On Tuesday, the Environmental Protection Agency created a Superfund site just four blocks from my apartment.
The Gowanus Canal is a two-mile waterway running through South Brooklyn into Gowanus Bay near Red Hook (where the new Ikea is). Henry Hudson and Giovanni di Verrazano both navigated the Gowanus Inlet, which led to salt marshes and navigable [...]
Archive for the ‘Geography’ category
Cleanup on the Gowanus Canal
Best use of Jew’s harp, 2010
And the award goes to: Bez Chempionlar, the Tatar folk version of “We Are the Champions.” What’s amazing about this is, if you didn’t know the original song, you would totally believe this is a Tatar folk song:
Of course, judging from other Tatar folk music online, it’s a little more polka-esque than one might have [...]
Green mountains turn white
Swells and I are enjoying a week in southern Vermont. We went on a stroll through the forest yesterday, and were amazed by the GREENS:
And if things weren’t wonderful enough, five inches of pure white brilliance blanketed the area this morning:
Here’s to a magnificent new year…
Welcome to Delaware!
RB and I drove to Delaware on the day after Christmas to see her family. She has an aunt and uncle who live there, and her parents came for the holiday too. We drove from DC, where my brother lives.
Here was the view from the car for the whole trip there:
Miserable, wet, windy, foggy weather [...]
Watching Rambo for the Holidays, Thinking of Home
I confess. I spent a day and a half watching all four Rambo movies back to back. I’m not quite certain what compelled me to start this process, but having started, I ended up sitting through the entire saga of blazing guns, gigantic explosions, over-the-top 80s patriotism, and the ever-ubiquitous bloodsplatter as Rambo does another [...]
The lustre had gone out of her
“And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it⎯a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!” ⎯Virginia Woolf, [...]
A very gory vegetarian festival
RB and I just returned from two weeks in Thailand. We saw and did the things one does there – snorkeling, hiking, riding elephants, kayaking, visiting temples, that sort of thing. But we also witnessed something most unexpected – something we happened to read about in a magazine and rerouted our trip especially to see.
It’s [...]
That was nice twice
As previously reported, Dave and Stella went to Maine. First stop, the American Folk Festival in Bangor. It opened with the University of Maine Black Bears Marching Band.
And Lil’ Ed and the Blues Imperials.
And a couple with matching LL Bean backpacks dancing.
The next day tropical storm Danny made it very wet.
But people kept their spirits [...]
Beautiful
So when I moved to New York I noticed an overabundance of beautiful people. Why so many? The question continues to puzzle me, and over the years I’ve developed several theories.
By flickr user Ed Yourdon
1. A certain percentage of the most beautiful people from all over the country move here to become yuppies. (The idea [...]
Late Summer
The sun is high and bright. Back in Saskatchewan, the fields are a burning gold, the skies unending in their pale blue, and the heat constant. At night, lightning storms fill the entire sky, or more often the heavens clear to a rich darkness with its ten thousand thousand stars. It’s strange how much I [...]
