In which our intrepid hero takes some time to soak in some Springfieldian sights…
On my way back home, I passed through Springfield, a town about 30 minutes west of Columbus. The light was already fading, but Springfield is such an interesting town that I decided to take at least a few pictures anyway, though I will certainly come back for a more extended sojourn (in better light). Of course, the same things that make Springfield interesting to me may seem undesirable for others.
In which our intrepid hero encounters Trojan horses of a most unusual kind…
Let me declare flat out that unexpected pleasures are the best pleasures. A gift is better if you don’t know what it is, better still if unanticipated. Case in point: twenty years ago, a local movie theater held a week-long series of Hong Kong films. This was long before Americans knew who Jackie Chan was and Hong Kong cinema was known primarily to cinephiles. I myself had never seen a Hong Kong film at that point, so I decided to go see one of the movies. This was the 1993 film The Legend of Fong Sai-Yuk. I knew absolutely nothing about this film—and this was before the World Wide Web—so I found myself in a situation that I pretty much never am in, going to see a movie completely blind about it. I didn’t know the cast, the plot, the concept, nothing. To my delight and surprise, the movie, an action-comedy, turned out to be extremely entertaining. Because I had no expectations for the film at all (I didn’t even know it would be a comedy), the fact that it turned out to be pretty decent made it even better, because it was so unexpected. Even the smallest pleasures get magnified when they come unannounced.
In which our intrepid hero discovers a saintly town…
One thing I discovered very soon after moving to Ohio was that Ohio is a state that steals place names. This is true of many areas of the country, no doubt, but it wasn’t true where I grew up. Place names near me included El Paso, Las Cruces, Canutillo, Anthony, Fabens, Alamagordo, Truth or Consequences (well, that was stolen from something, but not a place), and so forth. But in Ohio? We have Toledo and Moscow and Athens and Brooklyn and Cambridge and London and Dublin and Geneva and Macedonia and Ontario and Oxford and Toronto and many others—none of them even modest enough to throw a “New” in front of their theft. The one that gets me the most, though, is Rio Grande, Ohio, because locals don’t pronounce it the right way, they pronounce it “Rye-Oh.” As someone who used to ride a horse along the actual Rio Grande, that grabs my goat by the balls and twists.
Unearthed Ohio 