Great Allegheny Passage

I just got back from riding the Great Alleghney Passage. Amazing ride. (Pics and more info will soon follow.) Thought this was a relevant piece of news.

From: Pennsylvania Environmental Award to Present Lifetime Achievement Award to Linda McKenna Boxx, Reuters

Linda McKenna Boxx, the president of the Allegheny Trail Alliance and the
driving force behind the creation of the Great Allegheny Passage, a 150-mile
trail connecting Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland, will receive a lifetime
achievement award, announced today by the Pennsylvania Environmental Council.

[...]

In 1993, she saw an opportunity to work with a number of regional trail groups
in Western Pennsylvania and coordinate their local efforts into one large
continuous trail connecting with the C&O Canal Towpath trail in Cumberland,
Maryland, effectively creating a 335-mile continuous hiking and biking trail
from downtown Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C.

The success of that work resulted in the Great Allegheny Passage, which is now
nearly complete. All that remains is to finish a few miles of trail between
McKeesport and downtown.

Every year thousands of people complete the Washington to Pittsburgh trail ride,
including the hundreds of cyclists who last year participated in the week-long
sojourn or the 24-hour relay ride as part of the "Pittsburgh 250" celebration.

Ms. Boxx also serves on a number of boards, including the Fallingwater Advisory
Committee, the Regional Industrial Development Corporation of Southwestern
Pennsylvania, and the Laurel Highlands Visitors Bureau.

A little more background info on Linda.

Ms. Boxx`s distinguished career includes public service positions in state
government in both Pennsylvania and Arkansas. Her experience included a wide
variety of positions in conservation, land use planning and the infancy of the
rails-to-trails movement in Pennsylvania.

She has also served as the chairman of the Katherine Mabis McKenna Foundation,
based in Latrobe, since 1982. In this capacity, Ms. Boxx has worked to provide
support for a wide range of innovative programs including the remediation and
protection of land and waterways, development of community and recreational
facilities, rehabilitation of landmark buildings and a broad range of
educational opportunities.

'I Like Turtles', a viral video post mortem

The only thing better than a random seventeen second news clip "going viral" on the internets and being seen by at least three quarter million people is a three thousand word post mortem on the spectacle from the Washington Post.

Re: For the 'I Like Turtles' Boy, 17 Seconds Of Fame - washingtonpost.com

There was a time, not long ago, when a 10-year-old boy could head to a neighborhood fair, get his face painted like a Halloween zombie and blurt out something utterly inane to a local TV news correspondent and nobody would ever think about it again. Oh, there'd be an audience that night, much of which would chuckle and think "Whaaaaa?" But that would be the end of it.

The moment would not endure as a video snippet, posted on Web sites and viewed more than 500,000 times, nor would it inspire T-shirts, or parodies or remixes or mash-ups. It would not lead a company in, say, England to track down the lad and offer him -- or rather, his parents -- cash to turn his baffling three-word apercu into a cellphone ring tone. He would not hear from the Jimmy Kimmel show. A handful of strangers would not call hoping to send him pets.