posted 2010/01/04 at 13:36
I've written before about how I went to private school with children of the family that runs Toledo's local cable company, Buckeye Cablesystem. (The same family also owns our local paper, the Toledo Blade.) I've made no secret of the fact that I'm hardly a fan of Buckeye, particularly when they were slow to add new channels I really wanted in the 1990s (Food Network, ZDTV, MuchMusic, Bravo), which was why I had DirecTV for a few years there. After the fire I didn't bother renewing DirecTV, though, mostly because I didn't have much interest in television once I went back to college, and by that point I was tired of trying to catch every single televised performance of every musician I liked. (Now that other people have put those performances up on YouTube, I feel fairly vindicated in my decision.) Buckeye does have the best local cable and high-speed Internet access in town, yes, but given how Toledo is, that's kind of like being valedictorian at summer school. There wasn't even any serious competition in town until recently, when AT&T started making offerings, and so far their introduction into Toledo has been a huge disappointment. (I don't even think they've gotten their service out here to my suburb yet.)
That being said, Buckeye still puts up a lot of its own commercials during various broadcasts advertising their various services, and apart from the gratingly smug tone many of these commercials take, some of them are just so bad I can't stand to watch them. One of their recent commercial lines has been to show "humourous" things you can do with your old satellite dish after getting Buckeye Cable, like use it as a frisbee or an outdoor grill. Now, they're not that funny to me, but I'm willing to accept that my sense of humour is significantly different from most people's, so maybe that's just me. However, in each of these commercials, when they're advertising their special offers at the end, those offers include cash and/or credit for selling them your old satellite equipment. In other worse, they're showing you what you can do with your old satellite dish, and then basically saying you won't have the dish after you use this special deal. This is the kind of elementary logic failure that makes me want to go down to Buckeye Cable's offices and start yelling at no one in particular about how ridiculous they make themselves out to be.
In another of these "alternate use for your old satellite dish" ads, they show a guy turning his old dish into a replica of a Star Trek starship that he then hangs from the ceiling of his bedroom. They even have a crappy synthesizer playing a rip-off of the first four notes of the old Star Trek theme, and they only refer to it in the commercial as a "starship model." However, the man's bedroom is full of licensed Star Trek merchandise, including bedsheets with the Next Generation logo on them and a life-size cardboard cutout of Data. It's like they're trying to have it both ways, referring obliquely to Star Trek like they're trying to avoid a lawsuit, but then having all this official merchandise in the background. There's no disclaimer about Paramount licensing the use of Star Trek stuff for the commercial, either, so I have to assume that Paramount could shoot a cease-and-desist order to Buckeye Cable here to get that commercial taken off the air, which would do wonders for my nerves.
The other big line of commercials Buckeye has introduced lately has been for their home phone service, trying to show why it's a good idea to have a landline even in this age of cheap cellular service. I have to admit that the first of these commercials, about a grown-up daughter bonding with her mother over the phone, was actually quite touching and well done; it's probably the best commercial I've ever seen Buckeye put out. However, after that they started trying to be funny, and as before, the commercials became ludicrous. One commercial shows a guy having to lean out of a window of his house, with an active beehive right above him, trying to get good reception on his cell phone. (They couldn't even afford to get fake bees for him to swat at, so he just looks like he's having an episode.) After the Buckeye guy comes in and does his thing and hands the guy a wireless landline phone, though, the guy goes back into his house, but only closes his window part of the way. If the bees there were as bad as he made them out to be, his home would be uninhabitable within about five minutes. It's like that commercial the soda industry put out trying to get Congress not to put a national tax on sodas where the woman takes groceries out of her car's trunk and then leaves the trunk wide open as she goes into her house and closes the door behind her. I'd meant to blog about that commercial a while ago, but then Jon Stewart beat me to it.
The worst of these Buckeye phone commercials, though, makes me want to pull my hair out, so of course it's in heavy rotation. It's about this guy who tries to order a pizza at 2101 (9:01 PM, if you insist) since he doesn't want to use up any of his weekday minutes, only to be told that the pizza place he called stopped delivering a minute ago. First of all, nearly every cell phone company I know starts offering reduced/free minutes at 1900, not 2100. Secondly, no pizza place I know of stops delivering that early. Pizza places, like fast food (especially Taco Bell), make a killing on the late night just-got-stoned-and-need-munchies crowd, so it's in their best interest to stay open as late as possible. Those logical flaws alone would be bad enough, but then the Buckeye guy comes in and gives the caller a landline phone, the caller smiles, and then places a call on the landline phone. Uh, excuse me, but why the Toot is he calling again! The pizza place will still be closed! He's still going to spend the night hungry and miserable! Couldn't you have gotten the phone to him fifteen minutes earlier?
I know that looking for logic in television commercials is kind of foolish to start with, and I admit I probably view Buckeye more harshly than I do other companies, so I'm probably looking for this stuff to point out. Still, though, stuff like this makes me batty. If your commercials are going to be smug and self-righteous, at least have them make some sense.
Labels: commercials, television, toledo
posted 2009/09/19 at 22:52
Journey is one of my more shameful guilty pleasures. The video for "Separate Ways" caused too many bad influences in my childhood to count. This past NHL playoff season, of course, Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" became an unofficial anthem of the Detroit Red Wings, both for the reference in the song to "a city boy/born and raised in South Detroit," and for its general message of not giving up, no matter how tough times have been in Michigan these past few years. I don't know how many Red Wings fans stopped believing after that heartbreaker of a Game Seven, but I wasn't one of them. However, I think it's safe to say that I've pretty much stopped caring about the Red Wings. It was hard enough to get behind the team when it seemed to distance itself so far from its gritty roots -- and I realize that this is just Mike Babcock and management adjusting to Gary Bettman's vision of a new NHL -- but with Chris Chelios getting dumped this offseason and the team bringing back Todd Bertuzzi, who I still say has no business in any hockey sweater right now, let alone one with the Wing Wheel on it, I just can't see myself following the Red Wings that closely. I have too much on my plate as it is, and rooting for a team that no longer plays my kind of hockey just doesn't make much sense any longer.
As it is, the NHL has just gotten too sanitized for my liking, and as much lip service as Bettman pays to how fighting has always been a part of the game, he seems to be doing his New York best to cause fighting to slowly disappear from the game, and I'm sorry, but hockey needs fighting like Paris Hilton needs a brain transplant. This business with the Phoenix Coyotes has been painful to watch as well, as seemingly every other NHL team and every other major North American sports league seems to be behind Bettman's insistence that the team not be moved to a place where people might actually watch the games, namely Hamilton, Ontario. I have the feeling that Gary Bettman would move the Maple Leafs to Topeka and the Canadiens to Biloxi if he thought he could get away with it.
Speaking of sports, this past weekend I was in Columbus for reasons that don't concern you. Friday night, when I was in my hotel room chilling out, I turned on the television and sure enough saw a University of Toledo football game. This is never a pleasant thing for me, because a lot of the tuition increases I had to put up with as a student there were thanks to the college paying ESPN huge sums of money to televise so many Rockets games, only to have ESPN stop doing so once the Rockets began stinking again. It also doesn't help that last month I got a Rockets schedule in the mail, and even after adding gender identity to their non-discrimination clause, the college is still addressing mail to "Mr. Sean Shannon," whoever that is. (Then again, it also listed the 22nd of October as being on a Saturday. Remember, folks, this is where I got two degrees from.)
Anyway, this takes me to today, which was probably the most advertised Rockets football game in history, the start of a home-and-home series against Ohio State. (Speaking of Ohio State football, remind me never to travel to Columbus on the weekend of a big game ever again.) UT didn't really advertise it much when they went up to play Michigan last year, but of course after they won -- probably the second biggest victory in UT football history -- they've been sending me e-mails every month trying to get me to buy a "Big Win in the Big House" t-shirt. Now, I can understand why this would be such a big thing for UT, but in one of the most senseless decisions I can remember the school making -- which is saying a lot -- they decided to play the "home" game of the series at Cleveland Browns Stadium. Isn't the point of doing a series like this the revenue that can be gotten from having the Buckeyes here in Toledo? How much money did Toledo's local economy lose from such an asinine decision? The worst part is that the only major highway from Toledo to Cleveland is a toll road, so everyone from town who wanted to go to the game had to pay even more just to get to Cleveland. Anyway, Ohio State -- excuse me, THE Ohio State University (Goddess I can't stand that) -- shut out the Rockets, and will probably do so again down the road in Columbus next year. I'll try not to be in Columbus that day, no matter what other fun stuff might be going on in the city.
posted 2009/05/08 at 13:36
Ohio Christian school tells student to skip prom (AP via Yahoo! News)
Just when I thought this part of the country couldn't get more bad press after dealing with "Joe the Plumber" for the past six months, something like this has to pop up. In all seriousness, this is a news story I would expect to see in a newspaper from forty or fifty years ago, not in 2009. I'm not trying to be disrespectful of religious beliefs here, but at the same time, there is no doubt in my mind that, in this instance, Heritage Christian School is severely overstepping its bounds here by threatening to suspend Tyler Frost for engaging in legal activities on his own time. If the school wants to ban dancing or rock music on its own property, as much as I may disagree with their reasons for doing so, I can respect that as their right. When they threaten to punish a student for things he does off of campus grounds on his own time -- again, this is rock music and dancing we're talking about, not illegal drug use or drunk driving -- and even withhold him from his class' graduation procession, then I get angry and nauseated.
This was kind of a big issue for me growing up. I began having political leanings around the time I was in my junior high years, and some of my classmates from those years stopped going to the private school I went to after junior high, transfering to the various religious high schools around here. In almost every instance, when I saw the students later, they had become severely withdrawn, and their willpower and self-identity had nearly vanished. (One of the schools some students transfered to, Notre Dame Academy, was the same school Katie Holmes went to, to give you a reference point.) Children's rights became a big issue for me then, as these episodes cemented in my mind that children should have the right to practice their own religions, irrespective of their parents' beliefs. I was lucky enough to live in a household where my parents never pushed religion on me, except to learn about what was out there and make my own determination about what would work best for me. I think that's a right every young person should have, and this news story just reinforces, to me, the reasons for that.
Although I haven't thought too much recently about the episodes from my own youth, this is a topic I definitely deal with as a teacher. I try not to talk about my own beliefs -- religious, political, or otehrwise -- when I teach, and I always make a point to say on the first day of class that I grade based on the strength of an argument, irrespective of its position. I've assigned countless As to papers whose positions I wholeheartedly disagree with, because even though I disagree with the positions, the papers were written very persuasively, and deserved As. I often argue against my own beliefs in class when the need arises, because I want to encourage my students to think through opposing viewpoints, the whole Socratic Method thing. What I've noticed, though, is that for many students who come from these religious schools, who have had religion pounded into their heads from such an early age, when confronted with beliefs that are contrary to their own, not only do they show the same refusal to accept that people can hold different views that so nauseates me about modern conservative discourse, but some of them are even blown away by that fact, and get a glazed-over look in their eyes as I or other students explain the rationales behind the opposing viewpoints.
This just makes me worry all the more about our future as a country, because right now our education system is failing on all levels. No Child Left Behind and the rash of state proficiency exams that started twenty years ago have taken education out of the hands of the teachers, with education's goals and the methods taken to get there being put in the hands of people who have no training in education at all, no concept of how young people learn and what they need to know to function in our society. The financial "race to the bottom" has not only destroyed the arts programmes of countless schools to give students no creative outlets (because, after all, creativity encourages free thinking), but to cut costs students are often evaluated only by Scantron tests; you don't want to know how many students I've had who literally were never expected to write anything in high school. Corporate America has already trampled public schools with its sponsorships, further taking control away from teachers and further indoctrinating young people into consumer culture, and the charter schools that some (including President Obama) promote are about a thousand times worse in that regard.
One of my missions as a teacher is to open my students' minds to the realities and possibilities that are out there in this world. On the secular level, that's already being made painfully difficult by how high schools are turning into places where students are expected to do nothing but rote memorization of rules and nuggets of information deemed important by people who have no connection with the reality of today's youth, and hardly any connection at all with greater reality. Religious schools are even worse, as many students from those schools actively resist being exposed to beliefs and views that are in opposition to those they've been indoctrinated in for all of their lives. If we don't allow young people to vote until they turn eighteen because we don't think they have the capacity to make sound decisions until then, how can we say that they have the ability to choose their own religion? We need to take a serious look at the role religious schools play in this country, because it seems like a strong case could be made to banish those schools. How am I to be expected to open the mind of a young person whose parents, church, and teachers have been welding that mind shut for eighteen years?
Labels: rhetoric, teaching, toledo
posted 2009/02/03 at 20:22
I don't really advertise the fact that I keep pages on MySpace and Facebook. Yes, I put the links on the sidebar of my Website, but I don't talk about them that much because I don't have a real interest in "recruiting" new "friends" on either site. The only real reason I have accounts on them is because some of the people I've met over the years have taken to them so much that messaging them on those Websites is often the only reliable way I have of getting hold of them. I've dressed up my pages on them a bit, but that's mainly because I know that potential employers and clients might see them, and I figure it's for the best if I have something that looks nice. I've had a few strangers get hold of me through there, reconnected with people I knew long ago, and even had a number of my students friend me. (They even stay friends after they get their final grades, too, so I must be doing something right there. Either that, or they're all really lazy.)
However, several months ago I began to have ex-classmates from the private school I went to start to friend me on there, which put me in a bit of a dilemma. I have said repeatedly that I believe that school messed me up in more ways than I can count, and I still feel that way; a visit back there in 2002 for a University of Toledo commitment (on a Saturday, so I didn't see any old teachers or anything like that) was very troubling for me. The treatment I received there, from administrators, teachers, and students alike, was beyond intolerable, and I honestly believe that everyone there knew that they could get away with treating me like crap because my parents weren't as rich as the other parents, so we couldn't outlast them in a lawsuit. The wounds from back then have dulled in pain, but I doubt they will ever fully heal. Thus, hearing from so many of my old classmates from back then was not exactly comforting to me at first.
That being said, the classmates who have gotten in touch with me were not people who treated me poorly, at least not once we got to high school. They scorned me at times in high school, but, well, it was usually because I was acting like an idiot, so I deserved it. We haven't really messaged each other beyond the friend requests, but I wouldn't be opposed to talking with them over the Internet. Face-to-face encounters might be too awkward for me at this point -- I'm never going to any reunions -- but I guess that maybe now that all these years have passed (more than I care to think about), I'm finally able to put things in context, and I can do a better job of separating my feelings about the school and my time there from my feelings about them. I'm not going to make the first move to initiate conversations with any of them, but I guess now I'm not as opposed to talking with them as I once was. (Maybe one of them can get in touch with the school and tell them to stop sending me snail-mail addressed to "Mr. Sean Shannon." Better yet, maybe they can get the school to stop sending me mail, period.)
There is one thing that bothers me, though. I did a lot of really dumb things when I was there, albeit things that people my age tended to do. (At that school, though, you were never supposed to act like a kid, even when, you know, you were a kid.) Those of you who remember my Internet experiences pre-.org know that I did a lot of stupid things back then, and even in the .org days I've still managed to act like an idiot at times. I like to think that I've learned how to act better, but there are times when I wonder about that. Sometimes I think that maybe I am still the same idiot I was back then, and I've just learned to hide my mistakes better. Even if my old mistakes have been forgotten by the people I knew back then, or if those people have the decency not to bring them up, I still worry that if I ever meet up with them, I'll just make some new mistakes and things will go back to the way they were for me in my hardest years at that school. I've gotten past the point where I'll care that much about what they think of me, but if I do something like that, then I'll feel like it will be confirmation that I really haven't changed in the years that have passed, and that I'm still the same idiot I once was. That's why I'm probably going to remain passive about contacting them, at least for now.
Labels: internet, personal, toledo
posted 2008/10/16 at 23:39
In addition to being sick, and just plain busy with a hundred things, it's been hard for me to come here to write because most of my spare time has been spent following the election, and I just don't have that much to say about the election. I've got the worst case of election burnout I can ever remember having, and instead of doing the smart thing and taking a break, I'm just going to tough it out for the next nineteen days. It's not that long, and even though there's a growing perception that the presidential election is over and done with (I agree that McCain's chances of victory are diminishing but it's not over until the fourth of next month), the growing possibility of the Democrats gaining a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate is providing a bit of intrigue. As much as I have mixed feelings about Al Franken, I'm really pulling for him to win that Senate seat in Minnesota because it's the old Paul Wellstone seat and I really don't want that in Republican hands any longer.
I guess I got a bit of a break these past few days when I got to watch the Canadian elections. The difference in campaign commercials (I'm glad Hockey Night in Canada is back on, although the new format and new song do nothing for me) was refreshing, and watching CBC's approach to the returns was refreshing from the usual political coverage I'm used to here in America. Of course, I still found plenty to get ticked off about because the Green Party got shafted up there as well, although at least the media and party leaders up there take the Greens a lot more seriously than they do here. I wasn't that happy about the Conservatives gaining seats, but even with as little as I follow Canadian politics I knew that Stephane Dion was not about to lead the Liberals to retake government. Perhaps the unhappiest part is that because Canadian elections only run for five weeks, it didn't provide that much material for Rick Mercer, especially since he was off for the first couple of weeks after Parliament was dissolved.
Of course, all of this Joe the Plumber business now has Toledo back in the spotlight for another completely insignificant episode. I know Holland well because that's where the family lived after the fire while the house was being rebuilt; in the eighties a big strip mall called Spring Meadows was built down there, at the intersection between I-475 and the main road that leads out to Toledo Express Airport. Out hotel was on the other side of I-475. I still go down there sometimes -- the smaller of our two Best Buys moved into Spring Meadows lately (the bigger is in a nasty part of town I try to avoid), and there's also a Target there -- but the mall as a whole is dying because of the office park a couple of miles south of there, and then further south are our two lifestyle malls, the Shops at Fallen Timbers and Levis Commons. I'm surprised that Obama spent so much time in the Toledo area this week, given that the votes he needs to get are in the southern, more conservative part of the state, but the economic crisis is probably enough to shift enough cultural conservatives over to Obama's column to let him carry the state easily. Again, though, this isn't Election Day, and a lot can change in the next nineteen days, so I don't feel comfortable making any solid predictions. (Except that Nader won't win, I know, but I'm voting for him anyway dammit.)
Labels: canada, greenparty, politics, toledo
posted 2008/07/09 at 23:50
This past weekend I picked up a CD/DVD rack from Best Buy. Mind you, I haven't exactly been buying that many CDs or DVDs (or even video games) lately, but I have bought so many books that I needed to repurpose one of my DVD towers for books. I put the storage rack together over the weekend, and it was a huge hassle because the directions weren't all that clear; I had to put several of the supports on three different times before I got them assembled in the correct order. It was only after I got the storage rack put together that the real fun began, though, because I had to move my big heavy bookcase about six feet to make room for the new storage rack. This required unloading the whole bookcase first, moving all the books into my sister and brother-in-law's old bedroom, and then moving the bookcase and loading it right back up. After that, I was finally able to move the new rack in here and get it fully loaded up, something I didn't manage to finish until late this afternoon. I had some more rearranging to do after that, and I still have a large pile on unsorted papers and other items in front of my television, but for now I finally have all my media organized the way I want it, and I have room for it to grow once more.
My big bookcase, which had been behind me at my workstation here, is now just off to my right, and I literally had less than an inch of space to fit it in between the wall and the windowsill, but it's here now. The shelves, particularly the top ones, are starting to sag, and I know that I've probably got twice as much weight on those shelves than what they're rated for, but I still want to keep this bookcase if I possibly can. Not only is it a good fit, but it's made by Sauder, and Sauder is one of the few local companies that produces stuff that I like. (I don't know if Sauder products are marketed outside of the Toledo area, but they make good-quality, inexpensive furniture and storage solutions.) I'm starting to have so many "big" books, though, that I may eventually need to buy a second big bookcase to house them, and I don't have the space for a second bookcase in this room. I could always put an extra bookcase in the loft or the vacant bedroom, but I don't feel comfortable having my books and other stuff in another room like that.
The other big development that came from this most recent rearrangement of my stuff is that I've finally given up on finding spare plastic cases for my old Nintendo games, and I'm just shelving the cartridges by themselves. (I have a small "library" of manuals in the new storage unit.) I had tried forever to find those old clear plastic cases like they used to put the games in at video rental places, because I thought they looked good and did a better job of protecting games than the sleeves Nintendo packaged the games in. Let's face facts, though; what kind of luck was I going to have trying to find standard-issue plastic cases for NES games in 2008? Finding these empty cases was hardly my life's work for the past few years, but it was something I kept trying every so often for the past several years. Rather than continuing to fight that battle, I just took the games out of the plastic cases, and now they're by themselves on my new storage rack (and taking up a lot less space, too). I guess now I just need to find someone else desperate for these old plastic cases and see how much money I can get for them.
Labels: books, dvds, personal, toledo, videogames
posted 2008/07/07 at 16:35
Two of Dad's loves were architecture and cars. One of the ways he put himself through college was to buy old cars that were being sold for a pittance, then fix them up and sell them for a big profit. You don't want to know how many times I had to hear his speech about how the car companies are evil for making their cars impossible to fix on your own. (It's not that I don't agree with him, but after hearing the same speech umpteen times you get kind of sick of it, you know?) Although Dad's delineation work didn't require him to have strong knowledge of architecture, it surely helped, and Dad did redesign the house after the fire. His ability to identify makes and models of old cars was awe-inspiring, and his knowledge of architecture was expansive to say the least. (I wish I'd had the opportunity to take him on a drive to and from MCCC's main campus, because he would have gotten a huge kick out of all the old barns I pass along the way.)
These past couple of days I've had a couple of experiences that kind of tied in to those things. Yesterday I finally went out to see The Shops at Fallen Timbers, a new "Lifestyle Centre" development along the same lines of Levis Commons. Back when I first went to Levis Commons I thought it was a unique new development; it's only been in the past month or so when I've gotten into researching mall history (spurred on by the recent closing of Southwyck I blogged about earlier) that I've come to realize that these developments are more common than I believed them to be, and that they're being built at a fairly high rate these days. At first Fallen Timbers struck me as a larger version of Levis Commons (I wanted to check out the Barnes and Noble at Fallen Timbers since it's about three times the size of the one I normally go to), but the buildings at Fallen Timbers look, well, kind of bland. The main buildings at Levis Commons are built with Victorian architecture in mind -- something I just happened to pick up from Dad, who only went to Levis Commons once and declared it was "too good for Toledo" -- and I think that's one of the main reasons I go down there as often as I do, even though I don't care much for the shops there. Fallen Timbers has shops that are more useful for me, but it's not the kind of place where I could just walk around looking at the buildings for a while. I suppose I'll go back to Fallen Timbers once there's a good special at Barnes and Noble, and maybe then I'll look around a bit more.
On the car front, as I was driving home from teaching this afternoon, I noticed a very rundown car idling next to me at a stoplight. Rundown cars in this part of town are a fairly common sight, but then I noticed that the car in question was a Dodge Neon. It really struck me at that point that, even though I couldn't care less about cars (as long as mine get me to where I need to be and then back home), I was looking at a car that couldn't have been more than fourteen years old, and I thought to myself, "Wow, that car looks really old." (Keep in mind that I drove a 1985 Toyota Camry through college.) Honestly, I don't see how I could have known that the Neon was an old car -- perhaps the dings and dents on the side were throwing me off -- but it's hard for me to accept that a car made in 1994 was old because, damn it, that's the year I turned eighteen, and I can't be that old. Yes, I am that old, I know, but I still don't get how I could think of that car as being old. If you asked me to name the differences in design between a car that was made fifteen years ago and a car that was made last year, I wouldn't be able to come up with a single thing to say. (At least with my Camry it had that boxy first-cars-from-Japan look to it.) Still, I don't need more reminders of just how old I am, and I guess now I can't escape them even when I'm driving.
posted 2008/05/25 at 20:09
Southwyck mall to close June 30 (toledoblade.com)
It's amazing how every little detail of something like Dad's death seemed to add just that much more pain to the ordeal. When I was young, Dad always took me out to a bunch of places on Saturday morning and afternoon, as soon as my morning cartoons ended. He called it "Adventures," and in retrospect he was probably doing Mom a favour by getting me out of the house for a while, but I probably did more bonding with Dad during Adventures than I did with anything else we did together. We'd get lunch together, go to the arcade together, and see a lot of stores at the mall. When I say mall here, though, I'm not referring to Southwyck; I'm referring to Franklin Park Mall, the mall closest to our house, and the only major mall still left in Toledo. (Mind you, it's now called "Westfield Shoppingtowne Franklin Park Mall" and barely bares any resemblance to the mall I remember as a kid. To me, that mall died a long time ago.)
My first memory of going to a mall, though, is going to Southwyck. There are a few things I remember about going to Southwyck as a child. First of all, they had a lot of small water fountains throughout the mall, all of which had different coloured lights in the fall that projected up and made all the water these soft, translucent colours that I thought were some of the prettiest things I'd ever seen. Secondly, in the middle of the mall -- it was one of those malls with several "spokes" full of stores around a central location -- they had the only full-size merry-go-round I've ever ridden on (the miniature merry-go-round they used to have in front of K-Mart doesn't count), and a kind of small pit that sloped gently and seemed, to my young mind, like a natural performing venue, a theatre-in-the-round sort of thing. Third, Southwyck had the first "arcade" I ever went to, a place called Old Towne that had the kind of machines that you used to associate with arcades before the Pac-Man era.
I can only remember going there a few times when I was young, but I went there a lot when I was a teenager. The mall's a fairly short walk from the private school I went to for fourth through twelfth grades, and since I usually stayed after school to use the computer lab (the only computers we had at home at that point were old TRS-80s), if I had some extra time before my parents got off of work to come pick me up, I'd walk over to Southwyck. Old Towne was long gone by that point, but our local arcade chain, Red Baron, had set up shop there, and I was in the middle of my Street Fighter II phase around this time, so I played that an awful lot. My first post-high school crush worked at the Waldenbooks over there as well, so that just gave me more reason to go over.
Southwyck has been ailing for a long, long time, and there had been a lot of talk about doing something new with the property for a long time. A few years ago a developer opened a new shopping complex down in Perrysburg called Levis Commons that, surprisingly, is a pretty awesome place. (Aside from the Books-A-Million and East of Chicago over there, the stores are painfully upscale, though.) The thing is, Southwyck is not in a very good part of town, and even if they raze Southwyck down to the ground and construct something truly grand in its place, that's not going to change that it's surrounded by a lot of low-end businesses in crumbling buildings on moldering streets. I'm fairly certain that someone will try to do something to "fix up" that part of town -- we're in about the tenth attempt to "revitalize" downtown Toledo in my lifetime -- but Southwyck shuttering feels to me like the one true note of confirmation that this part of Toledo is now dead.
Labels: personal, toledo, videogames
copyright © 2010 Sean Shannon