Mae Travels

"The Iron Lady"

2012-02-06T07:57:00.004-05:00

Yesterday we saw "The Iron Lady" with Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher, both old and (pretty) young. Her performance was amazing, though at one point I couldn't figure out why I was thinking of Julia Child. Oh, yeah, "Julie and Julia" !

The recap of British politics of the Thatcher era was interesting, and seemed to bring up the issues that are currently being debated. Do you solve economic downturns and low employment through austerity? Do you tax the poor at an effectively higher rate than the rich? We don't know yet.

In the film, the real drama was in the 24 hour time of the frame story: the life and memories of very elderly Margaret Thatcher on one day in November, 2008, as she sees the Mumbai Massacre events on her TV, and as many similar events of her life, along with other events, flash back in her mind. The memories are vividly and literally recreated as relatively brief onscreen vignettes for the movie viewer. The result is the kind of unity of drama -- the classic kind.

I knew nothing about this film before we went; somehow I hadn't read a single review. So it was all the more impressive. Though I didn't and don't like some of Thatcher's policies and politics, I have a lot of respect for how she led her country, for her determination, and for her success in overcoming prejudice against her (as a woman and a grocer's daughter). The film reinforced that respect. All in all, it's quite worth seeing.

Is this serious?

2012-02-01T19:18:00.003-05:00

Could this be real news about a copy of Mona Lisa by a student working side-by-side with Leonardo? I guess there will be some discussion. I knew of the copy in the Prado, but now there are big new claims about it! And look: eyebrows.

The Lorax Visits the Smithsonian

2012-01-24T13:58:00.001-05:00

One more photo from last week when we were visiting Washington and Fairfax.

Samuel F.B. Morse at the Louvre

2012-01-21T18:27:00.004-05:00

Last week in Washington, we saw a little-known painting by Samuel F.B. Morse. He's well known for the telegraph and Morse code, little known for his early-life career as a painter.

Morse's huge oil painting "Gallery of the Louvre," which he painted during a visit to Europe from 1829-1832, is temporarily on view in the National Gallery of Art. In it he arranged an imaginative view of the works he most valued at the Louvre. He placed them to be of use to students, and painted some of his friends and his daughter in the room where he imagined them.

The National Gallery has hung Morse's work in a large hallway in the center of the museum, along with a very interesting explanation -- and a key to the works. I recognized many of them, but the key is very useful. Above you can see his arrangement of Mona Lisa -- below is Len's photo of the work as we saw it.

Morse based the work on many prior paintings that made a similar collage-like assembly of copies from a single museum's collection. He based his choice of paintings on his own taste and that of his contemporaries. He hoped this work would bring him fame and money, as he planned to exhibit it on a tour of the US. That didn't go as well as he hoped, so he turned to technology and became famous.

For more detail about Morse's paintings and the Louvre's collected works he included, see this website.

Skaters at the National Gallery of Art

2012-01-16T16:59:00.000-05:00

Skating at the National Gallery rink -- Miriam, Alice, and Evelyn, 2012.

"Winter Landscape with Skaters" (detail) by Adam van Breen, 1611.

Inside the National Gallery.

Morocco, London, and the High Seas

2012-01-15T07:44:00.001-05:00

"TinTin" begins in London, where he's a reporter. His exciting adventures take place on the high seas, in an old crumbling English-country manor house, lost in the Sahara, and in a seaside city in Morocco. Quite a bit of travel!

The visuals in "TinTin" were great. Sometimes they closely followed what you see in a cartoon, sometimes departed from that. I thought they very effectively combined realism with parody. Some of the people in the film were nearly caricatures -- an opera singer, a drunken ship captain, an evil villain, a Scotland Yard team, TinTin himself, with his quiff, and most of the minor characters. Some characters at times were quite realistic like TinTin when he's making a plan, the Sultan of Morocco, Snowy the dog or a camel in the port town. Some characters started out realistic and suddenly and enjoyably switched to something unexpected. The net result: an exciting and fun to watch experience.

Fun at the Piano

2012-01-14T09:25:00.002-05:00

Traveling Again

2012-01-13T08:50:00.002-05:00

Fairfax, Virginia, on a beautiful sunny day in January: the shadows seem very long for the early afternoon. We walked around a small lake surrounded by houses and apartment buildings, but with just enough woods to be very pleasant.

Here's Alice:

Kagemusha

2011-12-11T09:40:00.004-05:00

Inspired by our visit to Japan, we watched Kagemusha, an old film by Kurosawa. The visuals were fabulous: interiors that mirrored the style of the museums, traditional buildings, and gardens that we toured. Or did the traditional buildings and well-kept gardens mirror the movie sets? Maybe.

The action scenes with huge armies marching and fighting and horses speeding past the blurred background were also great, as was the plot about a thief rescued from death to be used as the double of a deceased warlord in a great struggle.

Animals

2011-12-10T07:01:00.002-05:00

Dragons

Netsuke Horse

--from the Tokyo National Museum

Foxes

-- from a fox shrine in Ueno Park.

In Japanese mythology, foxes bring luck and money, and often have their own shrines.

Dogs and Lions

Koishikawa Korakuen Gardens

2011-12-09T14:48:00.009-05:00

The original Korakuen Garden was begun in 1629; it was built for one of the Daimyos, or feudal lords appointed by the Edo Shogun. The red maple trees and other fall foliage were splendid when we visited it last Monday. The landscaping is intensely developed, with fish ponds, streams, arched bridges, a tiny artificial waterfall, pretend mountains and rivers named for real ones somewhere in Japan, stone lanterns, artificially-supported pine trees, rocky footpaths and stairways, trellised wisterias, and even a rice paddy.

As we walked we saw dozens of Japanese visitors with cameras, and one professional photo shoot featuring a couple of models dressed in kimonos and elaborate accessories. The Tokyo Dome is right next door, providing ultra-modern contrast with the ancient garden features.

Feeding the fish and ducks

Men working on the rice paddy; wisteria trellises in the background.

Tokyo Street Scenes

2011-12-08T10:30:00.004-05:00

From the Edo Tokyo Museum: an idealized street scene from the past. . . and several street photos that I took while walking around last week:

University of Tokyo Campus

2011-12-07T11:51:00.004-05:00

The University of Tokyo hosted the conference that Len attended last week; we stayed in a guest house near one of the several gates. Our gate was not decorative, only serving for security as cars drive through to the nearby University Hospital. Other gates are quite beautiful, such as the one above that frames the yellow leaves of an alley of ginko trees.

The building above is the most well-known sight on campus, our hosts explained. When there's a news story about the university, the media use this building as the representative view.

A famous location at the center of the campus is the Sanshiro Pond, originally part of a feudal estate in 17th century Edo (the old name for Tokyo). The water is quite far below the level of the rest of campus, and attracts ducks and other wildlife. When we walked down the steps to the path surrounding the pond, we felt as if we were in a rural setting rather than in the midst of a busy city.

Asakusa

2011-12-04T03:34:00.004-05:00

The gardens behind the Pagoda at Asakusa were open today, so we enjoyed a walk in the beautiful sunshine. A young woman dressed in a kimono-like blouse and jeans served us some green tea as we were walking.

From the Temple steps we could see the huge incense burner, where crowds of people were trying to breathe in the smoke. Similarly, many people were drinking the water at the fountain, and throwing coins into the huge offering trays.

We also walked through the large shopping area around the temple.

Water Taxi Ride on the Sumida River

2011-12-04T03:24:00.003-05:00

Here we are walking on the Azumabashi bridge after our water taxi ride. Behind us is the famous Asahi brewery building, designed by a French architect. I think the thing on top looks like one of those large Japanese radishes, but it's supposed to be a golden flame.

We had very good luck because our volunteer guide to the Edo-Tokyo Museum explained to us where to get the water taxi, looked up the schedule, and then walked us to the dock so we could buy tickets on a boat that was leaving 15 minutes later. We really wanted to take a boat ride, but were afraid we couldn't figure it out.

Gates

2011-12-03T16:49:00.004-05:00

The Kuromon, or Black Gate, now part of the Tokyo National Museum was once the gate to the Tokyo home of the noble Ikeda family, Daimyo lords of Inaba province. Its original construction was sometime in the Edo period (1603-1868), and it was moved to the musuem in 1954.

The second gate is the Red Gate of Tokyo University, not far from the campus guest house where we are staying. Next, a couple of random gates on the street, not far from the Red Gate.

And the gate next to the Isnsho-tei restaurant where we ate, in Ueno Park:

The gate to a little shrine beside an ancient well, now sandwiched between high-rises and other apartment buildings:

The gate to the Fox Shrine on a little island in a pond in Ueno Park:

AND one earlier thought:

Not far from the Red Gate of the University of Tokyo, in an un-noticeable alleyway, is an old wooden Buddhist Temple. A temple monk named Malcolm pointed it out to me after he also showed me how to buy and eat noodles in a little noodle shop. We went back at night and took a photo of the temple guardian.

Costco Sells Mona Lisa

2011-11-25T15:55:00.001-05:00

Black Friday Sale

Lewis Chessmen in the News

2011-11-18T07:15:00.001-05:00

I've always loved these -- and the NYT did a great job of describing their history.

Goodbye, Car

2011-11-07T16:08:00.002-05:00

Our car, yesterday, photo for Craig's list. We sold it this afternoon.

The new car, August 1, 2001. It served us well, but we just don't need it any more.

More in our neighborhood

2011-10-31T16:08:00.002-04:00

The pumpkin on your right weighed 1150 pounds before carving. Tonight there will be a long line of kids at this door, because the owner has 1000 full-sized candy bars to give away!

Halloween at my nieghbors' houses

2011-10-30T22:19:00.001-04:00

Not yet in my photos: the 1150 pound Jack-O-Lantern in one neighbor's yard.

Happy Halloween!

The Last Petunia of Autumn

2011-10-23T12:02:00.002-04:00

... and other scenes from our neighborhood.

Short Visit to Fairfax

2011-10-19T09:58:00.003-04:00

Alice on the monkey bars at Oakview school.

Miriam, on school patrol.

Alice and Miriam on the monkey bars. For comparison, see last year's post of them on the playground!

Route 68, the scenic way back, avoiding the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Beautiful Weather in Michigan

2011-10-10T09:18:00.002-04:00

Waterloo, Michigan: Sandhill cranes on a hillside and a view across the pond in the town itself. Glorious October sunshine!

More than the Mona Lisa

2011-09-28T13:09:00.005-04:00

"I long ago stopped counting how many times I’ve seen the Mona Lisa. The most visited work of art at the Louvre is, alas, at the top of the must-see list of every houseguest on a first visit to Paris.
"Mona is surprisingly small (30 by 21 inches), dark and hard to see behind the barriers and bulletproof glass. After a while, she gets — dare I say it — boring. So do the Winged Victory of Samothrace (No. 2 in popularity) and Vénus de Milo (No. 3)."

Elaine Sciolino writes about "The Louvre Less Traveled" in a recent New York Times article.

What does she recommend? --

Michelangelo’s two marble nude Slaves
Samuel Van Hoogstraten, “View of an Interior or the Slippers” (shown at right)
A collection of paintings donated by by Victor Lyon in honor of his wife, Hélène Loeb -- including works by Monet, Degas, and other artists you wouldn't expect to see in the Louvre
Charles V’s gold scepter
... and quite a few more

I always found many surprises on my visits to the Louvre, and this article makes me want to go back there, despite the overpowering size of the space and collections.

Lake Erie Birds

2011-09-16T08:14:00.002-04:00

While I was taking photos of the birdwatchers (see yesterday's post), Len was really watching the hawks and taking pictures with his much better-equipped camera.

I loved the lotus. I'm fascinated by the elaborate mechanism that makes the mud roll off of them, not long ago explained by science but of course observed for thousands of years. Their purity makes them a symbol in Buddhist tradition. A heron turned out to be hiding among the lotus blossoms and seed pods.

The Hawkwatch at Point Mouillee

2011-09-15T19:06:00.003-04:00

This morning we took part in the Hawkwatch, waiting for migrating hawks and other raptors as they come across the Detroit River from Canada. From a few points in Lake Erie MetroPark and at Point Mouillee at the mouth of the Huron River, we saw several kettles of hawks and also some smaller groups of hawks, as well as an eagle, but they were all very far away. I've been a birdwatcher-watcher for years; the birdwatchers looked good today.

Also from Point Mouillee at the birdwatching dock we saw the Fermi Nuclear Reactor and its plume of steam, hunters bringing in their prey, water birds, and flowers.

The hunters: On the front of their boat, they had two Canada Geese. Their waders are printed with images of reeds and water.

The Power Plant.

Water Plants: Beyond these reeds, we could see a large stand of lotus. Some were still in bloom, some with the characteristic seed pods.

What if I need something to read?

2011-09-07T09:51:00.003-04:00

Borders Books and Music is going out of business. Unless you live in a sealed paper bag, you know about this. In Ann Arbor, a sealed paper bag probably wouldn't be enough to keep from hearing the post-mortem laments and accusations. The latest one, at the Ann Arbor Chronicle, an online-only local journal, interviewed former booksellers and bookshop workers who were speculating about a replacement for the oldest Borders store in the chain. This flagship Borders was the largest retail business in the downtown area (I think). It occupied two floors of space in the building that was previously a department store: another type of business to which change has come more slowly than to its customer base in this constantly changing world.

Businesses seem to hate change, except the a few that figure out how to keep making money, and these get a lot of criticism for changing things. Journalists -- who have their own problems with change, to say the least -- seem strangely unaware of any big picture about the changes in the book industry. I'm especially annoyed by the writers of these screeds that blame people for shopping online, and seem to imply that the end of Borders is some kind of punishment for the people of Ann Arbor who used to buy books in stores but now are among the best book customers of amazon.

Yes, I used to shop at bookstores and now I rarely do, but things have changed a lot since I acquired the bookmarks below from Borders current and former downtown store and from other bookstores (some still in business). I have tons more like them, and I can't imagine how many have been thrown away.

I'm a reader. I need new reading material all the time. These days, I read a lot on my Kindle. Eventually I'll join the other members of my family who have moved on to reading on the iPad. I also read plenty of books. Almost all the magazines and newspapers I read are online, so I read on the computer as well. But the format in which I read has really made less difference to me than the way that I find what I want to read. I think the journalists writing about the book trade do not fully account for this fundamental change in the way that I and many others behave.

As so many journalism pieces have recently pointed out, the original Borders had a very excellent staff who selected and organized the stock especially well, and who could answer questions. At the information desk, they had a year of NYT Book Reviews and other useful material. Indeed, if you remembered vaguely having read a review somewhere, they could often locate it almost by magic, and produce whatever book you almost recalled. Now, if you remember reading about a book, you can use google or the journal's index find such things easily -- if you didn't keep some type of electronic record of what you saw. But that's not all that has changed.

In the days when I was acquiring all those bookstore-ad bookmarks, I found out about newly published books by reading reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the New Yorker, sometimes the Atlantic or the New York Review of Books, and in a few other places. I browsed at the public library, I used the card catalog in the university library and I read through the bibliographies of scholarly works, as well as going to helpful bookstores. At the time, I didn't find these methods cumbersome or time-consuming, but I do now! Changes in libraries, especially online card catalogs accessible from home that tell you if a book is available, made another big change for readers, but I'll stick to talking about bookstores.

My book-review horizon has broadened widely because so many more journals, newspapers, blogs, and cross-referenced catalogs are available to me on my computer. Every week I read reviews not only in sources I used before (they're all online and most have added a great deal of material beyond their print editions), but also in British reviews like the Guardian online, in newly invented reviews like Tablet online magazine, in blogs, and in many other places that weren't accessible before or weren't invented yet.

Besides speeding up and expanding my information on new books, this broad access has allowed me new ways to find old books. For example, thanks to a reference in a blog I read, I recently heard of an article written by W.H.Auden in 1948 about mystery novels. His article was available online. In it, Auden praised the novels of Freeman Wills Crofts -- a new name to me. Soon after, I read two of these on my Kindle, one free, one $2.99. Yes, something like this could have happened 20 years ago, but it would have been very cumbersome and involved microfiche and perhaps a very complicated and maybe expensive search for an out-of-print book!

Here's another contrast, between my experience and that of the Chronicle writer. I recently read a review of the book "1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created." I immediately ordered it from amazon.com for around half the list price, and the book arrived in a couple of days. Here's the Chronicle writer's experience with the same book:

"On a recent Friday afternoon I spent the better part of an hour browsing her [Nicola Rooney of Nicola's books] shelves for my husband’s birthday presents – I came in for Charles C. Mann’s new '1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created' ... Rooney and two of her staffers spent a good 10 minutes – a long time in a small shop – determined to hunt down one of the three copies of '1493' that were, the computer indicated, in the store. None were to be found. So she took my info and promised to let me know when the next copy came in (it was expected, and indeed arrived, on Monday)."

Yes, this is a great level of service, but it saved neither time nor money for the writer. In fact, she had to drive to the store an extra time, while UPS delivered the book to my front porch. For many reasons I choose to pay amazon.com the annual fee for free 2-day delivery of all purchases, so I suppose that my total cost should be incremented slightly. But I buy so many books on this deal (as well as watching streaming video for the same fee) that the increment is truly small.

Money isn't everything, but the savings on books one buys online are considerable. I resent the suggestion that I owe it to somebody or something to spend more by buying books in stores. I'm honest about it: if I find a book by browsing in a store and decide to buy it, I don't just write down the reference, but I buy it there. There's much more involved than just browsing. If I want to make a charitable contribution, this isn't it.

Automated recommendations from amazon.com are often compared unfavorably to a discussion with a live bookseller (or librarian). On the whole, I agree, though I admit that the amazon algorithm sometimes results in good suggestions. There are other services from amazon that I find useful, though. For example, I like the ability to maintain lists of books for future reference. I have several "Wish Lists" which actually represent a selection of just about any books that I might read eventually. If a book is too expensive or rare, I put the library call number in the notes; sometimes I also note where I read about a book; however, no notes are really required, and an amazon user can add books to a wish list with just a click and no typing.

After I read the books, the lists also serve as kind of a record of my reading history -- my family are warned not to use these lists as buying suggestions, as I might have them already. If I had been super organized in the past, of course I could have dreamed up a note-card-and-cross-referencing scheme that would have had this function, but I never was that organized or willing to devote the time to writing out all the information that amazon links to.

The combined capabilities of google searching and google books, online reviews and archives, and the collective force of the amazon catalog just makes it all so easy!

I have no idea if the simultaneous changes in the world of journalists makes it harder for them to see the big picture of the changes in the world of readers (who may also be book buyers). I've seen this gap in quite a lot of the coverage of the demise of Borders. By setting this tone, I think the Chronicle article also set up the type of comments that were made: at this point there are close to 30 of them, mainly along the same lines as the article, worrying about the lack of bookstores. I see a gap in these discussions, with much too much interest paid to book sellers, and not quite enough paid to the question of the new Internet-wide world of finding something to read.

A Walk around Argo Pond

2011-09-04T18:32:00.001-04:00

This is a beautiful place to walk. Around a year ago, I posted this.

Mona Lisa Barbie

2011-09-01T17:58:00.001-04:00

Here she is: my Mona Lisa Barbie. This is my first -- and last -- Barbie doll in my whole life. I guess. Unless they make a Leonardo Ken with a paintbrush or something.

Patti Smith and Arthur Rimbaud

2011-08-24T09:26:00.002-04:00

In Patti Smith's autobiography, Just Kids (our next book club selection) she often refers to the importance of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud in her life and her development as a poet. As I read, I made a note to look up more about Rimbaud -- in fact, I've been meaning to find out more about him for years. Conveniently, the current New Yorker includes the perfect answer to my questions -- REBEL REBEL: Arthur Rimbaud’s brief career by Daniel Mendelsohn. The article includes a biography of Rimbaud, a discussion of his appeal to adolescents and maybe other people, and even a couple of references to Patti Smith's love of Rimbaud. Above all, the author tries to explain the "powerful mystique that has seduced readers from Marcel Proust to Patti Smith."

Mendelsohn writes:

"The peculiarly adolescent quality of the poet’s life and work, the desire to rebel against whatever milieu he happened to find himself in—the schoolboy against school, the wunderkind against his admiring hosts, the poet against poetry—undoubtedly accounts for his particular appeal to teen-agers. (One statistic that Rimbaldians like to cite is that one in five French lycéens today claims to identify with the long-dead poet.) ...

"Ashbery ... was sixteen at the moment of impact, as was Patti Smith, the author of what is, perhaps, the most moving testament to the effect that a reading of Rimbaud might have on a hungry young mind. 'When I was sixteen, working in a non-union factory in a small South Jersey town,' she writes ... 'my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket.' The anthology, she adds, 'became the bible of my life.'”

Now I understand why I heard so much about him when I was young, and so few people seem to talk about him any more. I admit, I bought some volumes of his poetry but didn't get around to it. I wonder why it took me this long to read even a single article.

Reading Patti Smith's "Just Kids"

2011-08-22T20:37:00.005-04:00

I distinctly remember that the audiences seemed divided between those who thought Patti Smith was a goddess and Allen Ginsberg an afterthought, and those (like me) who hadn't really heard of Patti Smith, but thought Allen Ginsberg was an American legend. I'd never seen her before, but had seen him at events in Berkeley or San Francisco in the 1960s, most notably the Human Be-In, a memorable Happening in 1967. His readings in 1995 and 1996 made a lasting impression on me -- hers, not so much.

Just Kids -- which won the National Book Award, by the way -- seems to me to echo this divide, between the slightly younger punk musicians and the older Beat and Hippie generations. The New York Times reviewer said that Just Kids was "the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s that any alumnus has committed to print. The tone is at once flinty and hilarious, which figures: she’s always been both tough and funny, two real saving graces in an artist this prone to excess. What’s sure to make her account a cornucopia for cultural historians, however, is that the atmosphere, personalities and mores of the time are so astutely observed."

Right. But I really think her little life was eclipsed by a lot of the other things that were going on then, and I'm not at all sure her poetry has really lasted. Not like Ginsberg's! And though her main topic, the relationship she had with Robert Mapplethorpe, is compelling, it leaves me a little unconvinced. But I don't think I'll try to expand that topic now.

Family Reunion

2011-08-18T13:45:00.001-04:00

Here's half the family that gathered this past weekend. What fun!

Mona Lisa Sells Books?

2011-08-05T18:29:00.002-04:00

As usual, when a book talks about Mona Lisa but it's not really relevant, my BS detectors get very busy. In the NYT book review, "Sex, Lies and Data Mining" by Wesley Yang discusses a new book by two neuroscientists, Ogas and Gaddam.

The reported results in the sensationally titled A Billion Wicked Thoughts sound very much like a bunch of cliches: "Men like pornography. Women like romance novels. 'Men’s brains are designed to objectify females,' Ogas and Gaddam write. Since men’s only concern is with the biological fitness of women for childbearing, everything they need to know to feel desire is visible to the naked eye: 'The shapely curves of female ornamentation indicate how many years of healthy childbearing remain across a woman’s entire lifetime.'”

And where's Mona? Oh yes, "The enigma of the Gioconda smile; the technologically engineered 'craveability' of fast food; the alluring, 'alpha among alphas' quality of the paranormal hero; that climactic moment beamed to watchers on a hundred million laptop screens: all rely on the artful manipulation of our brains."

Really. I think we've seen all this before. Just because they were using internet search data as their source evidently doesn't mean we get any new ideas. I think I'll skip reading the book itself, though maybe that's unfair.

New Study

2011-07-24T11:28:00.002-04:00

Here's the new study arrangement: a big desk, leather chair, and reading lamp from Ikea. All the battered old furniture went to the dump or the Salvation Army. When we returned from our 12 weeks out west, we could really see how bad it looked. We also purged a lot of old saved paper -- our recycle bin runneth over. No hoarders here. Well, not counting the closets in the attic. The living area of the attic is also very much cleaner now.

Five Lakes

2011-07-04T19:09:00.003-04:00

We managed to arrive at the Bear Lake hiking area by 7:00 this morning to avoid the July 4th crowds in Rocky Mountain National Park. Our reward was not only being nearly alone for the first hour of hiking, but also splendid morning views of the snow caps mirrored in Bear Lake (above). Other lakes we saw while hiking today: Dream Lake, Nymph Lake, Emerald Lake, and Sprague Lake. We also hiked up to Alberta Falls.

Emerald Lake is still mainly frozen. A few daring (or maybe reckless) hikers were walking on the ice. We had to walk on quite a few snow piles that still cover the trails. By the time we were returning down the trail, the crowds were really making the surfaces hard to walk on. At one location, a number of energetic hikers were sliding down the snow on their backs. Although it's steep in places, the trail is mainly not very hard to walk where it's dry.

Sprague Lake, our last stop before leaving the park, was "improved" around 100 years ago by a resort owner who brought vacationers here before the creation of the National Park. He wanted to make the lake more attractive to fishermen -- evidently, they still like it. Much lower than the other lakes, Sprague is completely unfrozen and the trail around it is a very easy, flat walk on a smooth surface.

In total our hiking today was over 6 miles.

Rocky Mountain National Park

2011-07-03T19:35:00.003-04:00

We spent the afternoon driving on the famous ridge trail, and walking a bit at the highest point. The Alpine tundra is in bloom, and though the flowers are tiny, they are extremely delicate and beautiful.

Hunter Creek Trail

2011-07-02T18:04:00.001-04:00

Our Aspen hike of the day: Hunter Creek Trail above Aspen, looking toward the Maroon Bells, whose color is definitely maroon.

Happy Independence Day!!

2011-07-02T17:16:00.002-04:00

Repeated from last year: the best version of the Sousa March I can find. We heard a good wind quintet play it in front of the Paradise Bakery and Ice Cream store here in Aspen last week, but I don't think there's a recording.

And for nostalgia, here's a photo of Evelyn and our dog Dolly in the Burns Park neighborhood parade after she was in fifth grade:

We leave Aspen tomorrow and plan to be in Rocky Mountain National Park for the 4th.

Elaine and Larry have arrived in Aspen

2011-06-26T19:50:00.000-04:00

Flower Photos

2011-06-22T14:36:00.004-04:00

The scenery we've been seeing is so spectacular that it's hard to focus on smaller things. We've taken hundreds of photos, mostly of the grandeur of the Rockies, the breath-taking vistas of the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, the huge sandstone rock formations of Zion, and the amazing natural arches at Arches National Park. But the littler things, though maybe not majestic, also create the fabulous nature of the experience.

Flowers, tree branches, cactus, and other plants are a good example of the little beautiful things. Flowers grow out of cracks in the rocks on the cliffs at Zion; succulents and cactus grow in what appears to be totally arid sand, and they are everywhere in the woods and slopes in Aspen. Inspired by my blogger friend Jeanie at The Marmelade Gypsy, I've been taking close-ups or stepping back and trying to capture their images in the landscape. And now I've made a Flickr set from a number of these photos, from hikes, drives, Grand Canyon ATV tour, and strolls we have taken.

To see my 23 favorites of these photos at Flickr click on any one of the thumbnails below:

Last Rays of Sun

2011-06-20T23:22:00.002-04:00

We watched the tops of the mountains as the last rays of the setting sun made them first golden, then deep red. Finally, the mountainsides were unlit and the clouds were pink. Then darkness.

Aspen is Beautiful

2011-06-20T06:42:00.001-04:00

The mountains are indeed majestic! But I'm too busy having fun to post much about our biking, hiking, and other activities.

Arches National Park

2011-06-12T23:43:00.002-04:00

Balancing Rock, Snow-Capped Mountains in the Distance

Delicate Arch from a distant viewpoint

Len photographing a Window Arch

Cycling in Zion

2011-06-10T19:17:00.008-04:00

Bicycles are a perfect way to see the huge cliffs of Zion National Park. Only the park shuttle buses are allowed on many of the roads, and the drivers are very mindful of cyclists. This morning while it was still cool, we cycled up hill from the Lodge where we're staying to the Temple of Sinawava, the rock formation at the end of the road.

A mile of paved trail allows you to continue walking along the rushing river. This area has a fascinating little ecosystem with swamp plants and vertical cliffs covered with vegetation. At the end of the trail is The Narrows which we remembered as a wonderful experience from our previous trip, but at the moment the river is much too high to walk upstream in the river bed as we did then. The next photo shows the beginning of The Narrows:

On the way down we stopped at the Weeping Rocks where water oozes out of the rocks and drips down the rock face.

This afternoon, we decided to cycle downhill from the Lodge on the very steep road from to the Visitor Center. This part of the road is much steeper than the ride we took this morning: the road is above the cascading river. After the junction, the road is unrestricted, but there's a beautiful paved bike path for around the last 2 miles.

From the Visitor Center we and our bikes rode back up on the shuttle bus -- what luxury! We returned to the Temple of Sinagawa and repeated the downhill ride that we had done in the morning. Of course the effects of light vary throughout the day so we enjoyed it again.

Zion National Park

2011-06-09T23:29:00.002-04:00

From Zion Lodge where we're staying we walked behind a now-small waterfall -- it was big earlier in the spring. We continued to the cliffs above, where shallow ponds are trickling across stone shelves and dropping off the edge. The sheer height of the cliffs is amazing.

We continued along the trail to a viewpoint above the Virgin River, which flows in the deep Zion valley. Below you can see the river and the rocky faces on the other side from the trail.

my tired feet

2011-06-08T23:23:00.004-04:00

The National Park and National Forest at the North Rim of the Grand Canyon afford a vast number of views of the canyon from different locations. The "rim" is actually a series of peninsulas or mesas separated by smaller canyons. We went to many of them, and walked all day. More later when I have better internet!

The World's Most Beautiful Car Wash?

2011-05-31T17:11:00.003-04:00

The air here in Santa Barbara, surprisingly, deposits a fair amount of dirt on the car, so I took it to a car wash that advertises that it doesn't use machines, only very soft brushes and lots of TLC. They begin by vacuuming the car, scrub with the brushes, and proceed through a tunnel of high-pressure water hoses and vacuum-drying. While you wait, there are several beautifully landscaped seating areas with trellises of flowers and shade. In one corner, there's even a fountain.

When the car comes out, then lots more hand work, cleaning the inside of the windows, polishing the outside, and even cleaning the inside of the sunroof. The name of this place is Educated Car Wash -- in addition to all the service and comfort, their gas is cheaper than any other gas station I have found!

Watching Whales

2011-05-30T22:02:00.002-04:00

Our whale watching cruise in the Santa Barbara channel today was unfortunately a bit windy, but the skillful captain did find one beautiful whale. It was repeatedly coming up, diving, and blowing out its blow-hole. We were sometimes close enough to hear the snort as the cloud of vapor rose up from the waves. We also saw some dolphins, sea lions, and many birds.

The wind served to keep the fog or clouds away that sometimes make conditions a bit gloomy in Santa Barbara, so the harbor looked lovely and we had good views of the Channel Islands as we approached them.

Borges on Memory

2011-05-24T11:29:00.004-04:00

"Funes the Memorious" is Borges' story of a simple village man whose "perception and memory were perfect." Funes remembered every visual and bodily detail of every experience in every day he had lived, and learned languages with great ease. However, "he was not very good at thinking," wrote the story's narrator. His remarkable powers had appeared after a crippling accident which knocked him unconscious -- an event that often changes a person's mental abilities.

Before the accident Funes had possessed only one unusual capability: always knowing what time it was. Confined to bed after the accident, and choosing to spend much of his time in the dark, Funes was in the process of inventing numbering and classification schemes to allow him to deal with his overwhelming memories and perceptions. He borrows a book in Latin from the narrator and teaches himself to read it -- by chance it includes Pliny's chapter on memory prodigies, which Funes says "he is amazed that such cases were thought to be amazing."

Joshua Foer's book "Moonwalking with Einstein" which I wrote about last week describes a variety of memory specialists who have much in common with Funes, and for this reason I found Borges' descriptions especially interesting. Funes seems to me to illustrate very well the limits of having a fantastic memory, as well as reflecting some of the actual realities of people with unusual gifts like Funes' original ability to know what time it is. Funes seems to be an exaggerated -- or magically real -- example of what used to be called an idiot savant. Clearly, the story is more than a clinical description. It includes a characterized (and perhaps not entirely reliable) narrator, a setting in late-19th-century Uruguay, and descriptive details that are very enjoyable.

Foer says of this story: "Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. 'To think,' Borges writes, 'is to forget.'" (Moonwalking, p. 37)

Mona Lisa Books

2011-05-23T11:31:00.000-04:00

From the Norton Simon Gift Shop.

"Moonwalking with Einstein"

2011-05-09T09:50:00.004-04:00

Joshua Foer's book Moonwalking with Einstein takes an obscure topic and unexpectedly makes it interesting and relevant. The book has three elements often found in solid modern journalism.

First, Foer includes many interviews with eccentric people. He describes and interviews several amnesiacs and idiot savants who can remember vast amounts of stuff naturally. He also presents a few flamboyant memory experts who are eccentric or maybe phony con-men.

Second, he describes the relevant neuroscience -- here, how memory works in the brain. His explanations are really useful and intriguing.

Third, Foer relates his personal experiences -- how he learned the ancient "art of memory" by working with other memory champions and thus won the 2006 USA Memory Championship. In particular he describes what was going through his mind as he memorized a deck of cards -- including envisioning moonwalking with Einstein to fix one card in memory.

I enjoyed reading all of this, and learned a lot. However, I'm not really inspired to try developing my own technique for Memory Championship types of tasks such as learning strings of digits or the order of cards in a shuffled deck. Some years ago I read Frances Yeats' book The Art of Memory, so I was aware of the ancient trick of using a familiar house or other building as repository -- Memory Palace -- for things that should be memorized. I was impressed by the way that modern enthusiasts have re-adapted this technique.

Foer acknowledges that there are many aspects of memory that he didn't work on or fully understand, and that the routine memories that people often worry about -- like where one put one's car keys -- aren't improved by the Memory Palace approach or even by some of the other methods he hints at. As a result I have questions that I'd like to know after reading the book:

How do musicians memorize works like concertos that must be utterly perfect to play with an orchestra?
How do actors memorize their roles -- he alludes to this but doesn't explain, and they don't seem to do it by the ancient Memory Palace technique.
How do children seemingly memorize everything? Do they really lose their abilities as they develop reading skills, or is something else actually happening in their brains?
Do today's teenagers still memorize the lyrics to zillions of popular songs as my friends did? He mentions that singing is a technique for remembering (like the Australian Aboriginal Song Lines that allowed them to memorize maps) but doesn't develop the idea more.
How do you memorize a poem? He didn't actually seem to know the answer to this.
And how does a Pensive work? Harry Potter witnessed older wizards pulling smoke-like memories from their brains. And via the Pensive, he was able to re-experience these memories and make them his own. But what's the wizard neuroscience? (Yeah, I know, there aren't really any wizards.)

Evelyn gave me Moonwalking for Mother's Day -- on my Kindle. Great gift!!

Bird Photos

2011-05-08T23:42:00.002-04:00

At Arroyo Burro beach today, Len tried out his new camera on bird photos. The hawk above was particularly cooperative.

I saw "Thor"

2011-05-07T13:20:00.004-04:00

I quietly laughed a lot while watching "Thor" last night. Campy. Cliched. Anthony Hopkins the brave old god Odin trying to prepare his successor for appropriate response to the ancient enemy Frost Giants. Loki the shifty-eyed trickster. Thor the trigger-happy hunk. Asgard the unreal citadel of gods guarded by one who understands all the problems the gods have. Earth the undesirable place to go into exile with one's radioactive magic hammer. (The look of Asgard reminded me of the furutistic Jade Mountain resort that we visited in December.) Natalie Portman the dedicated scientist losing her commitment to rationality on two levels in response to the superpowers and super body of the god who came out of the sky. Wait. What?

Was there any pop movie that didn't echo someplace in "Thor"? Natalie Portman's woman scientist learning about alien beings (Norse gods in this case) was named "Foster" no doubt in honor of Jodie Foster's role in "Contact." Thor and the fire-spitting frost giant walk dramatically towards each other down the main street of the little town out West -- I was waiting for the clock hands moving towards High Noon. Men in black represent the government's interest in the impact crater where Thor just landed. Even the city of Asgard somewhere outside of reality reminded me of the town in the Gene Autry Western/sci fi "The Phantom Empire" though I'm sure many other sci fi films have used similar combinations of ultra-modern architecture to create an other-worldly atmosphere.

The serious critics have serious problems with this movie. Too bad for them.

Meyer Lemons

2011-05-06T16:55:00.007-04:00

Our temporary house in Santa Barbara includes a beautiful meyer lemon tree with the biggest, juciest meyer lemons I have ever seen. I love the taste of meyer lemons. I have already put the juice into a couple of salads and a sauteed pork dish, and will surely continue to cook with them throughout our stay.

Near the Yoga studio

2011-05-05T13:53:00.002-04:00

I've signed up for yoga classes in Santa Barbara. The studio is near Alice Keck park, one of the little places that makes the town so stunning. The park is only one city block square, but has little streams, marshes, lily ponds, flower beds, secluded stone paths and amazing picturesque though tiny vistas. Also lots of benches and places for kids to play. The park across the street has large grassy areas and a band shell.

Getting Settled

2011-05-05T12:12:00.002-04:00

From Len's new camera: a photo of one of the decks/seating areas surrounding our beautiful home for this month. Flowers are everywhere, along with mountain views and a glimpse of the Santa Barbara harbor.

Santa Barbara

2011-05-02T15:52:00.002-04:00

I'm happy to see that the last bird-of-paradise flowers are still in bloom here in Santa Barbara. The weather is stunning: very warm and sunny with clear views out to sea and up towards the mountains inland. We are slowly taking possession of our rented home as the owners are flying out tonight. It's very beautiful with both sea and mountain views -- to be documented in time.

I dropped Len off at the University and immediately paid a visit to Arroyo Burro Beach, which I have always loved.

The Channel Islands are very clear on the horizon, and I'm not the only photographer:

On the Road Again

2011-05-01T01:25:00.003-04:00

Western Arizona from Flagstaff to Kingman is spectacularly beautiful. Pine forested mountainsides at first; then we saw desert vegetation as we steeply descend to the Mojave desert.

In the distance, we often saw enormously long trains carrying hundreds of containers; some said "China" in big letters. Below: you can almost see the train making it across the open spaces:

Finally, crossing the Mojave, we saw Joshua trees and blooming cactus and desert flowers. Approaching San Bernardino: another descent; snow-covered mountains tower over the curving road.

Plants and Stones: The Petrified Forest

2011-04-30T00:57:00.005-04:00

A plant can grow to look like a stone. The desert is slightly spring green today with tiny somewhat camouflaged plants as well as the showier flowering ones among the rocks:

Trees can turn to stone, or once they did so. The back story: once there was a tropical forest full of huge trees and dinosaurs. The trees fell, and were covered by silt, or maybe a volcano or two erupted and covered the broken forest. Eventually, the trees all turned to stone and sparkling, colorful minerals replaced their organic elements.

Around 250,000,000 years later, humans have evolved. Early Indian tribes found the petrified trees, which had by then been delivered to North America by continental drift. At least two groups built pueblos in the area, and left petroglyphs on the rocks that as yet have no translation.

A few centuries later, humans discovered what they could do with mineral resources, invented the steam engine, and began looking for places to put railroads. The explorers and rail planners found the stone trees. Once the railroads were built, a whole industry grew up near the forest, ready to grind up the petrified wood and process it into many things. The railroad shipped tons of petrified rock out of the West, and brought tourists to see the natural wonders that seemed inexhaustible. Also, the beautiful agates, geodes, and other sparkling crystals that sparkle mysteriously in the ancient tree trunks were in time all pried out of the petrified wood and taken away.

By the time the Petrified Forest National Park was founded a century ago, it was almost too late, and the looting didn't stop. What's left of the petrified wood is beautiful and fascinating, but a little sad, especially the area called the Crystal Forest where all the sparkle is gone.

The landscape itself is still utterly beautiful.

And the older park buildings have a lot of their early-20th-century charm.

We had a lovely day in the park, while driving from Albuquerque to Flagstaff.

Oklahoma from a moving car

2011-04-28T22:15:00.002-04:00

Today we drove from Oklahoma City to Albuquerque -- definitely a scenic route in a southwestern way. Western Oklahoma has ranches, cattle, oil wells, wind farms, and bales of hay. The Texas Panhandle is vast, flat, almost vacant. Eastern New Mexico has deep arroyos with exposed red rock sides, as one is climbing all the time to get to the high plane. At one point we could briefly spot some snow-topped mountains, but never caught sight of them again.

Scenes along the way driving through Oklahoma:

Shaw's Garden

2011-04-26T18:07:00.004-04:00

The weather wizards relented! We had all the sunshine we could imagine at the Missouri Botanical Garden (Shaw's Garden).

In front of the Climatron, statues by Carl Milles, whose fountains I have always liked. I think prototypes for some of these are at Cranbrook near Carol's house.

Some of the Garden's collected works in glass by Dale Chihuly.

Ruby with Henry Shaw, founder of the gardens.

High school art class from nearby school.

I found the Japanese gardens amazingly beautiful!

Several more photos are on Flickr including:

Dark Cloud over St.Louis

2011-04-26T08:48:00.002-04:00

We made it from West Lafayette to St.Louis yesterday around 1:30 PM. At first we drove through a pleasant spring rain, enjoying greening fields and a few wide, vivid expanses of new clover the same color as the blooming redbud trees. As we approached the junction just before St.Louis we saw a dark and threatening cloud over the city. Are evil weather wizards angry with this city? The international news was already featuring the severe tornado that filled the airport with glass, rain, and stranded passengers last Friday!

We began fulfilling the purpose of the trip in the afternoon, visiting Len's 2 sisters, 2 brothers-in-law, 4 nieces & 2 nephews (counting spouses), and several of their children. Some by lucky coincidence were also visiting here.

Sunny today? I don't think so.

Pelicans in West Lafayette

2011-04-24T15:06:00.002-04:00

White pelicans have strayed from their usual migration route to the west of here and are now hanging out at the Celery Bog near Elaine and Larry's house. We saw them circling in the sky, and also sitting on this rock in the pond.

The wooded areas were carpeted with little white flowers, the frogs in the bog were singing loudly, and we also saw a very tiny turtle basking on the painted strip that divides the lanes of the bike path. Many other birds were flying and swimming, including this one:

Photos by Lenny.

Silly Silly Silly

2011-04-09T10:48:00.002-04:00

Irish connection for Mona Lisa? See: Leonardo DaVinci’s ‘Mona Lisa’ - the Irish connection by Cathy Hayes.

"Dominus Otho Gherardini ... travelled to Normandy with a caravan of Norman knights in 1056. ... Otho was a member of the Florentine family, the Gherardini. He came to the court of King Edward the Confessor in about 1056, ten years before the Norman Conquest of England. He then joined the invasion of England. After the Battle of Hastings he was given land in England. His son Walter FitzOther is mentioned in the Domesday book in 1086. About a century later his Norman descendants settled in Ireland. They were known as the Fitzgeralds."

Yeah, right. Mona Lisa had Irish cousins.

Still More Silly Research on Mona Lisa!

2011-04-05T13:59:00.005-04:00

Again in Italy the so-called researcher Silvano Vinceti has people jumping at his crazed suggestions. This time, he has convinced Italian authorities to dig up bones in a convent in Florence to see if they can find the real Mona Lisa. He says she's buried there.

In December his "discovery" was that Mona Lisa's eyes have "tiny letters" depicted in them -- see this article in the Washington Post: Mona Lisa's eyes reveal some secrets. See: More Silly Research on Mona Lisa

He must be an incredible con man!

Bubbles

2011-04-03T14:12:00.002-04:00

Soap film finds the surface with the least area.

Super Moon

2011-03-19T21:10:00.001-04:00

Tonight's full moon looks larger than normal because the moon is at its closest to earth. We saw it from Evelyn and Tom's house nearly an hour after official moonrise.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

2011-03-16T19:42:00.004-04:00

Our trip to Ireland was fabulous. We found that both art and nature support the popular expectation we've had for Irish imagery. This will be my last post on Ireland, as we've now been back for over a week.

Thus Len's HDR photo of an old cloister at Coing Abbey (above) illustrates the deep green foliage one might associate with Irish landscapes, along with beautiful medieval arches. And the modern water meter to the right also uses a Celtic knot design.

We find the Irish to be welcoming and extraordinarily friendly. Arny and Tracy's friends, people in shops and on the street, museum attendants, Bed and Breakfast and restaurant personnel, airport staff (yes, even security) -- all made us feel welcome. We were a bit startled to find all the usual Irish stuff like magnets and shirts that say "Kiss me, I'm Irish," toy leprechauns, and other cliched things that I thought were just for St.Patrick's day in the US!

So have a wonderful St.Patrick's Day. I think that the bars in Ireland will also be totally busy tomorrow, just like the bars over here. And I hope all the days are sunny -- though the photo below of the Claddagh in Galway illustrates that we also saw a bit of Irish mist from time to time.

Irish Nostalgia

2011-03-12T06:16:00.004-05:00

Last night we went to see Martin McDonagh’s play, The Cripple of Inishmaan, performed by the Irish Druid and Atlantic Theater Company. The sponsor was University Musical Society, which presents music and drama at various venues here in Ann Arbor -- it's a coincidence that they put on an Irish play that's so timely for me. When an ad came in the mail, I couldn't resist; we went with our friends Bob and Elaine, who are theater lovers.

The action of the play takes place on Inishmaan, one of the Aran Islands just off Galway -- last week, on clear days, we could see this group of islands on the horizon from the Cliffs of Moher where we took a walk (photo of Lenny on the cliffs right/above; islands vaguely behind him).

The characters in the play are colorful and a bit of a cliche -- two oldish women, a gossipy old man and his very very old mother (who drinks poteen), a none-too-virtuous girl, her brother, and the title role, a crippled boy. The performance was what I would call theatrical: very stylized acting, sort of proclaimed. I enjoyed it, but it was unfamiliar: totally different from watching a movie. Of course the characters all speak in a strong Irish accent, which underscores the folksy, retro quality of the plot and the dialogue. Like many tales of common people, comedy and tragedy combine in the course of the play; what Sholem Aleichem called laughter through tears.

The experience of this play seemed very consistent with an article I recently read in the Guardian titled IRISH EXCEPTIONALISM. It asked why the recent dramatic economic boom and bust seems to have had little impact on Irish fiction -- after looking at recent Irish plays, songs, art exhibits, etc, the Guardian author seems to find only that YouTube is "dripping with home-made 'bail-out songs.'"

And, says the author, recent events resemble a fictional production, maybe a good play:

"The cast of characters is superlative, featuring buccaneering bankers, outsized politicians and all-conquering property developers .... Even the locations are enticing, from rural beauty spots blighted by "ghost estates" to high-end networking jamborees masquerading as racing events."
"You'd expect this sorry tale to have generated a wave of films, plays and novels. After all, the Irish have never shied away from telling stories about themselves. Visual artists must have hit upon a new mode of expression. Musicians, surely, would have found a way to express the story through song, as they have done with so many of Ireland's historical traumas. Hell, this story could make an opera."

However, the Irish continue to write about their past, rather than their present and future, says this thoughtful article. One conclusion: "many of us hold tight to outdated notions of Ireland as a romantic sort of place that only the artist can really understand." Though I liked McDonagh’s Cripple of Inishmaan last night, I think this statement sums it up.

Note: I also liked the review of the play in the local online newspaper.

Irish Sheep

2011-03-11T16:30:00.002-05:00

Irish woolens are still being made -- we saw beautiful scarves and thows for sale, but had lots of sales resistance. We also saw the sheep, which still had their large fleece winter coats on. The sheep in the field above are grazing under Ben Bulben, the mountain made famous in several of Yeats's poems.

Where do Irish Fairies Live?

2011-03-10T07:47:00.006-05:00

The landscape in Ireland is full of ancient stones. Old towers and seaside fortifications from the Middle Ages. Early Christian churches, holy wells, and abbeys with a few standing arches from once-secluded cloisters. Stone walls from all eras dividing the land into sheep pens. Ruined castles from many different centuries. The giant Finn McCool's causeway. And neolithic tombs, forts, and other constructions.

My perspective in seeing all these bare stones on my three trips to Ireland has always been historical: I try to learn about the eras when many races and tribes came to Ireland and built new lives and new stone structures. I envisioned how these peoples cut down the ancient forests and turned them into bogs and stony fields. I read about centuries of fighting, famine, colonization, and other events affected the landscape.

But how did the Irish farmers two centuries ago view all this evidence showing centuries of human occupation? They had little historic information, and less understanding of how ancient the neolithic tombs and forts were created. The mysteries of their surroundings created a sense of enchantment. Irish folk tales invented Finn McCool to create the giant's causeway, and imagined races of fairies, wee people, leprechauns (who are originally shoe makers), banshees, and many others to populate these very scary ruins. In their stories, doors would open amidst the stones, old tombs would light up and songs would sound into nighttime darkness, and the old castles would come to life with ethereal people who couldn't be seen in daylight.

Neolithic stones, photo from our 2005 trip.

In reading William Butler Yeats's Irish Fairy and Folk Tales, I'm getting a much more vivid picture of how the fairies live. In one story, a man named Lusmore was walking slowly home one night, when "he came to the old moat of Knockgrafton, which stood on the right-hand side of his road." A moat is a neolithic tomb, such as I saw on my trip.

"Tired and weary was he, and noways comfortable in his own mind at thinking how much farther he had to travel, and that he should be walking all the night; so he sat down under the moat to rest himself, ... Presently there rose a wild strain of unearthly melody upon the ear of little Lusmore; he listened, and he thought that he had never heard such ravishing music before. It was like the sound of many voices, each mingling and blending with the other so strangely that they seemed to be one, though all singing different strains, and the words of the song were these--
"Da Luan, Da Mort, Da Luan, Da Mort, Da Luan, Da Mort;
"when there would be a moment's pause, and then the round of melody went on again. ... The fairies within Knockgrafton, for the song was a fairy melody ... " -- The Legend of Knockgrafton

Another neolithic tomb in The Burren, from our 2005 trip

Poulnabroe, a well-preserved neolithic portal tomb

One more portal tomb, north of Sligo, 2011

Castles such as the ones we saw were also homes for fairies; from the tale of a young man:

"An old ruined castle, about a quarter of a mile from his cabin, was said to be the abode of the 'wee folk.' Every Halloween were the ancient windows lighted up, and passers-by saw little figures flitting to and fro inside the building, while they heard the music of pipes and flutes. It was well known that fairy revels took place; but nobody had the courage to intrude on them." -- Jamie Freel and the Young Lady

If fairies or pookas come here now, they disturb the residents of the just-visible adjacent housing development!

Boats in Port

2011-03-08T13:31:00.005-05:00

Galway Bay is full of fishing and shipping boats. Tiny towns beside the sea offer fresh oysters, mussels, crab, and local salmon from boats and other fishing methods; I wrote about what we ate in these posts: Monk's Pub, Ballyvaughn Ireland and Coole Oysters. The city of Galway has berths for ocean-going cargo ships, though it's not a massive container port; the scale of ships is still a picturesque and modest.

At low tide in the small harbor at Kinvara the little fishing and pleasure boats we saw were resting on the mud:

We also stayed overnight at Killybegs, the largest Irish fishing port for the Atlantic. At night from our room we could see the big trawlers in the harbor:

In Dublin our B&B on Clontarf Road had a view of the ferry boats that cross from Ireland to Wales and elsewhere across the Irish Sea. We walked out towards the islands that face Dublin.

The Giant's Causeway

2011-03-07T12:28:00.006-05:00

Last Saturday afternoon Kīlauea Volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii began a new and spectacular eruption from a fissure that suddenly opened on the mountainside, sending a flow of lava into a seemingly bottomless crack in the earth. The goddess Pele, who controls Hawaii's volcanic activity, must have been really mad! (Above photo comes from the USGS Hawaiian Volcano Observatory. For scale: the spewing fires are around 30 meters high -- click on the picture to see a larger version in which you can see the burning trees beside the lava and a tiny geologist to the right.)

Around 62 million years ago, an even more enormous volcano than Kīlauea erupted in northern Ireland. The eruption created basalt pillars of great size as the lava slowly cooled and contracted. Over time, additional eruptions, water percolation, erosion, waves, ice floes, and other geological forces created the Giant's Causeway, an amazing array of geometrically regular pillars and stones. These rock formations are so evenly shaped that it's hard to believe they are natural.

Like the Hawaiians, who imagined Pele's wrath and power as the source of the inexplicable appearance of lava and eruptions, the ancient Irish believed in anthropomorphic forces as the explanation for the mysterious rock formations: the giant Finn McCool was their mythic builder. Unlike Pele, Finn wasn't angry: the story says he just didn't want to get his feet wet when he walked to Scotland across the channel, so he paved the ground with regular stones.

Our visit to the Giant's Causeway was certainly the most amazing part of our recent trip to Ireland. We loved walking on the stone pavement that Finn put down, climbing up between the pillars, and enjoying an unusually warm and sunny February day. We both enjoyed taking photos -- here are some favorites:

Irish Politics

2011-03-06T09:24:00.006-05:00

We arrived in Ireland on election day, and as we traveled, we constantly saw candidate posters, mostly on the lampposts. This is Derek Nolan, a young Labor candidate from the Galway district where Arny and Tracy are currently living. His posters were the first to go up, say Arny and Tracy -- though the campaign in Ireland is only a few weeks -- in great contrast to the US!

Just as we arrived in Dublin, we met Derek Nolan on the street, as shown above. He seemed happy to be recognized: the vote count had just been completed, so he was on the way to his first meetings prior to the induction of the newly elected Irish Parliament. The vote count is done by hand and is incredibly complex. Each voter numbers his preferred candidates beginning at 1 (as urged on all the signs) and going up to whatever number the voter likes -- sometimes 20 people might run for 5 slots. Each of the 4 parties proposes a slate of candidates, and independents also play a big role. So multiple recounts are needed to determine the winners.

This election was a really big upset for the Fianna Fail party that has been in power for many years. In Killybegs where we spent a night, our B&B hosts and the waiter at the restaurant where we ate were really excited because a young independent from their town had defeated the second in command of the government. Here's the poster for this big loser, Mary Coughlan, who's now out of power along with her entire party:

Reprecussions from the boom and bust of the last few years were the major issues in the election, with huge animosity towards Finanna Fail. The Fine Gael party, Labour, Sinn Fein (with roots in the old Independence movement), and independents all did well, but none had a majority, so ongoing negotiations were taking place all week -- with a little interference from Angela Merkel, German Chancellor. Fianna Fail was corrupt and had sweetheart deals with the banks, which have big debts to German banks (hence Merkel's interest). Irish people are angry because they have been left in a very bad economic situation, while the bankers are still collecting big salaries after lots of bad doings.

As we traveled we saw building projects abandoned, and occasional other evidence of how the enormous period of prosperity nicknamed "The Celtic Tiger" that was present during our 2005 trip has gone bust. The big influx of people from Poland and other Common Market countries have been leaving, as well as lots of unemployed Irish people, especially recent graduates. Tourism is down. The high-tech industry is in vast decline. And everyone is demoralized because they had hoped the change in Ireland's fortunes was permanent.

Misty Ireland

2011-03-04T16:57:00.003-05:00

We had several beautiful sunny days, but today it was more typical Irish weather. We drove up from Arny's Galway house towards the northwest, where we walked near Loch Nafooey and Loch Corrib. We would not have been surprised to see some faerie persons, who would have whisked us into the woods for 25 years, and we would have returned no older than we are now. Is that bad or good?

Loch Nafooey:

Irish Castles

2011-03-03T15:47:00.002-05:00

In Dublin, we toured Dublin Castle. It was the seat of English rule of Ireland until 1922, when it was turned over to the new Republic. The tower is medieval, the rest much newer.

Today we roamed through The Burren, a region of very rocky hills and cliffs. Ancient stone tombs from pre-Celtic people are the best known, but many sorts of castles were also a highlight of the visit. The earliest were built in the 7th century. Some are ruins through which you can see the sky. Others look nearly new, and are private residences or hotels, probably incorporating one much older tower. Some were obviously fortified, and face the sea; others appear to have been stately residences for wealthy land owners. Were they ruined by time or by rebellions? We don't really know.

As we left The Burren, the sun was setting over the water.

Irish Walls

2011-03-03T02:47:00.002-05:00

Everywhere in Ireland I've seen beautiful walls. Some are old, some new, but all grow moss, ivy, and other green stuff thanks to the constant damp and rain.

First, the wall of the churchyard where Yeats is buried:

"Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross."

"No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman, pass by!"

And the walls of Lady Gregory's estate, Coole, where Yeats lived for many summers.

The walls of the 12th century Assaroe Abbey, incorporating old water wheels:

A prehistoric passage tomb from the ancient Celtic inhabitants of Ireland:

The Galway Medieval city wall

An old wall and bridge:

A wall with rough stones at the top, a type I have frequently seen in Galway:

A wall by a sea inlet:

Ireland

2011-03-01T17:50:00.004-05:00

Probably the first thing I ever learned about Ireland was the song "Molly Malone." As children, we learned it from an old record (no, not an LP, an old 78 RPM record). We saw Molly as we walked out of the parking structure in Dublin this morning. Here she was with her wheel barrow, which I believe she wheeled through streets broad and narrow. This street is broad and near Trinity College and the museums where we spent the day.

The light was beautiful this afternoon, and the grass was very bright in St.Stephen's Green. Another lesson learned when I was a child: Ireland is Very Green. That's because it rains a lot: many people were delighted with today's sunshine.

Happy Birthday Alice!

2011-02-07T07:24:00.001-05:00

Here is Alice's most recent self-portrait with Photobooth. And here she is exactly 8 years ago today --

More Afro-Caribbean Carvings

2011-01-14T20:04:00.002-05:00

Above the entrance to one of the bars at Anse Chastanet in St.Lucia is a memorable wood carving by Lawrence Deligny, whose work we purchased -- see Afro-Caribbean Mask from St.Lucia my post from earlier today. The images from the life of Samson in the Bible are vivid -- on our first visit to St.Lucia years ago, I watched a wood carver creating an image of Samson with dreadlocks, and he told me that allowing ones hair to grow -- as the Rastamen do -- was related to the Samson story. The bars and restaurants are decorated with many more carvings by Deligny and another artist who works in brightly painted wood.

Afro-Caribbean Mask from St.Lucia

2011-01-14T14:21:00.003-05:00

This is the mask we brought back -- it's over 4 feet tall. We like the way it goes with our other African masks, which I wrote about here: About the New Masks and Our African Masks

The name of the artist is Lawrence Deligny, and other works of his are on display at Anse Chastenet where we stayed.

Alice and Miriam's Trip to Disney World

2011-01-03T22:09:00.001-05:00

I'm sure they took this photo just for me! Anything for Mona Lisa, right?

An eel hunts

2011-01-01T17:46:00.003-05:00

One more memory from St.Lucia. While snorkeling off the Anse Chastanet beach, I noticed about 10 feet below me a snake eel with his head in a hole in a coral rock, and his body whipping slowly back and forth in the open.

I watched him for a while. Occasionally, a little cloud of sand would come from one side of the hole -- as if he were smoking. He would take his head out of the hole and shake it a bit. His head was a very odd shape, pretty snaky. I realized that he was pulling some type of food out of the hole, but I could never see what it was.

Eventually, my quarry moved through another hole in the big coral formation. I saw his head go in, leaving just his tail outside the hole, and then saw his head come out of a hole on the other side of the coral. He hunted in another crevasse for a while, the same way, sometimes catching a critter which he pulled out of the hole. Eventually he snaked away.

Len took the above photo on a dive at another reef, deeper; but it's the same species of eel. I could see his spots clearly, though the one I watched didn't seem as vividly colored. His spots were closer to white rather than yellow.

Anse Chastanet

2010-12-30T15:39:00.003-05:00

We're back from our delightful stay at Anse Chastanet resort in St.Lucia. Considering all the airline disruptions that have ruined so much travel this month, we were very lucky to have all our plans work just as we hoped.

Here are a few more photos to illustrate highlights that I didn't mention. At the Botanical Garden, we walked up to a waterfall and a sulphur bathing pool with lukewarm water from the caldera. Here's Len, enjoying the pool:

Yoga at Anse Chastanet is really wonderful, thanks to the instructor Kristen and to the beach setting where the classes take place. (I won't dwell on the way the waves washed over the shore and flooded the yoga hut one day -- it was cleaned up by the next scheduled class.) Kristen quickly adapts her routines to the widely varying levels of the individuals who show up each day. Here she is, getting ready for class:

And here's one more view of the resort. Anse Chastanet is the name of the little bay and beach, and also the name of the lower part of the resort, where we stayed. Above Anse Chastanet is Jade Mountain, the futuristic resort that I wrote about here -- Jade Mountain.

For a complete look at Len's best underwater photos see his Flickr page.

Volcanic Caldera

2010-12-26T21:32:00.002-05:00

The caldera of the old volcano here is much smaller than those in Hawaii, but deep black water bubbles vigorously in the sulphur pools at the bottom of the deep crater-like surroundings. It's all private land, and has been built up with sulphur baths since the 18th century when the French planters developed it. At the nearby botanical garden (which we also visited on our tour) it's claimed that Napoleon's wife Josephine once bathed here -- her father was a plantation owner. More photos after we get home -- tomorrow and Tuesday we'll be hoping for the best with American Airlines.

Jade Mountain

2010-12-23T19:36:00.003-05:00

Today we took a tour of Jade Mountain, the luxury resort on the hilltop above our (already luxurious) resort. The rooms and architecture are over-the-top fancy. Each room is very large with a private swimming pool near the bed, a sitting area, and a bathroom also completely open to the view. No glass, no screens, just mosquito nets on the bed. Each room has its own butler who will (according to our guided tour) fill your jaccuzzi tub (as distinct from the pool) or bring all your meals. You can arrive by helicopter, go directly to your room, and never emerge until it's time to fly back to whatever planet you came from with whoever you anonymously came with.

For more photos, see this Flickr set.

This is not a fish

2010-12-23T06:53:00.001-05:00

Another good day of underwater pictures for Len yesterday. This coral head with a ribbon worm and strategically placed crevasses looks like a fish, I thought.

Birdwatching with Meno

2010-12-21T20:04:00.005-05:00

This morning we went on a bird walk with Meno, who leads many tours. We walked on the grounds of Anse Mamin, the old plantation where once slaves grew sugar cane and boiled it down into molasses. Mamin, the owner, was a particularly brutal slave owner. The old buildings are still in place or partly so. Above, a surviving staircase seems to go nowhere, though some workmen were using it while drinking an early morning Coca Cola.

Here's Meno looking for birds. He is also very good at calling them out of the woods. We saw quite a few nice ones.

Meno told us about a recent tragedy, which other St.Lucians have also mentioned. The stream that runs through the old plantation is small and tame now, but at the end of October, a hurricane brought 24 hours of heavy rain to St.Lucia, and the stream became a torrent, unleashing a disastrous mud slide. Meno's good friends -- a couple and their children -- were swept away along with their house. The mud slide left a huge mud deposit in the reservoir above the plantation. Meno kept saying to the river "Where are they?" His friends were either buried or swept out to sea, and can't be found.

Eclipse

2010-12-21T09:52:00.003-05:00

Last night's total solar eclipse was beautifully visible from the porch right outside our room, which is up on a hillside. I woke up when the eath's shadow had just begun to move across the surface of the moon -- around 2:45 AM. I watched as the bright light of the moon dimmed, and more and more stars became visible. The moon was fairly high in the sky above the Caribbean Sea, which was dark. Yesterday's clouds had dispersed, so I had a beautiful view, even of the Milky Way; I counted four shooting stars as I watched until the eclipse was total and the moon became dim, reddish, and insignificant, around 4:00. The shadowy forms of the two Pitons were visible behind me, and I could hear the waves coming in gently below.

It's a very rare occurrence for an eclipse to coincide with the Solstice. I found it thrilling.

Here is a photo just before the total eclipse -- our camera can't register the very faint light of the eclipsed moon, although it is very visible to the eye:

More of the Pitons

2010-12-20T20:30:00.002-05:00

Here's the very tiny town of Soufriere, just around the headland beside the hotel beach. We can see the lights of the town from some of the places in the resort.

A few more photos from my snorkel boat trip, which included a stop in the town:

Len's Fish from Yesterday

2010-12-20T07:01:00.002-05:00

For more see this flickr set: St. Lucia

St. Lucia

2010-12-19T09:44:00.002-05:00

Here's the view from our hotel room. The volcanic peaks are called the Pitons, and they are beautiful and (dare I say it) mysterious! Our travel day was very long, but fortunately unremarkable, and here we are. Len is getting his Scuba orientation, and I'm too lazy to do anything but sit around.

My father would be 105 today

2010-12-15T09:39:00.001-05:00

It seems amazing that he would be so old. I've written about him here:
Hyman Feldman (December 15, 1905)

More Silly Research on Mona Lisa

2010-12-13T21:49:00.004-05:00

From time to time "researchers" (especially some bozos in Italy) discover new clues to the imagined mysteries of Mona Lisa. May I point out that much more is known about the painting than about most 500 year old art works? To me, the mystery is why silly stories about Mona Lisa sell newspapers.

Today's "discovery" -- Mona Lisa's eyes have "tiny letters" depicted in them -- see this article in the Washington Post: Mona Lisa's eyes reveal some secrets. No explanation is offered as to how Leonardo was able to paint letters so tiny that they are visible only with 21st century scientific apparatus. Oh, wait: Leonardo was also a genius inventor -- he must have had a 21st century gadget.

I think that the accompanying photo of an X-ray fluorescence spectroscope is a stock photo that's used in all Washington Post articles about solving these mysteries -- it's not even clear that it's the apparatus being used by today's so-called scientist (left). Adding a Youtube video of Nat King Cole singing the song "Mona Lisa" is another clue that there isn't any real story here. For proof of this: the last time I ranted about these silly stories, I included a screen capture with the identical apparatus -- see below and Mona Lisa Smiles for Science.

I'm sorry, I find this all pathetic. Why don't they do something useful?

F0r more links to absurd Mona Lisa fake science, see this: Mona Lisa Nonsense

Self Portrait at Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh

2010-11-27T15:36:00.000-05:00

Self Portrait at the Detroit Institute of Arts

2010-11-13T21:25:00.000-05:00

Happy Halloween

2010-10-31T19:57:00.003-04:00

Our neighbors have beautiful porch decorations. I especially like the witch light fixture.

On Granger (one block from our house) the Ann Arbor City Council allowed (by resolution) street closing during trick-or-treating hours. Hundreds of families with small kids, teenagers, and miscellaneous adults were walking around and lining up at every door -- like this one, labeled "Bates Motel -- Vacancy." In some cases the sidewalk was almost blocked, but no one was walking in the street.

Along with the biggest pumpkins I've ever seen, the house in the photo above had some special thing going on inside with a big banner that said "Candyland." Around 40 people were lined up to get in, while others were inside and on the sidewalk.

Later Len walked around the block to Granger too. He saw a number of people with big puppets in a sort of a parade.

Over here, a block from the big action and excitement, we've had only maybe a couple hundred kids. At 6:30 I could see 30 kids nearby. Nothing like Granger, but I have almost given away my entire 10 bags of chocolate (forget about what I ate myself). Soon I'll turn off the light.

Recent reading with Kindle observations

2010-10-28T21:03:00.004-04:00

During the past week, I have read the new Booker Prize winner, The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson -- in fact, I read it and then reread it a second time, right through from the beginning on my Kindle. I liked it a lot, and kept using the "bookmark" and "notes and highlights" features. Note, however, that the feature that allows one to see the collective highlighting of all the other wired-in readers horrified me. I turned the feature off the first time I saw it on the Kindle (several weeks ago).

Just before that, I read 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein. I read it in a hard cover book. And on the Kindle: The World to Come by Dara Horn. Both books are about Jewish Americans by Jewish American women writers. End of similarity.

I browsed Evelyn's copy of Cooking for Geeks: Real Science, Great Hacks, and Good Food by Jeff Potter. I like the approach that everything is science, though I'm a bit skeptical of the quality of the recipes. For dinner tonight, I made something I bet wouldn't be in Geeks: a gratin Dauphinoise of the old-school type with lots of potatoes and real gruyere cheese and fresh garlic. I think that would be simplified somehow (though I might be wrong). I know most geeks would not like the hideously burned-on crust that I had to scrub off of the gratin dish. In sum: it's not my approach to cooking, but fun to think about.

I have read 25% of David Grossman's To the End of the Land, which I'm finding very depressing, though I like the Israeli landscapes. I will try to finish it. It had a good cooking scene. (I highlighted it. Maybe I will write about it on my food blog.) Note: the Kindle doesn't list page numbers, it tells you what percent of the book you have read. I'm having a little trouble with that feature.

I didn't do so well with How Rome Fell by Adrian Goldsworthy. I did not get as far as the huns -- I missed Attila. This book demonstrated to me the limit of reading on the Kindle. The maps can't be zoomed in enough to use them effectively. The footnotes might as well not be there -- the Kindle does not have hyperlinks within the book. Mainly, though, I just don't like that kind of unsocial history that goes on and on about the rulers and claims that there's not enough evidence about the way people lived. I think that the author's protests about this are self-serving. OK, he doesn't do social history, that doesn't mean it's not valid.

I read The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne on the Kindle. I believe I had read it most recently when it was assigned reading in high school. Surprise: I liked it. I read The Sea Wolf by Jack London, another free Kindle book from the Public Domain. It reminded me in some ways of Moby Dick, which is plausible as London appears to have read it. The political points seemed odd. I read a few Sherlock Holmes stories, also free. Here is a fact about the Kindle: all the books look alike. Same typeface. No page design or distinctive layout. I can't decide how much these things matter.

UPDATE: We finally figured out how to go to footnotes and get back. It's not easy but it works. THe map problem still is a problem.

Monkey Bars

2010-10-24T21:13:00.000-04:00