Tomorrow, the town will receive its first automated vehicle. It is said to be a bus. And you can ride in it. They gave away tickets! But if you didn’t get a ticket, there’s still a chance! They are doing walkup tours. All of this reminds me of those old newspaper stories about the first plane in town. Here, it was 1911, and the headlines read “‘Birdman’ with Machine Coming.”
“Take a ride in the air ship, and listen to the band play. Welcome to our city. There will be a hot time … stand on the hub of the wheel of the center of population and feel the world go around.”
That October, the flight crew reassembled their plane (it had to be hauled in by train) in the meadow next to our building. The paper says thousands of people came from all around to see two flights. An uneven field, a barbed wire fence and a stall on takeoff caused a crash.
The locals rushed in and started tearing apart the plane for souvenirs. One of the flight crew threatened to shoot the looters, so much of the plane, and the pilot, Horace Kearney, survived. He flew the plane again that December, but died in a plane crash the following year.
The next summer, there was another plane and another flight in Dunn Meadow, another pilot got his plane in the air. He crashed into a fence trying to dodge power lines and telephone wires.
So maybe that’s the reason they are also closing the roads for the automated bus.
The bus is expected to go up and down one of the main business roads. Today they’ve cleared off the parked cars, too. This is apparently going to be a three or four block ride up a straight street.
So, naturally, we’ve closed all of the intersecting roads, as well.
Blocks of two-lane gridlock.
You don’t want to inconvenience the robotic bus, after all.
Indiana / Monday / photo — Comments Off on Weekend photos passing through 25 Sep 17
Not to intrude on Catember, but this is the pup we visited with this weekend:
We were down near Louisville, where The Yankee was riding on the Ironman bike course. So we crashed with the family. And this is my step-sister’s dog.
He is a good pup.
And then on the way back to the house yesterday, we drove by these corn bins in Orleans, Indiana.
It is a small township named after … the Battle of New Orleans, which had taken place just two months before this area was surveyed for a town. Some 2,100 people live there, and they bill themselves as the dogwood capital of the state. John Stetson, the maker of the hats, had a house here. His wife, Elizabeth Shindler, was from Orleans and he had the place built. They call it the house that love built. And Samuel Lewis, who would go on to become important in Texas history, spent some time there as well.
Sometimes wide spots in the road are more than just wide spots.
Friday / IU / photo / video — Comments Off on Happens all the time 22 Sep 17
I like the way the sun comes into our television studio. I only spend one morning a week in there, but when the clouds don’t interfere you can get some real fun light tricks. But you have to shoot in sequence or the light doesn’t make sense. The onward march of time and all of that. If, that, is, you understand how the building is oriented to the passing sun. But who cares, look at that backlight!
That particular shot is in a corner of the studio. We have four chairs around the corner, so in two seats you can get the nice angelic backlighting effect. And in the other two you get a nice wall treatment. You can see it all here. This is the morning show they shot today:
And we are on the road once more. We’re taking an overnight trip down to Louisville. So we’ll have some barbecue, see a few people, do a few things and then be back it even sets in that we’ve gone somewhere. It takes no time, and it takes a lot of time. And after that, time really flies.
And now, a nice little sports show you can watch to catch up on all of the local sporting news:
I saw this print in a restaurant last weekend:
We have a running question about whether it is true that Marilyn Monroe came home from that USO tour to her new husband and said “It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.”
“Yes,” Joe DiMaggio said, “I have.”
It’s a great line, because Joe DiMaggio. But it was apparently first written in a Gay Talese essay, so it almost seems too perfect. The nature of quotes is a fickle thing sometimes, but if we will them into being we can sometimes will disbelief into submission.
I don’t know. I wasn’t there. It’s interesting to think that it happened, because it says so much about Marilyn Monroe. But to think that it is just a manufactured line, that she would know better, would say an awful lot more. Which is why I like to think it didn’t happen, that that wasn’t the exchange between an aging ball player and a young starlet.
I do know this. She’s just glowing in pretty much the entire photo collection, and she’s got that little dress on, in Korean, in the winter. All of the troopers are bundled up. It is February and some 30 degrees, at best. But there she was, soaking in that adoration and lust. A shot of home in a place very much not.
And of course I see this photo on the side wall of a hallway heading to a restroom.
You know, it isn’t as easy to track down the photographer of a 63-year-old photo as you might imagine. Surely the rights to that photo belong to an agency by now, but they’re all buying each other up and none of that helps gets you back to the actual photo zapper.
I think she’s singing Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend in that shot. You can see the same gesture here:
And if you watch the whole thing you might have to re-think everything you know about the 1950s.
I don’t really have a way to end this piece. I’ve looked for loops to repeat and curious, out-of-this-world trivia hooks that you wouldn’t believe. But everyone in the story is from somewhere else, or did other things. But I’ve watched that video a few times and I imagine Joe DiMaggio had a … different sort of adoring crowd.
