August 20, 2006

• Well, considering it's NYC, I can't see how space in a garbage can inside Grand Central Station wouldn't go for $750/month. When I lived in Oklahoma I always used to be intrigued by the house that was butt-up [Google Earth] against a busy intersection leading into Wal-Mart. I mean their front porch is 20 feet from the intersection and there's traffic night and day. Where I live now, there's a house right next to Sonic Drive-In. It's surreal trying to imagine oldies hits being piped 17 hours a day right outside the bedroom window.
• That was a really interesting article, meredithea. Thanks!
• RPMan, is Norman, Oklahoma as beautiful on the ground as it appears from above? What a garden spot!
• When I used to have a real job, and commuted every day, I'd pass this intersection and would wonder what kind of an idiot would pay $350,000 for a four bedroom home so he could look out his bedroom window and take in the sights and vapors of Canada's busiest highway. Also, catch the oh-so-lovely street names. Why, I live on Opera Glass Crescent! And I love the smell of diesel and sounds of air brakes in the morning!
• Many cities in Europe are like this. I remember soldiers telling me that, when they were stationed in Germany, one could put their hand out of the kitchen window and touch cars passing by on the street. Living that close to infrastructure is pretty standard. However, if you're living next door to a cement plant, you're playing Lung Cancer Russian Roulette.
• RTD - Norman, OK, is a suburb of Oklahoma City (capitol of OK, but pretty flat and boring) where a lot of industry has been developed. However, that image must have been taken in late fall or in winter. Oklahoma is very much in Tornado Alley, where Gulf moisture brings lots of drenching rain and high humidity in spring and summer. When I lived near Tulsa in the 1970s, neighbors would opine that we were going through a terrible drought if we didn't get more rain in a month there than we get in southern California in a year. Oklahoma, for the most part is startlingly green during spring and summer, but turns an ugly gray brown when the cold weather hits. The trees are mostly deciduous, and the grasses get sulky. They don't get much snow, so there's not even that to soften the Winter Wonderland, though I must admit that the ice storms were pretty spectacular - dawn would highlight trees with the several inches of congealed H2O that coated the branches, making them look like a fiber optic display.
• Here's a link to the article from the NY Times Link Generator for those who don't want to register or Bugmenot it. Oklahoma is a strange state, in more ways than one. You've got the panhandle, which is very desolate, desert-like and tumbleweed-y (yet gets more snow than the rest of the state), the area around Oklahoma City which is flat, flat, flat, and all covered with red dust (yet they get the biggest storms), the area around Tulsa which is all rolling hills and forests and rivers and lakes (and meth labs, and wacky white supremacist religious fundie enclaves), and then there's the southeastern part which gets downright swampy. Norman is where the University of Oklahoma is. I can't get the image to load, but it's very flat there and very much a case of (sub)urban sprawl.
• A group I belong to meets in a building sited on a picturesque tongue of sandy soil surrounded on the better part of three sides by a river bend. On the other side of the river, cut into the base of the mountain, and about twenty or thirty feet higher than the river itself are railway tracks. Whenever we meet there are interludes where no one can hear anything but train, sometimes for four or five minutes. It sometimes sounds more like the prolonged passage of a jet or of an exceedingly high wind thanks to the way the mountain slope affect the accoustics. No train ever sneaks by in silence, however. The first few months I thought this somewhat disagreeable, but after several years of strange punctuations in the otherwise very quiet countryside, I have got now so I actually enjoy it. /perhaps a sign of incipient dementia
• I live in Houston, right next to the train tracks. Note the freight train, loaded with crushed stone, cruising through the neighborhood. At the beginning of this month, after two years of effort, the city got the railroad to agree to stop blowing the horn as they passed by, as many as 20 times a day. It has improved things. However, it is not that bad having tracks right outside the back gate. The standard lot is 50 feet by 100 feet. On other streets, your neighbor's kitchen window is 15 feet from yours. With the tracks (and also powerlines, pipelines, and fiber optics) in the back yard, the nearest people are 500 feet away, going straight back. This is one of the several benefits. Another is that property values are lower, making it easier to buy, and to pay the taxes and insurance. I suppose that people can get used to just about anything, given time.
• I live in a leafy, spacious suburb of London. I can tell my house a mile off! It's that little brown one! On the street! The double decker buses come down my street, and stop in the traffic outside my flat - so I can wave at the passengers on the top deck.
• RalphTheDog, I've also wondered about those people. But I never knew all those streets were named after American baseball players. (Ewing and Silken Lauman excepted). Yet another reason I'm glad I don't live in the 905.
• ...the area around Oklahoma City which is flat, flat, flat, and all covered with red dust... You can't building anything on it, you can't grow anything in it -- the government says it's due to poor farming...
• I used to live in Houston, EarWax, while I was going to college. I lived across S. Main from the Astrodome.
• Meredithea: If you come back, you will be shocked that Astroworld is gone. It was torn out this spring, and is just a vast expanse of dirt, with weeds starting to take over. It just offends the eye that there is nothing where once there was a large, variegated something.
• I guess this is the wrong place to explain why Arkansas doesn't drift off to the east.
• Astroworld is gone! I had heard that it closed, but not that it was torn down (for some reason in my mind I never really connected the two). TenaciousPettle: It might be the wrong place, but I can tell you why Texas doesn't fall into the Gulf of Mexico ;)
• *Mumbles something about "Baja Oklahoma" and slinks off*
• My grandmother's place was exactly 23 feet from the main lines of the Conemaugh and Blacklick railbed. Took a couple nights, but eventually we kids could sleep through the freight hauls. I lived for a VERY short while in a coal town and next to a cement factory. YUCK. I don't know how people can live with the stench of papermills (Tyrone, PA) or sugar beet processers (Nampa, ID) or mondo stockyards (Grandview, ID) That's enough to gag ya!