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Roadside News: March 7, 2009

March 7, 2009

• Mobile Space Attraction: NASA is moving its Orion launch abort system cross-country, and is using it as a tourist attraction at various stops along the way. It’s odd that we’re starting our return to the moon and beyond with a road show of what would happen if the rocket explodes — kind of like the scary Shuttle Launch Experience in Titusville, Florida. Space: the potentially catastrophic frontier.

• Burning Curiosity About Burning Town Tourists: A university professor in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania, will give a lecture on March 18 inspired by the burning town of Centralia. “I’m interested in ‘fringe tourism,’” he told the Daily Item. “I want to consider what people get out of driving to the middle of nowhere to look at a landscape of weed-choked lots and rubble.” If Centralia is considered “fringe” in Pennsylvania, then what would the academics label the people who visit Pithole?

• Wall of Skis: A man in Juneau, Alaska, has received recognition in the Juneau Empire for his three-story-tall wall of skis, which he says he’s been building since 2001. “What began as just ’something to do,’” reports the Empire, “is now a tourist attraction.” Hmmm… where have we encountered that before?

• Statues Feared as Movie Murder Magnets: A collection of locally-popular junk sculptures — including an owl, moose, clam and T-rex — which had stood for years outside of a dump in Falmouth, Massachusetts, was secretly dragged away last week. Most people aren’t happy about it, but the town manager is standing firm. “We don’t want the facility to look like a crazy village in the movies where everyone gets killed.” No, then it might look like this, and as far as we know it hasn’t inspired any mass murders….

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