{"id":4177,"date":"2010-05-21T01:50:47","date_gmt":"2010-05-21T06:50:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/?p=4177"},"modified":"2024-10-04T13:35:25","modified_gmt":"2024-10-04T18:35:25","slug":"potpourri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.howderfamily.com\/blog\/potpourri\/","title":{"rendered":"Potpourri"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The virtual file folder is bulging at the seams but none of the topics I\u2019ve collected for today are large enough to merit a standalone article. There should be something for just about everyone here today, something old, something new, something borrowed, something stupid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Haines Shoe House<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Haines<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Wouldn\u2019t you visit the Haines Shoe House<\/a> if you were up in York Pennsylvania over the weekend (map<\/a>)? What could possibly be more entertaining than visiting a house<\/i> shaped like a shoe?<\/i> Well, plenty of things if you ask my family but that still didn\u2019t deter me. Arriving at the shoe and finding it CLOSED certainly deterred me though. That\u2019s why I have only a single image of this roadside oddity rather than an entire article and photo montage devoted to it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Incidentally, how does one close a shoe? I discovered apparently it’s not by tying a knot in the laces. No, it\u2019s accomplished by placing thick chains across the driveway. My disappointment dissipated when we arrived at Mount Joy about twenty minutes later for dinner at Bube\u2019s Brewery<\/a>. They had a great biergarten out back with live music and great beverages on a perfect springtime evening. Shoe House? What Shoe House?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That Horribly-Named Andean Bear<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\"Andean<\/a>
Andean Bear<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

“They” say a bad name will haunt you forever, and Chaska is a really bad name. Recall about a week ago when we had an opportunity to name an Andean bear after a geo-oddity<\/a>. The polls closed, the votes were tallied, and the National Zoo reports that “Chaska had edged out Paqarina by merely 72 votes (garnering 1,799 votes, or 37 percent of the total). Chaska, meaning the \u2018dawn star,\u2019 was submitted by the Embassy of Peru.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wait a minute — Roraima didn\u2019t even make it into the top two?!? Don\u2019t people realize that she would have been named after the mountain that hosts the Venezuela, Brazil and Guyana tripoint? Punks. I weep at the state of geographic education in public schools today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Incidentally, it turns out that Chaska is also a town in Minnesota<\/a>. Maybe the name isn\u2019t so bad after all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Random Entertaining Street View Images<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

New reader Joah stumbled across my recent Inuvik post and he decided to share a related image. Apparently there isn\u2019t much to do way up north because look what they\u2019ve done to the roadside along the Dempster Highway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n