The interview of highs and lows!

[kingtycoon]

aslant will keep you on your toes!

1. You are the mayor of Cleveland. What three major initiatives would you propose to ameliorate some of its civic ills, given a pot of, say, $15 million a year over three to five years?
Okay - I'm guessing you mean $15 bonus money since the operating budget of the city is way way higher.  It's very hard to talk about this subject without revealing a bunch of political attitudes I've more or less trained myself to kind of hold back on.  I'm gonna be a mix of Red & Green till I'm gone, for sure - but it turns out most poeple don't like it when you ramble on about Marx or Gore.  But, I'll continue.  Dennis Kucinich was the mayor of Cleveland and so was the great Tom Johnson - so it's kind of an esteemed company to stand among (if only in dreams).  Without going into fantastic ideas that would be impractical but satisfying e.g.:  "I get to chose who lives here."  &  "I would abolish football & gambling"  I'll stick to things a mayor might conceivably accomplish.

I'd try and go back to Tom Johnson's move of completely subsidizing the public transit.  Make all the busses & trains in the city free.  That's a lot of money - but I don't know if it's 15 Million - fares only pay so much of the operating expense of the public transit (the RTA if you're not from here).  Sales tax is probably the biggest contributor - and 1% of the sales tax pays for the RTA - I'd try and do away with that & roll it into the regular budget.  Cleveland has a flat 2% income tax on all residents, workers & businesses in the city - except for those subsidized by nonsense.  I'd try and raise a tax on all professional sports players?  Maybe knock it up to 45%?  It's interesting how this works - I met a guy who wrote payroll software for a baseball team - their taxes are all figured out in the places where they play - so you have to have the calculations figured for every stadium & arena in North America - interesting - but yeah - I'd like to disincentivize professional sports teams while profiting from them (for a change).  I'd also open up the big professional arenas so that all the local High Schools would play there on the regular.  My thought is-  it's certainly expensive but it's more likely cheaper than running all these dozens of HS stadiums.  I guess I should point out that making public use of the various stadia would come about through strict enforcement & collection of their back taxes.  The sports in this town are a shitty sacred cow that I have always hated - this is why I will never actually be mayor.

Kucinich saved CPP - the publicly owned power utility.  The publicly owned... coal plant.  The internet runs on coal - you mighta heard...  There are a few big windmills but no actual windfarms up on the lake - Solar seems fun but this is the most overcast town in the country, if memory serves - it's windy though - and the lake - so I'd try real hard to press CPP into going that way.  But also - I have to say - more than a centralized source of power I think I'd try to somehow incentivise personal power production - do something to help people get off of the grid.  The days of a monolithic power company should come to an end, I'd like to see it.

Municipal Broadband.  I'd write it into the city's charter that access to the internet is an essential right of all Clevelanders in perpetuity.

You gave me $15 million and that's not a lot - It might cover the free public transit within the city limits - I think I'd go to the next step though with rebalancing the transport budget - CLV has way, way too many roads - and they're all maintained-  I'd propose a triage system where we'd simply forgo maintaining a lot of the road infrastructure in favor of building up the main streets.  Letting whole neighborhoods degenerate to gravel roads doesn't actually seem like a bad plan, to me.

Finally, I'd build a 10' bronze statue of Superman in Glendale.


2. You are thrown into jail. Given some solitude, very limited printed matter, and no internet, design your ideal day.

Limited printed matter is a weird consideration - does this mean only unruled notepads?  Given enough time & pen & paper I think  I could really, really finally...  Escape from prison.

Here's how it goes - I work in the kitchen so I have access to the food.  I've made sure that's where I work by distributing a fair amount of serious beatings to those smaller and weaker than me.  Given access to the smoke-hood & a few tools plus natural gas & the neccessary household ingredients required to create poison - I Reverse the fan on the fume hood gassing everyone with a mixture of amonia & chlorine (which you may know as mustard gas) - I use this distraction to let the gas pipes explode the walk in freezer - this grants access to the maintenance hallway since prisoners aren't usually allowed to come into contact with the freon & plumbing - I get in there and it's a short journey to the secret area of the prison where the warden keeps his gold.  I'll snatch the warden's treasure & by this time gather the implements of the stunned & frankly dying inmates & guards whom I've commited hideous war-crimes against.  After this I load the gold into one of the prison school busses - I finally confide in my confederates-  who've wondered all along what I've been doing - I tell them that I've loaded the warden's gold into each of the buses and that we all need to go in different directions.  I let them escape in the buses while I hide in the woods where I will eat bugs & worms in secret solitude.  Later, when they are captured (as I will learn from the internet at the local community college where homeless looking weirdos are more the norm than the exception) I'll get into the impound lot for the local sheriff and snatch the gold for myself (having cunningly hidden it where no-one would look.  The other prisoners, my 'confederates' once captured will all tattle on me about my stated plan to drive my bus to canada.  I'll be watched for on the canadian border - but I have other plans in play.  I use my knowledge of abandoned places & my cunning at electronics to set up a series of safe-houses & headquarters in the periphery of the small-town that the prison is in.  Slowly, I'll start to infiltrate the town's infrastructure - sabotaging the emergency response systems, wrecking the city water & planting bombs & sabotaging the roads & bridges.  In the months that follow I'll begin to isolate the town & more than that - the prison - the final stroke will be the sabotage of the prison's payrol systems - which will provoke a strike after 2 months of unpaid work have accrued.  Once the guards begin to walk off the job - my real plan goes into motion - the fences & gates of the prison will be destroyed-  the walls will fall down like Jericho - if Jericho fell to draglines & homemade dynamite.

After nearly a year of forest-hiding & clandestine sabotage I drive off in the Warden's car with the Warden's gold while tens of thousands of the prisoners are freed.

This may seem unrealistic to you - but going to prison is unrealistic to me.

3. Cold weather. Do you own a jacket that keeps you warm when you're walking around in crazy wintertown? Sometimes I'm worried that you are very depressed in the winter in part because your jacket is not warm enough. Or is it really just that awful? Inquiring nosy moms want to know.

Oh man, I'm a big, big baby about the cold - I'm for example, wearing a sweater and my winter coat here in the office.  It never, ever gets too hot for me, but anything below 60 is too cold.  It only goes down to zero or so here, hardly a lot less than that.  my coat is good-ish - but my shoe situation isn't awesome.  Anymore my shoes fall apart without notice & the long underwear & 2-3 layers of socks are good, but not enough to keep the slush out - I spend the winters with cold wet feet & that's just how it is.  I put my hat on in November and barely take it off until after March.  Layers, warmth, planning?  I do a bit of walking in the snow - but the snow calms down after the lake freezes over.  Really, it's the darkness & the wind that are the hardest things in winter.  They're the killers - I plan to face these and usually do okay.  Oh!  And the fact that nobody shovels their goddammed sidewalks.  Or worse, they  let the driveway plow drifts up over the sidewalk.  Circling back to question one - I'd try and figure out a way to eminent domain anyone who ever does this.

4. Hot weather! Do you still celebrate the best day? The summer holiday thing? What would you do this year and how would you involve Agatha into it knowing her likes and dislikes?

My work has a big event that is super involved & demanding of my time & energy every year exactly during The Best Day.  I'm very interested in going back to having the best day properly - but reaching out to my lazy (very, very lazy) pre-teen kid to have her help out - well.  She's distractable & uninterested in things that require effort - so the Best Day is all me.  I really want to go back to it-  next year I'm going to try really hard.  Please remind me!

Also - the Best Day is at the Beach and last year all the beaches were kind of closed because of pollution.


5. What was the high point of your young life? The low point? Were either of them a turning point for you, of some sort? If not, tell us about a turning point for you.

This is a big one - I'm going to give it it's own entry, maybe later today.