EXTRAS

• "It's going to be arts, culture and Tony's pies," Stephen McEnlee of Fuse Management said of its proximity near the famed tomato pie joint.
• "That's the only thing the CDC cares about with this project," Brian Patrick King said. "We're going to transform this stretch of Frankford Avenue. This block is going to be a model and serve as a gateway to Mayfair."
• Pickering has had reservations for the March 28 opening for weeks, including one for 24 people from Bucks County.
• Pickerings, 50 and 29, now of Sicklerville, N.J. to work in Atlantic City, came on in January 2008. Met McEnlee in Discovery Church
• "We also have the most expensive curtain track in town," Mike Lally said of what is dividing concessions from the seated audience in the compact theater.

• Three years ago, Tony's expanded into a third storefront. "We have been waiting three years since for the Devon to open," he said.
• "This will make people stay in the neighborhood rather than go downtown or to Jersey," he said.
• Now Tony's has three rooms. In 1980 bought an adjacent storefront and three years ago, after first hearing about plans to bring the Devon back, bought a third, and now can seat 210 people.
• "We rented the room out, but now we will be able to regularly fill all three stores. We're trying to employ people again."
• "My father Dominic and his brother Tony opened this restaurant 57 years ago in 1951. So we have lots of loyal customers. Many of them have left the neighborhood and they still keep coming back. But, they come to eat and they leave," Mallamaci said. "The Devon will keep them here."
• "As soon as we heard the Devon was bought by the CDC, we bought another store to accommodate the new customers we knew would come."
• "Economically, when the economy went bad, we had to close it," he said of the third room. "But with the buzz and the talk about the Devon, it's going to make sense again."
• "I believe in the people over there running it. It's not just the plays but the graduations, the teacher conferences. I think it's going to have great long term success."

If there’s any truth in Revolutionary Road, American Beauty, Mad Men and the writing of John Cheever—that everyone in suburbia is secretly miserable, living life with crushing boredom or a crippling secret that’s killing them softly—you wouldn’t believe it on the first warm spring day in West Chester, Pa., where the flowers are finally beginning to bloom and college kids equipped with backpacks scramble across town to classes they’re running late for. It’s a quaint borough. Gorgeous. “Diverse … prosperous … collegiate … accessible,” its website proudly boasts. Huge, impressive houses spring up behind white picket fences. Lush pastures of rolling green farmland dominate the landscape. Picturesque. Peaceful. Idyllic. This is where “I Love College”—the boozy, marijuana-worshipping, horny ode to university life—was born. Read the rest here.

• Asher gave up his Atlanta home three months ago and has been living out of a suitcase. He plans to buy a tour bus and call it home for the next year, constantly touring, said Scooter Braun, Asher's manager.
• Accompanied by the original Roth Boys: "Boyder," Tom Boyd, who handles filming and merchandise and "Brain Bangley," Brian Langley, who's Asher's on-stage hype man and resident pothead. "Fans know who they are. They're pseudo-celebrities," said Scooter Braun, Asher's manager.
• Asher has two older sisters and was born and raised in Morrisville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
• "It's not like I grew up in the streets of Philadelphia," Roth says. "Do I have any emotional ties to . . . the city? Well, just as far as relevance to where it stands in the history with the Declaration of Independence and with putting out solid basketball players."
• "People think I'm from Atlanta," because that's where he was signed, Asher says. "How much of a bummer is that? I'm a Forty Niners fan. I'm a San Francisco Giants fan... It's hard to make that connection."
• "I've had my wow moments along the way," Roth said, after arriving back to his hotel after a shoot for an upcoming issue of Vibe. "But it's still never hit me that it's bigger than a scale that I could sense and people are listening to me on the radio."
• "I didn't realize I was in people's lives," he says. "Now I'm representing much more."
• "It's going to happen regardless. I couldn't stop it if I tried," Asher says of the marketing machine now in place.
• "There's some really, really dope music here. I want it to be about the music. I don't want it to be about the marketing or the fact that I'm white." It's not just a kid being marketed or whatever.
• "I'm just speaking about the world that I come from, but with hip hop, I'm speaking that language that attracts people. It's a perspective that's been underserved, that middle class suburban voice to hip hop."
• "Everybody wants to be down with hip hop. Most people like myself couldn't really relate, this behavior we really couldn't relate to."
• "I know there are a lot of white people in this world."
• "People tell me I am a white minstrel show. They say this is a white kid that is making a mockery of white people," Asher says. "But I am just more what white people like, based on the stereotypes... That's not a gimmick, that is me being who I am."

• XXL magazine said Rifkind "is responsible for breaking some of hip-hop’s biggest artists in his 25 years in the business." He's had a hand in the careers of artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan, Big Pun, Mobb Deep and Xzibit.
• "Em opened up the door for Asher at the end of day."
• "Why can't there be more than one white emcee?
• "Eminem came in a different time. Asher is in a completely different lane.
• "Em came from a harder life and Asher has his thing with the college."
• "This is just a great album," Rifkind says. "It's a multi-formated record, with rock records."
• Scooter was very passionate. Rifkind forgot and didn't know why they were in New York. Fall 2007.
• "It's great they want to compare us to Em... but, Let us sell some records first," Rifkind says.
• "He's going to have a long, luxurious career," Rifkind says.

• "Even though Eminem has opened up a lot of doors of proving that a white emcee can be really credible, I think every time a white rapper emerges, the hip hop audience is kind of skeptical at first no matter what, and I think I was kind of skeptical myself."
• "I think his album is pretty good. I think it's going to surprise a lot of people."
• Asher is using an unproven DJ, Wilson says.
• "What is most important to hip hop is honesty. Asher is approaching it the right way."
• "He has to be honest about who he is and where he comes from. People respect that in hip hop. I don't think you have to be poor and impoverished to make good hip hop music. I think most importantly again, it's about credibility."
• "I think white rappers stand out initially no mater what, but i don't really think white rappers get a lot attention in terms of  the right kind of energy which is to be looked as to really be something and to be a part of hip hop."
• "Everybody is out there. It evens the playing field. A kid in Oklahoma on his drum machine can make a record and he has the same outlets to put his record out there as Puffy does."
• "I don't think we'll have as many MySpace stars because I think Facebook has surpassed MySpace and now Twitter kinda doing the same thing.

• Braun was told that in Austria, being "asleep in the bread basket" means someone is very funny. "That's not why we did it, but that's great how other meanings are out there. Great albums are open for interpretation."
• "We leave it open, but I say bread is a word for money. Asher is in this place where all the money is around him and he has an opportunity to become very, very wealthy and he does not give a fuck. He's completely oblivious. He is sleeping because he doesn't care about that stuff."
• "I don't think geography matters shit to Asher," says Braun.
• "I think Asher is an artist who relates to people. Hip-hop has this really weird thing where you can only really rap about what you know. People got mad at Rick Ross for [being a police officer]. Was 50 really shot all those times? Did Ja Rule do this or did Jay do that?" Braun says. "It's a really weird thing, but Asher is the Bob Dylan of hip-hop. And the reason I say that is because Bob Dylan did songs like "Hurricane." He wasn't Hurricane, but he told that story. Asher is doing something where he is being true to himself, but he's making good music for all people."
• "As my grandma used to say, being mature is not changing who you are, it's realizing that you only have to be who you always were," Scooter says. "That is exactly what Asher is translating through."
• "The way Asher has broke in, no one has done it before. No one has broken in on the blogs and gone gold in five weeks."
• Asher like Kanye His album sounds like nothing out there." White rappers need to be completely individual to succeed."
• "My concept of the next great white rapper was always that you have to be able to hold your own against Eminem," Braun says. "Asher is the first to come along who has the talent to do it."
• "No one is talking about that we have a black president and for the first time two white MCs are putting out good hip-hop albums." Scooter
• On iTunes last week, Asher was 17, and Eminem was 18.
• The distribution line in my marketing plan was the blog. Nah rights, the two dope boys, the Illroots, the SOHHs, even the one time he was on Perez Hilton. The blogs are where people are turning for their information. They are the mixtapes and the magazines combined. And they're really a distribution tool. I've been telling all the blogs, whether people love Asher or hate him, they should buy his album because if he is successful, if he goes platinum,
• "The labels don't listen to music anymore. They look at what is financially successful. That's why when a boyband works, suddenly everyone has a boyband. When Soulja Boy works, everyone is doing fucking dance songs and stinky leg and every fucking thing else. It's not because they're looking for artists or whatever, they are looking for whatever will make money in that moment. And if the people want their music to be heard again, whether you  like a rock band that's on your favorite blog, or whether you like another rapper on your blog, if Asher Roth goes platinum, they [music labels] will turn to the blogs and that's the only place in music right now where the fans have a voice."
• "I said, tell me everything about Asher Roth," Braun said. Boyd hung up, fearful it was related to recent noise violations. Braun called back.
• Braun recalled. "Now Boyd says he was watching porn when I called. This is how stars are born."
• It was the power of social media. Days before, Asher sent a MySpace friend request to Braun.
• "I took one look, saw a white boy in a hoodie, and I said 'What the fuck?'" Braun says. He wasn't impressed with the music, but he liked Asher's rhymes.
• "He wasn't comfortable in his own skin," Braun says. "I was interested, but not sold."
• 50 cent said Asher's the first white artist to come along who will be able to get a piece of the profit Eminem has enjoyed, Braun says.
• "And they didn't get it because they didn't see kinda what we saw. And they didn't know how I planned on doing it. Because marketing a guy like Asher had never been done before."

• He's 23, 24 in May, went to Pennsbury High School with Asher. They played baseball together in ninth grade and become close friends after junior year. Close enough that Shannon (and others) went to Atlanta with Roth.
• "Asher recorded an album with Footie, Brian Sellers, in Brian's basement senior year. They just took beats off the Internet. It was a 16 to 17 track album, and we made copies with somebody's CD burner, and we sold them at school. They were selling them like crazy, and we got a lot of positive feedback."
• "He was always a great English student, great with words."
• "I was just always hanging out in the basement, giving my feedback on my songs."
• "He was always good for wordplay," Higgins said. "He read plenty and had a good vocabulary."
• "Now that we're living together in Atlanta, we'll be sitting around, and he'll ask a random word and if it would that fit here. He's always thinking about working some clever word into a rhyme. He's eloquent."
• "It's weird. It's funny. I find it amusing because I just look back and how it happened. Seeing him on TV, hearing him on the radio. People who haven't talked to me in a year will call and say 'oh my God, Asher's on the radio.' I get that call almost everyday. I got it yesterday, actually, and I just got to smile."
• "He's become more confident about himself and just to be the way he wants to be. He was always a laid back person, but he's even more so since this happened. He'll dress down, and wear the sweatpants and v-neck sweaters he likes. He doesn't care about how people see him."
• "In high school, he was friends with a lot of people. He was a very popular kid. Kind of a goofball, and not very serious.  He was big into sports and just wasn't a serious kid, and we just got along well."
• "He was a great English student and great with words, and not great at math. He wrote papers for people, I remember."
• "He's always going to be compared to other people. Some say white people just can't rap. Some people say you just sound like Eminem. Like, OK 'I sound like the most popular rap artist in the last 15 years. Cool."
• When he was at West Chester, he had a MySpace page. There was a phone number for contact information, and it was one of our friends, Tom Boyd. At 2 a.m., Scooter calls him, and says 'Tell me all about Asher Roth.' Well, Tom just hangs up on him because they'd been getting into trouble for noise violations. But then Scooter calls back and says, 'no, I'm serious."
• So Scooter flies Asher down to Atlanta and signs him.
• March 2007: "I remember, we were just sitting around the house drinking beer and he asked me, 'Do you want to move to Atlanta with me?' I had left school and was working at a bar, so I thought 'I could actually make this work."
• Scooter found a house for us. I remember, I was in a car driving to Florida with my family for Thanksgiving, and he tells me, 'Yo, we found a house. We move Dec. 1.' 'Cool, let's do it. It was a total whim."
• They drove down at the end of 2007 and began a rap career.
• Now Shannon works at a family restaurant and bar for one year.
• "West Chester is a part of Philly, and he was there for three years," Higgins says. "His first manager lived there."

• "I remember when I think he first thought it was serious. He came back from Atlanta, and he asked me 'What's going to happen if it all goes together.' I said 'you can't think about us.' I didn't want to get in the way of him following some dream."
• Dated Asher from February 2005, her junior year of high school, to February 2007, her freshman year in college
• junior at Penn State, dated Asher for two years, known him since her 8th grade (2001/2002) She last saw him December 2008
• "I could never, ever be in the spotlight like that. I told him that, and he said he doesn't listen to it, or oh, he listens, but he doesn't care what they say."
• "He has a good head on his shoulders. He might get overwhelmed with shows and photo shoots, but I think can do well, really well."
• "Goofball. He's just a lot fun. You could never take him too seriously. He takes himself seriously, but not too seriously." "I remember when his manager Scooter Braun found him on MySpace and wanted him to fly to Atlanta. I just thought, 'I hope he's not some not creep." "He's always been jokingly into himself and thought of himself as 'the man.'" "He's much more talented than they're going to push him to be. He's not a tool bag." "I probably shouldn't know what he did in college because we were together, and he was always sort of a ladies man."
• There's the story about Asher, among others, playing a game of strip poker at the Rees family home. Her father walked in and tossed everybody out. Asher called Q102 and described the incident to a DJ friend, Rees said. "He called me and said, 'Turn on Q102, we're going to be on in a minute."
• "I am nervous that they are trying to corner him into being the college spokesperson... He's 23 now."
• "He made me sell them in high school," Rees said of the "Just Listen LP.
• Asher was voted most likely to become a famous rapper in his senior year book.

• For now, his camp is trying its best to navigate the fiery buzz that is surrounding the precocious, suburban Bucks County rapper before his debut album is released next Tuesday.
• Video of Asher with Ludacris, meeting with Cee-Lo,
• MTV article, changing hip hop
• Vibe shoot? XXL cover? Album
• Morrisville, across the Delaware River from Trenton, N.J. and once a major stopping point on the 18th-century road between Philadelphia and New York, is named for Robert Morris, known as the financier of the American Revolution and a longtime Philadelphian. So, it might appear that Asher could be another feather in the cap of Philly's proud, if underdeveloped, hip-hop community. But that might be a bit trickier.

For Philadelphians not of a certain age, he just might be the most famous resident of Northern Liberties you've never heard of. To those who were active on the city's rock, rave and club scenes in the 1990s, Josh Wink is a deejaying visionary and techno legend. Twenty years after his first album, Wink has released his When A Banana Was Just A Banana LP and embarked on another extended European tour. But he's torn between the Philly he calls home and the continent that has catapulted him into another stratosphere on the international house music scene. "I would love to live in Europe as I spend half my time there," Wink said in an e-mail before leaving for engagements in Amsterdam, Vilnus, Lithuania and others -- his tour dates can be found at www.mypsace.com/joshwink -- but "there is something about Philly that most people understand that keeps us coming back." It can't be the adulation he gets here. Read the rest here.

• Even though I’m not happy about the BPT [business privilege tax] and NPT [net profits tax] tax rates here! I sure hope Nutter addresses this major issue!
• "I’m very proud when people from Philly succeed, really. I get asked all the time in interviews outside of the USA about the Philly scene and artists, and I’m elated to mention the people I know here that have blown up."
• "The scene here musically is always on the forefront, but we get lost in the shuffle of NYC. Which is why philly artist are true and genuine! We have big pride of being the underdog!"

• "We have synchronous lecture delivery," said Jennifer Maden a Penn program implementation manager. "We have a live lecture session and associated online activity. We can provide cross-disciplinary learning."
• "Part of the conversation was how can we capitalize on the intellectual community and bring it to our students" said Jennifer Maden a Penn program implementation manager.

• "Events that could be accessed by the general public for free that aren't normally recorded now will be," says Lisa Minetti, a curriculum design and assessment specialist at Penn. "This gives greater access to the person who doesn't have the time or doesn't know where these events are."
• "This engagement piece is important and differentiating," Minetti says. "We are building opportunities to improve education through interaction on a variety of levels: for our students and alumni but also others who are interested for free, through social networking and sharing."
• "The student experience is unique. allowing everyone to interact. We want that engagement, our online classes to be in a fully authenticated environment," Minetti says. "Some will be behind a wall, but a lot of our content is open to everyone, and those online classes are comparable to what is offered on our traditional campus, but with an online level of interaction."
• "We weren't behind [other universities] necessarily because we wanted to bring that high quality Penn context," Minetti says. "That student to student and student to faculty interaction that isn't just about going at your own pace like a continuing education program might be."

• "I think Penn is actually the first mover in terms of going for a really rich integration of interaction. Other universities have built very nice Web sites and nice resources and talk about comunity interaction,"Ludlow said. "But Penn is doing it."
• "We are using the power of social networking to create an interactive online learning platform that offers courses to audiences around the world. "Our movement is more sustainabile than what many universities can offer."
• "We are very careful to respect licenses," Ludlow says.
• "If a university has special requests, we are happy to do that. We have a lot of noncommercial content and we won't generate revenue on that noncommercial content. Our business model is about supplementing that content with think tanks and conferences, advertising, partnering with providers, tutorings and affiliate programs," he said.
• "We're going to offer universities the chance to opt in to revenue sharing. If they want, we can advertise on their content and share that money."
• "Grant money is going down, as are endowments. We can build a platform for these universities. It's a classy model."
• "Our goal is to add value, to add to the open courseware movement and other educational media," Ludlow says.
• If we are aggregating the content from all these universities, it makes it much more searchable for users, so they are not moving from site to site. It's all on one - ours," he says.
• "We want to have integration between these schools," Ludlow says. "That's our sole focus, a core competency, and developing technology around educational elements online, instead of each university investing their limited resources into developing the technology."
• Ludlow says, "We're working really hard with all the universities to provide more diverse content."
• "When universities have been creating these sites, their goal is to get people to see it, to have people interact with it. If we're doing the job right, we're giving them the opoportunity to reach more people."

• Of course, universities in the region and across the country have had online courses for years. Drexel is boasting growing enrollment in its online programs, as are Temple and Kutztown has more than doubled. Even Penn has had online courses for MORE THAN A DECADE, but the new movement in higher ed is to incorporate more interactivity and community development, said Jennifer Maden a Penn program implementation manager.jen -- no fully online degree or fully egree certificates, online courses 1998
• questions of sustainability fiscally seeeking Hewlett fundng, build sustainability model for-fee , fund this through revenue generating courses it's of interest no other school, see open as free -- grant funding Now let's get funding,  Lisa -- diffferent for-credit courses  Jen -some of the frree content degree program, private aspectadditional levels very diifferent levels ---  grant  Lisa - program devlopment, incubator --self-fundedusing university resources, prototype, using existing resources not productionquality Jen-- production quality you will see a range we needed to fulfill creating online spaces for online inqury -- lisa
• 200,000 unique views in month of february, first full month we'll, a chance in an ecosystem devoted to just education. youtube hosting video, they'll appreciate education enviroment."online delivery, penn like other ivies is lagging behind the for-profit "schools and schools targeted for work-place with onlineprograms," LISA "But the conversation on interaction is happening right now. I'd say our timing is just right.

Jan. 20, 2008: Glikman receives a frantic call from his 81-year-old father telling him that his mother, Adalina, is unconscious in their Somerton apartment in the Northeast. His father says a private ambulance company, Century, is on the way. Twenty minutes later, Glikman arrives at his parents’ home and finds his mother on the ground, still unconscious, with no ambulance in sight. His father calls Century again, but according to Glikman, the ambulance driver says he can’t get his engine started due to the blistering cold. Desperate to save his mother, Glikman dials 911. Fifteen minutes later—far too late by most national standards—a city-dispatched ambulance arrives just in time to pronounce her dead. Read the rest here.

• The private ambulance driver was formerly a driver at an elderly care organization that Glikman's parents used.
• Glikman had CPR training.
• "I asked him [my father] where is the ambulance? Why is no one here."
• "Twenty-five minutes [the driver] he says he can't start his truck. But he never made the call to 911. So I did."
• Third floor of apartment building
• Only dept. of health can revoke ambulance licenses, Glikman said.
• The private ambulance ignore the state EMS Investigation manual, Glikman alleges.
• "I filed it because they completely ignored that manual."
• This complaint was botched,
• All told, Glikman, 55, says it took more than 30 minutes for Century to arrive but came up the long walk and the two flights of stairs unprepared.
• Glikman, who has had CPR and first-aid training, says, "I started yelling, 'Are you going to do something or just crawl around?" "I guess they were just going to crawl around."
• One crew member returned to his ambulance to get additional equipment as the 911 ambulance arrived.
• Glikman is focusing his ire on Century, but neither Lomov's company, nor the city responded on time by most national standards, and that's become fairly common in Philadelphia.
• It was in her adopted American city that Adalina, Glikman's mother, celebrated her 78th birthday. One week later, it was where she died, though her son says things should have gone differently.

• "The additions impacted slightly, but not to the point where it making the difference on people's life."
• "It would be thinking out of the box here. Anywhere else, it's doing what everyone else is doing."
• We put people who are shot in the back of a cop car. We are getting away with it when we shouldn't. That wouldn't cut it in other cities.
• "The industry standard by the union to give the time to train, to freshen up, avoid skill degradation and burnout is .35 or .45. That means 35 or 45 percent of a unit's time is spent out responding to calls, making runs to hospitals. We have units doing .9."
• In Philadelphia, we look at it system-wide of .65. So that means an airport truck that does maybe 3,000 runs a year gets averaged in with one pulling 9,000 runs.
• "We can't measure our survival rate, but we know it ain't good."
• "There are maybe 50 guys who were paramedics and who are now firefighters. Give me ALS gear, and let me work overtime as a paramedic. Instead, the city takes a guy like me and ties my hands."
• Private ambulances  do transport but, you know, typically not for emergency.
• They're driven by profit. If it's not profitable, they might not do it.
• "Insurance companies only pay for transport. So private ambulances take that. You know what I mean? We'll provide service, and they'll transport. So a private company wants to get in the system, but, you know, they want to stay in their communities, like up in the far Northeast. If they come in the system and get sent to a neighborhood where maybe most of the people are under or uninsured, well, then these companies can't survive."
• "Private companies, fire department ambulances, they are all licensed by state, but private ambulances don't have specialized training for going into a sitution with carbon monoxide or with terrorism, an attack.
• "I take an oath for the people of Philadelphia. There's more to this than simply a pay check or a contract."
• "The difference, and they hate this, but the difference between a private ambulance and us is, well, it's hiring a cop or hiring a security officer. They both guns. They both have uniforms, but if the bank is being robbed who do you want with you?
• "We still have trouble hiring paramedics."
• "We have no way to deal with, what I call, BS calls. People who call because I have a pimple on my arm."
• There are many different industry standard suggested response times, Kearney says. Some say four minutes for first responder and eight for transport. The American Heart Association says six minutes. the American Ambulance Association says 90 percent of the time transport needs to come in less than nine minutes.
• "By any standard, we don't reach that benchmark, and the city plays games with our numbers.
• If you're in a large region or it's a busy day you're scrwed.
• "You don't have a constitutional right to an ambulance."
• Many suits have lost on the basis of due process, but, Kearney says, he would like to see someone see leaders on the basis of serving as a negligent provider.
• Five more were added last year. "But there's always an increase in need, that's barely keeping up," says Dave Kearney the recording secretary of the Philadelphia Fire Firefighters' Union IAFF Local 22. "That's a little improvement to a big problem."
• The administration, "has already cut seven companies. Those are in the first responder system, not just water and ladders. Our response times are going up because of it.
• There are other ways to simply cut down on bureaucracy and other costs, which remain persistent "roadblocks to success."
• Kearney says other cities use an advanced practitioner system, where calls for certain types of care are directed to the appropriate level of treatment - "instead of racing everyone to the emergency room who has a pimple on his arm."

It’s 1997, and Jeffrey Jackson is getting wet. He’s balled up, trying to sleep inside New Way Out, an addiction-recovery house in Kensington. The 28-year-old addict is in the process of kicking heroin after moving on from cocaine, but he’s starving and sweating and can’t somebody stop that damn rain from coming in? “I told the director, ‘Hey, your roof is leaking,’” Jackson says now. “The guy looked at me with a straight face and said, ‘Then move your bed.’” Read the rest here.

• "Some of the female houses in the area are good," says Elvis Rosado, a therapist who has worked in Frankford drug rehabilitation clinics. "Unfortunately a lot of the male ones are not."
• There are two types of licensed treatment facilities approved by the Pennsylvania Department of Health and partially funded by OAS: licensed inpatient treatment centers, ones that house and treat, and licensed outpatient treatment centers, ones that just offer counseling and medication. No one is squawking about them. But, including Jackson's, Frankford has at least 25 privately-owned recovery homes, which house recovering addicts who are using outpatient services and require little more than a business-privilege license to open legally. Some estimate there are more than 50 of these private recovery homes, some better managed than others, which would make Frankford home to more than any other neighborhood in Philadelphia.
• The Office of Addiction Services is an agency within the Philadelphia Department of Behavioral Health and Mental Retardation Services
• At last week's community meeting, Councilwoman Sanchez said she wanted to coordinate weekly meetings between the police department, L&I, residents and her office.
• "The civic is at a cross-roads," says acting secretary Elizabeth Mccollum-Nazario. "Officially we have not said anything, but we're leaning to saying no to all of them."
• "If we say yes to his two-beds, how will that will be perceived when we say no to someone who wants 12 beds?" Mccollum-Nazario says. "Saying yes to two is still saying yes."
• Frankford has found camraderie among the families that remain in the hard hit neighborhood, mostly in their criticism of these private recovery homes.

I was at the library last week. I’m not sure the expansion is a necessary ingredient of the Philadelphia ego. Chasing technology as an improvement when the city is not flush is foolish. I can’t imagine it’s a good thing to chase down short attention spans. Before building it the city should do an evaluation of how much is actually part of the library and not transitory technology.

What only librarians who work in the system know is that the “expansion” makes much less room for books. When the FLP decided to expand the administration it asked librarians at Central to weed one-third of their (flagship, unique) collections. This is a disaster for researchers and readers who rely on Central’s collections. What many librarians would prefer is to take over the Family Court building which already matches Central for design, is the greener option (only renovation is needed, and maybe a skybridge to connect) and could effectively double the space rather than reducing it, for collections. Finally, in our enthusiasm for technology, let us not throw out the baby with the bath water. Most books are best read in hard copy, and please do not believe that we will eventually be able to find all that we would like to read on the Internet.

Think of it as the library of the future. At more than 300 computers, graphic designers work on new projects, musicians record and bloggers and authors write and research, using the quiet of old and the wireless of new. Arching skylights vault over glass walkways, and plate–glass windows open an 8,500–square–foot foyer to light and weather patterns. A Visual and Performing Arts Department lets visitors focus on music instead of books. A Teen Center brings resources to school–aged kids courtesy of tattooed librarians, while the Entrepreneurium offers those who dream of starting a business the tools to make it happen. It’s all designed by internationally acclaimed architect Moshe Safdie, and it’s called Parkway Central—one of the premiere libraries in the nation. It’s also, for now, a fiction... Read the rest here.

• "We have to jerry-rig computers," says Sandy Horrocks, a spokeswoman for the Free Library. "This building [central library] was designed in the 19th century. It wasn't meant to have the capacity for the technologies we want to provide."
• "I think we can continue to quietly move ahead [with fundraising, project planning]."
• The court order is more complicated, too. If those 11 branches are court-ordered to remain open, the funding to staff them might not come with it, considering the Free Library already took a 20 percent budget cut in November, Horrocks says.
• "We're short-staffed, so we have to keep moving. We see more emergency closings, though, because we simply do not have the people or resources."
• "Library services can happen without a building. We can do those services, at a school or elsewhere."
• Horrocks did note that many library services don't need a building. But gosh it'd be nice, she says.
• "If we don't have those 11 branches, we will have to be very creative in taking on those new services. All of that work will come from central, which is already overburdened. It would be nice to do that work in a facility that isn't a mess."
• "We hope delaying might actually help the project," Horrocks says. "As the economy struggles so is the construction industry, so costs will be coming down. Maybe we can take advantage with that."

[caption id="" align="alignright" width="200" caption="illustration by alex lukas"][/caption] Pennsylvania’s Jack Wagner wants registered sex offenders to wear GPS monitors. In recent weeks, a handful of lawmakers have announced plans to introduce legislation at Wagner’s behest. “For all the right reasons, the Pennsylvania state government should be utilizing this technology to protect our most vulnerable citizens,” Wagner says. His late July announcement came not long after his office reported that of the state’s 9,800 registered sex offenders, the Commonwealth had lost track of 923—nearly 10 percent. More than one-third of them had last-known addresses in southeastern Pennsylvania, including 261 in Philadelphia. Calling those numbers “very disturbing” and “unacceptable,” Wagner, who’s seeking reelection in November, recommended the use of ankle-worn devices with a global positioning system—technology currently in use by 33 states... More. ...

If there’s any truth in Revolutionary Road, American Beauty, Mad Men and the writing of John Cheever—that everyone in suburbia is secretly miserable, living life with crushing boredom or a crippling secret that’s killing them softly—you wouldn’t believe it on the first warm spring day in West Chester, Pa., where the flowers are finally beginning to bloom and college kids equipped with backpacks scramble across town to classes they’re running late for. It’s a quaint borough. Gorgeous. “Diverse … prosperous … collegiate … accessible,” its website proudly boasts. Huge, impressive houses spring up behind white picket fences. Lush pastures of rolling green farmland dominate the landscape. Picturesque. Peaceful. Idyllic. This is where “I Love College”—the boozy, marijuana-worshipping, horny ode to university life—was born. Read the rest here.

• Asher gave up his Atlanta home three months ago and has been living out of a suitcase. He plans to buy a tour bus and call it home for the next year, constantly touring, said Scooter Braun, Asher's manager.
• Accompanied by the original Roth Boys: "Boyder," Tom Boyd, who handles filming and merchandise and "Brain Bangley," Brian Langley, who's Asher's on-stage hype man and resident pothead. "Fans know who they are. They're pseudo-celebrities," said Scooter Braun, Asher's manager.
• Asher has two older sisters and was born and raised in Morrisville, Bucks County, Pennsylvania.
• "It's not like I grew up in the streets of Philadelphia," Roth says. "Do I have any emotional ties to . . . the city? Well, just as far as relevance to where it stands in the history with the Declaration of Independence and with putting out solid basketball players."
• "People think I'm from Atlanta," because that's where he was signed, Asher says. "How much of a bummer is that? I'm a Forty Niners fan. I'm a San Francisco Giants fan... It's hard to make that connection."
• "I've had my wow moments along the way," Roth said, after arriving back to his hotel after a shoot for an upcoming issue of Vibe. "But it's still never hit me that it's bigger than a scale that I could sense and people are listening to me on the radio."
• "I didn't realize I was in people's lives," he says. "Now I'm representing much more."
• "It's going to happen regardless. I couldn't stop it if I tried," Asher says of the marketing machine now in place.
• "There's some really, really dope music here. I want it to be about the music. I don't want it to be about the marketing or the fact that I'm white." It's not just a kid being marketed or whatever.
• "I'm just speaking about the world that I come from, but with hip hop, I'm speaking that language that attracts people. It's a perspective that's been underserved, that middle class suburban voice to hip hop."
• "Everybody wants to be down with hip hop. Most people like myself couldn't really relate, this behavior we really couldn't relate to."
• "I know there are a lot of white people in this world."
• "People tell me I am a white minstrel show. They say this is a white kid that is making a mockery of white people," Asher says. "But I am just more what white people like, based on the stereotypes... That's not a gimmick, that is me being who I am."

• XXL magazine said Rifkind "is responsible for breaking some of hip-hop’s biggest artists in his 25 years in the business." He's had a hand in the careers of artists such as the Wu-Tang Clan, Big Pun, Mobb Deep and Xzibit.
• "Em opened up the door for Asher at the end of day."
• "Why can't there be more than one white emcee?
• "Eminem came in a different time. Asher is in a completely different lane.
• "Em came from a harder life and Asher has his thing with the college."
• "This is just a great album," Rifkind says. "It's a multi-formated record, with rock records."
• Scooter was very passionate. Rifkind forgot and didn't know why they were in New York. Fall 2007.
• "It's great they want to compare us to Em... but, Let us sell some records first," Rifkind says.
• "He's going to have a long, luxurious career," Rifkind says.

• "Even though Eminem has opened up a lot of doors of proving that a white emcee can be really credible, I think every time a white rapper emerges, the hip hop audience is kind of skeptical at first no matter what, and I think I was kind of skeptical myself."
• "I think his album is pretty good. I think it's going to surprise a lot of people."
• Asher is using an unproven DJ, Wilson says.
• "What is most important to hip hop is honesty. Asher is approaching it the right way."
• "He has to be honest about who he is and where he comes from. People respect that in hip hop. I don't think you have to be poor and impoverished to make good hip hop music. I think most importantly again, it's about credibility."
• "I think white rappers stand out initially no mater what, but i don't really think white rappers get a lot attention in terms of  the right kind of energy which is to be looked as to really be something and to be a part of hip hop."
• "Everybody is out there. It evens the playing field. A kid in Oklahoma on his drum machine can make a record and he has the same outlets to put his record out there as Puffy does."
• "I don't think we'll have as many MySpace stars because I think Facebook has surpassed MySpace and now Twitter kinda doing the same thing.

• Braun was told that in Austria, being "asleep in the bread basket" means someone is very funny. "That's not why we did it, but that's great how other meanings are out there. Great albums are open for interpretation."
• "We leave it open, but I say bread is a word for money. Asher is in this place where all the money is around him and he has an opportunity to become very, very wealthy and he does not give a fuck. He's completely oblivious. He is sleeping because he doesn't care about that stuff."
• "I don't think geography matters shit to Asher," says Braun.
• "I think Asher is an artist who relates to people. Hip-hop has this really weird thing where you can only really rap about what you know. People got mad at Rick Ross for [being a police officer]. Was 50 really shot all those times? Did Ja Rule do this or did Jay do that?" Braun says. "It's a really weird thing, but Asher is the Bob Dylan of hip-hop. And the reason I say that is because Bob Dylan did songs like "Hurricane." He wasn't Hurricane, but he told that story. Asher is doing something where he is being true to himself, but he's making good music for all people."
• "As my grandma used to say, being mature is not changing who you are, it's realizing that you only have to be who you always were," Scooter says. "That is exactly what Asher is translating through."
• "The way Asher has broke in, no one has done it before. No one has broken in on the blogs and gone gold in five weeks."
• Asher like Kanye His album sounds like nothing out there." White rappers need to be completely individual to succeed."
• "My concept of the next great white rapper was always that you have to be able to hold your own against Eminem," Braun says. "Asher is the first to come along who has the talent to do it."
• "No one is talking about that we have a black president and for the first time two white MCs are putting out good hip-hop albums." Scooter
• On iTunes last week, Asher was 17, and Eminem was 18.
• The distribution line in my marketing plan was the blog. Nah rights, the two dope boys, the Illroots, the SOHHs, even the one time he was on Perez Hilton. The blogs are where people are turning for their information. They are the mixtapes and the magazines combined. And they're really a distribution tool. I've been telling all the blogs, whether people love Asher or hate him, they should buy his album because if he is successful, if he goes platinum,
• "The labels don't listen to music anymore. They look at what is financially successful. That's why when a boyband works, suddenly everyone has a boyband. When Soulja Boy works, everyone is doing fucking dance songs and stinky leg and every fucking thing else. It's not because they're looking for artists or whatever, they are looking for whatever will make money in that moment. And if the people want their music to be heard again, whether you  like a rock band that's on your favorite blog, or whether you like another rapper on your blog, if Asher Roth goes platinum, they [music labels] will turn to the blogs and that's the only place in music right now where the fans have a voice."
• "I said, tell me everything about Asher Roth," Braun said. Boyd hung up, fearful it was related to recent noise violations. Braun called back.
• Braun recalled. "Now Boyd says he was watching porn when I called. This is how stars are born."
• It was the power of social media. Days before, Asher sent a MySpace friend request to Braun.
• "I took one look, saw a white boy in a hoodie, and I said 'What the fuck?'" Braun says. He wasn't impressed with the music, but he liked Asher's rhymes.
• "He wasn't comfortable in his own skin," Braun says. "I was interested, but not sold."
• 50 cent said Asher's the first white artist to come along who will be able to get a piece of the profit Eminem has enjoyed, Braun says.
• "And they didn't get it because they didn't see kinda what we saw. And they didn't know how I planned on doing it. Because marketing a guy like Asher had never been done before."

• He's 23, 24 in May, went to Pennsbury High School with Asher. They played baseball together in ninth grade and become close friends after junior year. Close enough that Shannon (and others) went to Atlanta with Roth.
• "Asher recorded an album with Footie, Brian Sellers, in Brian's basement senior year. They just took beats off the Internet. It was a 16 to 17 track album, and we made copies with somebody's CD burner, and we sold them at school. They were selling them like crazy, and we got a lot of positive feedback."
• "He was always a great English student, great with words."
• "I was just always hanging out in the basement, giving my feedback on my songs."
• "He was always good for wordplay," Higgins said. "He read plenty and had a good vocabulary."
• "Now that we're living together in Atlanta, we'll be sitting around, and he'll ask a random word and if it would that fit here. He's always thinking about working some clever word into a rhyme. He's eloquent."
• "It's weird. It's funny. I find it amusing because I just look back and how it happened. Seeing him on TV, hearing him on the radio. People who haven't talked to me in a year will call and say 'oh my God, Asher's on the radio.' I get that call almost everyday. I got it yesterday, actually, and I just got to smile."
• "He's become more confident about himself and just to be the way he wants to be. He was always a laid back person, but he's even more so since this happened. He'll dress down, and wear the sweatpants and v-neck sweaters he likes. He doesn't care about how people see him."
• "In high school, he was friends with a lot of people. He was a very popular kid. Kind of a goofball, and not very serious.  He was big into sports and just wasn't a serious kid, and we just got along well."
• "He was a great English student and great with words, and not great at math. He wrote papers for people, I remember."
• "He's always going to be compared to other people. Some say white people just can't rap. Some people say you just sound like Eminem. Like, OK 'I sound like the most popular rap artist in the last 15 years. Cool."
• When he was at West Chester, he had a MySpace page. There was a phone number for contact information, and it was one of our friends, Tom Boyd. At 2 a.m., Scooter calls him, and says 'Tell me all about Asher Roth.' Well, Tom just hangs up on him because they'd been getting into trouble for noise violations. But then Scooter calls back and says, 'no, I'm serious."
• So Scooter flies Asher down to Atlanta and signs him.
• March 2007: "I remember, we were just sitting around the house drinking beer and he asked me, 'Do you want to move to Atlanta with me?' I had left school and was working at a bar, so I thought 'I could actually make this work."
• Scooter found a house for us. I remember, I was in a car driving to Florida with my family for Thanksgiving, and he tells me, 'Yo, we found a house. We move Dec. 1.' 'Cool, let's do it. It was a total whim."
• They drove down at the end of 2007 and began a rap career.
• Now Shannon works at a family restaurant and bar for one year.
• "West Chester is a part of Philly, and he was there for three years," Higgins says. "His first manager lived there."

• "I remember when I think he first thought it was serious. He came back from Atlanta, and he asked me 'What's going to happen if it all goes together.' I said 'you can't think about us.' I didn't want to get in the way of him following some dream."
• Dated Asher from February 2005, her junior year of high school, to February 2007, her freshman year in college
• junior at Penn State, dated Asher for two years, known him since her 8th grade (2001/2002) She last saw him December 2008
• "I could never, ever be in the spotlight like that. I told him that, and he said he doesn't listen to it, or oh, he listens, but he doesn't care what they say."
• "He has a good head on his shoulders. He might get overwhelmed with shows and photo shoots, but I think can do well, really well."
• "Goofball. He's just a lot fun. You could never take him too seriously. He takes himself seriously, but not too seriously." "I remember when his manager Scooter Braun found him on MySpace and wanted him to fly to Atlanta. I just thought, 'I hope he's not some not creep." "He's always been jokingly into himself and thought of himself as 'the man.'" "He's much more talented than they're going to push him to be. He's not a tool bag." "I probably shouldn't know what he did in college because we were together, and he was always sort of a ladies man."
• There's the story about Asher, among others, playing a game of strip poker at the Rees family home. Her father walked in and tossed everybody out. Asher called Q102 and described the incident to a DJ friend, Rees said. "He called me and said, 'Turn on Q102, we're going to be on in a minute."
• "I am nervous that they are trying to corner him into being the college spokesperson... He's 23 now."
• "He made me sell them in high school," Rees said of the "Just Listen LP.
• Asher was voted most likely to become a famous rapper in his senior year book.

• For now, his camp is trying its best to navigate the fiery buzz that is surrounding the precocious, suburban Bucks County rapper before his debut album is released next Tuesday.
• Video of Asher with Ludacris, meeting with Cee-Lo,
• MTV article, changing hip hop
• Vibe shoot? XXL cover? Album
• Morrisville, across the Delaware River from Trenton, N.J. and once a major stopping point on the 18th-century road between Philadelphia and New York, is named for Robert Morris, known as the financier of the American Revolution and a longtime Philadelphian. So, it might appear that Asher could be another feather in the cap of Philly's proud, if underdeveloped, hip-hop community. But that might be a bit trickier.