Best Wildlife Photographs

Guardian.co.uk picture editor, Eric Hilaire, selects the best shots from this year's wildlife photography awards.

Review of 2010 wildlife photographic awards

Bright Lights, Big City

A couple videos featuring Christmas light traditions in Baltimore. I also have a Baltimore related music post today: A Baltimore Christmas

From 34th Street in Hampden, the annual Christmas decorations extravaganza.



From Mount Vernon Square, the annual lighting of the Washington Monument.



From the harbor, the annual parade of lighted boats.

SantaLeaks

From The New Yorker, leaked facts about Santa.

Secret cables from the North Pole
by Ben Greenman

Solstice\Eclipse Images

This is a fill in the blank quiz:
Below is a photograph of the eclipsing moon above the _______________.

If you don't know the answer, it is one of the photographs on the blog post from Boston.com linked to below, and the caption tells what it is. I have to admit that I did not recognize it until I read the caption, even though I have photographed this before.

A chilly solstice (and lunar eclipse)

Amelia Earhart Found?

It appear that—73 years after she went missing—the remains of Amelia Earhart may have been found.

Lunar Eclipse

For all of those—like me—who slept through last night's lunar eclipse here is a video.

Rochefoucauld Grail - Follow Up

The Rochefoucauld Grail. which I blogged about back in November, has sold for £2.39m ($3.71m). Here is the story from the Independent.

Chelsea Hotel

Last month's post NYC Buildings contained a photograph I took of the Chelsea Hotel. The guardian.co.uk has a set of pictures representing the "The 10 best Chelsea hotel moments", including Edie Sedgwick (pictured below) setting fire to her room. I am not sure "best" is the most appropriate word here, since a couple of the incidents involve death, and a couple others mayhem. Maybe it should be the 10 most notorious moments.

The 10 best Chelsea hotel moments

A Social Network Christmas

From Igniter Media A Social Network Christmas. Not quite as poetic as the King James, but it does cover the main points. (You might need to scroll down. I cannot get the video to move up.)

Picture ot the Day - 12/16/2010

From the campus of George Washington University earlier today. George himself accented with snow.

Pictures of the Day - 2010

Return of the Missing Head

The recent episode where the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall were accosted with shouts of "off with theirs heads" reminds me that there was a time when this actually happened, as does this story. For almost 200 hundred years the head of Henri IV of France went missing. Henry was assassinated in 1610, but it seems his head did not become detached from his body until 1793 when revolutionaries made off with it. I guess a it is much easy to carry off just a head as opposed to the entire body.

According to this article from the BBC, the head has now been recovered and returned—although probably not reattached—to the rest of the body.


[Added 12/18/10. A video from the BBC on Henri's head.]

Tests show head of France's King Henri IV 'genuine'

The Other Aubrey

What Aubrey Bodine is to black and white photography, Aubrey Beardsley is to black and white illustration. Beardsley was one of the most successful book illustrators of the 19th century. From The Independent, here is a selection of his work, as well as a couple other illustrators.

Fancy and Imagination

More Yosemite

I previously posted a series a Yosemite photographs by Mark Boster. Here is a video of Boster photographing in Yosemite.

Time lapse: One photographer, one subject, four seasons

Picture ot the Day - 12/11/2010

I am just wondering if drinks are served during the service here. That would probably warm the welcome.

Pictures of the Day - 2010

The Antikythera Mechanism

A Lego recreation of an ancient Greek device used to predict eclipses. More videos and information at the guardian.co.uk here.

Images of the Brain

The New York Times has an article and a set of illustration from the new book, Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. Included is this image that looks like a detail from a Gustav Klimt painting, but is actually an image of the Neocortex of the brain.

Visualizing the Beautiful Mind

At Home

I recently read Bill Bryson's latest book At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Bryson currently lives in a former Church of England rectory built in the middle 1800's. Going room by room through the house, he writes about the history of each type of room. Starting with pre-historic dwellings in Great Britain, he covers a lot of ground. His treatment is rather episodic, and sometimes he stretches to connect the history he wants to tell with the room he is relating it to. He briefly covers many topics, but his stories are always interesting, and often very entertaining.

This book reminded my of Witold Rybczynski 1987 book Home: A Short History of an Idea. Rather than going room by room, Rybczynski gives a chronological history of the home. Each of his chapters begins with a painting of a home from a specific time period, and then he discusses how the painting relates to changes in the concept of what constituted a home during that time period. This is the first book that I every read by Rybczynski, but he has since become one of my favorite writers. I have read many of his other books, and seen him speak twice. I would recommend anything that he has written.

Going back to Bryson's book, one of the episodes that he relates is the creation of the London sewers. I was already familiar with this from Stephen Halliday's book The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis. In short, following the rise of the flush toilet in the early 1800's, the Thames River became on massive cesspool. The smell became so overwhelming that the Parliament had to be shut down. Joseph Bazalgette took on the task of creating a sewer system that would remove all the waste from London. In the process, he created the embankments that currently line the Thames through London, and built one of the technological wonders off the 19th Century. A century and a half later, the sewer Bazalgette build is still the backbone of the system London uses to dispose of sewage. All of this as a way of introducing this video which is a modern day descent into the sewer Bazalgette build. I am including the link to this video because, knowing the history, I thought it was interesting. That being said, it is very gross. So if you are squeamish you might want to skip it. On the other hand, this may be the only place you will ever see a discussion of affluent effluent.

Below the waste line: Inside London's sewer system

The Birds of America

An original double elephant folio edition of John James Audobon's The Birds of America has sold at auction for $11.5, making it the most expensive print book ever sold. I bought a series of books that reproduce the original 4 volumes on ebay a couple years ago for much less, but it is probably not even baby elephant size. Here is an article with a video about the book.

Audubon's Birds of America: The world's most expensive book

Picture ot the Day - 12/7/2010

The remains of the two burned out buildings on the west side of the 800 block of Charles Street. I believe the very first Donna's was the one in this building. I would go take pictures of the buildings that burned on the Block, but it is too cold, and I need a nap. Note the icicles that froze on the stop light.

Pictures of the Day - 2010

"The Star-Spangled Banner" sold for $506,500

An 1814 first-edition copy of the lyrics and music of "The Star Spangled Banner" sells for over a half million dollars.

Sale of 'Star-Spangled Banner' sheet music sets record

Happy St. Nicholas Day

This link is from the Smithsonian Libraries' Facebook feed, but I really like this illustration, which looks like it may be from the Wiener Werkstätte. So I have cribbed it, as well as the link to their blog post.

Happy St. Nicholas Day

Two James Franco Films

Recently I have seen two films starring James Franco films. Both deviate from the structure of a normal narrative film. It is always risk to try to do this, but both directors still succeeded in creating engaging, and thought provoking films.

Yesterday I saw 127 Hours, based on the true story of Aron Ralston, who, while hiking alone in the Utah, fell into a crevice, and had his arms pinned under a boulder that fell on it. He was there 127 hours before he cut off the arm to escape. Much of the press on this film is about people passing out from the scene of the amputation, and something like this seems to have happened when I saw the film. Shortly after the critical scene there was a big commotion in theater, with people jumping up and calling for medical assistance. The film continued running, and after a couple minutes everyone settled down. I am not sure what happened, but an ambulance was outside when I left the theater.

It is a very intense film, and there is something in the primitive part of the brain that really does not like to see body parts being cut off. At the same time I would not consider it a sensationalistic film. The Ralston character is very well developed, with most of the film dealing with the lead up to the accident, and then his struggle as he is trapped for five days. The films actually works better because practically everyone in the audience knows what is going to happen in the end. While this lessens the shock when the amputation happens, it does increase the tension throughout the film, partly because everyone is hoping they don't pass out.

For perhaps a majority of the film Franco is the only actor on screen, although you could argue that the Utah landscapes of the film are almost an separate character. The sparse, but stunning, appearance of the setting, does something to balance out the gruesomeness of the story. Also Franco creates a very likable, and carefree character that you really have to root for. If any one character can be said to carry a whole film, I think you have to say that Franco carries this one, so he might get nominated for an Oscar.

Danny Boyle, who directed last year's Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire, might also get nominated again for this picture. He uses a lot of split screen and fast cut, odd angle editing to create the tension of the film. It may be that this is a little too out of the mainstream for the Oscars, but we will have to wait and see.



About a month ago I saw Howl. In this film, Franco plays Allen Ginsberg. The film goes back and forth between scenes that recreate an early taped interview by Ginsberg, narrative scenes that include other Beat characters, like Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady, and a recreation of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's obscenity trial for publishing Ginsberg's poem "Howl".

This film is not as good as 127 Hours, but it is an interesting look at Ginsberg, and American society in the 1950's. The cutting back and forth between the different scenes of the film does not get to confusing, and at 90 minutes I think it is the right length to deal with what is being covered. If it had been much, longer I think the jumping back and forth would have become overwhelming.

Milestones in Reading

A set of images from the LA Times depicting advances in reading technology over the centuries.

Milestones in Reading

Picture ot the Day - 12/02/2010

I missed the holiday lighting of the Washington Monument in Baltimore tonight. After it was over I did get this photograph. The lights are LED, and in various shades of blue, from greenish to light blue, even though that does not really show up in this photograph.

See related photographs at the Baltimore Sun.

Pictures of the Day - 2010

Eat Drink Art Design

Photographs of objects from the exhibition Eat Drink Art Design at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York City. These are some of the pieces that struck me the most, including this one by Keith Haring.

Note: Once the slide show opens, if you click at the top where it says "Show Info" the descriptions should appear with the photographs.

Eat Drink Art Design

Molecular Animation

A video from the New York Times on Molecular Animation.

NYC Buildings

Some more photographs from my New York City trip. Here are pictures of some buildings around New York City, including this one of the Chelsea Hotel.

Various NYC Buildings

Ethan Law\Cyr Wheel

For something totally different from anything I have posted before, here is Ethan Law performing with a Cyr Wheel.

Picture ot the Day - 11/27/2010

From the Museum of Art and Designs' exhibition The Global Africa Project, Absolut Power (2003), by Hank Willis Thomas, a mashup of the Plan of the British Slave Ship "Brookes" (1789) and the current Absolut Vodka ad campaign. This was my favorite piece in the exhibition.

Pictures of the Day - 2010

Times Square

I spent several hours in Times Square last weekend waiting in line at the ticket booth. I have a post on my music blog about the two shows I went to see, Memphis and Bloody, Bloody Andrew Jackson. Here is a set of photographs I took while waiting in the ticket line.

Times Square

Bailey White's Thanksgiving Story

I always look forward to Bailey White's Thanksgiving story. She used to do short segments fairly regularly on NPR, but now she just does one longer piece a year that is broadcast on Thanksgiving. You can listen to this year's story here.

A Kind Of Love

Robert Kennedy - 85

I am a couple days late with this, but last Saturday would have been Robert Kennedy's 85th birthday. To mark the date here is video of Kennedy announcing the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., where he recites from memory the quote from Aeschylus that was later inscribed at his grave.

Blue Ridge Harvest

The American Folklife Center—part of the Library of Congress—has posted this PDF version of the book Blue Ridge Harvest: A Region's Folklife in Photographs. Published in 1981, the book contains photographs with essays that cover late 1970's culture and religion in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Blue Ridge Harvest

Madison Square Park & Flatiron Building

Two more sets of photographs from my trip to New York City.

First some monuments and sites around Madison Square Park, including this photograph of Secretary of State William H. Seward, most famous for negotiating the purchase of Alaska. If not for this man, Sarah Palin might be a Russian. Just something to think about.

Madison Square Park

At the southwest corner of Madison Square sits the storied Flatiron Building. Completed in 1902, it is considered one of the first skyscrapers ever constructed. Daniel Burnham and Frederick P. Dinkelberg were the architects.

The Flatiron: The New York Landmark and the Incomparable City That Arose with It, an interesting, well written account of the building's history by Alice Sparberg Alexiou, a descendant of one of the former owners, was published earlier this year.

The Flatiron Building

The High Line

Once an elevated railway bringing trains into the Meatpacking District on the west side of Manhattan, the High Line is now a park that runs through and above the city. The portion that is currently open runs from Gansevoort Street to 20th Street, but it will eventually extend up to 34th Street. It was a bit overcast last Saturday when I took these photographs, so they are a little dull, but you can still see what is there. These are all photographs of or taken from the High Line.

Note: Once the slide show opens, if you click at the top where it says "Show Info" the descriptions should appear with the photographs.

The High Line

Picture ot the Day - 11/21/2010

Just back from two days in New York City. I will do more posts later this week. For now here is a picture of the stacked parking at 20th Street and 10th Avenue.

Pictures of the Day - 2010

Nat Geo's 2010 Photo Contest

The Big Picture at boston.com has a selection of photographs that have been entered into the National Geographic's 2010 Photo Contest.

National Geographic's Photography Contest 2010

WWI From Above

This is a fascinating documentary produced by the BBC, covering WWI with photographs and film taken from the air over Europe during and shortly after the war ended.

In four parts.

Sheila Bair

The most competent person in the federal government:

Mark Twain

A lot has been written about Mark Twain this year, since it is the 100th anniversary of his death. This article, from the Los Angeles Times, has three lists of works by Twain: Essential, Overrated and Overlooked.

My two favorite works by Twain are not on these lists. I have previously posted an animated version of one of them,The Diaries of Adam and Eve. Described by the publisher as:

The Diaries--written near the end of Mark Twain's life and career--are perhaps his wisest, most personal works. The wry humor we expect is matched by a heartbreaking tenderness found nowhere else in his writings. And it was only in Eve that Twain ever wrote from a woman's viewpoint. An afterword details Twain's fascination with Adam and the parallels between his own marriage and Adam and Eve as depicted in the Diaries.

My other favorite is The War Pray, written by Twain during the furor of the Philippine-American War. It was not published until years after his death, because as Twain himself said, "I don't think the prayer will be published in my time. None but the dead are permitted to tell the truth".

He is an animated version of the Pray, which is actually more of a polemic, than a work of fiction. The animation in this version is adequate, by I much prefer John Groth's illustrations that are included in the print edition.

In two parts.

Le Grand Voyage

A post to mark the end of the Hajj. From the guardian.co.uk, a set of photographs. Following that is the trailer for Le Grand Voyage, a movie I saw several years ago. In the film a young man and his father set out to drive from the south of France to Mecca for the Hajj. Over the 3,000 mile trip their relationship transforms.

The annual hajj pilgrimage to Mecca

The Rochefoucauld Grail

If you have an extra £2m, you might want to bid on the Rochefoucauld Grail. Three of the original four volumes of this 14th century illuminated manuscript of the King Arthur story are going up for sale at Sotheby's. More information at this article from guardian.co.uk, and the set of illustrations linked to below, including this image of Joseph of Arimathea delivering the Holy Grail to Britain.

King Arthur manuscript up for sale

Fair Game

I saw Fair Game yesterday. This is the film about Valarie Plame and Joe Wilson, and the Bush administration's attempt to ruin both of them after Wilson exposed the fact that Iraq had not tried to buy yellowcake uranium from Africa.

Normally I tried to avoid films about current events, but because Sean Penn is such a good actor I went to see this one. Sean Penn was great as usual. Naomi Watts also did a very good job portraying Plame as here career in the CIA is ruined, and her marriage almost breaks up. The film centers a lot on how the incident affected their personal lives, so it was not focused just on the larger issues of the incident.

One of the problems I have with current events films is that often times some of the characters are made rather cartoonish. In this case Karl Rove and Scooter Libby are already so cartoonish in real life, that the film could not really portray them any worse than they actually are.

Here is the trailer:

Follow Up - Litany & Adams

Follow up to my previous post on the poem "Litany", NPR has a segment on the meeting of Samuel Chelpka and Billy Collins.

Follow up to my previous post on the recently discover photographs that may or may not have been taken by Ansel Adams, the New York Times has a new article: Ansel Adams or Not? More Twists

Picture ot the Day -11/13/11

Scarlett Place condo building at 250 South President Street, Baltimore, MD.
Architect: Meyers & D'Aleo, Inc.

Built at the Inner Harbor on the site of the former Scarlett Seed Factory. One of the most prominent works of postmodern architecture in downtown Baltimore. This is not really one of my favorite buildings, but from this angle, in this light it is not too bad.

The Shot Tower appears in the background on the left.

Pictures of the Day - 2010

Charter for Compassion

On the one year anniversary of the establishment of the Charter for Compassion, here is Karen Armstrong's lecture that started the whole thing.

Tinkers

I just finished reading Tinkers by Paul Harding. This book won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. I have to say that this year my taste, and the taste of the Pulitzer judges diverge quite a bit.

If you are into tediously long sentences, this is the book for you. It may be that my attention span is too short, but all too often I found myself thinking where the hell did this sentence start, and is it ever going to end.

The plot involves a dying man, and the story of his father and grandfather. George Crosby, the dying man, fixes old mechanical clocks, which acts as a metaphor for much that goes on in the book. His father and grandfather have both been forced, by circumstances, to abandon their families. Their stories are interwoven with scenes from Crosby's death bed.

You can rightfully argue that the writing is accomplished. Here is an impressive passage:

Eighty-four hours before he died, George thought, Because they are like tiles loose in a frame, with just enough space so they can all keep moving around, even if it's only a few at a time and in one place, so that it doesn't seem like they are moving, but the empty space between them, and that empty space is the space that is missing, the last several pieces of colored glass, and when those pieces are in place, that will be the final picture the final arrangement. But those pieces, smooth and glossy and lacquered, are the dark tablets of my death, in gray and black, and bleached, drained, and until they are in place, everything else will keep on shifting. And so this end in confusion, where when things stop I never get to know it, and this moving is that space, is that what is yet to be, which is for others to see filled wherever it may finally be in the frame when the last pieces are fitted and the others stop, and there will be the stopped pattern, the final array, but not even that, because that final finitude will itself be a bit of scrolling, a pearlescent clump of tiles, which will generally stay together but move about within another whole and be mingled with in endless ways of other people's memories, so that I will remain a set of impressions porous and open to combination with all of the other vitreous squares floating about in whoever else's frames, because there is always the space left in reserve for the rest of their own time, and to my great-grandchildren, with more space than tiles, I will be no more than the smoky arrangement of a set of rumors, and to their great-grandchildren I will be no more than a tint of some obscure color, and to their great grandchildren nothing they ever know about, and so what army of strangers and ghosts has shaped and colored me until back to Adam, until back to when ribs were blown from molten sand into the glass bits that took up the light of this world because they were made from this world, even though the fleeting tenants of those bits of colored glass have vacated them before they have had even the remotest understanding of what it is to inhabit them, and if they-if we are fortunate (yes, I am lucky, lucky), and if we are fortunate, have fleeting instants when we are satisfied that the mystery is ours to ponder, if never to solve, or even just rife personal mysteries, never mind those outside-are there even mysteries outside? a puzzle itself-but anyway, personal mysteries, like where is my father, why can't I stop all the moving and look out over the vast arrangements and find by the contours and colors and qualities of light where my father is, not to solve anything but just simply even to see it again one last time, before what, before it ends, before it stops. But it doesn't stop; it simply ends. It is a final pattern scattered without so much as a pause at the end, at the end of what, at the end of this. - Kindle Loc. 520-38

I might admire the person who could write this, but it makes me dizzy to read.

After finishing the book, I went and looked at the comments on Amazon. It seems I am not the only person who noticed the striking similarity to the writing of Marilynne Robinson. Robinson's books Gilead and Home also deal with old men reconsidering their lives, and all three books have a pensive and reflective tone about them.

Robinson teaches at the Iowa Writer's Workshop, where Harding has recently studied, so the influence appears to have been rather direct. They say that "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", but that does not mean that it always works out. Robinson is one of my favorite writers. In my opinion, her writing is far more lucid than Harding's.

I think Tinkers could have made one, two or three good short stories, but for me in it's current form it did not work.

At the risk of sounding as cranky as H.L. Mencken, I will add one more point. What exactly is the problem with quotation marks? This is not the first book that I have read recent where the author disposed of quotes to mark dialogue. Maybe the lack of quotes is supposed to give the work a more stream of consciousness feel, but I for one find it annoying to have to constantly try to figure out if I am reading dialogue or description. This problem is made worse in this book, when it is difficult to remember where what you are currently reading actually started.

Picture ot the Day -11/10/11

"Man Helping Man" - A sculpture by Harold Kimmelman, in front of Heart House, 2400 N Street NW, Washington DC, 20037

Pictures of the Day - 2010

Underwater Photography

From guardian.co.uk, a collection of the year's best underwater photography, chosen by the judges of two major competitions - Our World Under Water and the fourth annual Deep International Underwater competition.

The world's best underwater photographs 2010

JFK Elected President

Today is the 50th anniversary of John F. Kennedy's election to the Presidency. Here is his statement on Nov. 9 1960 acknowledging the election.

The Bride of Frankenstein Poster

On Friday, this 1935 movie poster for The Bride of Frankenstein, by an unknown artist, goes up for auction. It is expected to sell for over $700,000, setting a new record price for a movie poster. The link below goes to an article from The Independent, covering this poster plus the top ten most expensive movie posters sold to date.

Coming soon! A film poster to break all records!

Lucy Kellaway on Apple

One of my favorite commentators is Lucy Kellaway from the Financial Times. She is describe on the web site: "the FT's management columnist, pokes fun at management fads and jargon, and celebrates the ups and downs of office life." Here are two of her recent podcast that deal with Apple.

Words to describe the glory of Apple

Time to spit out more praise for Apple

Movie News

Two interesting bits of movie news this week.

The following voice casting has been attached to Aardman Animation's next film Arthur Christmas: James McAvoy, Hugh Laurie, Jim Broadbent, Bill Nighy and Imelda Staunton. Due out for the 2011 Holidays.

Leonardo Dicarpio may star as the mass murder in the the film adaptation of Erik Larson's novel The Devil in the White City. Seems the film still has a long way to go before it goes to production though, and no word on who will play Daniel Burnham. It will take some work to distill this book into a movie. The story revolves around the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. I am interested to see this recreated on film.

A few post card images from the fair, where the souvenir picture post card made it's debut.

The Book of the Dead

The link below goes to a video on the British Museum's new exhibit that contains the longest know Book of the Dead. It has great images of the various spells needed to reach paradise.

A rare view of Egyptian Book of the Dead

Under the Harrow

A review of Under the Harrow by Mark Dunn. Dunn also wrote Ella Minnow Pea, one of my favorite books of all time. Evidently Dunn's publisher is barely solvent. I am not even sure if the hard cover version of this book is available. I read the Kindle edition. I supposed this also explains why the book has had no publicity

Dunn's books are all completely different, from Ella Minnow Pea, an epistolary novel where successive letters are dropped from use in the text, to Ibid, which consisted totally of footnotes from a fictional biography. You could say that his fiction tends towards the experimental.

Under the Harrow could be summed up as a Victorian, mystery, thriller, which is quite a combination. Set in the Dingley Dell in the early 2000's. All of the inhabitants of the Dell are descended from a group of orphans, who in the let eighteen hundreds were abandoned by all the adults. For over 100 years they have lived cut off from the outside world. A few, select residents do have contact with the outside world for purposes of trade, but other than this—for reason that the residents can only speculate on—there have been no outside influences on the residents of the Dell for over 100 years.

When abandoned the orphans were left with the Ninth Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, and a complete set of Charles Dickens' novels. Thus everyone chooses a name from Dickens. They also have an atlas, but they are not exactly clear where the Dell is located, other than that it is in a mid-latitude coal region. Some think they are in Australia, others England, and others Pennsylvania.

There are attempts by some to escape to the outside world, but those who try this either never return, or, if they do return, they must be locked up in an asylum.

After a century of living stuck in the late Victorian age, the novel picks up as the entire community is about to come to a cataclysmic end. In the novel, these events are recounted by Frederick Trimmers several years after the demise of the Dell. As events in the Dell begin to careen out of control, Trimmers becomes involved with a small group of residents who—disguised as a poetry society—are determine to figure out what is happening to their society.

The story has a large number of characters, from a few who attempt to escape the Dell, to their relatives who have been left behind, and are determined to discover what has happened to the attempted escapees. As a couple characters leave the Dell for the outside, the narrative also follows their interaction with the outside world, where the Dickens characters meet the modern world. Given the need to establish all of these characters, the novel starts out fairly slow. But as the reader becomes familiar with the characters the pace picks up until is ends in a mighty crescendo.

In the vein of Dickens, the novel deals with the relationships of different social classes. Even though everyone is descended from the same group of orphans, the society has become very stratified, from the members of the Petit-Parliament down to the outcast apricot eaters, who barely make out an existence on the edge. There is also the relationship of the few elite, who have limited interaction with the outside world, and may in fact know what is about to happen, with the rest of the society, who are totally in the dark about the outside world and the coming events. Added to this are numerous family conflicts.

As in many situations, the main internal conflict is should I stay or should I go. In this book this conflict becomes very literal.

I have not read Dickens for quite a few years, so I cannot say how closely Dunn's writing style follows Dickens, although the book is clearly meant as a homage to him. At the same time given that the novel deals with an old world inside the current world, it definitely has a post-Dickensian, if not post-modern, structure.

I tend to like shorter fiction, so I cannot say that I liked this book as much as Ella Minnow Pea. That being said, it is very original, a whole raft of characters are portrayed very comprehensibly, and once the pace gets moving it becomes very gripping.

One final point, in addition to the clear homage to Dickens, one of the characters in the world outside the Dell has a striking resemblance to Senator Arlen Specter. So even though Specter is about to lose his Senate seat, maybe his consolation prize can be that he has gained a place in literature.

The Raven

For Halloween, a Christopher Walken reading of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven. Illustration used in the video are by Gustave Dore.

People Who Became Nouns

From LIFE, a set of images representing 51 people whose names live on as references to cars, scientific measurements, prostitutes and various and sundry other things. Since it is election time, I am including the picture of the infamous Elbridge Gerry below on the link. The image of the Gerry-Mander may well have been reproduced in more history books than just about any other image.

People Who Became Nouns

White House in Pictures

From the White House blog, a post with photographs that represent the last year in pictures.

Pete Souza's Ten Favorites

Picture ot the Day - 10/26/2010

This is one of the cornices at the top of the United States Appraisers' Stores Building in downtown Baltimore. Built in 1932.

Pictures of the Day - 2010

Museo Subacuático de Arte

Some photographs and a video of Jason deCaires Taylor's Museo Subacuático de Arte. Large concrete sculptures submerged off the coast of Mexico, with the dual purposes of providing a place for new coral reefs to grow, and reducing damage to natural reefs by luring tourist away from them. It is planned to eventually contain over 400 permanent life-size sculptures.

La Evolución Silenciosa

Holland Island House Collapses

The Baltimore Sun has published an in depth article on the collapse of the final remaining house on Holland Island in the Chesapeake Bay. It is good to see that the Sun is still capable of doing journalism once in a while.

Here is a link to the photographs that go with the article.

Chesapeake Bay island vanishes

Picture ot the Day - 10/22/2010

I took this photograph last night from Federal Hill after the O'Malley Rally ended. Sunset over the Ravens' stadium.

Pictures of the Day - 2010

Campaigning on Federal Hill

Photographs from the rally for Gov. O'Malley today on Federal Hill. Main event was Bill Clinton, with numerous supporting characters.

Note: Once the slide show opens, if you click at the top where it says "Show Info" the descriptions should appear with the photographs.

Campaigning on Federal Hill - 10/21/10

The Great Gatsby

Roger Ebert's latest blog entry is about Bill Nack, author of the book that the movie Secretariat is based on. In the post, The storyteller and the stallion, Ebert discusses his long friendship with Nack, a fellow University of Illinois alumnus. The post contains a very interesting four part video of Nack discussing Secretariat. Also included is this video of Nack reciting the closing lines of The Great Gatsby.



See my previous post on Secretariat for more on the brawl between Ebert and Salon critic Andrew O'Hehir over the movie.

Ansel Adams' Photos of Manzanar

From the Denver Post's PLOG, a collection of Ansel Adams' photographs taken at Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, where nearly 10,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II.

From the Archive: Japanese Internment at Manzanar

Sleep Inducing Milk

An article, from guardian.co.uk, about a German company that has patented "nocturnal milk". That is milk with super high levels of melatonin.

German night milk may aid insomniacs

Four Seasons in Yosemite

The Los Angelos Times' Mark Boster spent a year photographing Yosemite National Parks. Here are highlights from his journey.

Four Seasons in Yosemite

Barbara Billingsley, RIP

Here is Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawick's write up on Barbara Billingsley, a very succinct summary of her impact on American society.

Barbara Billingsley, definitive '50s TV mom, dead at 94

Charlotte's Web Cover Art

Charlotte's Web cover art sells for more than $155,000.

'CHARLOTTE'S WEB' cover art snares $155K at auction

Baltimore Reflections

Here is a set of photographs that I took today. Every photograph in this set is a reflection, most in glass, but a couple in the water. The photograph below is the clock face of the Bromo Seltzer Tower reflected in a window of a hotel across the street, but it almost looks like the clock is on the wall of the hotel.

Actually these pictures are all dependent on chance, based on where you can stand in relationship to the angle of the sun. Some of them look almost like the actual image, and some appear to be abstract.

Note: Once the slide show opens, if you click at the top where it says "Show Info" the descriptions should appear with the photographs.

Baltimore Reflections - 10/17/10

Extraordinary, Ordinary Family

Here is Condoleezza Rice's appearance at the National Press Club to promote her book Condoleezza Rice: A Memoir of My Extraordinary, Ordinary Family and Me. A very fascinating talk about growing up in Birmingham, Alabama in the 50's and 60's.

Note the first 5 minutes is introduction, so you can skip over that.