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Early morning fog finds Baby Cakes outside in the yard, lord of the manor, master of all he surveys.
Back inside, fearless Defender of the Faith transmogrifies in an instant to Mr. Cuddles, master of the laptop.
A little more to the right, please.
Update: Lots more feline transmogrifications at Carnival of the Cats #224 at Victor Tabbycat and in loving memory of Bonnie Underfoot.
Our Heartland professors, nephew and wife Matt and Regan, are immersing themselves in Middlebury's seven-week French-language program, where students "use their target language exclusively in classes, dining halls, dormitories, and co-curricular activities." No English allowed. We've been encouraged to email them early and often, but only in French. 'Were delighted to learn via Yahoo's "Babel Fish" translation program that we are married to a "fold." That's their translation of Tuck. “But friendship is the breathing rose, with sweets in every fold.” Above, two kinds of French fold, the napkin version, left, and the paper one.
"In France, you can't own up to a mistake," writes Anne-Elisabeth Moutet in "L'Affaire Enderlin" at The Weekly Standard. She's talking about the latest wrinkle in the ongoing legal wranglings over al-Dura — blogged here from time to time — a signature episode in the life-and-death struggle for hearts and minds that is the Israeli-Palestinian propaganda wars:
So, in the case of Muhammad al-Dura — a 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli fire during a skirmish in the Gaza strip on September 30, 2000 — it was not really to be expected that the journalist who released the 59-second news report, Charles Enderlin, longtime Jerusalem correspondent for France 2 TV, would immediately admit having hastily slapped together sensational footage supplied by the channel's regular Palestinian stringer, and not checked whose bullets had, in fact, killed, or perhaps even not killed, the boy.
In the ensuing eight years, the small figure of Muhammad al-Dura cowering beside his crouching father became the defining image of the second Intifada. The "child martyr's" picture cropped up on posters, websites, postage stamps, and street names throughout the Muslim world from Mali to Indonesia, fueling lynchings and suicide bombings
Yet another egregious example of the big lie's ability to travel halfway around the world while the truth is either putting on its shoes or getting its pants on, and the court battles to get those shoes and pants on have dragged on for years, giving substance to the old saw that "justice delayed is justice denied." Can anything be done about it? Yes. Dogged determination is where it's at. Our own sub rosa blog friend, the distinguished Boston University professor of medieval history Richard Landes, has been on the case for years. He's the one who coined the term "Pallywood" to refer to "the staging of scenes by Palestinian journalists in order to present the Palestinians as hapless victims of Israeli aggression." As Richard explained at The Second Draft, politically correct, multicultural fellow travelers in the MSM are the Palestinian journalists' willing enablers:
They are able to succeed in this endeavor in large part due to the credulity and eagerness of the Western press to present these images, which reinforce the image of the Palestinian David struggling valiantly against the overpowering Israeli Goliath. Pallywood has led to astonishing lapses in Western journalistic standards in which badly staged scenes regularly appear on the news as "real events."
Then, as we wrote a month back, "the French court pleasantly surprised the seekers-of-wisdom-and-truth community this week by dismissing charges brought against [French media watchdog Philip] Karsenty by truthiness-monger France2." That was a breath of fresh air, but the forces of darkness — the totalitarian instinct that is our birthright — are forever lurking beyond the light of the campfire. No sooner had the court ruled than French journalism's old-cowboy network circled the wagons. More from Moutet's Weekly Standard report:
You might think Enderlin's professional standing would have been damaged by all this. You would be wrong. In less than a week, a petition was whipped up by his friends at Le Nouvel Observateur, France's premier left-wing newsweekly. The petition conceded no gray areas, no hint of doubt. It called Karsenty's vehemently argued but exhaustively documented stance a "seven-year hate-filled smear campaign" aimed at destroying Enderlin's "professional dignity." It flatly stated in the opening paragraph that Muhammad al-Dura was killed "by shots coming from the Israeli position." It expressed rank astonishment at a legal ruling "granting equal credibility to a journalist renowned for his rigorous work, and to willful deniers ignorant of the local realities and with no journalistic experience." It professed concern about a jurisprudence that would — shock! horror! — allow "anyone, in the name of good faith and of a supposed right to criticize and so-called freedom of speech, to smear with impunity the honor and the reputation of news professionals."
Moutet placed calls to a number of the signers, several of whom hadn't even read the petition they signed. One of our favorite responses:
There was the noted Paris-based former Washington Post foreign correspondent, 75-year-old Jon Randal, a Middle East expert I'd looked up to for years as a cub reporter, who trenchantly explained that he was seeing in all this a dangerous American trend of "vindictive pressure groups interfering with news organizations," now unfortunately crossing the Atlantic. (Having lived in Paris for over 40 years, Jon had become alarmingly French.)
"Americans have been under the gun of such people for some time, but France used to be free of this kind of thing. [These groups] are paranoid, they're persistent, they never give up, they sap the energy of good reporters. I can't imagine how much money France 2 has spent defending this case. Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist! I don't care if it's the Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him. Someone like Charles simply doesn't make a story up."
God bless America and those "vindictive pressure groups" and "such people" as Richard Landes who will call the self-appointed arbiters of "truth" to task.
Gardeners usually think of hostas as foliage plants, but the flowers of Hosta sieboldiana 'Elegans' (above x 1.76) are as showy as the gigantic "puckered, blue-gray leaves" that have grown by the back door of Chelsea-by-the-Sea into a dramatic clump 4½ feet wide.
Unfolding floral parts of our totally awesome blue-gray-leaved Hosta sieboldiana 'Elegans' demonstrate the "lotus effect":
Water, unable to wet the cuticle beads up and runs off, carrying dust and soluble contamination with it. This property of self-cleaning ultrahydrophobicity is known as the lotus effect.
A little Photoshopping — zoom tool plus paint-daubs filter — locates our plant's inner Georgia O'Keefe.
And what is a plant cuticle? According to Wikipedia:
Plant cuticles are a protective waxy covering produced only by the epidermal cells of leaves, young shoots and all other aerial plant organs without periderm. [AKA bark]…
The cuticle is composed of an insoluble cuticular membrane impregnated by and covered with soluble waxes …
[It] is one of a series of innovations, together with stomata, xylem and phloem and intercellular spaces in stem and later leaf mesophyll tissue, that plants evolved more than 450 million years ago during the transition between life in water and life on land. Together, these features enabled plant shoots exploring aerial environments to conserve water by internalizing the gas exchange surfaces, enclosing them in a waterproof membrane and providing a variable-aperture control mechanism, the stomatal guard cells, which regulate the rates of transpiration and CO² exchange.
In addition to its function as a permeability barrier for water and other molecules, the micro- and nano-structures of the cuticle confer specialized surface properties that prevent contamination of plant tissues with external water, dirt and microorganisms. Many plants, such as the leaves of the sacred lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) [and our own Hosta Sieboldiana 'elegans'] exhibit ultra-hydrophobic and self-cleaning properties … The lotus effect has potential uses in biomimetic technical materials.
Biomimetic technical materials? Think Velcro.
Out in the yard early morning, Gumby-Cat style, Tiny sits and sits and sits and sits, seeing things we don't in amongst the leaves of the English Ivy that grows on the west wall of the neighbor's house.
For the photographer seeking Cartier-Bresson's "Decisive Moment, this disposition of cats to tune out the extraneous and focus is the equal of any "watch the birdie" device one might use to catch the subject's attention.
We were free to rove around her, kneel down or lie upon the grass to get the proper angle. Intent upon her quarry, the Tiny was not for turning.
Update: Friday Ark at Modulator now underway.
Dan Adams (above departing Chelsea's Pearl Street Gallery Monday), took some of our best working-waterfront blogposts out from behind the computer screen, blew them up and hung them front and center in the window of his work in progress, the "Landing Salt" exhibition now showing at 100 Pearl Street, Chelsea. The young man we call the Eastern Salt Imaginator discovered the Chelsea salt piles 3 1/2 years ago during a Harvard Design School course, "Listening to the City," taught by Professor of Architecture Margaret Crawford, co-author of Everyday Urbanism. Her subject is one of three mutually contentious paradigms in contemporary urbanism, the other two being New Urbanism and Post Urbanism. In the words of Doug Kelbaugh, who wrote the book's introduction:
[Everyday Urbanism] "is nonutopian because it celebrates and builds on everyday, ordinary life and reality, with little pretense about the possibility of a tidy or ideal built environment. Indeed, as John Kaliski and others in Everyday Urbanism point out, the city and its designers must be open to and incorporate 'the elements that remain elusive: ephemerality, cacophony, multiplicity and simultaneity.'"
Nonutopian. Right up our alley. Ephemerality, cacophony, multiplicity and simultaneity. Right up Eastern Salt's alley.
When we arrived at the gallery around 5 o'clock Tuesday evening for the "opening event," a gorgeous bouquet of ivory roses from our greatest blogfan, the Goomp himself, was waiting for us. Tuck Willis photo.
Dan stood up and gave a whirlwind guided tour to the assembled guests of all things salt — photographs and paintings, of course, but also his own totally awesome computer-generated diagrams and charts and other explanatory material tracing the history and methods of extracting the salt of the earth. That's our stuff hanging in the window behind the artist, pretty in white. The maroon bag isn't a bag in the purse sense but in the bag sense, a lightweight but super-strong partitioned wine-toting bag the folks at Hannaford's give you to carry your bubbly home in. In our case we carried our silver party shoes, camera, business cards, house keys and such. Teresa Hummel photo.
"OMIGOD! You are so beautiful in your outfit!!!" imailed our sis as we deconstructed "The Outfit," first fashionable ensemble we'd bought in years, a personal milestone made possible by our loss of 40-plus pounds since jumping onto the Cold Turkey Cookbook bandwagon just over a year ago:
She: The maroon "evening bag" is the perfect complement. And THOSE SHOES!!! But, was there a swatch of turquoise at your waist, or is it just my eyes?"
We: Your eyes. It looks like a swatch and acts like a swatch but is my little t-shirt peeking out from behind the jacket.
It took over two hours and the tender ministrations of three different Macy's employees to locate the perfect pair of white lined linen pants — no pockets, concealed side zipper and lightly elasticized waist — and matching top with puffed sleeves and two oversized fabric-covered buttons just below the lapels.
A specially commissioned tiny replica of Eastern Salt's signature Manitowok crane and bucket — with moving parts! — a painting whose vibrant color and energetic brushwork capture Kelbaugh's "ephemerality, cacophony, multiplicity and simultaneity" and Dan Adams's photographs of the original "Chelsea Projections" light show animate the gallery walls. Teresa Hummel photo.
A closer look at the detailing of that little linen jacket as we engage in conversation with sub rosa blogfriend Jill of The Business of Life. Update: We liked Jill's casting of several of her conversational partners as archetypes: "It was a pleasure to be able to talk to the Manager, the Teacher and the Politician." Teresa of Technicalities was there, too, taking a lot of pictures — including this one — with her fancy new SLR digital camera. Our old green shirt, shorter than today's trendy tees, was the perfect length to fill the gap created by the jacket's unorthodox buttoning scheme.
"And when I looked, the salt had turned to gold" was sis-in-law Ellen's favorite. Ours too. What a treat to have her and brother Ben with us on our special night. Ditto that other Ellen of Grove Street in Chelsea. Our own sis couldn't make it but touched our hearts and minds with a sentimental gift of gardenias, the kind girls used to wear on their wrist to the prom. Teresa Hummel photo.
Dan said wonderful things about our work. We share a fascination with the authenticity and energy and "beauty in unexpected places" of those Everyday Urbanscapes. He's talking about maybe using that felicitous phrase to rename the whole show.
VIPs left to right: Paul Lamb, dock manager of the Eastern Salt working waterfront, our man Dan, company president and charming hostess Shelagh Mahoney and her daughter Molly. Teresa Hummel photo.
Teresa caught Chelsea City Manager Jay Ash checking out some of our work. Cool, huh?
Update: Here's Teresa's take of the evening's festivities. Thanks again, doll, for being there with us and taking all those pictures!
Update II: Be sure to check out Carol Ward's excellent comments re the dueling utopian and nonutopian Urbanisms. This, re New Urbanism, is a gem:
There can be no beauty in unexpected places, because there are no unexpected places!
It called to mind the humanizing individual remodelings of the rows of virtually identical Levittown houses. Something there is that doesn't like to be fit into a one-size-fits-all template.
Good Harbor Beach, 2005 oil on board by Ann Black.
Every venue you drop into these days, from the local supermarket to the mall to the beach, is inundated with trash noise. It makes our head spin. What if you were to wake up to the sound of bird song outside your window? It can still happen here in Chelsea-by-the-Sea, but it's practically impossible these days in the public square what with the mindless electronic engine-pumping sounds that come with every sunrise, midday and sunset — not to mention every segment of every TV show — always some automaton's choice of background music that kills the soul. We're talking the sons and daughters of Musak, something that started with the best of intentions — don't they all? — in elevators way back when and now fills every interstice of the modrin scene. We've despised Musak from day one, of course. First time we realized our impotence in the face of relentlessly broadcast music was as a pre-teen at Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester — Yes, the same town where local losers girls just wanna have babies. In those days we imagined you could spend a day at the beach, get a little sun, body surf and listen to the soothing sounds of the ocean breaking on the sand. But no. Already then, perhaps 40 or more years ago, the rude intruders had their radios turned up loud, ruining everything for folks like us yearning to breathe free. You can't go anywhere these days.
Update: More rude intruders on parade at Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities.
When it came down to the cutting-room floor for the final iteration of the "Landing Salt" exhibition, new synergies emerged as we edited out a few things and rearranged the keepers in new combinations. Above, Dan Adams's favorite of all our photographic images of the light fantastic from the front porch (left), the Greek bulk container Anangel Success out of Piraeus docking at Eastern Salt one snowy night, mutually energizes our own personal favorite, a bucket of salt releasing its precious cargo in the early morning light in our post "And when I looked, the salt had turned to gold."
"I think you are more or less writing my next post for me," we wrote our sis this afternoon as she imailed — with reference to our part of the "Landing Salt" group exhibition" that will open on Tuesday evening from 5 to 7 at the Pearl Street Gallery in Chelsea — "You, truly, are doing your civic duty":
She: I'm just so excited about what you're doing for Eastern Salt and its image within the community. All these spoiled hybrid-car drivers … where do they think salt comes from, when it's nicely strewn on icy roads? You have said, "YES!!! IN MY FRONT YARD!"
We: And the work speaks for itself.
She: Your pictures fairly thrum with the life of the tankers unloading. Static on a radio drives you mad, but the noise of unloading precious salt is music to your ears.
Different drummers were always our thing. Sub rosa blogfriend Greg of Sippican Cottage caught the conscience of the king the other day with a snippet of one of his brilliant who-knew discoveries, C.H. Spurgeon's Farm Sermons:
He who despises truth because it wears in this case no other adornment than a garland of the flowers of the field about its neck, or a wreath of barley around its brows, has no eye wherewith to discern beauty, which is as fascinating in rural dress as in classic attire. So long as the soul is fed it is small matter whether the subjects were suggested by the palace or the barn.
"Beauty in unexpected places," the tagline of sisu, is the title of our body of work in the "Landing Salt" exhibition. Writing about our series of daybreak portraits of the view from Goomp's front porch Down East awhile back, we blogged "Had Monet lived here in Southern Coastal Maine, he might have been known for his sunrises instead of his haystacks." The same could be said of the views from our own front porch down Chelsea, where Monet might have been known for his painterly studies of the ever-changing play of light on the working waterfront across the street.
"Sissy, you have to get your tripod and take some pictures," insisted nephie Christian, here on overnight layover on his way to Grand Cayman to meet his sweetheart, whose Coast Guard ship's laying in for a brief stay there tomorrow. Tuck will ferry him to Logan early morning.
Lazy of a Friday evening, we would never have bothered to trot out our photographic gear without his sweet whisperings. This one's an oil tanker — Jasmine Express — hottest thing in the international marketplace these days, now slipping the surly bonds of Chelsea Creek after disgorging black gold from its innards upriver.
Finely tuned in to her surroundings, Tiny triangulates outside in the yard this morning. Note right ear curved back towards the house, keeping track of any comings or goings of interest, left ear cocked towards the camerawoman's "watch-the-birdie" cat whisperings, and muzzle facing south for information cues blowing her way off the Creek.
"A child born today receives as his birthright the past’s accumulated warehouse of technical knowledge, from reading and writing to the recipe for scones, penicillin, suspension bridges, internal combustion engines, and nuclear weapons," observes Roger Kimball in an elegantly dismissive review of Patrick Buchanan's new revisionist history of WWII — Churchill, Hitler and "The unnecessary War" — wherein "Brownshirt Buchanan" attempts to blame not Hitler but Churchill for the war and, by extension, the holocaust. But Paddy's history-challenged revisionism is only a pretext for a Kimballist cogitation on the human condition:
There is an important sense in which a clever 18-year-old knows more physics than Newton, more chemistry than Lavoissier, more mathematics than Euclid. But is he wiser about politics than Madison or Tocqueville? Does he know more about the question, “How should I live my life?” than Socrates?
It has often been observed that one of the distinctive achievements of the species homo sapiens sapiens is its ability to pass knowledge down from one generation to the next: the great repositories of technical know-how and scientific insight into the workings of nature are eloquent testaments to this awesome process. Unfortunately, the operation of tradition, of handing down, is less successful in the realm of morals and politics …
Every generation, it seems, has to recollect the vital, hard won lessons of the past. When it comes to political wisdom, forgetfulness is all-too-often mankind’s inheritance.
Eyes, ears and nose focus singlemindedly on things we don't see, hear or smell.
If "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," those who wilfully forget Kimball's "workings of nature" are condemned to lose their shirts. The devastating floods along the Mississippi and its tributaries are a case in point. The words of World Conservation Union Chief Scientist Jeff McNeely in the wake of the 2004 tsunami apply:
"What has made this a disaster is that people have started to occupy part of the landscape that they shouldn't have occupied."
His words resonate today as heavy spring floods threaten to overtop and undermine the levees downstream from earlier flooding in Iowa. Following a record flood in 1927, the Flood Control Act of 1928 authorized the Mississippi River and Tributaries (MR&T) Project to control the "project flood," that is, any flood larger than the record flood, according to the Army Corps of Engineers website. MR&TP includes levees, floodways, channel improvement and stabilization and tributary basin improvements. We shall see how well they work to stem the tide in the coming days.
Douglas Belkin in the WSJ explains why we can't really blame it all on Mother Nature in "Critics Say Building Near Rivers Is Cause Of Recent Problems":
Around St. Louis, where the Mississippi is expected to crest this weekend, a number of scientists and activists argue the floods aren't caused by heavy rainfall but by irresponsible development. There has been considerable building since 1993 in Greater St. Louis, where demand for accessible property is at a premium. New and expanding communities pushed for new, taller and stronger levees.
By building along the riverbanks and forcing the Mississippi into a bed that is less than half the width of where it ran a century ago, residents are displacing water and forcing the river to run faster and higher. That, in turn, increases demand for taller, broader levees.
But as those levees make way for development that paves over wetlands, more runoff water is channeled into the river. Critics said the result is a self-perpetuating cycle: The rivers rise higher, new levees are built bigger, the rivers rise again."
What's that? It bears further study.
Western Civ has codified such things at least as far back as Vitruvius, whose first-century BC The Ten Books of Architecture advised against building on floodplains. But, getting back to Roger Kimball's point, it's the politics, stupid, together with the can-do entrepreneurial spirit that made this country the productive powerhouse it is. A little Corps of Engineers official history sets the stage:
By the year 1879, the need for improvement of the Mississippi River had become widely recognized. The necessity for coordination of engineering operations through a centralized organization had finally been accepted.
Accordingly, in that year, the Congress established the Mississippi River Commission and assigned it the duties. . . " to take into consideration and mature such a plan or plans and estimates as will correct, permanently locate, and deepen the channel and protect the banks of the Mississippi River, improve and give safety and ease to navigation thereof, prevent destructive floods, promote and facilitate commerce, trade, and the postal service."
And, back a little further in history to put life on the Mississippi into perspective:
The Mississippi River always has been a threat to the security of the valley through which it flows.Garciliaso de la Vega, in his history of the expedition begun by DeSoto, described the first recorded flood of the Mississippi as severe and of prolonged duration, beginning about March 10, 1543, and cresting about 40 days later. By the end of May the river had returned to its banks, having been in flood for about 80 days.
Since that time, explorers, traders, farmers, men of commerce, and engineers have known — sometimes too well — the Mississippi in flood.
All is well. She switches to automatic pilot until something comes up.
"It's only human to forget — repress? — horrific experiences, to move on," we wrote with reference to the tsunami:
Those who were there and lived to tell the tale are scarred for life and will never forget. They know it in their bones and will try to warn the world — of what? Pay attention to your surroundings? Don't take anything for granted? Repent before it's too late? — with their stories. Locally it will enter the communal lore. But beyond the region, it won't stick. The rest of us out here in the larger world — who only hear of it, see media images and try in our mind's eye to imagine the horror but then can turn away to the comfort of our everyday lives — we are the ones in danger of forgetting.
"Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons' sons." — Deuteronomy 4:9 (King James Version)
Update: Speaking of forgetting things which thine eyes have seen, we forgot to link last week's Friday Ark at Modulator. Better late than never?
Update II: Steve's latest Friday Ark at Modulator is under way.
Update III: Maggie's links.
Update IV: Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities is open for business.
A ladies' luncheon out on the terrace with Tuck as guest speaker and Ellen of Grove Street in Chelsea as guest of honor. We met each other a coupla years back when we were on walkies and came across her gardening in the totally awesome side and backyard of the home built by her father way back when. A rose is a rose is a napkin. Beautiful effects in the limpid sunshine that comes out after days of overcast and rain.
Soupçon. Silky Cauliflower Soup with a dollop of Peter Rabbit's Soup. Lots of Chelsea lore, historical and anecdotal, kept the conversation buzzing.
Chicken strogie on a bed of noodles with sweet potato/coconut puree, spinach Italienne and corny cornbread minis on the side. We've got the strogie down to a science.
Babe inside the screened window kept an eye on things outside. He'd already pronounced the chicken AOK.
Garrett Dash Nelson
Dem Apples
Dem Apples doesn’t have to be a mere repository of apostrophic debates about liberalism and ironically amusing comments by slightly off-kilter cat women
Patricia Baker
Pat's Pond
One more nose-bite to you, Blogmother.
Pat Santy
Dr. Sanity
Sissy Willis at sisu puts on her psychological hat in this excellent post.
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