Last weekend I was lucky enough to spend my weekend at one of my favorite places in Canada, Stratford, Ontario! As a former English major, the Stratford Festival is one of my favorite festival listings we have on ePodunk Canada. With four theaters and fifteen productions to choose from this year, it’s a drama lover’s paradise. The festival boasts a large offering of Shakespeare’s plays, both the well-known classics and the more obscure. This year, I went to Coriolanus, Much Ado About Nothing, and a lighter Boucicault comedy, London Assurance.
In the first photo, left I’m standing next to Colm Feore, Stratford great, on the Stratford Festival sign. Directly above, I embrace my inner-nerd with Shakespeare’s likeness outside the Festival Theatre. The Stratford Festival extends through Oct. 29, 2006 with select performances going on until November 12, 2006.

More Canadian Festivals here.

Yesterday, Laurie and I made a trip out to SUNY Geneseo’s campus to talk to a web publishing class about some of the key concepts we’ve taken from working on ePodunk. From web design, layout, text composition, to blogging, we talked about what we think works best and worst on the web.

On our site, we do our best to make information easy to access, understandable and cohesive. We want users to find what they’re looking for and to be able to orient themselves no matter which page Google takes them to.

Thanks for having us, SUNY Geneseo and best of luck in web writing!
Above, students outside Welles Hall at SUNY Geneseo.

After months of planning and weeks of testing, we have switched to a new, more powerful computer network. You should see much faster response times, without the aggravating waits you might have experienced in recent months.

We had been adding new servers all along, but the old network just couldn’t keep pace with the demand. So last night we moved the whole site to a new setup, with more powerful machines.

As Josh, one of our tech experts, said after completing the move at 1:30 this morning: “May I present … ePodunk, the way it should be viewed, like flipping the pages of a book!”

Please let us know if you encounter any problems.

Few festivals do a better job of conveying a sense of place than the annual Rustic Fair in Blue Mountain Lake, NY.

The event, held each fall at the Adirondacks Museum, attracts lovers of rustic furniture in the Adirondack and other regional traditions. The wood itself betrays its origins. Craftsman use yellow birch from the Adirondacks, bent willow from northern Michigan, and Connecticut maple that has been twisted and carved by the bittersweet vines that have killed so many trees there.

The Adirondacks region has long been known for twig work, an architectural and furniture style made by arranging sticks in geometric patterns. Equally important to the rustic tradition is the cottage furniture used in the camps of Adirondack Park.

Original pieces from the early 1900s have become collector’s items, often selling for tens of thousands of dollars. The Rustic Fair shows off modern pieces by artists from across the U.S. and Canada.

This year’s show, ending today, featured a $22,000 pool table, its legs a tangle of burnished white tree roots. There were lamps fringed by acorns and ornate rockers made for watching sunsets.

The term “rustic” belies the intricacy of many of the works, which can incorporate pine cones, birch bark, nuts, burls and stones. A grandfather clock made by David Waller of Gloversville was decorated with fishing rods and a reel that turned.

Visitors can buy these items (I collected a stack of cards for the day I can afford such pieces), and also can enjoy the museum itself. Among the many exhibits on the 32-acre grounds are the tiny cabin of mountain hermit Noah John Rondeau and the bobsled on which the Stevens brothers won the gold medal in the 1932 Olympics at Lake Placid.

Next year’s fair is scheduled for Sept. 7-9.

- Laurie

After receiving the following email, we found it necessary to address the subject of ePodunk’s inclusion of a gay index on our community profiles.

One user writes:

“WHY DO YOU HAVE GAY DEMOGRAPHICS ON YOUR WEBSITE ? THIS IS SIC”

Our audience - gay and straight - has shown a strong interest in these statistics. Gay couples, researching a move or a retirement location, often write to thank us for publishing them.

Others see the gay index as a measure of a community’s openness to diversity. (Those who prefer HOMOgeneity should aim for communities with low gay indexes. So even the writer should find some value in our publishing the figures.)

Some economists - most prominently Carnegie Mellon professor Richard Florida (more information here) - believe the number of gay couples living in a city to be an indicator of a region’s economic future. Gays constitute an important part of what Florida calls the “creative class,” a group needed for growth in the information age.

Florida’s theories have met with opposition among many conservatives, and we assume this group includes the writer .

Everyone is entitled to an opinion. We think that’s best formed through the free flow of information.

More information about our gay index here.

Genealogists have long been an important part of the ePodunk audience.

We can’t say we planned for that. People’s intense interest in their ancestors came as a surprise to us after we launched ePodunk, leading us to add cemeteries and other information about family history. Our links to Ancestry.com also help pay for the costs of running ePodunk.

Still, we were skeptical about a recent report that genealogy was second only to pornography in internet revenues. Family trees = big business?

Then we traveled to the Federation of Genealogical Societies Conference this week in Boston. Vendors jam the exhibition hall at Hynes Convention Center, selling subscriptions to online databases, software, books, historic maps and knickknacks for the passionate root digger.

The Association for Gravestone Studies offers tombstone rubbing wax and brochures on epitaphs and ornamental carving. Men in tri-cornered hats and breeches pitch membership in the Sons of the American Revolution.

A woman at the Rhode Island Genealogical Society, eying my name tag, says, “We have lots of Bennetts in Rhode Island.” In genealogical circles, this qualifies as hucksterism.

A review of the titles at booksellers’ stalls makes one wonder how more family lines haven’t been cut short by the constant onslaught of cataclysmic events. Somehow, civilization has survived “The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775,” “The Great Fire,” “The Great Famine,” “The New Madrid Earthquake” and “The Tri-State Tornado of 1925.”

And we’re still smiling. A sampling of genealogy humor, as evidenced by the many T-shirts, bumper stickers and key chains:
· Genealogy: Living in the past lane.
· Caution: I brake for cemeteries.
· Genealogists never die. They just lose their census.

It’s a comfort to know that death is not only funny (well, not exactly funny, but at least a source of mild amusement to some), but also profitable.

- Laurie