Robert Pence

Don't count on Indiana for support. Governor Daniels refuses to even discuss passenger rail with NIPRA (Northeast Indiana Passenger Rail Association) or MHSRA (Midwest High Speed Rail Association).

Sorry. Every time I've driven through there I've been returning from a trip to Chicago and seeking alternative scenery instead of the usual US 30 grind, and I've been tired. Each time I think, "I've gotta come back here and take photos." I should have learned by now; so many times I've said that about a particular building along the road and returned a couple of months later to find it demolished or fire-gutted. It's important not to postpone taking photos. While you're roaming northern Indiana, I recommend a visit to Bristol. It's kind of charming in some places and kind of red-necky in others and has a history of resistance to federal "meddling" but a sense of tolerance that on the surface seems incongruous. While you're there, don't miss Bonneyville Mill County Park, centered around a still-functioning water-powered grist mill. I recommend a summer visit, when the flower gardens in the park have come to full bloom.

Excellent photo tours. The views of the older downtown altered my first impression and make Stamford more appealing. While I like looking at the shapes, textures, and colors of the new construction, my tastes run more to dense old big-city downtowns with massive commercial structures and varied, utilitarian retail at street level; at risk of waxing melodramatic, I think that canyon streets capture energy so that it resonates and reverberates and becomes amplified. I feel invigorated in a dense urban street enironment with people going about their daily business, whereas in an wide-open grassy suburban plaza it doesn't matter how many hundreds of people may be present, or what staged activites may be going on, I just don't get that feeling. That's how I respond; I realize that some people find my favored environment unpleasant, unattractive, and even threatening.

That building looks dangerously unstable! Jewish people played an important part in the early settlement and development of Ligonier, but I don't think there's a significant Jewish presence, if any Jewish presence at all, in the town now. I believe there's a local museum that commemorates that heritage. I haven't been through there in a few years, and I'm saddened to read that the carriage works building was demolished. It was a large building and a significant part of the town's built environment.

Politicians, bankers, and investment brokers wear suits, often expensive ones.

I've found Photoshop CS5 to be buggy in 32-bit XP Pro, particularly when opening Perfect Resize 7.0 (formerly Genuine Fractals) (.STN) files. Anything larger than a desktop JPG (1024 X 768, 72dpi) image opens with artifacts that are thin horizontal bands of pixels from another portion of the image. I'm running a PC with Athlon XP64 3700+ CPU and 3GB DDR2 RAM, and it's set up dual-boot with XP Pro and XP64. If I reboot into XP64 and run CS5 there, I can open the same .STN file and it comes up perfectly artifact-free. I plan to go fully 64-bit soon, and just reserve the 32-bit XP Pro in case I run into something that won't run in 64 bit. The only thing that held me back was that there were no 64-bit drivers available for my older Microtek flatbed scanner, and Nikon never released any for my film scanner and apparently doesn't plan to. I've replaced the flatbed with a new Epson that is supported in 64-bit, and Vue Scan drivers and software will run my film scanner in 64-bit. A friend with an identical film scanner and 64-bit Windows 7 says that Vue Scan is more intuitive and works better than Nikon's proprietary Nikon Scan software.

Yep, you sure did. I've been dealing with this since about 16 years old. I don't even have an intimidating appearance. I'm like 5'11" and only 160 and have more of a grungy hipster style of dress as opposed to the hip hop style of the sterotypical black person (kinda Kid Cudi-esque). Just last week, I experienced this twice. While walking in Clifton, a small Asian girl and I were approaching each other from a distance, and once we got closer, she crossed to the other side of the street. Antother instance was when I was leaving Barnes & Noble in Kenwood going to my car, I passed a mid 90's model Oldsmobile and I heard "cli-click" (doors locking). I glanced inside the car and sure enough, it was an elderly white woman. *sigh*. The worst though was when I used to work in retail and some of the older white women would say I speak "so well" and I'm so "articulate." What the hell is that supposed to mean? :-D :whip: I've been robbed twice in my lifetime, both more than 35 years ago, both times by clean-cut white boys. One was wearing dress pants and shirt and tie, all perfectly coordinated and topped off with a navy windbreaker. He was light blonde with magazine-model looks. He was hitchhiking in downtown Fort Wayne when there still was nightlife there, and my guard was completely down. Where that large-bore revolver came from, I still haven't figured out; it looked like a .44 Magnum. The other time, I was where good judgement would have said, no, screamed, "Are you crazy? Don't go there at night!" I'm not counting the time I was drunk on the CTA Red Line at 1a.m. in a nearly-empty car and got shaken down for change and a transfer by a couple of black teenagers while the conductor watched from the end of the car and said/did nothing.

Great variety, and as usual, exceptionally well documented. Thanks for all your work in sharing this.

I know that some places, including one of the home decor/building materials chains, give discounts to veterans. A friend who's a US Navy veteran said that I can get a veteran's ID by presenting my DD214 at the local VA hospital, and I should do that.

I feel another attack of pedantry coming on. In the Shorpy photo, note the Ford Model T on the far left (license number19284). See the upright cylinder on the running board? That's what makes the headlights work. It's an acetylene generator, and the driver puts chunks of calcium carbide in the bottom and water in the tank on top. Water drips onto the calcium carbide at a rate that the driver can adjust with a needle valve on top of the assembly. When it comes into contact with water, calcium carbide releases acetylene gas, and the more water, the more gas. The acetylene flows through tubes to the headlights, which are equipped with gas jets similar to the ones on the carbide lamps still favored by some spelunkers (cave explorers). To light the headlights, one opens the door on each unit and then starts the flow of gas by opening the needle valve on the gas generator. After a minute or two, there's sufficent gas at the headlights to light with a match, and the intensity of the light can be varied by adjusting the rate at which the water drips upon the carbide. The acetylene gas burns with a brilliant whte flame, and the reflector-equipped headlamps cast a fairly bright beam. Between the early carbide generators and the later electric lighting systems, carbide generators often were replaced with pressurized tanks of acetylene gas produced by PrestoLite Corporation. Other lighting in automobiles, like tail lamps and the cowl lamps just below the windshield, burned kerosene in a wick, just like the kerosene lamps used in homes. Now, go back two more cars parked on the left and there's an electric auto occupied by two ladies wearing white blouses.

Neat as a pin.

It could be as simple as promoting a Twitter hash tag like #FreeFoodChicago. Or a Facebook group where people can report locations. That's a really good idea actually. Hotels/motels with breakfast buffets seldom monitor who partakes; when staying at them, I've never been asked to show a room key or anything in order to have breakfast. In fact, while staying at the now-defunct Terrace Hotel in Cincinnati, I saw a reasonably dressed guy with average grooming loading up on the free breakfast, and later I saw him on the street checking vending machines and parking meters for change. If you create a public forum that directs people to free food, you may generate so much traffic for those places that they either limit quanty and/or access, or discontinue the practice altogether.

Detroit may be the biggest, most attention-grabbing example of what has happened to industrial America but its image is reflected on a reduced scale in cities across the midwest, like Youngstown, Ohio, and Muncie, Indiana. Pittsburgh and Cleveland both were hard hit and although they've managed to salvage a lot and start reclaiming themselves with new economic bases, the effects of the decline of manufacturing are still evident in them. Edit: I started to go off on a rant about corporate directors and executives bowing to the demands of greedy investors by off-shoring all America's blue-collar jobs to exploit cheap labor in countries with weak and despotic governments, but that would be taking the thread off-topic and I don't want to do that.

Late last night I was driving home on US 30, something I try to avoid any time except broad daylight because of the huge deer population along the route. The wind was strong and cold, rain was off-and-on heavy, fog was dense in places, occasionally hail splattered my windshield, and as I neared Fort Wayne I witnessed spectacular displays of thunder and lightning. The posted limit is 60mph, but I had slowed to 45-50mph, something even some truckers had done, because of the weather. If I have to drive rural roads at night I keep a sharp eye on the roadside, looking for the reflection of headlights off deer eyes, but the visibility was bad last night and I almost got one. I only realized what had nearly happened after something flashed across my headlights. It was over in an instant, and if I had been going a little faster I would have harvested some venison and torn up my car. I got home about 11:30, dead-tired, and the violent weather continued long after I fell asleep. This morning I had no hot water. I have a direct-vent water heater, with the vent in a sheltered area behind my house, and last night was the first time in 22 years of living here that the wind blew out the pilot light. This morning as I was waiting to have the steering aligned on my car I picked up a Farmer's Almanac from among the stack of year-old magazines in the waiting area, and checked the weather forecast. It was spot-on for what we've been experiencing over the past several days.

Thanks for these; Akron seems to be successfully reinventing itself. I just realized that it's been almost three years since I've been in Cleveland, and now I know why I'm craving a Cleveland fix. Perhaps I'll make it soon, now that the season of dreariness is mostly past.

Puts "bathroom reading" in a new context. :-D

... but without the apparent tackiness that pervades most small-town tourist destinations. It looks tidy and respectable.

Cute town. I didn't know about the railroad, so I googled it. I may have to make a trip up there for a train ride this summer. The restored interurban car looks like a nice display.

There was a lot of corrosive stuff in the air, then. I remember waiting at a bus stop at the west end of the Detroit-Superior Bridge, and my eyes were burning and watering like crazy. It probably was sulfur dioxide from coal-burning power plants and/or steel mill coke ovens, the stuff that combines with atmospheric moisture to form acid rain. Thanks. Two gay icons of a certain era there. I printed a note card using the image with the caption, "Marlboro Man with rope checks out Greek god with truck."

I may have previously posted entire threads of my Cleveland film scans, and I know I've used individual shots here and there on the forums. The photos are sequenced by year starting with 1978 and running through 2003, with most of the photos before 1990. Here's an example. Click the photo to go to the page on my site:

Quite nice!

Think of the pluses. A cow can keep your lawn trimmed without generating lawnmower exhaust fumes and recycle the clippings into organic fertilizer on site. She can provide milk for drinking, cooking, and making cheese and butter in sufficient quantity that you'll likely have some to sell. She can reproduce, giving you progeny you can sell, raise for additions to your herd, or eat. All that in addition to providing petroleum-free transportation.

Just now, I'm breathing a sigh of relief. For data storage I have a pair of 1TB drives in a mirrored RAID. This morning when I booted up, I got a flashing red message flagging both drives as degraded. The system froze. I have another external mirrored RAID on continuous backup, but I've never been entirely confident that the drive/software combo is 100% reliable. Ordinarily I prefer to buy stuff online, usually from Tiger Direct, but this morning I headed out to Best Buy and paid too much (that's why I usually buy online) for an external enclosure that will allow a SATA drive to be connected via USB. My system recognized the external USB device, but couldn't even find the first drive I put in it. I'll play with that later and see if I can bring it back to life. Fortunately the second drive came right up and everything appears to be intact. I think I'll load a couple more backup drives before I do anything else. I think it's time to start shopping for a new motherboard & CPU anyway; this one is five years old and it's working ten or twelve hours on a lot of days, seven days a week. I'm starting to experience some sketchiness, like one of the USB ports has died, and I need more horsepower to handle Photoshop CS5 and the big RAW files from my current camera. I'm maxed out at 3GB memory, and I'd really gain some productivity if I could go to 64-bit OS full-time and at least double my RAM. I'm running dual-boot XP and XP64 now, and I've finally managed to track down 64-bit drivers for all my external gadgets. Edit: Got a new 1TB drive from Tiger Direct and installed it along with the surviving drive, went into the RAID setup at startup and selected "Rebuild Array" and it took right off. I didn't even have to initialize or format the new drive first. I think I need to start partitioning my storage into smaller segments; the rebuild took a little more than 24 hours. I'll stay with PC for my next system. I can build it fairly economically myself because I can reuse my case, power supply, DVD burner, and system drives. I've asked a couple of friends, one a pro photographer and the other a graphic designer and illustrator, if they thought I should switch to Mac, and neither one thought I should. They pointed out that at the hardware level there's precious little difference now between Mac and PC, and I'm already producing respectable output that wouldn't be dependent upon hardware platform, so I should stay with what I know.

Post-petroleum transport for the 'burbs:

On this morning's Diane Rehm Show on NPR, a topic was the Southwest Airlines fuselage rupture and FAA issues related to it. Among the guests was Mary Schiavo, former inspector general for the US DOT. During the call-in period, one caller tried to take the discussion off topic (a la UO forums), by asking why, considering all the safety issues and the cost of maintaining safety, the US wasn't investing more in alternative transportation, specifically HSR. Schiavo and one other guest launched into the hackneyed liturgy about the cost-effectiveness of subsidies for passenger trains and the mistaken notion that Americans love their cars, and so long as we have the option of good highway infrastructure we'll insist upon driving and wouldn't ride the trains if they were built. Schiavo cited the 3-C project as an example, and referred to those trains as High-Speed Rail. http://thedianerehmshow.org/audio-player?nid=13913