A British view of Cairo (Updated)

The Daily Mail of the UK has run a photo spread of Cairo, Illinois, saying the city is reverting back to nature as the town empties of people.

I've been to Cairo twice in my life, in 1986 and 2013. I'm thinking about a gofundme campaign or something so I can rent a small car and go down there for a couple of days. Cairo, Paducah and a few other places. Leave early one morning, spend two or three working days there, come back and fill the blog with my impressions of the Lower Ohio for several days.

One thing I won't do is go down there with the idea of telling the world what dreary or awful places these communities are. My wife is from southern West Virginia, where big-city journalists parachute in, interview few people disappointed with their lot in life and go back to write a story about wretched hillbillies. As my wife says, you don't walk into someone's house and tell them they live in a dump.

These places are people's homes, and they needed to be treated with respect as such. Writing the typical gloom and doom story is easy. It's so easy, it's almost predictable when you see the headline that someone has done it again.

That's the plan. Good idea or bad?

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I should have known better.

I looked at the Daily Mail page about Cairo again and I saw a couple of links at the bottom. I clicked on one and saw the same images. So somebody lifted someone else's work. I don't care who did what.

It was an old thing to begin with.

Sorry about that.

But I'm still going to Cairo again someday. It's high up on my bucket list.