Write Lightning is a blog from writer Deb Thompson.
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Everyone is welcome here.
(Some links or topics may not be completely kid-appropriate.)
Thu, Apr 01 2004
Ghosting Around
I found a nice site listing a bunch of ghost towns. I still remember passing along the low-lying town of Times Beach in Missouri, years before it was evacuated because of dioxin contamination. The true effects of dioxin are still debated among scientists, and more recent sources of the stuff have are said to have been anything from forest fires to Beanie Baby stuffing.
Towns become ghost towns for all kinds of reasons, I guess--natural disaster, famine, loss of the ability to make a living, environmental contamination, drought--and maybe other reasons. What I notice is that they all seem to develop bigger-than-life reputations that follow in their wake, especially towns associated with the Gold Rush era and the Old West.
Fiddletown is one great example of an American ghost town. From the web site's description, it sounds as though Fiddletown was to wagons what West Coast Choppers is to motorcycles today. And appropriately, the guy who runs the West Coast Choppers is named Jesse James.
posted at: 13:15 | category: /Miscellaneous | link to this entry
I found a nice site listing a bunch of ghost towns. I still remember passing along the low-lying town of Times Beach in Missouri, years before it was evacuated because of dioxin contamination. The true effects of dioxin are still debated among scientists, and more recent sources of the stuff have are said to have been anything from forest fires to Beanie Baby stuffing.
Towns become ghost towns for all kinds of reasons, I guess--natural disaster, famine, loss of the ability to make a living, environmental contamination, drought--and maybe other reasons. What I notice is that they all seem to develop bigger-than-life reputations that follow in their wake, especially towns associated with the Gold Rush era and the Old West.
Fiddletown is one great example of an American ghost town. From the web site's description, it sounds as though Fiddletown was to wagons what West Coast Choppers is to motorcycles today. And appropriately, the guy who runs the West Coast Choppers is named Jesse James.
posted at: 13:15 | category: /Miscellaneous | link to this entry
CSS Is Fooling Me
I'm beating my literal head against a virtual wall today in the process of studying some CSS. I'm trying to figure out floats, and while this page has a wealth of information, it also serves to confuse someone like me. There seem to be so many more things you can break using CSS. What worries me is that I'll get half of this figured out and then some navel-gazing little group of experts will come up with another whole way of doing things, and shoot the learning curve into a big black hole. That really sucks.
Pun intended--after all, it is April 1.
posted at: 08:34 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry
I'm beating my literal head against a virtual wall today in the process of studying some CSS. I'm trying to figure out floats, and while this page has a wealth of information, it also serves to confuse someone like me. There seem to be so many more things you can break using CSS. What worries me is that I'll get half of this figured out and then some navel-gazing little group of experts will come up with another whole way of doing things, and shoot the learning curve into a big black hole. That really sucks.
Pun intended--after all, it is April 1.
posted at: 08:34 | category: /Writing Life | link to this entry
