Flint Artifacts: Weaver's Bar Matchbook

Before you drink, be sure to obey the safety patrol.

Flint Artifacts: Raincheck Lounge Hawks Hockey Club Figurine

A Shoulder Clod Kind of Town

Ah, Flint. Good to know that — despite all the changes — it's still a place where Ruebens, shoulder clod, and brisket are considered light luncheon fare.

Roberto Acosta at MLive reports on the ownership change and menu updates at Blackstone's on Saginaw Street in downtown.

The restaurant will soon feature two menus -- daytime and nighttime -- each offering different items such as a classic Neapolitan-style pizza cooked in 170 seconds on a wood-fired oven. 

"It's light. It's not the heavier variety like some of the other places," said Hester. "It's something that you can come down at lunch and you're not going to overeat." 

The daytime menu will include sandwiches including the Big Sicilian from the Starlite menu, Reubens, hamburgers with a combination of shoulder clod and brisket meats ground in-house, and salads.

Lordstown, Meet Flint

Does this sound familiar?

The Associated Press reports:

"General Motors will cut up to 14,000 workers in North America and put five plants up for possible closure as it abandons many of its car models and restructures to focus more on autonomous and electric vehicles, the automaker announced Monday. 

"The reductions could amount to as much as 8 percent of GM's global workforce of 180,000 employees.""The restructuring reflects changing North American auto markets as manufacturers continue to shift away from cars toward SUVs and trucks. In October, almost 65 percent of new vehicles sold in the U.S. were trucks or SUVs. That figure was about 50 percent cars just five years ago. 

"GM is shedding cars largely because it doesn't make money on them, Citi analyst Itay Michaeli wrote in a note to investors."

And...

"Trump, who has made bringing back auto jobs a big part of his appeal to Ohio and other Great Lakes states that are crucial to his re-election, also said he was being tough on General Motors CEO Mary Barra. 

"At a rally near GM's Lordstown, Ohio, plant last summer, Trump told people not to sell their homes because the jobs are 'all coming back.'"

Slumming Became a Mania

"In the 1920s, 'slumming' became a mania, as urban elites sought out the exotic, the 'real,' wherever they could find it. They packed into the speakeasies that filled the cities after the imposition of Prohibition, where they could rub shoulders with Italian, Irish, or Jewish gangsters. They filled theaters to see ethnic entertainers such as Ragtime Jimmy Durante, late of Coney Island, or the anarchic Marx Brothers. And in the most startling turn of all, they discovered Negroes living in their midst. 

"In the early 1920s, sophisticates scrambled to grab a share of the black life that the southern migration was bringing into cities. White producers mounted all-black musicals. White couples fumbled with the Charleston. And white patrons poured into Chicago's South Side jazz joints and Harlem nightclubs. If they were lucky, they squeezed into the Vendome, where Louis Armstrong held the floor, or Edmond's Cellar, where Ethel Waters sang the blues. The frenzy was shot through with condescension. White slummers thought black life exciting because it was "primitive" and vital. Visiting the ghetto's haunts became the era's way to snub mainstream society, to be in the avant-garde. 'Jazz, the blues, negro spirituals, all stimulate me enormously,' novelist Carl Van Vechten wrote H.L. Mencken in the summer of 1924. 'Doubtless, I shall discard them too in time.'"