"I love picnics"

Governors Island

New York City recently (re) acquired rights to Governors Island, which is a small, unpopulated, and mostly undeveloped enclave used as a US Coast Guard station for some decades. It is now being turned into.... well, no one is quite sure yet, but so far a lot of people are enjoying taking the free bike-friendly ferry service from Manhattan and Brooklyn to it on weekends for some traffic-free biking and exploring.





Governors Island Preservation web site.

This link goes to a full set of photos taken by me on Saturday.

Moon Shots

Last week I took my telescope upstairs and got my first shots through a camera mount I've had for over a year and never got a chance to try out. It basically allows you to attach any camera (pocket sized.. 35mm / SLR.. as long as it has a standard screw tripod attachment) to the telescope and have the lens point right into the 'scope eyepiece. It's incredibly tricky to align it correctly and focus (there's TWO things to focus -- by the time you've got it mostly right the subject has wandered off the frame due to the Earth's rotation...)

There's at least one or two good ones, though... Click on the photo to see the rest.

(I also like the inadvertent "porthole effect" that you get from the edge of the eyepiece appearing inside the shot frame in some of them -- almost makes it look like you're looking at it through the window of a space ship...)

Lubbock

"Life in Lubbock, Texas, taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you're going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on earth and you should save it for someone you love."

- Butch Hancock, Musician, the Flatlanders

Polly Wants a MacArthur Fellowship Grant

Do you buy this? Does anybody have a link to the full documentary (or some literature that would flesh out these claims?)

David Gregory's Head is Two Feet Wide

This is a screen grab of David Gregory interviewing John Kerry (who is neither a small nor a small-headed man) on yesterday's Meet The Press. How is it possible for someone's head to appear dramatically larger than that of another person's, which is sitting four feet in the foreground? Is this some sort of blue-screen shenanigan, in that the interview may have been done by the participants remotely?

Two interesting articles about Ted Kennedy and Chappaquiddick

This

... from which I learned that the incident at Chappaquiddick occurred two days before the first moon landing! The writer is entirely correct in that today's cable news and talk radio would have engaged in wall-to-wall coverage of the former, completely ignoring the latter.

And

This

... from which I learned that Mary Jo Kopechne did not die of drowning, but of asphyxiation, trapped in a car only mostly filled with water, over the course of several hours. My assumption for however many years I've known about this incident is that it was one of those things that happened rather quickly, and while wholly avoidable, could simply be described as one of life's horrible accidents. This new knowledge really brings the moral implications of the act to an entirely new low in my opinion.

But having said that, the second article does also bring up an interesting ethical point, which is that if one thinks of the good/bad that a person's life brings to the world in arithmetical accounting terms, his life is squarely in the black. Fair enough, but I couldn't help comparing this evaluation to the life of another icon which died recently, whose life was considered to be one of monumental contributions to the world, save for one specific act... Could one argue that Michael Jackson's life, in the balance, was one of good, even if the accusations of his being a child molester were to be confirmed? Does that mean that a child molester can be "a good person"? Does this mean that I can be both a thief and a patron, as long as the former is monetarily outweighed by the latter? Most of our lives are a mass of gray-area actions, some not so good, some slightly better than average, but not usually in the extreme one way or another. What can be said of a person who, at a specific time and place, was as horrible as anything that ever was, but otherwise was admirable? What does this mean in the context of law and order? I'm confused.

What do cat owners and 14-year-old anorexics have in common?

What's wrong with me?

I see this banner ad on some web site and I immediately think "gee, that's an odd dating service..."

Skating with Prometheus

Something we did a couple of weeks ago:



The ice really was all fucked up and I was worried about dropping the camera otherwise I would have gotten more "action" footage. (it's surprisingly affordable for the what / where it is.. something like $10 admission + $10 skates rental each person.... I highly recommend it as one of those new york things one absolutely must do, such as fall in love and lose all hope).

(click to skate)