Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park has been celebrating its year-long 50th season with a remarkable number of premieres. Producing Artistic Director Ed Stern will sustain that commitment to new work with a world premiere to kick off the 2010-11 season in September. High will feature movie and stage actress Kathleen Turner in a drama already designated for a move to Broadway early in 2011.

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The Bengals will be on national TV tonight taking on their big brother the Pittsburgh Steelers, and they’ll be without Chad Ocho Cinco because he done broke a team rule. What kind of rules to the Bengals have anyway? No winning? HAHAHA.

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Why do you suck now?

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You know that friend who gets sweaty and angry and tense whenever someone says something bad about Cincinnati? The friend who will defend it like King Arthur defended Camelot, not only the city itself but the idea of it? I'm that guy. 

I will Wiki whatever city you grew up in and show you point by point why Cincinnati is better. "But adult internet star Raven Riley is from Middletown and did you know that the Cincinnati Public Library is arguably the largest public library in the country?" I say, scrambling for anything that might appeal to the Cincinnati-hater.

Last night was the season finale of Taking the Stage, the Cincinnati-based docu-drama about students at the School for Creative and Performing Arts. I've officially watched two episodes of the show (the first and last) and am therefore unqualified to comment on the quality and/or relevance of the content.

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Get your glue guns ready, ya'll, because the Crafty Supermarket's about to take over the Northside Tavern. That's right. Your local watering hole (generally full of tight-pantsed drunks at night) will be hosting an indie craft show on Saturday afternoon (noon-6 p.m.) with handmade fine art, recycled goods, home decor, jewelry, children's items, stationery and more.

The masterminds behind this DIY dream are local writer/editor/crafter Grace Dobush and recent DAAP grad/sustainable shoemaker Alisha Budkie. The duo will be bringing together over 20 craft vendors from Cincinnati and the Midwest for a fair inspired by the likes of Renegade Chicago. Along with shopping opportunities there will be "swag bags" for the first 50 shoppers, music from PROJECTMILL, food from Dojo Gelato and others, and a Make It! table where attendees can get crafty with the BYOProjectors (read about them here).

CityBeat recently had a little e-mail exchange with Dobush, whose book, Crafty Superstar: Make Crafts on the Side, Earn Extra Cash and Basically Have It All, is about to be released, about the Crafty Supermarket.

CityBeat: What is the Crafty Supermarket?

Grace Dobush: Crafty Supermarket is an indie craft show, or a Rock & Roll craft show, which is more appropriate since it's in Northside. This is not your standard high-school auditorium, church-basement craft show: We're having music by PROJECTMILL, rad food from local vendors and 20 hip crafters who will be selling the stuff they make. No packaged stuff, no commercial stuff, no lame stuff—just arts and crafts!

CB: Why are you having a craft show? What's the goal?

GD: My goal is to solidify the craft scene in Cincinnati a bit. There are a ton of really talented crafters and artists here, but none of us seem to know each other! My co-organizer, Alisha, and I had never met until we were in Washington D.C. at the Summit of Awesome (a craft summit organized by the ladies who put on Crafty Bastards, a humongous indie craft show). We really wished there was an indie craft event in Cincinnati, and eventually we realized that we should step up and do it ourselves! It's either the DIY mentality kicking in or a pretty solid sense of masochism, I'm not sure which.

CB: You seem to be an indie craft guru. What is your crafting experience? What inspires you to craft? What crafts do you make/specialize in?

GD: That's the first time I've heard that one! I've just been crafting a long-ass time. I've been printmaking since I was a teenager and then took a course on bookbinding my freshman year of college. It just kind of snowballed after that, and I sought out like-minds on the internet. Right around 2000 was a turning point for indie craft... it got a name, the indie craft shows started coming out, and all the movers and shakers were on these craft message boards and got to know each other. Some of the folks I know from those boards back in the day I ended up interviewing for my book, Crafty Superstar.

I'm not a full-time crafter (I'm a magazine editor and writer by trade) but I love connecting with people and talking to people. There are plenty of crafters who are much more successful than me at being a business, but I saw a lot of word-of-mouth information that hadn't been collected anywhere else. And my book was born!

CB: What role does crafting play in our modern world, so to speak? Why is it important?

GD: I think the popularity of craft is a direct backlash to the super-industrialized big-box shopping culture. People are starting to see the value in knowing exactly where the things they buy come from, and there's nothing better than finding an object you absolutely love and getting to talk to the person who made it. Of course, big-box stores recognize that this aesthetic is totally hot, so you see crafty-ish knockoffs for sale that are probably handmade... but by child laborers who may or may not be working against their will.

There are also a pretty big number of crafters who focus on using sustainable, local and/or recycled materials. And of course, when you support an indie artist, you are directly supporting your local economy. I can almost guarantee the $10 you spend at Crafty Supermarket will turn around and get spent on bus fare for the Metro, dinner at Melt or drinks at the Tavern later.

CB: What vendors will be on hand at the market?

GD: We've got a really wide range of crafters—selected from almost 70 applications, which just blew us away. The crafters make jewelry, paper goods, housewares, kid's stuff, clothing, art, knit things—all sorts of stuff. We also tried to get a balance of crafters in terms of wanting this to represent Cincinnati crafters—about three-quarters of the vendors are from the Cincinnati region. And although we have a lot of vendors who are old hands at the indie craft sale thing, we also wanted to make sure to bring in some folks who are doing a show for the first time, because once upon a time, we were the newbies.

CB: What sort of crafts will attendees be able to make at the Make It! Table?

GD: We've got a really random assortment of supplies and guest curation by the crafty people from BYOProject, which is a crafty collective that meets at Happen Inc. in Northside once a month. It's an anything-goes kind of craft situation, but specifically we've got paper to make your own album cover (12-inch, of course), and little paperboard albums that you can decorate to make your own storybook or draw a demented family album. Whatev!

CB: Will this become an annual event? Do you have any other events planned for the future?

GD: From the very beginning Alisha and I have kept saying stuff like "Next year, we are so doing X and Y," or "Next year, we are never doing Z again." It's just felt kind of natural that this would roll into being an annual event. Plus, since the response has been so huge (our Facebook event has 130 guests at this point) that it would be a shame to never do it again!

We don't have any more events planned immediately—we need some recovery time!—but at this point we're totally planning to do something even bigger for next fall. The late fall is primo craft sale time because people are much more willing to spend money to buy gifts for other people. It's pretty safe to say you'll see Crafty Supermarket again next fall.

Cincinnati restaurants Adriatico’s and Eli’s BBQ got national recognition this week when they appeared on Urbanspoon’s top 100 “cheap eats” list. Urbanspoon chose these two eateries, as well as 98 more, from the million (yes, million) restaurants in their database.

Eli’s BBQ upgraded from a tent at Fountain Square and Findlay Market to a permanent home in the East End this year. They serve smoked meat and home-cooked sides. On Friday afternoons, you can bring your own drinks to accompany the pulled pork and macaroni and cheese on your plate. Eli’s offers hickory-smoked ribs, all-beef hotdogs, pulled pork sandwiches and more. For a longer rundown of Eli’s BBQ, check out CityBeat's review of the joint.

Adriatico’s brings New York style pizza to the Queen City. The pizzeria and sports bar is open after midnight each night, so you can get your late-night pizza fix after most places are closed. And since pizza isn't complete without beer, this place has plenty of it. With more than 40 beers on tap plus tons of craft bottled and canned beers, you’re able to mix and match pizzas and brews for the best combination for you. To keep up with Adriatico’s, check them out on Facebook.

Congratulations to Cincinnati’s cheap stops to fill up and leave full. Once you give these restaurants a try, check out more local spots because Cincinnati has a lot to offer when it comes to eating.

This year’s free agent market has been extremely slow in developing, and there are still big-name guys waiting to find out where they fit in. The opportunity is ripe for a team like the Reds, with a little cash to spend, to find a rare deal. But the Reds are a weird team right now, and it’s been difficult to figure out what would be a good move, even if it comes for less than market value.

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In a stark turnabout from the company’s previous position involving the incident, Cintas Corp. has settled a lawsuit filed by the wife of an employee who was burned to death in an industrial dryer at an Oklahoma facility.

When Eleazar Torres-Gomez was killed at the Cintas laundry near Tulsa, Okla., in March 2007, the company took no responsibility and blamed him for his death. Further, Cintas initially tried to block Torres-Gomez’s family from claiming workers compensation benefits.

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Well, surprise. Most of the Americans who don’t pay federal income taxes live in states that polls show are locked in for Mitt Romney. They are down South. Or out in the Southwest, according to Tax Foundation data.

Mississippi has the most filers with no income tax liability. It has voted Republican in every presidential election since 1980. When Obama was on the ballot there in 2008, he only got 43 percent of the popular vote. Yet 45 percent of Mississippi tax filers pay nothing. That tidbit certainly rips a hole in Romney’s contention that Obama voters don’t pay income taxes — Republican voters appear to be skating as well, and obviously in far larger numbers than Romney suggests.

Our neighbors in Kentucky — who voted early 60 percent GOP over the past three presidential elections — are pretty good at not paying income taxes too. Fewer send checks to the IRS than in West Virginia. Alaska is the outlier — it votes Republican and just 21 percent of its filers don’t pay income taxes to Uncle Sam. You betcha, the vast majority of Alaskans do send money to the IRS. Perhaps they write their checks while looking at Russia from their porches.

If you are wondering about Ohio, the state had 5.56 million tax filers. Of that number, some 68 percent paid federal income taxes. We’re a swing state that backed Obama in 2008. Clearly, not all the payers were Republicans.

Here is a map with all the data:

The Tax Foundation, a group based in Washington, D.C. that calls itself a nonpartisan research group, produced its state-by-state ranking of non-filers in May 24, 2010. It has been available on the Internet for more than two years, which means it was available long before Romney said Obama’s supporters don’t pay taxes. This insight gets right to the heart of the matter:

“Nine of the 10 states with the largest percentage of non-payers are in the South and Southwest. In Mississippi, 45 percent of federal tax returns remit nothing or receive money with their federal tax returns; that is the highest percentage nationally. Georgia is next at 41 percent, followed by Arkansas at 41 percent, and Alabama, South Carolina and New Mexico at 40 percent. All of the top 10 ranking states have among the lowest median family incomes in the country.”

Anybody who’s familiar with the Internet knows that it’s a great place for looking at pictures of people without their clothes.

Apparently a lot of people want to do that to vice presidential candidates as well.

According to Google Politics & Elections, the No. 2 most-searched term connected to Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s name is “shirtless.”

Ryan is known for a proposed budget that would offer massive tax cuts to the rich while attempting to reduce the deficit by gutting Medicare.

If one is to believe TMZ’s absclusive titled “Paul Ryan: He’s Hiding A Six Pack,” then one could see why.

An intrepid CityBeat intern spent most of Monday morning searching for pictures of said abs, but was only able to turn up the vice presidential candidate waving ironically from his yacht.

According to TMZ’s unnamed Hill source, Ryan hits the gym every morning at 6 a.m., and his routine is “fierce.” The source, who talks like a stereotype, says Ryan is kind of on the skinny side, but “totally ripped and has a six pack.”

Ryan’s press camp responded to the news by challenging Joe Biden to a sit-up contest in lieu of a vice presidential debate.

Google’s top four related search terms for Paul Ryan:

1. Vice President
2. Shirtless
3. Wiki
4. Budget