Dowbrigade

In New York City, where there has been no snow at all this season, the cherry trees are beginning to blossom in temperatures that have been inching up all week and could hit 70 degrees on Saturday.

from the New York Times

New York, hell. This year, there’re probably tulips up in Nome. We know for a fact that the cherry blossoms are out along the Charles River in scenic Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we took some pictures to prove it.

Note the White Whale in the foreground, parked in front of the home court of the Just Don’t Suck Tennis Club in Riverside Park. We have played outdoor on these courts every weekend for the past year, with no end in sight. Tomorrow we expect to be out there again, clouds and sun predicted, temps near 70. Another record for the date, ho hum.

Word is that Atlanta is the new Miami, which means New York is the new Atlanta, and Boston is, well, it gets pretty complicated at that point. One thing that is undeniable, they don’t make winters like they used to. A few years ago we were rushing towards retirement so we could move somewhere we could play tennis outdoors year round. Scratch that one off the to-do list…..

This photo was on the front page of the New York Times today, and for our money is an immediate finalist for news photo of the year. Actually, a smaller, black and white version was in today’s Boston Globe, but we glanced at it and read on – it is a good example of how size, color and placement can completely change the impact of a photo.

As to the photo itself, pictures like this are worth a million words, but if we may waste a few – the swirling black smoke darkening the top of the frame, the swirling wind seen in the sky and reflected in the swirl of the man’s fuchia robe and the wind strewn detrius of corrugated steel, the eerie echo of the man’s elbow in the crock of the desolated tree, and the pale, shiny, plastic washbasin at the center of the shot, now used to rinse off soot, but minutes before certainly one of the containers being used to haul away the illicit gas. Fantastic shot, taken by Akintunde Akinleye.

The story behind the story, from the New York Times:

Tapping is common in Nigeria, a major oil exporter, where many of the 130 million people live in woeful poverty amid widespread graft that makes a handful of people wealthy. One pilfered can of gasoline sold on the black market can earn the equivalent of two weeks of wages for a poor Nigerian.

It takes only a bedsheet and 18-gauge wire for Bruce
Macdonald to stir road rage in some motorists.

For eight months the Cambridge lawyer has been stringing homemade banners from
highway overpasses, including those crossing Interstate 93 and Route 128. His
neatly painted messages usually take short jabs at the Bush administration or
the war in Iraq.

Like noxious fumes and traffic snarls, a well-placed road sign can’t be ignored
by a driver, he said. Tens of thousands of cars can stream beneath an “Impeach" or
“U.S. Out of Iraq" banner before it is ripped down, usually by a passerby
or road crew. “If they stay up a day they’re doing well," Macdonald said.
“Some people get upset ."

Macdonald, 59, is one of an increasing number of “highway bloggers" —
loosely connected activists who favor bridges over websites as posting places
for their antiwar slogans. They say it is an easy, inexpensive way to reach large
numbers of people, especially those who may not be receptive to their opinions.

Randall promotes freeway blogging on his website, freewayblogger.com , and through a two-minute instructional video, "How to Reach 100,000
People for Under $1.00."

from the Boston Globe

GUBEN, Germany — Dr. Gunther von Hagens, the German
inventor of a body-preserving process called plastination, is always
eager for volunteers, people willing to donate their corpses for his
public anatomical displays. He says 6,800 individuals have pledged
their mortal coils so far .

He hopes to add to that list when his traveling show reaches Boston later this
month. Body Worlds 2, which opens July 30 at the Museum of Science in Boston.

"Think of it as an alternative to being eaten by worms or going up in smoke," von
Hagens said by phone from his Institute for Plastination in Heidelberg, Germany.

from the Boston Globe

This is how we envision ourself ending up some
day, edifying the scientific and sensationalist curiosity of generations
of jaded youth, preserved for posterity with a fat joint still in our
hand and another between our
legs…..