Robert Pence

My niece, a college-level English composition and literature teacher, taught English for a year in a Japanese school in a rural community. She said that although English was a requirement, few of her students were motivated to acquire fluency or a real working knowledge of English vocabulary and grammar. To them, it was just a fad or fashionable thing to be able to throw out English words, phrases, and idioms here and there, often without regard for meaning or context. She said this site is pretty much spot on.

smiling bob and cortlandgirl79, I genuinely appreciate your contributions to the photo threads. Please keep in mind that this is a photo thread and occasional quips and comments are to be expected, but Personal Messages or even the Urbanbar Off Topic thread are better places for extended interpersonal banter. Thanks

The former Greyhound station looks identical to the one in Fort Wayne, that was turned into a parking lot in a weekend midnight raid by a real estate speculator, in order to do an end run around preservationists' efforts.

I hate that one too...there was one for teeth whitening that kept popping up....so if her discovery is that rinsing your mouth with chlorine bleach will whiten your teeth, we should listen to her because her credentials are being a "Mom"? Kinda like that Airborne stuff invented by a "teacher". I never clicked on the ad, but I read about the complaints elsewhere; the pitch is for a kit that costs something like $8, but the people who bought it later discovered to their dismay that they had signed up for something that got shipped monthly for something like a year for $8 a pop, charged to their VISA card. People who tried to cancel were told that they could stop shipments but would have to pay the whole annual charge they signed up for. Quite possibly their bakery does run 24/7. Large-volume, high-production ones sometimes do, because it takes a while to get equipment like ovens stabilized and it's more efficient to keep the whole process running once everything is right. Still, the wording on the package probably causes some shoppers to infer that the goods were baked the same day that they arrived on the local store shelves, and that ain't necessarily so.

Good bump!

Wellsville does not look well. :-(

Fine with me. :-)

Great colors and textures!

Great photos, rich visual experience!

Probably so. Ads that don't get results don't stay around long. Years of experience have led me to believe that only about two percent of people affected by any issue have any in-depth comprehension of what it's about. The other ninety-eight percent spend their lives in varying degrees of cluelessness.

A few years ago I was westbound on US 30 headed for Chicago in the pre-dawn hours. It's a drive I try to avoid except in broad daylight because of the high incidence of deer-vehicle interactions, and fast-moving traffic, especially big trucks, makes it hard to safely maintain a reasonable speed. Between Columbia City and Warsaw (Indiana) a nearly-new Caddy flashed past me so fast that the slipstream rocked my car. I was holding it under 60 and keeping an eye on the shoulders and medians, and I'm sure the Caddy was going more than 100mph. About 15-20 minutes later I saw lots of flashing lights ahead. When I got to that location there were deer fragments on the road, and the Caddy was sitting off to the side very badly smashed up. I never heard details of what happened, but the way that Caddy looked as I drove past, the driver probably got part of the deer through the windshield.

It's nearly midnight on New Year's Eve and I'm home alone updating spreadsheets, sober and with no music, no TV, no radio. And I'm completely OK with that. I may gra .... [interruption for a midnight ride] ... I took a notion to hop on my old Raleigh roadster and cruise downtown so I could see the fireworks at the ballpark at midnight. It's 54F, no wind, with an off-and-on light rain. The fireworks show was pretty good, with a nice noisy finale. No traffic; most of the drunks are still workin' on gettin' drunker, and the ones that want to go home can't remember where they left their cars. They're the only ones that are a hazard; despite my regular light and a bright white flashing LED, a couple of them walked right in front of me and with wet brakes I barely avoided running them down. I'm home safe and sound and a little damp. It was a short ride, but an appropriately environmentally-conscious way to bring in the new year, so I guess I'm not as big a cultural blasphemer as I try to be.

Heck, yes, I felt it! I was enjoying my morning cocoa and newspaper and a brief severe jolt shook my house mad made stuff rattle in the kitchen. It was similar to the feeling when a heavy, fast-moving truck hits a bad spot in the pavement about fifty feet from my house, but several times the intensity. I looked out the window and there wasn't a truck anywhere in sight, so I turned on the radio to see if there had been an earthquake. So far, I've heard nothing.

Thanks for posting these. I haven't been there since the late 1960s, when I spent a cold-and-dreary, drizzly late-winter afternoon with friends train-watching along what used to be a very busy mainline. I never paid much attention to the town, then.

Y'all's some sick folks. :weird:

As many Cleveland threads as I've seen, I've seen few to match this. You have a great eye for detail and for juxtapositions and compositions that most people wouldn't notice. :clap:

In more ways than just transportation costs. Petroleum and natural gas are major elements in the costs of growing and processing crops, from fertilizers and other agrichemicals to fuel for equipment to till, plant, and harvest. With investment in railroad capacity and efficient intermodal transfer facilities a big bite can be taken from transport fuel use by using road-railers, trailers on flatcars or spine cars, and containers. Rail freight consumes 1/5 to 1/3 as much energy per ton mile, compared with long-distance trucking. Regular unleaded gasoline last night at Kroger in Fort Wayne was $3.19/gallon.

Wonderful photo set. The contrasts are pretty striking, and overall the city appears clean. I'm surprised by the absence of grafitti, even in the blighted area shown in the first photos. In most urban areas, every surface that could be reached would have been tagged multiple times and heavily vandalized.

Neat stuff; facade grants ought to include signage, because it's an integral part of the streetscape's vitality. Great photos!

The biggest improvements to performance of the Capitol and Lateshore in the near future will come from federal investment in fixing the bottleneck in Northwest Indiana, where multiple freight and passenger routes to and from Chicago converge. It's a bad choke point that causes many delays, and the funds already have been committed for it.

Beautiful! Those really capture the mood of Chicago at Christmastime. I'm still not used to "Macy's." It probably will remain Marshall Field in my mind for a long time.

Anybody doesn't want their coal, send it to me. I'll throw it at trespassers. "Darn kids, git outta my yard!" Then, I'll gather it all up and put it by the fireplace along with what I got this year, to build a big smoky fire next Christmas eve and keep that fat elf outta my chimney. Track soot all over my house, will you? Not any more, by golly!

It was (or was supposed to be) yeast-raised. The yeast was fresh from the store, and I always proof it (make sure it's active) by softening it in a quarter-cup of warm water and adding a pinch of sugar. It foamed up in very short order. I add just a very small amount of baking powder to give the rising just a little boost during the early part of baking. I try to keep everything warm during all stages of preparation to ensure yeast activity, and at this point I can only guess that maybe I got it too warm at some point and killed the yeast.

Well, that was a total fiasco. I've achieved a certain amount of acclaim among friends and family over the years for my baking skills, especially with yeast breads. Even my grandmother, an accomplished baker in her own right, once asked me to show her how I made bread. So, for family dinners and gifts I stayed up almost all night last night baking cinnamon-swirl bread, a perennial favorite. I have yet to figure out what happened, but the loaves are of just the right consistency, texture, and density for sidewalk pavers. I'll probably crumble them and toss them onto the patio for the birds, squirrels, and raccoons. I've only had total failures like this a couple of times before in nearly fifty years of baking, and both of those times I felt tired, stretched too thin, and harried when I started, too. I suspect there may be a metaphysical element involved; one may have to put positive mental and spiritual energy into the process in order to achieve positive results. Usually when I bake, I'm looking forward to it and regard the process as rewarding and gratifying, and then the outcome looks, smells, and tastes wonderful.

You probably need to recalibrate your gaydar. I suggest starting in Cleveland to do that; my first few visits there, it took a while to adjust to the sight of straight men who cared how they dressed and groomed themselves. That was in the late seventies, and Cleveland was way ahead of the curve on Metrosexual. It's still true, too. Sounds like maybe you should go to Cincinnati, too, to calibrate it at the other end of the scale. Then, go to Chicago to check the mid-range. If you go into the Corner Bakery across from the Art Institute, you'll have to turn off the audible alert to avoid vertigo, but the signals are valid.