Beautiful Baltimore Redux

    Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. took a walk this morning through the Guilford neighborhood across the street from their condo.  Their destination was Sherwood Gardens, the incredible park maintained by Guilford residents for the enjoyment of the public and themselves.  Each year at this time tens of thousands of tulips burst into full bloom creating one of the most amazing floral displays on the planet.  Enjoy.
(Click on the pictures to enlarge).

                                                                     

                    This tree was in a yard in Guilford on the way to Sherwood Gardens.

                                    As was this unknown bit of colorful ground cover.

Meanwhile back at the Johns Hopkins library worksite workers installed the first roof beams yesterdat just as Uncle Jack predicted a couple of days ago.  Is he smart or what?

                                                  He wouldn't miss this for the world.

Baltimore the Beautiful

     Spring has sprung in Charm City. A few pictures are worth a lot of words.

                                             A house on St. Paul street near Uncle Jack's condo.

                                                         Same house. More bushes.

The Johns Hopkins campus was in fine floral fettle for this weekend's Alumni gathering.

The JHU bluejay was all puffed up after the lacrosse team's win over Loyola Saturday afternoon.

This gigantic tent was the scene of some lavish alumni stroking over the weekend.  Mayor Bloomberg of New York City is one of the alumni who have contributed many hundreds of millions of dollars to the school in recent years.  Most of the students' $45,000 a year tuition money goes to pay for extravagances like this tent which make the alumni feel important and loved.

And here is where some of the alumni contributions are going.  Steelworkers have taken over this phase of the construction of the Brodie Learning Commons next to the Eisenhower Library.

Same structure a few days later.  It will provide the connecting link between the old building and the new.

The roof girders on the main building will probably come next.  Stay tuned.


Uncle Jack didn't feel like writing anything this week so he drug this golden oldie out of the archives:


                                                                                                                   
                                                    Tempis Fugits

As Uncle Jack grows older he is seized more and more often by uncontrollable fits of philosophizing. He never knows when these attacks will come and he is as helpless to stop them as an epileptic is to control his convulsions. Fortunately these spells of pontificating usually pass before he has time to bore more than a few close friends and relatives.
Uncle Jack has been afflicted most recently with deep thoughts about the nature of time. He has reached an age that enables him to confirm the widely held belief that time seems to speed up as one grows older. He has often heard this said by older persons, but older persons have told him so much that turned out to be wrong that he has never been sure he could believe anything they say.
But now he knows from his own experience that time does indeed pass more rapidly as one grows older. It took approximately 25 years for Uncle Jack to get from age l2 to age l8 but it took only about two weeks to get from his 50th birth to his 80th. At this rate he expects to turn 95 sometime around the middle of next week.
   This amazing speeding up of time, which seems to be a fairly common experience of middle-aged people in our time-conscious society, can be scary enough to cause folks  in Uncle Jack's age bracket to do some fairly weird things. Men and women who have been dutifully trudging down life's highway for half a century or so sometimes accidentally look up just long enough to see a tractor trailer with a skull and crossbones on it bearing down on them.
Some folks go trudging on and don't even try to get out of the way, and for the rest of us it's probably a good thing they don't. Others make some remarkable moves in an effort to dodge that truck, like the folks he met on the waterfront in Manteo last week.
This couple, on the early side of middle age, took their big leap about a year ago, divesting themselves of cars, televisions, lawnmowers and mortgages---all the encumbrances of solid middle-class existence. They used the proceeds from their years of straight-arrow effort to build themselves the pretty sailboat you may have seen at the Manteo dock last week.
They live on their boat now, going wherever they please whenever they please. Sooner or later, when their money runs out, they'll be back in the middle of the road with the rest of us, but what memories they'll have on those nights when there is nothing to watch on TV.
Uncle Jack must say, however, that he felt not even the slightest twinge of envy when the intrepid couple sailed off to New York City yesterday. Why anyone would voluntarily go to New York City when he could stay in Manteo is beyond his comprehension.
The other event of last week that seemed to trigger this fit of deep thinking was the sunset last Thursday evening. Uncle Jack will wisely refrain from attempting to describe that sunset; it was truly ineffable (a word he learned in high school knowing that some day it would come in handy). Suffice it to say that the sunset was so magnificent that it started Uncle Jack philosophizing so hard he thought he was going to have a stroke.
The message in all this, he thinks, is that as we trudge down life's highway we should not be afraid to look up once in while. We might see a big truck bearing down on us but on the other hand we might see a sunset that will knock our socks off.
Whew.
Whatever this is Uncle Jack hopes he will be over it soon.

H. L. Mencken on Kissing

Mencken once joked that life would be perfect with a good sauce, a cocktail, and a
girl who kissed with her mouth open.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.

Easter on the Outer Banks: A Roaring Good Time

     Seekers of a peaceful place to celebrate one of the highest holy days of the Christian calendar did not find it on the Outer Banks this weekend.  The roads to and from the churches were clogged with what seemed like thousands of blatty motorcycles as the final few days of "Bike Week" happened to coincide with the three days of Easter this year.  God and Mammon duked it out and Uncle Jack isn't sure who won.
     Except for a quick trip to Manteo (which reverberated like the inside of a motor velodrome on Saturday afternoon) Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. stayed close to home in relatively peaceful South Nags Head and took several  long beach walks while enjoying the balmy temperatures that prevailed most of the weekend.  Tomorrow it's back to the peace and quiet of Baltimore where four persons were shot to death and one severely wounded by unknown assailants on Easter Sunday.  Maybe the motorcycles weren't so bad.

South Nags Head on Dwellable

                             Sunday afternoon in Sonag.  Don't you wish you were here?

                                Nary a fish was caught but who could care on an afternoon like this?

This house at the head of Pelican Street in Sonag burned several weeks ago.  Right now it's Motif #1 for amateur photographers like Uncle Jack.  Will it still be here when he returns next month?  Stay tuned.

The derelicts of Sea Gull Drive are still in place (sort of).  Don't be surprised if they're back on the rental market shortly after beach renourishment is finished.  The Lord works in mysterious ways, especially in the wonderful world of Outer Banks real estate.

The extraordinary height of this cottage near Sea Gull suggests just how much sand Mother Nature has removed from this section of beach.  No doubt she is licking her chops in anticipation of all the fresh, new stuff she can started moving around after beach renourishment

                      Only certified rappelers and sky-divers are allowed to use this beach access walkway.

                Hopefully beach renourishment will cover up this mess---for a little while anyway.

Sunrise in Sonag

     Uncle Jack and Mrs. U.J. are very happy to be in South Nags Head on this beautiful, balmy, sunny Wednesday morning.  As the pictures show they were up before sunrise and took a walk on the beach up to the new Jennette's pier before breakfast (whole wheat everything bagels from the Nags Head outlet of New York Bagels, now open for the season at the Outer Banks Mall).  There is a goodly crowd here in the run-up to Easter including a few hundred motorcycles left over from last weekend.  Many businesses sport fancy "Welcome Bikers" banners which they one day may rue if the experience of other resort towns like Myrtle Beach is any guide.

South Nags Head on Dwellable

6:20 The unspectacular adumbration of a rather puny sunrise to come. Taken from the beach at Whitecap Street in South Nags Head.

                                   This is as exciting as it got this morning.  Uncle Jack is spoiled.

At low tide the beach was wide and flat and great for walking.  Looking north toward Jennette's Pier.

A measure of this winter's erosion.  A root from what must have been a pretty substantial tree at one time.

Beach nourishment can't come too soon to the Comfort Inn South whose time has nearly run out.

The new 250-car parking lot at Jennette's Pier awaits paving which looks like it might begin today. The Grand Opening is only a month away now.

Sam and Omie's is ideally situated to attract pier-goers. Sigh.

This is a very sturdy-looking pier.  Mother Nature has her work cut out for her if she plans to knock this one down.

Recent bulldozing helped to soften the sheer dropoff in front of these Sonag condos.  The owners will no doubt welcome this summer's beach nourishment project no matter when it comes.

Ditto for these.  Renters should have a great view of the proceedings from their oceanfront decks.  Maybe next year they can sit on the new beach if it's still there.

     

The Humble Farmer Speaks

     Uncle Jack has a friend named Robert Skoglund who lives up in Maine and calls himself The Humble Farmer when he is doing his radio show or his TV show or giving speeches or writing his "Whine and Snivel Newsletter".  Humble and Uncle Jack are in complete agreement about most matters political and economic and every once in a while he writes something that expresses Uncle Jack's views better than he could do it himself.  He did it this morning in his Newsletter so Uncle Jack thought he would pass it along.  He and Mrs. U.J. are leaving tomorrow morning for a week in Nags Head so he will have some pictures---maybe even a sunrise----later this week.

                                           Humble Explains How it Works

We read in the newspaper about a No Labels political organization that describes itself as a grassroots group that aims to convince politicians to put aside their party affiliations and, instead, work together to address the country’s problems. Ho ho ho, thinks I.  To begin with, in every country in every age there have really only been two political parties. One party, whatever it is called, is a collection of people who have banded together to support the financial interests of the wealthy merchant class. Back in the good old days, they bought slaves. Today it is only by keeping wages as low as possible that they can keep profits as high as possible. The other party, whatever it is called, consists of the millions of people who work for wages and the folks who work 18 hours a day to try to keep their little mom and pop stores afloat. These people have the same goals as the wealthy --- they also want their income to be as high as possible.  So there is an inherent conflict of interest between these two groups when it comes to the bottom line, which is --- how do we divide up the amount of money that came into our collective till on this working day?   The wealthy merchants have always had an advantage when it comes to getting more than their share of the money in the till because there are many ways to keep wages as low as possible. War is a sure-fire means of sucking the lifeblood out of the most prosperous society. Nothing makes the rich richer like a good meaningless war to “protect our freedom.” You can also create a recession and lots of unemployment. Unemployed people are more than willing to work for whatever scraps they can get. Because men are trying to feed hungry families, there is likely to be an increase in crime --- another win-win for the rich who own and service the privatized prisons.   About the only way the working class can negotiate for better wages and working conditions is to band together into an organization which, in English, is called a union. Unfortunately for working people everywhere, management has whispered in the ears of millions of its employees, “If you have to work for me for three dollars an hour, why should your friends across the street be getting four?” How can management lose, when it can get 75 percent of an uninformed labor force to write letters to the editor that cry out for lower wages? “I work as hard as they do. Why should they get more than me? These are hard times. We all have to sacrifice.” When it is possible to get millions of working people in any country to honestly believe that they deserve lower wages, that country is in grave danger.    

But back to the No Labels organization. When I read of any organization, the first thing I do is to Google around to find out who is behind that organization. In other words, which of the two so clearly delineated classes of people in any society is behind that particular organization: Who is going to get the money?   Would you believe that the page that came up on Google belonged to Rush Limbaugh? And in the middle of that page is a big circle. And in the middle of that circle it says --- in capital letters, “No Brains. IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY.”

(And so it goes)

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FQF

Uncle Jack is pleased to report that he and Mrs. U.J. have survived another French Quarter Festival and are safely back in Charm City.  He uses the term "survived" advisedly because each year, as this magnificent free extravaganza of music and food grows larger (and they grow older) it has become a little more taxing and a little less enjoyable.  As usual they heard a lot of  music, much of it sublime and entirely too much of it wretched.  And they feasted on a number of culinary delicacies that simply do not exist outside of  New Orleans---mufulettas from the Central Grocery on Decatur Street, oyster po'boys from the Acme Oyster Bar, garlic soup and sweetbreads at Bayona, crayfish crepes from Muriel's on Jackson Square and pralines from Loretta in the French Market, all enhanced by that golden elixir known as Abita Amber beer.  There was much to enjoy----vastly more than they could manage in the heat and crowds.

    French Quarter Festival is one of America's greatest parties along with Jazz Fest and Mardi Gras, the major economic engines of the Big Easy.  It is much more family oriented than the others and probably the only time of the year when baby strollers outnumber Harley Davidsons in the narrow streets of the Vieux Carre. An estimated half-million people attended this year's expanded four-day celebration and it seemed like twice that many to Uncle Jack.  The weather man had predicted four straight days of uninterrupted heat and humidity with no hope of rain and that seemed to swell the crowd to unprecedented size.  Getting from Point A to Point B became such a struggle at times that Point B completely lost its allure.

    With all that they had a wonderful time and they are happy they went but whether they can save up the wherewithal, physical and fiscal, to do it again next year remains to be seen.  They have already made their hotel reservations just in case.

    A festively dressed couple enters Jackson Square, focal point of the FQF.  Those parasols are de rigeur when the sky is cloudless and the temperature reaches 90.  Parasol, after all, means "against the sun". Did you know that?

Part of the crowd listening to the New Orleans All-Stars and Pete Fountain give out with some rousing dixieland on the main stage in Jackson Square.  Pete is 80 this year and has suffered several strokes in addition to losing everything to Hurricane Katrina but he can still play and obviously loves FQF.

A portable police observation tower looms over the crowd in front of St. Louis Cathedral.  It wasn't needed for the very orderly FQF crowd.

One of the not-so-good bands that play on streetcorners all over the Quarter hoping for tips.

As usual the balconies along the Rue Chartres were bedecked with plants and flowers.  They have to be watered several times a day which makes for hazardous walking below.

The mighty Mississippi was nearly at flood stage trying to accommodate all the snow melt from regions as far afield as Montana and North Dakota.  The breeze off the river was almost like air conditioning for overheated festival-goers who flocked to the "Moonwalk", the promenade along the river named for mayor "Moon" Landrieu, father of the present mayor Mitch Landrieu and his sister, senator Mary Landrieu.  Politics seems to run in the family.

 One of the many art works that brighten the old French Market in the Quarter which has undergone major rejuvenation in recent years.

This lovely bas-relief celebrates the Old Market when it was a major source of fresh fruits and vegetables, fish and oysters.  Today it more resembles a bazaar in the Middle East with table after table of imported schlock.  

This young woman danced frenetically in the blazing sun in front of the Southern Syncopaters jazz band for nearly two hours.  The Department of Energy should be investigating her as a possible alternative energy source.  Uncle Jack would love to know what was in that gallon jug she sipped from between every number.

Meanwhile, back at the Johns Hopkins library building site, the work goes on.  At this point it is beginning to resemble a modern-day Stonehenge.