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Every day I look at the statistics that WordPress supplies to its bloggers.

On May 31, for example, I had 25 visitors (other than the folks who subscribe) and 35 views of different entries. There were a bunch of visitors from the United States, three from Germany, and one each from Japan, Poland, Haiti, Canada, Denmark, Switzerland, and Indonesia. No clicks on any of my links that day.

I would love to know more than just bare bones about these visitors. If I knew more, I’d try to post about things that might interest them.

Words have double meanings, which is why I eventually had to elide the two-word name of a certain white whale. And there is apparently a bus company called R*d Bus (guess the missing letter) that finally forced me to remove my picture of a r*d bus. It was just too lame to be getting all those hits from folks wanting tours of Australia.

Here are the search terms that brought folks to me on Friday: “corinna da fonseca-wolheim,” “inflatable flood tubes flooding house,” “swidish [sic] mom blog rose,” “coffee planting business model,” “mom storytelling to child, reuters,” “christy maclear,” “naomi shihab nye ghazal,” “mom blog income.”

Sometimes I have no idea why a search engine sent a particular query here. Sometimes I can guess. Corinna writes for the NY Times, and I have featured her articles several times. And I did have a post on inflatable flood tubes.

Unless they are in the archives, WordPress shows me which entries got viewed by the visitors on a given day. So I can assume that my post on a coffee business in Haiti was the draw for the search term “coffee planting business model.”

No one should come to me for “mom blog income.” But I am amply paid in technology and the great satisfaction of mastering a daily challenge and helping out.

Photo at Verrill Farm, Mother’s Day, 2013

3 grandchildren

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On Saturday I took a miserable walk in the wind and rain, temperature in the 40s. Today the temperature is in the 90s. Well, you know New England.

In the nicer weather I’ve been walking around and clicking. Would love to have you weigh in on any of these pictures, especially the ones that make you say, “What the heck?”

mural and graffiti, concordfort point fire escape

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

congress st nookleaning in - fort point

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

mysteriy plant like fireworksfort point - urban rebirth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

random angel

random glam angel

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When I got my current job, I went through the human resources “onboarding” with a young man from Mali. Even though he went back to Africa a couple years ago, we keep in touch. Naturally, I was worried when radicals took over Timbuktu, Mali, for a while. Fortunately, Mamoudou wasn’t living in Mali at the time, although he says Guinea is not that much safer.

Because of Mamoudou, I continue to follow the Mali news, and was especially interested in a link at the Arts Journal blog today: “Mali’s Underground Railroad: How Timbuktu’s Ancient Manuscripts Were Smuggled To Safety.”

Writes Sudarsan Raghavan of the Washington Post, “It was 7 o’clock on a hot night in August, and Hassine Traore was nervous. Behind him were 10 donkeys, each strapped with two large rice bags filled with ancient manuscripts. The bags were covered in plastic to shield them from a light rain.”

Radicals had taken over Timbuktu four months earlier and “had demolished the tombs of Sufi saints. They had beaten up women for not covering their faces and flogged men for smoking or drinking. They most certainly would have burned the manuscripts — nearly 300,000 pages on a variety of subjects, including the teachings of Islam, law, medicine, mathematics and astronomy — housed in public and private libraries across the city.”The scholarly documents depicted Islam as a historically moderate and intellectual religion and were considered cultural treasures  …

“A secret operation had been set in motion … It included donkeys, safe houses and smugglers, all deployed to protect the manuscripts by sneaking them out of town.

“This is the story of how nearly all the documents were saved, based on interviews with an unlikely cast of characters who detailed their roles for the first time. They included Traore, a 30-year-old part-time janitor, and his grandfather, a guard. …

“The New York-based Ford Foundation, the German and Dutch governments, and an Islamic center in Dubai provided most of the funds for the operation, which cost about $1 million.

“ ‘We took a big risk to save our heritage,’ said Abdel Kader Haidara, a prominent preservationist who once loaned 16th- and 18th-century manuscripts from his family’s private collection to the Library of Congress. ‘This is not only the city’s heritage, it is the heritage of all humanity.’ ”

There are heroes everywhere, keeping a low profile. And I am also pretty impressed with the funders, springing into action like that.

More here.
Map: National Geographic

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No one needs to be told that art is healing. I find it can cheer me up when I’m just having a bad day. I even tell coworkers who are stressed out, “Go over to Fort Point and look at some art.”

But for those who care more about data than folk wisdom, there is research.

Genevra Pittman writes at Pacific Standard, “Music, art, and dance therapy may relieve anxiety and similar symptoms among people with cancer, according to a new analysis of past studies.

“Researchers who analyzed results from trials conducted between 1989 and 2011 said the benefits tied to creative arts therapies were small, but similar to those of other complementary techniques such as yoga and acupuncture. …

“The analysis included 27 studies of close to 1,600 people who were randomly assigned to receive some form of creative arts therapy or not, during or after cancer treatment. Patients with breast cancer or blood cancers—such as leukemia and lymphoma—made up the majority of study participants. Music, art, and dance therapy programs varied in how often sessions were conducted and over what time span. …

“On the whole, people with cancer who were assigned to creative arts treatments reported less depression, anxiety, and pain and a better quality of life during the programs than those who were put on a wait list or continued receiving usual care.” More.

I didn’t get into art therapy when I had cancer, but I’m sure I would have liked it. I did have a booklet created by past patients that contained daily readings, and more often than not the choices hit the spot. The patients named the booklet “No Other Way but Through.”

Photo: Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Art therapy program

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An April NY Times article by Joseph Berger focused on the egalitarian, colorblind brotherhood of pigeon breeders.

“When New Yorkers consider the subculture of people who raise pigeons on rooftops, many are likely to think of Terry Malloy, the longshoreman in the 1954 film ‘On the Waterfront’ played by Marlon Brando. He was a classic rooftop breeder, rough-hewed, working-class and white ethnic to his toes.

“But that image has long needed some alteration because in the dwindling world of rooftop fliers, as they are known, the men are as likely to be working-class blacks or Hispanics. Many were introduced to the hobby by Irish, Italian and other fliers of European descent …

“Ike Jones, an African-American who manages one of the last pigeon supply stores for its Italian-Jewish owner, Joey Scott, said he learned much of the craft when he was about 12. He then became a helper to George Coppola, an Italian rooftop breeder in Bedford-Stuyvesant. …

“A new book, ‘The Global Pigeon,’ by Colin Jerolmack, an assistant professor of sociology at New York University who spent three years hanging out with pigeon fliers, makes the point that pigeon breeding brought Italian-Americans and other ethnic whites ‘into contact with people of a different ethnic and age cohort with whom they were not voluntarily associating before.’ ” More.

For another take on the rarefied world of pigeon lovers, read A Pigeon and a Boy, which I blogged about here. A wonderful book in many ways, I thought the ending bizarre and so can’t give it five stars. But I liked how it wove the world of pigeon raising and message sending into the whole modern history of Israel. (If you should happen to read it, please explain the ending to me.)

Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times
Delroy Sampson breeds his own birds.

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At Public Radio International’s “The World,” David Leveille has a story on research at Ellesmere Island in northern Canada.  There, University of Alberta biologist Catherine La Farge is finding that some frozen plants are able to begin growing again after 400 years on ice.

“Cold as it may be during the winter,” writes Leveille, “it’s a part of the world where glaciers are melting and ice sheets are breaking up due to climate change.

“One glacier there is called the Tear Drop glacier. As it has melted, some interesting plant life was exposed.”

La Farge’s results, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences “suggest that bryophytes, representing the earliest lineages of land plants, may be far more resilient than previously thought, and likely contribute to the establishment, colonization, and maintenance of polar ecosystems.” Who knows what else is under the glacier and about to be thawed out.

More.

Photo: Catherine La Farge
In vitro culture of Aulacomnium turgidum regenerated from emergent Little Ice Age plants beneath the Tear Drop Glacier, Sverdrup Pass, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut.

 

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There’s an in-demand artist who goes to Wal-mart to find subjects. His name is Brendan O’Connell. Maria Godoy writes about him at National Public Radio.

“Most people would be hard-pressed to call Wal-Mart a source of artistic inspiration. … Yet that’s exactly what artist Brendan O’Connell sees in the sprawling big-box stores. For the past decade, O’Connell has been snapping photographs inside dozens of Wal-Marts. The images have served as inspiration for an ongoing series of paintings of everyday life — much of which involves shopping, which O’Connell calls ‘that great contemporary pastime.’ …

“Wal-Mart stores, he notes, are ‘probably one of the most trafficked interior spaces in the world.’ In the tall, open, cathedral-like ceilings of Wal-Mart’s big-box stores, he sees parallels to church interiors of old. …

“As artistic matter, [Wal-mart is] a part of everyday life that seems to have resonated with lots of people. Since [a February New Yorker profile began a] media blitz …  sales of O’Connell’s work have jumped dramatically, he told me [in April]. ‘I sold more in a week than I did in some years,’ he says. …

“The people doing the buying, he says, come from all over the country.

” ‘What I’m struck by is this relationship to brands,’ he says, noting that buyers have called to inquire about specific paintings: ‘ “Do you still have the Corn Flakes? … I want the Maxwell House.” Whatever brand it is that they have a personal relationship with. And that, to me, is fascinating.’ ”


“O’Connell’s work is probably out of the price range of the average Wal-Mart shopper,” adds Godoy. “But he’s passionate about a project to bring art to the masses. The idea behind everyartist.me is to create a collaborative art project involving 1 million elementary school kids across the country. And all the recent attention on his Wal-Mart series has helped jump-start funding for the project … he says.”

(Thank you, Andrew Sullivan, for the lead.)

Image: http://www.brendanoconnell.com
Blond with yams

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I took a walk on Lakeside Drive today and saw scores (hundreds?) of swallows swooping and wheeling like berserk bats toward the lake, upside down over the road, then sideways and shuddering back toward the lake again in a group dance with no obvious explanation.

When I went online and Googled “swallows going berserk,” I found an Audubon blog post in New Hampshire that used that exact phrase. But the author  thought the swallows were just feeding and happy to see spring arrive.

I have decided that the collective noun for swallow should be “delirium,” as in “a delirium of swallows.”

Are you into collective nouns for birds and animals? They can be a lot of fun, with terms going back hundreds of years. Find your favorites at Wikipedia, here. A congregation of alligators, a rabble of bees, a coalition of cheetah, a gulp of cormorants, a consortium of crabs, a murder of crows — and I am only in the c’s!

Be sure to use “a delirium of swallows” as your next opportunity and appear to know something esoteric that no one else knows.

Video: John Downer Productions

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Last fall, I blogged about the worthy Granola Project, which gives employment to refugees in Rhode Island. It is housed at the social service agency Amos House in Providence. I bought some of the granola at the farmers market a just last week.

Now Sarah Shemkus has written for the Boston Globe about a similar initiative for refugees in Massachusetts, but with the goal of helping refugee women to spin off companies on their own.

“Moo Kho Paw fled the violence and oppression of Myanmar for a refugee camp in Thailand nearly a decade ago,” writes Shemkus. “Five years later, she, her husband, and their baby daughter resettled again, this time landing in Springfield.

“As she adapted to her new home, Paw started looking for a job … That’s when she learned about Prosperity Candle, the Easthampton company where she has now worked for three years.

“ ‘I love the job,’ Paw said. ‘It helps me to pay the rent, to buy the baby diapers.’

“That’s precisely what Ted Barber, 46, hoped for when he and partner Amber Chand founded Prosperity Candle in 2010. … Sales are only part of its mission — the company says its real goal is to help women in and from developing countries by teaching them new skills and creating jobs. …

“In Easthampton, the company employs refugees such as Paw to make and package candles and fulfill orders. Currently, up to four refugees are working there at any given time, though Barber expects to hire more as the business expands. …”

The idea for an enterprise like Prosperity Candle first occurred to Barber when he was working in Africa, helping entrepreneurs build small businesses. …

” ‘I realized I wanted to do something different.’ …

“Rather than giving away money or supplies, [his] company would provide women with the resources, skills, and support they need to start a sustainable businesses. …

“Prosperity Candle formed as a low-profit limited liability company, a structure that requires the business to put its social mission ahead of profits.”

More.

Photo: Matthew Cavanaugh for The Boston Globe
Moo Kho Paw (left) and Naw Test made candles at Prosperity Candle in Easthampton.

Prosperity Candle formed as a low-profit limited liability company, a structure that requires the business to put its social mission ahead of profits.

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Building energy savings into school design means more money for education.

At Yes! Magazine, Erin L. McCoy describes what planners did for the rural Richardsville Elementary School near Bowling Green, Kentucky.

“When Richardsville opened its doors in fall 2010, it was the first net zero school in the nation, meaning that the school produces more energy on-site than it uses in a year.

“Solar tubes piping sunlight directly into classrooms eliminate much of the school’s demand for electric light, while a combination of geothermal and solar power cut down on the rest of the energy bill. Concrete floors treated with a soy-based stain don’t need buffing. The kitchen, which in most schools contributes to 20 percent of the energy bill, houses a combi-oven that cooks healthier meals and eliminates frying. This means an exhaust fan doesn’t pipe the school’s temperature-controlled air to the outdoors all day long.

“Meanwhile, ‘green screens’ in the front hall track the school’s energy usage so kids can see the impact of turning off a light in real time.

“These and other innovations make Richardsville better than net zero. It actually earns about $2,000 a month selling excess energy to the Tennessee Valley Authority. …

“Three factors are essential to making a green school work: First, you need the participation of the community and the local power company; second, you can’t forget that a school is a dynamic learning environment; and third, you need to speak the language of money.

“Since the economic recession began in 2008, school districts have suffered. Local tax bases were shaken as property values plummeted, and states have cut back on funding to districts, which were pushed to cut funds wherever they were able. Addressing energy use made a lot of financial sense.”

More.

Photograph: Michael Heinz/The Journal & Courier/AP/File
Students gather on the first day of school at Wyandotte Elementary School near Lafayette, Ind., in 2011. Wyandotte is one of many US schools that have made cutting energy use a priority.

 

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Whenever I walk in the Greenway, I see where they are building the new  carousel park. Can’t wait until it launches! The carousel critters are so unusual.

Taryn Plumb writes in the Globe about the three years of painstaking work that have gone into creating them.

“A miniaturized right whale is caught in mid-spout, baleen exposed, barnacles clinging.

“A sea turtle swims, its wide shell blushed with yellow and iridescent red, flippers with waves of violet, pink, and cobalt.

“Enormous butterflies hover – monarchs in dramatic orange and black; buckeyes boasting amethyst spots; swallowtails showing off elaborate webbed patterns of scarlet, purple, and blue.

“Carousels usually evoke images of horses of various shapes and sizes, adorned with flamboyant regalia, circling endlessly in trots and leaps to a backdrop of colorful lights and carnival music.

“But this carousel – designed, sculpted, and painted by two local artists, and soon to adorn the Rose F. Kennedy Greenway in Boston – is a horse of a different color.

“In fact, it doesn’t have any horses at all.

“ ‘You’ll never see another one like this,’ said designer Jeff Briggs of Newburyport. ‘It’s much more elaborate, much more intense.’

“To be installed by Labor Day weekend, the carousel will include a resplendent assortment of local land, sea, and air creatures: lobsters, rabbits, owls, a skunk, squirrel, fox, right whale, sea turtle, cod, peregrine falcon, grasshopper, three species of butterflies, a sea serpent gondola, and a harbor seal chariot. According to the Rose Fitzgerald Greenway Conservancy, the animals were inspired by drawings from Boston schoolchildren, and the project, which also includes a new park, was funded by grants and several dozen donors.” More.

Who will join me when it opens?

Photo: Mark Wilson for The Boston Globe
Sculptor Jeff Briggs has spent the last three years creating the animals on the carousel for the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

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Boston and Baltimore have created cool places to learn and practice engineering and craft skills.

At Technical.ly (better cites through technology), Andrew Zaleski describes how the Baltimore Foundery [sic], “a campus for makers,” was inspired by Artisan’s Space in the Boston area.

“It was by chance that Andrew Stroup and Corey Fleischer, two [Baltimore] locals-turned-contestants on a new engineering-focused Discovery Channel TV show, met Jason Hardebeck, the executive director of gb.tc.

“But despite having only met earlier this year, the three had more in common than they knew: each thought it was high time Baltimore city had its own makerspace — a large, indoor area replete with machine tools, digital tools like 3D printers and equipment for woodworking and metalworking — on par with similar spaces in other cities in the U.S.

“Through their time on the show, Stroup and Fleischer met Gui Cavalcanti, who started the Artisan’s Asylum makerspace in Boston, a sprawling, 40,000-square-foot complex where members renting space brew their own beer, construct their own bikes and sculpt pieces of art from metal. After spending a weekend there in mid-January, the two were convinced they needed to find a place within Baltimore where any resident could do the same type of work.

“ ‘Baltimore has everything that we saw at Artisan’s Asylum: the level of artists, engineers, hobbyists,’ said Fleischer, 31, who received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering from UMBC, and now works at Lockheed Martin in Middle River. ‘Baltimore has those people, and Baltimore does not have a space like that where everyone can go.’ …

“Whereas few people in Baltimore have the resources to become ‘coders and programmers,’ Hardebeck said, people ‘can understand how to become CNC machine operators.’

“In effect, that’s the grandest wish Hardebeck — a former product manager at DeWALT — harbors for the new makerspace: a place that can foster the next generation of blue-collar workers in Baltimore city by offering a community workshop so people can have access to good equipment and classes. In turn, people can become entrepreneurs building products in their own small-scale manufacturing facility, albeit one they share with other makers.”

More.

Photo: Technical.lyFleischer leads a class in Introductory Welding last month.

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Another good lead from the voracious reader of magazines in my household.

This Smithsonian story shows how a relatively simple invention made it possible for the Impressionists to do much more painting outdoors, en plein air.

Perry Hurt writes, “The French Impressionists disdained laborious academic sketches and tastefully muted paintings in favor of stunning colors and textures that conveyed the immediacy of life pulsating around them. Yet the breakthroughs of Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and others would not have been possible if it hadn’t been for an ingenious but little-known American portrait painter, John G. Rand.

“Like many artists, Rand, a Charleston native living in London in 1841, struggled to keep his oil paints from drying out before he could use them. At the time, the best paint storage was a pig’s bladder sealed with string; an artist would prick the bladder with a tack to get at the paint. But there was no way to completely plug the hole afterward. And bladders didn’t travel well, frequently bursting open.

“Rand’s brush with greatness came in the form of a revolutionary invention: the paint tube. Made from tin and sealed with a screw cap, Rand’s collapsible tube gave paint a long shelf life, didn’t leak and could be repeatedly opened and closed.

“The eminently portable paint tube was slow to be accepted by many French artists (it added considerably to the price of paint), but when it caught on it was exactly what the Impressionists needed to abet their escape from the confines of the studio, to take their inspiration directly from the world around them and commit it to canvas, particularly the effect of natural light.

“For the first time in history, it was practical to produce a finished oil painting on-site, whether in a garden, a café or in the countryside.” More.

Dear artist friends, I can picture what it would have been like for you traveling by train after an outing to some scenic spot before this invention. “Oh, Madame, I am so terribly sorry. I’m afraid my cobalt pig’s bladder burst!”

Photo: Chrysler Museum of Art
The tin tube, below, was more resilient than its predecessor (the pig bladder), enabling painters to leave their studios.

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Pius Sawa at AlertNet (and the Christian Science Monitor) writes, “Residents of Rusinga Island in Kenya [are experimenting] with renewable energy innovations, environmentally friendly farming, tree planting, and other efforts aimed at improving the island’s environment, creating jobs, and overcoming shortages of food and water.

“For the past 16 years, Ester Evelyn Odhiambo has dedicated herself to improving life on one small island. It’s no small task.

“Rusinga Island, in the northeast corner of Lake Victoria in Kenya, is about 16 km (10 miles) long and 5 km (3 miles) wide. About 30,000 people call it home. But the island over the years has become an increasingly inhospitable environment for them.

“ ‘If you plant something, it just dries out,’ says Ms. Odhiabmo, who runs an organization to help people widowed or orphaned by AIDS [Kisibom, or “come and learn”]. ‘You try to irrigate, and the water is too little because the sun comes and dries everything.’

“The changes have come because of poor management of resources – including forests and fishing grounds – and because of increasing climate impacts.

“But now residents are experimenting with renewable energy innovations, environmentally friendly farming, tree planting, and other efforts aimed at improving the island’s environment, building resilience, creating livelihoods, and overcoming shortages of food and water.”

More.

Photograph: Pius Sawa/AlertNet
Ester Evelyn Odhiambo opens a charcoal refrigerator on Rusinga Island, Kenya. It is lined with charcoal, into which water seeps through a hosepipe fed by a bucket. The wet charcoal absorbs heat and keeps the items inside the fridge cool without needing electricity.

 

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A woman in Estonia watching a webcam trained on an osprey nest in Montana was able to alert researchers that an endangered baby osprey was in trouble.

My husband, who likes to read nature magazines, knew this story was a good one for Suzanne’s Mom’s Blog the minute he saw it this afternoon.

Doug Stewart writes at National Wildlife, “The nest overlooks the parking lot of a nursing home in Hellgate Canyon near Missoula. All summer, hundreds of thousands of people watched online as three nestlings screamed deliriously at fish deliveries or listened to their parents vent their fury at encroaching bald eagles.

“At one point last summer, one of the three chicks became entangled in monofilament line from a fish brought back to the nest. Fishing line can quickly strangle an osprey chick. It was a Sunday, and the researchers had not been online to check the nest.

“ ‘We were first alerted to the fishing line by an email from a woman in Estonia,’ says [biologist Erick] Greene. ‘Then we heard from a woman in Wales.’ The researchers also had set up a Facebook page for the ospreys, and in no time it became filled with alerts from concerned visitors. Borrowing a truck equipped with a bucket that can raise up to the level of the nest, the biologists raced to the scene to cut away the line from the chick and removed a fish hook embedded in its wing. The bird survived.”

More great details at National Wildlife, including a description of 700 kids at an urban school watching the webcam and tweeting questions about the osprey to researchers, here.

Watch the osprey here.

Photo: National Wildlife

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