Camel Corps

photo by andreakw

I learned on Twitter today that there are about 25,000 wild camels in the Australian outback, one of the more interesting invasive species to plague Australia.

Australia is not the only country coping with feral camels. While I was writing my term paper I returned to AUDC's great Blue Monday and the story of the US Army's failed Camel Military Corps.

Instead of serving the Confederacy, in 1863 the Camel Corps was sold off at auction. Most would wind up in private hands, but some would be released into the desert where they became feral. Hadji Ali, now known as “Hi Jolly” remained behind although whether this was to pursue the American dream or simply because he was marooned far from home is unclear. After a time running a camel-borne freight business, Hi Jolly, who was actually half-Greek and also known by the name Philip Tedro, married a Tucson woman and moved to the west Arizona town of Tyson’s Wells, nine miles west of Quartzsite, Arizona, where he worked as a miner until he died in 1902, reportedly expiring with his arm around one of his camels during a sandstorm. In memory of his service, the government of Arizona built a small pyramid topped by a metal camel on his gravesite in the 1930s. Feral camels would be seen roaming the desert until the early 1900s.

on the suburbs

Vitruvius - Satyric Scene

"One need only contrast this definition with the realities of the eighteenth-century city to see how radically suburbia contradicted the basic assumptions that organized the premodern city. Such cities were built up on the principle that the core was the only appropriate and honorific setting for the elite, and that the urban peripheries outside the walls were disreputable zones, shantytowns to which the poorest inhabitants and the most noisome manufactures were relegated.
[…] From its earliest usage in the fourteenth century until the mid-eighteenth century, a 'suburbe' - that is, a settlement on the urban fringe - meant (in the definition of the Oxford English Dictionary) a 'place of inferior, debased, and especially licentious habits of life.' The canon's yeoman in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales says of himself and his master, a crooked alchemist, that they live 'in the suburbes of town. We lurk in corners and blind alleys where robbers and thieves instinctively huddle secretly and fearfully together…'
In Shakespeare's London so many houses of prostitution had moved to these disreputable outskirts that a whore was called 'a suburb sinner,' and to call a man a 'suburbanite' was a serious insult."

- Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias

Jonathan Zawada

[but does it float]

Complete US Census Data Released

The Census Bureau finished releasing population data from the 2010 Census. They created the useful interactive map below.

The data gets even more interesting at the state level. In Illinois, you can see the big growth in suburban collar counties - a trend mirrored across the country. What's missing at the county level is that Cook County, while experiencing a loss of population, had a big increase in the area surrounding the Loop. I'm guessing the .6% decrease in the black population statewide is largely due to the dramatic decanting of traditional black neighborhoods on the South Side.

This phenomenon, which again isn't unique to Chicago, is addressed in further detail here.

THE GHOSTS