Hunting Wildflowers

Last week, Dana Milbank had a nice essay in the Washington Post about growing old and “spring ephemerals”. Those are wildflowers that come out in the early spring, before the trees are in full leaf and blocking light from reaching the forest floor, and show their tiny blooms for a week or two – at best.

Here in Southern Westchester, there are some nice nature preserves in my area where I regularly stroll for exercise and fresh air. What if I took my cheap old smartphone with me this time, and instead of my usual birdwatching, I looked for these wildflowers?

Flowers have a much greater advantage over birds – they don’t move, so you can get quite close to them for photographs. The disadvantage is that there are so may varieties and variations that it’s even harder to get a positive ID on one than it is to figure out “What kind of warbler is that?”.

I’ve made some tentative identifications – if you happen to have some better knowledge, please let me know!

Some of my Intelligent Readers do indeed have better identifications.


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BOOK REVIEW: Stranded in the Sky

Stranded in the Sky:
The Untold Story of Pan Am Luxury Airliners Trapped on the Day of Infamy
Philip Jett
Turner Publishing Company
Copyright 2023 by the author

In the late 1930s, the epitome of luxury travel was aboard one of Pan American’s “clippers”. These huge seaplanes crossed the oceans while passengers enjoyed all the accommodations and amenities one would expect from a four star hotel. Within the space and weight requirements, of course. A single round trip ticket across the Pacific might cost you the equivalent of $40,000 today. So only celebrities, government officials, wealthy businessmen, and the occasional Pan American employee would benefit. It was still much faster than travel by sea. The airline maintained their own network of dedicated hotels on islands across the oceans to allow for refueling, maintenance, and overnight R&R for flights longer than the planes’ abilities.

“Overnight to Hawaii” – 1940 Pan American Clipper promotional film:

In the early hours of December 6/7, 1941, the Hong Kong Clipper was in Kowloon Harbor in it’s namesake territory, waiting to begin its regular shuttle flight to Manila. The Pacific Clipper had already departed Honolulu, heading for Auckland, New Zealand, via stops in Canton Island (in what is now Kiribati), Fiji, and New Calendonia. The Anzac Clipper was ready to leave San Francisco for its journey to Singapore, stopping at Honolulu, Midway Atoll, Wake Island, Guam, and Manila. The Philippine Clipper was already along that route, heading for Wake Island…. Continue reading →

ECLIPSE 2024 – Part 4

And the usual final handful of observations to wrap up my visit to Rochester.

First, THERE ARE WIND FARMS IN THE CATSKILLS!

I’m driving along Route 17, enjoying the nice landscape that surely looks amazing in the fall when the leaves are changing colors (and not in early April when the buds have yet to appear). I round a bend, and OMG WIND TURBINES looming over the next hill in the distance! It was quite startling, actually. Those things are HUGE. Continue reading →

ECLIPSE 2024 – Part 2

Of course, if I’m going to be driving for half a day to a place, I’m going to want to make sure that there’s more than one reason to be going there. Experiencing a total solar eclipse at a winery, no matter how awesome that might be, isn’t enough to justify the trip.

Fortunately, Rochester is a big enough city to have plenty of things to see and do. While I do maintain that any community, no matter how small, is going to have at least one point of interest, if you’re going to make a vacation trip there, you want your destination to be big enough to be home to at least one or two minor league professional sports teams.

While Rochester is the home to the Red Wings (the AAA affiliate of the Washington Nationals) as well as teams in other sports, the one attraction that is unique to the city is the Strong National Museum of Play – also known as the Toy Museum.

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ECLIPSE 2024 – Part 1

“I can drive to the path of totality!” I said. “And in just one day! I’ll make a vacation out of it!”

I think I wound up in the only place in New York where the skies were completely overcast. Sunday was beautiful; mild temperatures and completely clear skies. Tuesday was unseasonably warm, with a few scattered clouds and a high, thin haze.

But on Eclipse Day, at 3:15 in the afternoon…..

Not pictured: Old man yelling

And because of the cloud cover, almost all of the eclipse phenomena – sudden drop in temperature, weird animal behavior – didn’t happen. All we got was the “twilight all the way around the horizon”.

Looking towards the City of Rochester

We also noted that it seemed to get lighter much faster than it got dark….

Well, at least the Casa Larga Vineyards had a very nice “Toast to Totality” event. I might have stayed there a bit longer (it lasted to 5 pm), but a little after four o’clock, a light drizzle started.

Ya know, I’m not sure I care for all these wineries becoming “event spaces” with sales rooms attached to them. I’d love to chat with the winery staff (NOT the sales staff) about their vines and grapes and how they deal with pests and how they are coping with global warming. Or how it seems that there are so many competitions these days that pretty much any winery can win some medals, or how a person’s particular sense of taste might affect how they enjoy a particular wine – there might be an equivalent to “color blindness” for taste, and we do know that your sense of hearing changes as you get older…. I suppose they’ve got to make extra money somehow…..

But anyway, my trip to Rochester wasn’t a complete waste – I made plans to do other things there, and I’ll tell you about them in the next few posts.

BOOK REVIEW: Crooked

Crooked: The Roaring ‘20s Tale of a Corrupt Attorney General, a Crusading Senator, and the Birth of the American Political Scandal
Nathan Masters
Hachette Books}
Copyright 2023 by the author

When most people think of Warren Harding’s presidency, one of the first things that will come to mind is the “Teapot Dome” scandal, where federal oil reserves were sold off to oil companies to the benefit of people in the Harding administration. Less well-known to us today, but even more outrageous was the contemporary scandal at the Veterans’ Bureau. The Bureau was purchasing goods for far more than market price, surplus goods were sold off for much less than they should have been, and millions of dollars were flat out unaccounted for.

Senate committees were investigating all this. But the biggest scandal was, quite simply, that the US Attorney General and the Justice Department weren’t doing anything at all to help the investigations.

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Eurovision 2024

It’s been a while since I paid any attention to the European Broadcasting Union’s annual international “Battle of the Bands”. Not knowing much (or caring much) about the contemporary music scene, either here in the US or in Europe, there really isn’t much to attract my interest.

I thought I’d give things a look and see if there was anything in this year’s crop of Official Music Videos that stood out….

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BOOK REVEIW: Time Trials

Time Trials
M.A. Rothman & D.J. Butler
Baen Books
Copyright 2023 by the authors

I don’t usually care for novel series. More often than not, you have to commit to reading the complete set of novels in order to get the entire story. Or the follow-up novels are just a case of the publisher telling the author “That book did really well. Write another one, with the same characters and same universe.” It gets annoying when you can tell it’s just a cash grab on the order of the Transformers or Fast and Furious movies.

The worst ones are where they can’t be bothered to indicate anywhere on the cover that the book is part of a series. Do I need to read all the ones that came before it to figure out what’s going on? Will I have to read all the following books? Do I have to read them all in a specific order?

Fortunately, there’s a blurb from Kirkus Reviews right on the cover that lets you know what to expect with this one: “An entertaining first entry in what promises to be a fantastic time-travel series.”

 

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Stamp of Approval

I remember back when we used to honor various worthies by putting them on postage stamps. Sadly, it seems that these days it’s just plants, animals, and inanimate objects that get the honor. I can’t complain about some of the wonderful designs and images we’ve seen lately, but a postage stamp is a quick and easy way to honor someone, and perhaps bring attention to someone we should know more or care more about. A heck of a lot easier to do than putting them on money…..

So here’s a half dozen notables that I think should be honored – and I might even get around to actually nominating them someday.

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