MattandSally.com

Here are a couple sites to bookmark for your civic population research and curiosity needs: city-data.com and dataplace.org. You can see dozens of statistics about any zip code in America. A few interesting things in my browsing:

1. Population Density: I grew up in a place with a density of 4288 people per square mile. Now, it’s over 11 thousand, and we’re not even in the city proper. Our old condo in Bucktown was in a population density of almost 24K/sq. mi. For reference, a random zip code in Brooklyn has over 38K/sq. mi.

2. Racial Makeup: my neighborhood in Amarillo had one black person for every 46 white people. In Oak Park, the ratio is about one to three. During the 1996-97 school year, I lived in a place (Tuskegee, AL) with a black/white ratio of 38/1.

3. Age Distribution: Each page on city-data.com opens with a graph showing the distribution of ages across the local population. Why is there such a concentration of 21-year old women in the neighborhood of my youth? Check out this concentration of college-aged youth.

There’s a lot more interesting stuff in there, including complementary graphs showing the marital status of men and women across all ages. I’m unreasonably melancholy after watching the bars representing widowed and divorced people grow with age.

Corporate Head
Originally uploaded by olganunes

Reasonable minds can differ on whether bizarre sculpture is a beneficial use of public (or any) funds. I, for one, think the world could use a whole lot more of this kind of stuff. I grew up in Amarillo, Texas — a place as famous for ten cadillacs buried nose-down in a row as anything else. In the shadow of the cadillacs, I’ve long witnessed a debate over bizarre public art. Does it pointlessly waste our time and resources benefitting only the creator’s vanity, or is there merit in making an unsuspecting observer pause to ask himself “why?”?

I, for one, love encountering the unexpected in all media. I particularly enjoy the paradox created by casting whimsy in bronze. Seeing things like this remind me of a scene from one of my all-time favorite movies, The Jerk. Steve Martin’s character has just discovered that he has rhythm by listening to Lawrence Welk on the radio. He dances through the house saying “this music speaks to me,” and “if this is out there, imagine what else is out there!” I’m also reminded of that scene at the end of Magnolia, when, as the sky is literally raining frogs, a child stares out the window in marvel saying, “this happens; this exists.” If there is a statue of a businessman with his head buried in a building, imagine what else is out there.

Here’s a collection of whimsical and provocative public sculptures (link not suitable for work if your boss holds an unreasonable view toward mild bronze nudity).

Photo from olganunes’s flickr set.