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With 28 days left before Halloween, here's your third installment of 2013's creepy to see list: The Autumn at OZ Festival.
Now, tiny-world theme parks are creepy in their own right, and the cheaper the creepier. While dusty animatronic elves and reindeer are supposed to give us a year-round feeling of wonderment, they usually just give us nightmares.
Beech Mountain's Land of OZ theme park in the mountains of North Carolina was likely intended to do a little of both. After being abandoned for two decades, owners continue to open the decaying relic once a year in October for the Autumn in OZ Festival, scaring the crap out of us and haunting us in our sleep.
While Philadelphia's ridiculously low property tax (or rather, absent reassessment of property values) has been an attraction to buy in the city, there's a flip side to the city's inefficiency.
Shocker, huh?
It seems for many long time residents and land hoarders, the perception of the city's property tax has been optional. So much so that currently the city is owed half a billion dollars in backed up property tax.
Well, the city is coming after you. That means foreclosures, wage garnishments, and leans. Words some property owners have evaded for decades despite our crumbling school district and struggling tax based economy.
In addition to streamlining the city's collections efforts, the city may even be usurping the Sheriff Office's sales program because of their corruption and ineptitude.
Check out the numbers here.
As the Union League allegedly plots to pilfer the remains of Philadelphia's public schools, Nutter's administration is poised to do what's best with what's left.
School closures have left the city with 31 unused buildings and at this point, and the city is left to determine which can be sold to help fund the school system, and which can be reused to benefit their communiy.
It's not a fun activity. In fact, it sounds a lot like the early loose reset of Parks and Recreation, the one where Ron Swanson suggested selling off City Hall and turning it into a TJ Maxx. While that didn't happen, our truthsmay be more realistic than fiction.
PlanPhilly posted a detailed article about the endeavor, at some points optimistic, at others, not so.
On one hand, the city is doing what it has to do. On the other, these sales usually go notoriously low and the properties can wind up in questionable hands. Unfortunately the city is not in the position to dictate what happens to the property it sells, just that it sells before it falls into disrepair.
With residential develop low, and in some of these areas nonexistent, they're tough sales. Universities have been noted for grabbing these opportunities, but so have predatory land hoarders.
We'll just have to wait to see.
It's October 1st, and time to kick off my favorite Holiday Season of the year right.
Lake Natron in Tanzania is a real life River Styx, with deadly water turning its animals into pillars of salt.
With extremely high levels of sodium carbonate, primarily from volcanic ash, this salt lake can get as hot as 60 degrees Celsius.
Take a look.
Welcome to the Great Shutdown of 2013. I really should add Facebook to my list of sites to block whenever anything politically sensitive is happening...along with CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.
While liberals post links to a shuttered Yellowstone National Park, conservatives blame a plan that was voted into law. Others cite wild claims that the unemployed will be forced to purchase Obamacare at rates ranging from $299 a month to a cool grand. Meanwhile friends inside the Beltway post pictures from cushy Shutdown Parties.
All of them managed to piss in my Corn Flakes this morning.
First of all, good lucky shutting down a park the size of New Hampshire. We barely kept the gates closed at Valley Forge past 11am.
And to conservatives claiming that their unemployed brethren will be forced to eat a one thousand dollar insurance premium every month, most people don't spend $12,000 a year on health care. If two idiots optionally enrolled in this mythical plan they would actually be profiting the country. Besides, with so many conservatives complaining about "lazy welfare recipients," wouldn't such an astronomical penalty encourage everyone to go out and get a job?
It's amazing how comical people can be without cracking a smile.
Oh, and to all the ass holes sipping wine on your DuPont Circle roof decks laughing about the circus you created, your detachment from the country you represent entirely encompasses what's to blame.
After all, when Washington shuts down, the National Zoo closes, field trips to the Smithsonian get cancelled, and the Botanical Gardens close. Boohoo. Washington doesn't go out of business. Like the Congress that made the earth stand still, those that caused it will never carry the weight of their actions.
We will.
The National Gallery will reopen, Metro will run as smoothly and cleanly as it always has, and Congressional lackeys will go back to work in a week or two, looking for the next way to screw America. It's easy for five million cockroaches to thrive on the banks of the Potomac when they can feast on the carcass of the rest of us.
For other cities it's not so simple. Tourism will always thrive in Washington simply because it's Washington. We've spent decades building a fragile industry that enjoys just a fraction of Washington's success. Jobs in DC don't disappear. It's an industry town that pays itself with the taxes that we generate. When it doesn't have enough, it just grabs more.
Perhaps Washington doesn't understand the economic complexities of a real city because it isn't one. Maybe they don't understand the fragility of competitive industries because its nonprofit market siphons capital off the rest of the nation to thrive.
Rebuilding an independent city a complicated endeavor. Even larger cities like Los Angeles and Chicago will feel the after effects of DC's neglected duties.
DC doesn't care. It's become a nationally funded entity that exists solely to serve itself. Like our own corrupt City Council's detachment from Philadelphia, the U.S. Congress and Senate are even further removed from the America they represent. It's as if the Beltway itself is a great wall around the region's deluded narcissism.
It's no surprise that the phrase "what happens in Washington stays in Washington" gets uttered without a wink of irony.
Closure signs plastered on parks and landmarks around the nation are little more than a message from Congress. It's pretty obvious that this is just political maneuvering when much of what's actually closed consist of parks and landmarks that require no more security than that hired to enforce their closures.
Is the Congressional Health Care system closed? Are those that forced the shutdown on unpaid leave? Of course not. The shutdown can't affect those who shut it down. Why would it? It doesn't serve their interests.
As hissy fits go, this is as expensive as they get.
Outside Washington, we'll lose billions, people will be laid off, and businesses will close. These are concepts a Beltway Lobotomite can't understand. Maybe they'll understand come election season. If voters outside Washington haven't learned what Capitol Hill has become, government shutdowns could become the new filibuster. We don't want that.
