There have been a rash of articles about the latest batch of information from the U.S. Census Bureau. Apparently, Ohio is slipping! Slipping, I say, in terms of population - only Columbus is really growing at all, with Cincinnati, Dayton, and Cleveland losing population. And that is just shocking. Can't we do better, people? Cannot we keep people in our great state? Lexington, KY, is growing faster than Columbus, the only city in Ohio to even be growing at all!

Ahem.

Well, that was not meant to diss Lexington, KY, at all. What it was meant to do was to alert us all to the staggering loss of people to our bigger cities. The Cincinnati Enquirer at least presented an article that stated that various suburbs around Cincinnati were growing... so that's good. I mean, as long as we're not losing people from the state as a whole.

But so I went to a fabulous website! I was looking at the U.S. Census Bureau's website, and let me tell you, it is quite difficult to get information from that website. It is couched in very tricky language and tables and all sorts of data-laden nonsense. I mean, I'm an English major, and I have trouble discerning what they're telling me. I wonder if there is some sort of special class to learn how to decipher their results. But anyway, so I was looking at my web search results for the census info, and I got linked to a terrifically not-dense website titled American FactFinder. It is also run by the U.S. Census Bureau, so it's all factual and true and stuff, but: the major appeal to me is where you can type in your city's name and get a wealth of information about it. It is so handy, and very easy to read (I'm a big fan of the easy to understand website).

For example, I myself typed in Dayton. And now I know that approximately 74.9% of Dayton's population is over 18, it takes approximately 21 minutes for its inhabitants to get to work, and 0.3% claim French Canadian as their ancestry. I think this website is terrific - go learn something new about your community! It'll totally take your mind off the fact that everyone's moving back out to the suburbs again.