As you’re probably aware, black Americans are arrested for marijuana possession far more frequently than whites. You may also know that there’s not much evidence that black people consume marijuana with greater regularity than whites do.

But the extent of the disparity between the rate of arrest and the rate of use for white and black Americans may surprise you. The ACLU has an absurdly comprehensive new report tracking marijuana possession arrests for blacks and whites at the national, state and county level. Sure enough, they find that black and white people use marijuana at roughly the same rates:

In at least one year, the white usage rate was higher. The others, the black usage rate was higher, but in no year were results for the two races that different. For young people ages 18-25, the rates of use are higher for whites:

And more blacks say they’ve never used marijuana:

Of course, this doesn’t translate to roughly equal arrest rates. Not even close:

And this is a uniform phenomenon. It’s not that some states treat the races equally and others treat them really unequally. Only in Hawaii are the rates even close to equal, and that’s biased by the fact that blacks make up only 1.6 percent of the population. In the state with the second-lowest disparity, Alaska, blacks are 1.6 times more likely to be arrested. In the state with the biggest, Iowa, blacks are 8.34 times more likely to be arrested. D.C. has the second biggest; in the District, blacks are 8.05 times more likely to be arrested.

Similarly, the vast majority of counties arrest blacks at a higher rate than whites, with some having a disparity of greater than 10 to 1:

And this includes a lot of urban areas that are highly populated and liberal-leaning. Cook County, Illinois, which includes Chicago, has one of the largest disparities of any county. So does New York County (Manhattan) and Kings County, N.Y. (Brooklyn):

How important is this? Well, while making up a quite small share of our prison population, marijuana possession charges make up nearly half of total drug arrests:

Obviously, being arrested without going to jail is a lot better than getting arrested and going to jail. But it’s still a major nuisance, leading to fines, long hours of community service and thousands of dollars in legal fees.

The report does suggest that legal reforms, in particular decriminalization, is effective at reducing overall arrest rates. Massachusetts decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana in 2009, and arrests dropped an enormous amount:

But interestingly, the racial disparity in arrests did not fall at all:

In 2008, the black arrest rate in Massachusetts was 3.41 times the white arrest rate. In 2009, it was 5.4 times the white arrest rate. Now, the importance of the disparity diminishes when overall arrests are falling that dramatically, and there’s no reason to think that decriminalization caused the disparity to increase; in 2010, it fell back down to 3.81.

But it’s hard to make the case that decriminalization made enforcement more equitable. Indeed, as Stanford med school Professor Keith Humphreys notes, the states that have legalized or decriminalized marijuana to date all have smaller-than-average black populations. That suggests that whatever benefits casual marijuana users have received from those policies have mainly accrued to white smokers.

by Rick Paulas

If you’re a man driving alone on a certain stretch of Archer Avenue on Chicago’s South Side, you may see a teenage girl on the side of the road, thumb out, trying to hitch a ride. If you stop for her—which, being a concerned citizen, you’ll consider—you’ll notice her outfit’s a bit dated: a white formal dress and the kind of dancing shoes you might find in the back of your grandma’s closet. There’s something a little bit off about her, but you can’t quite place what it is.

She’ll say her name is Mary and she’ll ask for a ride home, just up the road. When you approach the corner of Archer and Roberts Road, she’ll scream “Here! Here!” You’ll scan the other side of the street, looking for somewhere to drop her, but when your eyes return to the passenger seat it’ll be empty. Instead, you’ll get a clear view of the front gates of old Resurrection Cemetery. You might notice, if you’re not yet scared out of your wits by then, that two of the gate’s vertical irons are different from the rest, bending out like parentheses. If you’re brave enough to get out and look more closely, you’ll see a number of burn marks on the two bars, a constellation forming the shape of a pair of hands, roughly the size of a teenage girl’s. As you take off, you’ll notice that the curved bars look almost as if someone had tried to pry open the cemetery’s gates.

If you grew up on the South Side of Chicago, as I did, you know the story of Resurrection Mary by heart. This is one that gets passed down through generations at the bedtime story hour, then in the backs of school buses lumbering along Archer Avenue, then to younger cousins to keep them up at night. But the tale also gets spread in a not-so-organic fashion: It’s also a constant in every one of the city’s many ghost tours.

A decent ghost tour will also take you to other supposedly haunted Windy City locales, among them the long-abandoned Bachelor’s Grove cemetery, the site of H.H. Holmes’s “Murder Castle,” and the garage where seven mobsters were gunned down on St. Valentine’s Day, 1929. Whether you’re a believer or not—I, personally, am with Fox Mulder on this one: I want to believe, but would like some proof first—ghost tours are a way to see a city’s darker side. Local chambers of commerce tend to focus on the positive, so we need ghost tours to point out things like the former locations of makeshift Civil War hospitals; specifically, where the sawbones stored their collection of amputated legs.

But the landscape of the ghost tour business is not level across the country. In Los Angeles, where I live, there’s really only one ghost tour in town, and it’s more in the realm of celebrity-murders-and-ghastly-homicides than actual spectral phenomenon. According to Yelp, New York City has only two companies in the full-time ghost tour field. In Las Vegas, where 46 percent of employed residents work in tourism, only one tour haunts The Strip.

But in less populous cities like New Orleans, St. Augustine, Florida, Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, you can’t pass a hotel’s brochure rack without coming across dozens of ghost tour listings.

Setting aside the question of whether or not ghosts exist (because, c’mon), what makes one city “more haunted” than another? Why do ghost tours infest some, but remain an untapped industry in others?

A long history of tragedy certainly helps. New Orleans is considered one of America’s most haunted cities—the most haunted, if you ask the city’s tour owners—because they’ve had a high concentration of ghastly deaths throughout their history. “We’ve had to deal with everything from cannibals to quicksand,” said Sidney Smith, owner of New Orleans’s Haunted History Tours, “to alligators, snakes, a high murder rate, two major catastrophic fires in the late 1700s that destroyed the entire city, and over 27 yellow fever epidemics.” (Not to mention Katrina, although the recent nature of that disaster means only a small percentage of tours feel it’s fair game to talk about yet.) A surfeit of disaster leads to a dark and crowded tableau of stories.

A morbid past isn’t the only prerequisite for success in the ghost business. No city has a monopoly on death. Every house, apartment, school, bowling alley and movie theater, if you look in the right archive or know how to lubricate the proper town gossip, has a tale of someone dying far too young or by horrific means. “Look far back enough,” said Mickey Bradley, author of Haunted Baseball, a collection of ghostly occurrences associated with America’s pastime, “and everything is built on ancient Indian burial ground.” But why do some stories, like Resurrection Mary, have a long afterlife while others just disappear?

“The story itself has to be structured well,” said Margee Kerr, doctor of sociology and Scare Specialist for the web series “Scare U” (yes, really). “The retelling has to follow that traditional pattern—introduction with rising tension and some sort of resolution—so people can easily tell it over and over again.” It tracks: Mary hitching a ride, Mary disappearing from the car, Mary heading back to her final resting place. The simplicity of plot makes it easy to tell around campfires, bridge clubs, smoking parlors or, now, blogs. “In Pittsburgh,” where Kerr is from, “you had different groups coming from all over the world during industrialization. And whenever you have different cultures together, you get storytelling.” Vegas, on the other hand, is no one’s idea of a cultural stew. And while Los Angeles is a city of transients, few stick around long enough—or mix enough?—to be part of the inter-generational game of Ouija.

Perhaps more importantly, neither Vegas or Los Angeles look scary. The aesthetics of a city figures largely when it comes to starting a ghost tour. Walking through the French Quarter evokes more feelings of dread than strolling under the glittering lights of the Vegas Strip. (At least, it evokes a “more classic” sense of dread.) “If you’re looking at a gothic rather than a Frank Gehry building,” Bradley said, “it’s going to give you a different feel.” The topography needs to be considered, too. “We’re a flat city,” said New Orleans’ Smith, “so when somebody asks how much walking is on the tour, I assure them it’s a very leisurely stroll.” It’s why someplace like San Francisco, despite a history of hardships, a rich storytelling tradition, and plenty of Victorian buildings, only has a handful of ghost tours roaming its hills. Few want to pay to go on a strenuous hike.

A city’s historic core also needs to be active and vibrant—or at least intact. San Diego’s Old Town has a lively bar scene, Savannah closes early but has a walking population throughout the night, and New Orleans is, well, New Orleans. “It has to be in an area where it’s not too quiet, so people feel safe,” said Phil Schoenberg, of Ghosts of New York. “Our tour in New Haven is at 7 and 8 o’clock, because people don’t feel safe at 9 o’clock. There’s not a lot going on, a lot of homeless people.” Being in an active neighborhood, of course, leads to the most important reason that ghost tours are around: Tourists.

“There has to be incoming money,” said Tobias McGriff of Savannah’s Blue Orb Tours. “No matter how good your model is, if you don’t have the numbers to draw from, it’s a moot point.”

Getting the word out to those tourists that you exist sometimes means going through traditional means like buying ads in the local paper. But there are other techniques available as well. “The dirty secret of ghost tours, what a lot of people don’t understand,” McGriff said, “is if they’re staying at a hotel and talking to a concierge, and that person’s wearing a concierge uniform and has a name-tag from the hotel… they really work for a tour company.” Seemingly off-the-cuff advice about what tours to take are often just sponsored suggestions by the companies themselves.

Those concierges would have nothing spooky to suggest unless the city itself gives the go-ahead for the unsanitized version of its history to be acknowledged. They’re the ones handing out the tour licenses, after all. In Savannah, while the city caps the number of guests per tour at 30, there’s no start or end time to abide by. Becoming a licensed tour guide is also easy there. “You quite literally have people pay 200 dollars, get a license, take the tour guide’s test,” said McGriff, “and you can do it just during October because you can make so much money.” This lack of ghost tour regulations, like any business, can lead to some intense moments.

“Savannah has 47 ghost tours,” McGriff said. “That’s 47 operations in a city of 132,000 people. We get 12 million tourists, so we’re all trying to compete for the same $2 billion dollars in yearly revenue. People do crazy things to get that kind of money.” McGriff has sent three cease-and-desist notices and also filed a lawsuit against a rival. One time a car pulled in front of him while he was crossing the street. The passenger rolled down the window, yelled the name of another tour company, and threw something at his chest. “I looked down and it was six rubber bullets,” he said. This is what happens when you have so many people jockeying over a 2.2-square mile piece of territory. “You have companies who enter a square at the same time, and there’s yelling, screaming, and near fist-fights,” he said.

It makes sense why there’s so much animosity for the prized access to “haunted” locations: They are necessary for the story. “You need great locations,” said Rob Wlodarski who, along with his wife Anne, has written 24 books on various haunted locations across the country. Getting access is key. (This also inadvertently explains why so many bars are “haunted”: by allowing the tours access, the bar gets a guaranteed number of visitors, a percentage of which are surely going to inquire about spirits of another sort.) If an owner no longer believes free exposure is worth dozens of tourists flashing their camera bulbs, they simply cut off access. “When they don’t want to be associated with it anymore,” Wlodarski said, “they’ll just say, ‘Oh, we’re no longer haunted.’”

Tours are then left with two options: To tell the stories from across the street and hope the façade is interesting enough to assist the tale, or to just cut the story entirely, hit the research books, and find another one. (A third option of course, one which no tour will admit to, is simply making up a new story. “You can expose people for making up stories,” Wlodarski said, “but by that time they’ve already made their money.”)

Cutting those stories is ultimately how you kill a ghost. A story becomes a legend and then becomes forgotten.

“If you don’t tell the stories,” said New York’s Schoenberg, “you don’t keep the ghosts alive.”

That’s why Joel Chirhart, owner of Colorado Haunted History, is in the business. Chirhart is a company-of-one that provides tours in the not-so-tourist-friendly arenas of Morrison and Golden, Colorado. A general interest in ghostly phenomenon led to giving tours of local haunts. While an operation like Ghosts of New York has more 8,000 customers a year, Chirhart’s tales are told to about 300 to 400 people, mostly locals. “For me, it’s a tool to explain the history of the town,” Chirhart said. “I’m telling them things they’ve never heard.”

While there are heart-warming tales of guides who could care less about operating costs and maximizing profit, who are essentially local archivists bringing history back to life, mostly the industry’s full of the bottom-liners. When I called Savannah’s Hearse Ghost Tours to ask for an explanation about why they started, a somewhat-grumpy voice harumphed, “because somebody came up with the idea of doing it in a hearse.” Sometimes, like Resurrection Mary herself, ghost tours are around just to take you for a ride.

Ghost tours, on the whole, are among the worst forms of tourist trappery around. At their best, they’re willfully allowing a part-time actor dressed in a cheap period costume to lead you through city streets, past people who are, you know, actually having fun. At their worst, you’re paying to get pelted by fake spiders while listening to jokes told in fake accents (be it mobster or vaguely-European vampire) that were stale the first 1,000 times you heard them. And then hearing “Monster Mash” a few dozen times while looking at places where photos of dust were taken.

But still people pay, and happily so. Because while a ghost tour’s dose of spot-the-old-architecture and learning what was here before the Walmarts and the Hooters is great and all, that’s not worth $30 a pop. The reason we still take them, what makes us knowingly risk a boring and terrible night out in a town in which we have a limited amount of time, is gambling for some of the simplest things of all: A chance to get scared witless, and a tale to retell our friends and scare the wits out of them.

Rick Paulas has spent more money on ghost tours than he’d care to think about. Austin ghost tour photo by Adrienne Annas; Kingston ghost tour photo by Bert Knottenbeld; New Orleans ghost tour guide photo by “Space Pirate Queen”; spooky Savannah photo by Eric Fleming.

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The Fellowship of the Colors

via Kurt White

Since I write about muni issues every day, I couldn’t find where Meredith Whitney had covered much new ground in her book, Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity, which is released June 4. It felt like the book had been written over a year ago and was not in tune with current fiscal realities. For example, on page 117 Whitney says, “We have reached a breaking point for some states. There is no more money.” The only state that I know where that might apply is Puerto Rico. In fact, numerous states are seeing modest surpluses this year and some are rebuilding rainy day funds.

Bloomberg’s municipal columnist Joe Mysak drove straight to the heart of Whitney’s thesis:

We’re all moving to North Dakota.

Or South Dakota. Or somewhere out there in the middle of the country.

This is the thesis of Meredith Whitney’s “Fate of the States: The New Geography of American Prosperity.” The country’s “central corridor,” largely untouched by the housing bust, is going to drive the economy for decades to come.

The “smart money,” she writes, “is flocking to states with lower tax burdens and less strained budgets.”

Whitney’s contention that the population is moving to the central corridor of the U.S. is not supported by any data she can point to. Forbes wrote:

In fact, most of the top-10 states people are leaving are located in the Northeast and Great Lakes regions, including Illinois (60 percent), New York (58 percent), Michigan (58 percent), Maine (56 percent), Connecticut (56 percent) and Wisconsin (55 percent). According to Stoll, this reflects a consistent trend of migration from the Frost Belt to the Sun Belt states based on a combination of causes.

The data show that people are moving from the north to the south of the U.S. A county-by-county analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data performed by municipal data firm Lumesis is shown in the map below. Job growth over the past year is happening in numerous parts of the country. It’s distributed among low and high tax rate states. This undermines Whitney’s contention that new employment will be concentrated in low-tax areas  (California had strong job growth, though it is a high tax state).

Whitney’s book may be a useful intro for those who have not followed the fiscal struggles of state and local governments over the past five years. At 206 pages it’s a fast read. But I would encourage readers to view it as the opinion of one analyst who has often been wrong. In one memorable case, the Nevada State Treasurer Kate Marshall went after Whitney for her errors in calculating the liabilities of her state.

Muniland is a complex place with 50 micro economies, political practices and differences between state laws and constitutions. The best comment about Whitney’s book that I read was from fiscal analyst Kil Huh:

@RECusack @cate_long @JoeMysak You can get her book for $19 (just reduced). At least she’s not charging $50K this time for making stuff up.

— Kil Huh (@KilHuh) June 3, 2013

This map by General Electric shows, by relative size, the proportion of electrification among the United States:

Link -via TYWKIWDBI

Bust a move.

Congressman Steve Cohen's epic dance to his personal reelection rap song:

Source: youtube.com

Congressman John Lewis dancing Gangnam Style:

Source: youtube.com

Congressman Sean Duffy dancing on The Real World in the 1990s (caution, you can not unsee this):

Source: youtube.com

Congressman Trey Radel doing the Funky Chicken:

Source: s3-ec.buzzfed.com

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Pittsburgh Railways PCC No. 1635 on Smithfield St. bridge. 

If you lived on the east coast of the United States, instead of having an ocean, you’d have Africa.

Source: capitan-mas-ideas.blogspot.com

h/t io9.

Chemotherapy is never fun, but A.C.Camargo Cancer Center in São Paulo is trying to make it easier for children to accept the treatment. They're rebranding the treatment as "superformula" and using comics to help kids understand chemo.

Read more...

We're used to seeing modern landmarks in their completed glory, but we gain a new appreciation for those familiar monuments when we see them in progress, and remember all the labor that went into bringing them to life.

Read more...

In the alternate universe of Timothy Anderson's Star Wars pulp covers, Star Wars started its life as a series of novels, but ended up retitled with a set of salacious covers.

Read more...

   

Last night Ivy-Style.com was informed of strange similarities between “Richard,” the author of the WASP 101 blog (left) and Bryan R. Holloway (right), who is serving his fifth term as a Republican state representative of the 91st district in North Carolina.

Thirty-five-year-old Holloway is the son of a chicken farmer and teacher’s assistant and is a resident of King, North Carolina. He is a graduate of Appalachian State University, spent four years as a public school teacher and serves on education committees. He can be seen giving a speech in the clip below:

The similarities were discovered as a result of Google-enabled amateur sleuthing and a more-than-generous dash of Internet obsession.

Last night Ivy Style received an email from a source, who has requested anonymity, saying he had spent the past year trying to uncover the identity of the WASP 101 blogger. “I’ve been following every clue the weasel has posted for a year,” he wrote. “Sad? Yes. But what can I say, he bugs me.”

In an email exchange, he went on to explain:

Let me walk you through this obsession. I’m a traditional New Englander and stumbled upon his website after setting up a Google Reader account. At first I thought that Wasp 101 was satire — sadly it’s not. The more I read, the more I was convinced that I needed to take him down. So I began to read all of his past entries (no easy task) and kept a journal of all his outlandish claims.

More telling than the blog posts were the comments he posted defending himself to the anonymous trolls. The anonymous posters always managed to glean a kernel of truth out of Richard. For instance, he talks about visiting outlets in North Carolina (specifically Brooks Brothers). When pushed about his residence he claims that he lives within a few hours of the outlets. I drew a two-hour radius and worked out from the outlet location. I googled and contacted countless PR firms within the circle, but always a dead end. Those are but a few things I looked at.

The source continued:

His big mistake was [earlier this week] posting his retrospective timeline. An anonymous poster mentioned something about his wife’s breasts, and that led to a post about him attending a wedding for a client that is a state senator. We’ve all suspected that he was from North Carolina, so I looked at current members and, more importantly, their spouses’ Facebook pages.

That’s when I decided to look back at the last six years of state senators from North Carolina and see if any of them had been married in 2008. Politicos may set their accounts to private, but their spouses rarely do. State Senator Andrew Brock was there in 2008, and was married that year to Andrea. After scrolling through her friends I nearly fell out of my chair: the dog, that chin, that hairline, the wife — I knew them all so well.

“Richard” has posted many photos of his dog, which he has referred to by name as “Governor” in the comments section at WASP 101:

It appears to be the same breed of dog in this photo from Holloway’s Facebook page, which a friend in the comments section also refers to as “Governor:”

Below, the tan suit Holloway wears in the photo with Newt Gingrich is markedly similar to one “Richard” has blogged about:

    

One of WASP 101′s contributors, known as “Kipp,” also helped our source speculate that “Richard” resides in North Carolina:

… “Kipp” helped to confirm the North Carolina angle. In one of her posts around New Years’ she has a newspaper partially exposed on a table describing a fire. A simple Google search came up with a bar in Raleigh.

When pressed for a further explanation, the source explained:

Kipp left a corner of the paper’s masthead exposed. I googled NC newspapers and chose the one with similar masthead. Checked the headlines from the post time period and it matched.

This morning I telephoned Representative Holloway’s office and was informed by a female receptionist that he was in a meeting. I asked to leave a message, and halfway through spelling my last name, was interrupted with, “I know who you are.”

Update, 3:09 PM: The receptionist for Representative Holloway, according to her LinkedIn page, is Isabel Villa-Garcia, who bears a resemblance to the WASP 101 contributor “Kipp,” and which would explain why the young female receptionist of a North Carolina state representative would say “I know who you are” when telephoned by a New York-based menswear writer.

Below left is a picture of “Kipp” from WASP 101, while at right is Villa-Garcia from her LinkedIn page (more photos of “Kipp” are available through a Google Image search):

I then sent a follow-up email informing Representative Holloway that I was preparing a post for Ivy-Style.com that would examine similarities between himself and the author of WASP 101. The message was sent at 9:30 AM and Holloway was given a deadline of 2 PM to respond by telephone or email.

As of 2 PM Eastern Standard Time, Holloway had not responded to the telephone message or email.

A few minutes after the call to Holloway’s office, the WASP 101 website was taken down [Update: As of 2:25, the blog had been restored; as of 2:35 the site was again made invite only; 2:49 and site back up again; 2:56 down again; point made and no further updates needed.] Later the tumblr account called “The Preppy Halls Of WASP 101″ was also closed. Below is a screenshot of the tumblr page from earlier this morning:

The WASP 101 Facebook page is currently still up, however, as is a MySpace page. [Update: Within several minutes of this posting, the Facebook page no longer appeared to be operational.]

Update 5:07 PM: Apparently members of the North Carolina media are on this story, and Representative Holloway has denied operating the WASP 101 blog. Meanwhile the website, which previously had been taken down with a message saying it was invite only, now turns up the message “Blog has been removed.”

Update 7:44 PM: Villa-Garcia removes above photo from her LinkedIn page.

And while the WASP 101 blog is no longer accessible, the photos “Richard” uploaded to it can still be found through a Google Image search:

Politicians are always getting caught with their pants down. Bryan R. Holloway — if he is the author of WASP 101 — may be the first caught with simply his pants. — CHRISTIAN CHENSVOLD

The White House posted a photo:

President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama, along with daughters Malia and Sasha, listen as Eddie Floyd sings "Knock On Wood" during the “In Performance at the White House: Memphis Soul” concert in the East Room of the White House, April 9, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

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May 29th, 2013: Yesterday in the TOP SECRET ARCHIVE TEXT I wondered if our last panel could be translated into German. Turns out there are few (all-awesome) ways! Here's the last word, and YES I know some of them run right off the page, that is part of their joy: From Isabel: Anfängerkinderkramgleichsetzungsnationalsprachenbeschämungshauptwortverbindungsmangel (Beginner's-child's-stuff-equating-National-language-shaming-Noun-compound-Lack) From Johannes: Anfängerdummbabysprachanscheinssubstantivzusammensetzungslücke (Beginner-stupid-baby-language-genetive case of "appearance of the beforementioned"-noun-compound-gap) From Heather: Kompositarückständigkei die unsere Sprache wie eine Anfängersprache für Dummkinder aussehen lässt (compound-noun-gap-backstand (that stands towards the back, ie: is behind) that makes our language look like a beginner-language for stupid-children) From Christian: Unsere-sprache-wie-eine-anfängersprache-für-dumme-kleinkinder-aussehen-lassende zusammengesetzte-hauptwörter-lücke schlieszen From Patrick: NICHTKOMPOSITIONSLÜCKEDIEUNSERESPRACHEWIEEINEANFÄNGERSPRACHEFÜRDUMMEBABIESAUSSEHENLÄSST ÜBERWINDEN From Douglas: ZUSAMMENGESETZTESSUBSTANTIVKLUFTDASSUNSERESPRACHEWIEEINANFÄNGERSPRACHEFÜRDUMMBABYÄHNELNMACHEN And bonus points for a Finnish translation from Atte: aloittelijatyperysvauvojenkieleltänäyttäväksitekijäyhdyssanapuute OF COURSE I have the best readers and OF COURSE a bunch of them are generous polyglots. And a few people let me know about "English disease", a pejorative name for "whitespace in compound words", which is what happens when speakers of big-word languages (like German and Dutch!) learn English and then start adding spaces in their words, sometimes changing the meaning of the words. People take it very seriously when these mistakes happen! (Thanks Max for those links!) One year ago today: "Three Of A Kind": A Full House spinoff where three of the main characters from that show live together in a somewhat less-full house – Ryan

This new series of Gillette ads feature nerdy experts theorizing how the Man of Steel keeps his clean-cut looks.

Bill Nye

Source: youtube.com

Kevin Smith

Source: youtube.com

Mayim Bialik, TV's Blossom

Source: youtube.com

And of course, the Mythbusters dudes

Source: youtube.com

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The Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission photo shows the 1627-foot-long Clarks Summit Bridge at Scranton Interchange (1957)


No place to speed is this section of the Pennsylvania Turnpike. It's almost an S-curve (Oct. 1955).

"The Pennsylvania Turnpike"

It starred in films and singers mentioned it in songs. The Pennsylvania Turnpike is the grandfather of the American Interstate Highway System. Film crews came from all over the world and captured different stretches of one of the oldest American highways. It appears in a famous Russian film “Brat 2." In the middle of the film, a sign “Pennsylvania Welcomes You," signed “Tom Ridge, Governor" would have been familiar to those who traveled along the turnpike in 1998. In 2009, the producers of Cormack McCarthy’s “The Road" also used the Pennsylvania Turnpike as a backdrop for the film.

Billy Joel, in a love song speculated, "Home could be the Pennsylvania Turnpike." Country music composer and singer George Vaughn Horton dedicated his entire song to it. The song went like this:

"Pennsylvania Turnpike, I love you so,

All the way from Jersey, to Oh-Hi-Oh.

Oh how I go for the beautiful mountains, and the fields of grass,

And the friendly road staff, where we even can get gas.

Pennsylvania Turnpike, how I love you,

And when I pay my toll fare, don’t yer love me too.

Now I’m up in Somerset, and snow plowing ain’t come yet,

Pennsylvania Turnpike,  I’m stuck on you."

The vacation season is upon us and as much as no one would want you to get stuck on the turnpike, we know for sure that Pennsylvania drivers will drive along that venerable highway during their long-distance road adventures. They might even sing along, “Pennsylvania Turnpike, I love you so…" Or maybe not.  

In any case, with a song or not, the Pennsylvania Turnpike was the first roadway in the United States, and the second in the world, after German Autobahn, that had no cross streets, no railroad crossings and no traffic lights over its entire length. It was completed in 1940 and established a milestone and high standard for automobile travel in the United States.

The Pennsylvania Turnpike originally was conceived as a railroad project in the 1880s. William Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie, who at the time were building a railroad from Harrisburg west to Pittsburgh, saw the Allegheny Mountains as a barrier for trade. So building a railroad, from an economic standpoint, seemed like a good idea. The railroad had seven tunnels, which at the time was quite special. Yet, the work on the railroad stopped in 1885 because Vanderbilt went bankrupt. Only 50 years later, the work resumed with a shifted focus and mission.

In 1910, with growth of the American auto industry and a growing clout of the automobile lobby, a decision was made to convert the abandoned railroad into a motorway. The implementation of the plan took some time, though. In 1937, the governor of Pennsylvania created the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission. President Franklin Roosevelt fully supported the initiative; he saw the opportunity to use the turnpike project to lower unemployment  through the Works Project  Administration, one of the most important agencies established as part of The New Deal. 

When the construction plan was completed in 1938, 155 construction companies and 15,000 workers from 18 states were employed by the Turnpike Commission.

Today, in its sixth decade of operation the Pennsylvania Turnpike is one of the safest highways in the U.S. Also, it has changed significantly from what it was in 1940. The original 160-mile route has been expanded to 514 miles and is carrying 156.2 million vehicles per year at a toll of 10.6 cents per mile. Get your E-ZPasses ready.

"Oh, Pennsylvania Turnpike, how I love you,

And when I pay my toll fare, don’t yer love me too…"

Safe travels this summer, folks! Enjoy the ride!

— Mila Sanina

The Merciful Cousins is an order of cavaliers for the Pathfinder role-playing game that functions as a sort of D&D Red Cross. Now, if you buy the PDF that details how to use them in your D&D campaign, you can help the actual Red Cross bring aid to Oklahoma tornado victims.

Read more...

On the anc-6a listserv there is a response to neighborhood complaints about opening up "more bars" and why aren't retail shops opening?

Below is an older post from 2007 that explains why. But as I said in response to the email:

• The rise of e-commerce takes away 10-15% of business for bricks and mortar stores. Restaurants and bars can't be displaced by online commerce. That's why commercial districts are shifting to a greater mix of food and drink.

• Other trends affect the "delivery" of retail at the level of the neighborhood commercial district. Mostly, you will have convenience retail (supermarket, hardware, pharmacy--and in DC, pharmacies function like health and beauty convenience stores with food) at the neighborhood level and a broader array of retail at regional shopping districts. In the context of the city, a "regional" city shopping district like Columbia Heights, Rhode Island Place, or Silver Spring (which serves Upper NW neighborhoods) serves multiple neighborhoods.

• Last week, I wrote a long blog entry about how CM Wells' testimony to the tax revision commission about tax discounts for "long time independent retailers" was very well intended but missed the main point somewhat, because the real issue is that neighborhood commercial district retail properties tend to be overvalued tax wise compared to what they generate in revenue. This is an issue for new businesses, not just old businesses.

Tax overvaluation of small properties suitable for retail leads to higher rents and is another reason that retail concepts have a difficult time succeeding in neighborhood commercial districts.

• But despite people's claims they want to shop local, mostly they don't in many categories because of price points, selection, opportunity, etc. The Reilly Law of Retail Gravitation is relevant--I summarize it pretty simply as:

with transportation costs being relatively equal, people choose to shop in the retail district with the  greatest variety of stores and the most appealing choices.

Retail shopping districts that are successful have many stores in the categories they specialize in, not just one store.

• Another issue concerns the size of spaces available for retail concepts.  In DC, most neighborhood commercial districts don't have very large spaces available either, which hinders the creation of interesting stores.

But here is the old entry:

1. People don't buy all that they consume solely within their neighborhoods.*

* This is why market studies showing the household-by-household consumer expenditures within a neighborhood don't fully matter, because you need a certain level of store availability (cluster, agglomeration) to attract spending in a particular retail category. And stores need a basic level of customers and transactions to be able to thrive, without losing business each time a new store (or restaurant) opens in the commercial district.

2. For most goods, shoppers want to compare types of goods, prices, and options, before buying, so you need more than a single store--in a particular retail category--as an option.

3. Most neighborhoods (even in New York City), don't have enough population to support a complete array of stores representing all retail categories. (For example, in Lower Manhattan, the Union Square area is the "regional destination" serving many neighborhoods with offerings such as furniture and books, while most of the neighborhoods have grocery and related, restaurants and diners, and services.)

4. Most neighborhoods don't have enough population to support the amount of retail space that is extant. For example, to support about 50,000 square feet of retail space, you need 30,000 regular customers.
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This was written in 2007 and based on work from the 1990s.  Now, with the rise of e-commerce, and the loss of 10-15% of store-based sales, that number rises, probably to 40,000.
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5. If you want "higher quality" retail offerings, you need higher household income levels, and regular purchasing behavior in that category. (I can't tell you how many times people have said X or Y neighborhood could support a fine dining restaurant--say like Kinkeads--in their neighborhood.)

So, to repopulate the retail space available in a typical neighborhood-based commercial district you need to have destination businesses (and attractions) that appeal to and attract customers from outside of the immediate neighborhood. Together, non-neighborhood market segments and within-neighborhood segments may be able to provide the consumer demand necessary to support the retail mix that people say that they want.

But this creates tensions because too often, the retail that is offered, especially at early stages in the process of revitalization, is accused of not targeting the residents of the immediate neighborhood.

That's true. Otherwise, how do you support revitalization when there isn't enough market demand within a neighborhood?

Follow these dos and don’ts the next time you’re crafting up a press release and you’ll be on your way to press stardom:

If the Penguins go to the Stanley Cup Finals, I'm curious whether that $400,000 per game increase in economic impact estimated by VisitPittsburgh so far in the playoffs bumps up. I checked the Business Times archives and in 2009, when the Pens won the Stanley Cup, VisitPittsburgh’s estimate for the finals was $4.9 million per game. The projection for the Eastern Conference Finals is $4 million per game. In the meantime, bring on the Bruins!

The Koppers Building, an Andrew Mellon-commissioned Art Deco office tower dating to the 1920s that’s still home to its namesake, is being marketed for sale. A few weeks ago, Gerry Dudley and Ryan Sciullo of the Pittsburgh office of CBRE sent an email blast announcing they were representing the building for sale. A 34-story skyscraper completed in 1929, the Koppers Building totals 356,439 square feet in size and is 69.4 percent occupied, according to CBRE, with publicly traded construction materials…

To make up for the poorly received white dinner jacket, here’s a classic navy blazer that Pierce Brosnan wears in the first season of Remington Steele. It’s still not a perfect outfit, but Brosnan wears this staple very well. It’s a button two jacket with narrow pagoda shoulders, a clean chest and a close fit through the body. The chest fits a little too tight, since it bows open easily. It has swelled edges, flapped pockets with a ticket pocket, four-button cuffs and deep double vents. The buttons are shinier and less yellow than the typical brass, so they are likely gold-plated. Here we will look at two of the six episodes in the first season that feature this blazer: “Steele Belted” and “Etched in Steele.”

In “Steele Belted” the trousers are light grey wool with a flat front, and the shirt is sky blue with yellow and dark stripes. In “Etched in Steele” the trousers are dark grey with double reverse pleats, and the shirt is pale blue. Both shirts are the same style. They have a short point collar worn with a collar bar, and rounded double cuffs worn unfolded with the cufflinks only in outer holes. This would signify that his shirts were bought ready to wear and they could not obtain shirts with a long enough sleeve for his collar size. Later in the first season Brosnan starts wearing different shirts where he could wear the double cuff properly.

In “Steele Belted” Brosnan wears a solid burgundy repp tie and a burgundy satin silk pocket square. The square is not exactly the same as the tie, but it’s a bit too close. However, it’s not an offensive combination either. In “Etched in Steele” the tie is a red repp tie with thin yellow and blue stripes, and the pocket square is solid red. Brosnan knots his ties in a Windsor knot. The ties are narrow enough and light enough that a Windsor knot doesn’t overwhelm the small collar. Pierce Brosnan is almost never seen without a pocket square in Remington Steele, and it’s something he carried over to GoldenEye. But in Remington Steele he often—but not always—plays it too safe by matching the pocket square to the base colour of his tie. Finishing the outfits are black shoes and a black belt.

For all in tents and porpoises.

Source: youtube.com  /  via: mentalfloss.com

I spotted the ghost sign for Mueller Marble Works on Mehring Way at Gas Alley, on the Southwestern edge of downtown Cincinnati. The plaque on the left reads The Standard Marble Works Co. [is that the business currently in this building?].

[ By Delana in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

There are countless maps and other direction-finding methods for your smartphone that can help you get to where you want to go – but once you get there, you still have to worry about parking. This, of course, is one of the most frustrating aspects of going anywhere in a mid-to-large-size city. In fact, some 30 to 50 percent of urban congestion is caused just by people driving around looking for parking spots. But never fear – an app called ParkMe is here to provide real-time parking availability information in cities and countries all around the world.

The smartphone app works by utilizing data from a number of sources. Parking facility operators can update the app with their capacity and availability. Businesses can use a widget to provide real-time availability near their establishments, which is a win-win for them and their customers. Payment options are listed so you’ll know ahead of time if you need to have cash available.

Not all of the 1800 cities featured on ParkMe have real-time data available; only a handful of cities in the US offer that level of seamless parking integration. But the app does tell you where you’re most likely to find parking near your destination and how much you’ll have to pay for the privilege of leaving your car there. If you enter the amount of time you’ll need to park, the app will even tell you what your total cost will be.

Overall, the app will reduce traffic congestion in cities by helping people find a place to park in advance. If  you could figure out your exact route, down to the entrance to the lot you’ll leave your car in, before you even leave your house – imagine how much easier it would be to get to your destination and get your fun outing started.

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[ By Delana in Conceptual & Futuristic & Technology. ]

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By Rodolfo Reyes

To celebrate the release of Star Trek Into Darkness, the art blog Blurppy invited fans to create their own movie posters. You can see the rest of the collection at the link.

Link -via Geek Art

By Matt Needle

By Adam Rabalais

By Erin Gallagher

You know what’s compelling about creationists? They are awfully good at making incredulity seem like science: “Evolution is like believing that a tornado in a junkyard could build a 747″ and so on. Which means that we’re in for one last look at our tenth-grade science textbook, Biology for Christian Schools, by William S. “Stop Calling Me Pinkie Pie” Pinkston. Last time, we looked at the totally convincing scientific evidence for Noah’s Flood (review: God said it did), so now, let’s take a brief look at why most biologists are lying (it is because they hate God).

To start with, let’s just reject the notion of common origins, because all life was created by God, after all:

there is no history of evolution recorded either by man or by fossils. This lack of evolutionary records does not disturb most evolutionists because they believe they have a model of how evolution took place. This model is often illustrated by a phylogenetic tree — a line-up of organisms based on how they are supposedly related in an attempt to show the path that evolution has taken.

It is quite natural to notice similar facial features in different members of one family. But people who look very much alike may be entirely unrelated. One organism may have characteristics similar to another organism’s but not be related to it at all.

Haha, why would anyone think that people from different families are all related, unless they read the part of Biology For Christian Schools that says “The eight people on the ark are the ancestors of all people alive today”?

The sheer absurdity of evolutionists’ dumb guesswork is illustrated by this hilarious cartoon:

Silly evolutionists, whales cannot sit in trees! Pinkston then explains that all of evolutionary theory is based on wild speculation:

Evolutionists claim that organisms which are alike in some ways must have had a common ancestor. When a limb of a phylogenetic tree branches, a common ancestor is implied. A phylogenetic tree that contains many organisms and is relatively detailed usually has the known organisms (those alive today and those extinct organisms that left fossils) on the ends of the branches. The common ancestors at the forks of the branches are usually guesses. Many phylogenetic trees, for example, assume/that the birds and the mammals both came from a common reptilelike ancestor. In one line of development, the scales became feathers and the animals became birds. The mammal-bird ancestor may be imaginatively drawn and described, but examples of this common ancestor do not exist among animals alive today or in the fossil record.

Those wacky evolutionists! They use illustrations to lie! And even with their crazy speculation, Pinkston says, “there is little agreement among evolutionists about which organisms are the ancestors.” The thing is just a silly matching game, because for some strange reason, there are a lot of similar features among species, but they are also very different from each other, because God made them that way:

Although putting pictures in sequence is easy, when considering the thousands of characteristics of different organisms, it is not always easy to create a logical sequence for them. What characteristic should be used to arrange the organisms? The use of eye development will give one phylogenetic tree, and the use of leg form or another characteristic will give a different phylogenetic tree.

The really excellent news, however, is that good Christian boys and girls do not have to worry about such folderol:

Creationists have no difficulty with similarities and differences between organisms. God designed each organism for a particular purpose. If four long legs are the right design for movement in one animal, it is likely that four long legs will be the best design for a similar movement in a similar animal. Similarities and differences come from God’s design, not from a common ancestor.

On the other hand, instead of using real science, which starts with the plain truth of the Bible and then finds evidence in nature to support it (and ignores anything inconvenient), evolutionists have been forced to make up all sorts of outlandish just-so stories, without even accounting for miraculous intervention by God:

Using the fossil record and phylogenetic trees has not given adequate support to evolutionary beliefs. Evolutionists have thus resorted to trying to figure out how it could have happened, rather than showing how it did happen. This tactic takes evolution out of the realm of science and puts it into the realm of guesswork.

One of our favorite parts of this section is a text box on the evolution of horses. (It doesn’t use the illustration at the top of today’s blog, but it might as well). Pinkston states that the supposed evolutionary history of the horse is just evolutionists making unsupportable guesses, and that the fossil record really illustrates “some of the problems involved in lining up animals for a phylogenetic tree” (click illustration to embiggen):

The Eohippus was an organism about the size of a terrier dog, with four toes on each front foot and
three toes on each hind foot. Other extinct animals have been lined up with progressively larger bodies and with foot structures more like that of the horse to form an evolutionary “path.”

The evolution seems plausible until one realizes that much of the progression is art work, and much information has been omitted. The fossils of these organisms are not found in sequence in the fossil record. In fact, the fossil record gives evidence that these organisms were alive at the same time. Having the horse and the Eohippus alive together at an early date defeats the evolutionary purpose of the Eohippus, though, so that evidence has been ignored.

Wow, pretty compelling! Except for the teensy detail that, sorry, Eohippus and Equus didn’t live at the same time, although that discredited assertion has been around since the 1930s. And then, with a collection of evolutionary steps between Eohippus and Equus sitting right at the top of the page, the text pretty much holds out for Zeno’s paradox:

The supposed evolution of the horse is like a series of piers with the connecting bridges missing. In other words, this line—up of organisms, as with all such line-ups, is without in-between organisms, the missing links (common ancestors). According to evolutionary theory, these missing organisms must have existed. Research in the fossil record has not revealed any of the missing links in horse evolution. Nor does the fossil record show a clear progression between any two different kinds of organisms.

Of course, any time a new transitional fossil is found, our creationist says that there is no evidence of a transitional form between that fossil and the species it bridged. Fortunately, Christians are not burdened by any curiosity about the similarities between various fossil horses, because evolution is a fairy tale:

A creationist looking at the fossils of the Eohippus or the Mesohippus or any others in an evolutionary line-up simply observes that they are interesting animals that must have become extinct during the Flood or shortly thereafter.

Meh, bunch of dead animals. They mean nothing other than that God was finished with them, and with that, we are finished with this textbook. There’s a lot of other idiocy in Biology For Christian Schools — for instance, the mathematical improbability of getting a dictionary by just throwing millions of letters into a pile, or why scientists are increasingly rejecting the fuzzy idea of classifying life into “species” and adopting the much more useful Biblical term “kinds” (because that way, Noah’s ark is less obviously absurd) — but frankly, we’ve had about enough of this book, and since it merely repeats creationist nonsense you can find all over the intertubeses, we are going to move on to something different.

What do you think, should we look next at an American History book? We have Bob Jones University Press’s high school text, or an 8th-grade text from the always-nutty A Beka house…or for that matter, we could tackle both at the same time, for hot compare-and-contrast action. Or would you prefer that we delve into BJU Press’s 12th-grade American Government text, which promises some novel thoughts about the Constitution? Discuss amongst yourselves, and don’t worry, regardless of what we hit first, we’ll eventually cover the whole awful mess.

[Illustration: "Natural History Tour" by "Moderately Deviant"]

Remember, Pacific Northwest Wonkers, Yr Doktor Zoom will be attending the reader-organized Seattle Drinky Thing on June 1; details at this here linky. Door prizes will include copies of at least one or two of these god-awful awful-God textbooks!