From: "Strong, Lee" <StrongL at MTMC.ARMY.MIL>
To: "'WSFA members'" <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: West Virginia
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2002 11:08:27 -0500
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

	But who would take New York City?  I suppoe that the United Nations
might take it over as an international city right after they settle the
status of Jerusalem.
	There was a fairly recent proposal to rename New York City after
Martin Luther King, leading to the suggestion that tourists "Visit the King
City and the Empire State."
	And for the truly obscure, there is a book in the George Mason
Regional Library by Rebecca Shanor _The City That Never Was_.  It's full of
proposals for New York City that were never built or were built but in a
substantially different form including the original version of Batman's 1989
Gotham City Cathedral and the New Jersey city to be called Metropolis.
However, Ms. Shanor missed the giant owl on Washington Heights that
newspaper magnate James Bennett wanted to be buried in!

-----Original Message-----
From: lee gilliland [mailto:leeandalexis at hotmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2002 10:59 AM
To: WSFAlist at keithlynch.net
Subject: [WSFA] Re: West Virginia

New York State has been trying to get NYC into a separate state for 35 years

that I know of - it absorbs 92% of the taxes

----Original Message Follows----
From: Steve Smith <sgs at aginc.net>
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: West Virginia
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 10:52:42 -0500

"Strong, Lee" wrote:
 >
 >         Yes, obscure history is very much fun!

In my somewhat cynical opinion, the *only* kind of history that's any
fun.

Coupla more data points.  In 1982, Key West "seceded" from the US to
form the Conch Republic (Motto:  "We seceded where others failed").  See
http://www.keywestparadise.com/republic.html for details.  This was a
"theatrical" response to a legitimate beef, and it worked.
(Essentially, the US Government set up international border-type
checkpoints on the bridge to Key West to look for drugs.  This was
lethal to the tourist industry -- would *you* want to vacation in a
place that took 8 hours to get in or out of, and run the risk of having
your car disassembled?)

New York City has talked about seceding a number of times, most recently
in 1969.  Idea was to become a "free city", a la Singapore.  The idea
quietly sank when somebody pointed out what would happen if NYC was cut
off from funds coming in from the Federal and State governments ...

--
Steve Smith                                           sgs at aginc.net
Agincourt Computing                            http://www.aginc.net
"Truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense."

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