Kurumi.com: About (original) (raw)

About me

I'm Scott Oglesby, a highway historian (a type of "road geek"), and I collect highways. Photos, old news articles, opening dates, plans, maps — most people have some consuming hobby, even if it's watching TV; and this is mine.

There are many of us, congregating in places like the AARoads Forum. You can also find our work on personal sites, Flickr, YouTube and other places.

To contact me, use email ("sto" at this domain), or Twitter (@TheRealKurumi).

Q & A

What's the deal with your copyright statements? Can I cite your material in my paper?

By all means, go ahead and cite what you need, as you would from any book or periodical. The copyright statement says basically "please do not present my work as your own"; for example, copy-and-pasting into your own website.

Why the fascination with Connecticut roads if you live in California?

For one, California roads are quite well covered by Dan Faigin among others. It makes little sense to compete with or duplicate their work.

The main reason: Connecticut is where I grew up and got into roadgeeking. I'm still surprised at how much road history is woven into one of America's smallest states.

About the “Kurumi” name

When my wife and I set up the site in late 1996, we wanted a domain name, but hadn't really thought of one. "Kurumi" came to mind because it's the name of a honey-walnut dessert sushi. Kurumi is Japanese for "walnut."

It gets better. Kurumi is also a girl's name (image search can be quite NSFW), and a character in, of all things, Kimagure Orange Road. At least one KOR fan has stumbled across my site and wondered what the heck is going on: Rob's SuperKOR ver 5.0 site lists Kurumi.com under the heading "Oddball and Bizarre."

In the early days, I set up the website to reflect a fictional company - Kurumi Design. Some third-person statements on the site caused Kurumi to evolve into my nickname.