Researching the Moneta Theater

((The Moneta theater's reopening its doors this Saturday and I just wrote a small press release on its history. I think I'm stuck on an alliteration kick. Here's what I wrote today, culled from microfiched newspapers. Will someone please edit it? Thanx.)))

"A nearly century-old Sweetwater institution is reopening its doors. (Insert lead paragraph)

In 1915, the census bureau announced that the U.S. population had reached 102 million. Columnist J.C. Jessen of the nationally-syndicated "Motion Picture News" boasted that everyday one in ten of those people attended movie theaters to witness a burgeoning new industry being born on the California coastline. D.W Griffith released the first cinema masterpiece, "Birth of a Nation," which President Woodrow Wilson described as "writing history with lightning." Hardly any town was without a nickelodeon palace located in its center. Sweetwater would be no exception.

In the February of that year Frank Johnston opened the Moneta Theater. Ads promising "photoplays that please" ran in the Sweetwater Telephone alongside ads for castor oil and grippe relief medicine. The theater was an almost immediate success--attendance doubled in the course of its first five months as young and old alike went see the very first romances, horrors, and westerns. "The variety of Comedies and Dramas, will pleasantly relieve tired nerves and better prepare children's minds for study," one ad promised. A 7 year-old debutante, "Little Miss Margaret Bradley," treated her entire Sweetwater primary school class to a "Matinee party" at the the Moneta with movies followed by ice cream at Childress's fountain parlor. The baseball league hosted benefit screenings of "The Rosary."

In the year when Americans and British rallied around the cry, "Remember the Lusitania," the Telephone would implore its readers in a single column blurb each edition to "Remember the Moneta."

Copperhead in the pool

(((I spent the entire summer swimming and wadefishing Citico Creek. Didn't see a single snake. I finally go swimming in a backyard swimming pool and a dang copperhead nearly lands on my shoulder. He was dead coz' of the chlorine, tho.
Good thing. They are more aggressive than the timbler rattler. While rarely fatal, their bites can cause a considerable amount of pain and necrosis if left untreated.))))

I've been in a secret clubhouse.

(((Exclusive pics of a secret clubhouse. Isaac and Nicole watch TV, serve food, and read mail at their clubhouse. Tinker and I at Houston Park))))

Parking lots suck

(((We can't get anything done in downtown Madisonville because everyone wants to make the whole place a parking lot. Civic grandeur at work.))

We paved paradise: So why can't we find any place to park? Because parking is one of the biggest boondoggles -- and environmental disasters -- in our country.

By Katharine Mieszkowski, Slate

No matter how much land we pave for our idle cars, it always seems as if there isn't enough. That's America. We're all about speed and convenience. We don't want to walk more than two blocks, if that. So we remain wedded to our cars, responsible for "high CO2 emissions, urban sprawl, increased congestion and gas usage, and even hypertension and obesity," says Amelie Davis, a Purdue graduate student who worked on the study. Despite all the environmental evils blamed on the car and its enablers -- General Motors, the Department of Transportation, Porsche, Robert Moses, suburban developers -- parking has slipped under the radar. Yet much of America's urban sprawl, its geography of nowhere, stems from the need to provide places for our cars to chill.

(((Did James Howard Kunstler's "Geography of Nowhere" really enter the unattributable vernacular?))))

"Wonder why the mall parking lot is half empty most of the time? Developers build parking lots to accommodate shoppers on the busiest shopping day of the year -- the day after Thanksgiving -- so that shoppers need never, ever park on the street. Similarly, the church parking lot is designed to accommodate Christmas and Easter services. So a whole lot of land gets paved over that doesn't have to be, transportation planners argue."

"Parking lots also contribute to the "urban heat island effect." The steel, concrete and blacktops of buildings, roads and parking lots absorb solar heat during the day, making urban areas typically 2 to 5 degrees hotter than the surrounding countryside. "This is most apparent at nighttime, when the surrounding area is cooler, and the urban area starts radiating all this heat from the urban structures," explains Dev Niyogi, an assistant professor at Purdue, who is the Indiana state climatologist.

The urban heat island effect can be so dramatic that it changes the weather. One Indianapolis study found that thunderstorms that reach the city often split in two, going around it, and merging again into one storm after the urban area. "The urban heat island is not simply a temperature issue. It could affect our water availability," says Niyogi."

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Revolution in Jesusland

((((They're blogging right now from a superchurch in Atlanta, GA. I bet "creation care" becomes a buzzword in 2008.)))

"This blog is a plea to the progressive movement, to take another look and get to know the diverse and complex world of evangelical Christianity in its own terms. Here you’ll find interviews, commentary, analysis and other dispatches from all over “Jesusland.” This tour will explore everything from the workings of the local church, to the evangelicals’ vibrant, decentralized national leadership training infrastructure to theological questions such as, “How in the world DO they read the Bible literally?” and “Do they really think I’m going to hell?”

There are two really big reasons to come along on this tour:

First, progressives will never achieve their goals as long as they are hostile toward and ignorant about the faith of 100 million of their own people who are born again Christians.

Second (and we know how difficult this is to believe) there is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants—and even separation of church and state.

By learning to work together with “progressive” evangelicals, secular progressives will stand a better chance of achieving their goals and also learn an enormous amount from these remarkable people and their organizations that will help secular progressives strengthen their own movement."

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Tennessee man shoots himself in front of city council

Barbershop owner commits suicide after rezoning application rejected. Last Updated: Friday, October 5, 2007 | 8:23 AM ET

CBC News

"A distraught barbershop owner killed himself in front of a city council meeting Thursday after members voted down a proposal to rezone his property, according to witnesses.

After the 5-7 vote in Clarksville, Tenn., on Thursday night, Ronald (Bo) Ward walked toward the council and said, "Y'all have put me under…. I'm out of here."

He then shot himself in the head with a small handgun."

((((You know that creative writing assignment where everyone writes about an article they clipped out of their hometown newspaper? Small town kids really do well on that.))))
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