yo-yo

hoping to ease up through Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, Ossing, Danbury, Waterbury, New London, Mystic. End up in the fabulous Providence City Hall. Weather is conspiring against me. I like traveling up the valley, along the plateau, over the mountains, but I-81 reportedly is closed from the Mason-Dixon line to I-80.

public realm

Court Square, Harrisonburg, Virginia. Cars disappear. The street is temporarily ceded to pedestrians.

Crows

Providence, Rhode Island

flosser

Levi Spear Parmly, a dentist from New Orleans, is credited with inventing the first form of dental floss. He recommended that people should clean their teeth with silk floss in 1815. Dental floss was still unavailable to the consumer until the Codman and Shurtleft company started producing human-usable unwaxed silk floss in 1882. In 1898, the Johnson & Johnson Corporation received the first patent for dental floss. Other early brands included Red Cross, Salter Sill Co. and Brunswick.A character is depicted using dental floss in James Joyce's famous novel Ulysses (serialised 1918-1920) - an early mention of the practice in literary fiction.--Wikipedia

Obamajam bike valet

January 20, 2009

Washington Area Bicyclist Association parked 2000+ bicycles in the space a suburban CVS would use for a parking lot.
Biking on the George Washington Parkway without cars was sweet.

excellence

(lt) Charlottesville High School Orchestra principal cellist Marvin Brown, (rt) Charlottesville Mayor David Brown

Charlottesville has selected a new slogan, A Great Place to Live for All of Our Citizens.
In Charlottesville we are preparing to elect 3 new City Council members, a deliberate process. I wish some degree of deliberation was shown with this slogan business. The City will spend over 100,000 dollars for the design of a building, how about expending a little care on the sloganeering? Solicit suggestions from the public, have CCDC run a word-design contest. I think we can do better.

The little City that could..

the land game

My favorite thing about this picture are the tiny words below the plat of the new development:
"for illustrative purposes only, final site plan may vary."
True words, hear them!

Calderon or Obrador?

Could voting by the civic minded illegal expats make a difference?

For the first time, Mexico's presidential election was open to Mexican nationals and dual citizens living abroad... But only about 41,000, or 1 percent, of the estimated 4.2 million eligible Mexican voters living outside the country requested absentee ballots. Almost 88 percent of the 32,632 valid absentee ballots mailed to Mexico's Federal Electoral Institute were from the United States. -The Washington Post

Stewards, teachers, workers

Messieurs Caravati and Higgins leave the helm of the SS Charlottesville today. No in depth biographies here, but suffice it to say, one man was on the advisory and political side, the other man on staff since before the beginning of time.
They have been exemplary public workers, the thinking side of the City, for fifty years.

The City is in a difficult passage at this time. I will miss these men at the helm. I will miss their reliable good natures, work ethic and wisdom.

Where are the life jackets?

made in India

on katahdin today

...and there is no health in us.

I've been reading old deeds. Fascinating to see the promises made, never kept. I suppose that successors in title fail to check the old records. Fail to study what they were to do or not to do.

We have left undone those things which we ought to have done;
And we have done those things which we ought not to
have done...
-BCP 1928

civics 101

we have this principle called "separation of church and state".
See the writings of Senor Tomas

Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe

Seems that an explanation is in order. Blank stares from the blog readers. There was a dia sin immigrants rally in Charlottesville Virginia. I think the Catolico Church was the local organizer. The backstory- Albemarle County was the home of Th. Jefferson. The County takes that wall of separation biz pretty seriously. No big stones with the ten commandments loitering on our Courthouse grounds. No creche allowed on the County Office Building property in the month of December.
Ironies abound when words lose their meaning.

listen

the sound of chickens roosting
Office of Special Counsel Patrick J. Fitzgerald