Won't Somebody Think of the Teens
Teen suicides surge, a stolen Pawpaw costume and other uplifting news delivered to your inbox.
It’s Thursday and I’ve now had the song Misbehavin’ stuck in my head for over 72 hours. I should probably call a doctor but I’d pay $8,000 for him to walk in the room and say what are you talking about doofus this sounds like an awesome problem because this song rocks.
Other than that I’ve recovered from my bite of the Big Apple and it’s already Thursday baby which means the Rams are probably starting to hear the steps of that big brown bully coming down the hall to stuff their handsome coach in a locker.
Episode 3 of the Sadcast released yesterday too if you want to kill 27 minutes of your boss’ time before starting work. I liked this episode though my verbal tics are still a work in progress because I lack a formal education and how excited I get when I talk about the only thing in my life that matters outside of my cats.
TEEN SUICIDES SURGE ACROSS AMERICA BUT ESPECIALLY IN OHIO
If a new state ranking comes out you can rest assured Ohio will be near the top if the subject is “increase in registrations for phony LLCs used to money launder” or “states that want small business tyrants to control every aspect of your life.”
Anything else measuring any other statistic usually ends bad for our beloved state.
Teen suicides have surged across America but our state remains bad at getting teenagers the mental healthcare they need. We also struggle with keeping babies alive which is a weird thing for a state controlled by politicians who consider themselves “pro-life.”
From Gabe Rosenberg of wosu.org:
A national report ranks Ohio in the bottom half in the country for the health of women, infants and children.
The United Health Foundation released its annual report of healthiest states on Tuesday. Ohio is ranked at 32, the same position as last year.
The foundation’s report found an increase in teen suicide and child mortality rates across the nation.
In Ohio, teen suicides have gone up by almost 46% percent since 2016, when the report first came out. Over just three years, the state’s teen suicide rate increased to 10.8 deaths per 100,000 adolescents.
Over the same period, Ohio’s child mortality rates went up 16%, to 27.9 deaths per 100,000 children.
I love America but it’s embarrassing we’re as rich as we are and we can’t protect school children from mass murders let alone reckon with why so many of our children want to kill themselves. Obviously I have no detailed plan but then again I’m not the one who signed up to be in charge.
Perhaps though we could start with a fair tax code that invests in people instead of rewarding plutocrats and big business.
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS PAWPAW?
Be on the lookout folks a bandit got drunk at the Ohio Pawpaw festival this week and pinched a pawpaw costume.
From Terry Smith of athensnews.com:
The mascot for a festival that just attracted 9,000 attendees to Lake Snowden this past weekend remained missing early Wednesday afternoon, the apparent victim of larceny. Yes, the giant pawpaw puppet costume, patron saint of the Ohio Pawpaw Festival, has disappeared.
Otherwise, the festival went well, according to its directors (more on that later).
Word first went out about the missing pawpaw puppet costume around 10 Tuesday night when the Facebook page for the Ohio Pawpaw Festival posted the following message:
MISSING. The Giant Pawpaw. Tall, with green skin, a brown stem, yellow pulp and several seeds. Last seen at the 2019 Ohio Pawpaw Festival, at Lake Snowden, on Saturday night or early Sunday morning. Missed terribly by the Baby Pawpaw. Please message here or email pawpawfest@gmail.com with any information leading to its safe return.
All joking aside, we really do want this lovingly handcrafted puppet back. If you saw anything, please tell us. So many have enjoyed the Giant Pawpaw over the years.
As somebody who may have been a dude that would have pinched a pawpaw costume in the past all I can say is I hope the bandit woke up the next day and realized that jokes aside how many times can one person wear a pawpaw costume in their life in any other circumstance other than being at a pawpaw festival?
Sure you might get a good laugh from your friends one time but anything after that and now you’re the guy who gets drunk and wears a pawpaw costume for some reason and that’s not cool. Return the costume to the people that care about it!
OHIO HOUSE STAFFERS CLOWNSUIT MAN IN CHARGE OF VOTER PURGE
Secretary of State Frank LaRose presents himself as a clean cut guy with a nice family just here doing his job but in his almost two years on the job he has proven to be willing to do the Republican machine’s dirty work. Now he’s proving to either be illegally purging voters or incompetent.
From Andrew J. Tobias of cleveland.com:
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Officials with the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office say they’re working to make sure no voters’ registrations were improperly canceled after state legislative staffers say they found another flaw with the state’s system of keeping its voting rolls up to date.
After comparing and analyzing state and county voting data, staffers with the Ohio House Democratic Caucus found at least 1,000 Cuyahoga County voters whom local elections workers may have improperly marked for removal, due to what may amount to a miscommunication between the county and the state.
Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose’s office has contacted other counties to make them aware of the issue in Cuyahoga County, according to LaRose spokeswoman Maggie Sheehan. Local elections officials were required to finalize their purge lists last Friday, under guidance issued by LaRose.
“Any cancellation that is found to violate the Secretary’s directive will be reinstated by the county, and that voter will have a chance to have their voice heard in November,” she said.
House staffers dunking on the Secretary of State should give us pause about the purge. Instead LaRose will do what must be done to make sure as many people as possible are booted from the rolls instead of passing common-sense legislation like Automatic Voter Registration.
OUR FAVORITE SHERIFF IS BACK ON HIS BULLSHIT
Suspended Pike County Sheriff Charlie Reader hasn’t had himself a good month as he got put on leave for allegedly stealing money from crime scenes to feed an impressive gambling habit. His crimes could destroy the case against the family accused of murdering another family in 2016.
He doesn’t seem to be handling the stress well as yesterday he logged into Facebook and threatened a journalist with a military grade sniper rifle.
Doesn’t seem like that guy should have access to murder machines right now all things considered but hey some slave owners in 1776 ordained a “well-regulated militia” so now there’s nothing we can do until he explodes a journalist’s head.
A SMART OHIOAN LOOKS TO SAVE FUTURE ROVERS FROM THE FATE OF SPIRIT
I went to New York City this weekend and marveled at all the architectural wonders. It made me realize how thankfully for society I only play the smartest man in the world in this newsletter because if that were true we would not have any building more complicated than some sticks leaning against trees.
One smart Ohioan is aiding our country’s space travel in a unique way.
From Alan Ashworth of ohio.com:
“Spirit got stuck [and it] ended its mission,” said Heather Oravec, a mechanical engineering research associate professor at the University of Akron who is contracted to work full time at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland.
Spirit was willing, but its tires were weak.
Oravec wants to make sure what happened to the plucky rover doesn’t happen to its successors.
Part of her role at NASA is testing tire designs for future rovers using simulants — artificial “soils” with properties similar to Mars or lunar terrain — to test new tire designs.
Oravec is an expert on extraterrestrial dirt, having developed a simulant called GRC-1 for her doctorate thesis. Although she and her colleagues have no Mars samples to work with, many of the properties of different Mars terrain are known.
I didn’t even know it was possible to become an expert on extraterrestrial dirt. I’m going to make some business cards with that title on it just to see what people say in conversation after I hand them to it. I would have been much more interested in science as a child had I known that were an occupation I could one day aspire to.
CAN WE PLEASE NEVER REFER TO OLIVE GARDEN AS THE OG AGAIN?
I don’t like Olive Garden like I don’t like any other big chain restaurants other than Chilis inside airports. Other people like it and that’s fine unless it’s like their No. 1 favorite restaurant of all time in which case what the fuck get that person far away from me.
But Cincinnati.com food critic has been doing her job longer than I’ve been alive and has never eaten at Olive Garden. She changed that this week and the results were the slow arrogant burn only a food critic can deliver.
From Polly Campbell of cincinnati.com:
What I thought was, "I really ought to go to an OG." I had never been. Well, I'd never had dinner there. Once, I went for lunch because they had something called stuffed spaghetti and I had to see what that could possibly be. But this is the 9th most popular restaurant chain in the country. Applebee's is the only casual dinner chain that's more popular. I write about restaurants, I should have had dinner there by now.
…
I'm a thinker, and I can't quite get over OG's elaborate phony attempts to seem like it's actually an Italian restaurant. It is not, and I thought we could all agree on that. But my new Italian friend told me this story as we drank our sweet spiked strawberry lemonades. When he first moved here, an Italian couple who'd been here awhile invited him for dinner and gave him advice about living here. They told him that, eventually, someone was going to say, "Oh, you're Italian? I should take you to Olive Garden." Don't go there, they said. It's a trap.”
Extreme Ohio energy radiating from the couple that wanted to take an Italian person to Olive Garden. I’m not mad. I’m in awe.
Nothing at OG is touched by the recent thinking of people who think about food. There's no local sourcing, there's no respect for a food culture, and Lord knows, no concession to healthy eating. Except the calorie counts are on the menu, so you know just how unhealthy it is. (Independent restaurants don't have to do this, so I'm not saying they're definitely better on this count.) They do have an under-600 calories section of the menu from which I ordered shrimp scampi on angel hair (boiled well past al dente) with a lot of garlic and lemon. It had good flavor. Unlike the chicken marsala, which didn't yield any flavor at all to my chewing.
…
It's not just the parking or the price. (OG is not notably cheap, though it may be perceived as cheaper.) It's that there are no words you can't understand on the Olive Garden menu. There is no chance the server will intimidate you. You can ask for sweet wine without embarrassment. There are lots of comfortable tables, and if you bring your kids, that's fine, though they also do a nice job of making it feel upscale enough for a date.
The only quibble I would have is who the hell goes to a restaurant to be intimidated? And a good waiter doesn’t scare their customers but distills a complicated menu into a terms any idiot can understand. I’ll eat anything other than fish I don’t care.
THOSE WMDs. I am a gun lover but can no longer belong to the NRA… USDA offers pork companies a bigger role in their product inspections… How giving up refined sugar changed my brain… Keep things simple for a long, healthy life… What really brought down the Boeing 737 Supermax?… Which black Americans should get reparations?