Robert Pence

That there car with all them stickers prob'ly b'long to some dang liberal hippie commie pinko tree-hugger from Yeller Springs! :whip:

Amazing city!

This thread makes me wish for the ability to time-travel.

So, will there be peace in Cincinnati? I don't know about comin' there for a meet, if there's gonna' be a war there! :-o

That's plain-spoken, concise and comprehensive. It's the best commentary I've seen on fuel markets and prices.

I'm gonna' try to make it.

Remarkable photo set! It surprising that these copper vats are still in place; usually they get pulled out as soon as a brewery shuts down, because they're expensive to buy new and even worth a bundle for scrap. Often they're bought by other breweries, or moved to other plants owned by the same company.

I don't think it helped CTA when they did away with A and B trains, and made everything all-stops. Trains barely get moving before they have to stop again.

The Democrats should be wary of trying to capitalize on problems that they can't fix if they get elected. That practice will surely come around to bite them in the butt.

The buried electrical conduit that I've seen is gray. Flexible plastic material is used in a lot of low-pressure gas line installation now. It's less expensive than steel, and easier to install. Several years ago Northern Indiana Public Service Co. moved all the residential meters in my neighborhood from basements to outside locations, and in the process they replaced most of the residential gas lines with plastic. Rather than trench all the way from the main to the residential meter, they used a backhoe to dig two holes, one at the connection to the main, and one at the location of the meter. Then, they attached a long bullet-shaped cylinder, slightly larger than the diameter of the gas line, to the end of the line, and put it in the hole at the main, aimed at the hole at the meter location. They attached the other end of the line to an air compressor, and a weight inside the cylinder shuttled back and forth driven by the air pressure, to cause the cylinder to pound its way through the soil from one hole to the other, towing the new gas line along with it. Standing nearby, I could feel the thump-thump-thump in the ground as it worked. Across the street from my house, they did one run of about 75 feet with it. I think it took about half an hour. Local soil at that depth is mostly sandy clay and free of rocks and other sold obstructions.

:clap: :clap: :clap: :clap: More than one generation, in fact, with more on the way. Adaptation may start with the current crop of young children, but it won't be fully accepted until the expiration of the generation now establishing households in cul-de-sac land. Oh! And welcome, marky-mark48.

Colorful! Good tour!

The ties for streetcar tracks were never visible once the street was finished; ties were laid on the bare roadbed and the rails were installed, and then the paving bricks were laid so that the tops of the rails were flush with the street surface. On a street in my home town where the interurban tracks were paved over in the 1940s, the surface is taking on a washboard effect as the ties underneath decay.

Poor babies! Poor, lazy-a$$, selfish, self-absorbed babies! How I grieve for them. :-D South Shore ridership is up 30 percent, and they were already running at capacity. I'll be making the trip into Chicago from South Bend in a couple of weeks, and I'm glad for the heads-up. I'll be sure to take off-peak trains, and take along my hearing-protection earmuffs to block out the cell-phone yappers.

I just read an article in this morning's paper about local pawn shops. Their business has taken a significant upturn as people pawn personal possessions like power tools, TVs and jewelry to get money for gasoline. According to the article, the two highest-ranking purchases that take people to the pawn shops are gasoline and cigarettes. The hottest-selling items at the pawn shops are bicycles. They used to have several of them outside all the time, but now they're out of them. I think that trend will probably bring an uptick in the number of accidents involving bicycles and cars; I've noticed a sharp increase in the number of bicycle riders who obviously aren't commuting or riding for fitness or recreation; they ride on dangerous busy thoroughfares when there are bike paths and lightly-traveled, safer streets nearby and they ride on the left facing into traffic. Often they ride against traffic on one-way streets, and downtown they ride on the sidewalks. They wobble and weave and ride erratically. They were stupid drivers when they could afford gasoline, and now they're stupid cyclists and it's likely to get them killed.

Americans seem to identify with their cars more than most other nationalities. It's common in my neighborhood to see new and late-model cars in the $35K range and up, parked on the street in front of marginal-quality apartments that don't even have off-street parking. I'd rather have a decent place to live, than a fancy car -- and if I were to dump that kind of money into a car, I'd place a higher priority on a parking place safe from vandalism and late-night hit-and-run drunks. Americans should be a lot more worried about Bush's intentions than about pump prices, given his track record of manipulated intelligence and unilateral decision-making ("I'm the decider"). They should be scared to death about his statements regarding a preemptive nuclear strike on Iran; I'm surprised his statements in that regard haven't sent the world economy into a tailspin.

Gorgeous work!

Dang smart-alecky youngsters thing it's funny to disrespect your elders! That's exactly what I was talking about! :-D Seriously, though, we moved from Fort Wayne to a farm near Bluffton (pop. then 6,000) when I was about 8 years old. Our phone was an ordinary black desk set like most systems used in the forties and fifties, except that it didn't have a dial. All the residential phones on Bell's Bluffton exchange were five-party lines, and all the phones on a party line rang for incoming calls. To know whether the call was yours, you counted the rings; ours was 979 Ring 5, so if it rang 5 times in quick succession, we knew to pick up. Of course, all busybodies on the line knew we were getting a call, too, and there were a couple of old biddies who kept the local gossip machine fed by listening in on other people's phone calls. In addition, whenever they were on the phone gabbing :yap:, no one else on that party line could make a call until they finished. To make a call, you picked up the handset and waited a few seconds until an operator came on and asked, "Number, please?" If you wanted to call someone else on the same party line, you'd then hang up and wait for the rings. When the rings stopped, you knew they had picked up, and then you could pick up and talk with them. I think that system was in use until some time around 1964, when they put in direct-dialing. It was a few more years before all the rural party lines were replaced with private lines. Mostly I just hang up on telemarketers. I avoid a lot of those by letting the answering machine pick up most evening calls. You should see how I deal with (increasingly rare) door-to-door salesmen, though, especially when they won't take "no" for an answer. I actually made a Comcast salesman run, and he was a big guy (I'm anything but)! He was getting very pushy and I kept telling him I wasn't interested. Then, he sort of drew himself up to take advantage of his height and stepped into my space. Instead of stepping back like he probably expected, I stepped forward to meet him, with my right arm sort of drawn back like I was about to throw a punch :x. He looked a little startled and stepped back, and for every step he took back, I took a step forward. When he got to the bottom of the porch steps I sort of lunged toward him and he turned and ran. The whole thing probably took about five seconds. He didn't come back. Come to think of it, I haven't been bothered by any Comcast salesmen since. :lol:

The Prius is establishing an excellent reputation for quality and reliability; that's not suprising, I guess, because it's consistent with the reputation of Toyota vehicles in general. I've heard of some that are approaching 300K miles trouble-free, still using the original batteries. KJP, the King Midget originally was available as a complete vehicle, but now it comes as a kit that allows you to design your own driveline. It probably would be fairly straightforward for a capable engineer/technician to design a hybrid drive system derived from a battery golf cart, with a small, quiet gas engine and alternator to recharge and maintain the batteries for longer distances.

Like a pro! Gorgeous stuff. That park-scale locomotive is beautiful. It looks like the track was laid using streetcar rail. My mom used to have peacocks. They're strange birds. Sometimes they can make a call that sounds almost like a human scream, and it carries for a long way.

I remember Crosleys, although I never rode in one. They were powered with a V-twin air-cooled engine. They were so small, I'd think they'd probably come out on the worst end in a collision with a really big person on a bicycle. Apparently not many have survived; every now and then one will turn up at a collector car show. In the late 1950's my cousin had a King Midget, and commuted 25 miles each way with it for several years, except in winter. It had a rear-mounted 6-horsepower Wisconsin air-cooled engine and could make a little better than 50 mph wide open. http://www.midgetmotors.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/newcar.jpg

A minor peeve but it just happened again, and I don't have anything else to gripe about: Someone dials my number by mistake, and when I answer the phone, they immediately ask, "Who is this?" My usual response goes something like, "You called me. If you had good manners, you'd introduce yourself first." If they ask in a demanding or indignant manner, I may respond with, "Whaddayamean, whoisthis? It ain't my fault you don't know how to use a telephone!" Some fools can't get it into their heads that they could be screwing up, and they'll try three or four times. That's when I blow the police whistle into the mouthpiece.

Now I know where all the hippies went!

If someone buys a hybrid for altruistic reasons (conserve energy, reduce pollution, etc.), that's a good thing. If he does it to save money, it's folly. The payback period for the extra cost of a hybrid, over a comparable conventional model with the most economical engine/transmission options, is longer than many people keep their cars. The guy with the pickup truck will spend a lot less for gas when he trades for a hybrid, but his net long-term savings would almost certainly be greater if he were to buy an economical car with a conventional drive line.

I'm frustrated and dismayed that all the attention is focused on band-aid solutions instead of being directed toward the real problems. <rant> I've read that continuing to do the same thing over and over, while expecting different results, is a sign of insanity; from that I conclude that the nation is collectively insane. America, pandered to by self-serving demagogues the electorate has chosen as leaders, is obsessed with bio-fuels (ethanol and soy diesel) and hydrogen technology as a means to keep on doing what we've been doing, while avoiding the inevitable consequences of greed, selfishness, and wasteful behavior. Sustaining greedy, selfish, wasteful inclinations with agricultural resources and production, when those resources and products should be used to feed people, is unconscionable. Bio-fuels now provide a very small part of U.S. energy supplies, and even at that low level they're beginning to have a adverse effect on food production and prices. Ethanol is being used in increasing quantities to replace MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether), an additive that increases the oxygen content and octane rating of gasoline but has been proven to be a long-lived environmental pollutant in its own right. Ethanol is produced using corn, which is also a major feed component for livestock raised for dairy production and for meat. Livestock growers are already feeling the pinch as the competition from ethanol producers, following on the heels of a poor crop year, drives up the price of feed. Soybeans are an excellent source of protein both in livestock feed and in foods consumed directly by people, and their diversion into fuel production will have the same effect on prices and availability for processing into food. Reliance on bio-fuels isn't strategically sound, either. Just as hurricanes can disrupt gasoline supplies, weather can disrupt agricultural production; sometimes the impact can be even longer-lasting. In some years, an entire region can experience a total crop failure, as much of the northeast did with the corn crop about ten years ago. Climate change may produce widespread multi-year crop failures in future years. If Americans want to change the results we're experiencing, we have to change what we're doing. We have to reduce our energy demands. Sprawl-dwellers in too-big houses with too many energy-consuming gadgets have to stop driving their SUVs to get groceries from the distant stores they don't want despoiling their rural paradises. They have to stop solo-commuting to their distant jobs in cities they never see except through the windshield, and they have to stop speeding and driving aggressively. Beyond that, we have to stop accepting the creation of sprawl as "progress" and insist on reclaiming the many square miles of vacant and under-utilized land in our cities. We have to insist that new development be done with transit accessibility as a primary concern. We need to change the tax codes to stop subsidizing the razing of useful buildings to provide convenient street-level parking, and instead direct public resources toward providing public transportation systems that are clean and safe and that provide a level and quality of service that make them attractive alternatives for everyone, instead of "safety nets" for people who have no alternatives. </rant> I could go on, and often do, but I need to stop, take a deep breath, and maybe go out and take a walk.