In Stephen King’s Thinner, he describes a group of travelling gypsies in Maine. How many gypsies are in the US, and where are they? Do they get messed with a lot, by the authorities or people in general?
I can’t tell you how many are out there… but they are there. There are a number of “well known” Gypsy families where I live in Califronia, mostly running the fortune telling businesses. They tend to stay with (and marry) each other and unless you were to marry into the family you probably wouldn’t have much contact with them.
In the downtown Seattle courthouse they have scheduled Gypsy days so that the gypsies know when to be in town to settle their legal business.
Well, I live in Maine and I’ve never seen any gypsies… But I do have a Florida gypsy story.
My daughter works for a large hotel in Miami and the rule is NEVER BOOK A GYPSY WEDDING. She said that after a while you can just tell. But while she was on vacation a fill-in did unknowingly book a gypsy wedding. Apparently part of the gypsy tradition is to steal some large object. And sure enough! Several days after the wedding someone noticed that an extremely large credenza was missing–you know, the ones you see at either end of the hallways on each floor. None of the staff saw it go out the door!
I don’t know, perhaps I have a twisted mind but it seems like fun to me.
There are about 1 million Romani (Gypsy) people in the USA.
There is big gypsy population near Augusta, Ga. Most of them are in the construction business and drive really big pick-up trucks.
I believe there is one group of Roma known as Irish Travelers. Anyone know much about them? They also do construction.
Irish Travellers aren’t Roma, they’re an indigenous Irish ethnic group.
They really came into the news last year when that mother (Madelyne Toogood) was caught beating her daughter on the Walmart camera. Her and her husband were a class act, let me tell you. Ugh. Here is a picture from that. The media was covering them for a while and you got to learn what a thieving bunch the Irish travellers were, the type that steal $5000 from the elderly by promising to repave their driveway and then never show up for the job.
Watch Law and Order Criminal Intent, there’s a good episode on Gypsies in the New York area.
Here is a great article on the history of Irish Travellers. They state there are 7000-10000 in the U.S.
Great to see that racial stereotyping is still alive and well in the American south :rolleyes:
BTW, if you want to read accurate information about the Travellers, try their own sites:
http://www.paveepoint.ie/pav_home_a.html
http://www.itmtrav.com/
Would “the accurate information” include mentioning how they tear up cricket pitches with transit vans, chase children, generally wreak havoc, crap into plastic bags and leave it lieing around etc. etc. like they do everytime they come for a visit to my village?
The problem they create has become so great that the council has taken to building massive embankments and ditches to stop them parking their caravans.
Does the council provide them with adequate accommodation?
Do they pay council tax?
The obligation on local councils to provide suitable sites was removed in the Criminal Justice Act, 1994.
Why would they wish to?
They sound like poor guests.
Hell, they sound more annoying than… than…I can’t think of any day-to-day group of people that–WAIT! They sound more annoying than the Republican Party’s Xian Conservative branch.
Well, seeing as I can’t edit, in retrospect I should have added something to my previous post.
The caravans these gypsies drive around in aren’t “sheds on wheels” by any means. They are top of the range motorhomes / caravans pulled by often relatively new transit vans. Seeing as the village, and the town in general has an abundance of council owned property for rent, and housing is generally cheap to buy (we aren’t talking London here, we’re talking Wigan, NW England), I see no reason for them to be causing the havoc that they do when they could quite easily settle down somewhere.
So where are they supposed to go and what exactly are they supposed to do with their rubbish?
But they’re Travellers. They aren’t settled people. Your (and your councils’) failure to understand this is at the root of the problem.
They should put their rubbish in the bins provided less than 50 metres away from where they were camped at the civic centre. The fields right outside my house are playing fields, there’s tennis courts, football and cricket pitches there. The civic centre (owned by the council) has large industrial sized bins there.
There’s no excuse for it, even if there weren’t bins there. There’s multiple tips in the vicinity, it just smacks of them being as antisocial as they possibly can be.