Jun 22, 2013
Hats trimmed free of charge, according to the bronze lettering above the 8th Street entrance to the old Lit Brothers Department Store in Philadelphia. The original Lits opened here in 1891 and expanded to about a dozen locations in southeast Pennsylvania and south Jersey before the national chains killed it off in the 1970s. Today, Ross Dress for Less occupies part of the first floor.
Jun 21, 2013
Aerial view of terraced farmland surrounding a village in the Valle Gran Rey on Isla de la Gomera, one of Spain's Canary Islands off the coast of Morocco.
Jun 20, 2013
The day before Maggie and Colin's wedding, bridesmaids and friends were hard at work on table decorations. Flowers from gardens and roadsides filled about seventy little antique bottles rounded up from attics and garages and rubbish heaps. For the wedding itself, guests gathered on this balcony to watch the ceremony in the garden below next to the ferry landing on Peaks Island, Maine.
May 30, 2013
Yesterday's shout-out to our accomplished nieces at this commencement season mentioned Olivia, and Melissa, and Amelia–but inexplicably omitted another niece: Avi. Avi has just received her master's in zoology and wildlife management from Otago University in New Zealand, where she spent two years researching yellow-eyed penguins like this little guy, in the penguins' native beachland of New Zealand's South Island.
That's it for graduating nieces, we believe, but school is by no means all that these and others of our nieces have been busy with. We know of at least three who are planning weddings this year: Maggie, who's marrying Colin next month in Maine; Melissa, who's marrying Matt in October in Chicago; and Gillian, who's marrying Mark in December in Wellington, New Zealand.
And that's not all the nieces!! We can also brag on Jess in Arizona and Lindeigh in Seattle–we can and we will!! Nieces are so awesome.
May 29, 2013
Last week, as we see here, our niece Amelia graduated from Parsons School of Design, winning her class's Golden Portfolio Award.
Two weeks ago, our niece Melissa donned cap and gown for her Master's in Nursing from Penn. And next week, it'll be another niece, Olivia, crossing the stage at Bloomington High School South in Indiana.
For our family, this commencement season is shaping up as one for the ages. And now as the nieces venture forth, may they all find fair winds and following seas.
May 28, 2013
Regina's, we're told, is a restaurant in Mobile, Alabama. We don't know what you have to do to get yourself declared intolerably mean and banned from there. And we don't know Jeanne M., which is probably okay.
May 27, 2013
From friends and neighbors in Turkey comes this Istanbul street scene.
May 25, 2013
Just a few years after this picture was taken of singer-actress Shirley Jones, her son Shaun Cassidy at right, and her stepson David Cassidy at left, David had become the most famous pretty-boy teenybopper bubblegum pop idol on the planet, and Shirley and David were starring together in The Partridge Family, a 1970s television series about a whole family of pretty little pop singers.
Little brother Shaun wasn't far behind. He signed a record contract with Warner Brothers while he was still in high school and was soon singing and touring and eventually acting on TV just like his brother. Both boys had numerous top-40 hits but eventually left the music business behind; Shaun went into scriptwriting, while David outgrew his boyish persona and also grew uncomfortable with his celebrity, especially after a young girl was trampled to death in the crowd at one of his concerts. He eventually moved to Saratoga Springs, New York, and devoted himself to raising and racing thoroughbreds.
Shaun and David briefly came out of their retirements in 1993, when they appeared together on stage for the first time in the Broadway production of Blood Brothers, a musical imported from London about twins separated at birth. Displaying their sweet, essentially identical singing voices, they performed a duet from that show on TV, for Regis and Cathy Lee.
Shirley, meanwhile, starred in numerous movies, including Oklahoma and, shortly after this picture was taken, The Music Man. In 1960, she won an Oscar for Elmer Gantry, in which she was cast against type as a vengeful prostitute. She said she was warned before starting The Partridge Family that doing a TV series would kill her career; the audience would never get beyond thinking of her as Shirley Partridge. But she had children at home and welcomed the stability and regular hours of television work. Also, she was beginning to age out of leading-lady roles.
In 1962, when she'd starred with Robert Preston in The Music Man, she'd been pregnant with Shaun's little brother Patrick. Wardrobers on the set had had to alter her costumes as the pregnancy progressed, and it is said that the look on Robert Preston's face during the scene at the footbridge reflected in part his surprise at feeling the baby kick.
Baby Patrick also grew up to go into show business, appearing frequently on TV and on the Broadway stage. His mother did in fact have trouble getting good roles after The Partridge Family ended in 1974, despite her Oscar and the huge success of many of her movies. Last year, however, everything came full circle: Patrick played Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man for California Musical Theatre, and Shirley played the Widow Paroo, the mother of the leading character she'd played in 1962 when Patrick was still in utero.
May 24, 2013
During last year's drought, this hummingbird was photographed drinking from a person's open mouth in Rawlins, Wyoming. The photo has been submitted to National Geographic's 2013 Traveler photo competition, which is accepting entries through the month of June.
Heavy rains in March 2013 broke the three-year drought in the Southeast, but extremely dry conditions persist throughout much of the Midwest and especially the West.
May 12, 2013
Sandy Horowitz and Buddy Bergstein.
May 9, 2013
Willie Nelson's guitar, Trigger, is almost as old and torn up as Willie himself. Willie marked his eightieth birthday with a show last weekend at the 2013 New Orleans Jazz Fest; Trigger's been his concert workhorse for forty years now, ever since a drunk stepped on his prize Gibson guitar and he needed a replacement fast, from off the shelf.
Trigger is a classical-style guitar with with an electric pickup attached. It was meant to be played acoustically, strummed with the fingers, not amplified with a pick, and forty years of picking have worn right through the wood on the front face, leaving a big hole that's getting bigger.
There are also scrapes and scratches and dings and cracks, all of which seem completely predictable for anything in Willie Nelson's life, even something as precious to him as Trigger. And then there are the autographs, more than a hundred by now, beginning with Leon Russell and including the names of fellow musicians, friends, and of course his lawyers. The signatures are scratched into the wood, not inked on the surface; the cellphone camera failed to pick them out clearly.
Jazz Fest weather in New Orleans is supposed to be hot and humid; there may be rain and mud, but always there should be sweat and sunburn. This year, Willie and all the other performers sang into a hard, cold wind, nothing like what's normal for New Orleans in May. Most festival-goers were not prepared for the shivery conditions, but the music definitely took the edge off the chill.
May 4, 2013
Friends live here, on a bluff above Canyon Lake in Cottondale, Alabama.
May 3, 2013
It's t-ball time at Taney Field in Schuylkill River Park.
May 1, 2013
Blodgett Canyon, in the Bitterroot Mountains of western Montana, is a Yosemite-esque sort of place, flanked on the north by sheer granite walls of towering spires that are absolutely irresistible to rock climbers with ropes and stuff.
Our boy Hank climbed Blodgett's 600-foot Shoshone peak twice this spring; the first time, a sudden rainstorm forced a rapid rappelling retreat that left a lot of climbing gear stuck in cracks on the rockface. The second climb, pictured here, was a successful gear-retrieval mission–and also a sun-kissed flirtation with warm spring skies.
Apr 30, 2013
Stockholm's 110-km metro rail system has been described as one long tubular art gallery. Exposed bedrock in dozens of the stations has been painted and sculpted by a variety of artists from Sweden and beyond.
Consider this posting another entry in an occasional series: Places I've never been and stuff I've never seen and don't honestly know much of anything about, but damn.
Apr 29, 2013
Two women wait for the streetcar in front of a Chicago store window in the summer of 1941.
Apr 28, 2013
The 2013 photographer of the year for the GDT. a society of German wildlife photographers, is eighteen-year-old Hermann Hirsch, who called his winning shot "Evening Idyll."
Apr 9, 2013
Climate change–both the literal thaw in the Siberian permafrost and the political thaw in the Cold War militarization that long controlled life in the Soviet Arctic–is currently exposing long-frozen tusks of ancient wooly mammoths to the light of day and the vicissitudes of the global economy.
Until the end of the last ice age, around 10,000 years ago, woolly mammoths ranged the grasslands of eastern Siberia. As the icecaps melted and sea level rose, the grasslands became forest or were submerged in the Arctic Ocean, until hungry mammoths were eventually crowded together on isolated islands in the eastern Arctic. The last of them died there about 3,500 years ago.
A mammoth tusk like this one, which weighs 150 pounds, can sell for $60,000 in the Siberian town of Yakutsk, and it may fetch $200,000 or more in the ivory markets of China.
Each summer, thawing permafrost exposes more tusks in gravelly riverbanks and seaside bluffs, especially on remote, uninhabited islands north of easternmost Siberia. Each spring, Yakut tusk-hunters cross the frozen sea to begin searching for the new "crop" of ivory; they work alone or in small crews, living on scant rations in rough huts, until late-summer snowstorms once again hide their quarry.
The unlucky ones leave then, returning home emptyhanded in small boats in rough waters. The lucky ones hang on for a few more weeks, however, till the ocean freezes again and they can transport their tusks much more easily in sledges hauled by snowmobiles.
Apr 8, 2013
Pace, Mother Maybelle.
Apr 7, 2013
After Drexel's women's basketball team won the National Invitational Tournament on Saturday, beating the University of Utah in the final seconds of the game, students poured onto the court to celebrate.
Yes, that's the wrestling team down in front, but they'd come to cheer the Lady Dragons, not to rassle. They were wearing their singlets in a team effort aimed at winning $250 being offered by the athletic department to whichever of Drexel's non-basketball teams showed the most spirit at the game. The wrestlers didn't win–the prize went to the women's crew team for their dragon-themed "Feel the Fire" display, complete with sideways tilted baseball caps–but in our opinion, everybody who dresses in a singlet at a basketball game is a winner. And the wrestlers, whose season on the mat ended a few weeks ago, looked well-fed and frisky on the hardwood.
The basketball was championship-caliber as well. Utah led until late in the second half, when Drexel caught up but never could pull ahead by more than a point or two. With 21 seconds to go, Utah again had the lead and the ball. But one Drexel woman managed to tip Utah's throw-in, another snagged the ball, a third drove to the basket for a layup through traffic, and they all won their program's first post-season championship.
Apr 3, 2013
In the mountains north of Missoula, Montana, is an old ranch that once supported healthy cattle on healthy grassland but currently lies more or less abandoned; several species of invasive plants had crowded out the native grasses, leaving nothing for animals to eat and also leaving much of the soil exposed to erosion. This summer, ecological restoration students from the University of Montana will work at this site, trying out various strategies to help the land recover.
Recently, the students visited the land to see how it had come through the winter. One elk, at least, did not do well; perhaps weakened by the cold and the poor fodder in the ruined grassland, it was apparently attacked and eaten by hungry predators. The bones looked fresh but were stripped clean.
Apr 2, 2013
The new Acropolis Museum in Athens frames a view of the real acropolis, which at the time of this photo in 2009 was undergoing the final stages of restoration, a thirty-five-year project aimed at undoing thousands of years of neglect and abuse.
Back in the seventeenth century, for example, the Parthenon Colonnades had been destroyed by Venetian bombardment and then reassembled incorrectly. Beginning in 1975, the colonnade was dismantled again, this time by experts who put the pieces back properly, using original stone, titanium screws, and a few slivers of new marble from Mount Penteli.
Apr 1, 2013
The noonday sun works its way into Beijing's new Capital Museum to illuminate China's ancient treasure.
Mar 31, 2013
Happy Easter.
Mar 28, 2013
This was a winter of of moving on up for Joshua and his denmates in Portland, Maine, as they graduated from cub scouts into boy scouts. The controversy surrounding scouting these days is probably inaudible or nearly so to the kids, who like scouts of generations past happily keep their eyes on the prize: camping trips and merit badges and all that awesome quasi-Native American stuff.