Claude joined a group on Facebook called “Viva La Revolucion de Appalachia”. I joined, too, because I’m a joiner. It reminded me of a paper I wrote in college, in West Virginia, that compared the economic plight of WV to that of Third World Countries.

At the time I wrote the paper, I’m pretty sure I quoted a source that stated the value of WV natural resources made it the 3rd richest state in the country behind Alaska and Texas. Astute readers will note that those states are both significantly bigger than WV. I couldn’t find anything that said that during the brief research I did today (and that’s the way it’s going to stay since I don’t blog for a grade) but the West Virginia Development Office’s website claims that WV ranks 33rd in oil production and 11th in natural gas production and that it’s the leading exporter of coal in the US. So we’ll go with that since it still sounds pretty impressive.

So you don’t have to read however many pages of bullshit it took to fill some arbitrary page count requirement I’ll just skip straight to the thesis. Given the abundance of natural resource wealth in the State of West Virginia, why is the populace so impoverished? West Virginia has the same problem that most Third World Countries have. Foreign ownership of resources. In WV, “foreign” mostly translates to New Yorkers.  The Rockefellers and the railroad baron types owned (own) most of the mineral rights to the state. That’s why the Rockefellers sent (probably) the most retarded of their clan down to supervise their interests as a political hack. He’s never held an actual job… at least not since 1969.

The time has long since come and gone for WV to stand up to the people raping their state. The government in WV has been owned for so long by New York corporations that the kind of tax levied by Alaska on the value of resources removed from their state is just not going to happen.

Cory Doctorow posted an excellent examination of the current darling amongst media doomsters over on Boing Boing about the actual math behind the Spanish Flu of 1918. It’s not my intention to minimize the grief that had to accompany the deaths of so many people (my grandfather’s 1st wife died in the epidemic).  Modern medicine and instantaneous communication really does limit how likely it is that an epidemic of the severity of the Spanish Flu will happen again. Honestly, the Black Death is estimated to have killed a quarter of the population in Europe but that was during a time that medicine was little better than magic (we’ll set aside for a moment that it’s sometimes not much better than that now). They didn’t have anitbiotics or an understanding of germ theory or a grasp of how the disease was transmitted. It killed 25% of the population. In 1918, medicine was better but antibiotics weren’t available and it killed 2.5%.

Is it possible we could move along to the sensationalist photo-op, Big Media?

You used to hear about it all the time. In fact, there was a subdivision near where we used to live called Carpenter Village that was supposed to be this whole New Urbanist deal with housing and a central village square kind of thing with commercial properties. The houses got built. The village square is a largish expanse of nothingness. Seemed like a really good idea at the time. (I tried to find a picture of Carpenter Village’s desolate center online but all the shots seem to be from an angle to cleverly avoid pointing out that there’s nothing where the shops should be. Maybe I’ll run over and take one myself this weekend)

One of the things I wonder about is why there needs to be a New Urbanist movement when there’s an awful lot of Old Urban lying fallow. Not that I have any particular beef with the New Urbanists but it seems like if we focussed some of that energy on the urban areas that are already there and rehabilitated them it instead of coming up with some Disney version of what the urban environment should be it would save time, money, and resources. And that’s really what it’s all about isn’t it? I’ve talked about this before… everybody keeps forgetting about the total product life cycle. Yes, building in a sustainable fashion that encourages pedestrian activities instead of driving is admirable but new construction has an environmental impact. Especially when there is existing space that could be rehabbed. That said, there is some thoughtful insight offered in this post. Make sure your read the other post wherein direction by Master Control is also decried.

My other problem with the way New Urbanists work is that it’s all centrally managed and developed. Before the first bulldozer, there have been whole committees of people deciding that there will be single family residences here, and apartments here, right here we’ll have a coffee shop, and over in this corner…. People who know me, understand that I find this kind of centralization disconcerting at best. You know, like the old saying goes “A camel is a horse designed by a committee”. Nothing particularly wrong with camels but you never see one in somebody’s barn. As near as I can tell, that’s not the way old urban environments happened. Individuals decided what went where based on their needs. The problem, of course, is that this takes time because there are inevitably mistakes made in the decisions that individuals make. What I think somebody should try is laying out the basic infrastructure, ie streets, parks,  and then letting people have at it without any zoning restrictions. It would probably take a few years to get things sorted out and it couldn’t ever happen inside a city’s jurisdiction because the zoning wanks would have a cardiac because they know better than we do about what should go where. You can tell just by looking at your average suburban layout.

There’s a really good chance that Jennifer Aniston is a completely crazy, self absorbed, needy bundle of self-esteem issues. But every time I see her I can’t help but think I could take of all that for her. She’s definitely not Megan Fox but it wouldn’t suck to spend a weekend in Monaco with her.

I’ve noticed something lately. It seems like every time   I see a Prius it’s rocketing down the road or weaving in and out of traffic like Richard Petty. Doesn’t driving like a maniac erase some of the benefit of driving a supposedly green vehicle? Or is that part of the deal – ‘I can drive with the throttle to the floor because I’m still getting better mileage than that SUV over there’? I’m not opposed to greener and more efficient vehicles per se, I just haven’t bought into the whole Prius thing. There doesn’t seem to be any empirical data on how long the batteries will last but they won’t last forever. Proponents say that the batteries are fully recyclable. So are aluminum cans but an awful lot wind up in landfills.

See, the problem is that ALL of the extremists (that’s all of you on both sides of the issue) try to spin their version of reality. One term I find particularly revolting is Zero Emission Vehicle. There’s no such thing. There are vehicle that generate emissions at the generating plant but there are emissions. What I’d really like to see is thing tracked from cradle to grave and rated on environmental impact. That would include things like the manufacture of the battery packs. Then those of us that can read could make informed decisions.

It would be nice if people would figure out that there are a non-zero number of people in the population who believe that probably an entire argument is a lie when i little piece of bullshit is exposed. I’m one of them. A largish reason behind my general drug abuse when I was younger was that I found out that people didn’t automatically use herion after smoking a joint like the cop that came to the school and lectured us said. And people are still dying in car wrecks when they use their seatbelts and the airbags deploy. Everything doesn’t have to be black and white. In fact, to me almost everything appears to be in verying shades of gray.

Arsenio Hall is  hosting  a show on the  myNetworkTV network called The World’s Funniest Moments that plays funny videos from the Internet. Which is cool except that you can already see them. On the Internet. Without some chucklehead telling you how funny they are.  On the net where they don’t have to be censored or bleeped or blurred.

The second problem I see is that until I heard this story on the radio today I had never heard of myNetworkTV in spite of the fact that there’s an affiliate in Raleigh. Then I looked at the schedule for tonight and realized why I’d never heard of them… because there’s nothing but shit on.

The funny thing is there’s some network hipster that thinks this is a good idea and greenlighted this project. Nothing,  IMHO, better illustrates why television is doomed. They don’t understand why I wouldn’t want to park myself in front of the tube between 8 & 9 and watch something I can watch any time I fucking choose.  Network television has reached a level of derivative that I never would have believed was possible

Johnson and I went to see HU and Framing Hanley the other night and I got the tickets through Ticketmaster. Normally I avoid Ticketmaster like a case of herpes but since Norfolk is 3 hours away and I didn’t feel like getting there and finding out the show was sold out I went ahead and tainted myself. The tickets were $15 apiece,  the “convenience charge” was $6.75 (x2), and the “order processing charge”  was $3.55 for a total of $47.05. I’d like to note that I did this all online with no assistance or input from Ticketmaster. So I was charged $3.55 to check myself out apparently. I’m not exactly sure what constitutes a “convenience” but apparently it’s worth $13.50 on 2 tickets. I mean it’s not like they rolled up to the front door and delivered them. I still had to pick up the tickets at Will Call. I did find it somewhat amusing that I was offered the ability to print them myself for an extra $2.50. Let me say that again…. Ticketmaster was going to charge me $2.50 to print tickets using my paper and ink. Is there any other business in the world that can get away with something like that? It would be like the grocery store charging me to take the groceries home in my own car.

My question is: Why is it illegal for me to charge more than $3 over face value for a ticket but not Ticketmaster? I’ll tell you why… because Ticketmaster has bought the right to. North Carolina General Statutes § 14?344 covers the sale of tickets in excess of stated price and basically says anybody can charge $3 over the face value of the ticket but if you’re Ticketmaster you can charge whatever you tell the venue that you want to charge in excess of face value. Ok, that’s not the exact language but it’s what the statute basically says if you read it carefully because Ticketmaster is a monopoly. But nobody’s really noticed that either apparently.

So Johnson and I went to see Hollywood Undead and Framing Hanley last night.

The Norva is a really nice venue. It’s right on the edge of being too big for my tastes  but pulls off the bigness nicely. There’s a second level that’s only available to VIPs that purchase a membership for a year which is kind of a cool idea if you’re seriously into music.  I didn’t move around much since we got there a little late and wanted to hold on to our place in front of the sound guy. One tip that I will pass on is that I got my tickets through Ticketmaster (discussion of which is going to come in a later post) and had them held at Will Call. So when we got there, I’m guessing there were 300 people in line but the Will Call line had maybe 5. So we got in that line and saved probably 15 minutes in line.

Framing Hanley was pretty good. I’m really only familiar with their cover of Lil Wayne’s Lollipop although I’ve heard several of their other songs. Judging from the crowd response that was the song that most people were familiar with. They went on at about 8:50 and did a set that lasted until just about 10.

Hollywood Undead came on some time after 10:30 ( I forgot to look. Shoot me). They opened, as always, with Hollywood Undead (the song). They kicked ass just like they did at the Lincoln. Maybe it was me but the energy level didn’t seem as high as it had in Raleigh even though the crowd last night was probably 5 times the size (it was a sold out show last night). It’s possible that my perception is based on the size of the Norva though since we were significantly farther from the stage than we could have been in the Lincoln. To be that far from the stage at the Lincoln, you’d have to be in the street and possibly the parking deck. The funniest moment was when they did Bitches. There was a youngish girl next to us with her dad and they both just stood there looking really uncomfortable for the whole song.

Definitely worth the trip.

Johnson and I are at The Norva in Va Beach to catch Framing Hanley & HU. We only caught the last song of the opening act and I’ll have to find out their name because they were pretty good.

UPDATE: The opening band was Sonny from Virginia Beach. As a side note, If you’re starting a band one of the things you should do is come up with a search friendly name. Names like Sonny and Bob, while witty, are not really conducive to people finding your website after they’ve seen you at a show.

Framing Hanley is setting up now. More later.

Today’s WTF? comes to us from Rocky Mount, NC in the form of Richardson’s Food Mart & Auto Clinic. I suppose it makes sense, you can get your car checked out while you pick up some groceries. I love America.

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