Apr 21, 2012
It's been a couple of years since our last glimpses (here and here) of some of the moms and dads who stay forever young when their children post their pictures at My Parents Were Awesome.
Above is Usawa, submitted by Chioke, and Kang, submitted by Michelle.
Apr 20, 2012
The entire 3800 block of Melon Street, in the Mantua neighborhood of West Philly, got a new coat of paint last summer, thanks to the city's Mural Arts Program and a couple of dozen kids in the neighborhood who apparently are not-so-distant relatives of Tom Sawyer.
A new mural isn't going to transform a block, much less a neighborhood. A new coat of paint, even all at once on every house on the block, is unlikely to catalyze dramatic transformation. By all accounts, this was a block and neighborhood that needed a whole lot more than fresh paint. This particular paint job was part of a complex mural-arts project intended to focus attention on the problem of youth homelessness, but that problem, along with Mantua's many other social and economic afflictions, is still very much with us.
Even so, people in fancy neighborhoods aren't the only ones who deserve pleasant surroundings, handsome streetscapes. Melon Street may still be Melon Street, but there's no way this paint job made life there any worse.
Apr 19, 2012
The 199-year-old dome of the Arch Street Presbyterian Church is reflected at the base of the four-year-old Comcast Center office tower, tallest building in Philadelphia and fifteenth-tallest in the United States.
The black cube-like structure at the top of the blue-glass tower is said to be a water tank containing 300,000 gallons of water. The weight of the water–thirteen hundred tons–helps keep the building from swaying in high winds. The Comcast Center's Tuned Liquid Column Damper is touted as the largest watery building-stabilization system in the world.
The 58-story tower is 974 feet high. The cable company uses about 90 percent of the building's one million square feet of office space and leases out the rest.
Comcast touts numerous energy-saving features of the tower, notably including waterless urinals, which were opposed by the plumbers' union. The dispute was resolved by an agreement that included installation of plumbing to all the waterless urinals in case they didn't work out and had to be replaced by conventional urinals.
Apr 17, 2012
Another sample from the Library of Congress's small collection of color photos from the 1930s and 1940s, this one shows a woman working with aerial photos to develop camouflaging for airfields and critical factories during World War II.
Camouflage experts at New York University would use the aerial photos to build a model of an area that included the facility to be camouflaged. Then they would paint over the facility on the model until it blended in with its surroundings. Aircraft plants on the West Coast were covered with acres of canvas and plywood painted and sculpted to resemble suburban subdivisions. Airstrips were painted to look like small-town streets and farmland from the air.
Not everything was so easy to camouflage; ships at sea, for example, proved impossible to hide no matter how they were painted. A completely different approach, known as dazzle camouflage, was devised for ships; they were painted with crazy stripes at jagged angles, visible from afar but very different to interpret as to size, direction, and speed of movement.
Some fighter planes were painted pale pink, a color that was thought to show up as white or grayish, like clouds, at high angles of intense sunlight.
This photo looks posed, and the woman may be a model rather than a serious camouflage authority; she is holding the aerial photo more or less upside down with respect to the model she's supposedly painting.
Apr 13, 2012
Above the ships at sea and Lisbon's red tile roofs and satellite dishes.
Apr 10, 2012
Brittany Howard, lead singer of the Alabama Shakes, released her first CD today and played to a sold-out house last night at World Cafe in Philadelphia. I'm not a music reviewer; I won't try to describe or evaluate the performance, but I sure wouldn't quibble with the critics who have been comparing Howard to Janis Joplin, Otis Redding, James Brown, and just about every other legendary rock-soul-blues singer. She's got Brown's energy and Joplin's wail and Redding's sweetness and even a little of Hank Williams's falsetto--plus the whole history of rock and roll in the songs she writes and the licks she picks.
The rest of the band is tight and fine, but they're just along for the ride.
What do you think?
Apr 9, 2012
Detail from a painting in the offices of the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society; artist and title unknown (to me).
Apr 8, 2012
As peeps season approaches its annual crescendo, the Washington Post solicits entries for its Peeps Diorama competition. The winning diorama, not pictured here, was one of the numerous efforts portraying the OccuPeep movement. Other themes drawing multiple entries: Newt Gingrich's plan for a moon colony, Downton Abbey on TV, the raid on Osama Bin Laden, Madonna at the Super Bowl, and an old standby: peep holes.
Among my favorites: "Chicks are Peep-le too" (a reenactment of a 1917 suffragist demonstration in front of the White House); and a send-up of Steven Colbert's Super PAC and Mitt Romney's most memorable contribution to the political lexicon: "Corporations are peep-le, too."
Above is an example of another frequent meme: Steve Jobs in the afterlife. This one is titled "iHeaven: The New Project."
Only a couple of entries tackled difficult scientific issues, such as the neutrino controversy, "Faster than the Peep of Light," and Father Time's struggle to assemble February 29, 2012 from leftover quarter-peeps.
Below is one of the largest and most spectacular of the dioramas, "Peep-ius Maximus":
Apr 7, 2012
Motel room near Rio de Janeiro.
Apr 6, 2012
When Jewish families gather round the dinner table tonight for seders commemorating the exodus of the ancient Israelites from slavery in Egypt, they will read from books called haggadahs: collections of biblical passages, prayers, hymns, rabbinic discourse, and social commentary. The page above is from an eight-hundred-year-old haggadah from Catalonia, illuminated very much like Christian texts of its era. In the picture, as in the bible, Israelites are crossing the Red Sea via miraculous passageways of dry land, while all around them the Egyptian army is drowning in the waves.
The bearded man near the upper left, holding a shepherd's crook, is Moses. Some of the other Israelites are carrying sacks and baskets and jugs and candlesticks and other household items, but many more bear swords and shields. They are an army, fighting their way out of Egypt.
Modern hagaddahs tell the story with less of a military emphasis. The people were all slaves; then God and Moses helped them escape. During Passover, Jews are asked to remember that even today there are people on earth who suffer in slavery and ache for freedom.
The story has it that God made the Egyptian people suffer dreadful plagues; Pharoah's soldiers, as seen here, were all drowned. Freedom from bondage is something to celebrate, but plagues and drowning, even of the enemy, are not. To prevent excessive, inappropriate celebration, the passover seder requires reducing the amount of wine in each cup–only by a few drops, but still.
Raise a glass, drink to freedom. But drink a little less.
Apr 5, 2012
In February 1943, this unnamed woman was at work in the Vultree aircraft plant in Nashville, Tennessee, building a Vengeance Dive-Bomber.
Among the hundreds of thousands of photos commissioned by the government in the 1930s and early 1940s to document economic-recovery programs and the war effort, only a handful, including this one, were in color. After three-quarters of a century, the color images seem to suggest a world that is much more familiar to us today, much less shadowy and distant than the shades-of-gray America that is portrayed so dramatically in the more famous black and white works of the era.
Aircraft parts–fuselage panels, wings, and doors–are still manufactured today at the Vultree site in Nashville, which is now operated as part of the Vought subdivision of Triumph Aerostructures.
Apr 4, 2012
This rufous-sided towhee–aka Eastern towhee–is bathing in a creek in Randolph County, North Carolina. Red eyes are natural with towhees.
In case you were thinking that these Eastern towhees are really living the life, you should be aware that they commonly suffer severe bullying by mean girls of the somewhat larger Brownheaded Cowbird species. Cowbirds lay eggs almost constantly, like chickens, up to 40 a year, far more than they could ever raise themselves in nests of their own. So they lay their eggs in other birds' nests; they'll take advantage of any convenient nest regardless of the type of bird that built it, but towhees, who nest on the ground, are among their favorite surrogate brooders and baby-raisers.
In some parts of the country, more than 50% of towhee nests contain cowbird eggs in addition to towhee eggs. Some species of birds can tell the difference and will actually push the cowbird eggs right out of the nest, but towhees aren't that smart. Cowbirds, on the other hand, are very smart; to give their own eggs a better chance of survival, and to prevent discovery of what they've deposited in the nest by nest-owners who might know how to count, cowbirds often push some of the towhee eggs out of the nest when they lay their own.
Even worse, the cowbird babies grow faster and bigger than the towhee babies and soon muscle the towhees aside to claim all the food. They sometimes even knock the baby towhees right out of their own nest.
And even worse than that, because towhee nests are on the ground, under bushes, baby towhees may also be victimized by . . . our own sweet little Dobby the Miniature Dog. I believe that Dobby–who is terrified of cats and won't bark at the mailman until he's safely upstairs and under the covers–got himself a towhee last summer while I had him on a leash, waiting for a light to change at a busy intersection right in Center City, Philadelphia. Dobby suddenly dived into a brushy patch, and it was bye-bye, birdie.
Personally, I can't tell one species of cute, innocent, harmless baby bird from another. Maybe it wasn't a towhee, just some other kind of ground-nesting bird living under the bushes of Philadelphia. But thanks to the google, I found a website called ebird, on which I could locate 6 different lists of birds sighted by 3 different bird-watchers within a quarter-mile or so of where Dobby did the deed. Every single list included towhees.
I want to believe, however, that the baby that Dobby dispatched was not a towhee but . . . maybe a cowbird?
Apr 3, 2012
Last week, in Portland, Maine, in the combined first- and second-grade class at Longfellow School, Emily Wiggin and her classmates made a mosaic table for a silent auction fundraiser. The winning bid on Saturday night was $200, and somehow, on Sunday morning, there was the table in the Wiggin living room.
Meanwhile, back in Philadelphia, kindergartner Lily Sklaver spent the week learning to ride her bike without training wheels or pedals; by last night, when she had that balancing thing under control, the pedals went back on and she took off flying down the street.
Apr 2, 2012
Mike Adams's shot of dancers on the Coney Island boardwalk won a purchase award in the 2012 Double Exposure photographic exhibition in Tuscaloosa.
Apr 1, 2012
Hard to believe, but April hasn't even really gotten started yet, and the time of blooming is already behind us, at least for the Bradford pears on Kater Street. That afterbloom is just so messy.
Mar 31, 2012
The mountain moonscape of Terlingua, Texas, illuminated (ever so slightly) by the moon at noon.
Mar 28, 2012
William Pinkerton, back in the day, hard at work at the dispatch desk at Bud Wood's taxi service in Rockland, Maine.
Mar 27, 2012
The woman in this picture, Emilienne, shown here in 1922 with her daughter, also named Emilienne, was a French war widow; her husband left for the army in 1914, when little Emilienne was an infant, and was killed in action in 1918, mort au champ d'honneur.
Little Emilienne remained small all her life, less than five feet tall, but lived to be ninety-seven in Dieppe, France, where she ran a waterfront cafe for sailors. "She ignored the meaning of a word like wickedness," recalls her grandson. "When I was five years old at her cafe, that's where I first tasted Calvados. I miss her deeply."
Mar 26, 2012
Yellow House by Judith Schermer.
Mar 24, 2012
In 1900, British artist C. C. Lewis published Tribes of Burma, a hand-painted volume of ethnographic images based on his travels in Southeast Asia. The people portrayed are said to be representative of Burma's dozens of ethnic groups, dressed in characteristic attire and engaged in ordinary daily activities. The family above are Lahu Na, from extreme eastern Burma near the Laotian border.
Below are three more of Lewis's plates: a Wa couple, from the Chinese border region; a Kwi family, from eastern Burma; and a Hkun couple, from the Sittaung River valley in south-centeral Burma.
Mar 23, 2012
Last week, the Forest Lake homeowners' association in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, began siphoning the water out of Forest Lake, in hopes of revealing the debris that has collected in the lake since Tuscaloosa was devastated by a monster tornado eleven months ago.
The lake sits in the geographic center of Tuscaloosa and was near the center of the tornado track. Virtually all the surrounding houses were destroyed, along with the trees that gave the neighborhood its name.
Yesterday, when the water had dropped to the level seen in this photo, engineers were able to make preliminary estimates of the cost of debris removal: just under $300,000, about 30% less than anticipated. Even though the lake is privately owned by the homeowners' association, the taxpayers will be paying for cleanup; the city hopes to share the cost with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resrouces Conservation Service.
Mar 22, 2012
Philadelphia is a city of brick row houses, block upon block, mile after mile. But this house on Lawrence Street in Northern Liberties looks a little different; for one thing, it's detached from all its neighbors, set back from the street in a large fenced yard. And for another thing, well, it's a log cabin. Two stories high, a citified height, but still, unquestionably, a log cabin.
It doesn't date back to the "real" log-cabin age, however. About a quarter-century ago, in the mid-1980s, an artist named Jeff Thomas put the cabin together from a load of logs trucked in from West Virginia; its stylistic allusion, we're told, is to the back-to-the-landers of the 1960s and early '70s. In the 1980s, Thomas and other artists then settling in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia were recolonizing a city landscape of abandoned factories, decrepit warehouses, vacant lots, and boarded-up, blighted homes. Their pioneering spirit, embodied in Thomas's house, succeeded only too well, and the cabin is now surrounded by renovated homes that cost way too much for a struggling artist.
Mar 21, 2012
London at night.
Mar 20, 2012
In hopes of fostering the development of medical science in Russia, Peter the Great scoured the West for natural history objects: taxidermy, live birds and insects, botanical and anatomical illustrations, and paraphernalia associated with monsters. Albertus Seba, a wealthy Dutch pharmacist and traveler, had amassed the largest natural history collection of the mid-18th century. Peter bought all of Seba's objects and library, including this book of colored zoological plates, and installed everything in St. Petersburg, where it became the nucleus of the Russian national collections.
The book is currently in the Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas.
Mar 19, 2012
I have it on very good authority that these princesses were on their way to the drug store.