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People come and go so quickly here

city map

This blog has become one of my favorite daily reads. So I shall show my gratitude by swiping his stuff.

Like this map. The one up top there. Guess what the dots mean. No, guess. Seriously, I’m not typing anything else until you do.

Wrong! It’s a list of all 160 cities in 1900 that had a population greater than 25,000.

Holy smokes! Can you believe it? Granted, some of those cities had a lot more than 25,000 citizens. The top twenty ranged from New York City, at 3,437,202 to Providence, RI at 175,597. (Poor little Rhode Island. Providence has slid to 124th with a current population of approximately 176,862. We’re leaking people!).

It’s so easy to forget that Superpower America is a 20th Century invention. Before that, we were a few happy rubes with cowshit on our boots. One of my favorite displays at the Smithsonian was in the Castle: they preserved intact the 1876 centennial exhibition, showing all our proudest accomplishments at the end of the Victorian era. Tennessee’s entire display is a coon skin and some pieces of wood. With bark on.

Somehow, that map links up in my head with this datum what I also nicked: as of 2006, service industries accounted for 42% of the world’s employment in 2006, agriculture 36.1%. Listen up — we got more peeps driving desks than driving ploughs!

He says (and I agree) that this is a huge milestone: the point at which the majority of our species is no longer in the business of grubbing up food.

Why do these two ideas go together? I…hmm. Well, history moves very fast. And, despite everything, pretty much in the right direction.

Get me! I’m an optimist!

Comments


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: October 4, 2007, 7:10 pm

Well, history moves very fast. And, despite everything, pretty much in the right direction.

I just hope our brethren and sistren around the world realize this and, em, shape up.

(I never knew I was a cowboy.)


Comment from Dawn
Time: October 4, 2007, 7:41 pm

Here’s a link to his other blog

http://theborderlinesociopathicblogforboys.blogspot.com/


Comment from TattooedIntellectual
Time: October 4, 2007, 7:59 pm

I remember in my anthropology class during undergrad we talked about the avg “work” day of a hunter-gatherer ie. how much time was actually spent hunting & gathering (didn’t really include prep and such). Something like 17 hrs a week! Yep, that’s it. We’re doing something wrong w/ this 40 hr work week thing.


Comment from Dawn
Time: October 4, 2007, 8:44 pm

My sociology professor was Mexican and he taught that brown people were born with the inate knowledge of how to grind corn. He “proved” this by saying his niece knew what to do when she sat at a mill stone before anyone told her. What else would you do with a rock, a bowl, and some dried corn? He also spent a lot of time teaching that the mayan pyramids were built by telekinesis.


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: October 4, 2007, 8:54 pm

Pshaw. We all know it was the Freemasons. (They can evidently go back in time. Or go back in time and comandeer alien spaceships.)


Comment from Enas Yorl
Time: October 5, 2007, 11:09 am

TattooedIntellectual,

I have a comic strip where two cavemen are sitting around and one remarks to the other “Something’s just not right – our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic and free-range, and yet nobody lives past thirty.”

I have no problems with the 40 hour work week. 😉


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: October 5, 2007, 12:12 pm

Whoa! Check out this guy’s blog. Really excellent nature photography. It’s in Estonian, so that’s all I know. I ran across it doing a google images search of “weasel” (natch). Very nice weaselpic in December 2006.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: October 5, 2007, 1:00 pm

He’s really good, isn’t he?

Note the weasel’s obligatory ‘I’m so pissed!’ look on its mush…


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: October 5, 2007, 1:03 pm

And another… January 2007.

Haven’t spotted any badgers yet. Probably too busy to ponce around posing for the camera.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: October 5, 2007, 2:23 pm

Yes, he’s really good. You know how I can tell? I’ve taken about half of those pictures myself expecting them to look like that, but when I get them home they just look stupid.


Comment from TattooedIntellectual
Time: October 5, 2007, 5:56 pm

I shared your really cool nature blog find w/ GCP b/c I knew you wouldn’t sweasel 🙂


Comment from nbpundit
Time: October 5, 2007, 7:42 pm

Hey, what’s the deal Stoaty? Getting TI to do yer posting
for ya now?
By the way, I’ve got yer stapler right c’here….Heh™

…and the over the seas badger’s right, you deserve us.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: October 5, 2007, 7:55 pm

I feel weird posting in other places, NB. I don’t mind commenting, but posting on the main page makes me uncomfortable — I have no idea what people find interesting.


Comment from Muslihoon
Time: October 5, 2007, 8:54 pm

I have no idea what people find interesting.

Surely you are doing the pulling of our leg. Write any word, or none at all (for examples, see: Goldstein, Jeff), and people will be amused.


Comment from TattooedIntellectual
Time: October 6, 2007, 1:37 am

Sweasel, hon. I just post anything over there. If people like it, it gets comments, if they don’t, it doesn’t. C’est la vie.


Comment from EW1(SG)
Time: October 6, 2007, 12:06 pm

Weas says:

…posting on the main page makes me uncomfortable — I have no idea what people find interesting.

You kidding? You ever looked to see what kind of nutballs are over there?

Or the kind of stuff that does get posted over there?

Go ahead, join the nutcakes!


Comment from mesablue
Time: October 7, 2007, 4:37 am

They need to update the Michigan part of the map.

No one lives here anymore.


Comment from sinistar
Time: October 11, 2007, 12:32 pm

I think the city I grew up in is actually on that map, I know why too.

I remember reading or hearing somewhere that it wasn’t till the 1920’s that over 50% of the US population was in towns of 2,500 or more. Kind of an interesting fact.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: October 11, 2007, 1:57 pm

Yeah, I tried to find that statistic about the number of people who worked on farms at the turn of the last century but I couldn’t turn it up. It was a huge percentage, though.

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