I felt a bit bad, looking back at my last post. Depending on how you read it, it sounds like I’m describing the devastation of the environment and community of Centralia, PA as “random stuff I just love.”
That was hardly my intention, of course. Anyway, I’ll make amends by offering this link to the website for a new feature-length documentary on Centralia that was released this year, The Town that Was. I hope to see it soon.
This is the kind of random stuff I just love.
A few weeks ago I spent some time reading about Centralia, PA, a town that has dwindled to almost nothing over the past several decades due to an underground fire in a coal mine that has been burning there since the 1960s. I was just once again reading the entry on Centralia in Wikipedia, and I found this line interesting:
Centralia is now the least-populous municipality in Pennsylvania, with four fewer residents than the borough of S.N.P.J.
OK, there’s a borough (a distinction for municipalities that does not exist where I live, but basically, in other words, a “town”) in Pennsylvania called “S.N.P.J.”? I had to find out more about this. So I did.
S.N.P.J. stands for Slovenska Narodna Podporna Jednota which means “Slovene National Benefit Society.” OK, nothing wrong there (and I am trying not to think about Borat). But what’s really crazy about it is that according to the 2000 census, the municipality has a population of zero (although the borough itself claims 13 residents), which makes a little bit more sense when you understand its history:
The society applied to have their 500 acre recreation center in western Pennsylvania designated as a separate municipality in 1977. The S.N.P.J. borough was created so that the society could, among other things, get their own liquor license. North Beaver Township, Pennsylvania, the municipality in which the center was originally located, restricted the sale of alcohol on Sundays.
Wow. That’s almost as crazy as the guy I knew in California whose last name was Church, who filed paperwork with the IRS to get himself tax-exempt status. (Apparently, it worked.)
Well, the borough may be sparsely populated, but it (or at least, the organization behind it), does have its own website.
I’ve just finished a modification to the site design. I was starting to feel a bit too confined by the narrowness of the old layout, so I’ve basically kept things intact design-wise, but I’ve expanded the layout to be more suitable to today’s 1024×768-or-greater standard screen resolution. I’ve also bumped up the size of the type slightly.
The only design element that’s noticeably different is the little greenish weirdness at the right end of the photos in the header bar. This was something I spent a great deal of time developing for an old, shortlived design that was part of my quickly-abandoned experiment with running the site on Drupal. I may end up getting rid of it again; I just thought it deserved a second chance.
Now then, if you’ve actually visited this site sometime before, you may find the pages are looking somewhat garbled; sadly that’s the side effect of keeping a lot of the filenames the same; your browser likely has old versions of these files cached. Hit the Refresh button a few times or perhaps clear your cache. I did the Refresh thing, but I had to hit it about 4 times before all of the files actually updated. Sheesh, you’d think I was using a Microsoft product or something, not Firefox!
If anyone has been bothering to read my rants for the past five-plus years, you may recall that one of my earliest blog posts was a tirade against the evils of cords.
Finally, while it may not be much solace, science as at least touched upon an explanation for why cords suck.
It’s kind of funny now, looking back at what I wrote in 2002. I was speaking in awed and reverent tones of the mystical wonders that awaited us in the future, these things called “AirPort” (I’m not even sure the term “Wi-Fi” was in use yet back then), and “Bluetooth” — things so new and wondrous that I put them in quotes when I referred to them, without a trace of irony.
Now I am pretty much taking for granted the fact that I’m sitting on my bed typing this on my laptop, connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi link to the router downstairs, and I’m controlling the cursor with a Bluetooth wireless mouse. Frankly, I’m more surprised by the fact that as of last Sunday my Mac is now set up in a triple boot configuration, with Mac OS X, Windows XP, and Ubuntu Linux.
I know I’ve already ranted about Katherine Kersten in the past. I’m still not sure what masochistic compulsion drives me to read her column. I guess as much as I don’t want aggravation, I just can’t turn away when it’s staring me down, even when it comes in the form of a right-wing shill, a shameful hack of a “journalist.”
And so, today she’s at it again, this time railing against the “serial law-breaking mob” known as Critical Mass. I knew someone back in Atlanta who participated in Critical Mass, and even though I’m not a regular bike rider, I do choose public transportation for my daily commute, and I commend their efforts to wake up their fellow citizens to the multitude of ways that our gas-guzzling lifestyle is damaging the planet and, well, our lifestyle (if you need to put it in selfish terms to be motivated to care).
The real crime here is that a supposedly respected publication like the Minneapolis StarTribune continues to devote ink and paper, and even worse, money, to such predictably offensive drivel.