Hole in the Clouds

Mummering in Philly

Jan 2, 2012

A Mummer approaches the crowd along Broad Street during Philadelphia's 112th annual New Year's Day parade.

The Mummers Parade, unique to Philadelphia though with overtones of New Orleans Mardi Gras festivities, typically lasts about eight hours and involves more than 10,000 strutters, dancers, musicians, and stagehands. The 2012 parade was said to be reduced a bit in size and extravagance, reflecting economic hard times and perhaps also the city's changing culture.

Nonetheless, crowds carrying open beverages mobbed the sidewalks and cross-streets, as brigade after brigade of Mummers in full feathery regalia marched down Broad Street, pausing every few blocks to show off the results of their yearlong labors on costumes, choreography, horn-blowing and banjo-picking and precision dance.

At the convention hall near the end of the parade route, the various bands and brigades perform lengthier, more elaborate versions of their dance routines for judges, who award substantial sums of prize money to the top groups. The prizes don't begin to cover the costs of mummery, however; even though all the dancers work for free, the costumes and special effects can cost a brigade $100,000 or even more.

With less money to spend this year on costumes and staging, more attention was devoted to choreography and dance skills. According to one Mummer choreographer, Dennis Quaile, the mostly male Mummers base their dancing on boxing moves: "punches, lunges, and dodges."

"Anything effeminate they will not do," said Quaile. "Some brigades have girls and they can get away with it. But if the guys don't feel manly, while dancing in their feathers, they won't do it. So I have to keep it as butch as I possibly can."

streetscape   Philadelphia   parade   South Philly   New Year's   mummer  

The Polar Bear Thing

Jan 1, 2012

Some people, sometimes including some of my sons, bring in the new year this way. Maybe after a start like this, the rest of the year doesn't seem quite so rough.

But I say that's much too low a standard for 2012. Next year should be way, way, way better than an icy plunge, and way, way, way better than 2011, and just plain awesome. I lift my glass to good times all through 2012: love, warmth, health, wit, serendipity, hope against hope, and great kindness. Cheers.

winter   ice   New Year's   swim  

Amalgamated Center

Dec 31, 2011

One of about a dozen murals painted in 1938 by Joseph Hirsch to decorate the basement walls of a long-since-abandoned building on South Street in Philadelphia, this one is titled "A Mechanical Engineering Problem." I can't say I know for certain what the joke is here, though the fact that the art had been commissioned by the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA), who owned the building and used it for an office and social center, would have to be a major clue. My guess is that the mustachioed tailors portrayed here were not union workers and were not particularly skilled suitmakers, either; perhaps the point is that only a chump would order a custom-tailored suit from guys like these instead of buying a ready-made, union-made coat and trousers.

Here is another take on the same theme:

In this image, the chump is getting an ill-fitting suit not because it's off-the-shelf and union-made but because the slimeball salesmen can't or won't be bothered to fit him properly. The superiority of union needlework–which the establishment advertises prominently–is or ought to be a selling point among highfalutin haberdashers.

Whatever the punch line, the ACWA was happy with the murals and rehired Hirsch a couple of years later to do a much larger and more formal work for the wall of their auditorium upstairs: a mural 11 feet high and 65 feet long–the largest the entire city at the time–which traced the early history of labor unions in the United States. It was later removed from the building and installed in the lobby of the Sidney Hillman Apartments a few blocks away.

Sidney Hillman, who founded the ACWA, had no personal association with Philadelphia; he was born in Lithuania, and after being imprisoned for labor agitation in Poland in the early years of the twentieth century, he settled in Chicago, where he organized several powerful unions and steered the American labor movement toward the Democratic Party in general and Franklin Roosevelt in particular. But his ACWA represented about 25,000 Philadelphians in the 1930s, when locals from around the city got together to buy the building at 2101 South Street, which became known as the Amalgamated Center. There were offices upstairs, an auditorium and meeting rooms on the main floor, and a swimming pool, gym, and social hall in the basement.

The building was already set up for pretty much these same functions and had been since before 1900, when wealthy merchant John Wanamaker financed its construction for the Bethany Brotherhood, a men's fellowship and social lodge from nearby Bethany Presbyterian Church. During World War I, the Brotherhood turned over the building for housing and recrational use by soldiers and sailors on leave; more than 8,000 servicemen swam, played, and partied there in 1917 and 1918, with Wanamaker picking up the tab for operating costs.

The Amalgamated unions bought it in 1934 and remodeled and expanded it, eventually cladding many walls in marble; the ACWA and a series of affiliated and successor unions occupied the building until 1984, when declining membership led to its sale as office space for Graduate Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.

In recent years, it has sat empty. But this week, the basement and much of the first floor of the old Amalgamated Center reopened to something like its original function: once again, the place is a gym, this time operated by a private company, City Fitness. Old Sidney Hillman would not have approved of how the renovation work was undertaken; a couple of weeks before the reopening, there were pickets in front of the building, in response to a subcontractor's use of non-union labor.

Hirsch's murals in the basement will also meet an inglorious fate (as if the graffiti wasn't enough). They are theoretically protected by the building's inclusion on the National Registry of Historic Places, but what that means in practice is that City Fitness will soon be hiding most of them, covering them over with mirrors for the exercise rooms.

Meanwhile, for a brief moment in a new century, Sidney Hillman, "The Guide and Spirit of Amalgamated C.W.," is once again flying free, even if he does have a heart inked on his bicep with the name Carmine inside:

art   Philadelphia   mural   South Street   gym   Sidney Hillman   Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America   labor union   Joseph Hirsch   cartoon  

What Castro Was Smoking

Dec 30, 2011

We have received another posting from The Ensign™, who is still bobbing around out in the Pacific Ocean aboard the USS Ingraham. This time, he confesses to taking up a habit that mama sez will ruin the headliner and upholstery and even the plastic of the dashboard in his car. . . .

So I thought it would be cool to buy a box of really nice Cohiba cigars when I was in Panama. All the engineering officers were doing it, and they told me that they could get a better deal if more people got in on the purchase. So I decided to get a box for myself. The problem with this is that I don't really like cigars, and now I have a $120 box of eight-inch-long, super thick cigars. I have tried to be a man and smoke them, but I feel like I'm being punished for something. I have already given a couple of them away. And I traded the Chief Engineer two of them for his old LTJG shoulder boards. (I know it is a bit presumptuous of me to assume that I'll get promoted, but I like my odds.)

Even though I do not enjoy the actual smoking of said cigar, I do take pleasure in the act of smoking on a ship. Today I got off the reveille watch from two to seven in the morning, and although tired I began my day. I went to quarters, did an electrical safety walk-through of Radio division, ordered some parts for a broken coffee maker (this thing is HUGE and apparently has a lot of electrical components), emailed our shore engineer to coordinate some post-deployment electrical work, validated a bunch of jobs that my guys have written up that came back to me for grammatical errors (Yay! My English degree is slowly paying dividends...), ensured that some of my guys helped to secure the electrical power to a food storage freezer that needs to have work done, went to departmental training on the mess decks, and located a ground in the B phase. It was a standard day.

Anyways, after dinner, and a short nap, I went out to the weather decks (the designated smoke area) and lit up a cigar. Watching the sun dip below the horizon, and talking to smokers as they came and went, I couldn't help but laugh. Even though I felt like I was smoking a flaming cucumber, it was pretty cool to be out there. As the breeze whipped back my hair and rippled through my grease stained coveralls, as I tried not to embarrass myself by coughing amongst veteran smokers, and as I contemplated how small we humans are as the stars started to poke needle holes through the clouds, I couldn't help but laugh. This deployment, this job, it's kind of funny sometimes for no particular reason.

Well, I'm off to stand the evening watch and to try and come up with more excuses to give away my expensive cohiba cigars.

Navy   Allen   USS Ingraham   cigars   Panama  

Puzzling

Dec 29, 2011

Clear winners of the 2011 Christmas Vacation jigsaw competition are Olivia Horowitz of Bloomington, Indiana, and her grandmother Sandra Horowitz. They correctly assembled a 1,000-piece puzzle in less than 24 hours and would have finished even faster, according to spectators, had it not been for a break to watch a movie.

December 29 is Grandma Sandy's eighty-first birthday. Olivia, a junior at Bloomington South High School, is sixteen.

family   jigsaw   Sandra Horowitz   Olivia Horowitz   Bloomington   Indiana   (Image credit: Carol Fuchs)  

Generations

Dec 28, 2011

The twins rolling around on the mat at lower left are imitating their father's winning wrestling moves at right, during Deering High School's annual alumni wrestling meet last week.

For many alumni of Deering's storied wrestling program, this meet is their only chance to lace up their old wrestling shoes and see if they've still got what it takes. Coach Kirk, who's been running the show at Deering for more than thirty years, matches up each alumnus against a member of the current varsity squad; the wrestling is vigorous but not particularly intense, because Coach always rigs the matchups to favor the old guys. This year, as in most years, the alumni won every bout.

Portland   Maine   wrestling   Deering High School   children  

The Hanukah Bear

Dec 22, 2011

As Debby and her daughter Lily lit the candles for the first night of Hanukah, Lily's Hanukah bear sat on the kitchen counter just beyond the right edge of this picture. Use your imagination: the Hanukah bear is a stuffed polar bear wearing a yarmulke, with a battery-powered voice. Push the button, and the Hanukah bear sings and sings about a dreidel made of clay.

After the candles were lit and the bear had sung, there were dreidels made of plastic and gelt made of chocolate, plus presents for Lily and latkes for all.

children   Philadelphia   Kater Street   holiday   Debby Sklaver   candles   Hanukah   Lily   (Image credit: Hank Stein)  

Duck Duck Goose

Dec 21, 2011

This species of duck is native to Africa and is ubiquitous throughout the continent, except in deserts and deep forest. It is not native but nonetheless ubiquitous in many parts of Europe, especially England, where it was introduced more than three centuries ago and has thrived in town and countryside to such an extent that it was added last year to the official national list of animal pests. This picture was taken recently in London.

The birds are known as Egyptian Geese, despite the fact that they are ducks, not geese. Apparently, they have a heavy-looking habit of flight that makes them look goose-like in the air.

animal   duck   London   Africa   bird   goose  

In the Bean

Dec 18, 2011

Visitors enjoy their reflections in the bean, in downtown Chicago's Millennium Park, near the waterfront. The couple pictured here can also be seen at lower right in the picture below, when they were first approaching the shiny thing and had not yet found themselves in it. But they're already there, if you look closely, along with the skyscrapers in the background and an ice skating rink in the middle distance.

cityscape   Chicago   sculpture   skyline   Millennium Plaza   Grant Park   Cloud Gate   reflections   the bean   parkscape  

Lena's Mouth

Dec 9, 2011

The satellite view of Philadelphia in infrared, from a few days ago, led some people to ask for more false-color imagery of our planet. Here we've got a river delta in the tundra of eastern Siberia, where the River Lena empties into the Arctic Ocean. The image is from mid-summer, when the plants of the tundra were bursting with new growth, thanks to twenty-four hours a day of sunlight. The color scheme here is different from that of the Philadelphia scene but still not closely related to the colors a human eye would detect. The data displayed comes from three sensors on the Landsat satellite: one that detects infrared energy, another that detects near-infrared energy, which is very sensitive to the chemicals associated with growing vegetation, and a third sensor that picks up a part of the visible spectrum. Vegetation is green, exposed rock or soil is pink, wet soil (mud) is purple, and ice is blue.

Even in mid-summer, the sea ice floats close to shore. It will take another month or two for most of the ice to melt and/or wash out to sea, but as soon as it does freezing temperatures will return and ice formation will begin again.

The innumerable ponds and distributary streams are typical of flat places throughout the Arctic tundra, where permafrost just below the surface impairs drainage. Meltwater and rainwater sit on top of the permafrost all summer long, breeding mosquitoes...... which don't show up in the satellite imagery.

birdseye view   Russia   infrared   Siberia   remote sensing   tundra   Landsat   Lena River   delta   river   Arctic Ocean  

The Big Tree at the Corner

Dec 8, 2011

I always thought they were called sycamores, but no, the people who know these things tell me that city trees that look like sycamores are actually hybrid variants called London planes. Real sycamores, we are told, are too crooked to serve well as street trees, so things are what they are, and now that the old elm trees are no longer among us, we are left with London planes as kings of the sidewalks, with their fine white bark and annoying seed balls. This one is on South 21st Street in Philadelphia, near the corner of Kater Street.

The picture was taken about a year ago, when December was decidedly more wintry than has been the case thus far in 2011. But last year's decorations are up again, and the dusk is just as dark and just as early as I remember from 2010. Season's greetings are probably in order.

streetscape   winter   tree   Kater Street   city   dusk  

Beach Stars

Dec 4, 2011

The stars of the Milky Way rise out of the Mediterranean in this time-release photo taken on the beach at the edge of the Greek village of Elia, near Molaoi. The earthly lights in the distance at far right are from the port of Gytheio, a few kilometers away. The brightest part of the Milky Way galaxy, in the right center of the picture near the constellation of Sagittarius, is about 27,000 light-years away.

beach   Greece   Elia   Molaoi   night sky   Gytheio   (Image credit: Stavros Hios)  

Philly from Space

Dec 1, 2011

At about 9:30 in the morning on September 23, 1999, the Landsat 7 satellite swooped southward over eastern North America and captured this image of Philadelphia and environs.

Three of the Landsat sensors detected energy in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, completely invisible to the human eye. Data from these sensors is displayed here, with each of the three infrared bands assigned to one of the normal red-green-blue color bands so we at least have something to look at, even though the colors have nothing to do with normal vision.

Clicking on the picture brings up a bigger version, which shows much more detail.

We can tell right away that the rivers are black; infrared energy is completely absorbed by water, reflecting back nothing for the sensors to detect. And if we look along the river at lower left, we can make out the airport, with runways that are bright cyan in color. This white-to-bluish hue is also the color of roads, railroads, parking lots, and other paved surfaces.

Infrared data is especially useful for studying vegetation, which shows up in this color scheme as red, orange, or yellow. The brightest red patches represent vigorous herbaceous growth, such as healthy cropland in the midst of the growing season. There's little or no farmland in and around Philly, however, so the red patches we see here, such as in between the airport runways, are probably healthy weeds.

Patches of red coloration with a touch of an orange tint and some texture are forested areas, such as in parks or between the fairways of golf courses. Extremely vigorous grass, such as on the golf course fairways themselves, looks bright yellow in this view.

The brownish-to-grayish-to-bluish areas show mixed land cover: Landsat's sensors are averaging out the infrared signals from house roofs, pavement, lawns, shrubs, and trees in varying concentrations. Brownish areas are suburban, with lots of trees and grass; dark green to gray-blue areas are more urban, with a higher ratio of rooftops and pavement to vegetation.

Philadelphia has changed since this image was captured twelve years ago. Another stadium has been built near where the Schuylkill River empties out into the Delaware. In my neighborhood just south of Center City, the forested patch of land near the Schuylkill, which in 1999 was an abandoned and overgrown Old Sailors' Home is now a heavily developed condo complex. Even though the population of Philadelphia has shrunk dramatically over the past half-century and has just barely started growing again, land use patterns as viewed from outer space show ongoing urbanization.

Pennsylvania   birdseye view   infrared   Philadelphia   city   airport   Landsat   bands 457   rivers   refinery   (Image credit: NASA Landsat 7)  

Like a Character from Moby Dick

Nov 28, 2011

We have permission from The Ensign™ to share in this space one of his stories of high adventure on the high seas. As many of you have already heard, he is currently deployed on the USS Ingraham, a navy frigate patrolling the Pacific off the coast of South America.

♦

Happy thanksgiving!

Last week, we caught a drug smuggling ship disguised as a fishing vessel, which is awesome. However, there is a down side; having the prize vessel means that we have to send a crew over there to man the fishing vessel [and] what this means for the rest of us is  ...  we get even less sleep than we did before.

I stand watch, get a break just long enough to take care of my DIVO stuff and eat and if I'm lucky get two hours of sleep before I have to go back on watch again.

Eyeing an opportunity to get off the ship and do something interesting and new, I asked the captain if I could go be part of the captured vessel's crew for one of the shifts. She smiled at my excitement to get over to the other ship but said no. So the next day I asked again, citing the fact that it would be a good "learning" experience for me. She thought about it for a short time, but once again shook her head. Third time's the charm. I approached her stateroom the next night after dinner. "Captain," I said, "what an adventure this could be for me! A chance to be the executive officer on board a captured drug smuggling vessel would make this deployment for me!"

Finally, out of being annoyed by my Stein persistence more than anything else, the captain shrugged her shoulders and picked up her phone. "Go ahead and put Ensign Stein on the watch bill for tomorrow morning, uh huh, okay, thanks." She looked up at me and smiled. "Well, go pack a backpack, Electro, you're on the 0600 small boat transfer tomorrow morning."

And my adventure began.

All I packed was a book, my board shorts, my flip-flops, and a water bottle.

The next morning I was transferred over to the fishing vessel early. The first thing I noticed was an incredibly putrid smell. I gagged even before I stepped foot on board. These drug smugglers really went all out in making it appear that they were a legitimate fishing ship; they even had actual fish in the icebox below deck. ...  only I'm sure all of the ice has melted by now. It was one of the worst smells I have ever been exposed to. One of the other guys started throwing up immediately.

I spent most of the morning down in the bilge with the resident engineer while a Coast Guard guy and an LT drove the ship. We finally figured out how to rig the electric pump and got the bilge flooding down as much as we could. The engine died a couple of times, too, but we were able to get it up and running after some sweet engineering magic.

After everything was set down below, I changed into my board shorts and flip-flops, grabbed one of the cots, brought it up to the roof of the pilot house, took out my book (Moby Dick), and lounged out and read for an hour. The sun was shining, the ocean had a nice breeze, it was awesome!

After a short lunch consisting of a pop tart and a peanut butter sandwich, we made a startling, disgusting discovery: cockroaches. At first we just saw one, and there was a bottle of Raid, so we quickly took care of it. Then another came out, and we killed that one too. Then another. What the hell was going on? The Coast Guard guy noticed that they were all coming from behind this one crack in the bulkhead, so we decided to spray some Raid in that crack. We hit the mother lode! All of a sudden, cockroaches started pouring out of there like the mass exodus from a movie theater after someone pulled a fire alarm. Big ones, small ones, fat ones, fast ones. It was unnerving, to say the least. We sprayed the ones we could, but the others made fast to another crack and were gone. For the rest of my time on board the prize ship, my head was on a swivel.

I was John Wayne in a classic western movie, only [with] a can of Raid instead of a 44 magnum, and in a fishing ship floating in the Pacific instead of a western frontier town.

After the cockroach scare died down a little, we got a call from the Ingraham. There were some buoys way off in the distance that were suspicious, and they wanted us to investigate. We left our stationing spot off the Ingraham's port quarter and headed for the buoys. Well, these buoys did not have any drugs in them, but the lines around a buoy had wrapped tightly around a poor sea turtle's left front leg. Feeling bad for the turtle, we decided to pull up close and cut it free. The turtle was so funny up close; it had zero expression on its face, it didn't even say thank you! It felt good to save the turtle's life, though.

All of a sudden, after the turtle swam away, the buoy started pulling really hard from us. Apparently, there was something really strong caught in the net below the buoy. What happened next was all at once terrifying and amazing:  A twelve-foot manta ray–twelve feet no exaggeration– wrapped all in the net, exploded from the depths of the ocean. It started splashing about vigorously in the sea and pulled the buoy out of our hands and then dove back down underneath, temporarily pulling the buoys down with it below the surface. We couldn't believe it! Watching a sea monster splash around so close to where I was made me feel like a character from Moby Dick.

After the experience with the turtle and manta ray, the engine died and we were dead in the water until our reliefs came that night. I went back to the Ingraham smelling like long-dead fish, but filled with tales to tell. About how I fought a war against an army of roaches. About how I saved a life. About how I came face to face with a sea monster from the deep. It was so much fun. I was tired, sunburned, I had to stand watch on the Ingraham's bridge from two in the morning until seven in the morning, I smelled awful, but I was happy!

Hopefully this message finds everyone with full bellies and in good health. Tell people I miss them and that I wish I could be there.

Navy   Allen   USS Ingraham   Pacific   Moby Dick