The Nanty Glo Jonal gets a new start
New membership categories for Museum/Historical Society
Former Journal editor heard from
Where have Nanty Glo's trees gone?
Another bit of Rudy Basci lore

A new start for the "Jonal"

Those of you newer to this list or to the Nanty Glo Home Page than about the middle of 1999 won't remember the fun we used to have here with something called the "Jonal." The name was a play on the name of Nanty Glo's newspaper, the Journal (which I had the pleasure and privilege of editing in my salad days as a Pitt undergraduate). If you've checked out the archives of the email forum, you may have noticed that that page still caries the Jonal nameplate. But before we started using that page, we had a whole department on the Home Page called the Jonal. You can look at the old runs of it by clicking http://www.nantyglo.com/newadds.htm. From there, you can scoll to the very bottom and go back to even earlier runs of it.

The Jonal was an attempt to put something new on the site and give those of you on this list something new on an every-day basis. Not only did the name of it play on the name of the newspaper and my own first name, it also referred to the "diary" ("journal")-like quality of the effort. Every day, I tried to think up something to discuss, encouraging the members of this list to respond. We had some very good discussions, especially about our memories of running wild in the woods in the valley in our youth (the most popular topic), and the peculiarities of Western Pennsylvania jargon. Those forums are still online at the pages already referenced (or try a search using the Home Page search engine at the bottom of the front page…it's working again).

I for one have missed it, though my work of the previous year made it virtually impossible to keep it up. Now…maybe I can do it again. And there's another motivation to resume publishing in the older way again. The independently owned archive page for these emails changed its policy recently. Instead of keeping a permanent file of all letters on this forum, it will delete those 12 months or older from its site. I guess the policy is understandable, considering it's a free service of a division of Microsoft. But that's not what we were looking for. So I've taken a new list to a new "list server," called Topica. If you've received this (and apparently you have), your membership has been forwarded to the new list. The old one still exists and can be used, but it will probably be phased out.

So, here's a first attempt to revive the Nanty Glo Jonal, which will now be archived back on our own site where it isn't likely to disappear after six months or, I hope, even six years. Besides daily—or I should say, "frequent"—ruminations in this middle space by your webmaster and those of you who react to it, and the latest updates listed at the top of this page, I'm adding something new, a humor and/or inspiration department at the bottom of each page (and the idea, this time, is to make each Jonal page stand alone, like the letters to the Forum do, rather than turn into long, long, scrolls displaying a whole quarter's collection of entries).

The jokes will be appropriate for any member of the family, and both they and the inspirational items will be culled from daily emails I get, from public domain rather than copyrighted sources. If you have any you'd like to share, by all means, I'm looking. I expect the ratio of jokes to inspirational items will be about four to one, based on what I receive from my brother Bob, and a friend from a former job, both of whom send such things almost every day. (I've also forwarded a number of them to a number of individuals…many of the ones especially from my brother get forwarded to the friend, who sends them to dozens of people on his lists.) Sometimes (probably more times than I hope to be the case) the "daily" edition will have only a selection of forwarded material, with nothing new or unique from yours truly.

Burning Questions
If Fed Ex and UPS were to merge, would they call it Fed UP?  I believe five out of four people have trouble with fractions. If quitters never win, and winners never quit, what fool came up with, "Quit while you're ahead ?" Do Lipton Tea employees take coffee breaks? What hair color do they put on the driver's licenses of bald men?  Women should put pictures of missing husbands on beer cans.  I was thinking about how people seem to read the Bible a whole lot more as they get older, then it dawned on me . . . they are cramming for their finals. Since mothers feed their babies with little tiny spoons and forks, do Chinese mothers use toothpicks?