Pike Creek

I love doing map overlays on Google Earth. I learned how while working on map digitization at the Parkside Archives and have found the skill tremendously useful both for my own research, and for work for various classes.

Tonight, as I work on my history paper, I did some playing with overlays and figured out that a dump site mentioned in a 1951 Kenosha Common Council meeting is the same site that is now a "bulk waste drop off site:" in other words, it's still a dump. And it's located directly on top of the bed of Pike Creek. The council was voting to straighten 250 feet of the creek at the the dump site in '51.

Poor old creek. it was the dumping grounds for the world's largest tannery from the late 19th century through to the late 1920s, and dumping grounds for the city of Kenosha afterward. No wonder people wanted to bury it and forget it!

I'm most of the way through a draft of this paper. I'm leaving citation details for later. That part is always so annoying.

It used to be so much easier to get rid of your garbage....

Oh lord, I missed this the first time through. It's hard to concentrate on microfilm for prolonged periods and not start missing things. But as I read through my prints tonight I found this amazing piece from the Kenosha Evening News in March of 1959.

"The city waste department is dumping its trash into the basin now. It would take five years to fill the basin using trash collections alone." But that was too slow. As well as saying that the city would try to acquire fill dirt to add to the trash, the paper says "Citizens and contractors desiring to to dispose of non-burnable rubbish are asked to dump in the basin area instead."

So basically, the city started filling in the creek by dumping garbage into it. But there wasn't enough, so they asked citizens to simply come by and dump more garbage themselves. Right into the creek!

Poor old creek. From the mid-19th century to the early 20th, it was the dumping grounds for the biggest tannery in the world. After that, it was a dumping ground for the city. In fact, I figured out tonight via map overlays that the current dump at 50th and Sheridan has been a dump at least since the '50s and is right on top of the old riverbed. And *then* the city decided to actually use raw garbage as landfill!

Makes me wonder what's under all that land right now....

Library Thing?

Does anyone still use Library Thing? (https://www.librarything.com/)

Do you feel like it's a really neat idea to enable people to look at each other's bookshelves virtually? Or is it a way for people to selectively, even pretentiously, share portions of their library to make their image in particular for the benefit of people who'll likely never see all of their books?

I'd started cataloging all my books on here once when I was still with my ex, and I'm playing with the idea of starting over and cataloging *my* stuff instead of ours. I like to think it would be useful to me, having all my books in a searchable database. But at this point in time, there also starts to be confusion about physical versus digital. For instance, do I include my PDFs of things like Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" or Scott's "Seeing Like a State" (speaking of selective choice of titles that may border on pretention....) with all my physical books?

(no subject)

History draft is done! I'm going to finish up the archaeology directed reading questions.

Music and Mapping

I've really missed sitting and working at my computer with music. I do it while photo editing, but music is not conducive to paper writing. I realized tonight, though, that it works swimmingly while working with cartographic software.

I've gone through Dark Side of the Moon, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank, and am partly through the Indigo Girls' self-titled album. I think of myself as something of an audiophile. I still haven't managed to get my vintage Marantz receiver repaired, (That reminds me; my uncle was willing to look at it. I have to bring it to Easter tomorrow.) but I have a a decent set of three-way speakers that have a midrange response, unlike those little subwoofer and satellite sets that are so popular for PCs, all highs and bass. These belonged to my grandfather, and playing music on them makes me think of him.

Central Park labeling and Sarah McLachlan are next.

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Also, I'm playing my music mostly from physical CDs, on Winamp 2.9, copyright 2003, on a computer running Windows XP. I may be old-school, cheap, stubborn, or some combination thereof.