Robert Pence

Ignorant people are clueless about more than just individual events. Usually they don't pay attention to the details of anything going on around them, and that includes the things they need to pay attention to in order to internalize social conventions. They're clueless of their own ignorance, and clueless of the low regard in which non-ignorant people hold ignorance, so mostly they're incapable of embarrassment. If someone tries to apprise them of their ignorance they don't get embarrassed; they just get angry at being "picked on."

Some unique views of familiar places. Riverside has some interesting structures, and some of Evanston's single-family residential streets are gorgeous. The preserved Louis Sullivan designs and pieces of architectural ornament are largely results of the efforts of Richard Nickel, who ultimately died in a collapse while salvaging architectural ornament after hours from a demolition in progress. There's a very readable book by a Chicago author about Nickel's life and work and both lost and surviving Sullivan buildings, with many of Nickel's photographs: They All Fall Down, by Richard Cahan.

Interesting area; the commercial aspects are lively.

I think I'd be reasonably comfortable living there, although it would stretch my retirement funds. I've ridden the historic streetcars and biked on the excellent bike paths in the area of Lake Harriet. I noticed that a lot of the bigger, older trees in the neighborhood need attention from a skilled arborist; some areas look like a jungle. They need deadwood removed and the low-hanging branches cleared out. That can improve sight lines and let in more light without damaging the shade-giving properties of the trees, and reduce the damage to both trees and properties beneath them in an ice storm.

Yum! Beautiful shots, and the flower photos are exceptionally gorgeous. A person probably could get used to living on Portland, over time.

Stop right there. You obviously don't have a Mac! :) You're absolutely right, and I'm not even ashamed! :-D

When I built my current desktop, I found a nifty gadget -- a hard drive dock that installs in a desktop 5.25-inch external bay just like a DVD burner, and connects to a motherboard SATA port. I can plug any SATA 3.5-inch drive into it and it functions just like an internal drive.

Pretty good. Makes me restless to travel.

More, please.

Excellent photos. With the continuous firing required by the steep grades the Shays normally smoke quite a lot, but it looks like they put out an extra-spectacular plume for photographs The climate really changes on ascent to Bald Knob; a warm day at the depot can be downright chilly atop the mountain, and on my visit I saw many people ignore the admonitions of the ticket agents to put on long pants and take along a jacket. In their shorts and t-shirts they huddled around the engine's boiler trying to warm up at Whittaker and Bald Knob. I think Railfan Weekend is the only occasion when the Shays pull the trains. In normal logging operations, the descending trains were the heavy ones, and the locomotives always pushed the empties up the mountain and then backed down with the loaded cars following, so that the engines' tractive power and brakes could assist the cars' hand brakes controlling speed. With day-to-day passenger operations they follow the same practice, probably for safety reasons; if a car or cars were to become detached for any reason on one of the steepest parts of the line, it might be difficult or impossible to control them with hand brakes and a serious wreck could happen. Like the mill, the original shops and depot were destroyed by arson and replaced. The depot is an authentic-looking replica of the original, but the new shop building made pragmatic concessions to energy efficiency, comfort, and safety, as well as cost of construction. It's fortunate that the company store building didn't fall prey to the firebug, as it's quite a large structure that would have been difficult or impossible to replace with an authentic replica. Edit: Cass stands an an excellent example of the high quality maintained by West Virginia's state parks. Everything is kept impeccably clean and in good repair, and the employees are unfailingly friendly and courteous. West Virginia knows the value of tourism, and does a good job of encouraging it.

More! More! More! Super photos, wonderful place!

Nice-looking area with lots of vitality and diversity. The business name, "Harry Singh's Caribbean Restaurant" is an interesting contrast. I believe Singh is an Indian Sikh name." Minneapolis has a deserved reputation as a bicycling city where I'd expect awareness and proper cycling habits to be widespread, yet in at least two photos I saw cyclicsts riding on the left, against traffic. Are the rules different there?

Owwww! That stuff's not meant to be drunk straight! Or maybe drunk at all! You pour it over foods that you want to flame. Alcohol in that concentration is a powerful dessicant in contact with mucous membranes, and erodes the tissues in your throat and esophagus. Repeated use can result in hemmorage of blood vessels near the surface in those tissues. For no more stuff than you keep in that big 'fridge, you might be able to reduce energy consumption and save on your electric bills by unplugging it and buying one of the small dorm-room sized ones. They're quieter, too, than big refrigerators with built-in air-circulating fans, icemakers, and auto-defrost cycles.

Some years back, I attended a going-away party by and for a former neighbor and sometimes friend who was moving out of town. He had always been something of a stoner along with a circle of his closest friends. It was like tuning into a soap opera after not having watched for a long time; nothing much had really changed, and it was very easy to catch up with the plot -- a bunch of middle-aged slackers still dressed pretty much as they had been in their teens/early twenties, still with the same haircuts, all gathered on a sprawling sectional sofa in a corner of the living room, passing around a joint and reminiscing about all their past parties and what drugs they did and how stoned they got. Since then I've lost touch with all of them, but I suppose the same scenario continues to repeat itself several times a year. I suppose the traditional open house at the lower deck of the Detroit-Superior High Level Viaduct will take place on Saturday; I hadn't checked on it. It's a neat thing, for anyone who's never been down there.

I had the good fortune for a while to work for a manager who believed in teamwork and constructive interaction among our analysts and programmers and the in-house client with whom we were developing a new customer-service application. He fostered a very positive attitude in the work place. Then, he got a new boss who was very old-school (past normal retirement age, tailored black or charcoal suit, starched white shirt, solid-color tie, spit-shined shoes, slicked-down hair) and who believed that if you weren't suffering for your job, you must be slacking. He micromanaged instead of trusting his subordinates to know what they were doing, and eliminated long-standing perks like casual Fridays and flexible work hours. He always referred to the conference room where we had all our charts and project plans laid out as the "War Room." On one particularly stressful day when my fed-up meter was just about pegged, I piped up, "With whom are we at war? With our client, or with each other?" That did not go over well. :-(

I like the icy winter shots and the roaring water from the Spring runoff. "Ohio Lake Erie is lucky to have a treasure like Lake Erie Ohio."

Gorgeous place, and excellent photos. It's wonderful to see that some of those once-endangered buildings now are valued and are being preserved/restored.

I'm glad it brought back memories. Previously I posted a set of photos from TT taken that day, and didn't want to resurrect the whole thread here. However, that photo links to the 1978-2003 set on my web site. Click it to revisit thoses photos.

Compare: 2011 1985

Nice-looking town, with some truly striking buildings. I like the Art Deco touches here and there.

Gary, Indiana, be reachin' out to ColDayMan!

I'm working on it, little by little. I haven't had much opportunity in several years to just take off with the purpose of doing that, but whenever I can detour through a new one on an otherwise essential trip, I do it. I'm thinking this fall I might make an excursion primarily for that purpose. I need to create another thread just for a compilation of my courthouse photos; I try to get photos inside them whenever possible, but some have absolute no-camera policies, with just one entrance open to the public, and security screeners on duty with metal detectors. On this trip, in Knox multiple entrances were open and there were no screeners. I arrived in Rochester after the courthouse closed for the day, but all the doors appeared to be functional and I didn't see any screening equipment when I peered through the glass. If there's no screening, I just walk in and start photographing unless I see a law-enforcement officer on duty anywhere, like outside a courtroom. In that case I ask, and usually they don't object except to tell me I can't take photographs inside the courtroom while court is in session, or photographs of any of the people waiting outside the courtroom.

Crown Point, Indiana August 17, 2011 All Photographs Copyright © 2011 by Robert E Pence Lake County is the northwesternmost Indiana county. It was formed in 1837 and has an area of approximately 626 square miles. The 2000 census put the population at 484,564. The county seat, Crown Point, had a population of 27,317 at the 2010 census. The Lake County Courthouse was designed by Chicago architect John C. Cochrane and built by Thomas and Hugh Colwell using locally-made bricks, and incorporates a combination of Romanesque and Georgian styles. The central portion was built at a cost of $52,000 and dedicated in 1880. The two wings with their towers cost $160,000 were dedicated in 1909. The building was threatened with demolition to create a parking lot in the early 1970s after county administrative functions moved to a new building, and was saved through the determined efforts of citizens. It was registered as a national historic landmark in 1973. The Lake Court House Foundation, Inc., manages and maintains the building. The terrain here is somewhat rolling, and as I came into town on Indiana 231 and crested a rise, I saw this. My immediate reaction was, "Holy .... !" Elegant marble wainscotting and floors. The courthouse basement houses specialty retail shops and dining establishments. Around the town square and the central business district Masonic Temple The public library was expanded with an addition at the rear, facing Court Street. The original building still serves the public as the Carnegie Center. The Old Sheriff's House was built in 1882. The large jail in back, built in 1926, is best known as the jail from which John Dillinger escaped in 1934 using a fake gun carved from wood, not from soap as the popular legend says. The 1847 Wellington A. Clark homestead, the oldest house in Crown Point.

Beautiful vistas and some great cloudscapes.

Excellent photos. It's sad that they'll likely lose a landmark and it looks like downtown retail is on hard times, as it is in the majority of cities that size. Still, the downtown looks much cleaner and more attractive than it did when I passed through the area in the 1960s.