After a day of committee meetings, and email, and grading, and a bit of class work, I realized that every Friday is like that. Most days are similar. Some days have classes. Not every day has committees.
For a while today was so full, though, that I wrote a To Do list for the afternoon. I’m not a big To Do list guy, but I find that, from time-to-time, it’s an actual productive way to do a bit of cognitive offloading. Plus there’s a little satisfaction of having it all laid out in front of you. Fridays have become a lot of that this semester too: just a big block of uninterrupted time to take on what needs taking on. And, finally, there’s the muted pleasure of scratching a thing off a list. I didn’t use check marks. Didn’t draw a line through an item. I scratched it out aggressively. I don’t know why that is.
Speaking of cognitive offloading, I do a thing in my classes now where I show an AI fail each day. Usually it is an image. I try to find the sports-related one since those are my classes. And I try not to make them all about Google’s AI, which is unrepentantly terrible. If I just showed that thing every day I’d look like I was piling on. Some of these are funny. And sometimes my students ignore them. It is either, I’m not as funny as I think I am — which is not true — or they feel like I’m shaming them about lousy technology that has been marketed to them and they’ve fallen for — which is true, for the most part.
Miguel Angel Gongora Meza, founder and director of Evolution Treks Peru, was in a rural Peruvian town preparing for a trek through the Andes when he overheard a curious conversation. Two unaccompanied tourists were chatting amicably about their plans to hike alone in the mountains to the “Sacred Canyon of Humantay”.
“They [showed] me the screenshot, confidently written and full of vivid adjectives, [but] it was not true. There is no Sacred Canyon of Humantay!” said Gongora Meza. “The name is a combination of two places that have no relation to the description. The tourist paid nearly $160 (£118) in order to get to a rural road in the environs of Mollepata without a guide or [a destination].”
What’s more, Gongora Meza insisted that this seemingly innocent mistake could have cost these travellers their lives. “This sort of misinformation is perilous in Peru,” he explained. “The elevation, the climatic changes and accessibility [of the] paths have to be planned. When you [use] a program [like ChatGPT], which combines pictures and names to create a fantasy, then you can find yourself at an altitude of 4,000m without oxygen and [phone] signal.”
People will trust the weirdest things.
This is lousy op sec, and of course silly on the face of it, and catty to boot. Great reporting from the Star Tribune.
After the day’s work was done, we hoped on our bikes and rode up the road for a miniature group ride with our neighbor. Here I am, out front. Or, rather, here is my view in the one moment when no one was in front of me.
I’m riding with two All-Americans here. One of them a rather recent All American. I’m just trying to stay close to the drafting lines.
Near the end of the ride, on a false flat, there was a tease of a sprint. And then there was a sprint. My lovely bride spun it up, and the many years and thousands of miles riding with her told me instantly what was happening. So I sat on our friend’s wheel. She went to the inside of the lane and tried to take on the three-time Ironman. I was right in her slipstream, waiting. I figured if she got over I was going to counter attack. It would be beautiful. And then she sat up. Our neighbor is pretty new at this, and probably a bit stronger than she realized, but the other person in that photo is pretty fierce.
So I finished third, which is a perfectly fine way to start the weekend.
Here’s a photo I shot in the backyard tonight. The bright one, low and just between the tree crowns, is Jupiter. The second largest thing in our solar system, itself larger than what our puny little brains can contemplate — and pretty small itself, in the larger scheme of things — is just hanging right there. It’s bright enough to be captured by a cell phone camera, even as a little smear of light.
You know that big red spot on Jupiter? That’s a storm. It’s been raging away, a single storm, for at least almost 200 years. This is the view when Voyager approached in 1979.
That was just two years after Voyager 1 launched. And now, 46 years later, the probe is the thing we’ve cast farthest into the night. Voyager 1 began the summer 15.5 billion miles from home. Scientists predict it will be one light day from Earth in November of next year. If distance is success, it is more successful than anything that we’ll launch in our lifetimes.
Sometime, in the next 10 years, for any one of a variety of reasons, we’ll lose contact and control of Voyager 1 forever.
Which is a lot to think about, when you’re just standing out back. What is far away? And what is farther than that?
It immediately tried to tell me that Ohio State and The Most Definitely Back Longhorns are archrivals. I don’t expect a distributor of ones and zeros to know this, but five games played across 20 years does not an arch rivalry make.
Incidentally, Google’s Gemini got that right. The preceding is a sentence seldom uttered or typed.
ChatGPT goes on, trying to summarize a key point from random games. I didn’t ask for specifics, so it is guessing that I’d care about Michigan’s big day rushing against New Mexico. Justice Haynes tallied 159 rushing yards and three scores against the Lobos, a team that was 126th in rushing defense last year. It presumes I also had a peculiar interest on Nebraska’s Dylan Raiola. It tells me he threw two TD passes against UTEP. But…the Cornhuskers played Cincinnati, not UTEP. (UTEP fell to Utah State.) Dylan Raiola is a QB at Lincoln, and he did throw two TDs, though. ChatGPT mentions Purdue’s 31-0 “statement win.” That was a 31-0 trouncing of Ball State. If that’s a statement in West Lafayette this year, the Boilermakers are in for another horribly long season.
The point I’d like to make here is that I randomly picked three of the bullets ChatGPT offered me. One is wrong on the face of it; another is lacking any of the nuance your football hating relative could have brought to the conversation. Also, I spent three minutes Googling all of that to check its work.
Go ahead and subscribe to that newsletter. I’ve got an idea for another piece for next week.
Today on campus I had my second classes. Criticism and org comm — most of the students came back and some new ones came in. In criticism, we did our first high altitude pass of what media criticism is about, and started to speculate on why it is important. In org comm, we announced our fantasy football teams. We’re going to play football as part of our larger classroom experience. In groups of three or four they’ll all run a franchise and apply the things we learn across the semester. Some of these people are very eager to do this, which is great.
I gave both classes my second off-topic lecture. I do this three times a term. The first day, Tuesday, I talked about my hope of helping students discover the joy of learning. I do that by talking about a former student who is doing some really incredible things out in the world, simply because she wanted to take on new things.
Today, we talked about being safe around cyclists. We have a vested interest in this, of course. I told them about Johnny and Matthew Gaudreau, which was just a year ago last week. They know of it, being that they were local boys and Johnny was a big time hockey hero and Matthew was, to a different degree. But they don’t know the details. So I share a little of that, and then point out that in a few weeks my lovely bride and I will celebrate the third anniversary of her horrible accident after a tangle with a pickup truck. Three ribs, shoulder blade, destroyed collarbone, muscular damage and a concussion. It took her more than a year to get back to her normal quality of life.
I used to give this lecture, I told them, a bit differently. I used to tell students that I won’t say what color bike I ride, or what color my helmet is, because I want you to be safe around all the cyclists you might meet. And remember, I’d say to them, one of them might be me. And I have your grade in the palm of my hand.
I would do this with my very dry sense of humor, putting my right index finger in my left hand for syllabic emphasis. In the palm. Of my hand. At the end of one semester a young woman said to me that I got into her head with that, and it made her nervous every time she saw a cyclist. That wasn’t my goal, so now I explain the whole joke.
And now I’ll hope they give cyclists and others more room when they pass.
Next week I’ll start a class by saying “Who here drives a …” whatever car gets too close to be between now and then. I’ll drive this point home all term. I’m changing attitudes a few dozen people at a time. I wonder if they’d be willing to listen to me go on and on about Voyager 1.
For a grading break, and before an afternoon and early evening meeting, we went to the Museum of the American Revolution. It’s one of those things you wonder why I waited so long to do. And it’s one of those days where my lovely bride braced herself when she said, “What time should we go?” There was that meeting we had to attend, so we were backtiming the day.
I said I’d found that if you want to read things you could spend a three hours there.
And this is where it pays off to do things with a person who knows what’s in your heart, but are afraid to say out loud. This incredible woman bought tickets for 10 a.m., which would give us more than four hours at the museum.
Worth it. And we didn’t even get to see one of the rooms. But here’s a quick look at some of what we saw.
Outside, because of course you must start outside, there are modern brick walls, nondescript, but for this sculpture.
(This is the first of three panoramas in this post. And it’s beautiful. Click to embiggen.)
This is a really, really fine museum. But there are a few silly things. For tactile people, like me, there are a few things you can touch. You remember reading about the Stamp Act. Here’s an oversized stamp you can touch. It is made of plastic.
There are a few areas where they’re trying to create an immersive experience. You walk under a recreation of a Liberty Tree, where you can touch a bit of wood salvaged (and preserved) from an actual Liberty Tree, the last surviving Liberty Tree, which was felled by a hurricane in 1999 in Maryland.
Pasted up in some of those areas are reproductions of handbills that the revolutionary-era people might have seen. This one was printed by E. Russell, who notes his shop is set up “next the Cornfield, Union-street.”
E. Russell was Ezekiel Russell, a printer of minor importance. He apprenticed under his brother, and then bounced around New England trying to make his business work. For a time he dabbled in auctioneering, but he returned to slinging the lead. He wrote a royalist publication for a time, but history seems to think that he just needed the money. Most of his work is remembered as small pamphlets. His wife, Sarah Russell worked in the print shop, and took over the business after he died in 1796. She’s remembered as a pioneer of female publishing.
And before we get too far into this, let me direct you to Museum’s site, for a look at what they consider the crown jewel of the collection, which they don’t let allow you to photograph, George Washington’s war tent. It’s a living piece of history, lived in during war and well documented in peace, it is a piece of linen that’s 250 years old, so there’s no flashes or bright lights allowed.
You’ll see a few glimpses of it, and the mini-doc that visitors watch before seeing the tent, in this video.
Washington didn’t sleep in it every night during the war, but that tent got it’s share of use. It makes sense that this is well protected, but you still want to walk under those flaps when you see it. You want to stand there, and try to understand the sense of the size of the space, and the great men — scared, cold, hungry, determined — that stood there.
This is the second panorama in the post, and this is thought to be George Washington’s sword. And, remarkably, it’s just … sitting there.
(Click to embiggen.)
When they read the Declaration of Independence in New York City on July 9, 1776, some of the soldiers and sailors tore down symbols of the king. British flags, tavern signs, the royal insignia, were all removed. Including a statue of George III, that had been sculpted in London. Much of the statue — he’d been riding a horse, wearing a Roman-style toga — was carried off to Connecticut and melted into musket balls, some 42,000 in all. A few fragments of the statue survived.
They’ve dug some musket balls out of a few battlefields that matched the composition of lead and tin here, so historians think some of this statue was sent back to the British in anger.
The Declaration of Independence was distributed, by design and format, as a fragile thing. John Dunlap was the original printer, in Philadelphia. It is thought that he printed about 200, some of them in great haste. Just 26 copies of the Dunlap broadsides are known to survive. (Including one that was found behind a painting picked up for $4 at a flea market in 1989!) The Library of Congress has two of the Dunlap originals, and only one of those is complete.
I got to see one of the Dunlap broadsides in a museum exhibit in 2003. No photographs allowed.
This is not a Dunlap broadside.
John Gill, Edward E. Powars, and Nathaniel Willis printed the first copies of the Declaration in Boston, both in newspapers and in this broadside. This is a second printing of the Gill and Powars broadside. (The bottom line is the differentiating clue.)
Historians don’t know how many of their broadsides were made or survive. But you can still go to the print shop when you’re in Boston. (I’m going there.) A master printer, Gary Gregory, does historical reproductions in the traditional style. (I’m going to talk him into letting me print a copy.)
Ssshhhhh … I think this one is a reproduction, but it is historically faithful version of that second printing. It even has the Gill and Powars errors off the Dunlap original. I wonder how much thought the museum or other experts give to the amount of creases and wear should be worked into reproductions.
General Hugh Mercer fought and was killed at the Battle of Princeton. Born in Scotland, Mercer was a surgeon during the Jacobin uprising in his homeland. He fled to Pennsylvania, in 1747, after the Jacobites were put down. He worked as an apothecary, and then served in the French and Indian War in the 1750s. He was wounded twice, once badly, and he became George Washington’s lifelong friend, moving to Virginia to dispense medicine there, and then came the American Revolution, where he quickly was appointed as a general in the Pennsylvania militia.
He and his men, a vanguard of some 350 soldiers, ran across two British regiments and some attached cavalry. Mercer’s horse was shot from under him. The British thought he was Washington, and so they moved in and demanded he surrender. Mercer, instead, drew his sword. He was bayoneted seven times and left for dead.
You’ve seen the painting that commemorates his death. And maybe history is like that sometimes. A high profile person was killed, and he was well-liked enough to become the centerpiece of John Turnbull’s first war painting. (When you look at the painting, you see Washington arriving on horseback. In the foreground Mercer was wounded. But you don’t see Hugh’s face. Turnbull used Mercer’s son, Hugh Jr., as a model.)
Mercer survived the battlefield. He lived, in agony, for a little more than a week. He gave this sword to his friend and adjutant, a Welshman named Jacob Morgan, and it stayed in their family for two generations. The photo above, the sword is paired with a bayonet that belonged to one of the units that Mercer ran across on that fateful day.
This is the hilt of his sword, posthumously engraved.
“Sword of General Hugh Mercer of the Revolutionary Army born in Aberdeen Scotland 1725 He came to Philadelphia from Scotland in 1746. Died January 12 1777 of wounds received at the Battle of Princeton, N.J.”
A handsome, large weapons display. Touch the screens to learn about each of the items in this giant case.
On the left you see weapons that were commonly in action from 1775 to 1777. Some, the display notes, were local, some captured, some left over from previous conflicts. On the right are weapons that show up later in the war, including some standardized French weapons were so important in the fighting.
I wonder if historians and docents got a little giddy putting all of those things on display.
And why is this humble little canteen just as intriguing?
The UStates branding suggests it belonged to the Continental Army, somewhere around 1777. The other initials might be people who carried the thing.
The every day items are just as fascinating as all of the big ticket items here.
These buttons adorned soldiers’ coats. They also date to 1777.
The museum then, note that gunpowder casks in 1776 also were stamped with USA, but these coat buttons, 25 per coat, were the first widespread use.
Archeologists found these all over the place at Valley Forge and other camps.
There’s a naval section. More pamphlets set the scene.
Here, friend, learn this MANLY SONG, and then join the American fleet. “A privateering we will go my boys, a privateering we will go!”
I wonder when they had time to do much sailing, singing 10 verses of this MANLY SONG. You know it’s MANLY because of all of the bravely dying and cheerfully dying going on in this song. Between this, and my 2009 experience learning about what life was like aboard the U.S.S. Constitution I don’t think the sailor’s life would have been for me.
That exhibit tells of 14-year-old free African American James Forten who volunteered aboard a privateer ship. He survived the war, became a prominent abolitionist, a wealthy Philadelphia businessman and the head of a hugely prominent regional family name.
This is the flag of the 2nd Spartan Regiment of South Carolina. The sign says that this is the first time it has been displayed since it flew over arms.
This sword belonged to Maj. Gen. Benjamin Lincoln, Washington’s second-in-command at Yorktown. Yorktown was where the British surrendered, you might recall. When General Cornwallis sent his second-in-command to surrender, Washington sent Lincoln to receive him.
This is a panorama.
(Click to embiggen.)
One of my ancestors, a great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather according to online genealogy, was at Yorktown. He was born in 1751 in colonial Virginia, served twice in the militia and helped guard an estimated 500 British prisoners after they quit the field in Yorktown.
There’s also an ax head on display with Lincoln’s sword. The continental soldiers used axes like that to chop their way through British fortifications at Yorktown. (If you were wondering, Benjamin Lincoln was apparently the fourth cousin, three times removed, of Abraham Lincoln through his mother’s side.)
These beautiful buttons, the sign says, were sold as souvenirs of George Washington’s 1789 inauguration as president. They were sewn onto clothing.
Don’t you want a copy of each of those? (Real ones, of course. Not repros. Never repros.)
Just read the text on this sign. Go ahead and read it. I’ll be waiting on the other side of the photo.
“Charges spread through the partisan press that the state’s inclusive voter laws encouraged election fraud.”
We’ve been fighting this same stupid “Can’t let ’em vote, that’s how cheating happens” battle for more than 200 years. We’ve been fighting it because it is powerfully effective rhetoric. It’s nothing more than that, but still we are fighting it
At the end of the part of the museum we saw — because we didn’t get to see everything today, despite four hours! — there was a section of digitized reproductions of photographs of Revolutionary War era Americans. (Much later in life, obviously.)
Jonathan Harrington had seem some things. (And if I knew this story beforehand I would taken a more careful photo.) Harrington was, at 16, a fifer in a company at the battles of Lexington and Concord. His uncle and namesake was killed at Lexington, the boy escaped, only to rally and reengage the enemy soon after.
And, lastly, Daniel Bakeman, at a remarkable 109, was the last survivor receiving a veteran’s pension for service in the American Revolutionary War. If you believe his story, that is. It seems he might have served in some militia units. And then was a teamster for the military, then became a farmer in New York.
He had difficulty proving his service, but was eventually judged credible for pension purposes. Congress, on February 14, 1867, passed a special act which granted Bakeman a pension of $500 a year. Presumably he collected that twice before dying in 1869. Two other men were his last contemporaries to be pensioned for the Revolutionary War. By that point in the late 1860s the government was busy fending off requests from Civil War soldiers. (We have a history of treating our patriots poorly.)
My (apparently) great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was not on the photo display. Of course I looked. But here he is.
He is buried in Illinois, in some woods between two fields, an all-but-forgotten family plot, I’d guess. He was laid to rest in a place that, even now, is quite rural. That photo, if it is indeed the man, would have been taken sometime in the first five years of the Daguerreotype style of photographs, and he would have been between 89 and 93 there.
There was the eeriest light in the sky and on the trees this evening. The rain clouds came in from the west at the same time as the sun was going down. The photos don’t capture it, but it doesn’t matter. We need the rain that’s coming in now.
The grass will approve. Of the rain, not the last of the leaking light. And so will the flowers. They’ll be interested in the rain, though the flowers will miss the light a bit. They do love to show out.
This giant hibiscus is always looking for an audience.
And the hydrangea, a bit more understated, deserves some attention too.
There are other plants and flowers to see. I’ll try to show you some more in the next few days.
Usually, that’s a code for yard work. That is the case this time, as well. Fortunately, the heat wave is about to break. I will try to get philosophical about it this time. The yard work, not the temperatures.
We return once again to We Learn Wednesdays, the feature where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 41st installment, and the 73rd marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.
The only reason I’m counting is to see where this ends up. I started from a database and I know how many markers are on that list, but I’m not sure how I’m going to reach that number. But not to worry! There’s still plenty to see! Light helps with that.
The Finns Point Range lights served as a point of entry and exit for maritime traffic between the Delaware Bay and River. In 1950, after the Army Corps of Engineers dredged the channel to 800 feet wide and 40 feet deep, the Finns Point Rangelights became obsolete.
Erected in 1876 for the U.S. Lighthouse Service at a cost of $1,200, the Finns Point Rear Range Light is constructed of wrought iron as opposed to cast iron typically used in similar towers. Wrought iron was considered ideal for a tall structure exposed to both high winds and elements because of its resistance to corrosion and stress fractures.
Prior to automating the lamp in 1939, imagine the lighthouse keeper climbing each of the 130 steps to the top twice each day – once at night to light the lamp and again in the morning to extinguish the flame.
Efforts to Save the Lighthouse
In the years following its decommissioning, the Finns Point Rear Range Light went through a period of neglect, and the lighthouse keepers home burned to the ground. The toolshed is believed to be all that remains.
Through the efforts of a local citizens group called the “Save the Lighthouse Committee” and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Finns Point Rear Range Light was restored in 1983. Today, the lighthouse is part of the Supawna Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.
The light gets its name from the 17th century Finnish colonists who settled there in the 1630s. Jump forward 200-plus years, Congress put $55,000 for two pairs of lights to help navigation. This was the second light, the rear range light.
The Kellogg Bridge Company of Buffalo, New York made the parts for this tower, and it was all shipped by rail and then carried by mules. It was designed to be higher than the first, to aid with visibility and navigation, which was placed one-and-a-half miles inland. That front range light was put in a spot prone to flooding. Today you can only get there by boat. Eventually, river dredging made the lights obsolete, so that front range light was razed in 1939.
At the rear range, over half a century, four people were in charge, Edward Dickinson (1876 – 1907), Laura Dickinson (1907 – 1908), Charles W. Norton (1908 – 1916), and Milton A. Duffield (1916 – 1933). Laura was probably Edward’s wife. But that’s just my guess based on what usually happened when the head keeper died or could no longer keep up the work. His family would keep the lights going — this was a serious business — until a new head keeper could be hired.
Sometimes they kept the job for years. Not all of the women who did this work inherited the role, but these were some of the few jobs available to women in the government that weren’t secretarial. The Coast Guard records several women who worked on various lights for decades. Just a few of them: Julia F. Williams in California, 1865-1905, Catherine A. Murdock in New York, 1857-1907, Maria Younghans, Biloxi, Mississippi, 1867-1918, Ida Lewis in Rhode Island, 1857-1911, Kathleen Moore in Connecticut, 1817-1878. Who knows how much good they did for safety and commerce. Between them, the last two women are credited with saving almost 50 lives between them.
That local preservation group the sign mentioned wanted to move the light to a park, but that project failed. They did get it put on the National Register of Historic Sites in 1978.
After the restoration in the ’80s, the tower was opened to limited touring. In 2004, a re-creation of the keeper’s dwelling was built as part of the property. Today it serves as an office for Supawna Meadows Wildlife Refuge.
I’m feeling mostly better, thanks. Progress is progressive, and I’ll take every positive signal possible. Now, it takes twice as long for the fatigue to kick in, and so on. By next week, or perhaps next month or next year, I’ll be approaching the maximum allowable approach to 100 percent.
This allows for time, which I am told must be accounted for. I don’t necessarily agree with that. One could say I don’t believe it, because I don’t believe it. I’m sitting in this chair and I feel great!
I only believe in time when I must crawl around on my knees for something.
That’s not entirely true. I only believe it when I have to stand up, after crawling around on my knees.
A wise person learns when to be careful of one person’s criticism. A singular critique, no matter how nuanced, no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how accurate from an independent perspective, is just that.
It’s something news leaders should really do some soul searching about. Are we doing our job of informing the American public so that they can do their job of voting in an informed way? If many people don’t know the facts, the media needs to take some responsibility for that.
That’s Margaret Sullivan, the former editor of The Buffalo News, where she was also the vice president. She is the former public editor of the New York Times (a position they axed, wholesale, a while back, for times just like these) and media columnist for the Washington Post. Sullivan is the executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics and Security at Columbia University and is currently doing some terrific work for The Guardian. I’m not being critical of Sullivan, indeed I agree with her here.
But there’s two things here. Three things. First, she’s 100 percent correct.
Second, that this is a position we are in, that this is a thing that needs to be said — and ignored — says a great deal. We shouldn’t have to be doing this sort of soul searching, because we should already be doing this sort of soul searching. The responsibility is baked in and, often, ignored. This is the civic duty in which we were all trained, and which is now so often put aside for clicks, subscriptions, outrage. Dismissed for access, favor and larger corporate interests. The business model, in this configuration, hamstrings itself and everyone dependent upon it.
Third, and the less obtrusive, point, now that I’ve given you a thumbnail of Sullivan’s impressive bona fides: who are the news leaders here? Hers is only one pen, and she is well regarded by her peers. Sullivan does her part in trying to set tone. This interview with Public Notice, a quality independent outlet, furthers that conversation somewhat. At least she uses “We.” There’s a complicity in the problem, and she knows it. (And, if you read that, you do to, now.) For a media critic to have a criticism is proper. For it to go unheeded, for the sake of a dollar, with so much at stake, is a dereliction of civic responsibility.
Separately, but also related …
Some 16 years ago (give or take), there was this notion that companies and events would hire journalists to cover their programming.*
Mingling with the top brass and world leaders at the NATO summit in Washington this week will be some fresher faces on a unique mission: social media influencers recruited to improve NATO’s image with young people.
NATO invited 16 content creators from member nations including Belgium, Canada, the United States and Britain to attend the summit. The United States is running its own social media mission in support. An additional 27 creators were invited to the summit by the Defense Department and the State Department, which last year became the first Cabinet-level agency to establish a team dedicated to partnerships with digital content creators.
The creators have large followings on platforms including TikTok, YouTube and Instagram, and cover topics ranging from politics to national security to news, current events and pop culture. In the space of 48 hours this week, a band of creators met with top officials from the most powerful institutions in D.C., including the Pentagon and State Department. At the White House, they met with John Kirby, President Biden’s national security communications adviser. At least two creators were granted interviews with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.
The tools, of course, exist to reach desired audiences directly. And now an enterprising entity can. This will come with varied results, of course. Some such influencers may have a great grasp of their subject matter. Perhaps more than a parachuting journalist. This could be useful. Some could have less. This could become propaganda.
Think on that awhile. With the news media diminished, and avenues to the public zeitgeist easily and readily available, what are the best approaches for an agency or nation-state to deliver its message? And who defines “best?”
It’s a brave new world out there, where the Huxleyan and the Orwellian meet.
*Yes! Our best media thinkers invented corporate hack stringers for everyone!
We went for a bike ride with one of The Yankee’s running groups. She’s running with two groups. One of them has a subset of people who do triathlons. And, once a week, they do a brick workout. They go out for a ride, and then they run.
So we went to that nearby town. Parked at one of the group member’s houses, and went out for a ride. This was the ride before the group ride. We just went … that way for a while, and then turned around to go back for the group ride.
So it was a warmup ride. Also the headwinds were about 15-20 miles per hour. I worked quite hard to stay on her wheel.
And then came the group ride. They all just go out … that way … at their own pace for a fixed time. The diea is that they all return to the starting place at roughly the same time for a quick run. I am not running just now — I’ll get back to it one of these days — so I just kept riding into those headwinds.
When I turned around, I saw some bramble berries, so I stopped and had a few of those. Anyway, it all turned into a nice two hours. A 36-mile ride that felt pretty good after my recent almost-illness.
From today’s adventure, to a previous bike ride, then.
It’s time once more for We Learn Wednesdays, where we discover the county’s historical markers via bike rides. This is the 40th installment, and the 72nd marker in the We Learn Wednesdays series.
The state really should get around to updating some of these signs …
Pea Patch Island Heronry is the largest Atlantic Coast nesting ground north of Florida for wading birds. Originally a dredge disposal site, this vegetated high ground has been a nesting habitat for nine species of wading birds since the 1970s. It is one of the few protected areas available for these birds. Pea Patch Island supports between 5,000 and 12,000 breeding pairs annually.
Wading birds are highly social and thrive in noisy crowded colonies. However, the habitat available for these birds is being threatened by oil spills, industrial pollution, and pesticides. Protecting the heronry is critical to the survival of these species. By observing the population of these wading birds, the health of the wetland can be determined. A low population can be an early warning sign of environmental changes in these areas.
The heronry shares Pea Patch Island with historic Fort Delaware. It is a designated nature preserve with limited access and is managed by the Division of Parks and Recreation.
Local folklore has it that a boat loaded with peas that ran aground on a mud shoal in the 1770s. The spilled peas sprouted, mud caught in the vines, and so the island grew. Today they call it Pea Patch Island.
The seasonal ferry will take you there. And that’s what the heronry marker is about, ultimately.
As for the island on which it sits, In 1794, the island appeared on a map from the first time. Around that same time Pierre L’Enfant — you remember that name, he designed Washington D.C. — suggested that the island should be used as river defense. The installation burned in the 1830s. A new fort there became a prison camp during the Civil War. Pea Patch Island was only about 75 acres in size at the time. It was abandoned in the 1870s, but briefly came back to life during the Spanish-American War, and saw some service in World War I and World War II. It got larger in the interim. Earth dredged from the river was dumped onto and around the island in 1906, giving it the modern size, about 300 acres.
It’s a state park. There’s the fort, and the birds, and that’s it.
The marker, above, also features illustrations of some of the birds you’ll find there, and their approximate nest heights.
Great Blue Heron (50 feet, tall trees)
Black-Crowned Night Heron (15 feet, small trees)
Little Blue Heron (1-2 feet, shrubs)
Great Egret (40 feet, tall trees)
Snowy Egret (5 feet, shrubs)
Yellow-Crowned Night Heron (30 feet, small trees)
Cattle Egret (3 feet, shrubs)
Tri-Colored Heron (2 feet, shrubs)
Glossy Ibis (low shrubs)
If you go over to Pea Patch Island, take your bug spray.
