h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Charles Dickens was a remarkable man who could bring you into his world and make it vivid.

When he compared Pittsburgh to Birmingham, I thought he meant Birmingham Alabama.The one in England has a lot of small rivers. The one in Alabama is on a major river (the Cahaba), but it's at the headwaters, where the stream isn't very big yet. Oh, well. ;-/

Birmingham, Alabama was founded in 1871. Charles Dickens died in 1870.

Pittsburg must've been a truly dreary and smoggy place back then! Think I'd rather have lived in Alabama's version than in the industrialised Black Country.

The smog was bad, indeed. I knew people who remembered how bad it was - you couldn't hang laundry or place babies outside. The moral is: don't burn bituminous coal in a river valley surrounded by steep hills.

I would still have chosen Pittsburgh in 1871, rather than live in deepest, darkest Alabama. It's a question of spiritual state.

Thanks for putting Birmingham Alabama in its proper time sequence, Dmitri. I wonder, was there a settlement there before Birmingham came along, or was it pretty much a wasteland or forest or farm?

There were three farms, I think, that the planners bought to build this town. This was totally a commercial venture: they knew there was coal and iron there.

According to the Alabama history people:

'The name Birmingham was then suggested and adopted; and the principal industrial center of the State, and of the South, which then existed only in the imagination of its promoters, was named for the seat of iron manufacture in England.

Soon after the organization of the company, a few sales of land were made, and the building of the town had been started. The first building on the site was a small frame blacksmith shop. '

I am not a fan of Birmingham or Atlanta. They mess up the watersheds. Birmingham rated 14th worst U.S. city for year-round particulate air pollution. Neither place is friendly.

[Writes note to self not to move there]

Four hours in Atlanta airport on an emergency repair stop was enough for us! Scary flight.

Yeah, Atlanta is a major airport hub.

Their mass transit system is pretty cool, but their highway commute is a nightmare out of science fiction.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0C0fyizGQg

I went to an American Library Association convention in Atlanta about 17 years ago. Seems like a nice enough town, but except for the modern high-rise hotel I was in, it seems stuck in the past. The Macy's store had the decor of someplace in the 1950s.

The "Chinese" food in the airport was like the Chinese food I've had in , well, China.

That is, their Chinese food was *unlike* the Chinese food I've had elsewhere.