Best towns for an A*& whipping

Pretty much any city in NJ over 10k -- Camden, AC, Patterson, Brick City, East Orange, JC.

To the person who mentioned Red Hook, it is well on the way to gentrification.

 

Maybe Boots hangs around the Carousel, the intramural basketball courts or Daniel Brooks' favorite frat house.

 

Clarksville, Tenn., just down the road from Fort Campbell, Ky. Saw a guy basically beat another guy to death one night when I was in college ... we stopped him before he finished the job, but the poor victim ultimately didn't make it. A had a gun pointed at me that night (not by a policeman), which has a wonderful way of focusing your attention.

 

Freeway to Tobermory?

That's sacreligious.

 

Actually, I think it's the fabled long lost Gordon Lightfoot album. 

 

No, just a freeway to Owen Sound.

Apparently the government once planned to extend Highway 25 all the way up from Oakville and turn it into a freeway but it never happened. Now they say the 410 might be extended here someday. I'm not holding my breath.

It's just a pain in the ass to not have close-at-hand freeway access when every other part of southern Ontario has it.

 

But nobody LIVES up your way. What, build a freeway for you and six of your closest friends?

Seriously, do you really think there's enough traffic to warrant it? Highways 10 and 6 move along pretty well. The Sound is what, a little over 2 hours from the Centre of the Universe?

 

Who he?

 

This may be hard to believe, but up until about 1950 Owen Sound was larger and far more prominent than places like Barrie. The Gateway to the West is what the city was called, because goods from Toronto, Montreal and other places were sent here by rail and shipped out of the harbour toward the Lakehead, and vice versa.

The construction of the 400, which was originally pretty much built to nowhere, was part of what changed all that. The start of Barrie's boom also coincided with the opening of new canals built at Welland and on the St. Lawrence River. These all but destroyed Owen Sound's importance as a port centre, because the ships didn't have to stop here any more.

Then, when the province went on its road- and school-building sprees in the '60s and '70s, we got completely ignored. Oh, wait, they gave us a college -- a satellite campus, with the main campus in Barrie, of all places. Gee, thanks.

I realize this wasn't the first community ever to get screwed over by various levels of government, but it doesn't make it any easier to accept. Goddamn it, they owe us.

 

Cue the Talking Heads' "Road to Nowhere..."

Stevens is the senior senator from Alaska and now that Sperm, Strom Thurmond has gone to that great plantation in the sky, he's one of the senior senators in the building and one of the fiercest advocates for drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge.

Last year, in his role as Appropriations Chairman, he rammed through more than $200 million in a transportation bill for two bridges, the "Bridges to Nowhere" that go from Gravina Island (population 50) to Ketchikan. He diverted funds from Katrina relief to this and threatened to resign from the Senate if it didn't go through.

He didn't resign and the bridges were fully funded, thus showcasing a classic example of pork-barrel politics usually not seen this side of West Virginia's Robert Byrd. In one of his "See, I can be fiscally prudent. Vote for me" moments, John McCain went off about it.

 

Didn't know that about the Sound but that makes sense.

However, Barrie is a heckuva lot closer to TO than Owen Sound and its boom was predictable.

I imagine the 400 was originally built to handle the weekend cottage traffic.

And God, I'd live in Owen Sound in a heartbeat. You'd have to shoot me first before I'd live in Barrie.