I keep noticing that the mug shots posted from time to time in the local papers are always somehow just "off."
This is a mug shot of a guy named Charles Willis and the police in Milford, Delaware, are looking for him. I know nothing about this guy, but his mug shot matches the off-centered-ness of many I've seen in the local press lately.
Why can't these mug shots be better centered? It's off-putting to see them this way.
I finished book 32 -- A Lion Among Men -- last night. Seven of the 32 (about 22%) were purchased. The rest were from the Lewes Public Library (Yay, the library!). all but one -- Craig Furguson's memoir American on Purpose -- were novels. I read for escapism; I prefer fiction.
To get truly geeky, I have read 10,507 pages this year. That's an average of just over 328 pages per book.
The fine (but delightfully twisted) folks at Dogfish Head Brewery have arranged to give a home to the Steampunk Treehouse. The Treehouse was created in 2007 for the Burning Man Festival and has been erected for a few other festivals since, but has not had a permanent home -- until now.
Mariah Calagione explains on the Dogfish Head blog how the brewers reached out to Treehouse builders Sean Orlando and the 5-Ton Crane Arts Group last year:
We quickly realized that we were on the same page of a pretty off-centered book as Sean and his crew. We enthusiastically agreed to make a permanent home for the Steampunk Treehouse at our Milton, Delaware brewery.
I saw this blog post yesterday and found the idea fascinating. My nephew Magpie Killjoy spent some years publishing a steampunk magazine and has a good understanding of that world. I sent him a note asking what he knew about the Treehouse. He was excited at the news:
These people put a huge amount of energy into creating this entirely weird thing. And one thing that is beautiful about it is that it was built before steampunk got really codified and snobby, So it's the kind of thing that people now might say "oh that's not steampunk enough" or some such crap. I haven't seen it in person, but I was corresponding with one of the makers while they were working on it.
Cool that it's in Delaware. I was sad that it didn't have a permanent home.
One more reason to go spend more time with my off-centered friends at Dogfish Head.
The girls had their annual dance recital with the Sussex Dance Academy last night. I wasn't planning on taking any pictures, but a group of three very tall and very large-headed men sat in front of us. Our view was, therefore, somewhat obstructed.
It was a long show; the Academy continues to grow and now serves many students, girls and boys, of all ages. I looked around at the very large crowd before the show and realized just how much our friend Kate Walker's business has grown.
Class after class of dancers performed, from tiny, twirling tots to sophisticated and well-trained teens. They represented a cross-section of Sussex County, daughters and sons of dentists and doctors, teachers and farmers, cops and engineers.
Colleen danced a solo in the show. By tradition, graduating seniors have a farewell solo in the recital. She did herself proud, dancing her own choreography to Coldplay's "Yellow." Christina also stood out, she has developed into a fine dancer.
It's fascinating to watch these kids progress and develop. Christina now leads a core of talented kids who were gangly tweens just a short while ago. Behind them are younger boys and girls starting to grow into their talents. And in the many groups of very small kids being introduced to dance, you sense a number who get it, who belong on-stage and who will be part of the corps de ballet in years to come.
I'd just prefer not to be behind the big-head family any more.
A colleague and I took the afternoon off today to play 18 holes at Garrison's Lake Golf Course, just south of Smyrna, Delaware. Garrison's is coming back and offers good value for the money.
I had a fairly good start, but fell apart a bit on the back nine. I ended the day with a 115, about what I've scored each time out the few times I've played this year.
My drives have gotten better, but I was trying to hit my second shots with woods, instead of irons -- for the distance. Unfortunately, I wasn't hitting the woods very well at all. There are a few "blow-up" holes on my scorecard.
Sometimes I come across a passage in a book that I really enjoy and want to share with you. This is from the novel Johannes Cabal the Necromancer:
The hooting started at dusk. A dismal, unhappy sound that echoed from the hills and sent shivers down the spine. It was a faintly pleasant sensation. With no telephone calls or knocks at doors, the town gravitated en masse to the station that hadn't been there as anything more than charred beams and blackened piles of bricks even twenty-four hours before. In huddled groups, the citizens waited. The hooting came closer, joined by a gargantuan, rhythmic snorting and a mechanical clanging of metal on metal. Somebody saw the smoke first and pointed, speechless. The huffing plume grew closer and closer, and the people there didn't know whether to run or to wait. They waited because it was less effort.
And then it appeared: a great, monstrous beast of steel and fire. Sparks flew from its smokestack as they once did from the pyres of martyrs and witches, swirling into the darkening sky like fiery gems on deep-blue brocade. The train's whistle blew, the triumphant shriek of a great predator that has found the prey. And the hooting grew louder and clarified into a horrid, disjointed tune played upon the steam calliope in the fifth car, a death dance for skeletons to spin and stagger to.
The train drew into the station and spat steam across the platform, making everybody skitter away. The engine made a noise that, to Barrow's ear, sounded like a contemptuous "Hah!"
My work blog, DGDC News, gets a healthy amount of spam comments. Most are caught by the spam filter; I delete several hundred every few days. But a few make it through to comment moderation and I have to decide whether to let them be published.
Today, my inbox held three comments for moderation, all from the same IP address and all similar, but not quite the same.
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Obviously, I have lost track of my parts of speech (it's late), but you get the point.
The Middletown Transcript has an obituary for Rusty Harvey today. I didn't know him personally, but I knew of him and I know enough about him to say that this is sad news. According to the paper, he died on Monday, at age 69.
Rusty Harvey was a leader of Delaware Wild Lands, "a private, non-profit tax-exempt organization dedicated to the conservation and preservation of natural areas through the acquisition and management of strategic parcels of land."
In my career in state government in Delaware, I've been involved in several agencies concerned with land preservation. "Rusty Harvey" is a name I heard from the very first. He was so established as a "name" in land preservation that I thought he was already long dead and simply being honored posthumously with tracts named for him as far back as the early 90s. I was a bit surprised when he was pointed out to me one day.
I'm sure there will be many more memorials and testaments in his memory as word gets around. But I thought I would note his passing for those of you who aren't from around these parts and might otherwise have missed the news.
Karen and I are now the very proud parents of a high school graduate. Colleen received her diploma this evening at Sussex Tech High School in Georgetown. She graduated with an impressive 9.4 cumulative GPA and in the top 10 percent of her class.
I'm proud as hell and inclined to brag a bit. I'll note, though, that while I think she inherited some of her smarts from me, she inherited more from Karen. And it was Karen who enforced discipline and good study habits.
It was a challenge to get all 294 seniors across the stage, handed a diploma, and congratulated before some sizable thunderstorms rolled across Sussex County. We spent part of the evening nervously watching the storms approach.
Despite the threatening skies, the ceremony did not dissolve into mass hysteria with lightning strikes and pouring rain. In fact, when the storms passed, they passed by on either side of the school -- sparing the crowd and the moment for almost 300 happy graduates.
So that's done. Next up for Colleen is Villanova, while her younger sister -- Christina -- will move on to Sussex Tech next fall.
I was in Washington DC Saturday evening for my mother's 80th birthday party (mazeltov, Mom!). I stayed the night in northwest Washington and left this morning by way of Western Avenue, which forms the northwest boundary of the city. It gave me a chance to visit a few of the boundary stones that mark the District of Columbia boundary.
The stone pictured at right stands in Westmoreland Circle, where Massachusetts Ave. crosses Western Ave. It's not one of the original stones, placed by surveyors in 1791 and 1792. It appears to be a bit more recent and has at least one twin, on Chevy Chase Circle.
Just a bit north of this stone is Northwest No. 6 Boundary Marker, which is original and shows the significant weathering of more than 200 years. The iron fence was installed about 100 years ago by the Daughters of the American Revolution.
Though I am not very active on the site lately, I've been a MetaFilter member for about six years now and the reaction of this on-line community, and their success in dealing with this story, is no surprise.
I found MetaFilter when I was looking for help on a much more mundane level. A web-search for advice on an automotive matter led me to a MetaFilter discussion that solved my problem and I later joined the site. It was my educational resource for what the web has become, for blogging, on-line photography, and for social media.
I followed this Russian students/sex-traffickers story from afar this week. I had nothing to contribute, but I find this a fascinating example of what we can and should be in on-line communities.
I'm getting ready for a public hearing next week on a draft update of the Lewes Zoning Code. I'm part of the city's Planning Commission and we have completely re-written the code. After this public hearing, we need to ship a draft off to the Mayor and City Council.
Part of my job is to promote the public hearing and help explain the draft to the public. So I wrote a newspaper column about it. versions of this have appeared in the Cape Gazette and the Coast Press.
And I created a slide show that I presented to Mayor and Council last week.
I heard about Jamie Hyneman being the speaker back in April when Colleen was looking at Villanova. I'm a big Mythbusters fan; learning that Mr. Hyneman has been working with the Villanova Engineering School and would be commencement speaker that school rose in my estimation.
Of course, it was not my decision. It was Colleen's. She did, in fact, choose Villanova, though she's not at all impressed with Jamie Hyneman.
If we're looking at all bleary this morning, blame Colleen's Senior Prom. That event went off last night at the Exhibit Hall at the state fairgrounds in Harrington. It ate most of our yesterday and chunks of many other days leading up to it.
Karen, of course, carried most of the load. Try as I might, I have not been able to secure the role of dress, hair, and make-up advisor to my daughters.
Colleen's date was her young man from New Jersey, a very nice guy we've known since he was a boy. They made a lovely couple. I'll hold off on any more detailed pictures, publicly, until Colleen has time to go through all 300 that I took last night and approve any for publication.
This picture is Jake's shoulder, parts of his tux, and his boutonnière.
After a morning of hair appointments, the kids dressed in mid-afternoon and we gathered with a large group of their friends in a pocket park in Bridgeville for plein air portraits.
From there it was a short ride north to Harrington for a "grand march" designed to match the prom theme, which was something to do with Hollywood. A red carpet promenade was laid out in one of the nicer show-barn/pavilions at the fairgrounds and we cheered for and photographed our kids as they entered from a flotilla of limousines.
Based on a handful of wee-hour text messages, I understand that the Prom was good fun. A more full report, I'm sure, will come when all have recovered.
I brag a lot about how much I like working in downtown Dover, Delaware. I love the fact that I can walk uptown at lunchtime and not only find fine dining (or a cheese steak) but also beautiful, historic city spaces.
This is the old Green, which dates from colonial times. It was in a building on this Green that Delaware's leaders met on December 7, 1787 to become the first to ratify the Constitution of the United States.
Today it is a quiet pleasant spot in which to walk.
We went down to Selbyville this evening for the middle school band and choral concert for spring at the Southern Delaware School of the Arts (SDSA). Christina is about to graduate from the 8th grade at SDSA and this was her concert there.
Aside from playing clarinet in the band and singing among the music majors and minors (her major was dance, chorus was a minor), Christina was chosen to be part of a special singing group that took on the challenge of a classical piece, in Latin -- Pallestrina's Sicut Cervus.
The sound quality here is not the best, and my shaky arms had to serve as a tripod, but I think you get enough of a sense of how this sounded from this video. These kids -- 13 and 14 years old -- did a great job.
I just noticed that this photo, which I took last week in Dover and only just uploaded this evening, is the 6,000th thing that I have uploaded to flickr.
Flickr has been a great boon to me. It has given me a visual artistic outlet that dovetails nicely with my writing outlet -- this blog. The two have fed each other.
I found an interesting confluence of ideas this week in the separate streams of information from two musicians I follow.
Amanda Palmer, who is touring in Europe right now, performing both her own music and as a part of the music/art project EvelynEvelyn, posted a full quote of a rant from a music commenter named Bob Lefsetz about the Grateful Dead exhibit at the New York Historical Society.
Mr. Lefsetz was not overly impressed with the exhibition, but his brief review of it leads into a lengthy discussion of the approach to music-making that the Dead had and how that approach is lacking in much of today's music business. The Dead, he notes, were "an adventure without a destination." They didn't really have "hits," they weren't all over the radio (at least not in their heyday), and they didn't play a scripted concert. But their approach -- a communal dedication to the idea of music, to trying, to musical experimentation -- could and did pay off:
You’re not waiting for the hit. You’re not amazed by the pyrotechnics. But if the band stands on stage playing long enough, we’re all gonna fall into a groove, you’ll feel it and be transported.
I have not yet seen Amanda Palmer play live. Though I had heard music from her first band, the Dresden dolls, in the past. I found her and started to follow her activities, and listen to recordings, after she became engaged to Neil Gaiman, a favorite author and social media presence who I have been tracking. But I think she lives this approach to music; open, free, experimenting and giving to her audience. And I applaud her for it.
Meanwhile, John Mayer, who is in a break between tours, posted a video and discussion on his site this week that suggests as a similar approach, even if he does come from a much more pop-star and celebrity place.
Mayer is starting work on songs for a next album and has decided to try writing while on tour, working with his band during sound-checks and perhaps adding early versions of tunes to his set to see how they play.
For his last album, Mayor used the internet as a sounding board and posted works in progress, snippets, and thoughts as he went along. This time, he says, he wants to "think like a new artist."
Playing arenas and ampitheatres doesn’t have to mean showing up and doing an end zone dance. What if it were alive and organic and I played new tunes that were constantly changing and growing up each night? It would sure light a fire under my ass to write the best song I could, knowing I’d be bumping a surefire album track for it.
Playing to 20,000 people should feel like playing for 200, just with 19,800 more people looking in.
I think this is promising. I like John Mayer and have since his early light-rock singer-songwriter days.
I knew we were onto something with him when he appeared on a grammy awards show early on as a new artist allowed to play a bit of an early hit, solo, on acoustic guitar. He went off-recording during an instrumental break and added some very tasty, jazzy licks that suggested a jammer was in there somewhere.
His subsequent music has borne that out as Mayer mixes hard rock, pop, and a bit of jam-band aesthetic into what is still a pop star career.
Making music is at its best when it is communication, back and forth, between musician and listener. This can happen live, it can happen in recordings, and it can happen in written music if one stays open to the idea that the music is alive and depends on both playing and hearing.
And to the idea that the musician is as much the audience as the people who paid a promoter to get in the door. The best music often comes as a surprise to the musician playing it.
So, let us support those musicians who embrace this approach -- whoever they are, where ever they are, and whatever they play.
I have read 32 books so far this year. That is slightly ahead of last year's mid-year pace and about the same as at this point in 2008.
The Middletown Transcript has an obituary for Rusty Harvey today. I didn't know him personally, but I knew of him and I know enough about him to say that this is sad news. According to the paper, he died on Monday, at age 69.
