Donald Trump should love hemp. That’s right, you know, hemp is terrific. Just terrific. It’s going to make a tremendous amount of money for people in this great country. Win big. Really big.

… or at least that’s what we’d like to hear him say.

Trying to find the new administration’s position on hemp and hemp alone is like parsing hemp stacks for chemical pesticides and herbicides. Non-existent.

But Donald Trump should love hemp anyway and here’s why.

First the necessary primer. Hemp and its more popular cousin marijuana are related, but still quite different. Both emanate from the cannabis plant, but like, say, the familiar family dog, they are distinct. Canines can be bred to be giant Great Danes or tiny Chihuahuas, gentle and kind Labrador Retrievers or strong and aggressive Pit Bulls. By analogy, the hemp plant can be grown to be strong and fibrous for cordage that sails ships, or molecularly balanced for the oils that treat seizures in small children. Believe me, this plant is incredible.

It is almost impossible to find a picture of Chuck Berry where he isn’t holding a guitar, typically a Gibson ES-350T or ES-335. Although the 335 is probably more common in the photo vaults, most of records that Berry made during his heyday in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s – “Maybelline,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Roll Over Beethoven” etc. – were cut with the 350T.

The 350T is a semi-acoustic archtop, something of a cross between an amplified acoustic guitar such as the ES-150 and full solid bodies such as the Les Paul. A solid center block permitted electric amplification without too much feedback, while the hollow pockets on both sides of the guitar featured f-shaped sound holes which permitted the instrument to be played acoustically. Like most of the guitars of its era, it was intended for guitarists playing in the jazz orchestras popular at the time. Its arched body is a piece of craftsmanship, the work of a master luthier. They cost shit-tons of money.

The Columbus Dispatch apparently is abandoning its hard-right editorial page slant with the departure of Glenn Sheller, announced March 19. It advertised the vacancy in journalismjobs.com on March 2.

The longtime editorial page editor reflected an ultra-conservative point-of-view that was horribly out of step with the newspaper's core audience in deep blue Columbus and Franklin County, as I have pointed out more than once in this column, Sheller's head in the sand perspective may have been costing the print and web product thousands of subscribers and readers, not to mention advertisers.

In a column announcing Sheller's departure, Dispatch editor Alan Miller quoted publisher Bradley Harmon as saying that the next editorial page editor should reflect the “need for diversity to better mirror the growing, evolving region we serve.”

Harmon's statement could be interpreted to mean that Sheller's views were not congruent with the region's.

These are boom times for the Columbus Clippers. Our hometown heroes are riding a wave of success that includes three straight International League West Division finishes and a Governor's Cup title in 2015. But as the cream of Cleveland's fertile farm system rises to the AAA level, this Clipper squad might be the best one yet. This year's team is armed and dangerous, with a plethora of Major League ready talent both on the mound and in the lineup.

The arms include a young, yet experienced starting rotation and a veteran bullpen. At the top of the rotation is 26 year-old right-hander Mike Clevinger, who went 11-1 with the Clippers and 3-3 with the parent club last year. After making three appearances in the World Series, Clevinger is biding his time in Columbus, anchoring the Clipper rotation while keeping ready for the phone call that will inevitably come sometime this season.

Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil

Like millions of students, I never liked math. I thought it scary, mysterious and evil. I joke that I can’t even sit next to math professors during meetings! Generally a bright student with high grades, my lack of prowess at math let me down every time. And then in the ninth grade, the lottery placed me in Arnold Anderson’s general math class. He had a reputation for transforming struggling math students into, if not math wizards, students who would see that math was no longer mysterious and could even be interesting and—borrowing a term from my students—fun. (My favorite mathematical task? Balancing equations.) It was the first time I was interested in math, liked math and earned As in math. Alas, that was the last time for me; I managed to make it all the way to a PhD without math. I came to ruefully regret my lack of math prowess when I began my career in higher education. I was the person who always interrupted meetings so that someone could explain the math behind the data so ubiquitous in our field.