Quinn meets jellyfish

at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, November 2011

Dept. of Vapid Greenwashing

This week all the adspace at my metro stop was taken up by an oil corporation trying to convince people that it is thinking about the "new energy future" -- presumably to ensure that future still has a lot of oil consumption. For example.
So ... which type of energy should we unlock? Oh right, the energy that's locked away. No doubt Shell will get right on that. Nice work, marketing geniuses!

Still, on the balance, this batch is less objectionable than the last. For several months, this same metro stop was plastered with ads from Chevron (!!!) featuring attractive people gazing soulfully out of the frame and talking about how they were trying real hard to buy less of Chevron's product. Gah.

The advertising space in the DC Metro system provides amusements like these on a regular basis. My stop gets a lot of traffic from K Street lobbyists and other so-called thought leaders, and as a result we get a lot of "think piece" advertising. Last year we had dueling ads between the "clean coal" lobby and the "clean coal is a myth" lobby. Save the oceans. Fund the CDC. Stuff like that.

On the Orange/Blue line (which connects Capitol Hill and the Pentagon) you will occasionally see actual advertisements for armored troop transport planes, attack helicopters or like, bullet-proof laptops. Crazy stuff. At first my mind was boggled that a defense contractor would spend so much money just to subliminally pry the brains of (literally) a handful of people -- presumably congressional appropriation and DOD procurement staffers -- but then I realized that I have no conception of the type of money defense contractors routinely deal with.

DC, man.

Bay View

The view of San Francisco from up in the Berkeley hills (from here actually)

The zoom in looks a little smoggy, but actually the day was pretty clear.

Stone River

Stone River, by Andy Goldsworthy
I was at Stanford over the weekend for my class reunion and made a point to go see this Andy Goldsworthy installation outside the art museum. The curving stone wall is constructed in a shallow excavation, giving the impression of an archaeological dig or a vein of rock coursing through the earth's crust.

If you're not familiar with him, Goldsworthy is a British artist who uses the natural world -- sticks, leaves, stones, ice, landscapes -- as his canvas. A lot of his work is fleeting, captured only by camera, but lately he has been undertaking these massive curving wall installations.


I always have the same reaction to his work. At first I am wowed by the beauty of nature depicted in his photos, but then I realize that it is not really nature that I'm seeing -- at least not in the way that an Ansel Adams photograph is about nature. There is too much human ingenuity and manipulation out front and in your face; you just don't see patterns like these in the real world. Rather his art is almost a form of abstract design, using "nature" both as the medium and the topic.

Anyway, he's fantastic. There are any number of places to see his work online, such as here or here or here.

A fun side note is that Andy Goldsworthy seems to be the inspiration for a lot of the visual design of Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are (which was really good, by the way). For example, see this photo or the structure glimpsed fleetingly at 1:30 in the movie trailer.

Shoreline

Quinn playing on the shore of Huntington Lake. Reminds me of this excerpt from Tagore (again):

"On the seashore of endless worlds children meet.
The infinite sky is motionless overhead
and the restless water is boisterous.
On the seashore of endless worlds
the children meet with shouts and dances. "

-- "Seashore" from Gitanjali

lizard!

Tree and Sky

Dead tree, amazing clouds -- snapped on our hike to Twin Lakes (more on which forthcoming).

Best Street Sign in DC

No one is sure what the name of this street is, but it sure starts with 'H'

(V)OTE

Giant version of one of those ubiquitous Shepard Fairey HOPE posters - overseen at the corner of Kenyon and Georgia here in DC. This last weekend, my sis and I visited the National Portrait Gallery where we saw the "official" portrait version hanging there too.

How The Light Gets In

Our tiny backyard is paved over with concrete, but that hasn't stopped some pretty robust plant growth from poking through.

51 Quarters

Fifty state quarters (plus a stand-in for D.C. which doesn't get its own) arranged in rough geographic order:

I started collecting them as soon as we moved somewhere that didn't have coin-operated washers and dryers. Yes, I am a dork.

Might be time to pull over...

(late night driving somewhere in Delaware)

Land's End

(overseen in Cambria, CA)

Oh Boy...

(overseen in Hyattsville, MD)

Windowsill with potato sprouts

Earth From Above

The shoreline of Lake Mead. (While on our trip to Vegas, we took a brief plane ride over the Grand Canyon -- amazing! -- and snapped this photo.) The region is currently in a drought and the lake is way way down and so this stretch of shoreline is usually underwater. Which is partly why it looks so bleached, although, honestly, the area around the lake is pretty stark to begin with.

(fyi Earth From Above is also the name of a fairly amazing series of photos by Yann Arthus-Bertrand.)

going dowm

My hobby

Balancing polyhedra on my sleeping daughter's head.

It's good to have hobbies.

Welcome back to work

First day back at work and apparently stuff has been piling up in my office while I was gone.

demolition

They've been verrry slowly demolishing this building about a half-block from my work. About a year ago, when I started my job, the open pit you see here was an ugly, seventies-style, ten-story building. They started at the top and took it down floor by floor until they finally ended up with a giant hole about negative three stories tall. Apparently, they weren't allowed to just dynamite the thing because it's located just a few blocks from the White House.

Anyway, the weird buttressing posts caught my eye, as did the leftover morsel of underground parking garage still stuck to them.