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Photos of a Lost Paris

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 9, 2014| Leave a Comment »

As I mentioned a few posts back, we went to the Metropolitan Museum when we were in New York. We saw a show from the dawn of photography, pictures of a lost Paris by Charles Marville. I greatly admired the angles, the light and shadow, the crispness of the images. Someday I want to try imitating his use of doorways and windows.

Karen Rosenberg writes about Marville in the NY Times, “In the massive construction site that was late-19th-century Paris, the photographer Charles Marville was just a few steps ahead of the wrecking ball. As an official city photographer working under Napoleon III and his controversial urban planner, Baron Haussmann, Marville recorded some 425 views of narrow, picturesque streets that were to be replaced by Haussmann’s grand boulevards.” More here.

The Met’s site adds, “By the end of the 1850s, Marville had established a reputation as an accomplished and versatile photographer. … Marville photographed the city’s oldest quarters, and especially the narrow, winding streets slated for demolition. Even as he recorded the disappearance of Old Paris, Marville turned his camera on the new city that had begun to emerge.

“Many of his photographs celebrate its glamour and comforts, while other views of the city’s desolate outskirts attest to the unsettling social and physical changes wrought by rapid modernization.” More at the website, here.

Catch the show by May 4.

Photo: Charles Marville
Rue de Constantine in 1866, one of a hundred photos of a lost Paris are now on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

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Bike-Sharing Rx

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 8, 2014| 6 Comments »

Boston Medical Center is an inner-city hospital that takes a special interest in immigrants and the poor. It also treats patients holistically, offering a referral service for problems that get in the way of good health.

With the support of the City of Boston, Boston Medical Center has added a new item to its medicine cabinet: bike sharing.

Catalina Gaitan writes at the Boston Globe, “The City of Boston has announced a program to subsidize bike-sharing memberships for low-income residents, in partnership with Boston Medical Center.

“The program, ‘Prescribe-a-Bike,’ would allow doctors at Boston Medical Center to prescribe low-income patients with a yearlong membership to Hubway, a bike-share program, for only $5.

“Participants would be allowed unlimited number of trips on the bicycles, provided they use them for 30 minutes or less at a time. They will also be given a free helmet, the mayor’s office said in a joint statement with Boston Medical Center.

“ ‘Obesity is a significant and growing health concern for our city, particularly among low-income Boston residents,’ said Kate Walsh, chief executive of Boston Medical Center, in the statement. …

“Statistics show that 1 in 4 low-income residents in Boston is obese, almost twice the rate of higher-income residents, the statement said.

“To qualify for the prescription, participants must be 16 years or older and be enrolled in some form of public assistance, or have a household income of no more than four times the poverty level.”

More here.

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Poetry for All: Miami

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on April 7, 2014| 2 Comments »

You don’t have to love everything that someone calls a poem to believe that it’s a great thing to encourage poetic expression and enjoyment of poetry in all walks of life.

One of the memorable aspects of Jason Elliot’s book on Iran, Mirrors of the Unseen, at least for me, was how many ordinary people in that country were interested in the great poets of their culture and could recite ancient verse.

Meanwhile, in Miami, there’s a poetry festival that aims to touch everyone.

William Grimes at the NY Times says, “If you live in Miami and you do not read, recite or listen to a poem in April, something has gone seriously wrong. For the third year, the O, Miami Poetry Festival will flood the city with words, using any pretext to accomplish its mission of putting all 2.6 million residents of Miami-Dade County in contact with at least one poem. …

“Poems will be pasted on the mirrors of public bathrooms and positioned at congested intersections, so drivers stuck in traffic jams can get some uplift while their engines idle. …

“One of last year’s most popular events, run with WLRN, the local public radio station, was a poetry contest in which citizen-poets were asked to contribute lines dedicated to the theme: ‘That’s so Miami.’ The winner in the ‘best ode to Miami Spanglish’ category was Lauren Fernandez: ‘Exciting and Extravagant/Guajiros in Bentleys./Tostones and Champagne. That’s so Miami.’

“This year contestants must pick a location between the Palm Beaches and the Keys and enshrine it in verse, incorporating the words “this is where.” Winners will see their work published in The Miami Herald. …

“Ivan Lopez, an actor, will dress as the poet and revolutionary José Martí, mount a white horse and ride down Calle Ocho handing out roses with poems attached. That’s so Miami.”

More  at the Times.

Photo: Ting-Li Wang/NY Times
Reading poetry. Can you identify the poet? Hint: He’s not so Miami.

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In 1875, a Six-Day Indoor Race

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 6, 2014| 4 Comments »

Since I like to walk everyday, even going round and round indoors for much of this past winter, I was fascinated to hear about walking as a competitive sport in the 19th century.

At his WBUR radio show yesterday, Only a Game, Bill Littlefield talked to Matthew Algeo, author of Pedestrianism: When Watching People Walk Was America’s Favorite Sport.

Here’s Algeo: “Edward Payson Weston was a door-to-door books salesman from Providence, R.I. In the autumn of 1860, he made a bet with a friend on the outcome of that year’s presidential election. Weston bet that Lincoln would lose, and, of course, Weston lost the bet. The loser had to walk from Boston to Washington in 10 days and arrive in time to witness the inauguration of Lincoln on March 4, 1861.

“So Weston set out and made his way south. Of course, this was a very tense time in American history. Southern states began seceding. There wasn’t a lot of good, uplifting news. And the idea that this guy would walk from Boston to Washington in the middle of winter on terrible roads — it really did capture the imagination of the public, especially along the East Coast. Huge crowds would turn out to see him just walk through their town. Weston didn’t make it in time. He was four hours late to the inauguration. He did meet Lincoln a couple of days later and Lincoln offered to pay his rail fare home, but Weston said he would try to walk home. But the Civil War intervened.”

Littlefield then refers to Weston as one half of “the first great rivalry in the annals of American sports” and asks Algeo who the other half was.

“Daniel O’Leary, an Irish immigrant from Chicago,” says the author. “And what happened was Weston, to capitalize on his fame, decided to take his act indoors. He began walking inside roller rinks, and he would try to walk say 100 miles in 24 hours and charge people a dime for the pleasure of watching him walk in circles all day. This proved immensely popular — thousands of people would do it. Naturally competitors rose up and Daniel O’Leary actually walked 100 miles in 22 hours. And so he bested Weston’s record and so that set up the big showdown in 1875 that you mentioned. It was a 500-mile race over six days between Weston and O’Leary. …

“They would draw a dirt track on the floor of an arena. … The competitors would be sent off, and they would walk continuously day and night for six days right up until midnight the following Saturday night. And the rules were pretty simple: whoever walked the farthest was the winner.” Read more here, where you also can listen to the interview and read Littlefield’s book review.

 

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Taking Photos in New York

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 5, 2014| 6 Comments »

Washington-Sq-is-where-I-came-inWashington Square, New York City

Random photos from my travels.

My husband going into the Public Theater to see classmate Ted Shen’s musical, A Second Chance. The Playbill for the show. A delightful chandelier at the Public, with paddles that illuminate changing phrases.

Subway buskers playing a grandson’s favorite song, “When the Saints Go Marchin’ In.” Grand Central Station. The charming Iroquois Hotel. A flower-themed mosaic in the Lexington Ave. subway.

Gertrude Stein looking like herself in Bryant Park. And the Metropolitan Museum, where we saw a great photography show with my sister and brother-in-law. More on that later.

(Be watching for the relaunch of the Luna & Stella website, where one of the family pictures is of my sister at age 3, pictured with Suzanne’s maternal grandfather. … Did I mention this is a blog for Suzanne’s birthstone-jewelry company Luna & Stella?)

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A Long Pause on the Bering Strait Bridge

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 4, 2014| 2 Comments »

Raise your hand if you were taught that one day centuries ago people in Siberia woke up and crossed a land bridge to North America and became the first Native Americans.

That’s OK as far as it goes, but history doesn’t stand still, and new discoveries suggest that before they got to North America, the Siberians stayed over on the bridge for a few thousand years. Who figured out the new chapters? Archaeologists and geneticists. And linguists.

Nicholas Wade writes in the NY Times, “Using a new method for exploring ancient relationships among languages, linguists have found evidence further illuminating the peopling of North America about 14,000 years ago. Their findings follow a recent proposal that the ancestors of Native Americans were marooned for some 15,000 years on a now sunken plain before they reached North America.

“This idea, known as the Beringian standstill hypothesis, has been developed by geneticists and archaeologists over the last seven years. …

“Though often referred to as a bridge, the now sunken region, known as Beringia, was in fact a broad plain. It was also relatively warm, and supported trees such as spruce and birch, as well as grazing animals.

“Writing in the journal Science last month, John F. Hoffecker, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado, summarized the evidence for thinking the Beringian plain was the refuge for the ancestral Native American population identified by the geneticists. ‘The shrub tundra zone in central Beringia represents the most plausible home for the isolated standstill population,” he and colleagues wrote. …

“Linguists have until now been unable to contribute to this synthesis of genetic and archaeological data. The first migrations to North America occurred between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago, but most linguists have long believed that language trees cannot be reconstructed back further than 8,500 years. …

“But in 2008, Edward Vajda, a linguist at Western Washington University, said he had documented a relationship between Yeniseian, a group of mostly extinct languages spoken along the Yenisei River in central Siberia, and Na-Dene.

“The Na-Dene languages are spoken in Alaska and western Canada, with two outliers in the American Southwest, Navajo and Apache.” More here.

This is why it’s important for someone to be interested in studying mostly extinct languages spoken along the Yenisei River in central Siberia.

Map: Science, a journal, and the New York Times

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Navajo Baseball Players

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 3, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Photo: Ken Shulman/OAG
Players for Naat’aanii, a team created for Navajo youth, practice in Farmington, New Mexico.

Now that Native Americans are playing major league baseball, it seemed like a good time for Bill Littlefield’s Only A Game radio show to do a story about Native American kids getting into the game. Ken Shulman traveled to New Mexico “to meet a Navajo team that uses tribal lore to train quality ballplayers.”

One of the people Shulman interviews is Dineh Benally, a youth baseball coach with teams in Farmington and Albuquerque.

“’Benally learned baseball as a kid on a reservation in Shiprock, where New Mexico borders with Colorado, Utah, and Arizona. The Four Corners was the Navajo ancestral home until 1864, when the tribe was forcibly marched to a desolate reservation 500 miles away.

“ ‘Baseball is about failure,’ Benally said. ‘And I think life is about failure. You’re gonna fail more than you succeed. …’

“Benally’s had his share of hardship. And failure. Growing up on the reservation was fun. But farm chores often kept him off the ball field. And when he did play, there wasn’t much in the way of coaching. Still, the tall right hander was MVP of his all-Navajo high school team. He pitched two years in junior college. Then he got a break: a chance to make the team at New Mexico State University — and to prove that a boy from the rez could play Division I ball. He threw well in tryouts but was cut on the final day. …

“It was tough not making the team. But Benally rallied. He thought about his ancestors on that long walk from Four Corners. And he thought about what he’d learned.

“A few years after graduation, in 1999, he started a youth team, to give Najavo kids the type of training he wishes he’d had growing up. He called the team ‘Naat’aanii,’ a word that … means leader. He scoured the state for native talent, boys born on and off the rez who he could shepherd toward college baseball and maybe even the pros. …

“Naat’aanii is no longer just for native players. Any kid can join if he has talent and desire. But the logo and rhythm and ethos are still Navajo. Dineh Benally wants his players to learn more than how to turn a double play. He wants them to tap into the tribal soul, to find the strength to stick it out when times get tough. Because they will get tough.

“ ‘That’s where they’ll show me if they’re really a true Naat’aanii,’ he said. …  They look at me. They know what I’m talking about.’ ”

More at Only a Game, here.

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Volcano That Colored JMW Turner’s Skies

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on April 2, 2014| 2 Comments »

Red sky at night, sailors’ delight.
Red sky at morning, sailors take warning.
Volcano in Indonesia, Turner sunsets for years.

OK, I made that last part up. But there really is a connection between volcanoes and sunsets half a world away.

Writes Sindya Bhanoo at the NY Times, “Sunsets painted by the great masters are now providing a type of information their creators could never have imagined: important clues about air pollution.

“Polluted skies result in redder sunsets, and artists captured this redness on the canvas, said Andreas Kazantzidis, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Patras in Greece who was involved in the research.

“He and his colleagues analyzed hundreds of high-quality digital photographs of paintings done between 1500 and 2000. The period included more than 50 large volcanic eruptions around the globe.

“In each painting, they looked at the red-to-green ratio along the horizon of each sunset to estimate the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere at the time.

“When the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in 1815, ash and gas spewed into the atmosphere, producing bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for several years. This is evident in the paintings of the British master J. M. W. Turner.” More.

 At the NY Times, an 1829 landscape by J. M. W. Turner that researchers analyzed for its sunset.

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Chinese Superheroes

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on April 1, 2014| Leave a Comment »

The website of radio show “Studio 360,” here, offers a glimpse into an intriguing new graphic novel. Check out the slide show illustrating:

(1) “The covers of Gene Luen Yang’s two-part graphic novel Boxers & Saints.

(2) “A page from the book. The author describes the Boxers, depicted here, as poor villagers who believed they could summon the Chinese gods from the skies, who would grant them superpowers. ‘I grew up reading superhero comic books,’ Yang says. ‘And that was one of the ways I found a connection with these Boxers.’

(3) “Boxers transformed for a battle.

(4) “Four-Girl, who isn’t accepted by her family, converts to Catholicism — but she has many questions about the new religion.

(5) “Yang, a practicing Catholic, says he ‘grew up within a tension of Western belief systems and Eastern culture.’ Aspects of the book reflect ‘an ambivalence I have about my own identity.’

(6) “American Born Chinese is Yang’s semi-autobiographical story of a kid desperate to fit in. At one point, the story turns into a sitcom with a laugh track and comic relief courtesy of the grossly stereotypical Chin-Kee. Yang says he wanted make his readers squirm.”

I heard the radio interview with the artist. He said it worried him when people told him they loved the character Chin-Kee in American Born Chinese. Kind of made me want to see the show — and figure out how his message could have gone so wrong. Find the whole interview here.

Photo: First Second Books
The covers of Gene Luen Yang’s two-part graphic novel Boxers & Saints.

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Floating Cities

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 31, 2014| 2 Comments »

Photograph: Devesh Uba
Grocery store in Makoko, Lagos, Nigeria.

A recent manmade-island story in the Guardian made me think of Francesca Forrest’s lovely novel Pen Pal, which involves a girl in a floating community in the U.S. South who corresponds with a political prisoner in Asia.

The Guardian article, however, is about designers and architects building islands for populations threatened by rising seas.

Jessa Gamble writes, “It may seem like science fiction, but as rising sea levels threaten low-lying nations around the world, neighbourhoods like [the Yan Ma Tei breakwater in Hong Kong’s Causeway Bay, where residents live in boats] may become more common.

“Whereas some coastal cities will double down on sea defences, others are beginning to explore a solution that welcomes approaching tides. What if our cities themselves were to take to the seas? …

“The immediate and most numerous victims of climate change are sure to be in the developing world. In Lagos, the sprawling slum of Makoko regularly suffers floods, and its stilted houses are shored up with each new inundation. It’s under threat of razing by authorities.

“The Nigerian-born architect Kunlé Adeyemi proposes a series of A-frame floating houses to replace the existing slum. As proof of concept, his team constructed a floating school for the community. Still, many buildings do not make a city: infrastructure remains a problem here. One solution would be to use docking stations with centralised services, rather like hooking up a caravan to power, water and drainage lines at a campground.” More.

It all sounds like Noah building an ark. But I can’t help thinking it would be better to end global warming in the first place.

Photograph: Seasteading Institute, by way of the Guardian
The Seasteading Institute proposes a series of floating villages.

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Ted Shen’s Second Chance

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 30, 2014| 4 Comments »

Ted-Shen-Second-Chance-at-PublicWe went down to New York this weekend to see my husband’s classmate’s new musical.

Ted Shen wrote the book, lyrics, and music to A Second Chance, a lovely little cameo about a widower and a divorcee. The title refers to new beginnings for two people, but it’s hard for my husband and me not to think of new careers, too, since Shen was an investment banker for 30 years before turning to music so seriously.

At TheaterMania, where a couple of old reviews I wrote are still archived, Shen describes how he began to develop his musical after Stephen Sondheim gave him encouragement.

And he explains his style. “In my role as composer, my preference has been to emphasize the use of ‘action songs’ that show the characters interacting with each other and conversing primarily through lyrics rather than pure spoken dialog, and to limit the use of ‘introspection songs’ that stop the action to express feelings and inner thoughts. I have attempted to create a contemporary musical ‘language’ that is jazz-inflected rather than written in today’s predominant pop-based genre.’ ” More at TheaterMania.

Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, where the show is being performed, says that Shen “has written some of the most elegant and sophisticated music I have heard in theater in many a moon.”

While in New York, we also saw the musical A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder (based on the movie Kind Hearts and Coronets). It was pure Broadway fun, and we laughed a lot. But A Second Chance gave us more to talk about after.

Consider checking out the site for the Shen Family Foundation, here, which “concentrates its grant-making in the area of musical theater through its funding support of works of exceptionally gifted and highly original musical theater composers.”

Photo: Suzanne‘s Dad reconnects with his classmate decades after business school and asks him to sign a Playbill.

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Rhode Island Black Heritage Society

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 29, 2014| Leave a Comment »

Art: Edward Mitchell Bannister, Boston Street Scene, Wikimedia Commons

Some years ago, a friend who creates exhibits opened a highly successful one on black entrepreneurs in 18th and 19th century New England. In the process, she made the acquaintance of the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society. The society lent her exhibit some materials from its collection, including mementos of the painter Edward W. Bannister: a portrait he did of his wife, Christiana Carteaux Bannister, an original brochure for the nursing home that she helped found.

My friend has kept in touch with the society, which is how I learned about the two adorable-sounding events for children below.

“Join the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society at the Old Brick Schoolhouse in Providence for the annual Boys’ Bow-Tie Event [on May 3, 10 a.m.-12 noon]. The Boys’ Bow-Tie Event is a chance for boys ages 6-12 to learn to tie a bow-tie and a number of other useful skills to know as they transition into young adulthood. Attendees will be instructed by Casby Harrison, Esq., and other mentors on how to properly shake hands and introduce themselves in public. Attendees are asked to wear a collared shirt. Refreshments will be served during the event. All participants get a free bow-tie for attending!” Sign up at EventBrite, here.

And for the young ladies: “Join the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society at the historic Governor Lippitt House on Hope Street in Providence for the Girls’ Tea Party [on May 17, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.] Girls will be instructed on how to take tea and learn the basics of social etiquette. Mrs. Christiana Bannister, abolitionist and businesswoman, will also share stories of historic Black women in RI. All Participants will receive a complementary vanity mirror for attending!” Go to EventBrite, here.

Both events are free to attend. “If you would like to sponsor a child for the event by covering the cost of tea and vanity mirrors [or bow ties], you can do so with a donation to the Rhode Island Black Heritage Society. The cost to sponsor one child is $15. Please use the donation form [at EventBrite] or send a check to 123 North Main Street, Providence, RI 02903.

“The Rhode Island Black Heritage Society was founded in 1975 with a mission to preserve three centuries of African American history in the state.  The Society has amassed an invaluable collection of artifacts that documents African Americans’ achievements in military service, business, politics, the arts and education.  The Rhode Island Black Heritage Society encourages and promotes the study of African American history by hosting tours, lectures, and exhibits for the general public.”

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Employers That Encourage Volunteering

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 28, 2014| 4 Comments »

Holmes-School-Dorchester-MaA new employee goes to the Oliver Wendell Holmes School in Dorchester with the team I’m on. He can’t get over how great it is to work for an organization that gives you time to do this. We go out once a month from January to June, and other teams go once a month so that we cover every week.

I started eight years ago with the team that read picture books to a room of first graders. Then I read for a few years with fifth or fourth graders who received chapter books from the librarian. These were students whose teachers thought they would appreciate the extra reading. We all read aloud, with the adult volunteers only taking a turn if the story seemed to lag.

Holmes is a minority-majority urban school with many dedicated teachers who are tolerant of the extra work it takes to herd volunteers. (We also have volunteers who work on math.)

This year, the team I’m on includes the woman who started the whole relationship with Holmes 20 years ago and is now retired. We are assigned to read copies of printed passages and help the children answer multiple-choice questions from tests they have had in the past.

Given the current nationwide emphasis on testing and these third graders’ tendency to keep guessing wildly, I consider it my role to focus on the thought process and deemphasize getting the right answer. I ask, Why do you think that’s the answer? How did you get there?

The administrators often tell us that we make a difference. We’re probably just a drop in the bucket. But, you know, One and One and 50 Make a Million.

More employers should make it so easy to improve the world in which they operate. Other employees probably spend the hour and a half it takes to go out, tutor, and get back once a month in less valuable ways.

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The Impassioned Music Collector

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 27, 2014| Leave a Comment »

I remember going with Nicky Perls up a steep and very narrow stairway near Times Square years ago so my brother could buy bootlegged blues 78s. Later Nicky traveled the South buying up old 78s and rediscovering blues singers like Mississippi John Hurt.

Record collecting can become an obsession, as seen in a Brooklyn Magazine excerpt from Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records, by Amanda Petrusi.

Petrusi says, “In the 1940s, 78 collecting meant jazz collecting, and specifically Dixieland or hot jazz, which developed in New Orleans around the turn of the 20th century and was defined by its warm, deeply playful polyphony …

“Because of its origins, collecting rare Dixieland records in 1942 was not entirely unlike collecting Robert Johnson records in 1968, or, incidentally, now: deifying indigent, local music was a political act, a passive protest against its sudden co-optation by popular white artists. …

“In January 1944 [collector James] McKune took a routine trip to [the Jazz Record Center operated by Big Joe Clauberg] and began pawing through a crate labeled ‘Miscellany,’ where he found a record with ‘a sleeve so tattered he almost flicked past it.’ It was a … nearly unplayable copy of Paramount 13110, Charley Patton’s ‘Some These Days I’ll Be Gone.’

“Patton … was almost entirely unknown to modern listeners; certainly McKune had never heard him before. He tossed a buck at a snoozing Clauberg and carted the record back to Brooklyn. As [scholar Marybeth] Hamilton wrote, ‘even before he replaced the tone arm and turned up the volume and his neighbor began to pound on the walls, he realized that he had found it, the voice he’d been searching for all along.’ ”

More here on the world of the impassioned music collector.

Photo: Nathan Salsburg

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Art vs. Fossil Fuels

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on March 26, 2014| Leave a Comment »

No matter how much you like your routine or how pleasant your surroundings, sometimes you just have to get up and go out. Today I needed a change of scene so, in spite of the freezing temperatures and high wind, I went to look at some art.

The Design Museum is not far from my office, and the folks there come up with lots of good projects. I blogged here about their Street Seats, an array of public benches designed by creative people from around the world.

This being Design Week in Boston, I decided to check out the exhibit space they are using in a new apartment building called 315 on A, a lovely renovation of an 18th century warehouse for coffee.

The new exhibit is called Green Patriot Posters and features handsome posters from professionals as well as the pretty impressive results of a school poster contest on the conservation theme.

Many of the posters explicitly reference WW II posters. You know: “Loose lips sink ships” and all that. Here, the posters urge viewers to pursue a more sustainable way of life and fight global warming. More.

Be sure to check the poster over the left shoulder of the woman speaker in this video. That was my favorite in the show because it made me laugh out loud. I think you can see a Paul Bunyan figure with an ax. He is looking at the tree he was going to cut with an uncertain expression as the tree is growing out of his foot.

 

 

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