Last week, we opened nominations for our first “Biggest Asshole in Cincinnati” tournament. If you voted in our Best Bar tournament, you pretty much already know what to expect. If not, here’s the rundown again.
You can nominate your favorite Cincinnati a-hole by dropping a comment below, or by emailing us, if you feel the need to stay anonymous. Once we get 64 names or by September 27, whichever comes first, we’ll start putting the names together and building the “bracket,” so to speak. On October 1, the assholery will begin. Well, the voting on the assholery will begin, anyhow.
So, let us know who you think the biggest a-hole in Cincinnati, living or dead, is–and why. They might just pull one out of, erm, you know, and turn out to be the biggest.
Posted: September 18th, 2009 | Author: maoglone | Filed under: Tournaments | Tags: Biggest Asshole in Cincinnati, The Biggest Asshole in All the Land | No Comments »
Alexander Coolidge wrote up a really nice piece on the Ohio casino issue that’ll be voted on in November. The story does a good job of presenting both sides, and ends up (surprise, surprise) open-ended.
Somehow, I’ve managed to find myself able to disagree with all sides on this issue. The proponents seem to have not much more than dollars in their eyes when the results they expect don’t really take everything into account. The anti-casino folks are a bit preoccupied with gambling addiction and crime. Both sides here are surely coming from a good place, but they’re both missing stuff.
It should be more regularly noted, I think, that a casino bill needs to be fair to the city and its population above all else. This is because, the city’s residents, presumably, are the folks who are going to be spending their money at the casino. They’ll also be working there. Does the Ohio casio bill favor the residents of Ohio? That’s what’s arguable here, and that’s what I don’t think came across in the story.
In terms of what’s missing from either side: the anti-casino folks aren’t getting at the simplest issue of why gambling can be a problem. Spending money on gambling means that an individual (which, for our purposes, we’ll call a “consumer”) isn’t going to get to spend that money on, say, groceries or any other of a myriad consumer goods. Of course, the larger economy isn’t going to care–they’re still spending that money on a business in the local area. Unless, of course, the bill allowing the casino futzes with the tax rate that the state charges the casino, driving down the originally perceived influx of cash heading into Ohio.
Too, I wonder how much Ohio will make from a casino versus, say, a waterpark, amusement park, or something like that. Not that we’d want a waterpark at Broadway Commons, but it doesn’t seem possible that the projected money will be even close–if proponents are saying that it’s time to keep the money in-state, are they taking into account that it’s most likely that they’re going to have to share clientele with the Indiana casinos and therefore reduce the actual amount of monies coming in?
The casino proponents are missing a couple things, as well. First: casinos are fun, and they’re a destination. It could be considered implied, of course, but it seems worth mentioning. Second: a fair casino bill really can help the community. Period. Of course, that’s what’s in the air right now.
In the end, I can see the value of casinos in Ohio, provided that the bill favors the residents of the state and not the casino owners as much as past bills have–and if they can figure out a way to get some of the money re-invested into the community. On the other hand, a casino downtown doesn’t seem like it’d be a great idea, unless it would be, as Mayor Mallory puts it, “integrated into the fabric of the community.” In other words, it has to be an all-around good thing.
Is the Ohio casino bill a good thing all around?
Posted: September 18th, 2009 | Author: maoglone | Filed under: News | Tags: Casino, local news, Ohio | No Comments »
On Halloween this year, local show organizer extraordinaire Matt Ogden is putting together a big ass zombie apocalypse with the help of Frequency 94.1, Glossa Makeup and The Cincinnati Man.
Here’s what you need to know: 20 bands. Undead people. Chainsaws, blood, fire, and a lofty concept: what’s the music you’d want to hear while you’re in the back of a speeding pickup truck firing off headshots as one of the last of the living?
Here’s a list of the confirmed bands so far:
Angels of Meth
Banderas
Mala In Se
De Los Muertos
Mad Anthony
Black Signal
The Creation Museum
Oso Bear
RX-2
Dead August
Lovely Crash
Faceblind
A Tether In Space
The fire eaters at Soul Fyre Productions will also be present.
The Halloween Zombie Apocalypse is going down at Mad Hatter in Covington. More news as information arrives, but know that it’s important to remove the head or destroy the brain.
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Front pg. thumb:http://www.flickr.com/photos/ericingrum/ / CC BY 2.0
Posted: September 17th, 2009 | Author: maoglone | Filed under: Event Schedule | Tags: Events, Halloween, local events, Zombie Apocalypse | 1 Comment »
Each week, The Cincinnati Man hosts a roundtable discussion where it poses a question and asks its writers to answer. This week: Which U.S. President is the manliest? You can find past roundtables here.
Megan Ayers
One might argue that there have been many, many manly heads of state. John Quincy Adams was known for keeping an alligator as a pet, installing the first pool table in the White House, refusing to be interviewed by women (as he thought it was beneath him), and taking daily dips in the Potomac in his birthday suit. Perhpas Martin Van Buren gets your vote for Manliest President, considering he didn’t mention his wife even once in his autobiography, kept tiger cubs as pets, and presided over the Senate with loaded pistols.
Or maybe James K. Polk is your man: after all, he survived a gallstone operation without the comfort of anesthesia or antiseptics. Franklin Pierce was actually arrested while in office for running over an old woman with his horse, and in a tradition still practiced among the famous and wealthy, he got off scot-free, while Abraham Lincoln, the president most-portrayed in movies, might have had the most manly of faces with a beard, a wart on his right cheek, and a scar over his right eye from a fight with a gang of thieves.
click for photo credit
However, my vote for “Manliest President”, without a doubt, goes to our 7th president, Andrew Jackson. Among his many notable manly traits, he was handed a baby to kiss but declined, was shot in the chest during a dual over some unkind words about his wife, but didn’t even fall down. Instead, he killed the other man and never had the bullet removed as it was too near his heart. Jackson was involved in another dual where the slug shattered his shoulder, and the ball became embedded in his left arm. When told he’d have to amputate it, he refused.
Jackson raised eleven children, none of which were his own. The seventh president displaced more than 50,000 Native Americans from their ancestral lands, and in a similar bone-headed move, proclaimed to his death that the earth was flat. However, he has been the only President of the United States to pay off the national debt, ever.
A tough kid, Jackson was a POW of the Revolutionary War when he was only 13 years old. He continued this manliness all the way to 1835 when one of his many enermies attempted to shoot him with two pistols at point-blank range. When neither pistol discharged, Jackson pursued the man and beat him with his cane. In the end, Andrew Jackson’s pet parrot had to be removed from his own funeral because the animal swore raucously throughout the ceremony.
Andrew Jackson: seventh president, $20 biller, slave owner, cock-fighter, bullet-taker, and all around jerk–definitely the most manly president.
Citations:
http://www.facts-about.org.uk/american-president-andrew-jackson.htm
http://home.att.net/~jrhsc/prestriva.html
Mike Burkhart
click for photo credit
Ok – Jackson may have whored around a lot and not known that Eratosthenes (guy who calculated the Earth’s circumference, axis tilt, etc.) was right. That doesn’t make him manly. The bullet catching does, however, make him a good sport. Instead of being a catcher, I would rather be a pitcher though, and when it comes to taking a bullet there is no better president than Theodore Roosevelt. After his career as president, Roosevelt created his own party (The Bull Moose party) and was shot preceding a speech he was to deliver. Instead of going to the hospital he surmised on his own that since he wasn’t coughing up blood, the bullet had not penetrated his lung and decided to deliver his speech whilst bleeding through his suit vest.
This crazy “Rough Rider” spearheaded the Panama Canal project (you may have heard of it,) which allows boats to not have to go all the way around the Strait of Magellan (that’s in South America.) Can you hear that? Oh, that’s applause. Yeah, because this mother changed the face of the planet. Can your president do that? “Oh, I’m sorry, split two out of the seven continents in half?” Yeah, I didn’t think so. This guy was also a published novelist, skilled outdoorsman, war veteran, Deputy Sheriff, Governor, and is the first and to-date only President to be awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously (that means after death). By the way he also won some award for negotiating the end to a foreign conflict. Wait no, he was the first American ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in mediating a treaty in the Russo-Japanese War. Yeah, that’s all. No big whoop.
Credited with the phrase “speak softly and carry a big stick,” this all-American president went on safari immediately after his presidency ended. I would think that killing big game would be child’s play compared to running the country, but apparently TDR did this for science. Science! That’s why my homeboy had his ugly mug exploded into a mountain, because of pure badassery. In sum, TDR was a well-rounded, well-spoken, aggressive badass of a man-president. I would challenge you to find a more manly president, yet you would lose not only in America, but in other countries as well (especially Panama).
Citations: The Internet.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Roosevelt)
David Ben
click for photo credit
Manliest US President was, undoubtedly, Millard Fillmore. First off, dude grew up near where I grew up in New York state, and then went on to practice law in that wonderful (other) mistake-by-the-lake, Buffalo. Have you been to Buffalo? In January? In the mid 1800′s? Guy had to have had some stones.
But thats not all. ‘Ol Millard’s real claim to fame was that his legislative talent made the Compromise of 1850 happen, which (temporarily) averted Civil War. This compromise did several things:
- Admitted California as a free state.
- Settled the Texas boundary and compensate her.
- Granted territorial status to New Mexico.
- Placed Federal officers at the disposal of slaveholders seeking fugitives.
- Abolished the slave trade in the District of Columbia.
Now I know that the whole Fugitive Slave Law deal didn’t sit too well with them there Yankees, but without it, Fillmore wouldn’t have been able to achieve the compromise he did, sparing the nation from going to war with itself, albeit only for about a decade.
Wes Crout
click for photo credit
War hero. Beard wearer. Awesome name-holder. I’ll throw our 18th Head-of-State into the voting pool. Ulysses S. Grant is considered by some to be the reason the Civil War went the way it did. A known fighter, Grant did his part to fracture the Confederate forces and put their top dude, Gen. Robert E. Lee, into a Gracie-style hold that effectively ended the war.
Now, his reign as our president was remarkably less impressive. Noted to have often seemed puzzled, Ulysses was kinda “behind the wheel, but with nobody driving.” Like a true man, he never really stopped to ask for directions, and that’s why we remember him for his tenure as a fighter, not as a president.
Jason McGlone
click for photo credit
I gotta go with George Washington here. He was a war hero, having led the United States to a noted victory in a little thing known as “The Revolutionary War.” When it was suggested that he become King of America, he said, “Fuck that, we don’t need no king. This ain’t England, bitches.” Not sure that’s a direct quote, but you get the point. Also, there’s no evidence that that actually happened. Again, though, there’s the whole thing with you getting the point.
He was a laudanum junky. Like your grandfather, he had false teeth. He was the only slave-holding President to successfully emancipate his slaves. He managed to avoid being significantly injured in any of the battles he participated in and/or led. Speaking of that, in a letter to his brother, Washington writes, “I heard the bullets whistle and, believe me, there is something charming to the sound of bullets.” This, of course, means that he’s manlier than you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington
http://chss.montclair.edu/English/furr/gbi/docs/kingmyth.html
http://www.cracked.com/article_15895_p4.html
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front pg. thumb:http://www.flickr.com/photos/walkadog/ / CC BY 2.0
Posted: September 16th, 2009 | Author: maoglone | Filed under: On Manhood | Tags: Manliest President, Manliness, President of the United States, roundtable | 2 Comments »
The Cincinnati Man isn’t politically active, per se. Sure, we’ve got some opinions, and we’ll let you know when yours is wrong, but we don’t really get too involved in the day to day fights.
However, today we ask your help. This November, voters in the City of Cincinnati will have the opportunity to vote on Issue 9. It’s an amendment to our City Charter that will require a vote before any money is spent on any passenger rail project. If this passes, it will be nearly impossible to receive and use federal, state, county, city and donated funds on the proposed streetcar, the proposed 3C rail corridor connecting Cincinnati to Chicago, NYC and DC, high speed rail, and even that little train at the zoo.
If you like the idea of adding transportation options while creating thousands of jobs and jump-starting our local economy, consider voting NO on 9.
Learn if you are registered by clicking here.
Register to vote by clicking here.
Here’s where we want some help. A group called Cincinnatians for Progress is organizing some people get the word out there about why voting NO on 9 makes sense for Cincinnati. Visit this web site to help out. You can sign up to put a yard sign in your yard, volunteer for an hour some Saturday handing out flyers, shoot some video, host a party or even toss a couple of bucks their way. If are on Twitter and feel compelled to spread the word that way (it’s free, you know), include “#NOon9″ at the end of your tweet.
And one more thing: it’s not a God-damned streetcar amendment. We’re voting on a hell of a lot more than just the streetcar. Remember the amendment that prohibited all alcohol? They didn’t call it the Christian Moerlein amendment, because it affected so much more than just one type of alcohol. This is a far-reaching proposal that will have devastating impacts on our city. That’s why a bunch of people who disagree with the streetcar also recommending voting NO on 9. See this web site to see who else is voting NO on 9. The number and diversity just might surprise you.
Posted: September 16th, 2009 | Author: David Ben | Filed under: Cincinnati | Tags: Christian Moerlein, Cincinnati, NO on 9, streetcar | No Comments »