Ypsilanti School Bond election 2

This entry was posted in schools Ypsilanti on by (updated 6856 days ago)

ypsd.gifIn case you haven’t heard on Tuesday August 7 there is a bond election for the Ypsilanti Public Schools. The district wants to raise $40 million for upgrades to the district facilities. A lot of mechanical updates are needed to school buildings to keep them up to code and safe for the kids staff. Some of the money will also be used for technology upgrades as well as building the new bus garage. If the bond is approved there won’t be any tax increase because the millage will be replacing an expiring millage so this won’t cost local property owners any extra money. I urge anyone who’s reading this to head out to the polls on Tuesday and vote in favor of the bond. Our district needs it.

Can we please start ignoring celebrities!

This entry was posted in this and that on by (updated 6862 days ago)

What the hell is wrong with people?  With all the problems in the world why are so many people obsessed with seeing how stupid rich, famous people can be?  Yesterday over on ABG one of the guys wrote a post about a certain idiot who happens to be heiress to a hotel fortune.  I will neither mention her name or link directly to the post but she is hardly the only one of her kind.  The reason I bring all this up is because that post happened to be the most viewed post of the last thirty days on the site after the AOL home page linked to it.  What did she do that was so noteworthy?  She traded in her Range Rover for a Ford Escape Hybrid.  Who cares what celebrities drive? especially the likes of her.  We all need to make a pledge that whenever anyone mentions Paris, Britney, Lindsay, Russell, Robert, Mel or any of the other idiots who drink too much or use too many drugs or whatever, that we will immediately change the channel, leave the site and generally ignore their foibles.  Stop watching the slow moving train wreck that is celebrity life.   We need to stop enabling these morons.

Vultures 2

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This morning Max and I drove down to the Transportation Research Center in East Liberty Ohio to cover a story I’m working on for AutoblogGreen. About twenty miles from our destination we spotted this group of vultures having breakfast by the side of the road and stopped to grab some shots.

Vote for local businesses as the best 4

This entry was posted in food Ypsilanti on by (updated 6434 days ago)

I got an email from Kate Conat tonight that Channel 4 in Detroit is running a poll right now called 4 the Best with all kinds of SE Michigan businesses nominated in various categories.  Locally we’ve got several nominees including Cafe Luwak for best sandwich shop, the Sidetrack for best burger and Smokehouse Blues for best wings.  Zingerman’s Bakehouse is also in the running for best bakery.  Head over to www.clickondetroit.com/4thebest and cast your votes for some local businesses.

This entry was posted in cars Ypsilanti on by

smart fortwoIt’s that time of year again, the Art Fairs are back! The action kicks off this weekend at the Corner Brewery with the Shadow Art Fair. From noon to midnight on Saturday July 14 over forty artists will be hawking their wares amidst live music from Patrick Elkins, Black jake and the Carnies and more. Once the fun is over at the brewery if you have any cash left over you can over to A2 for some other fair. Actually their is a reason why some of you might want to head down to South University between Wednesday and Saturday to check out the Smart USA road show. The tiny Smart ForTwo is coming to the US market early next year and they are touring the country this Summer to let people check out the cars. If you’re interested you can even get a test drive in a Smart.

Reasons not to buy an iPhone 4

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iphoneJust in case you haven’t been paying any attention for the past six months there is a new cell phone going on sale next week. Some company called Apple is putting it out. Apple apparently has a reputation for great industrial design in their products and this phone sure looks cool. Now looking cool and actually working well don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Certainly an iPod looks cool and the click wheel interface definitely works great, but the touch screen interface of the iPhone is a whole new ball game. It remains to be seen how well it work and it may be great. Or not! Not having actually tried an iPhone I’ll stick to outlining some other reasons not to buy one regardless of how well it works.

  1. AT&T. This alone should be all the reason anyone needs to stay away from the iPhone regardless of how good it may be. AT&T has cooperated willingly in the NSA domestic spying program and for that they should be punished by everyone refusing to do business with them. They have also recently announced plans to monitor the data that their DSL customers are sending and receiving so that they can notify the extortionists at the RIAA and MPAA when suspect content is being transmitted.
  2. Cost. The 4GB model will be $499 and the 8GB version is $599. These are the kinds of prices usually charged for unlocked phones that can be used with any cellular provider. Usually when you buy a phone from a company like AT&T or Verizon they subsidize the price in exchange for signing up for a one or two year contract. If you leave your contract early you pay a hefty early termination fee. AT&T will be charging the ETF even though they are not subsidizing the phone.
  3. More Cost. The phone goes on sale next Friday and AT&T has just released the service plans for the iPhone and they start at $60 a month for 450 minutes.  If you have a family plan you’re SOL, no sharing minutes.
  4. If you currently have a GSM phone and plan, you can’t just buy an iPhone and pop in yor SIM card.  You have to sign up for a new two year service plan with AT&T
  5. With a regular iPod you can enable disk mode and drag files onto the drive and use it for portable storage.  The iPhone has no disk mode.
  6. With most phones today you can drop any mp3 file on the phone and use it as a ringtone.  The iPhone you can’t use your own files as ring tones.  You’ll have to buy from AT&T.
  7. You can’t record video with the iPhone camera, stills only
  8. You can’t swap out the battery.  If you have a cell phone that you use with any regularity you know the chances of the phone having any useful life by the middle of the second year is slim.  Presumably you can open up an iPhone like an iPod and replace the battery but it’s not trivial.  No one should sell a phone or media player without a user replaceable battery.
  9. The durability of the glass face on the iPhone is still a very open question.  I’d wait and see on that one.
  10. Finally and most importantly, AT&T is the only service provider. See reason No. 1 above.

Ypsi Board of Education to vote on reinstating Braves nickname! 2

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The agenda for the June 25 Ypsi School Board meeting is out and Tom Reiber has put the following item on the action items list.

     h. Ypsilanti High School Nickname Reinstatement Recommendation (Enclosure #9)

All of us with some common sense need to call Mr. Reiber and tell him that the students have selected a new nickname and it’s time for the adults to start acting like grown ups instead of whiny little babies and get over it.  The kids are.

You can reach Tom Reiber at home at (734) 434-1425 and by e-mail at techtom@comcast.net.  Everyone should come out to the board meeting on Monday night and speak out against this.

Statement to the Board of Education on sex ed and the Braves 10

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Last Monday night I made the following statement before the Ypsilanti Public Schools Board of Trustees during the public comments and I wanted to share it here.

I’ve got two kids in the Ypsilanti Schools. My daughter has been in the Ypsilanti public schools for ten years and my son for seven. In that decade aside from ridiculously cursory HIV awareness, they’ve gotten absolutely zero reproductive health education. The fact that this district has failed to provide any comprehensive health education to it’s students is an absolute disgrace. Just because one very vocal opponent has repeatedly spoken up at every single meeting of this board and some administrators may be squeamish about teaching kids about condoms, it’s not an excuse for continuing to stall on a very important element of these kids education.

Earlier this year you saw the results of a survey that was conducted by the Reproductive Health Advisory Board where almost seven hundred parents overwhelmingly said they want comprehensive reproductive health education. Some people may want to just tell kids not to have sex before marriage but the reality is that sticking your head in the sand like that will do absolutely nothing to protect kids. No matter how much you urge kids not to have sex the reality is that it will happen. Not all of them will but a significant number will. They always have and they always will. Believing anything else is deluding yourself.

Given that we need to make sure that we teach kids about healthy relationships, alternatives to intercourse and how to minimize risks if they do choose to have sex. The reproductive health advisory board has spent more than two years evaluating curricula and have chosen a comprehensive plan. They presented it to you and in public presentations. It’s time to stop stalling just because certain members of this administration and a very vocal minority of the population are uncomfortable with reproductive health education. The parents have spoken and the kids need this. We must face the reality that kids will have sex and most parents are just as uncomfortable as you are when it comes to talking about sex to them. Any parents that don’t want their kids to get this education are free to opt out of either the whole program or any individual lesson.

Finally on an unrelated note, this board in a previous iteration made a difficult and correct decision to retire the Braves nickname. It’s just a nickname and people need to get over it and move on. It offends a group within our community and tradition doesn’t make it OK. I urge you not to re-open this issue and not to restore the name. Starting this fall and over the coming years the kids will get used to a new name and within a few years none of them will care about the old name. Meanwhile alumni will always have their memories. Thank You.

What the … !

This entry was posted in TV on by (updated 6441 days ago)

After storming into TV viewers collective consciousness eight and a half years ago, The Sopranos stumbled out punch drunk and not knowing when to quit last night. The first two seasons were absolutely brilliant with top notch acting and writing. Ever since then David Chase and his team have taken longer and longer between successive seasons as all manner of famous and not so famous actors have gotten in on the action.

In engineering there is an old saying that in every project there comes a time when you have to shoot the engineers and get on with the job. It appears that someone needed to whack Mr. Chase at some point and finish the damn story about four years ago. As the wait time for each season stretched out the result seemed to be that Chase was just trying to jam in too many meandering, pointless story lines. The Sopranos needed some serious editing, but most definitely not the kind the final episode got last night.

By the time we finished watching that final hour last night, it seemed like they had shot three or four hours of footage from three or four separate scripts produced by different writers and then just through threw together randoms sequences from each into a one hour episode. At the end Chase looked at what they had wrought and just said “Aw Fuck It!” and turned off the lights. That was without a doubt the most unsatisfying ending I have ever seen. For a series that brought us so many brilliant performances over the years along with exposing some great but obscure music to go out in this way was a disgrace.

Positive attention for Ypsi events

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corvairFor those who haven’t been paying attention to my activity over on Autoblog.com I’ve been giving car related events in Ypsi some national blog love of late.  I’ve done features on the Show and Shine, Vintage VW and Orphan Car shows in recent weeks.  If you didn’t get a chance to get down to Riverside Park you can still see some of the vehicles that were on display.  It was nice to see a big turnout for each of the events both from participants and spectators.