I just saw this information posted at the Beacon:

What: “A Fugitive’s Path: Escape on the Underground Railroad.”
When: Fridays and Saturdays through March 10, also March 30 and 31.
Where: Hale Farm & Village, 2686 Oak Hill Road, Bath Township.
Who should attend: Ages 13 and up.
Cost: $15
Information and reservations: Call 330-666-3711 or visit www.wrhs.org/halefarm.

I had the opportunity to experience this program when I was a senior in high school. Quite honestly, it is one of those experiences you never, ever forget. And it is something I almost think should be required of anyone studying American history, especially the period of slavery.

You start your evening in the visitors building reading wall after wall of wanted posters advertising for missing or runaway slaves as well as billboards for slave auctions with lots of adjectives such as “likely” and “sturdy.”

After becoming thoroughly enthralled (as I was) or disgusted (I was that, too) by the posters, you are literally corralled with the others at the program and made to go to auction. I can’t speak for everyone’s experience, but myself, it was humiliating and gross. We had to hold this freezing chain and march through muddy, unpaved paths holding it while the slave driver yelled at us like a drill sergeant. And that’s only the beginning.

You will then, after being sold (and made to stand on the platform and move around, side to side, jumping jacks, etc.), you will be taken to a small house where a not-so-nice slave driver will tell you he’s got another job lined up and wants to get the owner back. So he’s letting you go. But don’t look back because once the owner finds out, he’ll be after you.

You are told not to run, but walk quietly and cautiously, and don’t look back, no matter what you hear.

But then, you hear the guns and the dogs and you’re not even halfway across the field to the village where you’ll meet other runaways who will help guide you. And you run, because, it’s human instict to run from dogs and guns. And you know it’s pretend, but something in you tells you, well what if it’s not? And you hear one person, a girl, scream and the shots stop for a moment. And you glance back but can’t see anything in the pitch black. And you run even harder. And, if you haven’t already, you forget that it’s pretend.

So begins your journey.

It is a moving experience. I took away from the evening an entirely new understanding and appreciation of what people, not just the slaves but the abolitionists as well, went through to attain freedom.

I once wrote the experience out almost minute by minute as a dramatic narrative for my honors newswriting course. I would LOVE to see the Beacon or someone take a video camera or even an audio recorder and do a soundslides and get this experience in multimedia so everyone else who isn’t in the Akron area could experience it. Wow, even just imagining how moving that could be makes me wish they would.

Until they do, if you’re in the Northeast Ohio area, you definitely need to attend this annual event.

“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.”
— Marian Wright Edelman

“Life consists not in holding good cards but in playing those you hold well.”
— Josh Billings

Recent snow falls and a lack of decent or any parking in this city have given me ample opportunities to practice parallel parking.

Background: The first time I took my driving test, I failed. How did that happen, you ask, since it’s the ONLY test I ever failed? Well, in the time it takes to say “Bob Saget” I had backed into a cone and knocked it over. Game over. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. (In my defense, I had to make a last minute switch to my grandparents Buick LeSabre for the test instead of the Pontiac Grand Am I had been practicing in. It was a full foot and a half longer, and I wasn’t good at judging for that.) Since then, I have had a very strong aversion to parallel parking. In fact, in Findlay, all summer I walked an extra block home each day to avoid on-street parking.

Unfortunately, my assigned parking lot at the J&C is always full. As in probably 50 percent of the time, which seems like always. Unfortunately, there are only about 20 spots. There are apparently more people than that parking there.

There is another parking lot a few blocks away or on-street parking for 2-hour intervals in the general area. The latter is what I have mostly opted for, and considering I am usually leaving within two hours for an assignment, it hasn’t been a big issue yet. However, the very first day during my brief orientation, I was specifically warned about parking on street. Apparently, the police are merciless and the fines add up quick. So I’m paranoid. As soon as I park my car, I set an alarm on my phone for 1 hour and 50 minutes later, lest I forget and get ticketed or towed.

Aside from the fines, the bad part about parking on the road is that I can’t just pull into a nice pre-measured spot. Nope, I have to gauge whether my taurus (not the smallest of cars) can a) actually fit in the allotted space and b) whether I can actually maneuver into it.

Today, I parallel parked between cars twice. Go ahead and applaud. I definitely did. I still pretty much go for it and hold my breath. (Incidentally, that was how I passed my driving test the second time around. When I pulled out of the maneuverability course, the instructor literally told me, “OK, you can breathe now.” And for the record, I may have failed my test the first time, but I scored a perfect 100 percent for the entire test my second go-round.)

The funny thing, however, is not my parking inexperience or annoyance. (Though, I will say both Lafayette and West Lafayette have real issues with parking availability. The entire cities. It’s really annoying. It’s like college all over again, only the fines don’t get attached to my bursar’s account.) The funny thing about today was how I lost my shoe.

Because of recent snows, there are huge mounds of snow piled along every road. These mounds are probably two or three feet tall and dirty from all the plows and car exhaust. Well, I was running late to one of my appointments. I decided it would take too long to walk all the way around the snow when the door I needed to enter was literally right in front of my car. The catch was, I had to go over the mound of snow between me and the door. So I did.

The first step was fine, very little sinking at all. The second step, OK, I sunk a little, but it was doable. The third step, mere inches from my destination was the killer. My leg slipped all the way down and up to my thigh. My now snow-covered leg was not my problem, however. My problem was what wasn’t on my right leg: my shoe. Yes, when I yanked my foot out of the pile, my shoe was stuck. Not only that, but the commotion of trying to get out of the snow had caused an avalanche of other snow to fall in the hole. My shoe was buried. And I was standing on the side of the road, now late for my appointment, with a leg covered in snow and no shoe on my now-freezing foot. So, I’m pretty sure I looked like a crazy person to any passers-by who happened to catch a glimpse of me using my hands — sans gloves — digging in the snow like a dog.

I did find my shoe. It was not only covered in snow, it was filled with snow. I banged out as much as I could. Put it on my foot and walked into my interview acting like nothing ever happened. What else could I do?

That is yet another item to add to my list of reasons why I hate parallel parking.

“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.”
— Anatole France

I was thinking yesterday about typical. Most people don’t know that MerandaWrites is not my first foray into Web site ownership. Hardly. I actually bought my first domain when I was 14. Yeah, 14. It’s still around at typical.net. But I haven’t redesigned it or really updated much since freshman year of college. It looks way off on Macs, but the quote splash pages look pretty great on PC’s using IE. (This was before Firefox existed as a serious contender on either.)

I have, every year, paid to renew the domain out of a sense of obligation. See, typical.net has history. It’s a big part of my adolescence. I’ve tried to think of what I can do with it. My main objective, honestly, is to avoid it being snapped up by a domain reseller who will turn it into a page of links. In the meantime, it sits there, a relic of my past.

But that’s not why I was thinking about typical. I was thinking about how lucky I am to have grown up using the Web as my playground.

There was a time before MySpace and Facebook were the go-to places for young people. There was a time before Flickr hosted your photos and your bookmarks were anyone’s business but your own. Back in the days when AngelFire, Tripod and Geocities hosted the Web. There was a time when Yahoo was how you searched, and nobody’d ever heard of Google. Hotmail was a fledgling idea, and AOL was the cool ISP to have. And back then, everyone had ICQ, and you could still get a meaningful AIM username. There was a time before Blogger, Xanga and LiveJournal gave everyone license to be a writer. Believe it or not, there was even a time when Amazon only sold books and when eBay was just a place to look for rare beanie babies.

I know this because I watched each of those technologies develop in the past decade of my lifetime. And that my friends is why new media excites me.

I don’t care about SoundSlides. I don’t care about the benefits of QuickTime versus Windows Media Player and how Flash is really what you should use anyway. I don’t care about message boards or story chats. I don’t care about blogs or wikis. Sure, all of these things are fun to play with and make for some compelling packages and discussions… today. But what excites me is knowing that next month or next year something I never even saw coming is going to become commonplace.

Typical is an example of this. It is who I was, and it was a necessary step in becoming who I am today. It taught me about the importance of community, about keeping content fresh and writing for an audience. It let me hone my photoshop skills and gave me an outlet for my photography and creative writing to be seen. But I was one of many doing that.

There was this almost underground “teen domain scene,” we even had a homebase. You’ll notice the last time the “Today’s Domain Online” site was updated was June 2003. That’s about right, because that’s when I graduated from high school and kind of stepped away from the “scene.” There were hundreds, who knows when you count the hostees probaby thousands, of us. We hailed from Tokyo and London from San Diego to Alaska to NYC to Akron. It was in many ways an elite club. You had to prove yourself to get noticed, to get hosted. You had to participate and put yourself out their for critique. But that interaction made it fun.

We didn’t just use these communities like kids today use MySpace. We CREATED them.

Today’s teens wallow on MySpace, but we had message boards on domains with names like “snuggles.net” and “bluemorning.nu.” When I first bought typical, I put up a message board. One of those UBB’s, which seemed ubiquitous among the higher profile “teen domains” of my era. I even grew a community of probably 50 very active users. We even had a mascot, Fred, who graced the top of my very orange message board. We talked about school and relationships. We talked about parents, about careers and college. Last year, one of the girls who had frequented the message board contacted me at my kent.edu e-mail address. She was enrolling at my university and wanted me to show her around campus. It was an interesting meeting, and it reminded me of the real world implications of the connections we make online. I learned how to moderate and generate discussion on those boards. I also learned how to collaborate and create a community on the domain.

Those are skills that, at 14 or 15, I just thought meant making it more fun. But then yesterday, when I was thinking about some of the awesome things available today and their predecessors, I realized it has all been just one big precursor to today’s Internet. I guess that’s the theory behind calling it Web 2.0. It excites me to think how quickly we’ve gotten here today. I can’t wait to see what the next generation holds and what new tools it will bring for communicating in, collaborating on and most importantly creating our world.

So, uh, Flickr’s down right now.

UPDATE: It’s 11:30 p.m. and it appears to be back up again.

Apparently, it’s been down for awhile. The Flickr blog says it was down earlier, up briefly and down again at 6:45 p.m.

But it’s 10 p.m., and this is the message I’m receiving on everything:

I don’t use Flickr much now, especially not since I have yet to take a single picture since moving to Lafayette a month ago. No joke, not a single photo. Most of the readers won’t understand why that is weird. But for my Kent State buds, you know how extraordinary that is. I am practically attached at the hip, in fact, when I have pockets in my pants or hoodie, I am literally attached at the hip, to my little camera. It goes everywhere with me. I just haven’t been motivated to trek out in the cold here yet. Today, as I was walking a few blocks to the parking lot after work, I looked up at the sky and felt the almost spring-like breeze and thought: man, this is perfect for a picture. Of course, my camera’s battery was dead because I hadn’t used it in a month. But I’ll resurrect my photo hobby soon.

The thing is, lots of people use Flickr like I use gmail or del.icio.us or wordpress even. I remember last semester when blogger would take forever to post my overheardatksu posts. It drove me insane. But still, they got posted.

What happens to people who spend hours each day on a social networking/Web 2.0 site and it goes down. Where are all the Flickr users uploading their photos? (I’m hoping this is just a fluke and not one crazy person mad about the whole ‘register for a yahoo name or else’ dictum Flickr’s imposing.)

But what if MySpace went down? What would college students do without Facebook for a day? What would Digg’s community do if the server was down for four hours? How about if you couldn’t post bookmark’s to del.icio.us? Or access Technorati? And so forth. You think these are silly questions, but I know people who literally would not know what to do with themselves without Facebook.

But, I suspect they, like many Flickr users probably did, could and would find suitable alternatives for the afternoon. If it was a longterm problem, they’d move on to something new. Which brings me to the longwinded point of this post: everything on the Web is temporary and replaceable. You can find what you want or are looking for in multiple places, whether it’s information or community. And it’s worth remembering that. What is big today, could tomorrow seem silly even primative.

“If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can’t be done.”
— Peter Ustinov

Moral of the story: You can’t always trust the experts.

I have a google alert on my name. Yes, I am weird. But I am also curious to see where my name pops up. After all, if some day someone important googles me, I want to have a sense of what they’ll find. (And I bet most people who think I’m weird are the same people who just never thought to do it for their own name but, starting today, they will.)

Sometimes my name comes up in strange far-flung places. A recent story I wrote about how the cold weather can make pipes freeze and cause all sorts of havoc has been interesting to follow. It was picked up by Gannett News Service.

What’s actually been interesting is how much it’s been rewritten. It’s the same general reporting (same sources, quotes and sidebar). But I’ve seen several different written versions of it still under my byline. Here are the first five paragraphs of my version and some others:

My original:

Kevin Gutwein was dealt a double dose of bad luck Monday night.

As temperatures fell to seasonal lows, the Lafayette resident realized both his furnace was broken and a water line into his house had frozen and burst.

“It was one of those times you stand there and look at each other and say, ‘Why did we buy a house that was built in 1880?’ ” Gutwein said.

It actually wasn’t the first time his family dealt with frozen pipes. In fact, when he realized the water pressure in the sink had fallen, he thought, “Aw man, this is what happened last year.”

Gutwein was not alone in his troubles. Suzie Kelsey, dispatcher at Brenneco Inc. plumbing company, which serviced Gutwein, spent Tuesday morning trying to keep up with all the customers with frozen pipes.

At the Citizen-Times in Asheville, North Carolina:

After a brief warm spell, the deep freeze is back in Western North Carolina. Temperatures are dipping into the teens at night and hovering in the 30s during the day.

Better check out your pipes and prevent a costly break.

“When weather like this occurs, we go into emergency mode,” says Randy Lynch, service manager for Brenneco plumbing in Lafayette, Ind.

But when temperatures ease, the problems won’t go away.

“Whenever a pipe freezes, if it’s copper especially, it expands and splits the pipe,” says Reggie Roy, owner of L&R Plumbing. “When it thaws out, that’s when you find out.”

And up at the Green Bay Press-Gazette, my story takes on the following:

For Kevin Gutwein, history repeated itself on a frigid morning.

As he turned on the faucet in his kitchen, he found that the water had slowed to a trickle and realized a water line into his house had frozen and burst — just like last year.

“It was one of those times you stand there and look at each other and say, ‘Why did we buy a house that was built in 1880?’ ” Gutwein says.

But houses built more recently aren’t immune. Any home with pipes in an unheated crawl space, set in concrete beneath a garage floor or in an attic where temperatures fluctuate is vulnerable to frozen pipes.

“When weather like this occurs, we go into emergency mode,” says Randy Lynch, service manager for Brenneco plumbing in Lafayette.

Now, I don’t care so much about the ledes being changed or reworked or the stories rearranged. I’m not one of those people who is married to her ledes. Sometimes other people have better ideas and what works for me might not work for them. It’s the message that matters. In fact, on shorter items, even getting credit seems unnecessary for me. After a summer where at least half of what I did went without a byline, I realized having the byline glory was not what it was about. My editors are trying to re-train me to put a credit on the quick-hit shorter stories.

My point isn’t so much, therefore, that these stories were rewritten while retaining my byline. I don’t care. It’s just interesting to me as I don’t think it’s ever occured on a story by me before. (Granted, most of what I write has a smaller, local scope.) So I don’t know if this is common or normal practice, but my hunch is it must be. Either way, it’s an interesting phenomenon.

I just saw the latest editorial cartoon from the Stater’s own Chris Sharron. Here’s what it looks like:

I love it. Kent State students, like many Midwestern counterparts, got a slight reprieve from the bitter winter this week when they had a snow day. Remember how I blogged last week about their whining because of the cold? I’m sure they’re still not happy but maybe a little more complacent. Although, I hardly think the futile protests had any impact on the decision to cancel classes this week. I just loved Chris’s “hell freezing over” metaphor here because, every time a major university cancels classes for the weather that’s how it feels: Can it really be happening or was I imagining things?

Chris is a ridiculously talented editorial cartoonist. That’s hard to come by, especially at the collegiate level where kids who think they can draw far outnumber those who actually can. That was why when Chris walked into the newsroom a few summers back we snagged him. I was the managing editor that summer, and I remember the editor telling me some kid had dropped off some sketches and now was going to be our illustrator. Just like that.

Matt, the editor, had a way of getting super excited about other people’s talents. He was never jealous, but he was always impressed by good work. “Man, this guy is so good,” I remember him commenting about one of my reporters that summer, saying that he “loved reading his stories” because they were so well written. I always admired Matt’s ability to be awestruck. So, when that “kid,” at the time only a junior in high school taking post secondary classes at Kent State, produced some awesome illustrations that summer, I was more than happy to join in the revelry. Our annual orientation issue that fall would not have been nearly as awesome without Chris’s helpful hand. Two of our four section fronts were pretty much dominated by illustrations with content overlaid.

Chris has only gotten better since then. This isn’t the best editorial cartoon I’ve seen from him, but it is a good sampling. He’s tackled some pretty big topics and keeps up on current events in politics, entertainment and local affairs probably better than most of his j-school counterparts. The thing is, he’s not in the j-school. Although he works for student media in production and as an editorial cartoonist for the Stater, his major is actually middle-childhood education. I asked him once why he was choosing to do that when he had such potential (imagine if you’re this good at 18 how good you’ll get). I forget his exact reasoning, but I believe it was something about having a career to fall back on and being realistic. :shrug: Either way, just as Matt was always amazed by other’s talents, I continue to be amazed by Chris’s wit.