Wanna Buy a Castle?

Today I posted over at Picture West Virginia. I do hope you'll follow me there, even if it's just to see the coolest house for sale in Morgantown.

Oh, and if you'd like to listen to a good new album for free, check out Freddie Stevenson's All My Strange Companions. It's well worth the listen, courtesy of his U.S. publicity company, Fanatic.

Hot Spots

I almost hate to write this post because I think it could support negative stereotypes of West Virginia, but we've got a bizarre thing going on that's just getting out of control. I know this is happening in other places too, but I'm not sure how widespread it is.

A few years ago legislation passed that legalized video gambling machines in small doses. Naturally bars started taking advantage of it, and it didn't take long for a whole new breed of place to open: the hot spot. These new gambling bars often go into some pretty weird locations, spots that would never host a bar otherwise. It's pretty insane how many of these places are popping up.

There's a three-mile stretch of road on the way to my house, partly commercial and partly low-income residential, and there are six of these places on that route. Check 'em out.

This place used to be a used-car lot:



Here's where someone put one in a gas station:


I really don't know what kind of building this one was. Maybe a house?



Old retail plazas are prime locations for hot spots, like this one:



This was a little NASCAR restaurant that converted. Cool paint job on the garage door:



So I was driving down this road the other day and I noticed a guy painting his place in WVU blue and gold. The Dalai Mama noticed the same thing and mentioned it later that night, because it was just strange. It wasn't until a couple of days later that we found out why he was painting it that way:



Yes, it's a trailer. And not a modular-in-a-commercial-lot sort of trailer, but a crappy-old-trailer-park sort of trailer.

I'm going to start calling them crack houses, I think. Seems applicable.

My Flash Mob Idea

About a year and a half ago or so, flash mobs were getting a lot of press. Of course this gave me an idea which, given the warm weather of late, I should probably have brought up a couple of weeks ago. But I didn't remember it until yesterday, so I'll bring it up now and maybe we can make it happen next winter.

I'd like to organize a different kind of flash mob. We -- and by we, I mean any of you who are close to Morgantown, preferably if you have access to a pick-up truck -- wait until we get a very big snow. It needs to be good packing snow, too. When this happens, we all get together with a couple of pick-up trucks and build the body parts of eight snowmen. We don't put them on top of each other, but we do decorate the individual parts with coal, sticks, carrots, holly, or any other cool, bio-degradable stuff we can think of. Then we load up the trucks and wait until the middle of the night. This would work better if it's still snowing, so there will be next to no traffic.

Next, we drive downtown and quickly assemble the snowmen -- two on each corner, opposite sides of the street, at the corners of High St. and Willey, Fayette, Walnut, and Pleasant -- and we take off.

Finally, an photographer accomplice follows us down the street and shoots some photos, just in case some humbug destroys the snowmen before the morning traffic begins.

It's performance art. We take not credit. We only use bio-degradable stuff so we don't break any littering laws. It would be unprecedented; eight snowmen on High St. If we want to really take it to Calvin-and-Hobbes-type levels, we could even make the snowmen on opposite sides of each corner interact with each other.

It could make for a fun evening.