John M. Cropper

Photo by Rogue Photo, Flickr My #11 Ohio State Buckeyes face #10 Iowa Hawkeyes for the Big-10 title today at 3:30 p.m. Apart from pre-season play against USC, this will be their biggest test of the season. Let’s hope Cincinnati’s win over West Virginia last night bodes well for Ohio football this weekend. The Bengals [...]

Last night I had the opportunity to watch a screening on campus of a powerful documentary, shot in nearby Moraine, Ohio, which chronicles the last months of the General Motors plant there as it faced closure. “The Last Truck” was co-written and directed by two-time Oscar nominee and Wright State University film professor Julia Reichert, [...]

I’m slowly piecing this site together with clips and photographs I’ve written and taken over the years, and it’s teetering toward presentable. I stumbled across a lantern.com archive a few weeks ago which had everything I ever wrote and produced there archived. That made the task of uploading clips so much easier, and I just [...]

I’ve moved. In an effort to consolidate all of my personal and professional writings into one site, I created johncropper.net, where I’ll be writing from now on. Eventually I’ll have this page re-route there, but I wanted to give some heads up first. Word.

It’s hard not to feel a little impressionable after a day like today. Sometime between the end of summer and the beginning of fall, I let slip any motivation I had built-up to run on a regular basis. My ten miles a week turned into two nights of Ultimate, which is itself great exercise, but [...]

Slowly, I’m becoming well-acquainted with long drives.

For several months now I’ve made the trek up I-71, the northeasterly vein that pumps traffic from my hometown of Wilmington to my home-away-from-hometown in Columbus, some 60 cornfield miles away. Almost three times a week I set out, most often in the late afternoon but sometimes before the sun is up, and push my car along. My sluggish but reliable Prizm shrieks and moans during the first few minutes of every trip, but then, like clockwork, it settles into the well-worn hum of 80,000+ miles and counting. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy these trips.

Today’s Columbus Dispatch features two couples in central Columbus, very near to where I used to live along North High Street, who turned their front lawns into veritable grocery stores. They planted over their (non-native) grass, and now harvest more than 20 edible crops right in front of their homes. “Couple Trade Their Lawn for [...]

     I’ll be here all weekend, and should have some good photos and videos from the festival. So, I’ll see you all on Monday.      In the meanwhile, however, here is a funny but informative video from Hank at EcoGeek about Cap and Trade, which most Americans understandably know little about.