Image by jimmywayne via Flickr      Malone, NY, I do love thee…but have you learned the tyranny of the quick fix? We look for easy ways out of problems and so we bring in prisons. Oh the economy will revive.     Nope. Just brought in prison families and lots of convicts who clog the judicial system.     We …[ read more ]

                           Image via Wikipedia      Pompeii existed over two thousand years ago as a prosperous town. People loved and fought, bought and bartered, reared their families and planned for the future. Until Mount Vesuvius had other things to say. Within twenty-four hours the angry volcano annihilated their world.     Ash preserved the torment of the humans who had lived …[ read more ]

Image via Wikipedia      Everyone loves a good scandal, so how do we create one? We are all familiar with Dutch Shultz, but gangsters like him are either in short supply or unwanted in our communities–unless we stuff them in the prisons that decorate our outskirts of our lovely villages.      In 1815 we discovered a …[ read more ]

     Blessed with more pears than anyone has the right to own, I decided to make pear butter. Never having done something before has never been a deterrent to me. So I began: I ran off a recipe. Of course when googling information, the first item the search turns up is the most reliable, right? This …[ read more ]

    Can you imagine living peacefully, running a successful business and having all of that ripped away simply because of your race?  The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 , nicknamed the Bloodhound Law, did just that. This law deemed that even if people of color had escaped or had been born free, they could be sent South based solely on …[ read more ]