Mark Knows It All

One of the anecdotal indicators of the economy is traffic. If traffic in the Mahoning Valley acts as a local barometer, things must be booming around here. I remember when Route 11 was first constructed. You could shoot a canon up the freeway and hit nothing. It was a consolation prize for Kirwin’s Ditch (the lake to river canal), and for many years it seemed the canal would actually have more traffic!!! Now it's packed. Bumper to bumper during rush hours between Columbiana and Mahoning Avenue; and from 680 to Route 82, it is extremely busy pretty much any time of the day. Have you driven to Akron on I-76 lately? Where are all of those people going? It’s not only car traffic. There are lots and lots of trucks. It seems like every day I am passing an oversized load with an interesting piece of heavy equipment tethered to its flat bed. I suspect that most of it is headed to the new Vand M pipe mill and other related Marcellus Gas Shale endeavors. Some of this st...

It’s time for the NCAA to wake up and smell the coffee. Over the last 18 months at least nine major schools have been investigated for various athletic violations related to amateur status of sport teams. These are big schools including Ohio State, Michigan and USC. Now the University of Miami is in the NCAA’s crosshairs. Did it ever occur to the NCAA with so many “serious” violations of its policies, the trouble may lie with the policies rather than the violations? Reports this past week stated the University ofMiami had consistently and knowingly violated NCAA rules by allowing a donor, one Nevis Shapiro, to shower players over a period of years with money, jewelry and whores. Nice work if you can get it. Mr. Shapiro is now serving 20 years in jail for running a $930 million Ponzi scheme. With friends like that who needs enemies? Unlike Ohio State, the allegations infer that the Miami mucky mucks knew this was going on and looked the other way for years. In the Ohio State matte...

From time to time things happen that absolutely confound me. What is Obama doing in America’s heartland driving around in those black monstrosities that we paid for? What is he doing? He says he wants to talk to America about unemployment. What for? What doesn’t he know after 3 years in office? And by the way, who ordered those black multimillion dollar mass transit vehicles? If it was under Obama, we need to know. If it was under Bush, we need to know. Who else is going to ride in those things? They said “heads of state.” Well, that’s one way to keep the riff raff out of the country. In all seriousness, let’s go through what the tour director of this bus travelogue has done. TARP 1, TARP 2; the trillion dollar stimulus; Obamacare; Quantitative Easing 1; Quantitative Easing 2; NO BUDGET FOR 800 DAYS, and when he produced one, it was so over the top with spending even his own party voted against it. Now he is touring the Midwest at our expense, and will be vacationing in Martha’s...

In that great expanse of America located in what my liberal friends call fly-over country, somewhere in between New York City and Los Angeles, is the little town of Shiloh, Ohio. It is located about 20 miles northwest of Mansfield near the bustling towns of Plymouth, Willard, and Greenwich (pronounced Green Witch). About 10 miles up the pike is the town of Shenandoah (pronounced shawn-a-door), just a little ways from Celeryville. Population is about 850. It has a diner, a Methodist and Lutheran Church, a post office and a bank, and an historical society. My late father-in-law’s barber shop still has the barber pole outside even though the space is now occupied by a beautician. This is America. I have never been one to ascribe some sort of special status or wisdom or insight to life to those who live in small towns, or any one else for that matter. On the other hand, I am not willing to dismiss them as country rubes and racist bumpkins who cling to their bibles and guns because they d...

What kind of ice cream do you like? My favorite is spumoni, and it better be the good…not the Neapolitan Ice Cream stuff you buy at Sparkle Market. Three layers of variably colored layers does not Spumoni make (huh?). Spumoni needs to be made with love. It needs a rich chocolate layer with bits of chocolate throughout. It needs a pistachio layer with chopped pistachios adding texture. It needs a strawberry layer with real dried fruit bits added…preferable soaked in something good like wine or rum. THAT makes good spumoni. Then top it off with some real whipped cream and sprinkles. Spumoni, like all good stuff, is hard to come by these days. There was an editorial cartoon in the Vindicator where a couple driving a car stopped and asked someone at an Internet Café for directions. The guy answered: “A retail bookstore? You drive past the drive-in theater. That’s down where the doctor who makes house calls lives. Turn left at the record store. It’s right across the street from the full s...