I had to double-check the title to make sure that the word “old-timey” doesn’t have any dirty meaning known only to Chimpo. Seems like I am safe for now but you can’t be too sure with him.
Long time ago, before the word “mail” got itself attached to the letter “e”, people wrote letters and exchanged postcards. Even I was in on the pen pal craze writing a couple of letters in broken English to some unfortunate American girl from Minnesota who wasted her parents’ money on a trip to the Soviet Union. Nowadays the post office is dying a slow death surviving only by delivering junk mail and bills. The email is faster, easer, more convenient and free, but one thing that’s being lost is the appreciation of the distances it travels making our world seem smaller and without borders. When an old card or a letter traveled for weeks crossing many countries and continents , it was an event to open a mailbox to find something touched by your friend or a relative and then be every mail person on the way. Email arrives instantly and no one touches it except the government’s supercomputer which makes sure you are not an evildoer. Many Americans grow up to think that the world looks like this. Many studies have been done to show that Americans can’t find other countries and even their own states on the map even if threatened with waterboarding. I always hated geography myself but I can still point out most countries on the map and even the majority of American states, except the little ones in the East, but they don’t count anyway.
Recently I’ve found an interesting website that preserves or, maybe, even resurrects an old hobby of exchanging postcards. Postcrossing.com has 43,693 members in 178 countries who connect through the website to send and receive postcards to each other. After registration you can initially send up to 5 cards to random members and then become eligible to receive up five cards from others. In the first batch my daughter and I mailed cards to Taiwan, Finland, Australia, Netherlands and Germany for a total of 23,344 miles traveled. Some of these arrived in less than 5days. We received messages from all of the recipients thanking us for the cards. Many people post their cards online and one local girl even made a presentation in her club with cards from around the world.
Hopefully, after some time our map of the world will be filled with cards we mailed. So far it looks like this. Again, like many years ago, I run (OK, walk) to the mailbox to see if there is anything there for me, besides bills and pizza coupons. I like the feeling. Try it for yourself.
I used to be better at remembering useless dates, I blame the atrophy of my memory on the iPhone. It’s the iPhone’s fault that I am posting this photo three days late. Vladimir Illyich Lenin died on January 21,1924.
Recently my friend EmawKC (I struggled for years to figure out what it stands for and gave up) happily helped out the City of Overland Park with his almost voluntary donation.
Through the miracle of modern forensic science I was ably to recreate the events leading up to the event. I believe it started something like this:
This is a live reenactment of what happened just prior to the act of the donation itself:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPx20Gb5Jro
*At this point of my research another policeman pulled up behind me and ruined the cinematographic moment. Although I wasn’t doing anything wrong being on public street filming a public employee, I didn’t feel like hanging out there any longer. Maybe next time time I will do a better job of blending in.
My Momma always said: Topeka is like a box of CrackerJack… sorry, wrong post…
For a long time I had in mind to climb to the top of the Kansas State Capitol and take a good bird’s-eye look at the great state of Kansas where the Capitol just happened to be located.
One good thing about our state’s capital is meetings. There was some kind of meeting about clean air and stuff.
To have a good meeting you always need:
Old ladies with signs and canes.
Cute chicks.
Women-voters (with an occasional stray man holding on to the sign).
A fat kid with the sign about what he wants to be when he grows up.
A union guy who hasn’t done any work in the past 20 years.
A bike-riding hippie with dreadlocks.
And a fat dude wearing an apocalyptic t-shirt.
I don’t recycle and I don’t want to die so we moved on to the next death threat.
Inside the capitol we got busy climbing 296 steps to the top.
The internal dome looks like this from the outside.
The legend is:if you make a wish inside the dome it will come true. But it doesn’t always work.
From the top you can check if your car didn’t get towed.
Meeting participants were still lingering on, checking the air quality after the meeting.
Inside, a group of people lined up for a photo-op in a mutually uncomfortable formation (because normal people are listening to the speech facing the speaker).
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_r2o8_8Yso
That’s the inner dome from the inside.
The truth truck was right – governor must have perished, good thing I didn’t flip them off.
Visit Topeka!
days. We received messages from all of the recipients thanking us for the cards. Many people post their cards online and one local girl even made a presentation in her club with cards from around the world.
