We’ve been living in Ohio for about 6 months now, and I’m still getting used to utter flatness and straightness of the roads. It makes getting around pretty easy, but not so interesting. Although it does give us a little more time to see upcoming sights such as the Field of Giant Concrete Corn in Dublin, OH or the Big Butter Jesus in Monroe, OH; two sites I’m looking forward to seeing in the near future.

the Field of Giant Concrete Corn in Dublin, OH

the Big Butter Jesus in Monroe, OH

I thought it was just going to be an adventure for Cooper and I, but Kelly and Ellery joined us for what turned out to be a driving, sighting, eating, and playground adventure. By the way, Ellery picked up two new nicknames today: Elle’s Bells and Beaner. (Can you figure out the provenance of each? One is decidedly easier than the other.)

Here’s a little background information about the big guy from maisonbisson.com:

PITTSBURGH – How can you find the Cadet Restaurant in Kittanning? The question is: How can you miss it, what with the 30-foot-tall cowboy standing out front on Route 422 wearing what looks to be a 10,000-gallon hat and holding a hamburger that looks like a quarter-tonner?

Customers “go by the cowboy,” says owner George Morda. “They like that.” Morda, who started the business northeast of Pittsburgh in 1952, met this big boy at the 1962 Chicago restaurant show and decided to buy him for $3,900.

As the fiberglass statue helped rope in diners, it acquired the nickname “Cowboy Sam” from Sam the police officer, who patrolled the popular drive-in lot the restaurant ran at the time.

Alas, one foggy morning in, Morda believes, 1978, the big man in white was felled by a Ford Bronco that was smashed into by a loaded coal truck coming from Indiana, Pa.

Sam’s broken body lay behind the restaurant, the subject of some pranks by local students who’d “borrow” his hat or his whole head.

But some Cadet customers eventually pieced Sam together again, and they finally stood him back up by crane in 2002. The traveling public, who still tend to stop and snap pictures and buy 50-cent postcards, couldn’t have been happier. Nor could Morda, who says, Sam “helped me out tremendously in my business,” increasing it by 20 percent or so. “That’s what he’s there for.”

The cowboy is great. He lived up to all my expectations, but I think Cooper was a little scared of the big guy. We went inside the cafe for an early dinner. Of course, I had to get their signature dish: the “Poor Boy,” which is essentially a double cheese burger.

After dinner, we tested the GPS to see what kind of Points-Of-Interest it had to offer. We ended up at a community park in Kittanning, PA. The park was pretty desolate, and its hard to understand how a town like that is still sustaining itself, but Cooper had a great time running around.

You can see more picture at our flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/thedahlpod/sets/72157617661502652/

What’s Pecha Kucha? Basically, each presenter is given 20 slides and 20 seconds per slide. The presentation is set to automatic, so the slides keep moving forward whether you are ready or not. That’s 6:40 to present an interesting idea and tell a compelling story.

It was great fun, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.

I presented an update to a side-project I have been working on just for the fun of it: my side view mirror project. Basically, I’ve been taking photographs of drivers through their side view mirrors during my daily commutes.

Check out the video below to experience it for yourself.

Pecha Kucha – Side View Mirrors Project from Erik Dahl on Vimeo.

At the time of writing this, I’m working on putting together an independent site for this project. More details to come.

During my presentation, I mentioned a few kindred projects and inspirations:

Andrew Bush – 66 Drives

Brian Collier – The Highway Expedition

Brian Collier – Very Small Objects

Julian Montague – The Stray Shopping Cart Project

Let me know what you think.

You can download the presentation here: dahl_PKN.pdf

We are going to see The Gruffalo (a play) with Cooper and some friends tomorrow (Sat, Feb. 28, 2009).

It will be Cooper’s first play and I’m looking forward to it.

I’ll try to follow up with a review and maybe some pics.

Tall Stories, a children’s theater company from England, stages The Gruffalo, a musical adventure set in the deep, dark woods. It’s adapted from the award-winning book of the same name by Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler. A mouse, one of the characters in the play, uses tall tales about the enormous Gruffalo, a monster-like character, to scare danger away. But what happens when he encounters the Gruffalo in the rough and real? This musical is brought to you by Pittsburgh International Children’s Theater; it’s best for ages 3 and older. [ via: WQED ]

Here’s a brief excerpt

Unemployment is 5.5 percent, far below the national average. While housing prices sank nearly everywhere in the last year, they rose here. Wages are also up. Foreclosures are comparatively uncommon.

Read the full article at the NYTimes…

Beau Weston is a sociology professor at Centre College. [full disclosure: I took several course from Beau during my time at Centre between 1994-1998 while I was getting my BA in cultural anthropology and philosophy.]

Apparently he is visiting his sister in my own town of Mt. Lebanon, PA. and couldn’t resist the chance to do a little social theorizing while he is here. His claim is that Lebo is a “crunchy suburb” as specified by David Brooks in On Paradise Drive. I initially questioned his claims and have done a little digging to clarify my instincts. Below is an excerpt from the post, “The Coffee House Test of a Crunchy Suburb” on his blog followed by my thoughts and commentary.

David Brooks introduces the useful concept of the “crunchy suburb” in On Paradise Road. This is an inner suburb of a big city. It has more of the people he called “bobos” (bourgeois bohemians) in an earlier book. Among suburbs, it is likely to have more professionals, better schools, and more sophisticated consumer goods.

We are in Mt. Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb where my sister is hosting Christmas this year. It meets these criteria. Mt. Lebanon has, I think, been more corporate and Republican in the past, but is shifting in the professional and Democratic direction that many good-schools inner suburbs are.

Danville, KY, is too much of a small town to have such nuances among the various sections of town. The coffee houses are in the middle of town and serve everyone from all the neighborhoods and “suburbs.” We needed to come to a larger city to see a crunchy suburb in action.

We are sitting in a coffee house in Mt. Lebanon. It filled up just after school drop-off. Mrs. G. suggested that this is a measure of a crunchy suburb. The first necessity of a weekday morning is to get the kids to school. The second necessity is espresso.

In comparison to Danville, KY, Mt. Lebanon may be further down the scale towards a crunchy suburb, but I think it still has a quite a long way to go be anywhere near a true crunchy suburb as laid out by David Brooks in his book On Paradise Drive.

According to David Brooks in an article he wrote for the NYTimes, he summarizes a crunchy suburb as:

You don’t have to travel very far in America to see radically different sorts of people, most of whom know very little about the communities and subcultures just down the highway. For example, if you are driving across the northern band of the country — especially in Vermont, Massachusetts, Wisconsin or Oregon — you are likely to stumble across a crunchy suburb. These are places with meat-free food co-ops, pottery galleries, sandal shops (because people with progressive politics have a strange penchant for toe exhibitionism). Not many people in these places know much about the for-profit sector of the economy, but they do build wonderful all-wood playgrounds for their kids, who tend to have names like Milo and Mandela. You know you’re in a crunchy suburb because you see the anti-lawns, which declare just how fervently crunchy suburbanites reject the soul-destroying standards of conventional success. Anti-lawns look like regular lawns with eating disorders. Some are bare patches of dirt, others are scraggly spreads of ragged, weedlike vegetation, the horticultural version of a grunge rocker’s face.

Definition of crunchy suburb:

A typically inner ring suburb characterized as progressive, anti-commercial, or countercultural, particularly found in cities located in the northern rim of the United States through Vermont, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Oregon, and Washington.

Satirized by David Brooks as a “progressive suburb dominated by urban exiles who con- sider themselves city folks at heart but moved out to suburbia because they needed more space,” a crunchy suburb is populated by countercultural urbanites with kids as well as businesses that cater to these families, such as food co-ops. Brooks sees crunchy suburbanites as open-minded, inclusive, and in possession of the last truly anti-commercial lifestyle.

While I do see some of these characteristics in myself and in the circle of friends that we have in Lebo, I think its a too much to say that the whole of Mt Lebanon could be classified as a crunchy suburb. It may be trending that way, but I think it is still more closely associated with other cultural zones described later in the book.

He goes on on to describe other other rings of suburbia further from city center that I would equate more closely to my experience in Mt. Lebanon.

Then a few miles away, you might find yourself in an entirely different cultural zone, in an upscale suburban town center packed with restaurants — one of those communities that perform the neat trick of being clearly suburban while still making it nearly impossible to park. The people here tend to be lawyers, doctors and professors, and they drive around in Volvos, Audis and Saabs because it is socially acceptable to buy a luxury car as long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy.

Here you can find your Trader Joe’s grocery stores, where all the cashiers look as if they are on loan from Amnesty International and all the snack food is especially designed for kids who come home from school screaming, ”Mom, I want a snack that will prevent colorectal cancer!” Here you’ve got newly renovated Arts and Crafts seven-bedroom homes whose owners have developed views on beveled granite; no dinner party in this clique has gone all the way to dessert without a conversational phase on the merits and demerits of Corian countertops. Bathroom tile is their cocaine: instead of white powder, they blow their life savings on handcrafted Italian wall covering from Waterworks.

Here are a few pages from the book describing “crunchy suburbs” via Google Book Search:

Read if for yourself and make your own decision.

Related:

Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes

Cardboard, phone books, junk mail, magazines and newspapers will all be picked up as part of curbside recycling beginning next month.

The South Hills Area Council of Governments (SHACOG), of which Mt. Lebanon is a member, has awarded a new trash pickup contract to Waste Management, Inc., which will take effect in January. Under the terms of the contract, recycling will be handled by Green Star, an automated Neville Island facility that is equipped to handle single stream recycling. This means all of your recycling can be co-mingled in one container.

Under the new contract, the municipality pays a fl at fee to the hauler, instead of a price per ton. Mt. Lebanon will pay $1.4 million a year for trash pickup and $288,000 a year for pickup of recyclables. This breaks down to about $138.84 annually per household for the two services.

Beginning in January, the following materials will be collected by the recycling contractor: brown and green glass; aluminum, steel and bi-metal cans; plastics marked with numbers 1 through 7; copier paper, paperback books, colored paper, fi le folders, hardback books (minus the hard covers); mail inserts, business cards, shredded paper, catalogs, telephone books, poster board, greeting cards, newsprint, magazines and corrugated cardboard. Material can be placed into the recycling bins as-is, with the exception of corrugated cardboard boxes, which must be flattened and can be no more than three feet wide or long.

Recycling will be collected every other week. Inserted into this month’s issue is the trash and recycling collection schedule for 2009. Copies of the schedule are also available on weekdays from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Mt. Lebanon Customer Service Center, located in the lobby of the Mt. Lebanon Municipal Building, 710 Washington Road.

via: [Blog Lebo]

The beer on tap will be from Troegs Brewing Company.

Its on my calendar, and I hope to see you there.

Let me know if you are attending in the comments at the bottom of the page:

I just heard that Hillary Rodham Clinton will be kicking off the final two days of GOTV at the Mt Lebanon field office this Monday at 9:30am. If you are coming get there early because it will be a full house. Even if you cannot get in the office be sure to stick around because Hillary will most likely want to speak to those waiting outside the office.

Canvassing will start at 10am sharp. Please come and help us turn the South Hills blue!

Mt Lebanon Field Office
642 Washington Road
Pittsburgh, PA 15228

[From technology + politics and Blog Lebo]