Just to keep the engineering correct, Mr Solonitz should differentiate in the hue between the particulate and chemical laden smoke stack discharges of the two stacks on the LH side and the heated water vapor discharges from the two cooling towers on the RH side.

 

Also, parabolic shaped cooling towers aren't specific to Nukes - as Mr. Cimperman implied at MeetTheBloggers.

 

Perhaps it would also be nice if  Mr. Solonitz  credited Eliza Young for her power point slide (below) from which it appears his image was inspired.

Friday, January 4, 2008

 

Paradise (by John Prine)

 

When I was a child, my family would travel
Down to western
Kentucky, where my parents were born.
And there’s a backwards old town that’s often remembered
So many times that the memories are worn.

And Daddy, won’t you take me back to
Muhlenberg CountyDown by the Green River, where
Paradise lay?
Well I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking.
Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.

Well sometimes we’d travel right down the
Green RiverTo the abandoned old prison down by Airdrie Hill.
Where the air smelled like snakes and we’d shoot with our pistols
But empty pop bottles was all we would kill.

And Daddy, won’t you take me back to
Muhlenberg CountyDown by the Green River, where
Paradise lay?
Well I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking.
Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.

Then the coal company came with the world’s largest shovel
And they tortured the timber and stripped all the land.
Well they dug for their coal till the land was forsaken
Then they wrote it all down as the “progress of man”.

And Daddy, won’t you take me back to
Muhlenberg CountyDown by the Green River, where
Paradise lay?
Well I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking.
Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.

When I die let my ashes float down the
Green River.
Let my soul roll on up to the
Rochester Dam.
I’ll be halfway to heaven, with
Paradise waitin’
Just five miles away from wherever I am.

And Daddy, won’t you take me back to
Muhlenberg CountyDown by the Green River, where
Paradise lay?
Well I’m sorry, my son, but you’re too late in asking.
Mr. Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.

I’ve had this post in my head since we first arrived in
Georgia for Christmas and I’ve really been thinking about home. I worked with this song, John Prine’s
Paradise, with Smithsonian Folkways Recordings while in graduate school. Paradise, Kentucky was a riverside town in
Muhlenberg County, as Prine tells us, in the coal-producing western regions of the state. Paradise was one of the many poor mining towns that littered the landscape until it was bulldozed as part of one of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs in 1968 – remember this is also the year that brought you the “it became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it” logic from Vietnam.

I hear this song and I think of my own hometown in
Georgia. Or, being a child of the Navy, it’s the closest thing I can call to a hometown, which is really Mama’s hometown. It’s in the cotton belt in the northern arc of the state, in my childhood well north of the big city but now in its most outer suburbs. My favorite verse is the third one, especially the line “They dug for their coal till the land was forsaken, then they wrote it all down as the ‘progress of man”. There’s no coal there, but there are people who have owned that land for hundreds of years.

Mama’s family house was set back off the road that eventually became State Highway 142. This property refers to several buildings on that land. There’s “the house” which is the residence where Mama grew up, but way back far from the road, one of the places you’d never know was there if you weren’t family, is “the old homeplace”, never rebuilt after 1864 and now stacks of decaying ruins. A half mile down the road is the family cemetery, turn left from the house and pass Uncle Mike and Aunt Carol’s place, and then my cousins’ place, and just across from the driveway at Cousin Anna’s house, all distant relatives created by subdivisions of that land, turn left up the gravel drive through the woods. There you’ll find my Mama’s relatives going all the way back to 1817.

But they want to build a subdivision there now. As the all-consuming largest city in the South reaches its tentacles farther and farther out from its core, they want to cut down those century-old oak trees, fence in my family cemetery and confine it to its own lot while they build McMansions around it. The times they are indeed a’changing. That house in the country was my constant when we changed houses every two years. I lived in thirteen different dwellings in my first eighteen years, yet somehow that one never changed.

There was a junkyard there, on the road between Winder and
Athens. It was a Sunday afternoon delight for my cousins who claimed and defended mountains out of the piles of junk cars or appliances. In my childhood there was a fence around it but it was a simple matter to climb over it. Since 2000 or so there has been an industrial-grade fence and a professional security force at the junkyard – and kids are not welcome anywhere near the place, someone might get hurt and the owner would be sued. But it may not be there much longer either. City dwellers complain the junkyard is a disgrace and are pressuring the zoning board to force them to close. As long as the zoning board are of my Nana’s generation, I know that old relationships will carry the day. But what when that generation leaves?

John Prine’s family was indeed from the town of
Paradise. He dedicates this song to them and the memory of that place. I’ve always been fascinated by “eastern ghost towns” like Centralia, Pennsylvania or
Burton, Georgia. They contain an incredible sense of place that shouldn’t be discarded just because they’re aged.

 

Posted by
Elizabeth at 1:48 PM 1 comments

 

From: http://whomadeyouqueen.blogspot.com/2008/01/when-i-was-child-my-family-would-travel.html

Photos of Paradise
Kentucky can be found here: http://www.muhlenbergcountyky.com/page5.html

 

For more photos, click on the links at the bottom of the page

You Tube Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEy6EuZp9IY