No wonder I shine...

The EPA offers a free online "see how toxic your neighborhood is!" type map, which I believe I've seen before, but I think that was for a school project in junior chem, ergo, I blanked it all out of my head. (true fact: my most vivid memory of high school science is the time a fellow student removed his pants in the middle of class, and then the fire alarm went off.) And, oh, my beloved hometown.

There is a "multi-activity" spot next to my house. By this, I don't mean 'in the general vicinity', I mean literally next door to my house. It's because I lived next to a factory, which is something that most products of suburbia cannot say. (True fact: the owner of said factory once called the police on me. Not me individually, it was more of a "you darn kids!" type thing. But still.)

In the mile or so betwixt my high school and humble abode, there's no less than six "hazardous waste" sites (in pleasant neon green!). This isn't "in the area between the two places", this is "along the roads that I walked home nearly every day for four years." (True fact: I once nearly got hit by a cop car while walking home. He was coming out of the Dunkin Donuts parking lot.)

There is one "hazardous waste" site directly next to my high school. Okay, fine, that one's a hospital, but still, it counts.

One of the options to display on the map is "populated places". I'm afraid to click it while looking at a map of New Jersey. Sure, useful if you're trying to find, say, nuclear waste in the middle of New Mexico, but for NJ? That little blip of population maps that glows with the combined fury of millions of soccer moms in Ford Explorers and the wrath of Mother Earth herself, wondering why we've forsaken her, paved over her rippling meadows?

Final fun fact: Apparently, Wal-Mart is not (as I had heard) going to build a Wal-Mart where the Echelon Mall is/was in Vorhees. I refuse to believe that such a mall still exists. It's the Bermuda Triangle of shopping malls.