Robert Pence

Even before I read this, I was thinking (somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but nevertheless ... ) "Why not use it for community gardens, or let people pasture dairy goats and use the milk to make cheese?" A more seriously-intended idea, disruptive to formal order but with creative possibilities, is to lay out plots where gardening enthusiasts plant and tend annual flowers and ornamentals and perhaps herb gardens. Let them recruit sponsors to underwrite their costs, and place the sponsors' names on small signs on the plots. Open it up to both amateurs and professionals and foster a friendly competitiveness. The results would be random, but probably amazing. The flower gardens on the statehouse lawn could become a tourist draw and a focal point for a downtown festival. People from the area and beyond would come to get ideas and learn from the gardeners.

:wtf: :|

See where the two cars are parked on the left? They're parked in front of my houses. My rental is just above the nearer of the two cars. I'm not far away, but as you can see, the land rises sharply there. At the hundred-year level, water begins to back up into the basement.

Fort Wayne, Indiana - First Flood of 2009 March 10 - 13, 2009 I'm labeling this the First Flood of 2009, because we've had higher water than this, as late at July. This doesn't qualify as a serious flood, in my opinion, because city crews were able to stay well ahead of the rising water levels and there was no major property damage, just damage to the taxpayers who will have to pay the estimated $100,000 cost of the efforts for this particular event. Heavy rains over the weekend, on top of already-saturated ground, caused the river to rise rapidly. City crews started building a clay temporary levee on Monday, and were well ahead of the rising water. However, the gates were closed that prevent floodwater from backing up into the storm sewer system. Water flowing down the storm sewers from higher areas had no place to go. Storm grates began regurgitating the water into the street behind the levee, and city crews brought in sandbags and pumps to protect low-lying homes. Tuesday, March 10, 2009 Pumping storm sewer water into the river City equipment and workers pile sandbags. Because a proposal for a permanent floodwall was rejected, neighborhood residents get to live in peril every spring of having their homes ruined, and listen to droning pumps all day and night. Wednesday, March 12, 2009 Storm sewer backup has nearly covered the intersection at Thieme and Wayne, a block south and just a block from my house. The river has continued to rise and is about to run around the end of the levee. Soon trucks will bring in more clay. Water boils up from a storm grate where the alley between Wayne and Berry ends at Thieme. The water flows along the curb downhill toward Berry & Thieme. Three pumps working on the storm sewers at Berry & Thieme appear to have the situation well under control. Thursday, March 12, 2009 Tire Trouble Twenty-four hours earlier the situation here looked completely under control, and officials thought the worst was past along the St Marys River. Then the crest on the St Joseph River arrived, and combined with an already-overloaded Maumee, caused a backup that extended for a couple of miles upstream on the St Marys. While the river south of town had dropped to 17 feet, nearer the confluence it surged to more than 22 feet and flooded Berry & Thieme again. City crews brought in another pump and more clay. The pink tape around the tree marks the level of a hundred-year flood. At that point I start to get water in the basement of my rental house. If I recall correctly, water has reached the hundred-year-flood level three times since 1978. Maybe it's time to recalibrate the statistics? Friday, March 13, 2009 Three pumps are holding their own, and the river level is starting to fall. Some views around the vicinity of Thieme Drive and West Main Street and the 1911 Thieme Drive Overlook. See the railing just poking above the water on the left, just this side of the railroad bridge? That's where the Rivergreenway goes under the railroad. The railroad bridge is on the Norfolk Southern's former Nickel Plate line that follows the route of the Wabash-Erie Canal through downtown. The house where actress Carole Lombard, AKA Jane Peters, was born.

Waltz with Bashir - If you haven't seen this, go. It's amazing animation sometimes bordering on photorealistic, with an involved story and some of the most arresting visuals I've seen.

Wonderful shots. I haven't been in Portland since 1995, when only the original segment of the light rail was open, and they were running two or three Gomaco trolleys on a downtown segment of the light rail track during limited daytime hours. I thought the city was fantastic then, and the changes are stunning.

And I believe the Russians reciprocated in their treatment of German POWs. A former German soldier who once worked with my brother had been captured by the Russians and held in a POW camp, and told of extreme gratuitous brutality. He and another man managed to kill two Russian guards one night and escape.

What I said before. The murals are chilling. The ordered symmetry and organization belie the human chaos this place was built to manufacture.

Thanks for visiting and photographing these places to share with us. It took me a few days to even work up the nerve to open the threads. There's a powerful lesson in the stories from the camps. Some people still take people's innate wariness of whomever is different, nurture it into suspicion and fear, and then into hate, and then mobilize the hate to divide us one against the other and elevate themselves to great power. Neo-Nazis exist in nearly every society; their danger is somewhat tempered by their often-obvious visibility and by their tendency toward inter-factional strife. More dangerous are the outwardly respectable people who pervert democracy and the legal system to create and maintain repression against one group or another, and the preachers who invoke religion to focus the attention of unfulfilled and resentful people looking for someone to blame for their failures.

Since the first time I saw the Detroit-Superior High Level Viaduct, I've been fascinated by it. It presents a beautiful blend of massive strength and soaring grace, and after more than eighty years it's still solid as a rock and working as it always has. That it was designed by Cuyahoga County engineers, and not some big-name East Coast firm, is an added plus in the city's history. UO and SSP forumers check it out in 2005:

My food intake is not a lot, because I get preoccupied with projects and either forget to eat, or do something quick just to keep going. I think some days my intake was in the neighborhood of 1,000 - 1,200 calories. The ongoing after effects of intensive radiation and chemo more than ten years ago have changed a lot of things, too, including the suppression of hunger awareness and the destruction of my thyroid gland. I've thought for more than three years that it had quit altogether, and finally a couple of months ago, the doctors decided I needed synthroid. The improvement in my mood and energy level has been remarkable, and it has kicked up my metabolism, too. Last week I stepped on the scale and came up 131 lbs. I'm just a tad over 5'10" and that's the lowest weight I've been in more than 40 years. I decided to get to work on that, and now I'm up to 135. To sustain my level of physical activity, I need to add about five more.

Some outstanding stuff in this thread. Going back to the Willys Building, their automobiles' most memorable claim to fame was the sleeve-valve engine. One of my uncles was an auto mechanic whose working experience went back to a time when a lot of cars from the Model-T Ford era were still on the road, and he was a great admirer of the Knight-designed engine for its smoooth, quiet operation and advanced technology. The drawback was the high-cost of building it and of overhauling it after it had many miles of wear, compared with the ubiquitous poppet-valve engines used by other makers. A link to the tech stuff on the Knight engine: http://clubs.hemmings.com/clubsites/wokr/gallery/wk_eng.htm Willys built some mighty sexy vehicles for their time. http://clubs.hemmings.com/clubsites/wokr/gallery/gallery.htm

The laundry techniques have multiple benefits. I've been washing my clothes in cold water for years, and hanging them to dry. In winter, I use a rack that's on rollers and put it under the ceiling fan in the kitchen. That uses less energy than heating water and running a clothes dryer, and clothes last a lot longer. Sweaters get hand-washed in cold water with Woolite and spread on a big towel on the floor to dry. I don't watch television, which saves the energy to power the set and gives me more time to pursue creative/productive activities (and not stay up late watching stupid people do and say stupid sh!t). I've replaced nearly all the bulbs in my house with CFLs, using the daylight/full spectrum/6500K ones that approximate the color of daylight coming in the windows. I think they make things look brighter than the 2800K ones that match tungsten-filament bulbs. My electric bill runs about $35/month for a 1,600 square foot house, less than half of what my brother pays on his somewhat smaller place. Probably my major use of electricity is my desktop computer with CRT monitor, although I leave it on standby when I'm not actively using it, and turn it off/unplug it during storm season. I've thought about renting out a spare room like I did in the 80s, but that didn't always work out well; some renters started out good, but fell behind on their rent and didn't catch up, ate my food, and brought home overnight "guests."

I love those photos. Some bring back memories. When I was a kid (1940s), my dad used to buy gas for his '41 Chevy at a sort of ramshackle general store in Wolf Lake, Indiana, where they sold groceries, hardware, and even ice cut from the lake in winter and stored in a sawdust-lined pit. The pump was similar to this one on display at Moser Ford, billed as Indiana's oldest Ford dealer, in Berne, Indiana: The glass tank at the top had a measuring stick inside, calibrated in gallons, not dollars. You used the lever on the side of the pump to pump up the number of gallons you wanted, and then used the hose to run it into your tank by gravity. Here's a photo of a gas station just north of the Wabash River bridge in Bluffton, Indiana, that I took late on a drizzly-foggy night just before Christmas, 1962. It's still there, although no longer a Phillips 66, and it's still known locally as the Airplane Station for the 1930s structure that stood there into the fifties, shaped like single-engine airplane with the wings extending out to form canopies over the gas pumps. I regret now that I never took a photo of that.

Or the South Side - As good as it looks: Or how about Wiener World? It must be good:

Giving up bathing will let me turn off my water heater, saving on my gas bill and the expense of soap and laundering towels and washcloths. I'm thinking I can cut down further on laundering expense by only changing clothes every couple of weeks. If I sleep in my clothes, it saves time getting dressed and undressed, and I can set my thermostat lower. Another plus, people will avoid me and I won't be annoyed as much and can drink less. :| Edit: I probably should have added this: :wink: And yeah, the Febreeze is a good suggestion. :-D

These are excellent photos. Painting with light reveals a lot more detail and distance than a flash, and presents the area more realistically. I'm glad you were able to do this. I've heard previous reports that they didn't allow photography on the tours.

I added a wink smiley to my canal comment. That's the way it was intended. :-)

Toledo was doomed from the moment it lost its canal connection with Fort Wayne. :wink:

I've done it. The spirit of the gift is more important than the cost. Besides, my friends know how I value and hoard books and what a significant occasion it is when I give one away.

The clearance looks close. If you had walked across and met a train, I think you would have ended up on the outside of the railing hanging on, and taking a photo might have been the farthest thing from your mind. Chances are the engineer would have gotten on the radio, and by the time the train passed you would have seen a cop waiting with a trespassing citation. The railroads have been testy about bridge trespassing since long before 9/11; I came close to getting arrested in Memphis in 1963 for walking out about fifty feet onto the Harahan Bridge. Old-school railroad bulls were big and scary.

Looks really pleasant; beautiful homes with deep setbacks and good trees. It has a well-established look.

Beautiful photos. Seeing Europe gives one a new perspective on American "history." America hasn't been around long enough to have much history in that context.

Gorgeous old city, and your photos show the streets packed with happy people. I love it.

Beautiful photo and powerful symbolism. It gave me a shiver.