Archive for the ‘Jeremiah Tolbert’ Category
Paranormal Sites of Kansas: The Big Well & Meteorite
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007
It is no coincidence that the world’s largest hand-dug well and one of the world’s largest pallasite meteorites are both found in Greensburg, Kansas. And it is no coincidence that a recent tornado flattened the prairie town and everything within it.
The official stories of these two artifacts do not intertwine. But a town of the size of Greensburg, Kansas had no need for a 109 foot deep, 32 foot wide well. The hole’s use as a well is an old cover-up, as is the story of a Hutchison man locating the meteorite in the 1900s with a primitive metal detector.
Local stories tell that the simple farmers and ranchers of Greensburg found themselves compelled to dig the well for no reason that any could speak of in the spring of 1887. They dug for days on end, in shifts, each man and woman confused as the other. Only the children were spared from the compulsion. After 90 feet, they discovered the stone, which weighed over 1,000 pounds. My source, the great-grandaughter of one of the well’s architects, claims, that as soon as the townspeople touched the stone, it floated into the air like a balloon, and the diggers were able to gently guide it up the shaft and into the light of the moon. Once it arrived at the surface, its weight and mass returned just as the compulsion to dig disappeared.
The meteorite remained undisturbed, and the real story of its discovery mostly forgotten, until 2006, when the largest tornado to strike Kansas in 30 years touched down within Greensburg, destroying thousands of homes. The town is only just beginning to rebuild. And while you can still see a meteorite on display at the Big Well, it is not the meteorite from before. Local officials have replaced it with a fake made from plaster; after the twister, the original meteorite was never found.
My Cell Phone is a Slut
Friday, October 5th, 2007
Seriously, my phone screws anything its ports are compatible with, and it’s only a week old, so it’s compatible with everything. It’s constantly skittering off to copulate with other consumer gadgets, which is annoying, because I’ve been waiting for this girl to call that I met at a skin-PAN party a few days ago. She had the most complete collection of Dr. Who episodes in her files I have ever seen–even the reconstructed episodes with the original audio and stills from production. I dropped my vCard, and I know she acked it. I’m afraid that while my phone is humping the cappuchino machine, it gets poor reception, and my voice mail has iterated out pretty far recently and it asks for instructions in Esperanto right now. My Esperanto isn’t very good. I’ve tethered it to my PAN for now, but that just pisses it off and I’m afraid it might start dropping calls on purpose.
I mean, I understand the whole principle of evolutionary processes in iterative product design, and the eggs that the phone lays usually net me enough credit to pay my carrier bills, but I think there’s something wrong with this one. Nobody else I know has a phone that screws so much. I tried calling technical support yesterday, but all I got was a calm voice of a woman telling me that the problem that I was calling about had already been diagnosed and a hotfix was being deployed promptly. There’s something a little unsettling about technical support that knows what you’re calling about before you even dial the number.
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Now my phone seems a little depressed, and I’m wondering if I should have made that call after all. The touch display doesn’t seem as bright, and the ring tones that normally match my mood towards the caller are all break-up songs from the 80s that I barely even recognize. I promise the phone that I’ll let it off its tether at the next skin-PAN party, and that seems to cheer it up a little bit, but it’s still not the same. I think I kind of miss my slutty phone. So I call technical support again. All I get is an error message, saying that my problem can’t be diagnosed, in a tone of voice that implies that I don’t really have a problem, and then it gives me the URL for a dating site I haven’t tried yet. I use my phone to upload a profile to the site, and I wonder if maybe I shouldn’t just set this phone free and upgrade to something from the next hatch.
Okay, so maybe not. This phone is black, and that color isn’t trending well lately, so my chances of getting a new one in the color I like is pretty slim. I’ll wait a couple more days and see if black comes back. It’s usually popular on Wednesdays.