Mucking around on the Internets as I do, I often will come across some truly incredible sites that no one seems to know about. At least I think that must be the case, because no one is telling me about them. In the interest of getting to bed at a decent hour and giving you something to do when you should really be collating I’ll give you five of my favorite places on the web to waste an hour or three while expanding my horizons. If you make it to the end of the column without getting sucked off into one of these powerful vortexes, leave a comment with a link to a couple of your favorites. Together we can lower the productivity of the country this week!

Gnarly Maps

If you don’t know about Radical Cartography and you even spent one day as a kid making a treasure map or a diagram of your neighborhood with secret hideouts and the like, you’re missing out. The site has everything: a Flash-animated map showing the development of area codes in the US, a map comparing the various mass-transit systems of North America, a cool overlay map illustrating the relative sizes of Europe and the US (I always thought Wisconsin was about the size of Germany; looks like I was wrong), and a map of the world from a New Yorker’s perspective. There are more cool ones, but I’ll let you discover them on your own.

My Old Kentucky Virginia Home

You know how some people are nostalgic about the old family farm? The owners of Enon Hall are rightly crazy about their property. Enon Hall, located in Lancaster County, Virginia, was the ancestral Hathaway homestead from 1762 - 1939. The present owners, themselves Hathaway descendants, bought the homestead in 1999 without even having toured the entire house. What has followed is a labor of love in restoring the home and the grounds, documented in a journal and aided by an extensive collection of historical documents. I just discovered this treasure this past weekend and have read up through November of 1999. I plan on reading the entire journal and then continuing to check back each month as the owners continue to rebuild a significant part of their family history.

Bullet Trains

I’ve held forth at length here in the past on the subject of high speed rail connections in this country. The MHSRA has crammed more information into one place than I can possibly link to, so you’ll have to do the exploring on your own. Worth looking at no matter if you’re a railroad buff, a proponent of sound civil engineering, or just curious about why high speed rail is such a no-brainer for the Midwest.

It’s like hacking, only with buildings!

I link to Action Squad in the sidebar, but if you haven’t checked it out yet, you really should, especially if you’re from the Twin Cities or you liked sneaking around like a favorite spy character as a tot. Whether crawling through the ruins of a state mental hospital, messing around in an abandoned bowling alley, or infiltrating the abandoned mines beneath Ford’s assembly plant in St. Paul, Action Squad leaves you wanting to do a little urban exploration of your own.

Ghost Towns, Junkyards, and the Salton Sea
If I ever have an office to myself again, I think I would like to decorate it exclusively with prints of Troy Paiva’s work, showcased at his Lost America website. Eerily beautiful, haunting, and just plain cool. And no Photoshop - just plain old lens mastery and long exposures. Brilliant.

Share the love with links in the comments!