what about the plastic animals?

A Beach Somewhere on the Oregon Coast

I wasn't sure where this was when I wrote the title but now I see these are from Bob Straub State Park in Pacific City, Oregon.  That's Haystack Rock in the top photo.  It was a nice beach.  I had it almost all to myself, probably because it was 50 degrees out and the wind was blowing a good 20 mph.

Painting in Progress

There's been a guy prepping and painting the railings on these steps in Morningside Park the past couple of weeks.  Thing is, it's not altogether clear to me that he's actually supposed to be prepping and painting the railings.  It's one guy dressed in raggedy clothes with a bucket and a few brushes.  There's no visible cue that he works for the Parks Department or a contractor.  When I saw him yesterday he said "Don't worry.  I'm not going to rob you."  He's doing a decent job of painting so this isn't a complaint.

Before and After Irene

I had this brilliant idea on Saturday to walk around the neighborhood and take pictures of things that might not be around after Irene came through the city.  My choices didn't out to be the best and Irene, thankfully, didn't inflict much damage.  The half-rotted London Plane at 114th and Morningside Ave. miraculously escaped unscathed.  Similarly, the big old tree on the lower path near 119th St. remained standing.  At least there two nearby trees fell.

Beach Erosion Writ Small

Hurricane Irene caused massive amounts of erosion at The Beach on Harlem Meer.  A lot of sand was washed away or rearranged.  The middle photo shows the formation of a new spit.  The squiggly green lines in the top and bottom photos is where duckweed was deposited on and above the beach.  It's about a foot above the meer at this location, which is pretty impressive for a large pond.

Bonus:  If you look very closely at the top of the last photo you'll see a great blue heron sitting on the newly formed spit.  It later alighted when someone thought it was a good idea for their little yippy dog to chase the ducks and flew across the meer to land in this tree.

The "D" River

That's the D River in Lincoln City, Oregon.  All of it.  The good people of Oregon claim that the D is the shortest river in the world.  The bridge I was standing on is over the edge of Devil's Lake.   From lake to ocean the river is 120 feet long at high tide.  The tree stumps in the river mark the high tide line.  Lincoln City hosts huge kite festivals twice a year at the D River beach.

Visiting the D didn't take too long.  It was after noon and I was hungry so it was off to lunch in Lincoln City.  Since I had a long way to go I wanted a quick lunch.  Urbanspoon told me a pizza place and a sandwich shop that I would drive be on the way out of town would be my best bets.  I pulled up to the pizza place and saw that it had no customers.  Not a good sign at lunch time.  The sandwich place was likewise deserted.  A Thai restaurant that wasn't listed in Urbanspoon had several customers. 

That was a good sign! 

That was a misleading sign!  It was easily the worst meal on the trip.  Tom Yum soup is supposed to look like this.  Note the shrimp!  Note the absence of broccoli!  Note the absence of grayish-brownish-greenish broccoli!  The soup was horrible and the chicken curry wasn't much better.  It was time to get back in the car, head up the coast, and find a beach to explore. 

Abe Lincoln on a Horse

 

In planning my trip I saw had to visit Lincoln City because they've got an Abe Lincoln on a Horse statue.  We've got one of those on campus!  I took a picture today so you could see him hidden away in the apple orchard.  There's also this post from 2006 that sort of explains the origin of the sculpture.

Lincoln City is on the Pacific and was incorporated on my fourth birthday when three neighboring cities and two unincorporated towns were consolidated.  The statue was given to the city in the same year so I'm guessing that it was a gift to honor the newly named city. 

Abe and his horse aren't any more visible in Lincoln City than they are on the Lamont campus.  Instead of getting pride of place on the Pacific Coast Highway, Abe sits in the back corner of the Elks Lodge parking lot two blocks away from the PCH.  There are at least two other copies of the sculpture.  One is at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse (to which the sculptress and her husband also donated 15,000 acres in the Adirondacks) and the other in front of the Bethel, Connecticut Public Library.

I arrived in Lincoln City about noon.  It was a bright, sunny day which meant I had to photograph the sculpture looking directly into the sun.  But for the magic of image editing software the top two photos would be silhouettes of Lincoln and his horse.

To the Sea

Back to Oregon.  A few sights on the drive from Portland to Lincoln City.  The old Dairy Queen sign is in Newberg.  The smoke, I don't know what that was about, was near McMinnville.  Nearby is the Evergreen Aviation and Space Museum, home of Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose and a vineyard.  I didn't have time to stop there.  Not too far from Lincoln City I saw a sign that said "covered bridge" so I took a quick detour to see the Drift Creek bridge, which was built in 1914, rebuilt in 1933, dismantled in 1997 and rebuilt on private property in 2001.

Manhattanville Overview

A couple of views of the demolition and construction going on with Columbia's new campus in Manhattanville.  The university is going at full speed to demolish most of the standing buildings and build the infrastructure for the campus, which is expected to open in 2015.  These pictures are way too small to see any detail.

Back in 2004 I took a bunch of photos of the neighborhood and I see now that I used the same title for a post just last April.  Sheesh.

The House of Jell-O

Let's switch things up a bit.  On an upstate trip this past June I stopped in LeRoy, southwest of Rochester, to visit the Jell-O Gallery.  Although Peter Cooper patented a gelatin dessert in the 1840s it wasn't until Pearle Wait developed a fruit-flavored gelatin, that his wife Mary named Jell-O, in 1897 that such a dessert became popular.  Actually, even Wait couldn't make a go of it so in 1899 he sold his formula to fellow LeRoy resident Orator Frank Woodward for $450.  The bill of sale is in the gallery!

It took a few years but enterprising sales techniques (salesmen provided stores with recipes and samples but very few boxes of Jell-O.  Demand quickly exceeded supply!) and an advertising campaign that started with Ladies Home Journal finally got sales going in the early 1900s.  Even though Jell-O was sold to Kraft and the factory moved to Delaware long ago, the entertaining ads for Jell-O trace their lineage back a century.

Most of the LeRoy Jell-O factory still stands but it is no longer associated with the company.  The Jell-O Gallery is operated by the LeRoy Historical Society.  Is it "LeRoy," "Le Roy" or maybe even Leroy?  I don't know.  The village website, which I won't link to because it wants to crash my Firefox, says "LeRoy" so that's what I'm going with.

The gallery is stuffed with all sorts of Jell-O paraphernalia.  One back cubby is devoted to nothing but TV ads.  A continuous loop of more than 50 years of Jell-O commercials plays on that little TV next to Bill Cosby,  Well, not quite continuous.  I was told to push the button on the TV to start the show.  Bill Cosby himself paid a visit to the gallery in 2004 to celebrate 30 years as a Jell-O spokesman.  You can see him on the TV being out-cuted by Emmanual Lewis.

Cumulonimbus at Sunset

I heard thunder but this storm cell didn't quite make it to Harlem.

To end the week, Groucho Marx gets flabbergasted by Albert Hall.