A misunderstanding over the attempted coining of a new phrase has resulted in an unlikely friendship between two groups of the City’s workforce.

When Tomas Babushkin announced the opening of WorkSHOP, his new “wiki-place” where freelance information professionals can rent cubicles, collaborate on projects, and drink complimentary espresso and yerba mate, he foresaw a clientele dressed in open-collar Prada shirts and Chip & Pepper jeans. What he didn’t expect were strong, silent types in flannel shirts and Carharts.

But WorkSHOP’s unexpected diverse clientele now includes many of the migrant workers drawn to the City in hopes of finding landscaping, construction, or agricultural work. Babushkin is still trying to adapt to this mixture of open-source and open-borders, but the “rock-ribbed entrepreneur” is thrilled to have the opportunity. “I guess I brought this situation onto myself,” said the former chief interaction architect for social-networking site MishMash. “But it is what it is, and I’m committed to serving all my customers, whether they’re running from corporate careers or ICE.”

It all started during Babushkin’s media blitz to draw attention to WorkSHOP. He was looking to advertise his services but also cultivate an image of the nebulous group of writers, artists, and consultants who work for themselves. Babushkin thought “freelancer” was overused and didn’t fully capture the spirit of the people he was trying to serve.

So during an interview with Journal-Clarion, Babushkin said, “Don’t mistake [freelancers’] casual dress for a poor work ethic: These people will toil for their paychecks. I like to call them new-economy day laborers.” Babushkin was so pleased with the phrase that it became WorkSHOP’s slogan: “Home office for the new-economy day laborer.”

And that’s where the confusion began. WorkSHOP ads used the slogan, and promised free services, including free international calls, for its first week. When WorkSHOP opened for business three weeks ago, Babushkin greeted a stream of white-collar freelancers — and migrant laborers from Mexico and Central America. While the freelancers booted up their laptops, the laborers rushed to the VoIP phones and began making free calls to their families down south.

“I took a bath on those phone charges for the first week, but how could I resist?” Babushkin says. “These men hadn’t had long phone conversations with their families in weeks, months — one guy even a year — and it was so great that they could do this. More than one of them openly cried.”

The free international calls ended two weeks ago, but the migrants have become comfortable with WorkSHOP, and Babushkin has become fond of them. Just as he predicted, various collaborative efforts have arisen between the freelancers and the migrants:

• Freelance TV producer Seth Cohn is working with a group of migrants on a reality show, tentatively titled Meet the Migrants. “The biggest obstacle is obviously protecting their identities, so these guys don’t get any interference from la migra, but I’m confident we can find a solution,” Cohn says.
• Independent political pollster Maggie McBride is conducting a long-term study of the migrants’ political beliefs. “I’ve been surprised by my findings so far — they think Congress’s stimulus package is a rash quick-fix to a complex problem, they support reinstituting the draft, and they’re surprisingly libertarian. Almost all of them would have voted for Ron Paul if he weren’t such an extremist on immigration.”
• Many of the freelancers are now proud owners of beautifully hedged lawns and sturdy, pressure-treated patio decks. One is even having an addition built for a home office in place of his WorkSHOP cubicle.

Babushkin, ever the communicator, has held a series of themed discussions designed to share knowledge between the freelancers and migrants. There was an uncomfortable moment when a freelancer asked a migrant panel about differentiating himself from his competition, and laborer Hector Gamez answered, “You must work very hard.” The freelancer, assuming Gamez’s simple answer was because of a weak grasp of English, tried to elaborate on his question in a raised voice before the laborer cut him off. “No, man, I’ve been speaking English since I was 3 years old. You just have to work really hard.” A confused debate ensued for the next 20 minutes before Babushkin said everyone was just going to have to agree to disagree on that point.

While no freelancers have traded their BlackBerrys for Black & Deckers, there are signs the migrants might be rethinking their career paths. Fortunato Umaña, a 23-year-old Salvadoran, says he’s through with landscaping. “I was talking to that programmer guy with the red hair, Brian, recently in the Idea Lounge and he was talking about how it hit him one day that he was sick of working for a corporation. When he started talking about how his manager just took all the credit for his work, I went, ‘Exactly! Why am I working 13 hours a day cutting and edging and leaf blowing and getting zero credit? I need to stop breaking my back and start using my brain.’ That’s when I decided to really make a go of it and become a landscaping consultant.”

Umaña then excused himself. “I need to go talk to one of the designers about my logo.”
—Craig Gaines and Ilya Perchikovsky

The Further Adventures of Li’l Bruce Wayne [The Invincible Super Blog]

Often disregarded as part of any continuity, Li’l Bruce Wayne was a long-running series of light-hearted comic books aimed at children, detailing the life of a young, fantastically wealthy Bruce Wayne (known in the series as “The Happiest Kid On Earth”) in the years before the deaths of Thomas and Martha Wayne and his subsequent transformation into Batman

The series was originally created by Bill Finger and Jerry Robinson to fill a gap in DC’s publishing schedule after the cancellation of More Fun Comics in 1946, and ran through the majority of the Silver Age despite being regarded by editors and fans alike as being “extremely depressing” [citation needed] and is usually left out of any discussion of the character. It is notable, however, as being the first published comic book work of writer/artist Frank Miller.

Of course, there are covers and details at the link.

Caption on the reverse of the photo: “March 13– Dr. Archibald Vinson, head of the City Health Department, administers a dosage of polio vaccine to his granddaughter, Becky Simmons, in her classroom at Calvin Coolidge Elementary School, as a demonstration of his confidence in Dr. Jonas Salk’s new creation. - Harlow Barton, Clarion-Standard”

In 1956, rumors and panic were running rampant amongst parents that the polio vaccine was responsible for a spate of cases of dropsy in area schoolchildren. The real cause was a small hepatitis outbreak, traced to a heavily-polluted pond in the city’s Roxboro section.
- RJ White, Ray Ingraham

Due to a clerical error, city funds earmarked for this spring’s pothole repairs were mixed up with funds intended for a potluck for City Streets Department employees to celebrate last month’s groundhog’s day.

Streets Department clerk Debbie Winton, who was in charge of the potluck, admits she was taken aback when she first saw the amount she had to spend on the annual lunch, typically held in Conference Room C in the Malcolm B. Adams Public Works Building on South Haverline.

“Usually we get about 20, 25 dollars for this kind of thing, most
people bring a dish to pass and we have a couple of grinders,” said Winton. “This year - well, let’s just say it would have afforded a much nicer affair.”

Some of the additional planned expenditures at this year’s Groundhog’s Day potluck included four six-foot-long submarine sandwiches, an ice-sculpture in the shape of City Hall, a chocolate fountain, fresh lobster flown in from the coast, individual groundhog shaped chocolates, a performance by the surviving members of the band Foghat and an appearance by Brian Doyle-Murray, who portrayed the mayor in the film Groundhog Day.

“I guess I just thought that this year they really wanted to reward us for our hard work and to maybe raise everyone’s spirits after all the crazy fluctuating weather we’ve had,” said Winton. “The temperatures going up and down like this will drive you nuts.”

Those conditions, repeated freezes and thaws, tend to create especially plentiful and deep potholes on city roads.

Before plans were finalized, however, the mistake was noticed by the city comptroller’s office and the funds were reallocated correctly. As a gesture, the Comptrollers Office allowed enough extra money in the budget to still allow for the ordering of the four hoagies.
- Brodie H. Brockie

@ goodspeedupdate- Planning a Fake City

Our novels, films, and urban planning textbooks are filled with imaginary cities. Whether utopias or dystopias, most of these fictional cities imagine what a city could be at its best — or worst. However, few describe an average city, let alone map out a typical 1,011 square mile American city in excruciating detail, complete with a named streets and an imaginary history. That’s precisely what my friend Neil Greenberg set out to do with his Fake Omaha project…

RG: How big will the complete Fake Omaha be, both on paper and also if it were a real city?

NG: The Fake Omaha metro area exists on 17 sheets, each one 34 inches by 28 inches. All sheets observe the same scale (4 inches equals 1 mile) and design standards. It’s hard to give dimensions of the whole map, as it’s oddly shaped and it’s been fully assembled only three times.

Fittingly, my approach to planning the project mirrored the development of American metropolitan areas. I began with one sheet, a “zoomed out” core area of Fake Omaha and a few close-in suburbs drawn at a 1 inch equals 1 mile scale. In this area, I mapped major roads and land features. I blew this up 400 percent, traced the base features onto the larger sheets, and mapped minor streets directly onto each panel. This original area amounted to maybe 10 map sheets. I kept going, and ended up mapping seven “exurban” sheets not part of the original core map. The sprawl ceased only when I ran out of paper.

Doing the math, the entire metro area equals 1,011 square miles to scale.

Intersection of Ludlow and Barnham Streets, in the city’s Northside section, during the Great Flood of 1914. The late-January flood was a result of an unseasonable warm spell dumping the melted remains of the Great Blizzard of 1914 (which itself had also indirectly led to the Cronin & Sons sawdust factory explosion) into the already swollen banks of the Ostahanoc River.

The flood, plus the Great Downtown Fire of 1911, the Great Carsonhurst Tornado of 1912, the Great Tin-Cart Riots of Late 1913 and the deaths of two mayors from a flu epidemic in late 1914, helped to cement city’s reputation as a center for disaster and instability that would last for years.
- RJ White

In 1980 the only remaining state correctional facility within the city limits - Amandour Prison - closed its heavy iron door for last time. The order to shut down the facility, once home to as many as 494 inmates, actually occurred in 1951. While it is not surprising for the wheels of justice – or the wheels of bureaucracy – to grind slowly, in this case neither the State Department of Corrections nor any combination of city government officials was responsible the long delay. If any person held the key (so to speak) to the 37-year gap between decision and action, it is former Judge Marvin Kristolich. But the ultimate determining factor in the long, slow decline, and eventual demise of Amandour Prison was the remarkable constitution of its final inmate, John Stuart Powell.

Powell was the principal suspect in the sensational murder of Charles Kerry O’Keefe, Commissioner of Police, in August 1949. In the summer of 1950, with the still-unsolved case becoming an ongoing embarrassment for the police department, interim Police Chief Donald Connolly announced the apprehension of a suspect connected to the homicide by a barely credible trail of conjecture and circumstantial evidence. That suspect turned out to be John Stuart Powell, who had not only acquired two prior convictions for armed robbery and assault, but also declined to furnish police with a plausible alibi for the time of the murder. Although when pressed he claimed no knowledge of the O’Keefe homicide, he did not invest much effort in his own defense.

Despite his client’s reticence, public defender Thomas Judson very nearly won the case, despite relentless pressure from District Attorney Peter Moltrie to plead his client guilty. Three times the jury reported themselves hopelessly deadlocked, until a last-minute, and some would say suspicious, change of heart on the part of several jurymen brought back a verdict of guilty for murder in the first degree. Judge Kristolich stated his disagreement with the jury’s decision, believing that the crime warranted a finding of murder in the second degree, but he declined to overturn the verdict. He did, however, unexpectedly sentence Powell to life imprisonment, rather than execution.

What the public didn’t know was that Kristolich knew Powell was innocent. In 1996, the records of the case were requested by the Journal-Clarion under the Freedom of Information Act; they revealed the startling truth. Mrs. Marvin (Margaret) Kristolich had been having an affair with Charles Kerry O’Keefe, and had killed him in a lover’s quarrel. Judge Kristolich had pulled every string he could fit between his dirty fingers to have the case assigned to his court, including threatening to reveal incriminating photos of Connolly and his ‘very good friend,’ District Attorney Moltrie.

Kristolich’s peculiar brand of ‘mercy’ in sparing from execution a man he knew to be innocent was entirely at the behest of his wife. In addition, it was Margaret Kristolich who inserted the clause in the sentencing decree that Powell never be moved from Amandour Prison. Mrs. Kristolich was soon spied making visits to the prison almost daily. In exchange for Judge Kristolich’s legal – and apparently also marital – largesse, his wife had agreed to keep the lid on a few sordid tales of her own.

Not long afterwards, the wheels of justice began to whirl at astonishing speed. Judge Marvin Kristolich was felled by a heart attack in September 1951, only a month after Amandour Prison was slated for closure, though by decree that closure would have to wait until the release or demise of John Stuart Powell. Judge Kristolich’s death also coincided with an end to Margaret Kristolich’s frequent visits to the prison. In fact, by October of that year Margaret Kristolich had moved to Healy, Alaska, now – coincidentally – home to freshly minted Circuit Court Judge Thomas Judson. Then, in October of 1952, while camping in Denali National Park, Margaret Kristolich was killed by a brown bear.

Meanwhile, John Stuart Powell, 59 years old at the time of his conviction, continued to survive in excellent health, even as he continued to be denied parole. He not only outlasted Judge and Mrs. Kristolich, but also Chief Connelly (1964), District Attorney Moltrie (1965), and even Alaska Supreme Court Justice Judson (1979). And by 1977, every other inmate at Amandour Prison had either been released or died, leaving Powell as the sole inmate in the 500-bed facility for the last 11 years of his life. Finally, on November 4, 1980, at the age of 88, Powell succumbed to pneumonia. Within a week of his death, demolition began on Amandour Prison.

In 1998, eighteen years after John Stuart Powell’s death, Val Kilmer portrayed him in Surviving Justice, a direct-to-video film directed by Phillip Noyce. And in 2008, twenty-eight years after the closure of Amandour Prison, dozens – or even hundreds – of patrons every day enjoy the mesquite-grilled flavor of San Antonio-style sirloin at the Amandour Avenue Lone Star Steakhouse, most without the slightest remembrance of the prison that once occupied the site, or any knowledge of its most famous inmate.
- David Andrews

Caption on the reverse of the photo: “Tuesday- During festivities, President William Howard Taft laughs heartily with Mayor Woolsey at a joke making sport of the intelligence of those in the Arizona Territory.”

During this May 1911 visit, there was an embarrassing incident in which Taft broke a chair in the mayor’s office. After decades in storage, the chair was finally put on display at the Rincher Museum of Municipal History in 1990.
- RJ White

Dubious honors were heaped upon the collective heads of The City Desk this week with the announcement of nominees for the seventeenth-annual SirSirSir Awards, hosted by the Journalists’ Smoking Club.

The “Sirries” are a lampoon award granted annually since 1991 by the JSC - an unofficial subset of The Typesetters Club, the city’s professional organization for members of the press- and developed “to honor those members of the fourth estate who boldly hold forth the principles of cowardice, ineptitude, laziness, meekness, collusion, self-righteous crusading, shoddy reporting, functioning livers,pink lungs and all other things anathemic to the field of journalism.” The ceremony will be held this Sunday at the Typesetters’ two-story clubhouse on Landon Avenue (between the Kwik-Park and 24-Hr-Park garages).

The City Desk finds itself nominated for three awards in the “Blogs” category established last year by long-serving Journalists’ Smoking Club President Orville “Otter” Oliver, columnist for The Evening Press. These include the “Bloag” award - short for “bloated blogs” - for “blogs laboring under an inflated sense of importance,” another award for sloppy fact-checking (certain of Ron Paul’s internet supporters would no doubt vote for the site) and the “Any Monkey Can Access The Internet” award for one of our frequent contributors (whose name we’ll leave unwritten, as reports have it that he is taking the nomination pretty hard).

The SirSirSir Awards are named after the infamous on-air performance of local reporter Tom Harley at a 1987 mayoral press conference, when the ten-year veteran of the Journal-Clarion vainly attempted to gain recognition from then-mayor Walter Jackson by repeating “Sir. Sir. Sir” in a staccato monotone for well over twenty-five minutes, and several tens of thousands of iterations, while never being acknowledged by Jackson.

Still, heads are held high at The City Desk this week. The consensus among the contributors is that morning show weatherperson and professional party planning consultant Patricia Casey’s mid-2007 series of entries on the Channel 18 morning program - wherein she argued the unusual premise that adopted children inevitably became overt and violent racists later in life - is bound to sweep the awards.

It pays to remember that the SirSirSir Awards are intended as gentle ribbing from a society of hard-nosed professionals, and that President Orville Oliver himself holds a record 47 “Sirries.” Oliver has also twice been decked by offended past winners and nominees.
- Jon Morris

Former presidential candidate Ron Paul was scheduled to give a speech this Wednesday at Watson University for several student political science classes, but the event has been canceled.

Watson Students for Poli-Sci (WSPS) had booked the Congressman (R-TX) to come and speak back when he was still in the race, but hoped that his exit from the campaign could still serve as fodder for an instructive talk. The problem came last week when the group began to circulate a last round of press materials promoting the campus event. In the press release, WSPS publicity committee head Ian Sandborn (class of ‘09), made a reference to “Rep. Ron Paul’s failed presidential bid.”

Once the release began to be circulated, that sentence was all it took for scores of Ron Paul supporters to begin a deluge of phone calls and emails to the Watson University Student Affairs office, Student Activity Board, Administration Office and to Sandborn’s apartment. Threats of protests, threats of contacting university donors and even threats of death resulted. At one point, even confused administrators over at the Community College were contacted about the release.

After consideration by administrators and the WSPS, Rep. Paul’s invitation was rescinded, citing safety concerns and what was termed a “lack of educational value at this point.”

In Sunday’s Journal-Clarion, Ian Sandborn said- “Someone called my parents, telling them they raised a failure. I didn’t really care at first, but that was too much. They’re insane. No wonder they call them ‘Paultards,’” he said, using a popular colloquialism for Rep. Paul’s often overly fervent supporters.

Libertarian mayoral candidate Lewis Armstrong was also quoted in the article lamenting the dis-invitation, as the city really has not had “a good conversation about the gold standard in years.”

He did not seem to be joking.
- RJ White