Punknews.com announced that “legendary musician” Ian MacKaye will speak at Franklin & Marshall College the evening of Friday, November 20.

The event is being hosted by the college’s student radio station, WFNM. MacKaye was the frontman of influential punk bands The Fugazi, Minor Threat, and The Evens. He is also something of a figurehead for the so-called Straight Edge movement within the punk subculture.

The event will be in the 500-seat Barshinger Center for Music. The suggested donation is $5.

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The website launches an all-out marketing campaign to get people to fill out their Census questionnaires next April. The population is counted every 10 years, and the numbers are used to reapportion seats in Congress and redraw state and local political districts. They also are used to determine where more than $400 billion in federal money should go every year.

The government is bracing for a lower response rate to the questionnaires than in 2000, partly because of a larger and more diverse population. The website is available in Spanish, and sample questionnaires can be viewed in 59 languages.

This effort for Spanish-language inclusion is important to Lancaster city where, according to a December 2007 report from the county Workforce Investment Board, “it is very probably that [by the end of 2022], Latinos will surpass the White non-Latino population.” At the time of the report, 18% of Latinos in the county spoke English “not well or not at all.”

I’ll be following the census effort and the resulting data closely, so if you haven’t already, be sure to sign up to receive this blog by e-mail, add the RSS feed to your reader, or bookmark the data and trends page.

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PPL customers can now get electricity from wind mills

Welcome to the new economy. Having to pay more for the same old stuff causes revolts. Having the opportunity to pay more for what’s innovative and sustainable engenders loyalty.

What I’m talking about is PPL’s new Green Power Option. You should do it. Go to communityenergyinc.com/ppl and choose how much of your household electricity you’d like to come from the renewable sources of wind and hydro. The options start at an extra $2.50 on your bill. Amanda and I are signed up to get about half of our electricity through green power. That will be about four tons less of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere this year.

I jumped at the opportunity to enroll in this program. I appreciated having a similar option through PECO when I lived in the Philadelphia area, and I have no clue why it has taken PPL so long to offer a green option here. The idea is simple: If it costs more to generate electricity sustainably, give people the option to pay the extra expense.

The green electricity PPL is offering is generated by Community Energy. It so happens that the company is the one that partnered with Temple, Villanova, and my college, Eastern, when as a student body we decided to get 100% of campus electricity from sustainable sources in 2002. I covered the story for our student newspaper as it unfolded.

Electricity generated by PPL comes primarily from four types of sources:

• Nuclear
• Coal
• Hydro
• Oil and natural gas

Participating in the Green Power Option gives PPL a financial incentive to continue its emerging set of renewable energy projects. PPL says that about 10% of the electricity it markets comes from such projects. While PPL claims the Frey Farm Landfill as one of its projects, the Lancaster County Solid Waste Management Authority’s website says that what electricity it does not use to power the facility itself, it sells to Met Ed, not to PPL. That’s a shame, because the LCSWM waste-to-energy system is sleek and innovative.

For now, I’m just happy that it’s finally within my reach to power my home with energy from green sources.

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First United Methodist Church as it appeared in 1946

One of the first exercises that the students will do is to complete a GIS database of all the religious communities practicing today and sort through the architectural spaces in which they worship. Then, we will move backwards in time, consulting Sanborn Fire Insurance maps, archival documents, photos, and genealogies from the Lancaster County Historical Society, the Franklin and Marshall Archive, and the Historic Preservation Trust. …

The complete list of places of worship in Lancaster adds up to 170. For the first assignment, each student will be assigned 10 of the listings and must conduct an architectural inspection.

Yes, Ethan, Wheatland is on the list. No, Ken, LCBC is not. Also on the list is the Unitarian Universalist church, all three synagogues, and the mosque.

Also, don’t miss Dr. Kourelis’s post on the Lancaster Building Conservancy, which I mentioned recently in relation to the Turkey Hill Experience, in which he writes:

It’s a wonderful project, the brain child of preservationist Ben Leech. I met Ben for lunch last week and got to know him a little. The Lancaster Building Conservancy and Ben’s other blog, Old Weird Lancaster, constitute for me a new kind of historical activism or grass roots architectural history. Blogging and the web have provided a platform for exciting and innovative projects. …On this blog, I’ve occassionally been critical of photographic projects (like Flickr communities) because they lack documentational discipline. Ben’s LBC is quite the opposite. The weekly drawing provides the foundation for a well-researched and articulate analysis. I hope Ben’s images have a post-blog afterlife. I hope they turn into an exhibition or a book.

Writing of an F&M professor reminds me that I’m curious to learn what Trexler Proffitt is up to with the local stock exchange idea he has been researching.

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Out of 7,261 votes cast yesterday in the race for Lancaster city mayor, Rick Gray won re-election by a mere 313 votes. That’s a much slimmer margin (orders of magnitude) than I anticipated.

Mayor Rick Gray declared victory around 10 p.m. He would win by 313 votes.

The slim margin of victory (which at one point, when 79% of precincts were reporting, was as low as a 131-vote lead) raises the question of why Gray (whose re-election I supported) declared victory so early, as reported by the Intelligencer Journal:

Gray claimed victory before a crowd of supporters at his campaign headquarters less than two hours after polls closed.

My friend Russell Frost tells me that there were other facts known at the scene, which justified the early victory declaration. I am interested to learn (from intrepid reporters, I hope) what those other factors were. I just hope it wasn’t my obviously premature call for Gray at 9:15 p.m.

Lancaster City Council Race

I chaired the Democrats for Holden committee, since I favor a diversity of voices in the legislative branch of local government. Matt Holden gave a very strong performance, stacking up 3,303 votes, compared to 3,851 for Todd Smith, 4,007 for Tim Roschel, 4,036 for Jose Urdaneta, and 4,255 for Louise Williams. Artie See reports that Matt congratulated the Democratic candidates in person:

Matt Holden was courteous enough to stop by Rick Gray’s campaign headquarters and personally congratulate Gray and the four Democratic City Council candidates on their victories. But by the time the party broke up, Smithgall hadn’t even called Rick Gray.

Other Races

Patrick O'Keeffe

In Lititz, Democratic challenger Patrick O’Keeffe lost his bid for Lititz Council. It was an interesting campaign to watch. Because he was running in a Republican stronghold, his race looked a lot like a third-party candidacy in a national race—it was driven by the mission of given voice to issues the majority had ignored, and given an alternative choice, even if people didn’t choose it.

In East Petersburg, my friend and local Twitter celebrity Jeff Geoghan won his uncontested bid for borough mayor. (I prematurely called that one, too.)

In Lancaster Township, Democrat Ben Bamford of High Industries was elected to the board of supervisors by 11 votes.

Voters in Donegal won’t pay for a new high school.

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Joe Robuccio hosted a geekfest at his home last night, to mark the launch of Windows 7. Even though I wasn’t invited (probably because I don’t, you know, know Joe), Fox 43 was all over it:

A free upgrade to Windows 7 will be arriving at my door in the coming week; we bought a new home PC running Vista earlier this year and it came with a preemptive free upgrade.

As for myself, I’m still really digging the operating system I’ve installed on my netbook, Jolicloud.

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Topical Costume for 2009: Cap'n Trade

1. Cap and Trade (couple’s costume) or Cap’n Trade

2. The Box that Balloon Boy Hid In

3. The Public Option

4. Drew’s Cancer

5. Chair of the Nobel Peace Prize Selection Committee

6. Lady Gaga’s Poker Face

7. The Inexplicable Success of the Snuggie

8. The Weak Dollar

Or, if you’re not feeling topical, perhaps try an Internet meme costume.

Aaron Gotwalt has posted a video of what may be the best costume ever.

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The Ashley & Bailey Silk Mill in Columbia, PA is now on its way to becoming the Turkey Hill Experience

If you haven’t been following the blog or become a fan of the Conservancy on Facebook, I can’t commend it to you highly enough. The drawings and photos are art, and the accompanying building histories are poetic and scholarly.

The shell of the building is being turned into The Turkey Hill Experience. LeFevre Funk is the architectural firm on the project, which is particularly interesting because the notably clean, almost sterile style of the buildings in their portfolio is such a dramatic turn from the jumbled mess that the building has been for nearly its entire existence.

The Turkey Hill Experience, artist rendering

If you’d like to see even more, Jerry King Musser also has photos of the demolition/renovation process in his Flickr photostream.

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Back-country road in Lancaster County. Photo by Kelsey Freeman.

Some nice photos of the Strasburg/Bird-in-Hand/Paradise area this morning from self-labeled “nomadic photographer” Kelsey Freeman, a 25-year-old from the Washington, D.C. area. Kelsey says she’s a contemplative Quaker who was recently living in South Korea.

You can also check out Kelsey’s full photostream on Flickr.

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