Hear the World on your Computer

From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia.



This may be old hat (stale news) to you, but it's an exciting discovery to me. I've found I can use my computer to listen to hundreds of radio stations around the world.


In the last two days I've heard programs being broadcast by stations in New Zealand, South Africa, Bhutan, Ireland and the United States. All I had to do was to visit a website in Palo Alto, California called TuneIn 


The website says:
"TuneIn is a free service that lets you listen to anything in the world from wherever you are. Whether you want to hear music, sports, news or current events, TuneIn offers over 50,000 stations, all yours, for you to choose from.


"From finding local stations to discovering new stations from around the world, TuneIn brings you to where you want to be.Millions of people across every continent listen to what they love through TuneIn."


Here are some of the stations I've heard (with varying degrees of interest):


Radio Valley 99.9, Thimphu, Bhutan. Bhutan is a small kingdom in the Himalayas, between India and China.


KNTU Denton, Texas
KNTU is licensed to the University of North Texas and is on the air 24 hours, every day of the year, broadcasting with 100,000 watts at 88.1 FM.


The Night Time Network, Dublin, Ireland. Its website says:
On the Night-Time Network we realise that not everybody goes to bed at night...if you're doing the night shift or just having trouble counting sheep, we have plenty of music and games to get you through your night.


567 Cape Talk. News from Cape Town, South Africa.

Try it out for yourself. Tune in to Tunein com

BBC Overseas Service May Be In Peril

From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia  <ericshackleATbigpond.com>



The BBC may be about to close its shortwave service which has presented Britain to the world for 70 years. 


I stumbled on this disturbing information while researching a story I was writing about the world's most powerful radio transmitters.


"RAMPISHAM’S radio transmission station may close before Christmas with the loss of more than 20 jobs, even though it’s currently broadcasting into Libya," Jonathan Hudston wrote in his blog.


"The proposed shutdown of the Dorset site follows the BBC’s decision earlier this year to cut back on World Service shortwave broadcasting and stop it altogether by 2014, even though nearly half of the World Service’s audience (184 million in 2010-11) listens via shortwave.


"The BBC says it’s phasing out shortwave because the Foreign Office cut the World Service grant by 16% (£46 million).


"The possible closure of Rampisham raises some big questions.Such as: Isn’t it just a stupid idea? And: Is it even possible?"


Some 80 years ago, in the early days of commercial broadcasting, a New Zealand radio station, 4ZF Dunedin, used only seven watts to play gramophone recorded music to its few hundred listeners. 


Far away across the Pacific, the Crosley Radio Corporation, of Cincinnati, Ohio, boastedI've just added a new story to my blog:
Nimblenoms.blogspot.com
 that its station, the new 500,000 watt WLW, was the most powerful in the world.


As a teenager in Christchurch, New Zealand in the 1930s, my hobby was DXing, searching for lond-distance radio programs. I managed to listen to both 4ZF and WLW.


Where are the most powerful broadcasting stations today?


To find the answer to that question I consulted my friend David Ricquish, founder and chairman of the Radio Heritage Foundation, in Wellington, New Zealand's capital city. He has compiled an amazing database of thousands of stations around the world.


Here's his surprising response:
These seem to be the 4 largest SW sites by kW power.
1. Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran, Tehran, Kamalabad site = 12 x500kW, 1 x 350kW, 3 x 250kW, 10 x 100kW = 8,100kW
2. RTRN [Russia], Taldom site = 3 x 1000kW, 4 x 250kW, 12 x 100kW =5,200kW
3. Babcock International, Rampisham UK site = 10 x 500kW = 5,000kW
4. SARFT [China], Urumqi, Xinjiang site = 8 x 500kW, 9 x 100kW =4,900kW


LINKS
BBC prediction: http://www.realwestdorset.co.uk/wordpress/08/2011/dorset-bbc-world-service-rampisham-radio-transmitting-station-clo
http://www.realwestdorset.co.uk/wordpress/08/2011/dorset-bbc-world-service-rampisham-radio-transmitting-station-clo
Hard-Core-DX: http://www.hard-core-dx.com/archives/july2001.html
Middle East on Shortwave:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/bdxc
Sunday Mail, Brisbane (1938)
http://www.bdb.co.za/shackle/images/roughrodeo.gif
RTRN Russia: http://www.rtrn.it/

Two towns: HAMM and TWO EGG

TWO EGG is the quirky name of a small town in Florida. Its official website says there are more stories on how it changed its name from Allison than it has people. And HAMM is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

Since we first wrote about amusing or peculiar names of towns a decade ago, readers around the world have told us of dozens of their favorite weird place names, .

Here are some of their e-mails:

Have you heard of the town of HOTAZEL in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa? It gets quite warm there!
- RG,  (Johannesburg, South Africa).

In addition to HELL, Michigan has a town named PARADISE. (It's in the Upper Peninsula, on the shore of Lake Superior.) When we bought a cottage there, one of the previous owner's wall decorations was a road map of Michigan with the route from Hell to Paradise highlighted and "325 Miles from Hell to Paradise" scrawled across the top! Oh, and while Pennsylvania has INTERCOURSE, Michigan has a CLIMAX.
- Barbara Bushey.

There is a CLIMAX, Michigan that may be worth a visit... or maybe CHRISTMAS, Michigan as well.
- Nathan Miller.

Here in Arizona we have WHY without a question mark, and a place between Wickenburg and Wikieup called NOTHING. It really is a nothing. New Mexico boasts TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES, named after a long since gone radio program.
- Stanley Dickes.

Here's some more for you: DIMBOX, GODLY, CUT AND SHOOT (all in Texas), and one of my favorites: TOAD SUCK, Arkansas.
- Don Cooper.

Just read about the various town names, and thought I'd send a greeting from my town of ROUGH AND READY, California.
- Rosie Mariani.

[Reminds us of Ben Ryan's 1926 song, Heart of My Heart:
When we were kids
On the corner of the street,
We were Rough and Ready guys,
But oh, how we could harmonize!]

My father knew the man who named ZZYZYX (I am sure it is pronounced "zai-zix"). As I recall, he was a bit of a promoter, who wanted to create a town there, and sell land. He selected the name in order to create interest. I guess he succeeded!
- Radha, St John, U S Virgin Islands.

Hello from the UK. It is quite common to live in HOPE around here - there's one in Montgomeryshire, Wales and the other just over the border in Shropshire, England. There is also a village in Shropshire called GREAT NESS. I always thought I was destined for greatness but never could afford a house there.
- Chris Bartram.

You missed mentioning PARADISE, Pennsylvania, which is not far from INTERCOURSE,Pennsylvania: and both are also close to BIRD-IN-HAND, Pennsylvania.
- Lisa A. Hallett.

You don't have to go to California to find PARADISE. Near LANCASTER, Pennsylvania you can find both PARADISE and INTERCOURSE. On a highway there is a sign there pointing in two different directions, one to PARADISE and the other to INTERCOURSE. Most people opt to take the road to INTERCOURSE, out of curiosity. I am not sure if they go straight to PARADISE after INTERCOURSE or return disappointed and then opt to go to PARADISE. The three cities, BiRD IN HAND, INTERCOURSE, and PARADISE are all within 5 miles of each other.
- Sethuraman Subramanian.

Another place to visit, other than HELL, is DILDO, Newfoundland
- Dave Ritchie, Canada.

I have been to Intercourse, PA. If you love fun place names, you should check out a map of Newfoundland. My mother-in-law is from there, and we have visited. Some are just picturesque, like Harbour Grace, Bay Bulls, Tickle Cove, Tickle Beach, Tickle Harbour, Leading Tickles (a jolly bunch those Newfies must be), Cupids, Mosquito, Goblin, Garnish, Harbour Buffet (to go with the Garnish, perhaps?), Goobies, Come by Chance, Renews, Dildo, Dildo South, Bacon, Old Shop, Gin Cove, Doting Cove, Noggin, Tilting, Little Seldom (emphatic redundancy, perhaps), Joe Batt's Arm, Too Good Arm, Virgin Arm, Whale's Gulch, Lushes Bight, Black Duck, Jerrys Nose, Witless Bay, and Blow Me Down.
Some tell stories of great hardship, which is remarkable considering the penchant of most New World pioneers to give their godforsaken new home a name with some gloss and hopeful (if not outright deceptive) - but what do we make of Hungry Hill, Burnt Islands, Little Burnt Bay, Isle aux Morts, Camp Boggy, Bareneed, Farewell, Gallows Cove, and such? But some must have found contentment and prosperity there. There are Heart's Content, Heart's Delight, and Heart's Desire, all just across Trinity Bay from Little Heart's Ease. - Randal Allred.

There is also a town in Norway, just north of Trondheim, called Hell. They get no shortage of English speaking visitors in this little town who go there just so they can say they have gone to Hell and back.
- Kerilyn Cole.

Paradise, Pennsylvania and Hell, Michigan seem to call for Purgatory, Maine. It is actually quite a disappointing place. Its corner grocery store didn't even have post cards celebrating the name!
- James and Helen Miller.

We found two websites with huge lists of even weirder U.S. place names.
First, we discovered a story written by Sherry Stripling in the Seattle Times, which mentions Scratch Ankle, Alabama; Good Grief, Idaho; Panic, Pennsylvania; Stinking Point, Virginia; Yum Yum, Tennessee (reminds us of Australia's Woy Woy and Wagga Wagga); Dynamite, Washington, and Tranquility, California, Nothing, Arizona and Zero, Montana.

Sherry was reviewing New York photographer Gary Gladstone's book, Passing Gas: And Other Towns Along the American Highway (Ten Speed Press, $19.95), so named because people who drive through Gas, Kansas, are told not to blink or they'll pass Gas.

Eager to learn more about Gary's book, we found a detailed description of it, plus a gallery of superb photos, on his website

"I drove 38,000 miles visiting tiny places with funny names," says Gary. "I made a portrait in a different town every day and posted daily journals on the Photo News Network website. It is now a book."

His photos have appeared in Life, Look and the Saturday Evening Post. Making nine trips in five years, he shot 21,000 frames of film, and visited (among many other odd places) Ding Dong, Surprise, Goofy Ridge and Monkey's Eyebrow.

If you visit his website, be sure to look at his remarkable slide show. There are great pictures of Gas, Purgatory, Tightwad, Rough and Ready, Sweetlips, Good Grief, Bitter End, Suck Egg Hollow and Lovely.

LINK.
Two Egg, Florida:  http://www.twoeggfla.com/

Condom, Intercourse and other strange places

From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia. <ericshackleATbigpond.com>



Most countries have towns with strange names. PITY ME is in England, INTERCOURSE is in Pennsylvania, HELL is in Michigan, while MORON is in Cuba; PARADISE is in California, while SURFERS PARADISE is in Australia.


"INTERCOURSE is the hub where the Amish and local folks do their business and host thousands of visitors each year," says that town centre's website. 


"The beautiful Amish farms surround the Village.... INTERCOURSE is [near] our sister Villages of BIRD-IN-HAND and STRASBURG .


"The Village stands as a clear reminder of our traditional American heritage as people live by a simpler way of life. Formerly known as CROSS KEYS from a noted old tavern, this village was founded in 1754."


No one knows for sure how INTERCOURSE acquired its name, says the Centre. It cites these theories:


The entrance to a racecourse east of the town was known as ENTERCOURSE, which gradually evolved into INTERCOURSE, the name given to the town in 1814.


Two major roads crossed there. The junction could have led to the town being called CROSS KEYS or eventually INTERCOURSE.


"Old English" language was more common in 1814. Intercourse referred to the "fellowship" or social interaction and friendship which was so much a part of an agricultural village and culture at that time.


So much for Intercourse. Now what about PITY ME? My friend Ian Scott-Parker, an Englishman living in HURRICANE, Utah, used to live near that oddly-named English village just north of DURHAM (pronouced Durrum).


He recalled other odd names: "COCKERMOUTH and GREAT COCKUP are always worth a giggle," he said. "The Scottish town of ECCLEFECHAN (birthplace of Thomas Carlyle), not far north of Carlisle, seems to please, though I never figured out why; visitors to Cumbria are amazed to find that TORPENHOW is pronounced Trapenna, and the delightful town of APPLETREEWICK in North Yorkshire is pronounced Apptrick."


British historian David Simpson says "It has been suggested PITY ME was the site of a small lake or 'mere' and that the name means Petit Mere, Petty Mere or Peaty Mere. 


"A more fanciful suggestion is that St Cuthbert's coffin was dropped there by wandering monks on their way to Durham. The miracle-working saint is said to have pleaded with the monks to be more careful and take pity on him.


"Another suggestion is that PITY ME is the cry of the Peewits (or Lapwings) which inhabit the area. Other PITY MEs can be found in the north of England, including a small place near BARRASFORD in the North Tyne valley, and a PITY ME near BRADBURY in south Durham."

Yorkshire boasts the villages of CRACKPOT, FANGFOSS, SCAGGLETHORPE, BLUBBERHOUSES, SLAPE WATH, WETWANG and GREAT FRYUP.
Across the Atlantic, there's a place named HELL in Michigan. "Tucked away as it is amidst the hills, creeks, and rivers, HELL maintains a strange combination of notoriety and attraction," says the hell2u.com website. "People come to visit, to see HELL, to say they've been to HELL and back."

It says there are two theories as to how the town gained its name in the early 1830s.

Theory # 1: Two German travelers slid out of a curtained stagecoach one sunny summer afternoon, and one said to the other, "So schoene hell." "Hell," in the German language, means bright and beautiful. Those who overheard the visitors' comments had a bit of a laugh and shared the story with the other locals, who [promptly adopted the name for their village].

Theory # 2: The area in which HELL exists is pretty low and swampy. Traveling through the area would have been wetter, darker, more convoluted, and certainly denser with mosquitoes than other legs of the journey. River traders would have had to portage between the Huron and the Grand River systems near the present location of Hell. You can picture them pulling their canoes, heavy with provisions and beaver pelts, through the underbrush, muttering and swatting bugs as they fought to get to the banks of the next river.

In California, there's a place named ZZYZYX (just the place for a quiet zizz).

Other countries have place names which sound strange to English-speaking visitors. Cuba, for instance, has a town called MORON. It has a population of 50,000. What do they call themselves?

Readers of the Sydney Morning Herald's quirky Column 8 trivia pagecontributed these imaginary yet familiar place names:
Going to Buggery
Drinking in Moderation
Living in Sin
Living in Exile
Living in Poverty
Living in Hope
Taking Care
Taking Umbrage
Dying in Vain
Placed in Jeopardy
Bombing at Random
Escapees at Large

RANDOM HARVEST
Random has its place in history, says Ian Hunt, of Carlingford. After a foggy night during the World War II blitz, he says, the BBC reported that German planes had dropped their bombs at random in south-east Britain. That afternoon, the German propaganda broadcasts proudly boasted that "the town of Random has been heavily bombed".

We're reminded, too, that in the 1944 northern Burma campaign around Myitkina, the US forces, having captured the airfield, grandly announced they had captured the town, where the Chindits were still fighting. It's said a message went out that the "the British have taken umbrage". The Americans couldn't find Umbrage on the map. -- Sydney Morning Herald.

Link
Intercourse: http://www.800padutch.com/intercourse.shtml

GRANMA: Cuban Newspaper's Strange Name

From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia.

Every Cuban knows Granma. It's the strange title of the nation's leading daily newspaper. How did a Spanish-language newspaper acquire that charming English language title? It took a long time and many e-mails to discover the details.

Granma was the name of the 38ft. motor yacht in which Fidel Castro and his men sailed from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 to start a revolution.

Castro had been exiled to Mexico. where he joined forces with Che Guevara, a young Argentine doctor who had abandoned his profession and his native land in an ill-fated bid to help the world's poor.

Castro bought the yacht Granma from a Texan yachtsman, who had named it after his beloved grandmother.

With a small group of supporters, Castro and Guevara crossed the Caribbean in the decrepit and leaking boat, vowing to invade Cuba and overthrow dictator Fulgencio Batista.

"On December 2, 1956, the Granma cabin cruiser arrived on the eastern coast of Cuba, at Los Cayuelos, two kilometers from Las Coloradas beach," Granma International recalled in 2000, on the 45th anniversary of the landing.

"It had left from Tuxpan, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, on November 25, with 82 men aboard, commanded by Fidel Castro.

"The purpose of the voyage was to return to Cuba and initiate the war for the island's definite independence."Landing in a hostile swamp, in a province now also named Granma, losing most of their party, the survivors fought their way to the Sierra Maestra, a mountain range in south-east Cuba.

"Two years later, after a guerrilla campaign in which Guevara was named comandante, the insurgents entered Havana and launched the first and only successful socialist revolution in the Americas."

Granma newspaper was established in 1965 by the merger of two major publications: Hoy (Spanish for Today), the organ of the Communist Party of Cuba, and Revolucion, the daily newspaper of Castro's 26th of July movement.

Because of Cuba's foreign currency problems, shortages of paper and ink have affected even government-owned media. Granma's circulation is now only a quarter of its 1990 peak of 1.6 million copies daily.

The newspaper also publishes a weekly international edition and two other official weeklies (Juventud Nacion on Sundays, and Trabajadores on Mondays), as well as various provincial sheets.

Sixty years ago, the Cuban people were among the most informed in the were among the most informed in the world, having a choice of 58 daily newspapers during the late 1950s, according to the UN Statistical Yearbook.

Despite its small size, that placed Cuba behind only Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico in the region. By 1992, government controls had reduced the number of dailies to 17.

Granma's website offers an impressive list of news stories in Spanish, and a link to Granma Internacional, which deserves an award as one of the world's most comprehensive multi-lingual sites.

The newspaper's weekly edition offers an array of news stories, facts, figures, politics and economy in Spanish, English, French, Portuguese and German.

Granma has its critics on the Internet. A report (in German) from "independent journalists in Cuba" says the paper is "the Party Gazette which is distributed throughout the country and which is the only and worst Gazette in the Republic. The page-long speeches of the Great Leader are also useful for toilet paper."

What happened to the historic yacht named Granma? It rests behind thick layers of glass outside the Museum of the Revolution in Havana.

A Cuban Government website says that one of Havana's tourist attractions is the Museum of the Revolution and Granma Memorial, adding, in halting English: "In the exterior areas it is the Memorial Yate Granma, where is exhibited, protected by an inmense (sic) glass case, the ship used by Fidel Castro and over 80 combatants in the return to Cuba from the exile in Mexico."

The current issue of Granma when I wrote this article (April 17, 2012) says:

DECLARATION OF THE CUBAN REVOLUTIONARY GOVERNMENT
For our second independence
THE Summit held in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, gave evidence of the ever-growing abyss that exists between "Our America", as Martí called it, and the "turbulent and brutal North that despises us." Cartagena witnessed a rebellion of Latin America and the Caribbean against the imposition made by "one and a half governments" which applied their imperial veto to paragraphs in the Draft Final Declaration of the so-called Summit of the Americas which demanded an end to the blockade and Cuba’s exclusion from hemispheric events.-----------------
"Though Cuba is not democratic, a majority of nations in the hemisphere support its participation in future summits. The U.S. and Canada oppose this, saying Cuba needs to undergo political and human rights reforms".-- Voice of America.
Granma website:http://www.granma.cu/ingles/
Photos of Yacht Granma:https://www.google.com.au/#hl=en&gs_nf=1&cp=19&gs_id=22&xhr=t&q=photos+yacht+granma&pf=p&sclient=psy-ab&oq=photos+yacht+granma&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_l=&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=8211ac86b7427ec4

Newspaper Slogans: True or False?

From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia <ericshackle*bigpond.com>

Multi-millionaires and famous film stars frolicking in America's most expensive ski resort are warned every day by this slogan nailed to the masthead of the Aspen (Colorado) Daily News: If You Don't Want It Printed, Don't Let It Happen.

And the good folk of another small western town, Yerington, Nevada, must surely glow happily when they read this slogan of the Mason Valley News: The Only Newspaper in the World That Gives a Damn About Yerington.

Another great motto still in use is Liked by Many, Cussed by Some, Read by Them All,
displayed by The Blackshear (Georgia) Times.


Texas newspaperman Charlie Stough said his family once owned a weekly in Arizona called Sage: The only newspaper you can open up in a high wind or read on a horse.

Newspapers around the world flaunt slogans on their front pages. Many are boastful, some are untrue, and others make us laugh out loud. Here's a selection. You can decide for yourself which category each belongs to:

• New York Times: All the News That's Fit to Print.
• Atlanta Journal: Covers Dixie Like the Dew.
• Chicago Tribune: World's Greatest Newspaper.
• Philadelphia Inquirer: The Oldest Daily Newspaper In The United States--Founded 1771 / An Independent Newspaper For All The People
• Burlington (Vermont) Free Press: America's Most Colorful Newspaper.
• Longview (Texas) Daily News: An Independent Democratic Newspaper Of The First Class Unchallenged In Its Field.
• Edmonson News (Brownsville, Kentucky): The Gimlet -- It Bores In.
• Colleton and Beaufort (South Carolina) Sun: A Weekly Newspaper for the Mutual Benefit of Ourselves, Colleton and Beaufort Districts and Mankind Generally.
• Julesburg Advocate, Colorado: You won't see a newspaper like THIS every day...just once a week.
• Los Angeles Times: Largest Circulation In The West.
• Los Angeles Herald Examiner: Largest Circulation In The Entire West.
• New Orleans States-Item: The Lively One, With a Mind of Its Own
• Putnam Pit (Putnam County, Tennessee): [No bull] Going where no dog has gone before -- and without a leash!
• TheTombstone Epitaph, in Arizona: 116 Years In the Town Too Tough To Die. No Tombstone Is Complete Without Its Epitaph.

North Star: Dr Larry Lorenz, a professor of journalism at Loyola University, New Orleans says Frederick Douglass escaped slavery in 1838 at the age of 21, and founded the North Star Newspaper. Its slogan was Right is of no sex, truth is of no color. God is the father of us all and all we are brethren.

Newspapers in Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia) also go in for slogans. The Post calls itself The paper that digs deeper, while the Zambia Daily Mail claimed We serve the country without fear or favour, which it later shortened to Without Fear or Favour.

Here in Australia, the Sydney Daily Telegraph once carried the sloganThe Paper You Can Trust. When I was a young reporter on its staff, in the 1940s, it was often called it The Paper You Can Thrust.

In those far-off days, the Sydney Bulletin magazine's masthead bore an infamous motto that persisted until 1961: Australia for the White Man. After the second world war, the nation's White Australia policy was abandoned, and Sydney is now one of the world's most multicultural cities. A single suburb, Marrickville, is home to people from 140 nations.

Gold Coast Bulletin,  Southport, Australia
Your Town, Your Paper

Sunday Mail, Brisbane, Australia: Feels Like Sunday

Sunraysia Daily,  Mildura, Australia: Bringing People Together

Sunshine Coast Daily,  Maroochydore, Australia: 
It's got the Coast written all over it

The Advertiser, Adelaide, Australia: Fresh Daily

The Age, Melbourne, Australia: Everyone sees things differently.

The Australian Financial Review, Sydney, Australia:

The Daily Habit of Successful People

The Border Mail , Wodonga, Australia: A New World Every Day 

The Daily Mercury,  Mackay, Australia: News You Can Use

The Examiner, Launceston, Australia: Read your own news every day

 The Morning Bulletin, Rockhampton, Australia: Local news means the world to us

The Sun-Herald, Sydney, Australia: It's a Newsstand in a Newspaper

The Sydney Morning Herald,  Sydney, Australia: Tomorrow's Paper


Die Presse, Vienna, Austria: 

Gotta make time -- to read the Times (So viel Zeit muss sein -- so viel Zeitung muss sein)

Kleine Zeitung,  Graz, Austria: 

Life Writes Its Own Stories (Wie das Leben so schreibt)

Walt Whitman's Western Newspapers

From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia. <ericshackle@bigpond.com>



Famous American poet Walt Whitman, who once edited New York's Brooklyn Eagle, wrote in his book November Boughs (1888): "Among the far-west newspapers have been, or are, The Fairplay (Colorado) Flume, The Solid Muldoon, of Ouray, The Tombstone Epitaph, of Nevada, The Jimplecute, of Texas, and The Bazoo, of Sedalia, Missouri."


Checking the internet, we find that three of those newspapers are still in business.
Walt was only 19 , when he was made editor-in-chief of The Long Islander,which went broke within a year of its founding. Whitman refused to give up, and within a few years he became editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.


Five years later, in 1848, he was fired again, because of his outspoken support for absolition of slavery. Undeterred, Whitman immediately set out for New Orleans to visit his brother Jeff.


While there, he became an editor for the New Orleans Crescent, but returned to Brooklyn within a few months to become editor of The Brooklyn Times. At the same time he worked for the arts-oriented periodical, the Democratic Review.
What has become of those far-west newspapers Whitman mentioned?
Let's visit them, one at a time.


FAIRPLAY FLUME
The Fairplay Flume has undergone more than a dozen changes to its masthead over the years. One of them was sub-titled The Paper With A Mission and Without A Muzzle. 


Today the sub-title is The Park County Republican's Fairplay Flume. 


Ten years ago, its then editor Robin Kepple told me "We understand The Flume acquired its name due to the vast amount of mining in Fairplay and Park County. A flume, as you probably know, is designed to channel water, logs, etc. from one place to another. In Fairplay's case, a flume was used to channel rocks, minerals and tailings from one place to another in the endless pursuit of gold.


"Some folks believe the name Flume was selected because the newspaper helps 'channel' information. I am not certain if this is really the reason for the name or not."


The Flume is now printed not in Fairplay, but in the nearby town of Bailey, which is also the home of the strangely-named Id-Ra-Ha-Je summer camps. That's shorthand for 
I'd Rather Have Jesus.


Today, the Flume's website says, "The Park County Republican and Fairplay Flume
is published every Friday and is the official newspaper in Park County, Colorado.


"The Flume, established in 1879, is almost as old as the county it serves - Park County, Colorado, which was formed in 1861. Park County lies just west of Jefferson County, the westernmost and most mountainous of the seven counties that are typically used in defining metro Denver.


"Headquartered in Bailey, an unincorporated town in the northeastern part of the county, The Flume covers all areas of life in Park County, including business, politics, the courts, weather, crime, festivals, fires and more.

"At the core of the stories in The Flume are the residents themselves, now numbering more than 16,000 in a county that's 83 percent bigger than Rhode Island and nearly as big as Delaware."


THE SOLID MULDOON
This newspaper was founded on September 5, 1879, and, through a series of name changes and merges, eventually became the present-day Durango Herald.


The newspaper didn't pull its punches. A local historian records that "David Day, a Medal of Honor winner for heroism at Vicksburg, had the distinction of having 42 libel suits pending at the same time [1900] for his raw and bitter articles in The Solid Muldoon newspaper of Ouray and Durango."  Maybe that's why it went out of business.


The original Solid Muldoon was the name given to a mysterious "prehistoric human body" dug up near Beulah, Colorado, in 1877. The seven-and-a-half foot stone man was thought to be the "missing link" between apes and humans. "There can be no question about the genuineness of this piece of statuary" said the Denver Daily Times.


It was later revealed that George Hull, perpetrator of a previous hoax featuring the Cardiff Giant, had spent three years fashioning his second "petrified man", using mortar, rock dust, clay, plaster, ground bones, blood and meat. He kiln-fired the figure for many days and then buried it.


A few months later, as the celebration of Colorado's year-old statehood approached, the statue was "discovered" by William Conant, who had once worked for the legendary showman P.T. Barnum. News of the find quickly spread to Pueblo, Denver, and eventually to New York.


The statue was named the Solid Muldoon after William Muldoon, a famous wrestler and strongman who had been honored in a popular song. Displayed in New York, it attracted large crowds until an unpaid business associate of Hull revealed the hoax to the New York Tribune, and the statue was seen no more. Muldoon was chairman of the New York State Boxing Commission from 1921 to 1923.


Rudyard Kipling, a ballad and prose writer as famous in England as Whitman was in the United States, wrote a piece entitled The Solid Muldoon, one of seven short stories in his book The Soldiers Three, published in 1890.


The world-famous TOMBSTONE EPITAPH in Arizona, was founded on the Southwestern frontier on May 1, 1880 by John P. Clum, who proclaimed in the first issue No Tombstone is complete without an Epitaph. Souvenir editions detailing the O.K. Corral shootout can be bought from the Tombstone Epitaph Corp, whose shop displays old type cases and the original printing press.


A local historian wrote "Clum was the quintessential frontier administrator. As an Indian agent, he dealt with great Apaches warriors like Geronimo and Naiche, son of Cochise. 


"As mayor and editor of the Tombstone Epitaph, Clum had much to do in helping to foment the high levels of tension in Tombstone. After the street fight and subsequent trial, Clum learned he was on a 'deathlist' made up by the cowboy gang. 


"In December 1881, Clum narrowly escaped what he considered an assassination attempt when highwaymen attempted to rob the stagecoach he was in. Clum was a life-long friend of Wyatt Earp and was one of Earp's pallbearers at his funeral."


The original Tombstone Epitaph is published monthly as a national historic edition. It contains original articles about the old west written by western history writers.


A small local edition of the Epitaph is now published by students of the University of Arizona Department of Journalism. Its sub-title reads: 116 Years In The Town Too Tough To Die. No Tombstone Is Complete Without Its Epitaph.


JEFFERSON JIMPLECUTE
The Texas weekly, the Jefferson Jimplecute, was founded as a daily in 1848, when Jefferson was a thriving Red River town. The "Jimp," as the locals call it, sells about 2400 copies. How did it get its name? No one knows. At one stage it displayed, beneath its masthead title, words which formed an acronym: Join Industry, Manufacturing, Planting, Labor, Energy (and) Capital (in) Unity Together Everlasting. However, a local history book says that that phrase first appeared long after the paper was founded.


Amber Cullen, managing editor of The Jimplecute, has just emailed me:
"The editor in chief/ founder of the paper (name unknown) when piecing together the letters for the front page flag- with the old metal 'stamps' (the old way of printing) - he 
dropped the box of letters to the floor, and in a fit, he picked up a
handful and jumbled them back in and Jimplecute was the name that arose.
The acronym did come later, and still runs on our pages today!"



SPRING PLACE JIMPLECUTE
Strangely, a second newspaper named Jimplecute was published in the small Georgia town of Spring Place (688 miles by road from Jefferson) from 1879 to 1903, but here again no one knows how it was named, or whether it had any connection with its Texan namesake.


SEDALIA Missouri BAZOO
This newspaper was published from 1881 to1895.


LINKS
Walt Whitman - Slang in America:
http://www.bartleby.com/229/5009.html
Durango Herald. http://www.durangoherald.com/
Tombstone Epitaph, http://www.tombstoneepitaph.com/ 
The Jimplecute, Jefferson,Texas http://www.jimplecute.com/