In 1751, the Pennsylvania Hospital at 8th and Spruce was 'way out in the country. Now it is in the center of a city, but the area still remains dominated by medical institutions.
A service economy needs more education past high school. Soaring college tuition costs imply a supply shortage; and hence we need more colleges.
But cheaper ones.
The industrial revolution made cities grow, and thus made mass transit desirable. The flight to the suburbs then made mass transit attractive only to urban politicians.
As the dominant Indian Tribe in Eastern America, the Iroquois were ruthless in war. Whether egged on by the British or for their own reasons, in 1778 they remorselessly wiped out the Connecticut settlers around Wilkes-Barre.
The Historical Society of Pennsylvania started out in 1824 as a repository of family treasures. Several mergers and changes of direction have given it a new mission.
An aristocratic court may seem a peculiar place to unite a republic, but the female-dominated social circle of 1790-1800 nevertheless united a new nation. Its definition of who is socially prominent still persists, to some degree.
A calendar (in progress) of outdoor blooming in Haddonfield, New Jersey.
It's about a 20-minute commute from Delaware to Philadelphia, with a big difference in estate taxes. Moving from New Jersey to Delaware would double that difference.
The Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of Friends has voted to endorse the U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The United States delegation to the U. N. has declined to endorse it. Each side has a point worth considering.
Quaker treatment of the Indians had been exemplary before 1737, and has been highly sympathetic ever since then, too. However, James Logan totally destroyed the trust of the Delaware Indians by using hired runners to establish boundaries of the Walking Purchase, north of the Neshaminy Creek. General Braddock would eventually pay the price of this betrayal when it was later imitated by Benjamin Franklin at the Albany conference.
The Clinton Health Plan was dead on arrival, but the media didn't know that.
The death of William Penn left his heirs the largest land holdings in America. Although they managed it fairly well, it proved to be more than a single family could cope with.
The Chinese did not invent the export-driven economy, or monopolize its use. But their command structure allowed them to exploit it most effectively.
In The Philadelphia Inquirer for February 4, 2010, By Claudia Vargas Inquirer Writer.
It would be lots easier to solve the malpractice problem if it could be all concentrated in one federal place.
Without a written doctrine, outsiders get a glimpse of Quaker belief from what they think is worth arguing over.
It's only open a few days each year, but the red brick building at 5th and Arch was the meeting house for those few Quakers, including Betsy Ross, who fought for the Revolution. The Park Service has made a beautiful restoration, which deserves to be seen by more people.
I have new-found respect for George Will after his speech to CPAC last week. If it's possible --from a sober egghead-- he had more laugh lines than applause lines. And a trenchant message.
After several thousand years, building the Egyptian pyramids turns out to be easier that we imagined.
The Swedenborgians belong to the Church of the New Jeruselem, following the teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg, and strongly emphasizing personal responsibility, individuality, and good works. The Philadelphia branch is particularly strong, centered around a magnificent medieval cathedral in Bryn Athyn. Johnny Appleseed and Helen Keller were notable adherants, and a driving force has been the Pitcairn family of industrialists.
Banks would not normally take sides between first and second mortgages. However, securitization took the first mortgages away from big banks, so they now have an incentive to seek political favor for second mortgages.
Thirteen stars and stripes became the National Flag in 1777, but a rather similar flag was the National flag from 1775-1777. It was also designed by a Philadelphia milliner, Margaret Manny.
The land granted to Penn was mostly swamp and wilderness in the 17th Century. Infinite disagreements were certain to result, but a paragraph described all that could be known at the time of the grant.
James Logan and Benjamin Franklin were at the opposite ends of the social scale in Colonial Philadelphia, and were to adopt stongly differing political views. But each recognized the intellectual power of the other, and they were fast friends.
Some massive beautiful Victorian buildings still dominate the City crossroads on Broad Street near City Hall.
Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences introduced the world to dinosaurs, and now introduces us to a miniature version.
Hard
Parthenon-like Art Museum at the other.
Prior to 1854, Philadelphia City was one of twenty-nine political entities within Philadelphia County. After that, it became one big city without suburbs. Growth pressure now reverses toward suburbs without a city. Political boundaries should thus shift inwardly.
A flash of inspiration gets a medical article published.
In a few years, the baby boomers will retire and two things will happen. They will have to retire later in life, and the country will have to borrow money to pay for the rest.
Snapper soup can be made from snapping turtles, but the historical source of the ingredients has been shipped from the Caribbean.
The Constitution took certain defined powers from the states and gave them to the Federal Government. Further steady erosion of states rights began, but the Republican Party gave things a big push during the Civil War.
It was inevitable that someone would pull a trigger, and market gossip is now shaking loose who actually did. The cliffhanger to come is the insolvency of Fannie and Freddy.
Toasts to Ben Franklin continue. This one by a former president of Swarthmore College has its focus on women in Ben's life.
Englishmen play cricket and rugby. Americans play baseball and football. The rest of the world plays soccer, and calls it football.
Refugees from Haiti slave revolts brought Yellow Fever to south Philadelphia.
With two hundred years of embellishment, the story of the big party the British Army gave for Philadelphia as a goodbye present, lives on and on. For any ambitious hostess, this is still the party to equal, although neither the Quakers nor the patriots thought very highly of it.
With Washington beleaguered at Valley Forge, an Indian massacre of the nearby Wyoming Valley was a serious threat from the rear. General Sullivan was sent to exterminate the Iroquois, and proved utterly ruthless.
One of the oldest, most prominent Quaker families contained a multitude of famous, rich, distinguished leaders. Many suffered imprisonment or exile for their pacifism, but one Pemberton is the highest-ranking wartime general buried in Laurel Hill Cemetery. He was a Confederate.
Bank s: Fragile and Dangerous
A bank can't function without deposits, and it can't function unless it can sell shares. So a bank will collapse if there is a run, or if the price of its stock declines severely; public opinion has a lot to do with the success of a bank. What's more, banks have a lot of dealings with each other, so a panic can quickly spread from one bank to another. That's known as counterparty risk. The laws require a bank to maintain a certain ratio of equity to assets, which is to say a ratio of the collective worth of its stock compared with the collective worth of its outstanding loans. The intent of this rule is to make sure the stockholders lose every dime of their investment in the bank, before the depositors lose anything. Facing the total loss of their investment in almost every serious difficulty, bank stockholders are very twitchy.
If the bank is doing poorly for some reason, the stockholders get wind of it, and the price of the stock declines as stockholders sell out. The effect of this is to bring the "capital ratio" below the required level, and the authorities will require the bank to sell more stock. That will in turn dilute the value of the stock of the existing shareholders, decreasing the stock value. So the effect of a sharp drop in share prices will have almost the same risk to the bank as a run on the cash by the depositors, because now the shareholders will sell more stock in the hope of getting out before it declines further in value. This happened in 2008 with the stock of Fannie Mae, which dropped from about $70 a share to $10 in a few weeks, prompting the Federal Reserve to offer to loan cash reserves, and if necessary to buy the stock. After that, it sent investigators to measure the solvency of Fannie Mae.
This historic episode illustrates the valuable role of the stock market in sensing trouble before regulators are aware of it, and helps explain to Congressmen who want to pass abusive legislation that "The stock market won't let you do that." A week or so earlier, Senator Charles Schumer (D, New York) had made public a letter expressing his concern about IndyMac, another large bank, with the immediate result that there was a run on that bank which made it collapse. So, not only are there banking situations which Congress does not dare meddle with -- there are even situations which the Senate Banking Committee does not dare talk about openly. Naturally, this sort of situation wounds the egos of Congressmen, but a number of left-leaning and high-handed foreign countries have in the past nationalized their banks, with disastrous results. When a bank gets to a certain size, it is as fragile as a land mine. And just as dangerous to tamper with.
Selection of Judges
JUDGE. Mr. Smith, are you trying to show your contempt for this court?
MR. SMITH: Why, no, Mi lord. I'm trying to conceal it.
Whether this exchange ever really took place, most English lawyers believe it did. It could only have happened in an English court, because lawyers in other jurisdictions would be afraid of reprisals in later cases before the same judge, if not in this one. Like Naval Captains, judges have a lot of latitude to be petty, eccentric, incompetent or arbitrary, and not a lot can be done about it, least of all by lawyers who must appear before the same judges month after month. A judge's legal opinion can be appealed and reversed in a higher court, but if a judge just slapped down a smarty lawyer, higher courts would likely look the other way.
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| Margaret Thatcher |
Both the Judge in the anecdote and Mr. Smith were barristers. Only a barrister may be a judge or even represent a case in court in England. There's a second kind of lawyer called a solicitor, who drafts contracts and wills, arranges divorces, gives legal counsel and whatever, but the English court system is reserved for barristers. To become a barrister, it is necessary to be invited to enroll in what amounts to a boarding school, one of the several Inns of Court which date back to the days of Crusader knights, the Knights Temple. Gradually, the barrister students graduate upward from shabby boarding school quarters, one day actually being invited to have dinner in the main Hall as a reward for good work. In time, they will have their living quarters in one of the Inns, as well as their offices, or Chambers. The Inns turn out to be an elegant place to live, with lawns sweeping down to theThames River for a greater view than the Houses of Parliament enjoy. On the other side of the Inns is the center of London. It's a great place to live in the company of learned and powerful classmates you have known all your life. It's a monk-hood, all right, but one with elegance. It's a place where wit is celebrated to the point where the Mr. Smiths can get away with a devastating response to a classmate who happens to be a judge, if they think the point is a just one. The judge knows right well how his discomfort will immediately circulate in Hall, and the brotherhood will somehow protect Mr. Smith. Quids custodies custodies.
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| Inns of Court |
It was probably inevitable that Margaret Thatcher of humble origins disliked the barrister system and tried to abolish such elitism. But it was probably also inevitable that the English court system enjoyed such prestige that she was defeated. The American system for selecting judges cannot compare with it. Indeed, the problem of judge selection has been a topic of debate in our law schools for a century, a debate that no one ever wins. Either we allow politicians to select judges, and that's obviously bad, or we make them into politicians themselves by electing them, which is even worse. We get some good judges, but we get too much incompetence, too much politics, and too much ideology. We resort to asking the Bar Associations for advice, and that leads to politics with a different set of politicians. This whole problem is insoluble as long as immense power is given to people who then operate largely out of public view, often underpaid because we fear that some might seek the job for its money, and sometimes deliberately undereducated because we fear elitism.
Because justice is mainly a search for acceptable resolution of disputes, religion is usually found at its origins. The decline of established religion makes religious tradition less acceptable as an overt source of impartiality, but religion's techniques still make useful models. America never had an established religion, but even the English system is now far less a priesthood than it used to be; the Common Law was once the exclusive product of the courts and the Church, but now Parliament creates a larger body of Statutory Law. The former system tilted toward the aristocracy, the present one is in danger of tilting toward partisan politics. In a sense the English Civil War was about discovering that parliaments can be as tyrannical as kings. Two things are almost certainly true: we cannot tolerate a judiciary accountable only to itself, and we cannot tolerate a legislature that both makes laws and interprets them, even indirectly through intrusively selecting judges. Judging by results, the English might be a little closer to proper balance in these difficult matters, than we are.
Mississippi Carillons
The Mississippi runs across a fifty-foot ledge at Minneapolis, providing waterfalls for power used to mill flour, and effectively ending northward navigation up the river. In the eddies and side streams around the rapids, great swarms of Canada geese paddle about, quacking, right in the center of the city. A church with a carillon of shiny bells stands on the bank above this scene, its many bells ringing at once in clashing sounds quite evocative of the gaggles of geese on the river below. The effect is surely intentional, although at first encounter it strikes many as an unpleasant dissonance. It may be artistic, but it is not music.
At the other end of the Mississippi, in New Orleans, jazz was born. A group of musicians play together in an aimless way, until one soloist strikes up a melody, with variations. In time, another musician and then still another, take up the melody, playing different variations on different instruments. Sometimes the whole group join together in a minor patch of symphony. In time, one musician wanders off on another theme, or the whole group seems to agree on when to stop.
There's a small Quaker meeting in Minneapolis, but most of Quakerdom branches off to the left up the Missouri River, or to the right up the Ohio. There's less overt music in the meetings up the Ohio, but there is some. Either way, there is usually a sense of timing and harmony in the verbal messages. Some are like a Belgian carillon, exquisite as Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring. Others participate like a game of volley ball. Only a few seem to find pleasure in independent vocal ruminations, and those are usually meetings too small to organize an effective carillon.
Friends Lifecare at Home
Over thirty Quaker retirement villages scatter through America, more than twenty in the suburbs of Philadelphia -- "under the care of the Yearly Meeting", as their expression has it. But for some people, community living seems unattractive. It does not speak to their condition.
For one thing, it may not be affordable.
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| lifecare |
Or the style of may seem too fancy, or too plain, for some tastes regardless of cost. The increasing emotional rigidity of growing older is a factor; by the time people get to be seventy-five, they had better make this decision or forget it. Plenty of people are hale and hearty at ninety, but they establish pretty firm ideas about the sort of person they want for neighbors while they are still in the workforce. Quite often it's just a habit, people have lived in their home for several generations and cannot imagine another neighborhood, lifestyle, or environment. This is home, and they intend to die there.
So, to address this need, or market, a group of Quakers conceived of a retirement village without walls. Live in your own home and someone will come oversee things, will know what to do if there is an emergency, and may eventually make the decision for you that you absolutely must go somewhere else. All of this is wrapped within an insurance vehicle, to recognize the fixed incomes of retired people, the inevitability of terminal illnesses, and the occasional risk of monumental medical expenses. At present, about 1600 people in Philadelphia are enrolled in the unique plan of Friends Lifecare at Home, making it one of the largest retirement communities in the country. The organization receives universal praise for its imaginative responses, as well as the dependability and high quality of the people it sends out to the homes of subscribers. Friends Lifecare is a pioneer, and it is gradually weeding out the ideas that didn't work, and adding new features that were not originally contemplated. One of its greatest challenges is the need to adapt to unexpected and uncontrollable changes in the Medicare program. Slashes in the Medicare program could bankrupt Friends Lifecare, and even sudden windfalls like the Medicare Drug Benefit create management problems. There can be no doubt that one element of trust exists for which there is no substitute; Philadelphians know that the invisible support of the community and its Quaker core is behind them. If anyone can possibly preserve a moral commitment to the elderly, it will be the Quakers.
Ultimately, the commitment is not so much to 1600 subscribers as to the notion of finding out what works. Life expectancy has extended by three additional years, during the past ten; that's a joy, but it's a problem to finance. The optimum size of the organization is also an unsettled question. Although this program is relatively large by comparison with individual retirement villages, it may not be large enough to have spare capacity to cope with influenza epidemics or record-breaking spells of bad weather. Since it's the only one of its kind, it is vexed by popularity in ever-widening geographic areas. It must grow to some reasonable size in one area before it can spread its resources to another. By the same reasoning, it must have a reasonable number of prosperous subscribers if it is to accept even a limited number of poor ones.
The idea of creating a seamless partnership with the residential-type retirement villages is certainly attractive, but Friends Lifecare must be careful to avoid becoming too much of a life raft for other people's problems. When the resale price of residential housing rises in a housing bubble, people wish to cling to a rising investment. During the same economic period, the entry and rental price of residential villages also rises. With a great many uncertainties that are specific to this pioneering effort, it is hard to know what policies to develop to insulate the lifecare environment from speculation in the mortgage and housing markets. Or, right now, high-rise apartment development. All of this creates a need for clear minds in the governance, determined to see and acknowledge difficult reality. If anyone can do it, Quakers can.
Use the Internet for Your Club
Most clubs, family groups, or neighborhood associations are held together by one loyal volunteer who does all the work. This limits the scope of the club to what one person is able to do in spare time. When that central person gets tired of it or moves away, things tend to fall apart. In the spirit of encouraging more volunteerism, this article suggests some ways the home computer can easily automate the normal drudgery of running a club. Having just performed this task for the local computer society, I can report it takes about two hours to put it together. If I did it three times, it would take forty-five minutes. A rank beginner, who doesn't even know what the words mean, might take all day to do it, but no more than that.
Most of the programs a club would need were first developed for people on the go, like a salesman who visits several cities, or a college student who commutes. It's an easy step to imagine different club members in different places instead of one person in several places. Electricity travels so fast that connecting computers together over the whole world's Internet can be thought of as essentially creating one big computer. For practical purposes, it doesn't matter whether a piece of information is in two parts of one computer or in two different computers hooked together by the Internet. The whole process is so cheap it might just as well be free.
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The new Macintosh Mac Mini is designed for people who already have a keyboard and monitor, such as existing PC users, who might want to switch. |
Selection of Computer and Operating System. Over ninety percent of the world's home computers are based on the Windows operating system, but Windows is having a lot of trouble right now with viruses and spam. Right now is Apple's big chance, because the Apple OS X operating system, based on Unix, seems to be immune to viruses and spam. So, if you are buying a new computer, I suggest you look at Apple's headless version. That's a little six-inch box to which you attach the monitor, keyboard and printer that presumably you have left over from some Windows system. Times will change, but right now this five hundred dollar little headless job is worth the money. That's for the club secretary; all the club members can use any kind of machine they happen to have, at least for read-only use.
Router. If you have several computers on one telephone line, you need a router to send the right signals to each machine. Because the router changes the identification numbers every time it is restarted, it tends to foil the buccaneers out there who are trying to find your credit card. Therefore, it's not a bad idea to have a router attached, even if you only have it connected to a single computer. Security folks say it takes about fifteen minutes for some buccaneer to find a newly installed computer, and most banks get several hundred break-in attempts every hour. That's because everybody is getting automated these days, including criminals.
Choice of Browser. After you get set up and organized and all, you need to download the Fire fox browser, which right now is faster and more spam-proof than either Internet Explorer or Netscape. Go to some other browser and enter http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ . There's no harm in having several browsers sitting on your computer, including Opera if you like, but right now Fire fox is the one to use. A browser, in case you care, is a program that takes a stream of Internet data and translates it into the image on your screen, sort of like translating Morse code into a telegram. Some browsers are lean, mean and fast, while others are loaded with a lot of bells and whistles that slow them down. If you can't see any difference by trying them, go with the one that gives you most spam protection.
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You can have a personal calendar by clicking on http://calendar.yahoo.com |
Yahoo Calendar. There are lots of computer calendars, but right now Yahoo offers one that is somewhat better for public use by clubs. For an illustration, take a look at the Philadelphia Orchestra calendar that can be located on Philadelphia Reflections in the lower left column, by first clicking the Philadelphia Calendars button, and then clicking the link to the Orchestra's schedule. Naturally, the Orchestra doesn't want people changing their public schedule, so the calendar is read only. You can create a calendar like this for your club or organization by going to www.calendar.yahoo.com and entering an identifier and password. You can only change the calendar if you have the password, so be careful who is allowed to have it. If you make a misjudgment about this, just abandon the calendar and start a new one. You can of course create a personal calendar for yourself; it would be nice to merge your calendar with organization calendars. Calendar-merge programs do exist, but presently are a little primitive. Even nicer would be the ability to drag and drop individual events from one calendar to the other, but that's mostly on the wish list.
Yahoo Address Book. There are zillions of address books, but Yahoo provides a public one, if you allow club members to know the password. On the one hand, it's a big convenience for the secretary to have everybody fill in his own data. It can take ten or fifteen minutes apiece to complete all that information. On the other hand, if just anybody can have all this data, you can expect to get lots of unwanted solicitations. Naturally, you want to keep intruders from altering the data, but whether or not you make your membership list public is your own decision. So, probably you want to transfer the data to a list that you keep private, using a system of letting people enter data, and then erasing it after it is transferred.
Listserv. A very handy tool is to create a listserv, which is a system of e-mail that is sent to everyone on the list, and everyone can chime in with comments. It makes for a lot of local excitement, and it keeps families together, including reunion classes from all the schools you went to, 'way back then. If the Rs and the Ds get to bashing each other on the Listserv, you will learn the value of designating some sober soul to be list master, given the power to exile people whose mouths get too noisy.
Minutes and History as Blogs. Most clubs keep minutes, and after a while they start to record their history. It's a lot of work, and often gets lost; furthermore, it's hard for anyone but the author to read. We suggest you create a blog, and hang it on the Internet.
While there are a dozen programs and systems for creating blogs (that's short for Web logs), Google has bought blogger.com from that company, and has pepped it up quite a lot. Like the rest of these ideas, this one is free, and there are several million of these in existence. Sometimes people write poetry in the form of blogs, and some other people put up some pretty raunchy pictures or commentary. Apparently Google doesn't care, so they shouldn't mind if you publish the minutes of the East Whipswitch Cooking Society as blogs. It's very easy to do, and their canned templates produce some pretty elegant web sites in minutes. That's right, minutes in minutes.
Finances and Newsletters. Clubs typically collect dues or charge for luncheons, but financial stuff on the Internet is more complicated and must be dealt with in a later article. Similarly, you can publish a newsletter using RSS that is very spiffy indeed, but that's really hard to explain, and must be described in a separate article, too. Anyway, these preliminary items are enough to keep a new club busy for a few months.
Fast User Switching. Other operating systems will surely imitate it, but Apple is at present where you have to go to make a separate computer section for your club. Apple originally had the idea that several people would use the same machine, and want to keep their data secret from each other. So, they have a system in which you can click the upper right corner of the screen, and you can place yourself in a secret room with its own password. We suggest that it would be better to see this as a new desktop. All graphical interfaces of all computer operating systems use the metaphor of a desktop, which is what suggested to me that the club needs a desktop like my own. That is, it's littered with half-finished business of a dozen sorts, suddenly abandoned when the phone rings or a visitor arrives. You would like to be able to come back to your desktop and take up your work where you left off. For that, you probably need several desktops, and that's what fast user shifting provides you. Not vitally essential, but very convenient.
Favicons. Especially if you have fast user desktops specially designated by work topics instead of people, you can really use the favicon, or favorite icon, feature. A favicon is the little miniature do-hickey to the left of the webpage URL in the URL box. Maybe you never noticed it, but it's usually there. If you take your mouse and drag the favicon onto the desktop (you may have to shift something to create some blue sky desktop room) a new icon will appear on the desktop. Close up and click on that new icon, and you will open up a browser and go right to the page you were using when you created the icon. This is such a real neat feature that your desktop is apt to fill up quickly with a lot of web pages you happened to come across. It doesn't take long for the favicons to choke the desktop into uselessness, so this feature is at its best in a system where the topics of general utility to the user are sub-set by fast user switching.
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Apache has the largest share of the market and is available for most computers. |
Your Own Website. Apache. Your club will soon get the idea that you need your own website, but in fact you already have several of them. Your calendar, address book, club minutes blog, club history blog already add up to four websites. To most people, having their own website means consolidating all this material into one elegant page, with photos and artwork. You can do that, but it's much harder, and you first need to see if you really have a need for that. By far the easiest way for amateurs to have a website is to pay somebody a couple hundred dollars to write the code for it, and pay an Internet provider ten or twenty dollars a month to display it for you.
But for advanced players, like a club of computer professionals and particularly if that club runs a little on the snooty side and highly prizes its privacy, it might want to consider going all the way and becoming its own Internet provider. In that rather special case, it brings us back to Apple, since the OS X system includes a free copy of Apache, the program for running your own site on your own computer. Now, that's really a big undertaking, far beyond the average club. So if privacy of that order is mandatory, you may have to hire someone to set it up for you. But Apache sure makes it possible, if that's where you feel you want to go.
Your Own Newslettter. First, take a look at what you are trying to achieve, and a handy example would be http://www.yahoo.com/.
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| Yahoo |
You will see it is not a daily or a weekly, it is continuous. The page of the newspaper is a montage of ten or twelve blocks on a page. For example, one block might display the month's schedule, another shows sports scores, another shows the stock market, etc. Each one of those blocks is probably updated at a different time, making this a continuous newsletter. Of course there is a way provided to individualize the blocks of space, change the color schemes, etc. Since this newsletter is on the Internet, anyone can read it from anywhere in the world, at any time. That is, they can read it if they know the password, which some clubs want to keep private, and others prefer to skip because it is a nuisance when people forget what the password is and call you up at home after midnight to ask for it.
What underlies this process is a technique known as RSS. Each block of space in the newspaper is operating on a different scheduling, and each blocks "polls" a donor site every so often, for example fifteen minutes. The polling program calls the URL of each donor site at a preset time, where a record is kept of the last time the site was modified. If the site has been changed since that last visit of the polling program, the new site is downloaded to the newsletter page. If there has been no change, the polling program simply goes on to the next-scheduled site. In effect, the polling program is acting as a "robot". Modifications of this system, with considerable elaboration, are at the heart of the Google robot and other robots for other purposes. Generally speaking, the ordinary user doesn't have to know how to construct one of these robots, or modify one. No doubt, there will be extensive elaboration of this concept in the near future, but that's essentially how you can construct a usable newsletter in short order.
www.Philadelphia-Reflections.com/blog/464.htm
Wish you were back. Take care and continue your good work.
Kimmer, volunteer for
genealogytrails.com/penn/philadelphia/index.html
Anita McKelvey
anitmckelvey@verizon.net
Why not contact them and suggest that they link to you and perhaps even recommend you to their visitors?
Ditto the local magazines and newspapers. One of their missions is to generate interest in the region and a recommendation from any of them would drive a great deal of traffic to your diary.
You would get the satisfaction of increased, and perhaps active readership; they would get a great source of interest in the local area.
I'm glad to see you're back on the air: rotating your articles and adding new content. A veritable encyclopedia on the Quaker Colonies and environs!