Between 1950 and 1953, Philadelphians demonstrated repeatedly in many neighborhoods, seeking stop signs, traffic lights, and one-way traffic patterns in hopes of making the city's narrow streets safer for pedestrians, especially children.
In June 1952, these women and children blocked off Sansom Street at 32nd Street, to draw attention to a block where seven children had been hit by cars in a single month. Police broke up the demonstration and arrested three of the women.
At some point between then and now, city officials made almost all the streets in and around center city one-way and installed stop signs or red lights at virtually ever corner.
Pedestrian safety is no longer a major political issue. Parking, on the other hand. . . .
Guest of honor at this Valentine's Day party in 1944 was Eleanor Roosevelt; serenading her was a soldier by the name of Pete Seeger.
The gathering celebrated not only Valentine's Day but also the grand opening of the new Labor Canteen of the United Federal Workers of America, CIO, near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C.
United Federal Workers was a labor union representing U.S. government employees. Though soldiers and sailors were certainly not unionized, they may have frequented the new canteen for political and/or social activities.
The UFW included both black and white members. But the scene in this room was extremely unusual for 1940s Washington, which was still a completely segregated city. The military was also still segregated. Eleanor Roosevelt's presence was making a political statement about race as well as labor.
The cartoons on the wall in the background may have been the work of Woody Guthrie.
As some of you will surely point out, the banjo Pete Seeger is playing here does not look like the long-necked music machine he was long associated with. That one came a few years later.
In 1748, George Washington was a 16-year-old kid hired to help out with a surveying party in the mountain wilderness that is now eastern West Virginia. The surveyors stopped to rest in a narrow valley known now as Berkeley Springs. Young Washington described the valley as unpleasantly narrow, scarcely touched by the sun, but after spending a few days soaking in warm springs that bubbled up out of the ground there, he decided he liked the place.
Two years later, when Lord Fairfax, who had commissioned the survey, finally got around to paying the survey party, Washington took his pay in the form of land grants in and around Berkeley Springs. Those grants of 250 acres were the first of numerous grants and purchases over the years that expanded his holdings throughout Virginia, especially western Virginia, till at his death the father of our country personally owned more than 60,000 acres of our country.
The "bathtub" at Berkeley Springs is a modern recreation of the rock-lined pools built in the center of town for the crowds of spa-goers in mid-eighteenth-century America who sought the curative powers attributed to warm (78.4 degrees F), mineralized spring waters. Until 1784, when the first bathhouse was completed, the spa was entirely out of doors, in rock pools screened for privacy by piles of brush and woven branches. Separate hours were designated for male and female bathers.
Washington was part of the crowd; he visited repeatedly, at first with his half-brother Lawrence, who was ill with tuberculosis. When the baths did not help, George took Lawrence on an ocean voyage to Barbados, in hopes that tropical air might prove curative. In Barbados, George Washington contracted smallpox but recovered; Lawrence Washington continued to do poorly and returned to Virginia to die at home in 1752.
George Washington returned again and again to the baths at Berkeley Springs, which had become something of a social scene for colonials of his class. The town grew rapidly to wine and dine the bathers, and George Washington bought up several building lots. A house was built for him on one of his lots, but the Revolutionary War was diverting his attention at that time, and it is believed he only visited the house once.
In mid-winter, the water in Washington's bathtub looks disgusting; the spring is warm enough that there's little or no ice in the pool around the spring but plenty of algae and moss, and nobody has cleaned fallen leaves out of the tub. But straight from the springs, Berkeley Springs water is clear and fresh-tasting. The town hosts an annual water-tasting competition, at which its own municipal water usually fares well.
And there's another annual event in town: George Washington's Bath Tub Weekend, celebrated each year around March 18, the day Washington first showed up for a bath in 1748. The weekend "highlights history-related activities," according to its promoters, "and retail sales."
Fisheye view inside the mid-eighteenth-century Vakil mosque in Shiraz, Iran. The 48 columns seen here are all monoliths, with spiral carvings and lotus-leaf capitals.
It was a nice flat little rock that hopped across a nice icy little river, at the foot of a nice little rocky mountain in the eastern panhandle of West Virginia.
Doris's sign might be a little misleading in one way, since there's really not much of a parking problem in the community of Great Cacapon, West Virginia. It's a wide place in the road: a post office, a few dozen houses and trailers, and Doris's, which advertises Bud Light by the 30-pack ($23.99).
The deer in the noose, however, looks just like the wall mounts on sale at a furniture store back in Berkeley Springs, the county seat. And if you don't want a deer for your wall, you might consider a longhorn steer instead.
A couple of weeks ago, in the desert near Pinnacle Peak, outside of Phoenix, people who stepped out of their cars to savor the sunset felt the wind pick up suddenly, blowing hard and cold and carrying . . . raindrops? Really?
Careful examination of clouds in the distance revealed ragged curtains of rain showers swirling down just below the cloud line. Apparently, most of the rain evaporated long before moistening the dust, but we can vouch for several drops, perhaps even several dozens of drops, that fell all the way to earth.
After a few minutes, the wind died down, and the storm, such as it was, no longer was.
Caught by the camera just as he finishes up his unauthorized street decor, this graffiti artist in Queratoro, Mexico, appears to have done a pretty darn good job painting a quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of the ancient Aztecs.
When last we spent our Saturdays at high school wrestling tournaments, back in the decade of the twenty-oughts, we were parents of wrestlers, which meant that we were working the concession stand or down on our knees with a camcorder or scanning the scene from the bleachers, looking for indications of wrestling drama.
We can report with confidence that in the winter of 2015, all the drama is still much in evidence. Even before you enter the gym, you can't help but notice the kid standing all by himself out in the cold parking lot, hiding his face, struggling not to cry.
The only big difference nowadays is that somehow, magically, our wrestlers from way back then have returned to this scene as what might be called wrestling facilitators. One of them is now a referee with striped shirt and whistle, and another is an assistant assistant coach, a guy who sits in the corner of the mat during each bout and yells, "Circle! Circle! Good–keep that elbow. That's all right, don't worry, now up and out!"
High school wrestling matches last six minutes, except when they're over in a few seconds. That can happen when a newbie, with panic in his eyes, is up against an experienced wrestler who knows a few moves. Of course it can also happen when an experienced wrestler underestimates an opponent, or when he forgets for an instant to do or not do something critical that he knew perfectly well he was supposed to do or not do.
The drama actually begins before the wrestling even starts. Kids wearing hoodies pace back and forth in front of the bleachers, headphones clamped on their ears, eyes focused in some alternate universe. They're trying to psych themselves up, or calm themselves down, or both.
By the time they strip off the hoodie and walk out to the center of the mat, some of them already look destined to lose. They've heard something about their opponent that scares them, or they just know from lessons learned the hard way that their performance will likely be disappointing. They may surprise themselves, they really may win, but their posture and eye movements are already broadcasting what they figure are the dismal odds against them.
Other kids work hard before the match at presenting body language that says something different: "I'm the man," or "You're dirt," or "I will break you." They're swaggering out there, playing the part in the script that they want for themselves; maybe it will work, maybe it will backfire, maybe it won't matter at all. But there's no wrestling without broad drama.
From the stands, kids cheer on their teammates and yell at them to shoot. They talk smack with each other and steal each other's drinks and snacks and pretend not to give them back. Some of them are smartasses. Some are trying to nap. They're high school kids, and it's a Saturday.
And on display in the gym are adolescent bodies of every imaginable size and shape, all looking at least a little bit goofy in those singlets. There are little guys with twigs for limbs, and thick-necked muscle-bound jocks, and mountainous heavyweights with serious guts and no necks at all. No other high school forum welcomes all these physical specimens, offers them all a chance, however slight a chance, to be a hero.
Among the hundreds of boys are a few girls. During our years as wrestling parents in Maine, there were girls on some of the teams, and they wrestled boys, occasionally with some success. This year in western Washington, girls appear to be a bit more numerous on the mats, and they wrestle one another.
We attended the Marysville Premier tournament, in the company of the Blazers from Timberline High School in Lacey, Washington. Four girls wrestle for the Blazers, alongside a couple of dozen boys. They all wear black singlets unless they make it to the tournament finals, when they dress in special gold singlets decorated with a double-bladed axe, their school logo.
Three Blazers wore gold in Marysville, and one of the three won his final match to claim the tournament championship at his weight class. The next week, at the Jaguar Invitational tournament in Puyallup, four Blazers took championships, and in the 126-pound weight class, the two wrestlers in the finals were both Blazers.
The regular season is winding down now, leading up to regionals and then states. Go Blazers! Shoot! Shoot!
In 1899, snow was shoveled off busy Manhattan streets, loaded into wagons, and hauled down to the docks, where it was dumped in the river.
Nowadays, the EPA doesn't like for states or municipalities to dump dirty snow from city streets into rivers or, as in the case of Portland, Maine, into the ocean. Portland used to throw its snow from downtown into the harbor, but it now builds mountains of snow, dump-truckload after dump-truckload, in an empty field near the airport.
New York City trucks its snow to melting machines, known as snow dragons, which can melt thirty tons of snow an hour and discharge the meltwater into the city sewer sytem. In an emergency, however, such as a ridiculously huge blizzard, we are told that the EPA will look the other way while the city rids its streets of snow the old-timey way.
The sun rises over Gasworks Park and Lake Union in Seattle, or at least it tries to. The clouds scuttling into town from the the west (right edge of this picture) are about to roll all over the golden disk and thus reestablish normal winter gloom.
From the Lockridge community near Durham, North Carolina, comes this photo and note from Carol Stack: "My first selfie, with birthday flowers."
This time of year also marks the birthday of our boy John, a.k.a. J.J. Good cheer to both, many happy returns, and let's hear it for one-eyed floral birthday selfies!
This is the front panel of a Nechada barrel organ, made in Odessa, Ukraine, in the early years of the twentieth century. It was often set up in the street outside a bar or brothel, in hopes that the popular tunes it blasted out would draw a crowd of potential customers. Sometimes, of course, the organ grinder had a monkey as an added attraction, or a troupe of very young girls, perhaps eight or ten years old, who danced and sang and turned cartwheels to entertain the drunks.
Odessa was home to a number of piano manufacturers, who made these organs as a sideline. No musical skill was required to operate them; the organ grinder just turned the crank on one side of the box, which pumped air through the organ pipes and also spun rolls of paper that had been pre-programmed with the desired musical compositions. The paper blocked air from entering the pipes except where holes had been punched; when a hole in the paper came in line with the opening to a pipe of the desired pitch, air was forced through the pipe, generating each note of a song.
Odessa street organs, called sharmankas, were sold throughout the Russian empire from about 1860 until they began to be replaced by more modern music machines, notably record players, in the 1920s. Even then, they remained in use by street buskers, particularly in Tbilisi and other Georgian cities, where street organs were popular well into the 1960s.
The inscription across the bottom of this organ gives the name and address of its maker. Ivan Viktorovich Nechada worked out of a piano factory on Balskovskaya Street, now Isaac Babel Street, in Odessa. This organ is in the collection of the new Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, but recently a very similar Nechada organ, said to be in perfect working order, was advertised in Moscow; "May be sold or exchanged for a car," wrote the seller, in an ad in Mechanical Music Digest.
Last January, when this picture was taken, Rittenhouse Square looked plenty wintery. The snow hasn't been as deep this January, but the cold has been, if anything, even deeper. Which just goes to show, except that actually it doesn't.
Above, wildebeest cross the Mara River during their annual migration northward from the Serengeti in Tanzania to the Masai Mara in Kenya. An estimated two million animals, mostly wildebeest but also including hundreds of thousands of Thompson's gazelle, zebra, and eland, make this long trek every year during the dry season, as they seek greener pastures; their navigation techniques are not fully understood, but one strategy they seem to follow is to head toward thunder and lightning.
This photo, by Nicole Cambre, took first place in the "Nature" category of National Geographic's 2014 photo competition, which attracted more than 10,000 entrants from 150 different countries.
Below, ice on a window in Tabasalu, Estonia, propagates in a crystal form that the photographer, Maie Kinmann, calls "Dragon." This photo won honorable mention in the "Nature" category.
A fisherman goes out at night with his cormorants on the River Li, amidst the karst spires of south China. The photo does not make clear how he monetizes his fishing in these postmodern times: by selling fish, or by entertaining tourists?
Pacific Ocean beach near Kalaloch, in Olympic National Park.
Driftwood arrives naturally on beaches in the Pacific Northwest; storms, erosion, and ordinary old age can cause trees growing in thin soil on steep slopes to tumble down into inland creeks and rivers; when the rivers are running high and fast, entire forests can be floated right on out to the coast.
Between 1950 and 1953, Philadelphians demonstrated repeatedly in many neighborhoods, seeking stop signs, traffic lights, and one-way traffic patterns in hopes of making the city's narrow streets safer for pedestrians, especially children.
At the University of Alabama this semester, Joe is taking a ceramics class, which meets, appropriately enough, in the old Bureau of Mines building.
Caught by the camera just as he finishes up his unauthorized street decor, this graffiti artist in Queratoro, Mexico, appears to have done a pretty darn good job painting a quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of the ancient Aztecs.
Above, wildebeest cross the Mara River during their annual migration northward from the Serengeti in Tanzania to the Masai Mara in Kenya. An estimated two million animals, mostly wildebeest but also including hundreds of thousands of Thompson's gazelle, zebra, and eland, make this long trek every year during the dry season, as they seek greener pastures; their navigation techniques are not fully understood, but one strategy they seem to follow is to head toward thunder and lightning.
