Yesterday, my name appeared on Jeopardy. During the Double Jeopardy round, one of the categories was "Geoguessing in the USA"...and a photo of mine was used as the lead-off clue! (Don't worry; it was with permission. It's cool.) Where do roads have a fraction-like format like this? Where else but West Virginia? On the off-hand chance that any game-show aficionados, GeoGuessrs, or trivia buffs…
50 years ago today, homosexuality was decriminalized in West Virginia. This was accomplished through the repeal of the state's unjust sodomy law, effective 11 June 1976. During the 1970s, the state of West Virginia experienced a renaissance of progressivism and population growth unlike that ever seen before or again. Abortion was legalized and the ERA was ratified in the same decade. Much of this…
My special interests are stuck in a rut. A road rut. A brand new feature has been created: The Roads and Rails of Summers County, West Virginia! Summers County directly borders Mercer County, making it a logical next place to explore...and its parks and scenery are second to none. So far the scope is limited to primary highways, but that alone took a week and a half of work. Brand new maps have…
The world is burning, but this website will continue to be updated for as long as I'm able. This week, I added two new features to the Licence Plate Gallery: Unsolved Mysteries. Letter codes of unknown significance, plates that no longer exist, designs that make no sense, sequencing that no one fully understands... The Link Directory. Searching for surviving vestiges of the old hobbyist web. I…
The Highways of Hamilton has been expanded with a comprehensive guide to former County & Regional Roads (179 of them altogether, although many were internal designations or renumberings), and a scattering of new pictures.
New feature! The Highways of Hamilton. Enjoy.
Microsoft Windows 95 was released 30 years ago today! Windows 95 was irrefutably the high-water mark of software design. Microsoft engaged in actual usability research in the lead-up to release (the kind that never happens today!), testing the effectiveness of different UI paradigms before settling on something that was both powerful and intuitive. Windows 95's 32-bit API was robust, and…
110 years ago today, my great-grandfather Clifford Turnbull immigrated to the United States from Canada. To gain the right to live on the other side of the border, all Clifford had to do was show up at the bridge and fill out a form. The United States had open borders in 1915, and economically thrived as a country on account of the people immigrating there. With one catch. See the field on the…
Every four years, I go through an utter nightmare. The United States goes through a presidential election...throwing ballots before the hands of racist voters in overrepresented rural states, then filtering them through the undemocratic Electoral College, practically inviting the Republican Nazi Party to seize power and destroy everyone I care about and everything I hold dear. And every single…
...that would have meant everything in the world to me if they had said them, out of their own volition, before 2017: [...]
The farther away I am from West Virginia, the more I want to write about it. No, I don't totally understand it either... With the railways done, the time seemed ripe to reinvigorate the other half of that project from 2019. What did I do? Well, I think I outdid myself... 38 new pages (yes, thirty-eight pages!) devoted to explaining every known County Highway and Delta Road. Vector maps drawn or…
Back in 2019, I debuted a project called The Roads and Rails of Mercer County, West Virginia. I never finished it. After a monthlong burst of productivity in which I explored the history of the county's twelve major highways, I was burnt out. So I let Part 1 stand by itself, and resolved to tackle Part 2 whenever the time was right. In September 2024, the time was finally right. So I started…
Rando xenophobe: "Damn illegals coming into our country! Stop illegal immigration!" Me: "You must definitely support the abolition of immigration controls, then. Making all immigration legal by definition, thus solving the problem!" R.X.: "NO! Not like that!!"
These are graphical re-creations of West Virginia vehicle inspection stickers from the four decades leading up to my departure from the state. If you're feeling uncharitable, you might call it "forging official governmental seals"...though after this long (and at this low a resolution), it's doubtful that anyone would care! [...]
I had no shortage of strange experiences growing up in West Virginia in the 1990s. How about Learning Day Camp? 'Twas a thing I remember from my younger years...sometimes with a grimace. [...]
As it happens, I fell into a rabbit hole early this month researching the licence plates of Mexico. Here are the results, for your collecting enjoyment [...]
How do I get home to Canada without a car? If there's a will, there's a way. First objective of the day: Travel to Northville, and return a borrowed vehicle to its rightful owner. So I turned onto Seven Mile Road, and cautiously coasted towards town. What can go wrong? Nothing, that's what. There were no breakdowns, no sirens, no catastrophes, and no surprises at all...other than seeing a generic…
Way back in the summer of 1991, I remember visiting Lansing. My family and I piled into a car, drove down Michigan Avenue (the fact that the street shared a name with the state it was in interested me more than it should have), and found ourselves at an interactive museum where I had an incredible time. Snuggled between R. E. Olds and the Lansing Centre on the riverbank was a science centre called…
The last night in Lansing was uncomfortably humid...and at the crack of dawn, I checked out. The DoubleTree Hotel was OK on the balance...but I have a hankering suspicion I would have been more comfortable at a Motel 6. Next point of order: The ALPCA Annual Meeting. "If you're visiting from outside the United States, stand!" I stood...and so did fewer than a dozen people out of a room of hundreds.…
Day V was a watershed: The moment of the ALPCA convention when I could finally catch my breath after two days of frantic action, relax, take some photos, chat with friends, and enjoy my fleeting moments in Lansing before the week was finally through. But there was something else to attend to that day. I had a close relative from Northville to meet at the hotel, and I didn't want to keep him…
I pulled myself out of bed, pulled on some shoes, then pulled myself outside. Surely there ought to be a good coffee shop or restaurant in downtown Lansing serving better breakfast fare than the host hotel? Turns out the capitol square is a ghost town at 8:17 am. Half an hour later I returned...just as empty as I was before. On Day III, I managed to wind myself halfway around the convention hall…
Typically, hotel breakfasts work in one of two ways. They'll host a continental breakfast, where a wide variety of mediocre foods are spread out in the lobby for the taking. Or they'll have a "real" restaurant serving scrumptious, tasty fare...for a price. Somehow, breakfast at the DoubleTree combined the worst of both worlds. The hotel restaurant was closed, yet its space was commandeered to…
Day two was destined to be the slowest, most sluggish leg of my journey. I was in no hurry this day: Ann Arbor and Lansing were just 120 kilometres apart on the map, close enough that I could have biked between them if I really wanted to. After living in Thunder Bay where any travel time of 8 hours or less was considered "short," it was a trifle! [...]
Long-gone are the days when I habitually made stateside trips for fun. Since the world changed in 2020, I've crossed the border for only two reasons [...] But this summer, I had a third: To attend an ALPCA convention. [...]
Greetings from the Hammer! Where there are streets that share names with cities in West Virginia, for some reason.
Apparently my high school reunion in West Virginia is being organized by the racist clod who used to dress in Confederate flags from head to toe, giving proclamations that "the South would rise again" and describing gay men in terms comparable to Fred Phelps...and a friend of his invited me to come...ROFL, PMP, NO, I'm not going, and I'll NEVER associate with the white-supremacist Christofascist…
Many thanks to Steph Duchesne for her amazing work.
Dedicated to Andrew Filer, who I think would have gotten a kick out of this. On cold winter weekends, there's nothing I like better than browsing the Lakehead University Library...and looking for the unexpected. Take the periodical above. Despite being in a Canadian library, it unexpectedly bears a mailing label addressed to Nashville, Tennessee. And that bright orange sticker with the letter "S?"…
This was Andrew Filer. He was a friend of mine. He died two years ago. He was only 40. I only found this out this week, and now I feel like shit. :'-( [...]