They're wanting to come in from the cold

Big bird, little birds

Two summers ago, these three birds were spotted in the skies over Machias Seal Island, off the coast of downeast Maine. The whirlybird had just delivered a new stove to the Canadian Coast Guardsmen stationed on the island.

The shoulder season

Satellites take pictures of the same places over and over again--in winter, in spring, in hurricane season, in drought. Needless to say, the snapshots can look very different at different times. In this mosaic of imagery from around the Baltic Sea, winter and spring butt up against each other. We can't tell which came first--the sea ice on the left or the open water on the right.

Feast Day

This prayer service in a soccer stadium in Mopti, a small city near the center of the West African nation of Mali, marks the beginning of festivities for the Muslim holiday of Tabaski. The festival, known as Eid in much of the Muslim world, commemorates Abraham's sacrifice of a lamb.

To prepare for Tabaski, people who couldn't afford to buy a lamb had bought a goat, or if necessary, a camel, "haggling over the purchase...at a giant outdoor market where many sheep are transported home strapped to tiny motorcycles." After prayers in the stadium, families go home to slaughter the lambs in their living rooms and begin three days of feasting and visiting. All the meat must be eaten within the three days.

This photo and the description of Tabaski come from Janet Goldwater, who has just returned from filming in Mali for her new documentary, Mrs. Goundo's Daughter. The film tells of a Mali-born family facing deportation from the U.S.; the parents are desperate to protect their two-year-old daughter from the near-universal Malian practice of female genital cutting. Mrs. Goundo's Daughter, Janet's sixth movie, is due out in 2009. To see trailers and all kinds of good stuff, click here.

Dreaming of summer

From time to time, I propose to send pictures of places I've never seen but would like to visit. The list of candidate places is long, but I'll start with Newfoundland. One reason I'm interested in Newfoundland is that in the summertime, it has icebergs. Another reason is that it used to have Vikings, who lived there in sod huts a thousand years ago. Also, it's got its very own time zone, half an hour ahead of Atlantic time in Eastern Canada. A few years ago, I worked with a guy who visited Newfoundland as often as he could. He said he liked the culture, the lifestyle. When I asked him why, he said, "Well, to start with, there are no jobs, so nobody goes to work."

Finally, a big attraction for me is the berries, especially the kind called bakeapples. I've never tried them, but I'm not worried; I know they'll taste like sunshine in a basket.

Hat Tip

It has been Hank's good fortune over the years to have at least one older brother who has been helpful in showing him how to dress stylishly and generally make a good impression in the world.

John's shirt says "Hercules" in Greek, for the local soccer team in Thessaloniki. Hank's shirt says "Old Navy."

Foklore Museum

This photo from Amman, Jordan, comes via Katrin Maldre.

Snow Day

Ice day, actually, Thursday night into Friday. Without power and cable, the blogging didn't go well.

Most of us in Portland, however, are back to normal now. The other 200,000 homes across the state without electricity--and more in New Hampshire and Massachusetts--may not get their service restored till sometime next week; we're told that crews now are still de-electrifying downed power lines and will have to come back later to make things work again.

Meanwhile, stay warm.

Follow the manganese

This picture is a manganese X-ray map--an image showing where the metal manganese is concentrated in a sample of rock. An electron microprobe beam was aimed at the rock, and sensors measured the X-rays that bounced back. Where lots of manganese X-rays bounced back, the pixels in the map are colored bright white; where there's some manganese but not a whole lot, the pixels show up in shades of gray. Black pixels indicate no measurable amounts of manganese. The microprobe had to run all night long to map this one little rock sample, which measures just over 1 square centimeter.

Who cares about manganese? Geologists studying metamorphic regions of the world--places where rocks were once buried 10 miles deep or even more. Why study stuff like that? Because it's really fun, and because metamorphic history tells a story about how the planet got to be the way it's gotten to be.

Manganese is an elegant element to map because under conditions of high temperature and pressure, it always wants to make a garnet, and garnets are among the most useful minerals to study, very sensitive to changes in temperature and pressure. The areas of this map that show presence of some manganese--that are gray or white--are in fact garnet. The areas that are black are minerals other than garnet. What look like two black eyes near the middle of the garnet are inclusions of other minerals within the garnet. What looks like a very bright white "nose" in the middle--well, that's the exception that proves the rule, a grain of a fairly rare mineral called manganiferous ilmenite. Ilmenite usually contains titanium and iron, but in this grain, much of the iron has been replaced by manganese. If you want to know why, you'll have to speak up; this message is already way too long.

Metamorphic garnets are typically very high in manganese right in the middle, at their cores, where they first start to grow. As they grow larger and larger, they require less and less manganese. Normally, you'd find the least manganese at the outer edge of the garnet--the garnet rim on a map like this should be dark gray, almost black. But the rim of this garnet is bright white--chock full of manganese. Also, it's funny-shaped, kind of fractal, an intricate crust of little garnets embedded around the edges of a big ol' lumpy garnet in the middle.

This garnet is not normal. It doesn't have the usual kind of metamorphic history. It started out normal, with higher manganese in the middle gradually decreasing as it grew. But I think it kept on growing and growing far beyond the size we see here--it became a huge garnet, a normal-looking one, with the usual pattern of manganese decreasing from core to rim, till there was just a tiny bit left at the rim.

Then the garnet's world started to change. It was pushed and shoved part of the way closer to the surface, and/or the mountains sitting on top of it partly eroded away. At lower temperature and pressure, garnet was no longer chemically stable. Garnet likes it hot. It doesn't like room temperature, as a matter of fact, that's much too cold--but it takes a lot of energy to un-make a garnet once it's made, so at room temperature, garnet stays garnet. I believe that the garnet in this X-ray map spent much of its "life" enduring pressure-temperature conditions not quite hot enough for it to "want" to remain a garnet, but still pretty hot--hot enough tto motivate the garnet to gradually become something else. The iron, magnesium, calcium, and aluminum near the rim of the crystal all got sucked out to make different minerals, minerals such as chlorite and mica that are more stable at slightly cooler temperatures than garnet. The manganese got left behind, and it backed up just inside the garnet rim, because other minerals don't like manganese and manganese doesn't like other minerals. It's loyal to garnet, unlike iron and all those other elements. As the garnet shrank, the manganese level got higher and higher, reaching levels that show up bright white on the map.

Then the garnet's world changed again. Temperature rose. Pressure increased. Conditions became once again favorable for garnet growth--and there was all that huge store of manganese right near the rim, just itching to make more garnet. There was so much manganese available in one convenient location that the new garnet grew in a flash, nucleating hundreds of new baby garnet grains on top of each other all over the rim of the old core garnet.

If you can make up stories like this from manganese X-ray maps, they'll give you an advanced degree in geological science. Truth.

Latest in the line of firsts

About thirty years ago, both of John's grandfathers and his great-grandmother all wanted to hold him. Top to bottom, he poses in the arms of Grandpa Joe Stein, Great-Grandma Harriet Ruskin, and Grandpa Bob Horowitz.

John was the first grandchild on either side of the family, and on the Stein side he was the first son of the first son of the first son of the first son of ... some Eastern European somebody. Back in the day, a first son would have inherited all the family land, forcing his younger brothers to leave home and make their own way in the world. Since there is no family land, and perhaps never has been, it's all good.

Grandpa Joe died a few months after this picture was taken; John was then 20 months old and Ted was a newborn. Great-grandma Harriet lived about ten years longer. Grandpa Bob is now 84 years old and still ready to hold a baby in his arms.

Put the popcorn in the microwave

Today we've got a little movie for everybody--a file called allen's new camera.mpg. It's a 57-second action classic, starring Hank and Allen and featuring me doing a voice-over near the end.

I get some pretty good lines in there: "Hey, excuse me," I say. "I need a garbage bag up here. And, um, Hank needs to study." Also, a few seconds later, I get in the penultimate word: "Did you hear me?"

Video removed. You'll have a better morning without it. Sorry.

Madonna of the Rail

Scattered from coast to coast, roughly along the route of U.S. HIghway 40, sit twelve identical statues, each ten feet high and weighing five tons, made of poured stone and concrete. These are the Madonnas of the Trail, commissioned by the Daughters of the American Revolution in the 1920s. Designed by sculptor August Leimbach, each madonna stands tall, rifle under one arm and baby in another, sunbonnet on her head and toddler clinging to her skirts. Some years after the DAR placed Madonna #5 at the entrance to a city park in Richmond, Indiana, town fathers there renamed the park to honor local boy Glenn Miller; American history just swings right along. But today's Good Morning features Madonna #1, in front of the post office in downtown Bethesda, Maryland, at the eastern end of what was once America's first turnpike for the westward bound, the Old National Road, now known as Old Georgetown Road.

For eighty years or more, Madonna #1 sat unperturbed on the sidewalk while Bethesda's farmland turned into suburban housing and then into offices and condos and high-end retail establishments for a shiny-new satellite city just outside Washington, D.C. The Baronet Theater next to the post office became a Hyatt hotel. The People's Drug Store next to that became a hole in the ground with a fake waterfall, the entrance to Washington's new Metro subway system.

When the sidewalk under Madonna started to collapse, she had to be removed for a few years. The picture above shows the ceremony marking her recent return. Below is the bottom of the waterfall underneath her feet, where buses pick up and drop off subway passengers.

Below the bus lanes, at the bottom of a long escalator, is the subway tunnel and its Bethesda station platform:

Meanwhile, up above the head of Madonna #1, transportation is by elevator:

Madonna should not try to bring her gun onto the subway.

8 cousins, 60 years

Ten years ago, this snapshot of the 8 grandchildren was taken with a cardboard camera during our celebration of my parents' 50th anniversary. That may have been the only time we succeeded in gathering all these cousins together.

The "little cousins," Olivia and Nick, are now 13 and 12, in the eighth and seventh grades. The five "boy cousins" now range in age from 16 to almost 31, and the short one wearing the vest is now the tallest. Only the "girl cousin," Jessica, still looks the same.

December 26 will be my parents' 60th anniversary. They don't look old enough for such an occasion.

Crimson Tied

Used to be, back in the days of Rose Bowls and glory under Coach Wallace Wade, that the Alabama football team had the best of everything while the marching band had to scrounge and beg for pennies to buy sheet music. But for the Georgia Tech game in 1922, the band members came up with enough cash from local merchants that they were able to buy train tickets with overnight sleeper accommodations--two bandsmen in each lower bunk and two in each upper. Noting their sudden prosperity, alumnus "Champ" Pickens dubbed them the Million Dollar Band. Alabama didn't have much of a team that year, the press reported, but they had a Million Dollar Band.

A few years earlier, in an Alabama-Auburn game that Auburn was predicted to dominate, the team from Tuscaloosa known as "the thin red line" managed to hold Auburn to a 6-6 tie. Crimson tied! This story, while not exactly apocyphal, is one of many purporting to explain the roots of the nickname.

Whatever. Roll tide, roll.

Today, undefeated Alabama, ranked #1 in the nation, is the underdog going into the SEC-title matchup against Florida, which had a loss early in the season but has since been playing phenomenal football. Fortunately, the Million Dollar Band will be there in Atlanta to raise the roof for the football players. Much like the team, the band is a huge operation involving dozens of staffers, graduate assistants, scholarships, tryouts, summer camps, elaborate uniforms, and buses that make extra stops to pick up the tubas. TV viewers miss their halftime shows when the networks switch to talking-head highlights shows, but a staff of five videographers records each performance. Maybe the bandmembers have to watch the videos on Monday to see what they did wrong. But videos and CDs of half-time shows are popular gift items.

Still, the band is not the football team. For example, the band itinerary for the Atlanta trip this weekend outlines arrangements for dinner Friday night in the Milton High School cafeteria, catered by Slopes Bar-B-Q: "Please make only one sandwich. Please choose either chicken or pork--not both. After everyone has been through the line, you may return for additional food. If you have not yet requested a vegetarian-burger option, don't even ask, it's too late." Somehow, you get the feeling that the football players can have more than one sandwich for dinner.....

So let's hear it for the Million Dollar Band! Yea Alabama, Crimson Tide! Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer!

Skipping dessert

According to John Stein, this would make a crazy t-shirt.

Sixty-five years ago this month

The baby didn't fall. Maybe he fell, but he survived to become the eldest of eight children of Lynn and Hugh Massman, and he wore clean, boiled diapers.

For this photo, taken in December 1943 for the Office of War Information, Lynn Massman's kitchen was illuminated with floodlights. The family was living in Washington, D.C., at the time, while Chief Petty Officer Hugh Massman was undergoing training.

After the war they returned home to Montana, where Lynn Massman opened a tailoring shop that she ran until the 1960s. No doubt she sewed the dress she's wearing here, and it must not have been easy to match the stripes when setting in those sleeves.

But her son (this baby is Joey) and his brothers and sisters remember their mother at the stove, not the sewing machine, and in particular, they remember her cooking with a pressure cooker. As she lay dying in 1986, they recalled, and slipping in and out of consciousness, she asked if the pressure gauge had been taken off the lid.

Somehow, amongst the babies and the pressure cooker and the sewing machine, she managed twice to run for state senate.

This photo was left large in case you want to zoom in and see all the details of kitchen life.

Good morning, good morning . . . It's great to stay up late.

We talked the whole night through.
Good morning, good morning, to you.

They say that this song-n-dance number was quite a challenge for Debbie Reynolds in "Singin in the Rain." She was cast for that movie after winning the "Miss Burbank" beauty pageant at the age of 19, and she'd never, ever performed professionally. What amateur tap dancer could even think of keeping up with Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor? And then there were somersaults, jumps straight up from the floor onto the bar, and of course the singing. In a classic case of life imitating "art," the high notes in her singing had to be dubbed. Also, she burst a blood vessel in her foot. But the show went on.

.....Now the milkman's on his way
It's too late to say "Good Night."
Good morning, good morning to you.

Sebago

Sebago Lake, about 20 miles northwest of Portland, is the deepest lake in Maine. In some places, the lake bottom is more than 300 feet below the water surface--and more than 70 feet below sea level. The lake itself is basically a puddle left over from glaciers melting at the end of the last Ice Age. The colored splotches on it...well, they're real, but they're not real. This image is a composite of thousands of aerial photos of the lake and surrounding land, and each splotch represents a separate snapshot of the water taken during a flightline. As the plane flew back and forth, changes in sun angle, amount of cloudiness, water depth, wind ruffling the surface, muddiness, etc., resulted in slightly varying water coloration in the different aerial snapshots. When the plane flew over land, the various snapshots did not pick up such subtle differences because land surfaces reflect back only a fraction of the amount of light reflected by water.

I took the composite image and greatly overstretcheded the color contrast, till the slight variations showed up as bright, distinct patches of color. My kind of lake.

We get our drinking water from Sebago. The water from the red splotches tastes the best.

Blow it out.

For about six months now, a PowerPoint slide show purporting to contain 52 photos by "a German photographer" has been circulating in cyberspace. The images are actually snagged from the work of many different photographers who share their work online through the German website fotocommunity. Someone downloaded low-resolution versions of the 52 pix, watermarked each one with a "Laoen" logo, and spread the wealth. This behavior is not completely respectful of the creative enterprise. However, it's an awesome slide show, and you can find a Japanese version here.

Here's one of these "Laoen" pictures. How do you think it was done?

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.