Celebrate NYE 2010 Downtown

Come downtown to ring in 2010! Fountain Square will feature a 15,000 pound Ice Bar, which includes a Red Bull ice luge. Faucets are frozen inside the bar so beer can be tapped from inside the ice. The bar is about 20 feet long, 12 feet deep and 10 feet high. Soda, snacks, draft beer, champagne and mixed drinks will be available for purchase.

Additionally, Strauss & Troy are sponsoring FREE ice skating and skate rentals, which are typically $2.50 each.

DJ Pillo will spin tunes all night to keep the non-skaters moving as well. At 11pm, watch Red Bull’s “New Year No Limits” TV special live on ESPN. Red Bull athlete Travis Pastrana will drive a car off a pier in Long Beach and land it on a barge floating in the harbor, in an attempt to set a world record for longest distance jump in a rally car.

Then at 11:59 pm be part of a live television crowd on Fox 19 that counts down to the New Year and welcomes 2010 with fireworks by Rozzi’s Famous Fireworks.

Sponsors of this event include Kroger, Toyota, P&G, Fox 19, Rewind 94.9 and Moms Like Me. The event is produced by Fountain Square Management Group, a subsidiary of 3CDC.

Parking is available all evening in the Fountain Square Garage for just $5. Or leave the car at home by taking a bus to the envent (click here to plan your trip). You could always take a cab home if needed.

This post also appeared at UrbanCincy.

Who Gives a Fox?

Imagine this guy standing on a street corner and ringing a bell, wearing a sandwich board that says “The End is Coming!”

Now imagine this little feller nailed to a cross, a reminder to all mankind of how much he suffered so that we may live in cable bliss.

One of them will have to budge before the ball drops at Times Square this Friday.

If you’ve watched television in the last month or so (and I’m guessing you have, unless you’ve been locked in a closet at Texas Tech) you’ve heard of the spat between Time Warner Cable and Rupert Murdoch’s Fox. Time Warner says Fox is threatening to hold your favorite shows hostage for a hefty ransom, while Fox claims Time Warner is bullying the network and pocketing your money instead of paying for quality.

In other words, two very large companies are bickering over stacks of cash while trying to look like poor Tiny Tim. Both have websites pleading their cases and begging for your support. It’s like King Kong verses Darth Vader begging you to place your testicles in the palms of their hands.

If there is no deal and Fox goes ahead with its threats to pull the plug Friday, you will lose:

• Fuel
• Fox Reality Channel
• Speed Channel
• Fox Soccer Channel
• Fox Sports World Espanol
• FX

Notice that you will not lose the Sugar Bowl with UC verses Florida. You will not miss the last week of the NFL or the “always entertaining” Fox robot. The same goes for 24, The Simpsons and House. Unfortunately, American Idol is also safe. It would be a different story if we were in, say, Chicago or New York where Fox owns and operates the local affiliate channels. Then we’d be fucked.

Here’s the background on this shitstorm.

Reportedly, Fox wants Time Warner to pay the network $1 per subscriber every month. Cable channels like TNT and USA already get these fees—ESPN reportedly gets about $4 per subscriber per month. Over-the-air networks like CBS and Fox have done without, relying on commercials to pay their bills. But the advertising market has crumbled, no thanks to gadgets like your DVR which make commercials oh so skipable. So Fox has decided to start dishing out ultimatums for more money. The company is already on a roll finding new ways to bilk you, including plans to charge you to access its news sites while accusing Google of stealing.

Not that Time Warner has been the better public citizen. The company made about $660 million in the last quarter, yet it is still raising cable rates nationwide, including here in the ‘Nati. The cable industry as a whole has raised rates more than 30% since 1996, or about three times the rate of inflation. Time Warner has also courted ways of charging you more if you use the Internet too much (read: if you download too much porn). Swell!

Blah, blah, blah. The reason I bring this up is because I wonder whether you’d be willing to switch to an “a la carte” cable system instead. Try out this calculator for an idea of how much you’d pay. I’m right around $30 a month, which includes must-haves Lifetime and Oxygen. Mock me all you want. I love made-for-TV movies starring LeAnn Rimes.

For now, we wait and see what will happen as the deadline looms ever closer. At least it’s better drama than a lot of the shows Fox has churned out lately. And way better than the Fox Reality Channel.

Dear Cincinnati Beacon: Shut Your Facehole.

So, I was flipping through my RSS feeds when I came across this article from the Cincinnati Beacon.  For the non-clickin’ public, here’s a quick summary:

“Who Dey is racist.”

Essentially, the piece runs down a number of references showing that the Bengals and Saints “Who Dey” and “Who Dat” chants, respectively, ultimately hearken back to racisty minstrel shows and are connected in some way to this guy.  This, of course, amounts to not much more than smartassed navel-gazing, and comes across as The Dean of Cincinnati being contrary for the sake of being contrary.

This seems to be the central mission of The Cincinnati Beacon, so at least it’s in keeping with how they generally approach everything.

So, let’s cede the overall conclusion of the piece: both chants hearken back to the minstrel shows it references.  Two questions immediately come to mind.  First, what purpose does saying this in the first place actually serve?  To be sure, it’s in The Cincinnati Beacon’s best interest to “spur conversation” or whatever, but when you say something this stupid and this disconnected from everything, what kind of response can you possibly expect?

Second: doesn’t our fanhood, collectively as a city, transcend race, regardless of the words we use to show it?

I don’t need hastily-slapped-together research to come to a conclusion of my own: shut your face, Cincinnati Beacon.  You’re not helping anyone.

Bowled Over

At first, it was fun.

Marmaduke once entertained me with all manner of improbable situations. I mean, how could this huge dog cause so much trouble and property damage?

But I grew up, and Marmaduke just kept coming. His owner kept accidentally using Marmaduke’s toothbrush. Marmaduke kept proving to be far too large for the family’s car. Marmaduke started making his comic strip neighbor Ziggy look hip.

In many ways, college football is starting to feel like Marmaduke.

Just like cramming your face with Christmas cookies or those boxes of chocolate-covered cherries that run you $1.50 at Walgreens, you can have too much of a good thing. We are still about a week removed from the BCS, and I’m already starting to get tired of all these damned bowl games.

34 bowl games now litter the landscape of sports. Tell me that you haven’t checked the sports page and wondered to yourself, “Wow, I had no idea there was such a bowl game.”  The NCAA has added 12 bowl games since 1999. That’s 12 more games in 10 years, including such heavy hitters as the New Mexico Bowl, the Meineke Car Care Bowl, and the succulent Papajohns.com Bowl. We also have the Little Caesar’s Pizza Bowl, which this year saw my alma mater lose despite playing better than the St. Louis Rams.  For a brief time, we even had the “Magic Jack” St. Petersburg Bowl. You know it’s bad when the crap you see on infomercials get their own bowl games. Negotiations for a “Snuggie Bowl” and a “ShamWow! Bowl” seem to be stalled, for now.

Much like the NBA and NHL’s never-ending playoff stories, college football teams should not be rewarded for mediocre seasons.  Much as I will enjoy the chance to make fun of Bobby Bowden’s hat and his offensive line’s “Mannequin” routine one last time, a 6-6 record does not warrant a bowl game appearance.

The lure of money is too strong to shut down or even slow down the bowl machine, so let’s try this solution to the glut of craptacular bowl matchups.  It’s called the Everyone Else Bowl.  You take every school that finished at least .500 and combine their teams into one “super squad.”  Then you match them up against that year’s biggest disappointment, such as USC or Notre Dame.  Hold the game on an abandoned airstrip in North Dakota.  Dig pits in the field and fill them with lava, alligators, spikes, catheter machines, and Fran Drescher. Everyone’s a winner.  Everyone, that is, except the cornerback who falls into the Fran Drescher pit.

Call it a mockery of the game, but it will at least be as entertaining as Marmaduke.

The Turkey Plant of Your (Bad) Dreams

Wow.  I thought that the days of companies doing stuff like this were over.  Yes, I’m completely naive.  For the non-clickin’ public, here’s a quick rundown:

• A local turkey plant deposits blood and juices into two private ponds in Harrison.
• This makes the surrounding area stink of dead shit.
• People don’t like that, neither does the EPA.
• Imagine going outside in the evening and breathing chicken fat.  Yum.
• The plant isn’t going to be doing this for much longer.

The story tells me that the company isn’t going to be allowed to do this anymore, and they’ve “Applied for a permit to treat the water at a new onsite treatment facility and then discharge it into the [Whitewater] river.”

This, of course, doesn’t sound like much of an improvement to me.  What are the details on this water treatment facility?  How well do water treatment facilities work?  For that matter, how do they work in the first damn place?  Also, is it appropriate to use a water treatment facility on turkey juices?

I’m not asking this to be a prick; I genuinely don’t know.  Well, maybe I am asking because I’m a prick.  But I really don’t know.

What I do know is this: if there aren’t any follow ups to this story, the Enquirer is doing a disservice to the people of Harrison.  And their noses.

Speaking of problems with the Enquirer, I think I’ve spotted one major issue with this story: WHAT’S THE NAME OF THE COMPANY?  We get the name of the owner (Kevin Kopp, ftr), but we’re never told the name of the plant.

Comic: If Vengeance Be My Destiny #32

VBMD is TCM’s Sunday comic.  You can catch up on the story right here, buddy.

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