The site’s photo galleries are now up-to-date through May. Previously they’d stopped at February — I’m blaming comps. Now, though, you can see most of the things my camera saw in March, April and May.
This one did not make it in there, but will be on the June page when I build that.
Allie is very streaky when it comes to places she occupies. Each part of the day has an assigned location, most having to do with the sun in the windows and where we leave her alone. And from time to time those locations just. Lately she’s been a monorail cat on the arm of the sofa.
She’s sitting there just now, in fact. I think she likes it because it gives her the high ground (over her entirely fictional competitors) and allows her a commanding view of two rooms and the main hallway. She could pounce down from her mesa and control any situation.
This is the cat startled by anything larger than a moth.
Easy day today. Overslept, and so I missed my opportunity to ride. It was decidedly too warm by mid-morning. I’m going to have to maintain a real schedule in order to get my rides in, it seems.
Cleaned the office a bit, caught up on the site, goofed off with The Yankee and generally had a nice day of it. We were fortunate enough to have shrimp for dinner tonight; there’s nothing wrong in our little corner of the world.
Fifteen easy miles — I coasted on tired legs today — the last four racing home a thunderstorm. I was heading east, rounded a big 90-degree turn to face a big, dark, lightning belching cloud looming to the south. Which was great, because that was the way I needed to go.
So pedal harder, to a red light, onto a road with traffic, and then a long downhill into the light which shall not ever be green. And then back up the last hill to home. I was within sight of my road when the serious raindrops started, so I did just make it back in time.
And I did web site stuff for most of the rest of the day. First here and then on a site I’m doing for an organization and then also the LOMO blog. I’m mostly behind on everything, but I’ll catch up eventually, or it will somehow become prioritized and the least important things will be conveniently overlooked. That is the way of it sometimes.
It was discussed openly and in whispers, over the phone and in the church pews. When it was brought up at school, the curious were quickly shushed. Eventually, the whole thing got pushed aside by other concerns, a bit of nastiness better forgotten, or judged never to have occurred at all.
So it is a rumor, then.
But Madison Phillips says it is true. He says that he and his mother, Annette Singleton, both black, were turned away from a church shelter by a white woman on the afternoon of April 27, the day of the tornadoes. And within hours, Ms. Singleton and two of Madison’s young friends, who had been huddling with him in his house within yards of that church, were dead.
That’s horrible.
There is little agreement about what happened, or whether it happened at all, and the full truth may never be known. Madison says he did not recognize the woman. The only other witness, an older man who is known around town for his frequent run-ins with the law and fondness for alcohol, is saying that he did not see the situation firsthand, but only talked to Madison’s mother as she was coming and going.
So, clearly, this is grounded in solid evidence, unimpeachable by the highest tribunal of fair men and women.
But Madison’s story has stayed consistent, prompting a nagging, uneasy question about what kinds of things are possible, still possible, in a small Southern town.
Assertion does not equal evidence. They’re unfamiliar with this notion in the newsroom, it seems. It goes on for a while, delving in stuff the author doesn’t really care about, but he finally gets back to the important part.
There is a nearly unanimous conviction among blacks here that the incident described by Madison Phillips not only could happen here, but did. Yet there is little vocal outrage.
The whole story goes on like this, trading in speculation, fully admitting that no one knows the answer, only that everyone in town might be racist. There’s a restaurant named Rebel Queen, after all.
One man has an alternative theory.
“Nobody hardly knew her,” said Theodore Branch, 74, who has been the city’s only black council member for 36 years. “If you live here and everybody knows you, it’s a different situation.”
So naturally you don’t hear from him again. What he’s talking about, though:
Ms. Singleton, who was 46, was relatively new to town. She went to church 45 minutes to the southeast in Birmingham. The two boys who died with her, Jonathan and Justin Doss, ages 12 and 10, were from a poor white family who lived in an apartment complex on the outskirts of Cordova, where Madison and his mother had lived until recently.
That’s the 18th paragraph in the story, where the race of the other two victims in a story evoking racism finally landed. Eighteenth. In the business we call that buried.
I leave you with Atticus Rominger, a former reporter with an award-winning pedigree. And, sadly, that’s about the only way you’ll see those storm stories in the media again.
Just for fun:
If I taught public speaking classes I would show this at the beginning of every semester. Somehow, he did not get the nomination.
Hello, Thursday, I’d like you to recall Tuesday. We’re going to add a few more pictures from Tuesday in this space today, and then some more, tomorrow, to round out Wednesday.
This idea didn’t make any more sense when I initially thought of it, either.
We are very high up on the Empire State Building, here:
We met an Auburn man there, too. We had four War Eagle Moments in Manhattan over the last two days, in fact. All four of those stories have been added to that photo blog.
It doesn’t look that high in the picture, but of course this was as high a place as you could stand in the man-made world. And, of course, that’s higher than you should ever hold your phone through the railing for a picture of a shadow.
I have taken this picture before, but the one below is better. I love this stuff:
Like this. That’s great faux-deco.
And the NBC microphone, at Rockefeller Center, took that picture five years ago, too.
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, from high atop Rockefeller Center:
We were able to walk behind the pulpit in St. Pat’s for the first time ever. They had a copy of Pieta there, and the others visiting revered it with a reverence that could only be considered reverence.
I have seen Pieta, at Rome. (The original was by Michelangelo, and it was the only piece he ever signed.) St. Pat’s Pieta is a fine sculpture, but on a scale of one-to-10 Pietas, this is four Pietas at best. According to Wikipedia, the authority of everything Michelangelo, the St. Pat’s version isn’t even an “authorized replica.” This version was built in 1906 by William Ordway Partridge, an American who studied in Florence, Rome and Paris (where he was born).
We learned about this building while on the Circle Line tour on Tuesday:
It was the first skyscraper on the island. Actually, our guide said, they originally called it a cloudscraper, all three stories of it, but they renamed it so people wouldn’t think poorly of the weather. Marketing has deep roots. Behind it, I believe, is the New York Bank Department.
OK, this one needs a bit of background. Our friend Kelly takes pictures of her feet to prove she’s been places. (Ask her why.) Every so often, then, we take pictures of places our feet have been. Here The Yankee shows Kelly the Statue of Liberty. I suppose my picture of her taking a picture is the “making of” photograph. Wendy also took a picture of The Yankee taking a picture of her foot. I took a picture of Wendy taking a picture, which means I also shot the “making of the documentary.”
This was all on the Staten Island Ferry, which we rode over from Manhattan and back for an extra, late evening view of the statue. We rode to Staten Island on the Molinari, who was a congressman and borough president. We rode back on the John F. Kennedy. We passed the S.I. Newhouse, which was named after the historic publisher. I worked for one of his companies for more than four years and walked past some of his offices in Times Square on Tuesday. No getting away from the man. He died in 1979, his son runs the family empire today, at the age of 83. He’s worth billions.
Remember: we’re doing a two-day tour of Manhattan over the course of four days on the blog. The first part of Day One was yesterday, and is found in the previous post. This is, as the title indicates, the first part of Day Two. Day One’s finale is tomorrow, and we’ll wrap up Day Two on Friday. Clear?
Every time we’re in Manhattan we stop to visit St. Patrick’s. Beautiful church. I tried to do a pan-around photo with a free app I downloaded, but I’m still trying to figure it out. I thought I’d nailed it, when looking in the phone, but on the monitor it was full of flaws. So here you go. Also, search around and you’ll find plenty of other mentions of this beautiful church elsewhere on this site.
We also hit The Metropolitan Museum of Art, which we visited only briefly. Just about the time I found the sections I’d like to see it was time to go. Next time, perhaps. Meanwhile, men in armor:
We walked by here at lunch time. I didn’t have the heart to tell all these New Yorkers that chickens don’t really chirp all that much.
Yesterday we checked off an item from Wendy’s list, which was to get a hot dog from a street vendor. Our friend who is from Brooklyn, says street vendors are for tourists. We needed to go here:
And I love everything about the place. I had the depression special, two dogs and a drink for under five bucks. I had the papaya juice, because that’s the name of the place and also because we had a little communication mix up. I was looking for the condiments and he wanted a drink order. But, as a general rule, you can always order the thing similar to the name of a restaurant.
Get the onions on the hot dog. Definitely.
We visited St. Thomas in Manhattan for a service that marks the Eve of the Ascension. St. Thomas is beautiful. And — perhaps an audiophile can discuss this at length — I believe there is such a thing as a perfect acoustic. If St. Thomas doesn’t have it you’d be hard-pressed to find somewhere with a better sound. This is a clip of a small men’s choir singing Bach. There were maybe a dozen men, but they filled their sound filled the entire church.
The picture was taken with the iPhone, the audio was recorded on the sly with a free app called Recorder. This was the first time I’d ever been in a church wearing shorts.
The Yankee got in trouble, though. She got caught trying to record a little of the singing and a priest pointed at her. Very sternly.
The second part of Day One will be here tomorrow. The rest of Day Two, including another museum, a moment of drama and more.
