Just back from Monhegan

We’ve lived just down the road from the ferry to Monhegan Island for the last 3 years, but hadn’t ventured out there until today. Unfortunately, the digital camera chose this morning to announce its retirement (thus creating an Opportunity for the impending Birthday Month), so I was unable to record anything of Monhegan’s fabled visual wonders. It occurred to me that Flickr might stand in for me, and sure enough a quick search discloses more than 6000 images tagged ‘Monhegan’ and quite a few of the first hundred-odd will give an idea of why people rave about the island. We walked about half of the cliffy Atlantic side, mostly in hazy/foggy obscurity, and clearly it’s worth many return trips.

Been a while

…what with summer visitors, a weekend at an extreme yoga workshop, more summer visitors. But here’s one that summarizes a lot of what I learned about The South in 13 years of living on its fringes, courtesy of Michelle Shocked:

A nice sunny day

Several things this morning:

(1) The feed from my Delicious bookmarks is still out of commission, but here are three, eclectic as ever, from the last couple of days:

Magic From Space: Traffic from Space Videos Blow Our Minds, Pants, and Socks (yup. UK traffic visualizations, the sort of thing I’ve been imagining for years, and here it is)

Geeks, nerds, or dorks? (Joho the Blog points to an explanation of the frontiers of physics)

Dumneazu: Polish Truck Stops: We Like Them. Very Much. (more food and music)

(2) Today’s BoingBoing tells us of Cliff Bolling, an enthusiast for 78 RPM records, who has digitized a whole lot of them (all this via a Wired blog posting). Since I’ve been playing around with the same general sort of effort to extract music from obsolete formats and organize the resulting mountain of mp3 files, it’s useful to see how somebody else approaches the enterprise.

(3) via Keep Swinging: Chinatown My Chinatown as a banjo duel. The banjo player on the left is Spats Langham; on the right Johan Lammers: