Local trees & c.

Roy Arden's one-of-a-kind-blog continues to astound....

Elvis Birthday day on TCM all day...

Vincent Minnelli's Madame Bovary (on TCM tonight) is imperfect but worth seeing, with Charles Boyer,  James Mason as Flaubert (!) a luminous Jennifer Jones & the best ballroom sequence before "The Leopard"...

Local trees & c.

Bird feeders drive evolution...

The small gray birds that summer there traditionally winter on the Iberian Peninsula, fleeing the nutritionally sparse region for the lush olives and fruits of sunny Spain every year. But in the 1950s, a small part of the population began overwintering on the British isles instead of Spain...

 my friends Bruce Conkle & Marne Lucas' show "Eco-Baroque" named Portland's best of the year in “Best Of Visual Arts 2009” @ Willamette Week

recordings of "American Ones" & "Mine: The One That Enters the Stories"
newly added on Pennsound's Clark Coolidge page...(thanks Tom Orange)

The music cassette will never die!

“The cassette offers one of the great listening experiences,” he says. “That friction of the tape against the head is unbeatable. Then you’ve got the aesthetic difference. You find a mixtape that someone has made for you, and there is no mistaking the amount of care and affection that has gone into it...”

We have met the enemy...

Harper's vicious politics were in some ways inevitable. If we allow our political culture to erode and weaken into little more than a side-show to consumerism, it is just a matter of time before the forces of reaction seize the moment and permanently change the country...

It means, in effect, that we are simply not serious in fighting the dismantling of the country. Given the values of Canadians, and the enormous capacity of civil society to respond to the challenge if it chooses to, this simply should not be happening. That it is happening is a dramatic demonstration of our failure of political will...

GIS Mapping Shows What Discrimination Looks Like

Joyner displays a series of maps showing the Coal Run neighborhood, a handful of streets located just outside the city limits of Zanesville in central Ohio. The first map provides a simple baseline, showing the city water plant and the boundary between the city and Coal Run, a part of Muskingum County. The second map adds water lines, which serve only the northern half of Coal Run. Successive maps add the residences in Coal Run, note which residences have water and which don't, and break down their occupancy by race.

The last map puts all the data together, and the picture suddenly comes into sharp focus: Almost all the white households in Coal Run have water service, while all but a few black homes do not...

"It's a Gift" & two more on TCM today, meanwhile here's W.C. Fields in POOL SHARKS (1915)