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So our endless winter has decided to dump more than a foot of snow on the area. By midweek, temperatures will rise and there will be widespread flooding. I'm surprised that the cities haven't thought of an enterprise that involves vacuuming up the snow off the streets and shipping it (melted) by rail to Los Angeles. They can have it...
So I'm sitting here holed up in my Ohio home, in the middle of a deep Arctic freeze, reviewing the bills for heat and electricity, and commencing my annual ponderance on whether or not I really want to stay in Ohio where winter seems to drag on for half the year.
Like many people, I telecommute for a living. So... theoretically, I can live wherever I want to, right?
My thoughts shift to the time when I took a road trip to the Deep South and observed a pattern: the casualties of Strip Mall America. What had once been the bustling centers of thriving small towns had been sadly abandoned in favor of the strip malls on the new state highway several miles away. Town after town of great old brick buildings -- all that space going to waste now, either vacant or warehousing trinkets and antiques or something equally non-vital. I figured the rent must be really cheap there.
The drawback, of course, would be a lack of community of like-minded people. ...Unless a bunch of like-minded people all had similar ideas and decided to collectively invest in these communities all at once.
Urban renewal (and New Urbanism) has been an ongoing trend in many American cities in the Arctic tund North. I've seen grimy older neighborhoods spiffed up and turned into trendy, thriving communities thanks to the collective efforts of people with the vision to turn things around for the better.
If telecommuting has made it possible to live wherever you want to, why not start a telecommuting revolution by reclaiming these small Southern towns? With the skyrocketing cost of natural gas heating, it might just be a sensible thing to consider.
New section here. I'll be adding many more as I find them.
The good ideas:
An Old High School Is Recycled Into Apartment Housing
How To Brew Your Own Biodiesel
Now for the *bad* ones:
Lions and Elephants Roaming the Great Plains?
When I first saw it on the newsfeed I assumed it was a hoax to make the scientific community look bad, but I Googled the name and he's for real. It's kind of unclear whether he's talking about creating a giant game park with fenced boundaries (which already exist on private lands, mostly for hunting), or actually allowing the critters run free. ...Bad, bad idea since it involves people and property issues, most of whom aren't exactly thrilled about seeing North America's more recent large fauna (wolves, grizzlies, pumas, etc.) reintroduced, either.
I'm guessing this man probably had to drive through Texas, Kansas, or any of the other Great Plains states and is suffering from delusions brought on by extreme lack of mental stimulation. :) It's a tempting thought if you've ever had to do those stretches of highway. :)
...No. No. This, of course doesn't reflect my opinion about Hillary as a person or her political record to date. But I don't think a liberal female candidate -- especially one whose power was helped along by riding [a scandalous] hubby's coattails -- stands a chance of winning in a time of war. The zeitgeist just isn't right for it, and you can bet this will bring out all the mudslingers in full force. Wartime tends to bring gut-level emotions to the fore, which will naturally give "authoritative/masculine" contenders an advantage.
If Hillary Clinton ends up winning the Dem nomination, I'll start to wonder if there's a scenario a la "The Candidate" afoot: "You Lose".
