Mensch

Today's pictures are stolen shamelessly from the Maine Sunday Telegram, which ran a story by Kelley Bouchard about a farmer named Bill Spiller in Wells, Maine, south of Portland. Spiller grew an extra $20,000 of food crops this year to give away. To help his neighbors in need, he planted, weeded, harvested, cleaned, and delivered to a food pantry a total of more than 10,000 pounds of fresh, top-quality produce: strawberries, tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, green peppers, watermelons, squash, corn, apples, and carrots.

As you can see in the picture of Bill's hands holding fresh-dug carrots, he's not a young guy, and the work is rough. He says he's never made much money, but even so, the portion of his crop that he gives away is "surplus." Every year, he and his wife dedicate more and more rows in their fields to the York County homeless shelter and food pantry. They say their goal is to give away 20% or more of what they grow.

More Mainers have turned to the food pantry recently as it becomes harder for people to feed their families. This week, more than a thousand people in York County will enjoy Thanksgiving dinners made possible by the work of Bill Spiller's hands.

Time goes by.

Dinky

The town of Tunbridge, Vermont, gathered in 2006 for a town picture that was posted here last year. But ten years before that, Tunbridge was featured in a sort of town movie, "Man with a Plan," a mockumentary that starred local dairy farmer Fred Tuttle as a candidate for Congress who was interested in the job because it paid a good salary. Fred needed the money to pay taxes on his farm and buy a hip replacement for his 91-year-old father. and he managed to spend only $12 on his campaign. His slogan was "FRED: Friendly, Renewable, Extraterrestrial, Dinky." His debate tactic was to ask his opponent how many teats there were on a Jersey cow. In the movie, Fred won the election and showed up in Washington, still in overalls, eating a sandwich on the Capitol lawn.

In real life, he got a fair number of write-in votes, enough to inspire him to make an actual run for the U.S. Senate in 1998. He ran in the Republican primary against a wealthy carpetbagger from New York, spending $200 this time, mostly on port-a-potties for his campaign rally, Fred Day. And just like in the movie, he won the nomination. The real Fred, however, couldn't go to Washington because his wife wouldn't let him, so after the primary he endorsed the Democratic nominee, Patrick Leahy, and retired from both politics and the movies.


Fred Tuttle died in 2003. But there must be something in the water in Tunbridge, at least when it comes to spot-on slogans. Tunbridge's main commercial activity, ever since 1869, has been an annual World's Fair--a world's fair, as opposed to a county fair, because you don't have to live in the county to enter your preserves or your team of oxen. The fair got a pretty sketchy reputation over the years, but the Union Agricultural Society that runs it has cleaned it up recently, so much so that the year we visited, there were protesters outside the gate demanding reinstatement of the World's Fair Demolition Derby. The 138th fair, which is set to open September 17, 2009, is being promoted by the singing Shugarmakers, who invite the world to come on down to Tunbridge and "Get funky--it's no big deal."

Ghost ship #312

A few days ago, a gang of pirates from Somalia captured the Sirius Star, a ship the size of an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean. The Sirius Star is a Saudi supertanker carrying about $100 million worth of oil. The pirates took the crew hostage and sailed the ship 400 miles to a desolate region of the central Somali coast, near the village of Harardhere, a village so small it is said that the entire town could fit on the bridge of the Sirius Star. The tanker sits anchored offshore while ransom negotiations proceed. So far this year, Somali pirates have captured almost 100 ships in the Gulf of Aden and Indian Ocean and ransomed them for an average of $1 million each.

The ship in this picture is not the Sirius Star, though its location is very near (probably within 10 miles or so) where the pirates are said to have anchored the tanker. The ship seen here is an unremarkable cargo vessel, roughly the size of a World War II liberty ship. It is believed to have run aground and broken up--damage is visible at the stern--some years ago. In the Google Earth catalog of some 1800 shipwrecks visible from space, this is #312, with no details available concerning the vessel or its fate.

At the moment, the pirates of Somalia are said to have possession of 14 vessels, with more than 300 crew members held hostage. Unlike pirates of old, these brigands are not at all interested in the cargo of the various vessels they capture--for one thing, they have no facilities to offload oil or much of anything else in their remote villages. They do have money-counting machines, however, for they deal only in cash ransom--Somalia has no functioning banking system. Shipowners sometimes deliver the ransom in waterproof suitcases dropped from helicopters. The impact of so much cash in the pirate villages is said to be dramatic: new stone houses have been built, Toyota Land Cruisers have appeared, and enterprising merchants, even western-style caterers, have become wealthy providing goods and services to the pirates and their captives. In the nightmare that is latter-day Somalia, life among the pirates can seem sweet. "Our children are not worried about food now," a Harardhere mother told Western journalists. "They go to Islamic schools in the morning, and in the afternoon they play soccer."

The ransom demands are not particularly burdensome to the Saudi princes negotiating for release of the Sirius Star, but overall the wave of piracy is devastating to worldwide shipping. More than 40,000 vessels a year pass through pirate-infested waters south of the Suez Canal, and many insurance companies are now refusing to insure them. Some shipowners choose to avoid the danger by rerouting trade all the way around the continent of Africa, a much longer and more costly route. Shippers fear that steering clear of the Somali coast won't keep vessels safe for long; the new speedboats and weapons that the pirates have been buying with their ransom money permit them to venture hundreds of miles out to sea in search of prey.

Two hundred years ago, in the early years of the American republic, North African pirates claimed an annual tribute of $2 million for American ships to sail in the Mediterranean. The fledgling U.S. Navy went after these Barbary pirates, and the brand new U.S. Marine Corps mounted an expedition to the pirate stronghold of Tripoli. Actually, only one officer and seven enlisted Marines participated in that expedition, but this fact became legend and the legend became song, part of the first line of the Marine Corps hymn.

On the rocks

Enough of that stork stuff. Today we've got a seal, resting on a beach in New Zealand.

Hat tip to A, who saw that seal and snapped it up.

Whatever happens in this alley . . . stays in . . . .

Father Acastorio watches over the entrance to an alley in Verona.

Pippi Longstocking aka Carmen Sandiego

I was pawing through Google Earth hacks, which is something I do sometimes, when I came across one for Villa Villekulla, on an island in the south of Sweden.

You will recall, of course, that Villa Villekulla is the name Pippi Longstocking gave to her house, where she lived with her monkey, Mr. Nillsen, and kept her horse, Little Old Man, on the front porch. Astrid Lindgren wrote the first Pippi book in 1945, with illustrations that portrayed the house as follows:

The Google Earth hack appears to claim as the "real" Villa Villekulla a house in Gotland built for a 1969 movie version of Pippi's adventures:

Some tourist website and numerous blogs, all in Swedish, refer to a different  but quite similar-looking house as Villa Villekulla, located in the village of Kneippbyn:

Also in the islands of southern Sweden is an Astrid Lindgren theme park, with its own version of Villa Villekulla, and a summer theater with a stage set of the house for outdoor performances:

  

On Amelia Island, Florida, is a house used for a recent Pippi Longstocking TV series:

And then there's the Lego version, as shown on a Dutch website:

  

Of course there's also a Sim Villa Villekula, with a virtual tour on a website selling a line of high-styled Scandinavian fashion:

The best YouTube Villa Villekulla is a tour of a diorama, perhaps built as a dollhouse?:

Just goes to show, don't believe everything you see in Google Earth.

I've been to a house in New Hampshire that Hili Thomson named Villa Villekula. There was no horse on the porch, but two goats in the kitchen.

Are they real Americans?

Do you know these people? They were last spotted in the old Patent Office building in Washington, D.C., on the Fourth of July, 2006.

Somewhere over yonder

Late in the afternoon of April 2, 2006, we looked out our window across the street, just past the Lutheran church and right smack in back of the Cumberland Farms Exxon station--yup, there it was, the pot of gold.

Framed

Left to right: The painting "Bouquet with a View," Sandy Horowitz (my mother, and an appreciator of the painting and painter), and the painter of the painting, Belgian-Israeli artist Anne Francoise Ben-Or. All three are framed here in Ben-Or's studio in Israel, near the window that frames the view in the painting.

Not bare-chested in the fountain

This warning sign clarifies what is allowed and not allowed in Verona.

Big bird

Storks don't have to ask us first; they can just go out in the street all by themselves when they feel like it.

leafy issues

Damage or disease or pestilence ......

Kinda purty.

Careful.

Watch your step. Don't you crush that ferry house.

Used to could

Was a time, back in the day, when the Joe could really fly.

Namibia in Infrared

This digital patchwork is from infrared Landsat satellite imagery of the Atlantic coast of the African nation of Namibia. The gold strands separating purple and black in some of the patches represent the beaches, where in Namibia and nearby parts of Mozambique, thousands upon thousands of diamonds could once be plucked from the sands. The bright gold color is not caused by diamonds or anything else precious; most likely, it is the bright infrared signal produced by salt, which encrusts the sands here where the extremely arid Namib Desert meets the sea.

The black patches or parts of patches in this quilt are water as seen by the satellite's infrared sensors; water generates no infrared signal at all. The purple patches are barren desert: dune fields, craters, and rock formations.

Much of this coastline is closed to tourists, as part of governmental and quasi-governmental efforts to limit access to nearby diamond mining operations. The mines themselves are mostly inland, in geologic formations that are two or three billion years old. But after a couple of billions of years of erosion from wind and occasional desert rainstorms, much of the matrix rock that held the diamonds has crumbled, and many thousands of loose diamonds have been washed down to the coast and out to sea. Diamonds are so heavy, however, that sea currents don't carry them far; waves tended to wash them right back up onto the beaches, where they rested in the (salty) sand awaiting human greed. In a couple of dozen years, miners plucked from the Namibian sands very nearly all the diamonds that nature needed a couple of billions of years to put there. Almost certainly, a few loose diamonds continue to surface from time to time on those beaches, but if you want to go look for them, of course, you'll need assault rifles and other mining implements.

The patchwork pattern here is an off-center version of an old flower-garden pattern that is usually worked up with floral fabric. I'm told that if plain fabric is properly sprayed and soaked, satellite imagery or any other picture can be printed on it with an ordinary inkjet printer. One of these days, I'd like to learn that technology and make this digital quilt into the kind of cover that can keep people warm.

Boy with the checkered shoestrings

A few years ago, Allen made a friend underneath a bench outside a gas station in Hattiesburg, Mississippi.

Fiddlin on the ferry

At the feet of the fiddler in this picture is his open violin case, with a hat in it. He is riding the Washington State ferry that crosses Puget Sound between Edmonds and Kingston, just north of Seattle. I don't know if he's trying to make a living this way or just hoping to pull in a few bucks or simply earning back his ferry fare as he rides the water. It's also possible that he's doing this because he lost a bet. Whatever, this crossing had a soundtrack that I used to believe was better suited to trains than to boats: Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Orange Blossom Special.

Smile for Michael

Cousin Michael Schreiber died unexpectedly last week at the age of 50. He was a Buddhist, a bankruptcy expert, an Egyptologist, and an avid photographer, among other things. These photos are from the albums he had posted on MySpace: cousin Maggie in New York City, and a clown from the Barnum & Bailey Ringling Bros. circus.

Once and future morning

This year, November 4 fell on a Tuesday, making it election day. Five elections ago, in 1992, November 4 was a Wednesday, the day after voting day, and it was about as good a day as days get. We won in Alabama. We got Hank.

Yesterday, Hank turned 16. He's still too young to vote, but not too young to work hard for the candidate of his choice (Chellie Pingree, in the race for Congress from Maine's first congressional district) and not too young to get a job in Washington as a page for the U.S. Senate, starting next January.

In fact, all his political work is interfering with his chance to take driver's ed and do what 16-year-olds usually like to do, so drivers in southern Maine can relax for a little while longer; the Hankster's on the bandwagon, but not yet behind the wheel.

Commuting to the sun

Early-morning commuters waiting for a train at the Oak Park station can look eastward down the tracks to see the sun rise just behind the skyscrapers in the Chicago loop. Photo by Katrin Maldre.

If Barack Obama wakes up this morning in his own bed in his own house, he won't be able to look out his window and see Russia, but he might be able to see these same skyscrapers. By the time he goes to bed tonight--God willing and the creek don't rise--he may have signed a lease on another house. He'll be your tenant and mine, and in lieu of rent, he's promised to fix the place up a bit.

Father of the groom

Ladislav (Sandy) Fuchs poses with Max the big cat.

The day after tomorrow, Sandy's son Martin is getting married in Tel Aviv to a young woman from iraq.

Moody's point of view

In 1807, Portland, Maine, was home to a smart guy named Lemuel Moody. I'm calling him smart because he figured out how to make a lot of money off something that other people shrugged off as just an inconvenience of life in Portland. Life was a little inconvenient in those days for area residents, particularly for local merchants, because the topography of the Portland peninsula blocked everybody's view of approaching maritime traffic until the ships were all the way into the harbor and pulling up at the wharves. In other ports, where ships could be seen long before they actually docked, merchants could get their wagons down to the water and unload cargo as soon as it arrived. In Portland, ships would pull up to the wharves and sit and wait while the merchants got ready to receive their cargo. Time was wasted.

Moody made money off the merchants' impatience by taking advantage of another feature of Portland topography--a hill just beyond the harbor, with a cow pasture on top. He built a 70-foot tower in Munjoy's pasture, called the Portland Observatory, which offered a vew far out to sea and across the entire downtown part of the city. He set up a telescope in the top of the tower, which made it possible to identify particular ships while they were still far outside the harbor. Merchants could subscribe to his services for an annual fee. Moody would climb the tower every hour or so to check for ships; when he saw a vessel of interest to a subscribing merchant, he would raise that merchant's flag on the tower. The merchants, in order to get their money's worth, would have to keep stepping outside their establishments and looking up the hill to check for flags. They evidently decided that the inconvenience of paying an annual fee and then repeatedly checking for a flag was less onerous than the inconvenience of being surprised by a ship's arrival.

The business model must have been a good one, because the Portland Observatory stayed in business for more than a hundred years, until the telescope was stolen in 1939.

The b&w picture shows the tower in 1936. The color picture is evolved from what Ted and I saw of downtown Portland (looking away from the harbor) when we went up in the tower in August 2008.

I beg, I thank, and here come the storks

I beg forgiveness for blowing off this morning stuff all week--I was sadly distracted and on the road and technically incompetent. I'm still on the road and incompetent, but I've found help and learned a workaround for email that spit out attachments when away from the home network.

I thank Ted and Amy for days and days of work--all these mornings from 2007 and 2008 really are on a blog now--momsgoodmornings.blogspot.com. Clicking on the pictures will make them open up big, which is how I like 'em.

About the storks: We don't have them in America, of course, though we do have the European legend about storks bringing babies. And in Europe, where they really do have storks, the birds seem to have mostly retired from the business of bringing babies; in many European countries, the birth rate has dropped below the level necessary for population replacement. Stork babies, however, as opposed to human babies, are still happening. In Estonia last spring and summer, a webcam was trained 24/7 on the nest of a sort of Truman family of storks. Here is an image of a stork family based on a 19th-century German print.