How bad is Chuck E. Cheese these days? Well, consider that in the last month, one local TV station has reported on three assaults at area metro Detroit restaurants.

The most recent was here in Dearborn on Sunday evening at the store located in a strip mall on Michigan Avenue, just west of Telegraph

According to local broadcast and print media, a Dearborn Heights grandmother who was celebrating her grandson’s seventh birthday was allegedly assaulted by a man following her request to him that he watch his profanity.

The man in the other group responded with more profanities and then allegedly attacked her, hitting her in the face and dragging her by her hair, according to the victim’s family.

“There was an altercation,” Lt. Patty Penman of the Dearborn Police Department told The Detroit News. “And we’re trying to see if usable video exists and submitting the matter to our local prosecutor for review.”

It is another story taking off across the Internet, putting Dearborn again in the spotlight. We heard of the news from one of our readers who sent us this link HERE.

Headpace Gallery inside Dearborn’s Green Brain Comics is proud to announce its next exhibit, HOT/COLD, featuring some of Michigan’s best women artists.

The idea behind the HOT/COLD exhibit theme was to offer each hand picked artist the choice to create something hot and sassy, cool and wintry, or incorporate both themes. The results are amazing and Headspace Gallery is honored to showcase the wide range of styles resulting from this unique theme.

“As always, we like to promote our local home grown talent,” says Katie Merritt, co-owner and curator of the exhibit.

Most of the artists hail from the metro Detroit area, with one addition from Kalamazoo, and one former Detroiter currently residing in New York.

The artists vary as wildly as the styles including a published graphic novelist, Jane Irwin, two Center for Creative Studies students, Natalie James and Hanna Lee Stockdale, a musician/local business owner, Windy Weber, and even a 10-year-old aspiring artist, Audra Evans. The exhibit is featuring 14 of Michigan’s finest female artists in all.

HOT/COLD officially opens Saturday, Jan. 21, 2012 with an opening reception/meet and greet with the artists at Headspace Gallery. The fun starts at 7 p.m. and runs until 10 p.m. with a live DJ, Terri “WhoDat?” McQueen.

Headspace Gallery is located inside Green Brain Comics, 13210 Michigan Ave.  in East Downtown Dearborn. For more information check the website HERE or call 313-582-9444.

The exhibit will be on display until March 31, 2012.

The Dearborn Community Fund will host a rocking evening on Saturday, Feb. 11, featuring the music of ABBA performed by the Swedish group Arrival.

The Dearborn Community Fund (DCF) will host a rocking evening on Saturday, Feb. 11, featuring the music of ABBA performed by the Swedish group Arrival in a dynamic concert at the Ford Community & Performing Arts Center followed by the Ultimate Dance Party.

The event will benefit the DCF and other participating non-profit organizations that serve the Dearborn area.

Arrival’s performance in the Michael A. Guido Theater begins at 8 p.m. and includes some of the most upbeat, feel good sounds of the ’70s including classic ABBA hits featured in both the musical and movie “Mama Mia.” You know them all – “Dancing Queen,” “Take a Chance on Me,” “Knowing Me, Knowing You” and more! Arrival is the only group sanctioned by ABBA to perform their classic hits.

Immediately following the performance, the season’s Ultimate Dance Party, open to those 21 and over, kicks off at 10 p.m. at the center in the dome room. Under a spectacular light display, party goers will groove to more ABBA music and other tunes mixed by two of Detroit’s favorite DJs – Ray G of Detroit and MMK of South Beach. Included in the evening will be other entertainment, hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar featuring specialty ABBA drinks.

Combination concert/Ultimate Dance Party tickets offer special benefits. VIP tickets are $100 and include premium front section concert seating, an opportunity to meet the performers, Ultimate Dance Party admission, and two drink tickets. A $60 combination concert and Ultimate Dance Party ticket includes main floor concert seating.

Tickets to only the Ultimate Dance Party are $25. Individual Arrival concert ticket prices vary. The Center, located at 15801 Michigan at Greenfield, is fully accessible and offers free parking.

The Arrival ABBA Concert and Ultimate Dance Party fundraiser is coordinated by the non-profit Dearborn Community Fund (DCF). The organization provides resources to support arts, cultural and recreational projects that impact the citizens of Dearborn. It is funded entirely through generous contributions from individuals, businesses, sponsors and fundraising activities.

For tickets or more information, call the Ford Community & Performing Arts Center box office at 313-943-2354.

Judge Mark Somers

The Dearborn Press & Guide is reporting that 19th District Court Judge Mark Somers has pulled petitions to run for Wayne County’s Third Circuit Court.

Somers, who has served as one of Dearborn’s three district court judges since 2002, told the paper that he reached the decision over the holidays after speaking with his family.

“With three judges retiring, I don’t know that there will be another opportunity like this in my life,” the paper quotes Somers.

Somers must collect 4,200 signatures by May 1 to appear on the November ballot. He said he plans to start collecting signatures immediately.

The city of Dearborn was awarded a $7.5 million low-interest loan from the State of Michigan to continue the massive federally-mandated combined sewer overflow work that has been going on in our city for more than a decade.

This particular loan will go toward the sewer-separation project south of Wilson Street, east of Telegraph Road and north of the Rouge River, City Engineer Yunus Patel tells DeepsaidWhat. Construction is set to get underway in February. If all goes well, construction of this phase of the CSO product would wrap up in October.

Costs for this part of the project are expected to total about $12 million. These costs and interest on the loan, a 2.5 percent rate, will be paid down through the special CSO millage instituted in 2004. Any other project costs will be paid “using various funding sources”, the Dearborn Press & Guide quotes Dearborn finance officials as saying.

The CSO project is aimed at putting an end to the discharge of untreated sewage into the Rouge River. The cleanup is mandated by the federal Clean Water Act.

Those of you who have been following this project will recall that our elected Dearborn officials first chose to address the problem by approving spending on constructing multi-million gallon containment shafts able to store any excess drain water. But the implementation and construction has been a quagmire of engineering problems, followed by lawsuits.

So in 2010, Dearborn officials decided to abandon the containment shaft and go to sewer separation, which was one of the original ideas proposed nearly a decade ago but rejected for reasons we simply can’t recall. While a little more intrusive to vehicle traffic, separation is less expensive and results in new paved surfaces once the work is completed.

The Press and Guide says that according to the DEQ, from January through November 2011, Dearborn’s CSO Outfall 004, which services the area that will see work beginning in February, there were 27 reported overflow events, which released 45.7 million gallons of untreated combined sewage into the Rouge River. Prior to Dearborn beginning their CSO control program, the total average annual volume of overflows per year was approximately 929 million gallons.

The new hotel is expected to open later this year.

A near-completed hotel on Michigan Avenue that was slated to open as a Holiday Inn Express a couple of years ago now has a new owner, who is working to open the hotel later this year.

We have written several stories about the hotel, the most recent in November when we received word that a new buyer was working on purchasing the nearly-completed hotel from a bank. The good news is a deal was reached between the two parties and the hotel is expected to open as a Holiday Inn Express.

The property, just west of Telegraph on Michigan and adjacent to Toys R Us, landed in the hands of the bank when the original developer simply ran out of money and couldn’t finish the project.

The out-state buyer, who owns other hotels, intends to open as a Holiday Inn Express, a person familiar with the negotiations tells us.

Three years after opening, Dearborn's O’Sushi is now expanding.

It’s always nice to see a family business do well in Dearborn. And that is the case with O’Sushi, which opened three years ago this month.

We wrote about O’Sushi’s grand opening in January 2009, when Canton couple Shawn and Sophia Kang placed a bet that Dearborn was the right location for a second restaurant.

Now the Kangs are expanding their Japanese restaurant, taking over the vacant space created when the next-door Thai food restaurant closed.

Shawn Kang told DeepsaidWhat the couple decided three years ago to branch out from Canton and come to Dearborn because they loved our city and Ford Motor Company.

With good service and good food, it’s easy to see why O’Sushi is now expanding.

If you haven’t stopped in and visited O’Sushi drop in and try the fresh food and say hello to Shawn, who is there on most days.

We wish the Kang family the best on this next chapter of their Dearborn restaurant.

The Dearborn Community Arts Council is hosting art experience workshops 3-5 p.m. on Sunday afternoons at the Ford Community & Performing Arts Center. The cost is $10 per person or $32 for a family of four per session.

Each session is a sampling of an aspect of the arts. The remaining schedule is:

• January 8 – Pottery W/ Village Potters Guild Artisans

• February 12 – Photography – How to use your own camera

If you are interested in registering call 313-943-4095 or email sgreene@ci.dearborn.mi.us

Morris Goodman, a Dearborn attorney, past president of the Dearborn Democratic Club, a longtime political activist and observer and regular reader of Deepsaidwhat.com now adds “education snob” to his list.

Goodman says education issues should take center stage in the 2012 Presidential election.

“ . . . it is mind boggling to realize that just at the time that the nation is coming to grips with the importance of an educated workforce in a global economy, we are cutting funding at the national, state, and local levels for publicly supported K-12 and higher education. This is even more pronounced in Michigan,” Goodman says.

“ Teacher salaries and benefits are going down and class sizes are going up. Moreover, public university tuition for those who want to teach is going up and aid to these students is going down. Also, the interest on federally insured student loans is now immediately payable, rather being deferred for some time as previously was the case, and these loans must be paid back sooner. Let’s see, our prospective teachers have to pay more to earn less. Hmmm. What’s wrong with this picture?”

His column begins below:

Morris Goodman

I am an education snob. Among my wife two sons, daughter-in-law, and me, there are 5 Masters degrees and one law degree (yup, that’s mine). It turns out that this snobbishness is also an important employment indicator. While this is not a surprising fact, the extent of the advantage a good education provides is. Presently there are radio ads for a local college touting the fact that a person with a college degree will earn on average $1.3 million over a lifetime more than someone with only a high school degree. Quite a difference.

At the beginning of December the Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the United States added 120,000 new jobs in November and the unemployment rate fell to 8.6%, the lowest since March 2009. In the mass of data released at the same time by the BLS, several facts leaped out at me. First of all, the unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree or higher was 4.4% and for those with only a high school degree the rate was 8.8% – precisely double. For those with no high school degree the rate was 13.2% or three times the rate for those with a college degree.

We all know that most new jobs being created in the U S today, even at the entry level, require more than a high school education. The auto industry used to employ just about anyone who could read and was willing to work. Recent articles about auto manufacturing jobs stress that almost all positions on the car assembly line or at parts plants require workers who have fairly sophisticated computer skills to operate the all pervasive robotic machines.

In our economic recovery, both nationally and particularly in Michigan, everything points to added employment in the next few years in auto related work. So clearly we, as a nation and state, need to put resources into preparing our student population for those kinds of jobs. Thus, it is mind boggling to realize that just at the time that the nation is coming to grips with the importance of an educated workforce in a global economy, we are cutting funding at the national, state, and local levels for publicly supported K-12 and higher education. This is even more pronounced in Michigan.

Teacher salaries and benefits are going down and class sizes are going up. Moreover, public university tuition for those who want to teach is going up and aid to these students is going down. Also, the interest on federally insured student loans is now immediately payable, rather being deferred for some time as previously was the case, and these loans must be paid back sooner. Let’s see, our prospective teachers have to pay more to earn less. Hmmm. What’s wrong with this picture?

Read the rest of this entry »

So what New Year’s resolutions have you made for 2012?  Bill Maher, the host of of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher”, penned a few in a column in today’s New York Times. We thought we’d share a few of his thoughts here. Happy New Year!

New Rule Starting this year, every appliance doesn’t need a clock on it. My stove, my dishwasher, my microwave, my VCR — all have clocks on them. If I really cared that much about what time it was (or what year it was), would I still have a VCR?

New Rule Starting next year, any politician caught in a scandal can’t go before the press, offer a lame excuse and then say, “Period. End of Story.” Here’s how you indicate a “period” and the end of a story: shut up.

New Rule Now that we have no money, and all our soldiers have come home from Iraq and they’ve all got experience building infrastructure, and no jobs … we must immediately solve all of our problems by declaring war on the United States.

New Rule Internet headlines have to be more like newspaper headlines. That means they have to tell me something instead of just tricking me into clicking on them. If you write the headline, “She Wore That?” you have to go to your journalism school and give your degree back.

New Rule Let’s stop scheduling the presidential election in the same year as the Summer Olympics. I get so exhausted watching those robotic, emotionally stunted, artificial-looking creatures with no real lives striving to do the one thing they’re trained to do that I barely have energy left to watch the Olympics.

New Rule You can’t be against same-sex marriage and for Newt Gingrich. No man has ever loved another man as much as Newt Gingrich loves Newt Gingrich.

To read Maher’s complete column, click HERE.