5chw4r7z:: the ethos of downtown Cincinnati

Sid Saturday

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If you can't afford, or are too cheap to buy a music pass like me, this weekend's MPMF has a midway located at 12th Street, between Vine and Walnut. Bands, food and beer you can't go wrong. In between bands tour the Box Truck Carnival. Tonight is also Final Friday in OTR so if you want to witness an absolutely insane night in Cincinnati this is the night people.

Need to get to another show fast? If you have a wristband jump on one of the Chipotle sponsored bikes.

I met everyone from the Queen City Project last night, what a cool group of guys, the work they've been doing is fantastic.

Galaxaga, I had the high score last night

[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati

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American Made, Cincinnati Made

Recently VisuaLingual of OTR was in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s inaugural American Made competition. We won't know the winner until Oct 8th, so until then Maya invited me to tour what constitutes their production space right as they were getting ready for a huge retail shipment of Seed Bombs to Restoration Hardware and Anthropologie. The reason for the visit? To see why they're in need of the $10,000 prize.

They need more space, and I would add, a ground floor location. I can't imagine having to carry raw materials up three floors and then all the finished products back down three flights. Crazy, but they do what they have to do. Maya says the Restoration Hardware order was their biggest most complex order to date, 133,920 individual seed bombs in 70 cartons on 4 skids weighing in at 2,700 lbs.
How did a couple of designers get all tied up in this? It all started with the idea of a seed bomb; could they could be produced and marketed as a product? And from there Maya says it got crazy. What started out on their dining room table led to stories in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. 100 seed bomb packets has turned into an almost overwhelming amount of work in cramped quarters.

Looking around the space at what they were doing got me thinking about just how labor intensive manufacturing is, no getting around it. But even with all the lip service it gets from politicians manufacturing doesn't get any love, it just isn't glamorous. To contrast, tech is sexy- no one ever got in trouble throwing money at it. I guess what gets me is that no one is asking the right questions. Low tech businesses like local, non-chain retail and manufacturing requires a copious amount of people and a large support system creating jobs and all that money stays right here in the area. On the other hand, tech firms require few people or resources, you end up with a tech firm like Giftiki which got mentoring and $20k from the Brandery. They raised a million dollars, were sold and the developers all moved to California.
I'm not picking on the Brandery, the people there are doing incredible things, I just know a little more about them because they've gotten tons of press lately. And VisuaLingual, I suppose there are worse things in the world than demand for your product beginning to outstrip your ability to supply it.[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati

5 seed bombs tossed

to live and ride in Cin-say

So we dodged a few rain drops, and a few Reds fans and had an interesting ride past the lower industrial section of downtown. At the end we had a cool detour through the 2nd St transit tunnel. Photofocus also showed up handing out goodies. They promised to be back next week too so if you've been wanting to attend an UBBC ride and/or want to know more about Fotofocus Cincinnati we'll be on Fountain Square again next Tuesday at 6:30.

[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati

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Anubis

[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati

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Cincinnati Park[ing] Day

Park[ing] Day is an annual worldwide event where artists, designers and citizens transform metered parking spots into temporary public parks. Its been said that Cincinnati is one of the better cities for a proliferation of fantastic public parks and this is true. But the main idea of Park[ing] Day is that a spot on a public street has more potential to a city than to just be a place marker for an empty vehicle.
Celebrated on the third Friday of September, this years event saw a broad participation of arts groups and businesses in Cincinnati.

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Jay Bruce* is livin large at Great American and at Bakersfield

*It probably isn't Jay Bruce's McClaren. But it could be!
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Sid Saturday

[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati

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rear view mirror

[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati

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Benglas pregame flyover

While not as dramatic as jets flying over and shaking the building it was still inspiring to see a 70yr old Mitchell, the type of bomber used by "Jimmy" Doolittle in the first bombing of japan in WWII.

[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati

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8am East Cmpus

[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati
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five years ago I joined twitter

Jackie pushed me into it, she's my fairy social media mother.
Took me awhile to figure it out, twitter begins to make sense the more people you follow and vice versa.
Five years?
That's like forever on the internet, considering how stupid some people say it is it has staying power.
[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati

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Findlay Market

Busy couple days at Findlay Market last week. Started out with a blogger meetup and eating food sourced from, where else, Findlay Market vendors. Of course its not going to surprise anyone who frequents the market that the snacks were high quality and amazing.

One of the highlights of the night for me was finally meeting Stephanie of Small Girl Adventures fame.
I'm still a dork meeting bloggers I'm a fan of. I always feel like a pimply faced 14yr old with my voice cracking.

Ilene, a rare picture of Jeff and Courtney

Ilene and I had planned on doing a Tour de 'Spresso and we did but there were some snafu's and I don't think it ended up being a fair comparison. Dojo's espresso is still number one and they probably would have been anyhow. I'll have to size them up head to head with 1215 on Vine some Saturday, that will give them some competition.
Did you know after your have two espressos you feel like you can anything? Like flip cars? It almost came to that at one point.