what about the plastic animals?

Mistaken Identity in Wheeling

Tonight's topic is the Internet version of the telephone game aka Chinese whispers.  Before reading any further, compare my photo above with this picture.  At first glance they are almost identical.  Look closer.  The colors are slightly different and the books are arranged differently on the shelves.

The photo above is one I took when I was in Wheeling, West Virginia a couple of years ago.  I didn't post it here but I finally uploaded it to my Flickr stream last September.  The sign is outside the Paradox Bookstore across the street from the Centre Market in Wheeling.

From September 9th, 2010 until August 8th, 2011 the photo garnered 52 views.

On August 6th, the look-alike photo was posted to the Tumblr I linked to above.

Three days later a link to that photo gets posted to a reddit books sub-community.  A big discussion about how wonderful this policy is ensues.  In the middle of that conversation someone writes that's not the original, my Flickr photo is the original and that everyone should go see my photo.  That resulted in almost 1200 views in a day.

That got my attention.  At first I was ticked off but then I noticed the photos are different.  I'm not a reddit member so I couldn't point out the difference there, but I did update my Flickr caption. 

At around the same time the reddit discussion takes off the photo also appears on Imgur.  Someone on that site also mistakenly points to my Flickr photo as the source.  I'm not signed up to Imgur so I can't leave a correction there either.

Interest wanes as the week goes on but by yesterday my photo has about 1700 new views.  By comparison, the original Tumber has over 40,000 notes and the Imgur page now has over 164,000 views.

At lunch today I checked my Flickr stats and they are spiking again.  Over 2700 new views.  As far as I can tell LettersOfNote, which has lots of Twitter followers,tweeted a link to my photo.  Ninety-one people then retweeted it.

So, thanks to a couple of cases of mistaken identity (Tineye is not perfect!), the picture above is now the second-most viewed photo on my Flickr account.  This is first, in case you were wondering.

People!  Do not miss tomorrow night's post.  It will be a good one.  I guarantee!

Around Lewisburg

1897 Bank

Dick Pointer monument and grave

Carnegie Hall

Mt. Tabor Baptist Church

Lewisburg, WV was an unexpected pleasure on my trip.  It is just down the road from the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs.  I first stopped in Lewisburg for lunch before exploring the Lost World Caverns.  I liked it so much I changed my trip so I could make another visit.

Lewisburg has an active downtown, complete with several good restaurants, coffeehouses, art galleries and bakeries.  I ate twice at the Stardust Cafe and twice bought various baked goods at the Greenbrier Valley Baking Co. (definitely stock up on their granola).

One of the world's three Carnegie Halls is in Lewisburg.  The other two being here in New York and in Dunfermline, Scotland.

Lewisburg was the home of Dick Pointer, a slave who was a hero in the battle against the Indians at nearby Fort Donnally in 1778.  For his heroics Pointer was made a free man in 1801.

Pointer died a few years before the Mt. Tabor Baptist Church building was constructed in 1836.  The church was originally a white congregation but was given to African-American Baptists after the Civil War.  I took the picture from the cemetery across the street.  I think I could have spent all afternoon looking at that shade of green.

Something else I could spend all afternoon looking at:  THE BEST MUSIC VIDEO EVER MADE.

Signs

Somewhere north of White Sulphur Springs on WV 92

Near the State Fairgrounds on Rt 219 in Fairlea, WV

Along US 250 near the West Virginia-Virginia border

A wide range of religion-inspired signs in West Virginia and possibly Virginia.

There were a whole bunch of signs similar to the top photo along a short stretch of highway north of White Sulphur Springs.  Each had a different quote on it.

I don't know what that last sign is all about.

Rural West Virginia Scenes

It was a foggy, rainy drive between Elkins and Lewisburg (via Green Bank).  From the vantage point of mid-February all that green looks really nice.

The red barn was on the way to the Rich Mountain Battlefield, location of an early Civil War skirmish.  Not too far out of Elkins I came upon the village of Beverly.  Bev looked like a neat little town but I didn't have enough time to explore it.  Instead I saw a sign pointing to the battlefield and decided to go there.  There was no distance mentioned on the sign so I just assumed it was on the edge of town.  Several miles, and six hairpin turns on a muddy gravel road later I came upon the battlefield.

Unrelated Greenpoint Puzzler:  How did this car get here?

National Radio Astronomy Observatory

The Reber Telescope

Blue Checker for getting around the campus

The Green Bank Telescope from afar

Continuing on our drive through West Virginia we find ourselves visiting the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank.  We also find ourselves referring to ourselves in the majestic plural which, if Mark Twain is correct, means we have a tapeworm.

The NRAO at Green Bank has the world's largest fully steerable radio telescope, the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope.  The GBT is 100 x 110 meters, or two acres, big.  You can sort of see it through the rain in the bottom photo.  As a side note, we are tempted to return to West Virginia to photograph every item named after Senator Byrd.  We reckon that project will take us several months.

We couldn't take pictures of the GBT from nearby because the electronics in our digital camera would interfere with the telescope's reception.  The whole area is within the National Radio.  There's no cell phone reception and only a couple of radio and TV signals.  To minimize electronic interference while moving around the campus, NRAO employees use old diesel cars, mainly Checkers.  Parts for the old cars are beginning to get scarce.

The observatory has a nifty science center and public tours are free.  At the campus entrance is the first radio telescope ever built.  It was constructed by amateur astronomer Grote Reber in his Wheaton, Illinois backyard in 1937.  Reber donated the telescope to Green Bank in the 1960s and it was painted a patriotic red, white and blue for the 1976 Bicentennial.

Unrelated:  We have been spearfishing on Lake Winnebago.

Cool Springs Park

The east-west highways in West Virginia are anything but straight.  One particularly intense stretch with a double hairpin turn occurs on US 50 between, well, I don't remember passing through any towns.  East of the hairpins you finally come upon the perfectly located Cool Springs Park, a tourist stop and general store that hasn't changed much since it opened in 1929.  It was a good place to stop and check out the corn cob pipes, state magnets and tractors rusting slowly into the earth.

Mail Pouch Factory

Even though they are merchants of death, no trip to Wheeling would be complete without a quick look at the Mail Pouch Tobacco headquarters and factory.

Finding the place involved an excellent photo not taken and one of the stranger moments on the trip.  I only knew that the factory was on the south side of town.  Driving southward from downtown I saw a building that looked like an old factory.  It was but it was the nail plant (Wheeling once was, and still may be for all I know, the country's leading nail manufacturer).  It was noon and sitting outside on a bench were five guys wearing blue work shirts talking and eating their lunch.  They would have made a great picture had they not noticed me driving slowly by.  Oh well.

A few minutes later I came upon the main post office.  I stopped for postcard stamps and asked the woman behind the counter if she knew where the Mail Pouch factory was.  She didn't know what it was or where it was located, but she would check with someone in back.  She went into the back and I stood there waiting, and waiting, and waiting.  After about five minutes I decided she wasn't coming back so I left.  Mail Pouch is about a mile south of the Post Office on the same street.

Original DiCarlo's Pizza

The restaurant doesn't look like much but DiCarlo's in Wheeling cooks up a mighty good pizza.

Did you know there was an Ohio Valley style of pizza?  I didn't either until I read Slice's regional pizza style round-up a while ago.  After reading that I knew I had to try a slice when I returned to the area.

Ohio Valley-style pizza is cooked in a pan and is square.  What gets cooked is the flaky crust topped with a slightly sweet tomato sauce.  You order by the slice.  When the pie comes out of the oven it is quickly cut and freshly grated provolone is sprinkled on top.  The cheese gets topped with a couple slices of pepperoni, placed in half a pizza box which then gets folded in half and secured with a rubber band.

I ate here on the Sunday night I got into town.  It was so good I decided to drive out to the original restaurant for lunch on Monday.  Google Maps let me down!  I punched in the address, followed the directions and found myself looking at a bunch of trees where the pizza shop should be.  Nor did I see pizza nearby.  Perfect motivation to head back to downtown Wheeling and have another couple of slices at DiCarlo's.

The Hempfield Viaduct and Tunnel

When I bring my bicycle along on a trip I like to check out the bike trails in the towns I stay in.  In my extensive research into Wheeling's bike trails (i.e. googling 'bike trail wheeling') I found out that Wheeling has a trail that runs through a tunnel.  A tunnel!  Who can resist riding a bike through a tunnel?

There's two trails in Wheeling.  I started out on the trail that paralleled the river then doubled back to find the one that led to the tunnel.  The trails intersect somewhere but I missed the sign.  Wheeling isn't very large so I just wandered around until I saw these road markings.  Aha!  The way to the tunnel.

To get to the tunnel you ride over the viaduct that crosses Wheeling Creek.  The tunnel and viaduct were built in the 1850s to connect Wheeling to points east by rail.  Both were designed by the same engineer who designed the Wheeling Suspension Bridge. The tunnel is only a few hundred feet long but it is a tunnel and that is all that mattered.  I didn't realize it at the time, but there's an infamous cave next to the tunnel.  (Actually if you want to know more about Wheeling you should just read Ryan's blog).

Three Quickies:

Looking to decorate?  Apartment Therapy used a photo of mine in a Toys as Decor post.

Photo of me harvesting corn in Illinois.  Or not.

The Hiny Heater can be yours for only $93.

Mid-Century Wheeling

Wheeling is another Rust Belt cities along the Ohio River.  Its population peaked at over 60,000 in the 1930s.  Today less than half that many live in the city.  There were plenty of empty storefronts downtown and it was easy to find a place to park.  I dutifully put a few coins in a cobweb covered meter at one spot.  While walking around I noticed that I was the only person who had fed the meter.

One benefit to having a dying downtown is that the old buildings don't get modified, which results in a de facto preservation policy.  There were plenty of buildings and storefronts that looked like they hadn't changed in decades.  Dane has a better picture of the Spic & Span Cleaners.  I was tired and didn't feel like switching out the wide angle lens.

Wheeling is only an hour from Pittsburgh, but Kaufman's of Wheeling is not related at all to Pittsburgh's old Kaufmann's Department Store.  The latter is no more but I did visit the Kaufmann family house in rural Pennsylvania.