We’re skipping the regular Sunday feature to talk about the U.S.S. Constitution, which sailed again today.
Old Ironsides, the world’s oldest commissioned warship, cruised open water today to honor the bicentennial of the battle against the HMS Guerriere in the War of 1812.
These days she is an incredible museum ship. We were there three years ago, almost to the day.
Here are some pictures, including this replica gun:
An estimated 13 percent percent of the original vessel is still in place, all below the waterline. Including, I love this, some of Paul Revere’s nails:
This is where the sailors slept. It wasn’t this well-lit. There was obviously no fire alarm. And it didn’t smell like varnish. (We were there during the latest renovations.) The docents, sailors in the U.S. Navy who said this duty station was a great honor, said 19th century conditions aboard ship were less than ideal:
The anchor capstan was used when the order came to weigh anchor. Sailors walked in a circle, pushing long poles into those square cutouts. Anchor cables wound around the capstan, which could raise or lower anchors up to 5,443 pounds:
One of the salt boxes by the guns. A gun wad is on the left and a felt cartridge is on the right. The plaque says “The origin of the name is lost to history. Each gun was required to have a “salt box” which was to hold the felt cartridges ready for loading into the gun. Only one cartridge at a time was to be kept in the salt box.
“Cartridges were made of felt or foil or lead and were color marked for type and size. Red was close, blue was standard, white was distant. Size was indicated by numbers.”
Here she was in her mooring in 2009. It had been 12 years since she’d last set sail:
And today, for just the second time in more than a century:
Someone in our house couldn’t sleep last night. And, for once, it wasn’t me. I fell away to the night at around 2 a.m. — which is late enough, but sadly to normal for me — and The Yankee was up even later. She tried to keep me awake, but I have a secret weapon.
I can’t say what it is, because she’ll read this and know.
So she took a nap today, unusual for her, and I woke her up in time for a late lunch. We watched a football game from Auburn’s 2010 season, the Ole Miss game. The Tigers are 9-0 after that game. Big things could happen for this team. We’ll have to keep watching to see how they fare. But we also broke my DVD player.
I bought it probably seven years ago. I’m a late adopter on entertainment tech. Because I am cheap I was trying to not talk myself into getting one, but a colleague pointed out that it’d work for a while. And, he said, if it broke, I’d be out less than 50 bucks. Think of all the discs you could watch in the meantime!
They weren’t especially expensive even then. But I was thinking about that tonight as I took off the cover and removed the metal casing that tops the disc tray. I’d read extensively — OK, two websites — that guided me through the process of fixing your DVD player. Cheap.
After removing three screws you find yourself at the laser radiation warning. Three more screws and you’re at the center of the component. This is the most accessible technology you take for granted in your entertainment center.
First you make sure the lens apparatus is moving well. That part of the equipment sits on two rails that move it from a resting position to the reading position. Everything seemed to be in working order there. You can also clean the lens. I dug out the rubbing alcohol and dabbed at the thing with a Q-tip.
I took a whiff of the alcohol, and instantly flashed back to 8th grade biology. We had to create an insect collection, and that was the preferred method of killing the critters. Some things stick with you, like trying to center a pin into the world’s tiniest thorax, and the smell of alcohol that lingered long after the grades were handed down by the teacher.
So I cleaned, re-covered, plugged in and listened to the DVD player. Click. Click. Click. The screen said “Disc Error.” It was an incredibly cold message. What do you expect for a cheap Emerson product?
I did it all again. Click. Click. Click. No change. The websites said the next thing to do is junk it and go buy a new one. The laser is too expensive to replace, they say.
I can get a new cheap DVD player at the big blue box store for $35.
We visited the pool this evening, just to dip our toes before the rains came:
We have a neighborhood pool and it is within walking distance of our house. I’ve managed to average getting in the pool twice a year since we’ve lived here. I’m no better this year, somehow. But if I hop in every night for the next week — and if I do laps — I might sleep very well.
Yesterday was our Pi Day anniversary. At a Pie Day not too long after we got married, The Yankee, Brian and I figured out when our Pi Day would be. As of today we’ve been married 3.14 years.
Pie is very important. That’s how I got her to go out with me the first time.
“Want to grab a late lunch? It’s Friday. Friday’s Pie Day.”
It was something a server at Johnny Ray’s, one of the big, local barbecue chains, had said a few weeks before. It was sound logic that day — the table of people I was with all had pie. And it worked on her, too. I blurted it out and took The Yankee to Jim ‘n’ Nick’s, one of the other chains, where we have enjoyed the majority of our Pie Days over the years. Pie is very important.
(Note the sign in the background.)
Here’s to the next Pi Day, sometime in the fall of 2015.
Welcome back to the weekly installment of extra pictures. It cleans out the files. It gives me content, of a sort.
On with it, then. Still life tomato. We have so many tomatoes around here. We get them in our weekly veggie basket from a store we visit. Some nice people we know brought us some more. They’re just piling up, like every other healthy food here. We are eating so well these days. Only I can’t eat these things fast enough. Life is hard, I know.
If you were wondering about that ladder the other day, yes, I only showed you the top. I like the rail and the sliding and reaching for far, out of reach books. I like the notion of getting lost, leaning on that ladder, in some old passage I’d forgotten about.
I didn’t show you the middle of the ladder because ladders are ladders are horizontal lumber. Here’s the bottom, though:
This is the balcony view at the J&M store on South College. Pretty casual today, but the students come back soon. It’ll pick up.
We developed a theory in undergrad that you could identify people’s age by the name to which they referred to the places that were always in flux. This place, to me, is Lil Ireland’s and, on the left, Ultravox, around the corner. It isn’t Blue’s or Sky Bar or any other place. This is Lil Ireland’s. By the time I was a senior Ultravox had changed hands so many times no one but the townies recalled that name.
I wish the old movie theater was still on this lot, though. The era of downtown theaters is one I’d like to experience, but I missed it by a few years.
I’m sending this picture and telling people they’re tearing it down. They’re rebuilding the brick facade, a nice job for August, I’m sure.
I have older memories. I remember a few things that happened in the place where we lived when I was four. That’s about where it starts for me. And it is increasingly foggy up until about … I dunno … 15 minutes ago.
Sometimes I wonder about the false memories. The oldest memory I have, as I have described it, didn’t actually exist. We never lived in a place with a yard like that, I’m told. Did I see Empire Strikes Back in the theater? Or was it a re-release of the original Star Wars? Do I remember the I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke campaign? It started long before I was born, but did it run long enough for me to eventually notice? Or was that some reproduction?
Picking out what is right and what is wrong on the conveyor belt of your brain is like pulling getting that one bad grape. Squishy and bitter. And it puts you ill at ease about the next grape, too. Ancient memory is a tricky thing, but for as long as I can recall I’ve wanted bookshelves with a ladder attached to them:
I have a lot of books. We turned a room in our home into a library. It has a fireplace. This is serious. We have bookshelves in other rooms because there isn’t enough room in the library. And yet we still don’t have enough books for the bookshelf ladders. You can’t have one. You need at least two. That’s the mark of a good library.
I saw that one in a bookstore today. We hit two today, after a late breakfast. I found the book I wanted at the second bookstore. It wasn’t on the shelf at the first place, but I did see an employee playing checkers on his computer. It was slow. Bookstores here will pick up in the next few days, though, when the college kids come back to town.
You know who doesn’t come back? Anything to Olympic venues. Surf around and you’ll find plenty of complaints about facilities rusting away in Beijing or going to seed in Greece. Apparently they aren’t even showing up to begin with in London:
After a week of unusually quiet streets, idling cabs and easily navigated shops, fears of the Gridlock Games have transformed into complaints about the Ghost Town Olympics.
Experts say tens of thousands of foreign tourists without tickets to the Olympic Games appear to have decided to skip London, bowing to official warnings of stifling overcrowding — a forecast that ignored the lessons of other Olympic host cities that have emptied out during the Games over the past 20 years. In even larger numbers, these experts say, Britons themselves, including tens of thousands who normally commute to work in London, have heeded official appeals and stayed home.
Aside from that timeless crutch of the lazy journalist, “experts say” there are plenty of lessons here. The biggest two are maybe it is a good thing Chicago didn’t get the Games. Maybe bids should be limited to cities with the venues already in place or cities … elsewhere. Boondoogle: not in my backyard.
By the way. I wrote last week about Auburn’s first Olympians. Here is a picture of the first one, Snitz Snyder, taken from the 1928 Glomerata.
He ran in the 400 meter race in 1928. If he had the race of his life — the race he qualified with was a national record, 48 seconds — he might have made the medal stand. For comparison: the world record in 1928 was 47 seconds and the U.S. record today is 43.18.
Snyder came home and became a legendary coach in Bessemer, Ala. He has a football stadium named after him today. The gentleman standing next to him is the great track coach Wilbur Hutsell. The Auburn track and field facilities are named in his honor.
I did a bit of hasty counting today. At one point this afternoon Auburn athletes, as a nation, would have ranked 44th on the all time Olympic medal list. The Tigers are coming after YOU, Kazakhstan. This list doesn’t, of course, count the Jimmy Carter 1980 Games. There were a few guys on that U.S. Olympic roster projected to compete for medals in Moscow. Impressive stuff for a university.
One other Olympic note of limited use, the most retweeted thing I wrote on Twitter today: NASA is landing something on a DIFFERENT PLANET and airing it live. Your move, NBC.
You start noticing third party effects when people you’ve never heard of start retweeting you. When you see it more than a few times you start to wonder about it. I ran that Tweet through a tracker and found it reached something like 28,000 accounts. Of course not all of those people were online at the time, but that’s still a nice statistic for a piece of sarcasm. The conclusion, we’re all happy to complain about NBC.
I began following this Smithsonian blog on Tumblr last week. (Follow my Tumblr, too!) They are quick hits, and mostly pictures. I traded out a few other sites for this one. (I’m trying to cut back.) But this one is worth seeing, and this post today proved it. The person that uploaded it asked “What’d be going through your mind in this photo moment?”
I’d be thinking This is the GREATEST thing that has EVER happened to me!
There aren’t enough explanation points in that air tank. I’d suck it down to 200 pounds in no time.
When the real serious rains blow through now we think about the 2009 West Virginia game. I wrote about that and have some nice pictures to memorialize the day. (Rain was in the forecast and I wisely left my big camera at home that night.) We sat in that over-crowded concourse for an awfully long time and I wondering: How many places could you be crushed like this for … almost an hour now and watch all of these people maintain their good spirits? Not many, I’d bet.
Is it football season yet? We’re only about four weeks away …
