Southern Gothic

See More Trees Here

Perkins Follow Up

Given some of the feedback (comments and e-mails) to my post Developers, Perkins, and Our Shared Environment, I do sense a need to clarify and elaborate.

I have not talked to Robbie Perkins in years, mostly because we travel in different circles (you think?). When I did know him he was only ever nice to me, as was his wife. In fact, I liked the Perkins family very much. Robbie always carried himself in a gentlemanly demeanor. I thought of him as a gracious person and a good and decent man. I would suppose that those qualities have a significant role in his electability.

I wrote what I did about his comments regarding water runoff because I wanted to illustrate the "mindset" of developers, a mindset which has always mystified me somewhat.

And truth be told I have gotten more and more disenchanted with the power which the "developer" class yields in local decisions. There does seem to be a quintessential good old boy network ("boy" being used loosely of course) going on here. When otherwise good and decent men and women are drawn into making back door deals and decisions which impact the public good, who work the system and take advantage of poorly written laws that give them undue power, who use their wealth to "help" like minded folk get elected, and who use their influence on city and county councils to advance their industry if not their own companies, then no matter how good their motives may be what you have is an incipient corruption. I think it has gone well beyond incipient. But I would not myself call Mr. Perkins a sleaze ball as did one commenter. I don't think that way about him.

I think her is just being a developer, a developer mixed up in local politics. It's a bad combination.

I am interested in reading more about Protest Petition issue as brought to my attention by triadwatch. The TREBIC cartel does concern me, and it seems cartel is not an inappropriate designation.

Downtown Haze, Rain in North Greensboro

I was walking up South Elm Street yesterday (from the Green Bean back to my office), about 3:30 I think, and noticed the air. It's hard for me have a thought without wanting to write, and I was already composing a sentence with silly alliteration to describe it - "heavy humid haze hangs"....but my the time I got back to my office other things took front seat. Anyway, it was Columbiaesque outside, just not so hot. I was surprised today to read about the fire "down east" (as they say in these parts) bringing the smoky air back this way.

That itself would seem odd - a fire east of here effecting our air - but the storm in north Greensboro Thursday was similar. It was cool to watch from my office window. I could see the rain, the lightning, the ominous clouds drifting not west to east or south west to northeast, but east to west! I called home and yes, it was pouring they said. When I left the office not much later it was clear we had gotten creamed - Richland Creek was almost overflowing, trees were bent down from the weight of the water, many trees were split (hurray, a few more Bradford pears gone!), tree limbs of all kinds were down, and trash containers were strewn everywhere.

We have had three or four huge storms where we have been absolutely deluged by rain, and I have checked two days running and there has been no record of any rain at the airport. I would guess that we have had six inches more rain in the last month than they have had there.

Greensboro Wiki

Early this week a Clemson student found some pictures on my Flikr site of Clemson in the mid 1970's. He made lots of neat comments. In one of the comments he made reference to ClemsonWiki, a site he had checked out to find out more about Issaqueena Dam, a favorite playground in my Clemson days. See the ClemsonWiki article about Issaqueena Dam here.

Anyway, poking around ClemsonWiki revived an idea I had floated a while back about us having a local Greensboro Wiki site. I had put a fair amount of time into our church sponsored site The Back Porch, but because (I think) of it being sponsored by our church, it was just really hard to find people to contribute articles and expertise to it.

I would love to be a part of a true community wiki site, and would gladly devote considerable time and effort to such an effort. I do NOT have the computer know how to set it up and maintain it though. I would be happy to serve, perhaps with a couple of others, on an oversight board, or maintenance group, or whatever they call it. There is this sentence on Clemson's site - "ClemsonWiki.com is currently maintained by C. mark Sublette, Evilphoenix, Darvian, Levine, 3toes, and Victor." I think you have to have a few folks to keep mischief away, like a flood of articles about the best local strippers, or articles in praise of the local Klan leaders, or just total nonsense. I am not sure how that is dealt with in Wikipedia but there must be some way to take out the trash. And there would need to be the computer software maintenance I am sure as well.

I looked up "GreensboroWiki" and it looks like the domain has lapsed. One could go with Triad Wiki or GuilfordWiki I suppose if not.

I think having such a site would be an asset to our community, and would draw in the expertise of a lot of people.

I am moving into a new phase of my work in my job and community and this is one project I would love to be a part of. I would gladly give ALL of my backporch.org content to it, whatever is deemed worthy, as we phase out that site (or not, if GreensboroWiki doesn't happen).

Anyone interested?

Can You Help Me Name Our Buildings?

I've taken a few pictures of downtown buildings over the last few months, and would like to name them accurately, but I don't know the names of many of them. Nor do I know much about architecture, so I can't really name the "type" (genre?) of building it is. I also don't know much about the history of when these buildings were built, which would be nice to add.

Really, anything you can think of would be great. Also, some of the buildings are reflected off others. There are a few "jumbled" reflections. If you can name those structures you get bonus points.

If any of you would like to help you can go right to my Flickr site and see that most of the recent pictures are of buildings north of Market. Scroll down a page or two ands there are many buildings south of Market. You can add comments right below each picture, or, you can add comments here on this page.

Go to the set Guilford County and all the building pictures I have so far are there.

I'd love the help as I try to present Greensboro and Guilford County to the world!

Joel