ornoth

I write a lot of blog articles, but only about half of them ever get posted. Every so often I have to clean out my “drafts” folder, and sometimes I find an oldie but goodie that really should have been shared.

Such is the case with this puppy. Six years ago, when we were still living in Western Pennsylvania, the following map sparked a wee leetle rant:

This is a map of Pittsburgh. The green dots represent areas where the land slopes at greater than a 25 percent grade. You’d look at terrain like that and say, “Basically, that's a cliff.” Looking at the map, you might wonder why there aren’t any mountain goats native to Western Pennsylvania. You wanna know why? It’s ’cos they’re fucking scared of these hills!

If you don’t live in Pittsburgh, your city prolly doesn’t have many – if any – slopes above 25%. At 15%, people wonder if their car can make it up, or whether it’ll be able to stop at the bottom going down. But in Pittsburgh, they build roads on 15% grades. And 25%. And 30%! And 35%!!! Then they plunk whole neighborhoods down right at the edge of that precipice.

It’d be one thing if Pittsburgh’s geology was nice, stable granite like New England, or limestone like Texas. Nope. Pittsburgh’s built on something called “slushstone”. Every time it rains, some hillside somewhere in the city decides it can’t hill anymore, embarks upon a brand new career path as mud, and slides down into the nearest valley, usually taking a major road and a number of houses with it.

Believe it! There’s a neighborhood here called “The Bluff”. You know why it’s called “The Bluff”? Because it’s just one big 300-foot cliff face. What do Pittsburghers do? Cantilever no less than six separate levels of two-lane highways hanging in mid-air off the side of the cliff, stacked one on top of the other! And just for good measure, they built a big hospital and a major university right on top of the cliff. What could possibly go wrong?

Six levels of roads stacked on Pittsburgh's Duquesne bluff

Now, if you think Pittsburghers are stupid for building houses and roads on the side of an unstable cliff, consider the alternative: building houses and roads in the valleys directly underneath those slushstone cliffs. When the slushslides come, that might not be such a bright idea, either.

In fact, living in Pittsburgh is kinda stupid, like living near the top of an active volcano... Except that a volcano might not explode for twenty, forty, or a couple hundred years, whereas Pittsburgh has landslides every time it rains. And – I shit you not! – Pittsburgh actually has more rainy days per year than Seattle!

Notice those all-white flat areas on the map, right next to Pittsburgh’s famous three rivers? Those are obv the easiest ways to get around town, and as such they’re filled to bursting with railroad lines and superhighways. Good thing Pittsburgh’s rivers never flood! Oh, wait…

With highways and railroads leaving no room for cyclists on the flats, if you’re gonna bike around here, there’s only one direction you can go: up! They really missed an opportunity when they gave the city “Benigno Numine” as a motto; it really should be “Excelsior”, because no matter where you are or where you hope to go, it’s guaranteed to require an arduous climb… or five.

The whole package is enough to make me wanna hang up my bike and buy a pedal boat. Except even the rivers here are also just liquefied slushstone, liberally mixed with industrial waste and sprinkled with sunken coal barges, rail cars, and aircraft.

If you’ve spent much time with me, you probably discovered that I mark my paper money and track where it goes using the Where’s George? website. And you’ve probably asked yourself, “Why?”

There’s no good answer actually, other than boredom and curiosity.

In 2004 I was between jobs and had nothing better to do, and I remembered having seen one of the very first Where’s George? marked bills at work back in 1998. I thought it might be interesting to see where my cash went, so I registered and started entering the serial numbers of all the currency that passed through my hands.

However, I quickly learned that doing it ad hoc would be a huge pain. I found it much easier to make one trip to the bank every month or so, pulling out $200 in $1 bills and another $200 in $5s. In order to get more bills into circulation, I tended to avoid using $10s and $20s, but I did drop a fair number of $100 bills off at casinos!

Whenever I traveled, I’d spend the bills I’d entered in Boston, so that someone who found my bill in Las Vegas or Pittsburgh or St. Thomas could see where it had come from. Then I’d pick up more cash to bring home, since it would be equally interesting for people in New England to receive bills from faraway places.

Over the past ten years, I entered 17,600 bills, 95 percent of them $1s and $5s, totaling about $64,500 worth of currency. Most of those were entered in Boston or Maine or Pittsburgh, but I’ve entered bills in many other locations, including Las Vegas, St. Thomas, the Caymans, Puerto Rico, Korea, Scranton, and Boise!

Out of all those bills, 1,450 of them have been subsequently entered (1,600 times) by someone else, which is about a 9 percent hit rate. On average, I get a hit every other day. Since I don’t mark my bills very conspicuously, few of my bills get hit multiple times; only 14 of them have been entered by three different people after my initial entry.

My bills have been hit in every county in Connecticut and Rhode Island, but I still haven’t gotten the needed Martha’s Vineyard hit to complete my home state, or the one remaining (Coos) county in New Hampshire.

My bills have been hit in every US state except five obscure ones: Alaska, Arkansas, Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota.

Beyond our borders, my bills have been re-entered in Canada, Puerto Rico, the US and British Virgin Islands, Anguila, Bermuda, England, Ireland, France, Germany, the Philippines, Cambodia, and Australia (my farthest traveler went 10,500 miles to Melbourne).

My longest “sleeper”—a bill that resurfaces after a long time with no activity—was spent at a restaurant in Scranton in 2006 and showed up at a grocery store in the same town around Christmas 2013, more than seven and a half years later!

If you really want to know more, here’s a link to my Where's George? profile.

While all this was going on, I discovered that the most active Where’s George? users get together in regional “gatherings”. I attended a number of local meet-ups in the early years, and got to know Hank, the site’s irascible creator. But there haven’t been any gatherings in Boston for years.

Over the past six months, I’ve been looking critically at where I invest all my time, energy, and attention, and I decided to stop entering new bills into Where’s George? on March 25th, my tenth “Georgeaversary”. The date was convenient, and the decision pretty inevitable.

Why inevitable? Well, it’s like this… When you first start “Georging”, all kind of interesting things happen. The first time one of your bills gets “hit” (entered) by another person. Your first out-of-state hit. Your first hit in another country. Getting a hit in every county in a state. And so forth. But over time, those milestones become less and less frequent. And as I said, it no longer offers the social opportunities it once did.

Plus it’s a bit silly. It’s not the kind of hobby that would impress a girlfriend or your co-workers; yet it can be a rather difficult one to hide from them, if you ever go out to lunch together!

Ultimately, it came down to whether I was getting enough entertainment out of the hobby to make it worth the investment of time spent entering and marking bills… And in the end, that answer was unequivocal.

So now it’s on to other things.

I’ve always been a big fan of maps and mapping. I can remember living in Portland (see below), and making a map of the streets in the neighborhood. That’s pretty early, because we moved out of Portland when I was eight years old. I had a whole collection of topo maps by the time I was thirteen, and I one of the first people to own a handheld GPS, back back in March 2000 when Garmin produced its first model. And, of course, I’ve stayed on top of Internet-based mapping technologies from Etak to Mapquest to Google Maps and MS Live Search. I wrote my first Google Maps mashup as soon as the mapping API was released.

However, the mashups I created have been somewhat superceded by new functionality that Google has added to Google Maps, including the ability to share maps, if you so desire. So here’s a few of the maps that I’ve put together, in case you’re at all interested:

Ornoth’s House: A pointer to where I live, Boston’s former Hotel Vendome. Mostly this one’s just somewhere I can point people if they need directions.
Places I’ve Lived: A plot of all the places where I have lived, which are all in Maine and Massachusetts.
Places I’ve Visited: A general view of some of the places that I’ve visited. It’s only really valid at the state/city level.
DargonZine Summit Locations: These are the places where my magazine has held its annual writers’ gatherings. Virtually all of them are located in a place where one of my writers lived at the time.
Pan-Mass Challenge: The route of my annual Pan-Mass Challenge charity ride. The route varies slightly from year to year, so it’s not perfect, but it’s close, and will give you an idea where we go.
Flickr Map: This one’s actually a mashup hosted by Flickr, but it’s a nice geographical plot of the photos I’ve uploaded to my Flickr account.

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