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cycling / Friday / photo / Twitter / video — Comments Off on Wrapping up this week
5
Jun 20

Wrapping up this week

There are a few Eastern Tiger Swallowtails (Papilio glaucus) down at the lake. I’ve seen them flying around and play-fighting a few times. Photographing butterflies is easy with a proper camera. If you’re using your phone you have to be first, sneaky, and, then, lucky. And I was almost one of those two things today:

That was while The Yankee was getting in her laps, though one doesn’t really do laps in a lake. She’s doing concentric shapes, and always improving the open-water swim. It’s the opportunity found in all of the pool closings. Plus, butterflies.

And, now, some scenes from today’s bike ride.

It was a light week, so we only rode two hours today. That is a thing you say, sometimes. It is one part posturing. “Yep. Light day, just two hours.” It is also one part something you can be incredulous about: “I’m not even training for anything and this was a light day and it was two hours.” Or you could be incredulous in another way, as I was: “It took me how long to go that far?”

Anyway, today’s route was a simplification of the recent Friday regular. We just went out a ways and then turned around and retraced the route. Instead of making the big circle, or having the one proper climb in it, we went close to the lake. All of the fun, without the refreshing water views or the dreadful climb after.

It was good, then it wasn’t. Then it was all over the place, which is what usually happens with my rides, so it was good. Except for the parts that aren’t.

I went through one little slice of town and set out for more rural communities and pedaled 55 minutes in one direction, at which point I turned around, figuring that’d the reverse course would set me up at one hour and 50 minutes, which was, I think, the goal, and my understanding of math. And the math worked out, perfectly, before I added an extra mile or so at the end to put a unique finish on a regular route.

Now we just have to find some long flat routes around here. (We won’t.)

Much more on Twitter today, like …

Be sure to check me out on Instagram and listen to the On Topic with IU podcasts, as well. And have a great weekend!

Bloomington / history / hobby / Indiana / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Fossils
4
Jun 20

Fossils

Here are some crinoids I picked up last weekend. I was wondering down by the creek bed enjoying myself quite nicely and it quickly became a scavenger hunt. Right there at my feet I found three of these at a glance. Why, then, I had to wonder around a bit to discover a few more.

Old seaborne fossils. Or, around these parts, definitely freshwater fossils. You can find them most anywhere that has water, seems like. Why do I still pick them up? Why do I bring them back to the house to take pictures of them?

These are, I believe, crotalocrinites. They are the sort I’ve always found. They are extinct now, but they appeared about 300 million years before the dinosaurs.

I’ve just discovered, online, there are star-shaped fossiles called pentacrinites. I want to find some of those.

Let’s jump in the time machine, though, and move up a few hundred million years. I pulled back the break lever just a bit too soon, however, and we’ve stopped 103 years before. It’s June 4, 1917. What’s going on in the world?

Oh. That. So the summer before there was a massive sabotage in New York. And two weeks after this Congress passed the Espionage Act, something Woodrow Wilson had been on them about for several years. I can’t find any details today about this person. So we’ll just have to be satisfied with these news briefs:

The next day you had to go sign up for the draft. Married men couldn’t duck it. You’ve already seen that peaceful registrations were predicted. And we now from earlier editions of the paper that several American men, even some locals, are going off to war in some capacity or another. Just down the page there’s a brief listing another handful of names. In New York, when the draft went into play, it was anything but peaceful. So, I’m sure, people were hoping for the best.

There are two creeks on either side of us that have these names.

And while people are out surveying damage, and you’re reading in another column the news that a former local who had moved to Illinois just had his house destroyed in the storms, you get this little ad:

A.H. Beldon had been a grocer. By the teens, he was doing insurance. He made it to 80 or 81 and died in 1939, the same year as his wife. Their son flew planes for the Army in World War I, in Texas, it looks like. That guy’s son served in the Army during World War II.

Enoch Hogate had some paralysis, and then he did not. Much improved was he, a relief to all it was.

Hogate had joined the law school in 1903 and served as the dean from 1906 to 1918. He also had a turn in the state senate prior to all of that.

Polio caused paralysis. I wonder if that’s what it was. He passed away in 1924.

This was the vessel, The Success. It was not built in 1790, but rather 1840. It was not a prison ship, unless it was. Sometimes Internet searches are contradictory. Anyway, it was by now a museum ship. A good fraud well executed, from the looks of things.

She was scuttled in 1891, re-floated the next year, restored and then sailed to England. In 1912 the vessel came to the U.S. and returned to cargo service in 1917, after which it sank. It was re-floated and turned into a museum in 1918, appeared at the Chicago World Fair and fell apart. The Success was to be scrapped on Lake Erie, but it sank for a third time. Someone pulled it up again in 1945 and it promptly ran ashore. In 1946 there was a fire that consumed it. The moral to that story, I guess, is don’t make up a fake history about your ship.

Get ’em a camera!

I wonder if they’re still hiring …

The second and third pages of the four-page rag were just poorly scanned photos of the graduating high school class, which is why we jump immediately to the scolding baby.

Look, baby, nobody likes a scold.

This one had a column jump, which is why it looks weird at the top. But let’s get a load of those people. George Washington Henley had graduated from the law school here three years prior. He went into private practice and got married soon after.

The well-known home boy would serve as a state lawmaker for a decade and, later, sat on the state Supreme Court bench for two months. He was a replacement until the end of a term, but he didn’t want to stay on. He needed to get back to his own clients and he just wanted, Wikipedia says, the prestige. He died in 1965 and was eulogized by the university president. His wife survived him by a dozen years, and was living in California when she passed away.

This is why you should keep Googling names. One of the attendants of their wedding was Paul Feltus. He would become a newspaper editor, witnessed and reported on the atomic bomb tests in 1946 and served as a board member for the university. He wrote four silent film scripts, served in the artillery in World War I and was a colonel in the state guard in the 1940s.

Now, a life of 81 years can’t be distilled into a paragraph, but a paragraph like that hints at an interesting life.

Because the second and third pages were poor artifacts, and because the last page was torn right through the copy, you’re getting a second wedding announcement.

This was Melvin’s second wife. His first died young after just six months of marriage. She was ill most of that time. They had 17 years of unalloyed happiness, I hope. His second wife had a child and died in her 40s, in 1934. Fender kept on farming, retired, and passed away in 1958 at 74.

OK, “Bobby.”

I spent a lot of time looking into this ad. I’m not sure Bobby was a real person.

IU / photo / podcast / site / Wednesday — Comments Off on Give this a listen
3
Jun 20

Give this a listen

Today is going to be brief, because I have decided to take a bit of this day away from this glowing machine. So here’s a flower from a recent walk.

And if the photos look a bit larger around here today, they should. I decided to change the default photo size earlier this week. Mondays, first of the month and all of that. Usually these sorts of changes are made in August, in honor of the anniversary of the place. And, who knows, I have this vague idea that I’ve done this before and that somewhere along the way I forgot that and reverted to the older habit. Habits are like that sometimes.

Said the guy who knows he’s got too many of them.

I talked with sociologist Jessica Calarco today. She students social and socioeconomic inequities and their impacts on families, children and school. It seemed a good set up for the end of the school year, when the state’s school experts are expected to make their first announcements about next fall later this week. She gave us a really great interview.

I have at least three of them lined up for next week. More school issues, more economic issues, and who knows what else may appear. You should just go ahead and subscribe so you can get the latest episodes as they are released.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

journalism / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Let us all be upset together
2
Jun 20

Let us all be upset together

I don’t know who needs this — goes the well-meaning message on social media, which was instantly copied to the point of becoming a satirical meme all it’s own — but here are a few seconds of quiet video of the creek.

We walked down there on Sunday. Kids play there. Sometimes little, sometimes small. Always it’s fun. It’s a place filled with the screams and the shrieks and the joy of families doing things that young families should be doing. It’s a place where people create soggy memories and stay cool and promote wonder and it’s all free, because it’s a stream. The cost seems to be trampled grass, and occasionally a bit of litter, but someone keeps this area nice and tidy.

And sometimes, like that little moment there, it is nice a quiet.

It was a nice and warm summer day today, 89 degrees and definitely not spring any more.

It was slow, except for the swift parts, which only punctuated the slow parts. Highlighting them, if you will.

We’re going to talk about the news.

First, look at the source. Ahead of Trump Bible photo op, police forcibly expel priest from St. John’s church near White House RNS is an 86-year-old outlet and it is affiliated with no less than the Missouri School of Journalism. This is a place with history and bona fides. And there’s a lot more to that carnival you saw last night than you realize.

The church appeared to be completely abandoned.

It was, in fact, abandoned, but not by choice: Less than an hour before Trump’s arrival, armored police used tear gas to clear hundreds of peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Square park, which is across the street from the church.

Authorities also expelled at least one Episcopal priest and a seminarian from the church’s patio.

“They turned holy ground into a battleground,” said the Rev. Gini Gerbasi.

Bishop Budde, who oversees that church, got in front of The Washington Post immediately. She called in to CNN and they cut off a three-way panel, in fact interrupted a retired three-star general mid-sentence, to express her outrage. And here she is on PBS:

Much of the talk is about clearing out that path for this gigantic overreach — there’s no two ways around this, the administration overreached and it’s hard to imagine them not realizing it almost immediately — and it should be. And people see the violence in New York, California, Philadelphia. I also watched really spotty coverage of riots that followed peaceful protests in my hometown early this morning in anger and despair. I also watched a reporter I know there get mugged by looters. And this happening in smaller towns, too.

In Little Rock, like a lot of places, reporters are catching it from all sides:

Not for nothing, but that would have been me 18 years ago. It could be my peers and friends and former students today. It could be my students tomorrow.

This is a paragraph or two after we should remind ourselves what terrible injustice brought that on and why we are here. Let’s remember who brought us here. And those authorities are doing this too:

They’re doing it in great numbers. When police across the country know that people are watching them more closely than ever, this has been their reaction. That’s instructive.

160 Threats to Press Freedom in the United States—This Week (Part I):

In this spreadsheet, I identify 160 threats to press freedom that have transpired amid the George Floyd protests in the United States this week.

Let’s note: Not every item is equal in gravity. Some instances are simple and you may be well reasoned to wonder “How could the police avoided that?” Others are serious violations of press freedom by an over-militarized state.

I include arrests, police beatings, pepper spraying, shootings with rubber bullets or other projectiles, incidents where police forced journalists to the ground, forced them into pepper spray, or wrongly denied them certain access.

[…]

Many of the incidents I document came after or seemingly because journalists identified themselves as press. Many had press badges on, gave verbal indications, wore press vests or helmets—and many were blatantly ignored or targeted for that.

It’s going to get worse. It’s going to get better. There’ll be no rhythm or reason to how it waxes and wanes, this pain and this anguish. But so long as we’re referring to American cities as “battle spaces” and, God, help us from that, and this sort of thing is taking place …

It’ll keep happening. And let’s let this ring with the clarity of the bells: This is happening to all of us.

Monday / photo / running / swimming — Comments Off on So June, huh? That’s one way to start.
1
Jun 20

So June, huh? That’s one way to start.

Well hello there and happy Junevembertoberuary. I’m working on wrapping up week 12 at home. And this is where I would say I am doing well and we are blessed and all of that is true. All of that is very true. I’ve been to a grocery store a few times and we visit the drive through at Chick-fil-A on Saturdays and had some nice bike rides, but otherwise it has been right here. And I won’t complain! I can’t complain. Everything within our immediate reach is peachy keen while so many things beyond our grasp seem so far beyond our grasp.

There’s a lot to write and a lot of questions and worry and anger today, and there should be. A badly hurting world became something altogether worse tonight while we were on a one-hour bike ride. So quickly were things moving that I asked a friend what exactly was taking place that I managed to get caught up before he did. And then we sat aghast and in worry the rest of the night, as many people did. These next few weeks will try us. We must not be found wanting, when clearly so many people are.

The other day Poseidon help me work on a ceiling fan. He’s big on team efforts:

Did the fan get fixed? No. I blame the cat.

The fan is fine, but it does make a nice creaking nose. So we will continue to try to balance the thing. It’s only a problem for the few minutes when you’re really trying to go to sleep. And when it isn’t a problem it is really out of your mind. It’s a metaphor for life!

Phoebe does not care about your literary tricks. She is only concerned about getting in your path of travel and getting pets. And trying to stick her head through the spindles on the handrail for some reason.

This was a custom photo. The Yankee wanted one of her hiding and in preparation of attacking the laser. The dot can’t see her, you see, on account of her incredibly low profile. Laser dots, traditionally, scan the horizon as their primary form of enemy detection …

Between Thursday and Saturday morning a tree fell on a nearby path. It is a tree that had been waiting for some time to fall. I noticed a week or two ago that it had a serious lean and was braced against other trees that were still doing their part. This guy was rotted and exhausted. And now he’s just in the way.

But you don’t let that stop you, not when you’re running. You turn obstacles into hurdles. And that’s what we did. And then I used the saturation features on my phone to really jazz up this photo.

You gotta just look up. That’s the lesson here. This is a view on our Sunday walk.

And we played in the stream partway through that walk. It’s a peaceful little thing, watching the world’s tiniest waterfall in the valley between two quiet hills.

We went back to the lake. The Yankee went for a swim, her second swim since the pools closed in March, and so her second one in the lake. I sat on the shore to make sure the shore stayed in good shape. There was a bobber hanging from a tree:

And there was a log that was drifting in:

And she had a good swim!

I mean, look at that form! Such technique!

That’s a tow along buoy. Three quick puffs of air inflate it, and then you strap it around your waist and it swims behind you. They are designed to be visible for other people out on the water. Safety first, because low profiles and silhouettes and what not.

I could see this big pink dot about 150 yards away, or so, it is definitely high-viz. She says there’s no drag. She doesn’t even notice it behind her.

Other stuff? There’s more on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well.

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