Norka Notes, 6/6/08

I'll try to do this at least occasionally. But as always, no promises.

So here's what's going on in The City Formerly Known as Rubber:

Jeff Coryell notes the ABJ piece on dropping property values, including a haste-inspired goof by me. The drop county-wide is one percent; the drop in Akron is four percent. The full version on the website now includes a map showing what you would expect -- drops in Akron and most of the southern suburbs, and increases in the northern subs, led by Hudson.

All of this is, by the way, still better than the double-digit drops on the coasts, mostly because we didn't have the speculative bubble around here pushing values up to unsustainable levels.

Speaking of money and Akron, TechRepublic notes that Akron is among the cities where IT professionals can command the highest hourly rate (happy birthday, K.)

Cuyahoga Falls School Board member (and blogger) Kellie Patterson has sued the board she sits on to compel the board to follow Ohio's open meetings law. Kellie explains her lawsuit on her blog.

PETA, whose basic philosophy seems to be that looking exhbitionistically goofy is always more important than actually improving life for animals, is nagging Kent State over a live golden eagle mascot. No word on how they feel about Zippy.

But seriously, I wonder how they feel about protecting the lives of jellyfish. PETA is generally anti-zoo, but the big ticket at the Akron Zoo this weekend is a jellyfish exhibit. Jellyfish pose something of a challenge to the bright-line rules PETA tries to draw. There's little morally meaningful difference between a jellyfish and, say a kelp bed.

At any rate, the jellies exhibit looks good and opens to the general public tomorrow.



One of the big tickets