Checkland Cuyahoga Quotes

A drone is often preferred for missions that are too "dull, dirty, or dangerous" for manned aircraft."

PROLOGUE

The graffiti was in Spanish, neon colors highlighting the varicose cracks in the wall. It smelled of urine and pot. The front door was metal with four bolt locks and the windows were frosted glass, embedded with chicken wire. They swung out and up like big fake eye-lashes held up with a notched adjustment bar.

This was a factory building on the near west side of Cleveland in an industrial area on the Cuyahoga River known in Ohio as The Flats.

First a sweatshop garment factory, then a warehouse for imported cheeses then a crack den for teenage potheads. It was now headquarters for Magic Slim, the only pimp in Cleveland with his own film studio and training facility.

Her name was Cosita, she was eighteen looking like fourteen. One of nine children from El Chorillo. a dangerous poverty stricken barrio on the outskirts of Panama City. Her brother, Javier, had been snatched from the streets six months ago, he was thirteen and beautiful.

Cosita had a high school education but earned here degree on the streets of Panama.

Interpol, the world's largest international police organization, had recruited Cosita at seventeen. She was smart, street savvy, motivated and very pretty. Just what Interpol was looking for.

Cosita would become a Drone! ~ Nick Hahn

Just like you could dump oil into the Cuyahoga in the 60s and let someone else foot the bill, today you can pump CO2 into the atmosphere and let the whole world foot the bill. ~ Ramez Naam

Early one seasonably cold morning, the first day of November, in the year of our lord 1952...the Cuyahoga River caught fire.

The river burned.

It wasn't so much the river, but a huge oil slick *on* the river, though distinguishing one from the other was more a job for a chemist than a lay observer. ~ Mark Winegardner

It's the Cuyahoga River that puts the cleave in Cleveland, separating East from Midwest, integration from segregation, a place that sees itself as America's westernmost Eastern city from a place that sees itself as the easternmost midwestern city. The rest of the country sees it as neither, though it must be said that the rest of the country is perversely wont to misunderstand Cleveland. ~ Mark Winegardner

Get out. Get out of our house. Both of you. It makes me sick just to have you here. You called me a nothing girl. Well, this nothing girl despises you. I'd rather be nothing and loved by Russell Checkland than anything else on earth. You would have ruined his life and he's so much better than you. He's kind and generous and passionate and everything you're not. He will be a great painter one day. And – and he goes like a train. ~ Jodi Taylor