The writers at the Babylon Bee..............

 

.....need to get out of their bubble every once in a while.

1970..............................

       Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young................Ohio

 

Well, yeah ........................

 

     I never loved the taste of morels, but I would eat them for tradition's sake and because I liked the idea of physically absorbing both the essence of the woods and the associated mystery of mushrooms themselves.

     We would soak them in salt water, slice them in half, dredge them in flour, and fry them in butter.  We are Ohioans.  If we could pluck starlight from the sky, we would dredge it in flour and fry it in butter.

-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You

Loving.....................................

 

........................................................Ohio.

Go Bucks...................!

 Whether it’s the two biggest capital investment announcements in Ohio history in 2022 or the very real statewide manufacturing resurgence, Ohio is on a trajectory for growth and opportunity which most Ohioans haven’t seen in our lifetimes.  Governor Mike DeWine is right to say, “It’s Ohio’s time.” 

-Rick Platt, as excerpted from here

Hey, that's Ohio he is talking about................

 Heartland Manufacturing Renaissance | City Journal (city-journal.org)

Joel Kotkin points to good things (from an economic development point of view) happening in Ohio.  The Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority gets a nod:

The Buckeye State, notes Rick Platt, president and CEO of the Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority, “never skipped a beat on funding development.” More than 60 such authorities in Ohio work to attract industry with capital financing, infrastructure investment, land preparation, and speculative building development. Such efforts often tend to be largely expensive money-wasters, but in Ohio they have proved more successful. For the past quarter-century, Heath-Newark-Licking County Port Authority has transformed the former Newark Air Force Base into a hotbed of more than 20 companies with a total of 1,650 jobs. The companies operate in fields as diverse as aerospace, medical products, automotive and energy-related products, and even the world’s first organic baby food company, located in the industrial city of Heath (population 10,000), one of four plant-based food firms in the area. Licking County’s manufacturing workforce has expanded by 10,000 this decade.

Talking Ohio...............

     But still, this was his hometown, his home state.  He had played for the mighty Buckeyes and then, albeit briefly, the Cleveland Browns.  He was a product of the Midwest.  He never got too high and never got too low.  He looked at the world realistically.  He was a jeans and beer kind of guy.  He could never fit inside a Ferrari, not that he would ever want to.  He always tried to do the right thing.  He helped others when they needed it.

-David Baldacci,  as found on page 298 of Redemption

Gerrymandering in the year 1882..........

     In the end he captured the nomination without difficulty, but the general election proved more troublesome.  The initial vote count gave him a victory of just eight votes, and he headed to Washington as an incumbent.   But well into his new term, a review panel dominated by Democrats awarded the seat to his opponent.  So he returned to Canton a defeated politician.  On top of that, the Democratic legislature once again reconstituted his district, giving Democrats an estimated registration advantage of some 900 votes.

-Robert W. Merry,  President McKinley:  Architect of the American Century

Opening paragraphs...........................

     The prominent Massachusetts minister and physician Manasseh Cutler captured the optimism of Americans at the dawn of their republic when he described the territory between Lake Erie and the Ohio River as "the garden of the world, the seat of wealth, and the centre of a great Empire."  In these lands, he mused, "the arts and sciences will be planted;  the seeds of virtue, happiness, and glory be firmly rooted and grow up to full maturity."  It's worth noting that, when he wasn't ministering to his New England flock or tending to his patients, Cutler speculated in Western lands and dreamed of wealth, and no doubt there was some marketing hyperbole in his lyrical description of territory so far from American civilization.  Indeed, that expanse struck most Easterners at the time as hopelessly inaccessible — on the far side of the merciless Appalachian Mountains, bordered on the north by British Canada and the south by Spanish Louisiana, peopled with hostile natives bent on protecting their homeland through whatever savage methods they could devise.
     But Cutler understood the new republic's expansionist impulse.  When he died in Massachusetts in 1923, those lands of his vision, now roughly the state of Ohio, boasted the country's fifth-largest population, with 581,434 residents.  These were young and hearty folk — 64 percent of them under the age of twenty-five — and by 1830 they had subdued nearly all the state's land suitable for cultivation.  By midcentury Ohio led the nation in production of corn, much of it transformed into whiskey and hogs for easy transport, and a decade later the state's population of 2,339,502 trailed only those of New York and Pennsylvania.  As a later historian put it, "Ohio recapitulated the history of colonial encounter, conquest, and postcolonial development with breathtaking speed."

-Robert W. Merry,  President McKinley:  Architect of the American Century

Beauty...................................

So, my Sweetie and I (and most of the gang) took a day trip to the Hocking Hills for a walk to Old Man's Cave.  You could tell that the Buckeyes were playing a night game - the place was packed.  Still, what a beautiful slice of Earth.

God's Truth........................................

thanks Pat

Hey, wait a minute.....................

“Times are not good here. The city is crumbling into ashes. It has been buried under taxes and frauds and maladministrations so that it has become a study for archaeologists...but it is better to live here in sackcloth and ashes than to own the whole state of Ohio.” 
-Lafcadio Hearn, Inventing New Orleans: Writings of Lafcadio Hearn

Just as some background on Hearn, here is an excerpt from his Wiki:
By the strength of his talent as a writer, Hearn soon obtained a job as a reporter for the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, working for the newspaper from 1872 to 1875. Writing with creative freedom in one of Cincinnati's largest circulating newspapers, he became known for his lurid accounts of local murders, developing a reputation as the paper's premier sensational journalist, as well as the author of sensitive accounts of some of the disadvantaged people of Cincinnati.

Speaking of Ohio................

About 17,000 years ago, a long time to us humans, but a blink of an eye in the great geologic scheme of things, much of Ohio was covered under a sheet of ice.  Those who know these sorts of things estimate that the ice sheet may have been a 1,000 feet thick in the center of our fine State.  That's a lot of ice.  Casual readers may sense that this blogger doesn't get all excited about the problem of "global warming."  This is mostly because Ohio has been glaciated more than once, and sensing there is some natural variation in climate, and also sensing mankind is fairly clever at problem solving, he prefers warming to cooling.

Ice Extent   circa 15,000 BC