Ruk and Leela Rai, Bhutanese refugees, now have the opportunity to raise their three-year-old son Anish in an environment so many take for granted thanks to a local program that assists refugees in finding decent, affordable housing by utilizing the growing number of foreclosed and abandoned homes in the city, reports Loren Belin of the Huffington Post.
 
“The Cleveland program is part of an emerging national effort that is seeking to find a silver lining in the foreclosure wave that has pockmarked communities with abandoned properties. Across the country, nonprofit organizations are purchasing, repairing and redeploying vacant homes in a bid to provide needy families with housing, while revitalizing struggling communities.”
 
In Cleveland, the International Services Center has helped to resettle nearly 13,000 refugees over the last 50 years.  They came across the idea of making use of foreclosed homes last summer when it struggled to find acceptable homes for newly arrived families due to landlord reluctance.
 
“The challenge is to find a landlord and then explain that their future tenant is arriving in the United States and has no employment, no immediate future employment, and no credit history, but to please give them a place to live,” said Karin Wishner, ISC’s executive director. “That leaves few landlords to work with, and then the question is if they have openings when we need them."
 
Read more about the Rai family and the Cleveland program in the lengthy Huffington Post feature here.

"The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum, a gleaming glass pyramid on the shore of Lake Erie, has become a proud symbol of this city. And Cleveland’s rock fans turned out in droves for the hall’s 27th induction ceremony on Saturday, only the third time it has been held here," writes the New York Times.

Highlightes include The Red Hot Chili Peppers playing with Slash of Guns N’ Roses, George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic and Ronnie Wood of the Faces and the Rolling Stones. For a Beastie Boys tribute, Kid Rock, Black Thought of the Roots and Travie McCoy of Gym Class Heroes rapped in old-school green Adidas jumpsuits.

"The ceremony, at the stately Public Auditorium -- a 1920s Beaux-Arts monolith a few blocks from the museum -- also honored Donovan; the blues guitarist Freddie King; the linked British invasion bands Small Faces and the Faces; the music executive Don Kirshner; and an array of backup groups."

"And in between encomiums, blistering jams and shaggy-dog stories about rockers’ early years, musicians spoke of cities as inspiration, common ground or hell."
 
Read the rest of the liner notes here.

"US Route 6 is the longest contiguous transcontinental route in the USA," says the blog site Stay on Route 6. "Running from Provincetown, MA to Bishop, CA (and before 1964 to Long Beach, CA), Route 6 goes through 14 states. This is your guide along all of its original 3,652 miles. From Revolutionary War sites to pioneer settlements and western mining towns, Route 6 offers an in-depth lesson in US History, charms of yesteryear and comforts of modern times."

For this post, the writer takes readers on a visual trip through Cleveland, with stops along the way in downtown, Asiatown, University Circle, Little Italy, Lakewood, and Detroit Shoreway,

Check it out here.

Rolling Stone magazine couldn't resist leading its review of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony with a Titanic reference, but writer Andy Greene quickly righted the ship, so to speak.

"Walking into Cleveland, Ohio's Public Auditorium for the 27th annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony last night, it was hard to not think of the Titanic striking an iceberg on the very same day 100 years ago. In recent days Axl Rose and Rod Stewart, two of the biggest stars entering the Hall of Fame this year, pulled out of the show, making complete reunion performances by the Faces and Guns N' Roses impossible. Red Hot Chili Peppers guitarist John Frusciante opted not to come, and the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch stayed home as he continues to recover from cancer," he wrote.

"One might think that these absences would sink the induction ceremony somewhere deep into the Atlantic Ocean, but it turns out they didn't matter much at all. In fact, it was one of the best Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in recent memory."
 
Highlights include a "note-perfect 'Sweet Child O' Mine," "an incredible medley of Beastie classics" performed by the Roots and Kid Rock, a "bombastic rendition" of Green Day's "Letterbomb," and the three-song set by Red Hot Chili Peppers that included "By the Way," "The Adventures of Rain Dance Maggie" and "Give It Away."
 

Read more here.

"Is music director Franz Welser-Möst -- now in his tenth season with the 'Big Five' orchestra -- in the same league as George Szell and Christoph von Dohnányi and his other illustrious predecessors? Will the orchestra overcome its substantial debt? Are its periodic residencies in Miami and New York acts of desperation, or creative solutions to its fiscal woes?" the San Jose Mercury News asks rhetorically in a review of the visiting orchestra.

"Yada, yada, yada. Sunday night, the orchestra arrived in San Francisco for the first of two programs, and it sounded marvelous from the opening measures of Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 3 in A minor, "Scottish" -- and still better with Shostakovitch's Symphony," it answered itself.

"No. 6, which was like a long and beautiful march to the abyss. Coincidentally, Sunday was the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, but this orchestra wasn't going down. If anything, it sounded titanically impressive at Davies Symphony Hall, where it is performing in honor of another centennial: the 100th anniversary of the San Francisco Symphony."

Enjoy the rest here.

In this travel feature for the Oregonian, a writer visits the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

"Ever wonder why geezer rockers continue to tour across the country playing songs that haven't been hits since Richard Nixon was president?" begins the item.

"Come to Cleveland and find out. Like tie-dyed pilgrims, the over-40 generation flocks to this glass pyramid in the heart of Middle America to relive the soundtrack of their lives at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

"The Beatles, Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Woodstock, R&B, Motown, Elton, Springsteen. All are celebrated in full glory. There's everything from Jimi Hendrix's hand-scribbled "Purple Haze" lyrics to Janis Joplin's 1965 psychedelic-painted Porsche."

Read the rest here.

A recent item in the Wall Street Journal highlighted the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame archives.

"The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation is best known for its raucous induction ceremonies -- on April 15, acts including the Beastie Boys, Guns N' Roses and the Miracles will be welcomed into the fold. But today, the 29-year-old institution is emphasizing a quieter aspect of its mission with the grand opening of a new library and archives facility near its Cleveland, Ohio, headquarters."

"The library's collection spans more than 3,500 books, 1,400 audio recordings and 270 videos. It includes contracts, correspondence and photographs donated by industry icons such as Scotty Moore, Elvis Presley's original guitarist, whose papers were recently acquired. The Rock Hall had been accumulating such materials for years, but it was difficult for the public to access them; there wasn't much room for storage and research in the museum's pyramid-shaped headquarters."

Read the rest here.

CNN recentlly published a list of "10 quintessential U.S. meals and where to get them."

"Grilled, fried, slathered in cheese, wolfed down on a street corner. These timeless stateside feeds never disappoint," states the travel feature.

Under the headline "Steak," reads the following:

"Just about every U.S. city has its legendary steak place, but Michael Symon’s Roast in Detroit is the one that sizzles in our dreams.

"The restaurant is located inside the Westin Book Cadillac Detroit hotel, but executive chef Andy Hollyday says don’t be intimidated by the valet or linen. Waiters here wear jeans and the loose, happy-hour vibe at the bar sets the tone for the restaurant.

"Hollyday’s favorite is the 450-gram house-aged rib-eye, aged for three weeks, then grilled over hardwood charcoal and topped with a marinade of orange juice, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and roasted blue cheese."

Read the whole list here.

In a long and sweeping feature in Rolling Stone, the magazine highlights the events in Cleveland surrounding the 27th annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

"Bill Rowley, chair of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum board, compares the induction ceremony to a Super Bowl that comes to town every three years. Cleveland fans "not only support [the induction] financially, but they will be there at every party, every night, and it will be jam-packed," he says.

It is staggering to believe, but this year's Cleveland International Film Festival -- the 36th annual -- once again broke the previous year's attendance figures.
 
The 11-day film festival, which wrapped up on Sunday, April 1, checked in a record total of 85,018 filmgoers. This is a 9-percent jump from the previous year and a whopping 143-percent increase from 2003.
 
What's more, the festival saw it's largest single-day attendance on Saturday, March 31, with 13,176 coming to see a film.
 
See you next year for another record-breaking festival?

As part of the multi-part spread in Details magazine, the article "The Rust Belt Revival: What's Happening in Cleveland, Ohio" highlights "Pioneers have brought back made-in-the-Midwest fashion and opened an assortment of innovative bars and restaurants."

Included in the spread are features on:
 
Midwest Fashion Makes a Comeback
Starring Danielle DeBoe and Sean Bilovecky of Dredgers Union.
 
"The Dredgers Union is bringing back made-in-the-Midwest style."
 
The Architectural Upcyclers
Starring Chris Kious of A Piece of Cleveland.
 
"His team then transforms the southern yellow pine, maple, and oak into furniture and architectural elements. APOC sells its smaller creations -- wine racks, benches -- to heritage-hungry consumers and tackles commissions for clients like Starbucks and the Cleveland Institute of Art."
 
The Beer Evangelist
Starring Sam McNulty of Market Garden Brewery.
 
"His latest contribution to the now-thriving hood is Market Garden Brewery & Distillery, a bar-restaurant in a former slaughterhouse that lets you store perishables from the West Side Market while sipping one of 32 craft brews made on site (and soon small-batch whiskey, rum, and vodka, too)."
 
America's Next Great Chef
Starring Jonathon Sawyer of Greenhouse Tavern.
 
"Culinary wunderkinder often leave cities like Cleveland; they rarely come home. But after stints in New York City at the now-defunct Kitchen 22 and Parea, native son Jonathon Sawyer returned with dreams of owning his own place."
 
 
Read more here.
 

A multi-part spread in Details magazine trumpets the remarkable rise of the so-called "Rust Belt."
 
In the piece titled, "Talented, educated, creative people are no longer fleeing the region -- they're flocking to it," the writer kicks off with:
 
"Rust connotes decay and neglect -- and indeed, the Rust Belt's decline coincided with a massive brain drain. But in the past half decade, the region has retained more of its homegrown talent while drawing the best and brightest from across the country."
 
Cited in the article is a Brookings Institution report that found "cities like Pittsburgh and Columbus have increased their college-educated population in recent years, and Cleveland and Buffalo are on their way -- having stanched their decades-long outward migration."
 
Called out for special attention are Clevelanders Eric Kogelschatz and Hallie Bram.
 
"In Cleveland, Eric Kogelschatz founded the think tank shark&minnow with his wife, Hallie Bram Kogelschatz, after both fled high-powered marketing jobs in Boston; besides organizing TEDxCLE (last year's sold out in two hours), the organization collaborates on events with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Cleveland Museum of Art. What prompted the move? "We really didn't know what we were getting into," Eric admits. "But we were tired of Rust Belt cynicism."
 
Read it all right here.

“Now it seems that Lucy shared Eastern Africa with another prehuman species, one that may have spent more time in trees than on the ground,” writes John Noble Wilford of the New York Times.
 
The name Lucy was given to the famous 3.2-million-year-old skeleton discovered in Eastern Africa and is considered the oldest known ancestor to modern day humans.
 
“A 3.4-million-year-old fossil foot found in Ethiopia appears to settle the long-disputed question of whether there was only a single line of hominins -- species more closely related to humans than to chimpanzees -- between four million and three million years ago,” Wilford continues.
 
Beverly Z. Saylor of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland is a member of the scientific team making the discovery and an author of the report announcing the group’s findings.  She states, “the time this hominin lived, the region had many lakes and streams with wooded shores, thus ample opportunities for arboreal habits.”
 
Fellow CWRU colleague and author Bruce M. Latimer states, “The findings clearly showed that the adaptation to bipedality, though considered one of the decisive transitions in early human evolution, was not a single, isolated event.”
 
Read the full New York Times story with Cleveland connections here.

Thanks to a 10-percent increase in international cargo during the 2011 navigation season, the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority nabbed the prestigious Robert J. Lewis Pacesetter Award from the Saint Lawrence Seaway Development Corporation (SLSDC). It is the Port's 10th Pacesetter Award.
 
A large jump in cargo, mostly attributed to the handling of windmill components originating in Germany and destined for Euclid, is to thank for the increase.
 
"The sustained strong economic performance by the port serves to highlight marine transportation’s importance for the city, the region, and the country," said SLSDC Administrator Terry Johnson. "Through its ongoing infrastructure improvements and forward looking strategic plan, the port is well positioned for further growth in 2012 and beyond."
 
"The Port of Cleveland is clearly one of Ohio’s economic engines and we are fortunate that Will Friedman is leading the organization," said Joe Roman, President of Greater Cleveland Partnership.
 
Read the rest of the shipping news here.

Ohio wine producers, most notably those in the Northern part of the state, got a huge shout-out in Huffington Post's national travel blog, "CarsTravelFood."
 
Titled "Explore America: One of Ohio's Best Kept Secrets Is Wine," the feature goes into depth about Ohio's rich wine-making history while offering modern-day tips on where to go.
 
"Ohio wineries might be one of the state's best kept secrets, something worth exploring when visiting the Buckeye State. What's for sure is that the wineries are definitely popular destinations and a worthwhile road trip for those who live here."
 
Some stats: There are now about 150 wineries in the Buckeye State, and 60 percent of those grow their own fruit. At least eight new wineries will open in the state in 2012.

"Ohio wine country is a welcome glimmer of hope in this tough economic climate."

"There is no recession in wine country; our wineries are exploding," says Donniella Winchell, executive director of Ohio Wine Producers Association. "There is a winery within 45 minutes of every resident of the state of Ohio."

The wine industry in Ohio provides about 4,000 jobs, and these vintners attract about 2 million visitors a year. Winchell says 65 percent of Ohio wines are grown in the northeast part of the state in the Grand River Valley, which is 22 miles long and four miles wide. There are about 20 wineries in this region.

Drink up the rest of the travelog here.

Cleveland’s own Michael Symon continues to receive out of town press, this time in a piece from Sylvia Rector of the Detroit Free Press. 
 
As the newspaper’s scribe for the "Dining Out" column, Rector reports that an upcoming episode of the Food Network’s Iron Chef America will be a "battle between two almost-Detroit chefs -- Takashi Yagihashi of the renowned, now-closed Tribute in Farmington Hills, and Michael Symon, the Clevelander who owns Roast at the Westin Book Cadillac Detroit.”
 
The episode airs April 1.
 
The battle will pit two James Beard Award-winning chefs with notably different cooking styles in a contest focusing on a common “secret ingredient.”
 
Later in the story Rector notes Symon is “often credited with igniting his hometown's restaurant renaissance in the mid-'90s -- and if he didn't ignite it, he certainly threw gasoline on the sparks.”
 
"At the end of the day, I cook a very Midwestern style. It's who I am," Symon told the Free Press as he prepared to open Roast, which was the Detroit Free Press 2009 Restaurant of the Year.
 
As Clevelanders it is difficult to imagine a food scene without Symon playing a major role.  While his celebrity has certainly exploded in recent years, it is certainly well deserved.
 
Read the full Detroit Free Press story here.

Clevelanders are becoming familiar with the cash mob experience, which encourages consumers to converge and spend at locally owned stores. But the warm-hearted initiative is spreading to other parts of the nation, reports Reuters.

"After the original Cash Mob in Cleveland, [Andrew] Samtoy's Facebook friends in other cities picked up on the idea and organized their own gatherings. Samtoy can rattle off a list of friends from Los Angeles to Boston who were the ‘early adapters' of the Cash Mob phenomenon," the article reports.
 
“Flash mobs have been blamed as a factor in looting during urban riots. But now a group of online activists is harnessing social media like Twitter and Facebook to get consumers to spend at locally owned stores in cities around the world in so-called Cash Mobs.”
 
The concept of a cash mob is simple, you are required to spend at least $20 at the chosen location (usually a small independently owned local establishment) and meet three people you have never met before, according to Samtoy, the concept’s founder.
 
“The 32-year-old dreamed up the Cash Mob idea last year after spending time in Britain during summer riots that unleashed looting in cities including London, Manchester and Birmingham.”
 
Read the full inspirational story here.

Triple Pundit, a publication that covers "people, planet, and profit," recently published an article that counters assumptions that the green economy is just a passing fad.
 
"To hear conservative commentators tell it, the green economy is a fad, with trumped up benefits, offering jobs that only come at the expense of conventional jobs. And now, they say, with a recession raging all around us, is not the time to be investing money in a more sustainable future," writes the reporter.
 
Rather, "global demand for renewables grew by 31 percent during 2011 to nearly $250 billion. Last month, renewable energy jobs in the European Union broke through to 1.14 million, finally exceeding through the milestone million. The report goes on to say that the EU is on track to meet their goal of 20% renewables by 2020."
 
Closer to home, clean energy jobs in the US, in the years 1998-2007, grew by 9.1% while overall jobs grew by only 3.7%.
 
Mark Muro, of the Brookings Institution, says the 100,000 green jobs were added between 2003-2010, with the highest levels of growth occurring in areas with green tech clusters, like Albany, NY and Cleveland, OH.
 
Read the rest of the good, green news here.

Seven Days, Vermont's alternative newspaper, takes a seat at the new Crop Bistro in Stowe. Launched by Cleveland-based chef and restaurateur Steve Schimoler, the restaurant has more than a few ties to C-Town.
 
"Key to understanding this work in progress, perhaps, is noting that the restaurant’s concept was imported from Crop Bistro & Bar in Cleveland. Schimoler founded that establishment five years ago as both a farm-to-table eatery and a food lab, in many ways an extension of his work as a food scientist and researcher for Cabot Creamery and Nestlé. In Ohio, Crop has earned a reputation as an innovative, playful spot where the kitchen marries fresh produce with modern culinary gear such as vacuum tumblers," writes Corin Hirsch.
 
"Some of the starters come straight from the Ohio menu -- for instance, deviled eggs dusted with chili powder, two of which are topped with bits of crispy, salty bacon. The Cherry Bomb, a plate of two Roma tomatoes stuffed with chorizo sausage and Jack cheese, wrapped in wonton shells and deep fried, comes off as a midwestern snack."
 
"Other appetizers (and main dishes) mimic their Cleveland cousins with rustic twists. For instance, in Ohio, braised pork belly is served over a malt waffle; in Stowe, the cubes of luscious meat are crisped on one side and served over a delicious tangle of cider-braised cabbage. "
 
Read more Cleveland references and the lengthy review here.