the organic style of Eva Zeisel, one of my favorite mid-century designers, is finding a contemporary clientele (Crate and Barrel has just reissued some of her pieces, and the dishware and glassware in the Incredibles feel like copies of her work)
striatic does dc
color me striatic
no… wire… hangers… EVER!!
elfintech posted a photo:
Mommie Dearest on a giant inflatable screen in Stead Park near Dupont Circle, the first Screen on Stead offering this summer to benefit the DC GLBT Center
[ geotagged: see this photo’s location on a map ]
santa emilia anna
paying a steep price
I just got my first car insurance bill since my accident back in April. In 3626 [thanks to Gene for noticing the error in my math] years of driving I’ve never even gotten a moving violation (update: I just remembered that I did get one ticket a few years ago for turning red on right at an intersection where “no right turn on red” signs were present; the intersection previously had permitted for right turns, and I hadn’t seen the signs, which had only gone up shortly beforehand, but still I did screw up on that one, but I paid for it with a hefty fine) and only two parking tickets, but in the past five years I’ve been involved in two very minor fender benders (though I wasn’t charged in either of them). Jumping at the opportunity, though, GEICO, to whom I’ve paid tens of thousands of dollars in insurance premiums over the last twenty years, though they’ve had to pay out only about $1K in all that time, just raised my insurance rates by $505 annually, an increase of 44%.
Life sucks.
north port, florida and olive, new york?
Don’t get me wrong; I absolutely love Google Maps, especially the incorporation of satellite imagery, but the default-level U.S. map strikes me as a bit odd.
OK, so the West seems pretty straightforward, with city dots pretty much where you’d expect at this high-level view, where we find dots labeled San Francisco and Los Angeles, Portland and Spokane (though Seattle is oddly missing, with Port Angeles labeled instead), Las Vegas, Phoenix, etc. The midwest and southwest, too, have the expected pointers for Denver, Dallas, Houston, Kansas City, Chicago, etc.
But the East Coast, Atlantic Seaboard and South are rather puzzling. Sure, Boston and New York are there, and the District of Columbia is pointed out (albeit as though it were a state rather than as the city of Washington), but most of the other cities plotted in these regions at this view make no sense to me; many of them I’ve never even heard of.
Virginia, for example, has no cities bulleted at all, no Richmond or Norfolk, nor are there any population centers of note in Maryland, West Virginia, Georgia or either Carolina. Baltimore, Atlanta and Miami are absent. Instead, we have such cities as North Port (FL) and Bedford (PA). Louisville is here, but not the one you might have guessed; no, this Louisville is not in Kentucky, but in upstate New York, which state also boasts the apparently world-class cities of Fine, Long Lake, Olive and Hancock. There’s also a Dennis plotted on this map view, but Google Maps itself doesn’t even seem to know whether it’s in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New York or New Jersey (it’s the latter).
Whuh? Do the Stanford whiz kids working at Google really know so little about East Coast geography?
striatic does dc
Yesterday evening, Jeff and I met up with two other DC Flickrites–Tampen and Finiky–to welcome striatic and emily ann as they breezed through DC on their way to Virginia Beach and beyond, during the striatic does america tour.
It was a fun hour or so, walking around Union Station and the Capitol, chatting and taking photographs of the area and one another. I just wish they’d been able to stick around longer, and that more of the DC Flickr community had been available to come out at that time of day.
My other photos of the meetup will be up on Flickr, of course, as I get them uploaded.
a weekend in the country
This past weekend we made a quick visit (down on Saturday morning and back Sunday evening) to see my Mom and the rest of the family. Between Father’s Day on Sunday (the first since Mom’s dad’s death, and only the second since my dad’s), Mom’s birthday on Monday, and some other family troubles, I knew that it might otherwise be a difficult weekend for her, and I hadn’t been home since Christmas (though she and I had spent time together in April, when Jeff and I took her to Manhattan), so we decided to visit even though we knew it would have to be short.
Before heading to Mom’s house, I took Jeff over to see the acre of riverfront property I own just down the road, and then to the nearby “camp”–a cabin on the river originally owned jointly by my grandfather and his best friend, whose latter share has now been offered for sale to my mother–where my family spent many summer weekends when I was a kid.
Saturday evening we went to a cookout–chili dogs, potato salad and deviled eggs for days–at my Mom’s church, where a gospel-bluegrass quintet–a father on guitar and lead vocals, sons on mandolin and banjo, and two friends, one on bass and the other providing female harmony vocals–was performing. Towards the end of the evening, my cousin and his wife brought out a cake in honor of my aunt and uncle’s 50th wedding anniversary that day as well (meanwhile, this week also marks the second anniversary of Jeff’s and my first date), and we topped off our full bellies with cake and ice cream. Later that night, Jeff asked to see pictures of me as a kid, so we broke out the photo albums for a while before walking over to my sister’s house to spend some time with her family.
On Sunday, we met up with the rest of the family for lunch after their church service, and then we spent a couple hours at my sister’s house again before leaving there around 4 to be home by 8. A heavy rain began a little earlier in the afternoon and accompanied us off and on about the first 45 miles, but by the time we were passing through Lexington the rain had stopped and the weather was delightful and clear the rest of the trip home.
Jeff also has posted about the weekend, during which he was much more at ease than during his only other trip to Covington in February 2004, and about the little ways in which our 15-year age difference, normally not something we find particularly meaningful or apparent, sometimes does make itself known. My little Ashton, for example, was born the year Elvis died, whereas at 15 I remembered where I was when I heard the news of his death (not that I especially liked Elvis, but because my family and I were on a road trip at the time it made more of a lasting impression than it probably otherwise would).
Onward, Moderate Christian Soldiers (New York Times)
the conservative religious right is not the only voice representing American Christians, just perhaps the shrillest