skills

Lichens, fungi, and algae are referred to as cryptogams, which literally means “hidden marriage” -- a reference to their means of reproduction, which long remained a mystery to botanists. During World War II, a misunderstanding about the meaning of this term led to a breakthrough of the greatest military importance.

Geoffrey Tandy was the [London Natural History] museum’s “seaweed man.” he only ever published two scientific papers, a lack of productivity that seems to have been owing to a hidden marriage of his own, for Tandy shouldered the burden of running two families in tandem.

His great moment came when a functionary in the Ministry of War became confused between crypotgamists and cryptographers, and recruited Tandy to the British center for signals intelligence at Bletchley Park, where some of the world’s brightest minds were working on cracking the German Enigma Code.

During Tandy’s stay at Bletchley Park several sodden notebooks holding vital clues to the German code were recovered from sunken U-boats, but they seemed damaged beyond recovery. Tandy, however, knew exactly what to do, for the problem was not so different from preserving marine algae. Obtaining special absorbent papers from the museum, Tandy dried the sodden pages and made them readable, an important contribution to deciphering the Enigma Code.

From Tim Flannery’s review of Richard Fortey’s Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum in the 4 December issue of the New York Review of Books.

detour

detour
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Cut through the Chicago Cultural Center on our way to the Art Institute and encountered two spectacular exhibits: 1) The Lane Tech Murals from the early 1900s (of which this is a snippet) and 2) Photographs from the LaSalle Bank Collection -- which featured Callahan, Nickel, Evans and Bey, among others.

Highly recommended, and free.

Posting by cameraphone.

errand the second

errand the second
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Making a wishlist at Prairie Avenue Books.
pabooks.com

Posting by cameraphone.

errand the first

errand the first
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Dropped off a couple Russian rangefinders
at Central Cameras to to be CLA'd.

Posting by cameraphone from Chicago's Loop.

attention must be paid

He represents an extremely subversive vision with his interest in populations that were disdained. He paid careful attention, not touristically but profoundly, to the human beings on the earth who think differently from us. It’s a respect for others, which is very strong and very moving. He knew that cultural diversity is necessary for cultural creativity, for the future.

Landscape designer Gilles Clément speaking of Claude Lévi-Strauss at the anthropologist's 100th birthday party yesterday in Paris. The party was held at the Musée du quai Branly, for which Clément designed the grounds.

Of negligible interest: Clément compared the hundred year old Lévi-Strauss to a tortoise.

on sunday

memory
is not an archive
nor does it record
in real time

it lives in the brain
in chemical traces

the traces can fade
can be augmented

our memory
is the fullest record
we have of ourselves

Found in Just Remember This in the New York Review of Books.


While reading Michael Greenberg’s review of Sue Halpern’s Can’t Remember What I Forgot: The Good News from the Front Lines of Memory Research, in which these words appear, through a happy surfeit of turkey and stuffing and pecan pie last night, I began to cry.

A sure indication, I suspect, that the bruise I picked up in Seattle when I saw my grandmother last (when, in her Alzheimer’s, she failed to see me) is still tender.

The note above is in my grandmother’s handwriting. She left it in my rental car when I came to visit the time previous to the last bruising stay -- the time when she knew who I was and I took her to church and sat with her all day Sunday, only to find her surprised to see me (having forgotten our Sunday) when I returned a few days later, my business done, to take her to lunch before saying goodbye.

The note was her cheat sheet. On that visit she was confused as to when I would arrive and returned repeatedly to the front desk of her retirement community to ask if I had come yet -- days before I ever did. She told me the story, laughing, when at last I did arrive, embarrassed that the girl at the front desk was laughing at her with each subsequent visit, thinking her ridiculous.

(Hearing the story, I wanted to bean the girl at the front desk.)

I found her note to herself inside a cheap plastic tote that she insisted on carrying to lunch, and then left behind in my rental car. Finding that there was no article of urgency in her tote (like a wallet) I stuffed it in my bag with the intention of returning it to her by mail. I never did, because of what I saw inside. I hoped instead that she would forget she ever left it.

There was a birthday card, signed by half a dozen dear friends and neighbors. There was an empty envelope from a card once sent by a fellow she dated briefly after my Bompa died. She had circled his return address. There were two ziplock bags, a scattering of rumpled kleenex, and the program from her baby brother’s funeral, seventeen years before.

There was this note, her cheat sheet to herself, written on note paper that I’m certain she picked up because my Bompa had the habit of saying “don’t forget about old Eeyore,” meaning himself, on which she had penciled out this calendar to remind her: This is where I am. This is where I’m going. This is where I will meet my granddaughter.

And there was a clipping, among her crumpled artifacts, of a newspaper article that read: Gene work may yield Alzheimer’s advance.

Which was a little like the horror of finding garlic and a wooden stake among the possessions of a friend who had been carried away improbably by a vampire.

A friend who had earlier feared the very same vampire; who had told others (like her granddaughter) that the vampire was after her, and others (like her granddaughter) had said: Don’t worry. You’ll be fine. You don’t have Alzheimer’s, Grama: You’ve just misplaced your keys.

chaff

chaff
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Road tripping to exotic Dubuque, Iowa to spend
the holiday with some dear friends we've been
missing. Shot this somewhere near Elizabeth, IL.

Posting by cameraphone from the road.

Grateful for long drives and good company.

What do you make?

balloons!

A Flickr Slideshow of Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parades from years past.

(karig started it »)

Happy Thanksgiving, y'all! Regardless of your continent. ;)

homeless

homeless
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

I've mentioned this before but every time I work the shelter I'm moved by how much currency a smile has; a conversation. How looking someone in the eye and saying "Please, Sir" and "Thank You, Ma'am" with kindness can bust a grim and tired soul wide open like a bud receiving the sun.

Can make a homeless man feel like he's home.

Posting by cameraphone.

derecho de no migrar

I am an artifact of the global economy. Within a spread of about three hundred years the economies of Norway, England, Ireland and Wales strained to support their people, and my people got on boats and came to America.

My great great grandfather Soren landed a job in this box factory, owned and operated for many years by Nabisco in Marseilles, Illinois. Other kin opened boarding houses in Chicago; manned stage coach stops, opened saloons and mined copper in Butte; farmed the earth in Virginia and Kansas; operated grocery stores and washed laundry in Seattle; picked fruit in California; fished for salmon in Alaska; built highways and factories across America.

They fought for America in our wars, they gave birth to her children. They worked.

They were exiles and aliens. They were immigrants. They made the best of it.

In the latest issue of Orion Rebecca Solnit points out:

Seldom mentioned in all the furor over undocumented immigrants in this country is the fact that most of these indigenous and mestizo people would be quite happy not to emigrate if they could earn a decent living at home; many of them are just working until they earn enough to lay the foundations for a decent life in their place of origin, or to support the rest of a family that remains behind.

Derecho de no migrar means the right not to migrate. It’s the call of a protest movement in Mexico that calls attention to the necessity of migration to North America to survive the economic strains of life in Central and South America. The movement of the Indigenous Front of Binational Organizations (FIOB) insists that the right to stay home, and make a living in the place of one’s birth, is a human right. One that is violated by government policies that inflict economic harm on a whole countries.

I point this out because of the disturbing news of a Jersey youth who, with his friends, regularly engaged in “beaner jumping” in which they drove around the streets of their home town until they found an individual of Latin descent who they would then collectively pummel.

On November 8th they targeted Marcelo Lucero, a legal immigrant from Ecuador. Seven boys attacked Mr. Lucero without provocation, and Mr. Lucero died.

Let us remember that most of us are immigrants. Let us remember what it’s like to be far from home; to miss the family and place that defines us. And let us wonder at the courage it takes to travel far from that place in an effort to make it better for the ones we love.

Let's remember a place called Plymouth Rock.

kansas city castle

a curious tale of lost things found

POSTDATED: I wrote this a few weeks back en route to somewhere else. Just now getting around to posting it.

Chapter One.
Last night, en route to dinner, I fumbled around in my bag hoping to find a pack of gum that I almost certainly had stashed there, but found none.

Returning late from a ride around (in) the Galaxy with the World's Best Mechanical Engineer, I discovered the missing pack of gum leaning against the outside of my hotel room door. It was accompanied by a scattering of sweet offerings: 3 peppermints, 2 tootsie roll tootsie pops (miniature pops: one orange, one raspberry) and 4 after dinner mints (the buttery kind) wrapped in convenience packs that read "Thank You!"

There was also a ballpoint pen, the cheap give away kind, imprinted with: "Springhill Suites". The hotel in question, the hotel where I discovered the curious offering, was not Springhill Suites. The pen was pink.

Chapter Two.
While deplaning from my San Francisco flight in the Minneapolis Airport I was chased down by a young man who shouted "Miss!" and handed me a thick wad of bills saying: "You dropped this."

But I hadn't. I counted them: $148. They were folded in half with the $20s on the outside and were flat and compact as if they had been compressed in a pocket. I studied them, as if the bills would reveal themselves as kin that belonged to me through some familiar marking. They didn't. I gave them to the gate agent, along with the worried "what do I do with money that isn't mine" expression that I had worn the moment before.

Chapter Three.
On the ground in Minneapolis waiting to disembark I received a text message from a friend. A friend of his had sent it to him and I could see from the metadata of the message that he had sent it on to two others as well. It contained the simple story line of a dream, of a car ride in a large front seat reminiscent of last night's Galaxy, a Bulgarian sandwich shop, and a friend who is now dead who said nothing but nodded and smiled and looked younger than his years.

For a flash I felt him beside me, solid, a seat mate tired from our transcontinental flight. A tear jumped up. Then it was my turn to exit the plane and I wiped my face dry.

and the power you possess

What Valerie developed is the art of telling people to go to hell and making them look forward to the trip.

Vernon Jordan, speaking of Obama Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett, in An Old Hometown Mentor, and Still at Obama’s Side in this morning's New York Times.

Jordan is a cousin by marriage to Jarrett and served as an adviser during the duration of the presidential campaign.


Over the weekend, for no good reason, I started fussing about Wonder Woman's super powers. As I could recall them they were few and rather passive: Bracelets, for deflecting bullets. A golden lariat, for extracting the truth. An invisible plane that failed to cloak its occupant and pilot, making her (I thought) a vulnerable target among the clouds.

Mr. Hoo argued that she was similarly outfitted to Batman -- a human being's mortal powers extended by technology and some trickery. But Batman had the advantage of money and power. Wonder Woman's social advantage, if any, were her connections with her Amazonian heritage. Her family.

And let's not forget the theme song from the 1970s television show:

Wonder Woman
All the world is waiting for you
And the power you possess
In your satin tights
Fighting for your rights
And the old red, white and blue
...
Change their minds
And change the world

I expect whole theses have been written about Wonder Woman as a male projected fantasy. Her superpowers are extensions of womanly wiles -- satin tights, extracting the truth via some dominatrix hotness, deflecting blows rather than leveling them -- she changes the world through changing the minds of evil doers, rather than laying them low the way Superman and Batman would.

Then this morning, while reading a NYT's flattering profile on Valerie Jarrett, and subsequently crushing on Obama's new Senior Adviser, I couldn't avoid the strong similarities in how Jarrett was painted: her impeccable suits. Her steady listening. Her family connections. Her piercing gaze. Her decision to take a less visible position within the administration rather than pursuing Obama's Senate seat.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions »

Sunbathing persimmons
Originally uploaded by Astor Cazzolla

persimmon:

your name is too pretty for poetry

you are delicious
(and we are alone)

the biggest screen of all

Video: David Lynch speaking of small screens

Some things we forget. But many things we remember on the mental screen, which is the biggest screen of all.

David Lynch in this Sunday's New York Time's Magazine.

by the shining big-sea-water

It was Hiawatha ... who bound together the five arrows. One arrow alone, he said, can be broken, but the bundle of five is too strong. The structure of the Iroquois Confederacy became the model for the colonist's new union, and the symbolism stands today: the eagle in the great seal of the United States holds those five arrows [1] in its talons.

From The Rights of the Land by Robin Kimmerer in the November | December 2008 issue of Orion Magazine.

Kimmerer's piece, about a unique suit brought by the Onondaga Nation to regain legal responsibility for their ancestral lands surrounding Onondaga Lake, is unfortunately only available in the print edition.

Onondaga Lake is now a superfund site due to industrial misuse. The Indian nation has introduced a suite that "is unheard of in American property law":

The suite is termed a 'land rights action.' When they finally got their day in court last October, members of the Onondaga nation argued that the land title they're seeking is not for possession, not to exclude, but for the right to participate in the well-being of the land. Against the backdrop of Euro-American thinking, which treats land as a bundle of property rights, the Onondaga are asking for freedom to exercise their responsibility to the land.

[1] Thirteen, actually, for the thirteen colonies. It's the origin of the symbolism that's of interest in a country that rarely acknowledges its indigenous precedents.

UNdone

There are wonderful little things that get into people’s minds that we will respect. It’s an old hat that everyone puts on every day. It feels right.

Michael Adlerstein, who is leading the renovation of New York's United Nations Building, and has previously led renovations of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, speaking in this morning's New York Times of how the renovation of the UN will retain essential details like the blue seats for members that surround the Security Council table.

The UN will be renovated over the next few years to a tune of $1.9 billion.

the last biscuit

The Last Biscuit
Originally uploaded by Friendly Joe

Thanksgiving's coming. Remember your manners.

public works

Kansas City, MO

holga.

sometimes all you need is a word.

Snapped this quieted carousel on my cellphone in the cold of Bryant Park in Midtown Manhattan at the end of a long day, piled on top of two even longer days, feeling unsettled and misread and far from home. Far from myself.

I suspect wearing a suit coat for three days in a row contributed to the uptight feeling; showing up for my last meeting and realizing I didn't need to be wearing one almost certainly tipped it over the edge.

All my meetings went well and the job got done, but still.

I missed home -- where people get my jokes and tell me when I'm full of shit. I missed being seen in the larger landscape of who I really am.

And then George drove up to the curb.

George drives a limo and he received the random assignment to drive me to LaGuardia. Once I got settled and double checked my itinerary (to be sure that LaGuardia was the airport we wanted), I asked him how business was and whether he was seeing fewer airport trips since the economy started crumbling.

Sure, no, he said: business is down. But it's not the thing I worry about -- I have other concerns I worry about, and then, without breaking his stride, he asked if he could ask my opinion as a woman.

Uh oh, I thought.

He was looking for a word to describe a woman who is like a gentleman, he said, but not a man. A true gentleman. But a woman.

I told him that lady was often used as the feminine to gentleman, as in "ladies & gentlemen", but I asked if he was looking for something similar to the Spanish Senora or the French Madame -- if he was looking for a word that conveyed respect.

Because if he was looking for respect, "hey lady" wasn't going to do it.

Yes, YES -- respect, he said, leaning hard on the word and gesturing with a ballpoint pen as he spoke.

He was writing a letter to his professor -- one that was direct and honest "with no romance" -- but that explained why what she had done for him meant so much.

Because there are a lot of ways someone can help you, he said, but sometimes all you need is a word.

He spoke quietly, with an intensity that broke my heart.

We wrestled with his letter, and while I could find him no equivalent to Senora in the English language, I suggested that if he wrote the letter with the same directness and honesty with which he told me his story then I suspected it would be well received.

It will be, he said, it will be, betraying no ego outside a confidence that was deeply invested in the good heart of his subject.

We spoke a while longer about people and conversation and the power of human exchange. How ideas come alive when people talk to one another, honestly, authentically. How so much is discovered, unexpected, "unknown even to your own self."

"Do you believe in the idea about right people appear at the right time?" he asked me. I told him I did, and told him that it sounded like his teacher had done that for him.

He said yes, "but I was thinking of you". He had told no one about this letter, that I was the first, even though he'd been working on his letter for weeks and had been looking for someone he could ask. Someone who would understand.

Why me? I asked him.

I can read people, he said. I read you.

nikola tesla corner

nikola tesla corner
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

40th & 6th, Bryant Park
Midtown Manhattan

Headed home. Posting by cameraphone.

found on my way to something else

Our memory is longer than mine
Originally uploaded by ionushi

Participants in the game of Karuta (かるた, from the Portuguese carta, "card") must quickly determine which one out of an array of cards placed in front of them is required and then to grab it before the opponent. Each of the cards contain the last two lines of a tanka, and they must identify which one suits with the verses readen aloud by the conductor. The poems are from the Hyakunin Isshu, an anthology composed by the poet and scholar Fujiwara no Teika at the beginning of XIII century. This set of photos were taken during the karuta contest at the Yasaka shrine on January 3, 2008.

Flickr slideshow »

cloud bridge

cloud bridge
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone from 5th & 37th

bread pudding at gallo nero

bread pudding at gallo nero
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

(Long gone.)

In the gracious good company of
R. "where's my churro" S.

Hell's Kitchen, NY
Posting by cameraphone

old guy dreaming in a box

aka Christmas window at Lord & Taylor
Fifth Avenue, NY NY

Posting by cameraphone

PWM

PWM
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

The *other* Portland,
outbound to LaGuardia.

Posting by cameraphone.

Tired.

a spacewalking astronaut

A spacewalking astronaut
let go of a tool bag
as a grease gun exploded

and watched
as the tote

floated away

From the front page of today's Wall Street Journal

consider the lobster (latest casualty of the financial crisis)

Along the Portland waterfront, seafood shops are selling lobsters for as cheap as $3.89 a pound, which is about the price of bologna at the deli counter.

(...)
The primary factor, a drop-off in demand by penny-pinching diners, has been in place since summer. But a secondary problem recently surfaced: The global banking crisis left Canadian processors short on credit, trapping Maine lobstermen and dealers with too much supply.

From Lobster Prices Plunge in the Washington Times.

like the great giant Christopher

like the great giant Christopher
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Cape Elizabeth Lighthouse
Cape Elizabeth, Maine

Folks say Longfellow used to hang out here, and that it anchors his poem "The Lighthouse." I'm posting by cameraphone so the best I can do is provide a URL:

home.comcast.net/~debee2/maine/Longfellow.html

for em (from the far side of the atlantic)

for em (from the far side of the atlantic)
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone from
Cape Elizabeth, Maine

lost

lost
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Somewhere in Portland, ME.

Light's lovely. Don't mind so much.

Posting by cameraphone.

mel's shine stand (business closed)

mel's shine stand
(business closed)
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

If I had the courage to approach folks and ask for their picture (I don't) I'd do a photo essay on shoe shine stands in airports.

Shoe shine stands give off the same big boy vibe that Barber Shops do (another largely male domain I'd love to shoot someday), and are usually manned by an old guy reading the paper who would be chomping a stogy if smoking in airports was still allowed.

I've only once seen a woman having her shoes shined at an airport stand, and I've never had the courage to get a shine myself, although I could use one.

The fittings and furnishings of the shoe shine stand often seem independent of their surroundings. Regardless of how shiny new the airport may be the architecture of the shoe shine stand usually hails from somewhere between 1956 and 1973, as if it was schlepped in from the curb just as the doors were opening on the new terminal. "Hey: You forgot this," says the old guy with the stogy, while the guy in the suit rolls his eyes and turns away.

Incidentally and probably not accurately I've arrived at the conclusion that the farther East you go the more frequently shoe shine stalls are actually *used* and engaged in earning their owners a living.

I've wondered in my purely unscientific way if the prevalence of casual attire and the running shoe has urged the slow demise of folks like Mel at SeaTac who has now closed his transient stoop and no longer shines the black leather loafers or brushes the brown tassles of the shoes his clients wore as they passed between here and over there and home again.

Snapped this a few months back in Seattle. Posting by cameraphone. Killing time infight before I touch down in Portland.

for sale see jerry

for sale see jerry
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Somehow failed to pack any reading materials
for my two hour flight and I'm not in the mood
to fire up my laptop so I'm browsing through
the cameraphone pics I never posted.

Brace yourself.

Posting by cameraphone.

This one's from the Sandwich County Fair
awhile back.

outbound to maine

outbound to maine
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Chicago O'Hare to Portland International Jetport.

Our flight attendant, introduced alternately as "Miss Maria" and "The Lovely Maria", is sporting a beehive that's about six inches tall. I'm captivated and endlessly staring. (She smells nice, too.)

Posting by cameraphone.

cross-section

Clickthrough for Flickr notes »

circle back

Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange

Migrant Mother was made while Lange was travelling home to San Francisco in the rain. She passed a sign that read 'Pea-Pickers' Camp' and drove for anoher twenty miles, before something compelled her to turn back and visit the camp.

From the Genius of Photography: How Photography Has Changed our Lives, a remarkable BBC title that accompanies the television series of the same name. [1]


The book is a treasure, a gift from @bobcatrock, which I've only just recently had a chance to dive into and devour. (Thank you, friend: it's amazing.)

Reading its pages has made me acutely aware of why I care about photography.

If I have a theory of photography it resembles the philosophy of the Tao: Nothing is fixed, all things change and there is value in studying this slice of time before we move on to the next.

I've art directed hundreds of hours of commercial studio photography where someone else worked the shot and captured the magic. I've marveled at the photographers' skill and talent, and been grateful that they managed to capture the image I needed to tell my story and sell my goods.

But the photographs that arrest me with wonder are the ones where chance conspires with geometry and light and the odd artifact of this brief now. They're unstaged and elusive, and they're true.

If I have any rules for my own photography they are these:

Keep moving.
Circle back.
Work with (only) this.

side streets & closed doors

along side streets and behind closed doors

this is where it first unwraps itself
still wet from the chrysalis

this is where
the eyes of the rough edged idea
adjust to the light

take me (with you)

Photo by Denis Belliveau. Francis O’Donnell, left, and Belliveau during their travels.
This is my kind of pr0n. From today's New York Times:

Back in 1993 these two men, friends from Queens, decided it would be fun to try to follow the trail supposedly blazed by Polo more than 700 years ago. It was a brash concept, since that trail is thousands of miles long and goes through places like Afghanistan and Iran. Add in that the men vowed to spurn air travel and were sort of making things up as they went along, and you have a delicious, self-imposed obstacle course. The adventure lasted two years.

So there's that: They made the trip I've always wanted to make.

But the thing that pushes me past the point of no return? It's the analog light meter hanging around Belliveau's neck. My favorite fetish object.

Yes, I'll be watching, although it looks like my first shift will be watching to see when the show airs on a Chicago station. (The NYT piece says it'll air as part of National Geographic's Expedition Week, but I'm not seeing it.)


Here's the website: In the Footsteps of Marco Polo »

win without fail

When Nestlé rolled out their candy in the Far East, locals couldn't help but notice how close the words "Kit Kat" were to "Kitto-Katsu," which roughly translates to "win without fail." In time, students began to believe that eating a Kit Kat before they took their exams would result in a higher grade, which is the major reason the Kit Kat brand is doing so well in Japan's overcrowded retail market.

Nestlé went one step further by rolling out their Kit Kats in a blue bag -- to make people think of the sky, as in Heaven -- and printing the words "Prayers to God" on the package. It seems that Kit Kats are scoring in Asia not just because they are considered good luck, but because on the Nestlé Web site, browsers can enter a prayer that they believe will be sent up to a higher power.

From Martin Lindstrom's Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy.


More on Kit Kat in Japan »

how she rolls

If he governs with the skill and the grace and the greatness of which he is capable, we're going to be just fine. And as he prepares to fill the office of Washington and Lincoln, know that this is a shining moment in American history.

Sarah Palin speaking of Barack Obama at a meeting of U.S. Governors in Miami, as quoted in USA Today.

Lest we forget, it was recently reported in Newsweek:

The Obama campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and very disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October, at the same time that the crowds at Palin rallies became more frenzied. Michelle Obama was shaken by the vituperative crowds and the hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. "Why would they try to make people hate us?" Michelle Obama said to a top campaign aide.

The vitriol against Obama that Palin helped stir up during the election hasn't yet quieted down. Today Newsweek reports that Obama has more threats than other presidents-elect »

and now for a story

Once upon a time... from Capucha on Vimeo.

NYT 4 July 2009

embiggen »
Maybe. Expect this will disappear soon. Clickthrough while you can »

And read the fine print »

via @martindave

& for dessert

& for dessert
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

receiving the stillness
of a starry evening

unfurled by the galaxy


(alternate title: the stars, the moon & a donut.)

Posting by cameraphone from Los Altos, CA after a moonlit ride with the top down.

17th & de haro, dusk

17th & de haro, dusk
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Blurry too: I was holding a cup of coffee
while I was snapping this.

Posting by cameraphone from SF, CA.

hotel room, morning light

hotel room, morning light
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Posting by cameraphone from South San Francisco.

this kind of tired don't come easy

this kind of tired don't come easy
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Headed for my third time zone of the day:
Outbound from Detroit International to
San Francisco after leaving Chicago at 7AM
earlier today.

Bright spot: window seat in the exit row =
prime snoozing seat.

(But yes, Mr. Teter: The dreaded Coach.)

Posting by cameraphone.

on the road

Outbound to Detroit and then San Francisco
before the day's out.

Shot this on the train from long-term parking
into O'Hare. Entirely unremarkable, really.

Like some days.

Posting by cameraphone.

glass house + stones

study war no more

Grieving Sphinx, Great War Memorial (WWI)
Kansas City, MO

holga.

p.s. Like Mahalia said »

my honored soliders. my ancestors. my dead.

Bompa, my paternal grandfather, who served as a Naval Communications Officer in the Pacific Theater during WWII and endured Guadalcanal.

Bumpa, my maternal grandfather, who served as a Merchant Marine in the Pacific.

Grandpa S., my step-grandfather, who soldered steel on the Battleship Missouri, on whose decks the Japanese surrendered to General McArthur.

Uncle Stan, my grandmother's brother, who parachuted behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge.

Uncle Jack, my Nini's dearest brother and elder by only 18 months, who as a Staff Sergeant and tail gunner lost his life on July 9, 1944 when his B-24 bomber was shot down over the Ploesti Oil Fields in Romania. He was 21 years old.

And one of my great great great uncles on my mother's side, whose name I don't know, who was the first of his small town in Virginia to be killed in the Civil War.

These are my honored soldiers. My ancestors. My dead.

It's Veterans Day: Hug a Soldier.

mars cheese castle

mars cheese castle
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

I bought a summer sausage that's shaped like a football. (Oh yes I did.)

Posting by cameraphone from Kenosha, WI on the road home.

post-meeting pit stop

post-meeting pit stop
Originally uploaded by suttonhoo

Braised cabbage & smoked trout + art = lunch

Posting by cameraphone from the Milwaukee Art Museum

(Apologies, Penelope: No Bonnard.)

changed landscape

When you think about it, a campaign is a start-up business. Other than his speech in 2004 at the convention and his two books, Mr. Obama had very little in terms of brand to begin with, and he was up against Senator Clinton, who had all the traditional sources of power, and then Senator McCain. But he had the right people and the right idea to take them on. When you think about it, it was like he was going up against Google and Yahoo. And he won.

Blogger Ranjit Mathoda in this morning's New York Times commenting on the Obama Campaign's use of social networking to win the election.

The article also tells of a late night meeting at SFO between Senator Obama and Netscape creator Marc Andreessen who now sits on the board of Facebook.

Related: Barack Obama behaves like a well-defined brand »

she drink coffee

Sunday breakfast + Holga + Instant Film Back loaded with Polaroid 690 = Holgaroid