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westervlibrary Mark your calendars: Registration for Move w/Music and Storytime sessions starting March 31st opens this Monday at 9am! Be 1st on the list.

I’d forgot I was following the Westerville Library on Twitter.

Twitter… it’s not just for chatting about the weather or trivia about mouse hunting laws in Cleveland. There was a great triviabot Tweet that reminded me of Westerville. The Tweet was about prohibition…. that some cities sold their jails because they were so convinced that crime was because of drinking, with prohibition they they did not need jails anymore. Made me think of Westerville and it’s history in the temperance movement.

Are you a Central Ohio Twitterer? I am @maureenmccabe

Columbus do you Twitter?

The Blizzard of ‘08

triviabot “ In Cleveland, Ohio, it’s illegal to catch mice without a hunting license.”

Or an Ohio city’s hunting law anyway… not a Central Ohio city but I can’t resist this little snippet from Twitter via the Triviabot.

I love the triviabot on Twitter but my friend Carole Cohen in Cleveland says this piece of Ohio trivia is not true. You do not need a hunting license to catch mice in Cleveland… I wonder though if the difference is between hunting and trapping… Maybe trapping mice is legal but if you are going to use a gun in your mouse hunt you need a hunting license???

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Wikipedia mouse trap photo credit: ” Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation license, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation license”.

Wednesday, the New York Times, advertising column covered the controversy of Columbus retailer, Abercrombie & Fitch donating funds to Nationwide Children’s Hospital for an emergency facility, which will be named after the New Albany based retailer. Children’s advocacy groups and individuals have formed a coalition to lobby the Children’s Hospital in Columbus to not put the Abercrombie & Fitch name on the facility.

When a Corporate Donation Raises Protests

The money, 10 million dollars was donated to Columbus Children’s Hospital in 2006 by the Central Ohio retailer. The hospital since renamed Nationwide Children’s Hospital after Nationwide Insurance donated 50 billion dollars, will complete the emergency facility and trauma center by 2012.

In the NYT column Jon M. Fitzgerald the president of the Nationwide Children’s Hospital Foundation is quoted that the hospital does not sell naming rights.Often controversial Abercrombie & Fitch is an inappropriate sponsor for the children’s hospital according to the coalition of children’s advocates.  A& F is guilty of “sexualizing and objectifying children” in the words of, the director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood in Boston, Susan Linn quoted in the New York Times advertising column.  The columnist, Stuart Elliott also quotes Linn as describing A&F as “among the worst corporate predators.”

Columbus tops the list of Top 10 Up-And-Coming Tech Cities which came out Monday Forbes latest cities list came out.includes  ‘In Pictures: Top 10 Up-And-Coming Tech Cities’ and says of Columbus:

“No. 1: Columbus, Ohio. In 1997, the Battelle Memorial Institute, Ohio’s largest research center, based in Columbus, managed a single lab for the U.S. Department of Energy with an annual budget of $1 billion. A decade later, Battelle oversees seven major laboratories for different federal agencies; current budget: $4 billion.”

The Forbes article written by William Pentland is based on a survey of cities done by  professor of public policy at George Mason University, Philip Auerswald.    Auerswald first looked at ”regional innovation trends” looking for:

advanced materials(?)

nano-crystals and quantum dots

polymers and plastics

 micro-systems

cell microbiology

Auerswald then looked for patents… or relationships between patents for technical areas.  Columbus is number one on the Forbes list which includes Santa Fe NM, Pittsburgh PA, Milwaukee WI, Yuma AZ, Lake Charles LA. 

Look out Silicon Valley….

In “How’s the economy in your hometown?” in USA Today, the Columbus Metropolitan Area gets a green dot for “Expansion.” The state of Ohio as a whole is  “At Risk” of recession according to the interactive map, so shows up on the US maps as yellow.   The legend on the map shows the green states (and metroplitan areas click on a state and it shows you cities.)

In housing the state was basically flat “Ohio -0.4%” (this is home value) for last year. The article breaks out state economies by tourism, motor vehicle production, exports and agriculture as well as housing. Using motor vehicle production for 2006 Ohio is fourth on the list titled:

“Top 10 states with motor vehicle production as highest percentage of gross state product in 2006″

Neighboring Michigan is of course one of the states shown in red for recession on the interactive map… The USA Today article says the states that were in recession at the beginning of 2008, California, Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Michigan account for 25% of the US total economic output.

Thanks to Allan Young’s Incoherence  for the heads up about the USA Today article.