January-March 2021 Archive

9 March 2021

Another week gone without having much to show for it.

Random factoid: 2021 was supposed to be the year in which Target Canada made money after losing it hand over fist for eight years. As with many other predictions for the time we live in today, it was not to be....

1 March 2021

Somewhere near Thunder Bay, Ontario.

23 February 2021

Rush Limbaugh is dead. I react to this fact with the exact same emotions with which I reacted to the deaths of Fred Phelps, Jerry Falwell, and Andrew Breitbart: A swelling of pent-up anger, tempered jubilation, and relief.

All four were compassion-devoid ghouls who devoted their lives to one end, and one end only: The vilification and destruction of innocent human beings. AIDS victims. Pregnant people. Black lives. Immigrants. The LGBTQ community. Women. Climate scientists. Basically, anyone other than amoral white men à la Tr*mp.

I have no sympathy for Rush. I only have sympathy for the legions of people that he and his ilk were directly responsible for abusing, dehumanizing, disenfranchising, and driving to death.

And fuck everyone who rewarded him with a syndicated platform and audience for 32 fucking years.

15 February 2021

Twitter: The Redux

The curse of proprietary, walled-garden social websites is that you can't usually or easily archive your own data. Twitter is actually an outlier in that the service at least purports to allow you to do so:

In six years, I composed 4,254 messages. 280 characters times 4254 equals 1.14 megabytes. Obviously the size of the archive couldn't possibly exceed that, right?

Wrong: Somehow, Twitter's Nazi-enabling code monkeys succeeded in bloating an archive of text messages by 8588% (that is not a typo). What's more, this 97.5-megabyte monstrosity doesn't even contain any list of messages in human-readable format...only a thicket of bloated .js files that are completely incompatible with older browsers.

Fortunately, Luca Hammer has concocted a way to convert this hot mess into a 766-kilobyte CSV file. So I can finally dig in and quote the time I said, "Had a comment faved by a homophobe whose Twitter stream is a wall-to-wall Time Cube of rants about 'Celtics' and 'huns.' WTF, man?"

What, new content?

Some potentially-useful HTML pages that I had created at one point, but for whatever reason never published until now:

• Coins of the Canadian Dollar. Nice and simple.
• Coins of the British Pound. Not quite as simple.

As 95% of you don't know, I'm a mite interested in deciphering vehicle identification numbers. On the off-hand chance that this tickles anyone else's fancy, here are some exploratory works-in-progress on that front:

• Ford.
• Volkswagen.

I've also updated the FAQ and the site map at long last.

8 February 2021

New content!

Do you remember my Supermartifacts project? Rest assured, I haven't forgotten it.

425 N. Center St., Northville, MI

4141 Nakoosa Trail, Madison, WI

31 January 2021

Yesterday, I found myself pondering: "What was the last photo I ever took in West Virginia?" I don't like to leave a question hanging...so I dug into my archive, and found answers.

The last picture I ever took in West Virginia was this image of a decrepit 1970s-era school bus, somewhere in the backwaters of Raleigh County on 11 May 2013. "Normal" people would think of this as an unlikely subject to immortalize, but those who know me would expect no less!

The last picture I took while actually living in West Virginia was this image of the now-closed Kroger store in Bluefield, sometime in May 2008. The next exposure on the reel was taken in Ohio, on the way out. I was still shooting film in those days, so the precise date has been lost to time.

Moving from the state level to the national, here's the last picture I took in the United States: An image of the former Soo Line trestle in Moose Lake, Minnesota in the twilight of 26 December 2019. I was following the historic course of Highway 61 home to Thunder Bay, and the last leg of the trip ended up being in the dark.

The last picture I took while actually living in the United States was this image of a vintage Jeep Commando parked in Madison, Wisconsin, on 12 August 2017. I remember having a nice chat with the owner...then I went home, and started itemizing all my earthly possessions. Ten days later, I was in Canada.

26 January 2021

For the record, Mercer County, West Virginia also voted for this piece of execrable human garbage. This is why some of us don't go back.

18 January 2021

This week, I unveiled a massive update of my favourite personal project of the last year: The History of School Transportation in Mercer County, WV. As with Roads and Rails, this was an autobiographical feature that felt like an extension of my lived experiences. And I hope it makes a splash.

Regardless of where someone ends up living their life, they have only one hometown or home county...and for me, that's Mercer County, West Virginia. It's a place that fills me with memories of childhood experiences, many of them warm and fuzzy. But I don't know if I can go back there.

A 77% supermajority of Mercer County voters are sadistic, amoral ghouls. And Christians, no doubt. You can look at the statistics yourself (JavaScript required), if you feel like throwing up on the floor.

But surely Mercer County is a pretty big place, right? Surely there are some pockets that aren't dominated by enthusiastic supporters of white supremacist insurrection? Well, let's find out.

The county is subdivided into 47 precincts for voting purposes. Trouble is, there are no maps or geographical descriptions of these precincts on the Internet: It's as if they're secret. But the county clerk does publicize each precinct's polling location, giving some rough idea of where the epicentres are.

Let's plot out the winning vote percentage of each polling location on a map, and see where the evidence falls:

    = Biden
    = His Fascist Opponent

Fuck, this is a bigoted place.

But not everywhere. Is that a tinge of blue I see in the lower left? Let's take all the pie charts, and put them in order. It's...a stark comparison:

Dog bless Precinct 14: The north end of Bluefield, which happens to be the place where Mercer County's nonwhite population is sequestered as a lingering consequence of segregation. They're the exception to the rule. The ray of sunlight in an underground mine. And we need them...now more than ever before.

8 January 2021

Me:

You know...I kind of miss West Virginia. I really shouldn't be so harsh on my home state...it was founded by radical leftists in opposition to the Confederacy, after all. Surely it ought to be a place defined by humanist values, where people treat others with dignity and respect? How bad can it be?

West Virginia:

West Virginia Lawmaker Derrick Evans Was One Of The Terrorists Storming U.S. Capitol

GOP Terrorist: West Virginia Lawmaker Derrick Evans was one of the Trump-loving domestic terrorists who stormed the U.S. Capitol.

"It should also come as no surprise that Evans campaigned as a conservative Christian, complaining that 'Christian values' had 'fallen away.' BuzzFeed notes that before being elected to the West Virginia House, Evans was 'a well-known anti-abortion activist who garnered a following by harassing people at West Virginia clinics.'"

Me: