Looks Like I'll Have to Make Friends With a Lawyer/Author from California

Michael Gabriel is the guy's name. He has bought Fourteen Foot Bank Lighthouse that I was tempted by back in August.

When I spotted the government's on-line auction of the lighthouse the bidding was at $40,000. It eventually went for $200,000 after a flurry of last minute bidding-up by Mr. Gabriel and some other person.

Gabriel, who also bought and is refurbishing a lighthouse in the Chesapeake Bay, plans to add a desalinization system to provide drinking water, a marine sanitation system to handle waste, and he plans to find a way to provide electricity to the site. At his other lighthouse (what a curious phrase), he's using a windmill system to provide power.

Obviously, Gabriel is a rich man. And a man of vision, who likes lighthouses. I'm sure we would get along famously. Don't you think?

Where Has This Week Gone?

I'm a little surprised to be sitting here on Thursday night, headed into Friday, with little posted despite the fact that it has been a busy week.

Tuesday was the first day of school at the Southern Delaware School of the Arts. Karen and the other teachers had been hard at work for at least a week before, getting things ready at their new digs at the old Indian River High School building between Dagsboro and Frankford. The original SDSA building, the old Selbyville Middle School building, is up for a desperately needed rehab. For at least this year, SDSA is in the old high school.

The SDSA teachers are focusing on The Gilded Age this year. They are organizing the curriculum around an exploration of the nation in the latter part of the 1800s. For the first day of school, they set up an Ellis Island experience.

The buses were greeted by Karen, dressed as the Statue of Liberty and standing on a pedestal in front of the school. Kids started at the cafeteria and were led, in class groups, though the school to the gym. Once there, they faced an inspection, not health, as at Ellis Island, but of their school uniforms. Then parent volunteers snapped a "passport photo" of each kid and released them into their grade's "holding area" from which they were dismissed to class.

I took the morning off so that I could help out. I took portraits of 58 seventh graders. It was fun; these older kids had a good sense of what was going on. They were comfortable and familiar with how things re a bit different at SDSA sometimes. So I could play the Ellis Island Immigration Guard a bit.

Then, yesterday evening was given over to a special meeting of the Lewes Planning Commission to review the draft preliminary site plan of the proposed "Showfield" development, which is asking to be annexed into Lewes.

This is a large plot of land. It could support more than a thousand units. The developer seems to be trying to be responsible. He's hired one of the more progressive local land planning and
design companies and together they've put together a plan for a bit more than 600. It's a good-looking plan, but there's a great deal of work to be done in reviewing it and fine-tuning it to the point where we can make a recommendation to the City Council.

That meant a three and a half hour meeting last night. We had the mayor and city solicitor with us and more council members in the room. We had lawyers and designers and environmentalists and concerned neighbors. We had a productive and open discussion.

But it took the whole evening.

And this evening we all met after school and work at Sussex Tech, where Colleen and the rest of the Ravens Marching Band put on a preview of their half-time show for the band-parents.

It has been a busy week.

Fifty Years Ago Today

This is who we were just 50 years ago.

On September 4, 1957, a 15 year-old girl walked down the street to her first day at a new high school. Dorothy Counts was a special young woman; tall, smart, and pretty.

She was also the first African American student to enroll at Harding High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. She was one of four students to integrate High Schools in that city that year.

Her walk from her father's car to the school building was short, but she was followed and hounded along the way by a crowd of angry white kids. They told her she was not welcome and should go home. Only less politely than that.

She made it to the school, but her career there was short. The stress of that first day expressed itself in a sore throat and fever. She returned to the school for three more days before the threats, rock-throwing, and spitting convinced her parents to pull her out of the school.

Here's the statement her father released to explain that move:

In enrolling Dorothy in Harding High School, we sought for her the highest in educational experience that this tax-supported school had to offer a young American. ... Needless to say that we regret the necessity which makes the withdrawal expedient. This step, taken for security and happiness, records in our history a page which no true American can read with pride.

True. And fifty years later, have we earned the right to be proud of ourselves? Technically, our society is integrated; as are our schools. But, let's be honest: we can do better.

One has only to read the "comments" section of the News Journal web site to see how far we have yet to go.

Yet, I take some hope from the story about this anniversary in last Saturday's Charlotte Observer. Dorothy Counts -- now Dot Counts-Scoggins -- is able to look back with compassion and some understanding on that time, and so are several of the young boys, now older men, who made up part of that mob.

Have a look, it's worth the read.
(Photo credit: Don Sturkey, 1957 North Carolina Collection, Univ. of N.C. Library at Chapel Hill.)

Ninth Golf Game of 2007

Andy and I played The Rookery this afternoon. We got an afternoon tee-time and arranged to meet our wives and kids afterwards at Big Fish Grill for our annual last-day-of-summer dinner.

We got to play with a fellow named Ray, the head horticulturalist at The Rookery. This is the guy who plans and plants and maintains the gardens and the grounds. We were literally "on his course."

Ray is a very nice fellow who knows the course intimately and, though he has a singular swing, hits the ball a mile.

I can't say that I played very well, though I did make at least one par. I carded a 110. My putting was terrible, but my chipping is looking good. And, though I only had a few chances to show it, I was quite proud of my play out of bunkers. Somehow, I've found a swing to get my out of the sand and onto the green.

Andy started slow, but improved steadily and finished the day at 99. He sank a ridiculously long putt for birdie on the par-5 18th.

It was a bright and sunny afternoon. The course was in fairly good shape, in spite of the dry summer we've had.

A Walk At Cape Henlopen

The staff at Cape Henlopen State Park re-opened the Point at the Cape this morning. I knew I had to head out for a wander when it re-opened, so I was rolling through the fee booth just at 8:00 a.m.

Christina was with me; she's been my frequent beach-combing partner. Christina likes to gather shells and pebbles and I like to gather photographs.

The Point of Cape Henlopen juts out from Delaware into the Delaware Bay and towards distant Cape May, in New Jersey. The Park staff closes the Point each summer to allow the rare Piping Plover a peaceful place to mate and nest and fledge out a new generation. Once the birds move on, the beach is re-opened to wanderers and to "mobile surf fishermen" who drive out on the beach in their trucks and vans to fish from their tailgates.

We weren't able to make the full trip around the point. A part of the Bay side of the point remains closed for a few remaining nesting pairs and to allow a rare plant a chance to grow a bit more. That, in effect, doubled our walk.

I found myself adding pictures to my "Distant Ships" collection. There were two ships coming in towards the Bay from the south. And another headed outbound past the lighthouse. The Pilot Boat was headed out to meet them, making its way through rough seas.


There were also several headboats (group-charter fishing boats for which anglers pay "by the head") and two sailings of the Cape May/Lewes Ferry.

The beach was somewhat empty when we started out. There were just a few truck-born anglers on the beach and a handful of other beach-combers. Things got more crowded by the time we returned to the Point parking lot, after two hours walking.

We found seashells and plenty of pebbles. Some of the shells were worth collecting, including a nice partial conch. We found driftwood and beach grass and some wildlife (both alive and dead).

Christina spotted a tiny, nearly translucent Ghost Crab skittering away from us in a panic. I took his picture when he paused; you can see his little stalk-eye staring up at me.

It was a nice walk. I got a good photo collection out of it. With the rest of the Point due to reopen on October 1, I plan to head out again a few times this fall.

Eighth Golf Game in 2007

Christina and I played 18 holes of practice/instructional golf this afternoon at the Midway Par 3 course, just outside of Lewes. It was her idea; I'm glad she suggested it.


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Midway is a great place to learn to play. It was where my friend Andy took me some years ago to get me started, and it was the first place I took both Colleen and Christina. Christina has played with me twice before. She's starting to get the basic idea. Now all she needs is more practice.

Because we were in practice and teaching mode, I didn't keep score. It was just as well; I'm rusty, not having played since we were in Vermont.

"Hello, Daily Delaware"

The person (or persons) blogging on Daily Kos as Delaware Dem has started a new, Kos-style Delaware political blog: Daily Delaware.

This should be interesting.

I've been toying with going back to more political content here, but I can't find much interest in myself to write about political things. It may be that we're too far from the actual primaries. And yet, I'm growing sick of the partisan bickering that has taken over so much of the political blogosphere in Delaware of late.

There's still a sense of camaraderie among the red and blue bloggers in the First State, but I'm seeing cracks. It feels like we're starting to stray from examining and solving problems towards "gotcha-style" stories and name-calling. Maybe I don't trust myself to rise above it?

In any case, I do take an interest in what's being said, even if I'm reluctant to wade-in very much myself. So I'll add Daily Delaware to my blog-roll and to my Google Reader and see what develops.

A Season Ends

This evening, we attended the final show of the 2007 season of the Rehoboth Summer Children's Theatre. We saw a delightful performance of their version of The Wizard of Oz.

It was a special occasion for a few reasons. Not only was it the last night of the Theatre's 26th season in Rehoboth, but it was also the final performance in the basement Fellowship Hall of Epworth United Methodist Church on Baltimore Avenue in Rehoboth Beach. The Epworth congregation is building a new sanctuary, pre-school and other facilities just outside of Rehoboth, off Route One. It's likely that the Theatre will move many of their performances there next summer, though they are still looking for space within Rehoboth; they'd like to maintain some ties to their history in the beach block.

And we were treated to a rare performance by both of the founders of the Rehoboth Summer Children's Theatre: Steve and Elise Seyfried, who founded the Theatre in 1982. Because the young actress who usually performs this show with Steve has headed back to college, Elise (who co-wrote the play and originated the RSCT version of Dorothy) joined her husband on stage.

Coincidentally, the Wizard of Oz was the first show performed by the two Seyfrieds when they started the Theatre.

They still get to play together this way every once in a while; it's always fun to see. Steve and Elise have an ease, a rapport, a spark that only comes from sharing a life, raising a family, and nurturing a theater together.

The experience left Karen and I reminiscing. We've known Steve and Elise as summer friends for some 15 years (maybe more). We first saw them perform together when Elsie was pregnant with her youngest child; Julie, a delightful young lady and good friend of our youngest. I spent about a decade on the Theatre's Board of Trustees. And I still maintain the Theatre web site as a favor to Steve.

We're sad to see them pack up their stage and head home to the Philly area, but we're glad we know them and their impressive kids. Remind me to tell you some time about the Chamber Music Festival Elise and her oldest son founded some years ago here in Lewes.

Random Images, and Music

Here's a neat art project: a randomized music video that draws imagery from the whole of flickr.

The fellow who created ASTRONAUT -- Felix Jung -- has taken a music track by a friend and used keywords based on the lyrics to fetch semi-random images from flickr, based on tags given to those images. He has built a web-movie, using Flash, that incorporates those images into a simple music video of the song.

Flickr users can add tags to their images as a way to organize them or categorize them. For example, I have quite a few photos tagged with "Vermont." There are even more tagged "Vermont" by other users. Using tags, I can quickly see all of my Vermont photos or look at photos of Vermont from other users.

Felix Jung has taken this a step further, as he explains in his post about this project:

Each time the Flash file is loaded, new images are randomly pulled from Flickr. I've hard-coded 53 keywords at set points in the song, and when the page is first loaded... calls are made out to Flickr to retrieve these keywords. With each call, I vary the parameters a little bit.

The song includes either the word or the concept "distant" towards its end. Jung has taken that as a keyword and called flickr photos tagged with "distant." There are 4,664 photos so-tagged as I write this morning. The parameters Jung refers to are changing ways to randomly sort and select from the found images. That way, different images are chosen each time the movie is played. This morning, my playing of it turned up this image.

It's a simple thing, but makes nice use of the many images that flickr users are adding to the public face of flickr each day.

We sometimes forget about the potential for the web to be a global, interactive, collaborative marketplace of ideas. We add content -- through blogging or posting photos, sound or video -- partly to satisfy our egos and be "published." But we also should remember that we are adding small bits to something larger that grows in ways we cannot forsee.

This is what is at the heart of the philosophy of the Creative Commons.

At least part of our pleasure in this Internet thing should be to see to what unexpected use other folks put our creations.

Reaching the Edge of the Place

Last night I drove to the edge of the continent and had to turn around and head back inland.

I was driving in to Rehoboth Beach to pick up Colleen, who had attended a show at the Rehoboth Summer Children's' Theatre. Rather than try to make what can be a difficult left from Rehoboth Avenue, the resort's main drag, I followed that road to its end at the boardwalk and made the circle around the Rehoboth Bandstand.


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It's a route I've taken hundreds of times in the last twenty years. For some reason, though, last night it felt clearly like I was just reaching the end of the continental US and had to turn around because I could go no farther.

It was startling to see that spot in a different clarity for a moment.