communities. How many other Peter’s will discover they are being robbed to pay someone else’s Paul?
So now we know when the government is doing the counting $1 equals about 50 cents.
It helps you understand how the government can annually spend more than it takes in every year and then tell Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer not to worry about the debt. But oh, by the way, more tax revenue is needed so ante up.
I wonder what would happen if I sent a letter to the IRS explaining I was keeping half of what I owed them to pay my state and local income tax bills. Yeah, right. We all know the answer to that one.
No matter how any government official or elected politician tries to explain it, the Federal Highway Agency unilaterally changed its original commitment and its contract with the City of Bucyrus.
I don’t know what you call it, but here on The Other Side it’s called going back on your word because words and numbers do mean something. I guess we all learned what the American Indians did more than 230 years ago: you can’t trust the American government to do what it promises.
That’s how it looks from here on The Other Side. Thanks for joining me.
I had trouble sleeping a couple of weekends ago and was channel surfing to cure my insomnia. I came across the 1983 movie “War Games,” the one in which a Defense Department computer takes over control of America’s nuclear warheads while playing a computer game and threatens to start World War III.
The dilemma’s solution comes when the computer named Joshua is diverted to tic-tac-toe and discovers it is a game that can’t be won; the obvious deduction is that nuclear war is no more winnable than tic-tac-toe.
Well it would seem as though the current lineup of politicians, in spite of promises that things would change and be different if they were put in office, are playing what amounts to political tic-tac-toe.
And like the X’s and O’s game we all learned to play as kids as well as an all-out nuclear war: no one wins.
Not liberals, conservatives or moderates. Not Democrats or Republicans. Not FOX or MSNBC. Not poor or rich, black or white. Not employer or employee. Nobody, no how, no way. We all lose.
There simply are no winners.
Partisan politics is a game not even Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers would try to patent.
No, the patent seems to belong to Ohio politicians who play it as well as anyone. No one wins, but they play it flawlessly none the less.
The latest move was made this week by Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner. You remember her. She was the one that was OK with not verifying voter registration information. It took a last-minute lawsuit and court order to force her and then she had the audacity to claim others had overstepped their authority in trying to get her to do her job.
Now Brunner is ready to move on with plans to run for the U.S. Senate where they up the ante in partisan politics.
Brunner seems intent on leaving her mark on her current job and a member of her party in the office. Just this week she told State Senator John Husted, a member of the other party who has declared his intentions to run for Secretary of State, he needs to give her utility bills and phone records to prove he is a resident of the district he represents and eligible to vote there
To be fair, Brunner is investigating after a newspaper story that questioned Husted’s tax deduction for a home in Kettering. But the current Secretary of State didn’t ask anyone else in public office with two homes to provide the same information.
Brunner, though, is simply following the example of another high-ranking Democrat – none other than Governor Ted Strickland.
In response to a Republican’s lawmaker’s request and subsequent lawsuit asking for Strickland’s research for his budget-shattering education funding reform the Governor sent thousands of pages useless documents and notes.
Wow! What bi-partisan cooperation there is in Columbus.
Some might compare that with cleaning out the barn and spreading it on the fields in the spring for fertilizer. At least we would here on The Other Side.
There are issues and topics that are sometimes better left untouched. And then there are yet others you would rather not bring up but realize that not talking about them is only likely to lead to more problems.
One of those is sexting. It is such a relatively new thing among teens and I suppose 20-somethings that I bet your spell checker doesn’t even recognize it as a word.
Sexting is the practice of using one’s cell phone to send revealing and often naked pictures of one’s self to others. I hesitate to use the words fad or craze to describe the practice because that might imply the act in question is harmless and passing.
This doesn’t seem quite so harmless and unfortunately I would guess that it’s here to stay for awhile.
As you might imagine, once the pictures exist in cyberspace they spread faster than a California wildfire. It has happened in this county, Richland County and Wyandot County that I know of. Being the old fuddy duddy I am, I’m sure it’s happened a lot more than I’m aware and in more places than I really care to know about.
It’s easy to say back in the day . . . we didn’t have things like cell phones and didn’t have to worry about things like that. True I guess as far as that goes. But there were problems of a sexual nature back then and nobody ever talked about them.
Maybe if they had been discussed more openly and frankly, there might not be some of the issues we face today. And maybe that is both wishful and naïve thinking – who am I to say.
What I do know is that sexting is dangerous, degrading whether it is meant to be or not and illegal.
Very recently an 18-year-old girl in Columbus committed suicide. She had sexted a questionable picture of herself to her boyfriend and it wound up making the rounds from cell phone to cell phone at her school.
It was the forerunner of an eerily similar situation to one here in Crawford County that made it into several schools this year.
Predictably the young lady suffered an immense amount of teasing. Obviously she had meant that picture for one person and not the entire student body.
But intentions, like youthful innocence, are often lost in the moment. She decided she had reached the point where the teasing and embarrassment was too much for her to bear.
In talking with law enforcement officials, it is clear that the sending and possession of such pictures of minors are felonies under the current statutes and offenses that are considered sex crimes.
While many police and prosecutors are looking for ways to file lesser charges so as to not permanently label those involved, the real damage being done to adolescents isn’t from a police record.
No that is being inflicted by a society that encourages and even forces them to grow up at warp speed. Sadly, it is something that many parents and adults seem to endorse.
It is a different world than the one we grew up in. It doesn’t always make it a better one, or even a worse one. Just a different one for which fewer and fewer people seem to have the answers.
But we know the answer in this case. It’s more parental involvement and awareness. It’s more open communication at an earlier age with our children.
It’s also the obligation and determination to tell them “No” when “No” is in their best interest even if they don’t like us for it some times.
I ran across a story this week from Dayton where that city school district’s board of education decided to return to what it called a traditional school schedule. Ever since 2005 students in Dayton have attended school year round. No more.
That story made me grin. Both because it referred to “tradition” and because the district conceded the year-round philosophy wasn’t workable for them even in the 21st century.
I’ve never been in favor of year-round school. Partly because I’m a kid at heart and could never imagine a child’s life without a summer vacation. The other reason is because I see it as yet another intrusion on family life and an attempt to further separate kids from their parents and vice versa, further eroding that relationship and parental influence.
I know that sounds old fashioned and probably more than just a bit paranoid. But when a former vice-president of the United States goes into a school and tells children their parents don’t know anything about a subject, regardless of what it is, and not to listen to Mom and Dad – I think that justifies a little healthy paranoia.
While I would agree that we need to strive to improve education in this country, I think it can be done without more school days or hours. In fact I think the solution is a rather simple one: Return to the values and expectations of yesteryear.
First throw out all the things from school curriculum mandated by state and federal governments that really shouldn’t be there in the first place. Let’s focus strictly on reading, writing and arithmetic like we used to and let parents parent and teachers teach. I’ll bet we could surprise ourselves in this country with all that could be taught and learned in a “traditional” school calendar.
Let’s return to the premise that we can not only expect a lot from school-age children, but we can demand it too. And while we’re at it, I’ll bet if parents were being supported more by schools and less undermined those same parents just might be willing to return that support at home for what goes on in the classroom.
Just a thought and not an original one at that, but it might work.
But that’s not the only old-fashioned thing worth hanging on to. How about the idea that people are responsible for their own well-being, as well as failures and successes?
It’s more than just a little disturbing that the President’s answer to the never-ending mortgage crisis is more money from folks who played by the rules and were responsible with their finances being doled out to those who weren’t.
I know my politics might be showing a bit here, but you’ve got to ask yourself if Joe the Plumber didn’t have it right. Is this change we’re supposed to believe in about evening the score by taking from those who have worked to get what they’ve got and give it to those with their hands held out?
I don’t want to see anyone lose their home. But if a homeowner wasn’t forthright about their income in order to buy a home beyond their means in the first place, should they be in that home ?
You know, come to think of it we were once told not that long ago that it takes a village to raise a child. I remember a day when the village let families raise their own children and take care of themselves.
We’ve heard the news on all of the alphabet news broadcasts from liberal to conservative and every stop in between. We’ve read or listened to the state of the state and state of the city addresses.
They all agree. These are difficult economic times.
Every one of us could have told the experts that long before they told us. But I guess it’s us that are supposed to listen to them. Why it’s that way I haven’t exactly figured out yet.
You don’t need an expert to tell you the economy is suffering. All you have to do is look at your check book and savings account to know that.
We don’t need talking heads to explain the market is falling. We can look at our 401K and IRA statements to figure that much out.
And we certainly don’t need anyone else to tell us that healthcare costs are going through the roof. Our co-pays and insurance rates have told us that for years.
But the attitude that we must be told what is happening, why it’s happening and how to fix it as if we’re not smart enough to decipher that on our own is not only a sign of the problem, it is in many cases the cause of the problem.
People don’t think, don’t reason and don’t act on their own anymore because no one expects them to and I think in some cases because certain factions of our society don’t want them to.
It’s like there is some unknown need to be told what to do what we know we should be doing anyway, but being told by someone in authority – real or imagined – provides us with some type of security blanket.
The truth is a lot of us like to be told because it lets us off the hook for the results and makes someone else responsible for our success and our failures.
And most of all it gives us someone else to blame when things aren’t going so good. Like right now.
The results are right there before our eyes and in our ears on a daily basis. A different industry is asking to be bailed out by the government every day. The numbers may change a little, from $800 billion this time to $700 billion the next and even a trillion dollars or more on occasion.
But the bottom line is always the same. Private business and private people are coming to the government with their hands out.
Just remember we are the government in this country. Politicians can go only one place for power and money – us.
Personally, I think it’s time to keep a little bit of both for ourselves and stop giving it away.
We can decide to survive this difficult challenge, or we can give up and hope someone else can save us or at least lead us out of the wilderness they led us into in the first place.
I hate to break the news, but bad times have happened before. We have survived and we can survive this time. But it has to be our choice, our course of action and our decision. Not the politicians or the pundits.
Our destination is our responsibility.And our most important resources are our decency to one another and our determination.
Neither of which ever have to be in short supply. The most important skills that have been lost in this country are patience, kindness and self-sufficiency.
Our families, our friends and our neighbors shouldn’t have to wait or depend on the government for a bailout or a handout. They should know instead they can depend on those around them and more importantly themselves. A daily prayer doesn’t hurt either.
A girls high school basketball game in Dallas continues to get as much attention in the national media as an NBA playoff game. Then again, considering the overall popularity of NBA basketball, those Texas girls might be getting more.
Unfortunately the attention is negative which is too bad since so much positive can and does come from interscholastic athletics when they are valued and played in the perspective for which they were designed.
By now you have certainly heard of the 100-0 shellacking laid on Dallas Academy by Covenant School. A triple-digit defeat is rare, but not unheard of even in these parts. The same is true of scoring 100 points.
When those two elements are combined with a complete shutout over four quarters of high school varsity basketball, it is an event that gets people talking. And it seems people were talking almost before this game was even over.
But what put the game on the Internet and national wire services was the apology and sense of embarrassment expressed by Covenant School – that’s right, the winning team.
Covenant School is a private Christian school guided by the tenants of faith promoting Christ-like attitudes and behaviors. According to the school’s officials who publicly issued the mea culpa, their team’s actions that day didn’t live up to that standard.
My initial reaction was the apology brought more embarrassing attention to their opponent who had already been shamed enough on the basketball floor. But then some additional facts came to light.
Covenant School is well-known and respected for the quality of its girls basketball program. Dallas Academy, on the other hand, is a specialized school for students with learning disabilities and its sports programs are designed more for an opportunity to participate than interscholastic competition. Academy has just eight girls on its varsity roster.
I still had a tough time accepting the position of Covenant School other than to wonder why this obvious mismatch was even scheduled. I’ve always been of the opinion you can’t put non-starters into a game at any point and tell them not to play hard.Sure, a team can be instructed to do and not do certain things that will help keep the score in check. But in any sport, athletes that are playing should play hard with the intention of doing their best. So if the subs of Covenant put up some points, that certainly wasn’t their fault.
Then reports surfaced of various presses being deployed by Covenant and 3-point shots still going up even after a 59-0 halftime score. Added to that was the behavior of assistant coaches who were standing up and cheering second-half 3-pointers as if they were game-winning baskets. Their celebration at point 100 made it clear the goal was to score triple digits.
Covenant should have been embarrassed. This wasn’t a case of playing hard, competing or any other values interscholastic athletics are designed to instill.
But then the coach who oversaw the rout, Micah Grimes, sent an e-mail to the local newspaper in which he took issue with his school’s apology. Grimes made it clear he was neither apologetic nor embarrassed. He said he was proud of his team which he insisted played the game the way it was meant to be played.
His assertion was that he was not running up the score and that his team played with honor and integrity. Grimes was promptly and properly fired by Covenant officials.
There is nothing honorable about taking advantage of an outmatched opponent for self-promotion which is exactly what happened. This wasn’t about winning or competition. It was instead about grandstanding and showing off at another’s expense.
Don’t assume Grimes was relieved from his coaching duties because of what he allowed his team to do that day. He was fired because his statement made it clear that he would do it again if presented the chance and Covenant made it just as clear there wouldn’t be any such second chances.
News came this week that Browns’ great Dante Lavelli died. The Hall of Fame receiver was more than just a great football player; the original member of the Cleveland Browns was a part of my childhood even though he retired from the game before I was born.
Lavelli played on four Browns teams that won All-America Conference championships and three more that claimed NFL titles. Yes, there was a time when the Browns were regulars not only in the postseason, but in championship games.
It is said that those Cleveland Browns were the New York Yankees of professional football. For 10 consecutive seasons they played in the championship game of their league. They are the only professional football team to win three games within a seven-day span and two of those games were on a West Coast swing.
The Browns media guide only lists the glue-fingered Lavelli as 10th all-time on the Browns receiving list, but that doesn’t include his All-America Conference numbers which take him all the way to second – only behind Ozzie Newsome.
Lavelli joined the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1975, an honor long overdue since he retired from the game in 1956. But Lavelli has been in my personal hall since the early 1960s.
I grew up on stories from my dad and other relatives about the great Browns of old. When I would get excited about Frank Ryan, Gary Collins, Jim Brown and Bill Glass, they would regale me with tales of Otto Graham, Lavelli, Marion Motley and Bill Willis.
When I cheered and hooted when Gary Collins hooked an elbow around a goalpost to change direction and beat a defensive back for a touchdown, it was my dad who said Collins stole the move from Lavelli.
While the former were the heroes of my childhood, the latter were the bigger-than-life legends of my dreams. They were players I could never see on live TV and only a rare glimpse on vintage highlight shows.
So when the opportunity came to meet some of these men, there was only one person I considered taking with me – my dad.
The summer of 1999 marked by the return of the Browns after the originals had been stolen and carted off to Baltimore. I was covering the Hall of Fame inductions that year as well as the Hall of Fame game that paired the Browns against the Cowboys.
While Newsome was going into the Hall of Fame that year along with the likes of Lawrence Taylor, Tom Mack, Eric Dickerson and others, the real attraction for my dad and me was a special tailgate party prior to the Browns and Cowboys game.
We had tickets to the invitation-only bash as part of my media packet. All of the old Browns had been invited and we were there with one caveat – no microphones or interviews on the record.
I think that made it even more special. It was a time my dad and I could be together as fans again. My dad had always treated my brother and me with trips to Cleveland to watch and cheer the Browns of our youth. This time I could treat my dad with a trip to Canton to visit with the Browns of his.
We waited patiently and enjoyed leisurely conversations with my dad’s football heroes. Lou the Toe, the Amazing Otto and Dapper Dante all talked about the good ‘ole days with us.
I’ll never forget the look on my dad’s face. I knew then what I must have looked like on that first trip to watch my Browns in Cleveland Stadium. This time I was sharing his moment with him.
Those three are gone now – Groza just over a year after we chatted with him followed by Graham and now Lavelli. All that’s left are memories.
But the memory of them I will always cherish the most is those few minutes they allowed my dad to be a kid again while I stood and watched.
It’s one of those things you just can’t describe – not even here on The Other Side.
As a long-suffering Browns’ fan, and I do mean suffering and long in every sense of those two words, I’m used to my team not being in the NFL playoffs. It didn’t used to be that way, but ever since the late 1960s I’ve had to be content to pick a second favorite to root more often than not.
And if there wasn’t a team in the postseason I could muster up some feelings for, I usually relied on finding a team to dislike and root against. I mean really dislike and root against as passionately as I rooted for the Mistakes on the Lake.
It was the only way I could generate some enthusiasm for pro football in January. Either find a team to adopt or a team to despise.
The latter wasn’t too tough to do throughout the 1970s and ’80s with the evolution of the team at the other end of the turnpike in Pittsburgh. I mean I’ve really come to enjoy rooting against the Steelers as much I do for the Browns.
And since the Browns have only had one playoff game in the 10 years since they returned to the league and lost it to guess who – the Steelers – the Browns in the playoffs are an extremely rare sight, deserving of a place on the endangered species list.
In fact Cleveland has only played five playoff games in the last 20 years and lost three of them, two of them to Pittsburgh and one to Denver.
Not exactly a stellar history for the past two decades. Especially for a fan who grew up weaned on the stories of the Browns from the All-America Conference in the 1940s and the NFL teams of the ‘50s. Then in the ‘60s I actually saw them win an NFL title and come oh so close on several other occasions.
Then, like other Browns fans, I became consumed by the near misses we gave code names to like Red Right 88, The Drive and The Fumble.
It was especially tough given the Steelers’ gaudy display of Super Bowl rings with mantras like “One For The Thumb.” I used to go to Cleveland just to watch the Browns whip up on the boys from Steeltown when they were perennial also-rans.
The Steelers’ success made the Browns mediocrity even tougher to endure.
Then I developed an almost equal dislike for a second team – my old team that deserted me and my fellow fans for news digs and a new beginning in Baltimore. And what does my old team do? It did something it could never do in Cleveland, it won a Super Bowl.
And that brings me to my present dilemma this week in the AFC Championship Game. There is no team to adopt and root for because there are only two teams to root against – the Steelers and the Ravens.
It completely spoils an entire afternoon of football because I know they both can’t lose. One of them has to win and go back to where my team has never even been once
It’s unbearable. It’s embarrassing is what it is.
While the Terrible Towel waving Steelers fans and those who cheer for a team named after a bird that survives by eating road kill prepare themselves for the ultimate prize, we Browns Backers are left to contemplate starting over yet again with yet another new coach.
So what’s a true Browns fan left to do? Root for the Cardinals, another perennial loser who has somehow stumbled into the limelight of January football.
That’s who we’ll be cheering for here on The Other Side this weekend.
I must confess that I am becoming more and more amazed at how things have changed.
I used to evaluate change by comparing all that my 97-year-old grandmother had seen and experienced – from horse-drawn wagons used as school buses to rocket ships that land on the moon.
Maybe it’s my increasing age or my enjoyment of nostalgia, but lately I’ve been using my own life’s experiences as a gauge for change. Not only does it make me feel old at times, but it makes me feel out of touch and out of place.
Not too long ago I came across a story about a new Web site to help students and families with college funding. My kids are out of college now, but with a new grandson and being afraid to even guess what the cost of college might be in 18 years when he’ll be ready to matriculate I thought it might be worth checking out.
All I can say is my how things have changed!
I’m not talking about the Internet or even the accessibility of personal computers. When I was growing up computers covered entire office walls and spewed out IBM punch cards like spitballs in a 5th-grade classroom.
The Internet? Not even Al Gore was dreaming of the Internet when I was a kid. Nobody considered having a computer on their desktop, much less at home. Not when a decent calculator you used in school could cost you as much as $50, $60 or even $70.
The evolution of that technology paled in comparison to the evolution of thinking when it comes to getting money for college.
When I went it meant my folks took a second job and I often worked two jobs in the summer to put away some cash for books and college tuition. I worked while attending classes too, sometimes a 5-hour shift from 3-8 in the morning which meant I had to hustle back to campus to get to my first class on time.
A lot of us lived pretty frugally while sweating things out in a college dorm room without air conditioning. The first couple of years we didn’t even have phones in our dorms rooms and nobody had even heard of cell phones then.
It taught us the value of an education, not for what that education could get us, but what it cost to have. My own two daughters got through in much the same way.
But now thanks to www.gradefund.com students get paid for getting good grades. Not with scholarships or grants, but from family, friends, businesses and anyone else out there with some cash needed for nothing else than to pay someone for doing what they are supposed to do – study and do their best.
Of course the folks at www.gradefund.com get their cut of the action too in the way of transaction fees. All you have to do is get sponsors, get the grades and the money comes directly to your school or even in some cases to you.
The Web site says students are motivated to perform better when there’s a financial award for excellence.
Being paid for grades is not a new concept. In some ways, that’s exactly what a scholarship does. Even back in my day some of my classmates and friends were paid by their parents for good grades. But not in my house - then or now.
I asked my dad back then to see if that was an arrangement he would be willing to consider. He never answered what my good grades would be worth, but he did quickly explain what grades reflecting less than my best effort would cost me.
Participating in sports, riding my bicycle and later driving the family car topped a long list of lost privileges.
It used to be people understood the consequences of not doing what they were supposed to rather than getting paid extra for it. It also means there weren’t too many people walking around looking for a hand out for something they didn’t earn.
Not all change is good and some things appear to be better the way they used to be, at least here on The Other Side.