Whitcomb: Seasonal Assist; Ships and Bikes; Healthy Voyeurism; Quake Ready? Ken Block Nails It
Robert Whitcomb, Columnist
Whitcomb: Seasonal Assist; Ships and Bikes; Healthy Voyeurism; Quake Ready? Ken Block Nails It
“Once, for a dare,
He filled his heart-shaped swimming pool
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTWith bank notes, high denomination
And fed a pound of caviar to his dog….’’
-- From “After the Deluge,’’ by Wole Soyinka (born 1934), Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet and essayist.
To read the whole poem, please hit this link. It’s the second poem down.
“Most people have found out, somehow, that they can’t serve God and Mammon – so they serve Mammon.’’
-- Josh Billings (1818-1885), American humorist and lecturer
“A bad review may spoil your breakfast but you shouldn’t allow it to spoil your lunch.
-- Kingsley Amis (1922-1995), English comic novelist
I remember standing on a rocky headland (trespassing on a summer resident’s land) along Massachusetts Bay on Oct 2, 1959 to try to experience a total eclipse. Unfortunately, it was cloudy, which made the eclipse effects even darker. The seagulls, which usually make a racket on that shore, shut up during the event.
The eclipse tomorrow, and big dumps of wet snow the past couple of weeks, are bringing some much-needed revenue to ski areas and the hospitality business. November and early spring are the slow seasons in the North Country, with their dominant color brown. But watch out for floods in the next few weeks as rapidly warming temperatures and more rain overwhelms streams, followed in some particularly wet places by black flies.
Mud season, which usually lasts from early March to the first or second week of April, mostly gets its name from the muddy back roads of that rural region as the snow melts amidst the frequent rains of the season. I remember it well from living in New Hampshire in the mid and late ‘60’s.
Read Robert Frost’s “Two Tramps in Mud Time”: HERE
Springs up there start earlier than they did back then, before the acceleration of global warming, but it can remain a weeks-long drag before things start to green out. In some years, it seemed that we’d go directly from winter to summer, which in the Upper Connecticut Valley could get surprisingly hot on a some days in June.
I wonder how many more houses fell into the sea during last week’s storm and whether this will cut shoreline property values and raise insurance rates even further.
Transportation News
It will be interesting to see how much of the car-import business in the Port of Baltimore, now blocked by the collapse of the Key Bridge, ends up in the Port of Quonset/Davisville over the next few months. Thank God for Quonset/Davisville, a huge Rhode Island wealth creator. Are there other big cargoes besides cars blocked in Baltimore that can be diverted to Davisville?
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We’d better get used to a lot of street adjustments during the next several years as the bridge is torn down and then replaced. That includes lots of repaving needed to repair damage from the huge increase in traffic, including heavy trucks, now coming through the city’s East Side as drivers try to avoid the Washington Bridge.
Unfortunately, few out-of-towners enter Providence by bicycle.
When They Built Grand School Buildings
The plan is to transform Providence’s Mount Pleasant High School in the next few years into something called Mount Pleasant Early College and Career Academy. Increasingly, at both the secondary school and college levels, the emphasis has been on career development instead of, say, educating students to be informed and responsible citizens through more of a liberal arts approach.
That’s even though what might look like a good career now might be superseded by technological and other changes in just a few years.
A big question is what will happen to the Collegiate Gothic building, put up in 1938 by the Works Progress Administration, which built many impressive structures during the New Deal. That building is the star of the Mount Pleasant neighborhood. I sure hope that at least part of the school’s grand structure can be preserved, especially its façade. The old-fashioned interior probably can’t be rehabbed to serve contemporary classroom needs, including increasingly computer-dependent teaching. It will have to be gutted if the whole building isn’t torn down.
Places for People Watching
“The human backside is a dimension architects seem to have forgotten.’’
“It is difficult to design a space that will not attract people. What is remarkable is how often this has been accomplished.”
-- William H. Whyte
As the weather warms, it would be nice if there were more public places in cities and towns in which to sit down and watch the world go by. I thought of this when reading about the research and opinions of the great American sociologist and urbanist William H. Whyte (1917-1999). He was one of the most brilliant American writers on how cities work and how they don’t.
To Whyte having many places to sit outside, on comfortable benches and sturdy chairs (maybe bolted to the ground), such as in vest-pocket midtown parks and on sidewalks shaded by trees, makes cities more inviting and prosperous. They draw people to local stores and restaurants and make people want to live in such communities.
One good thing that came out of the worst of the COVID crisis is the proliferation of eateries offering outdoor dining, which around here means mostly mid-April to late October. This has turned out to be so popular that it ought to encourage cities and towns to create more places where people can sit outside on nice days and watch the different varieties of humans. Such sites are sweet additions to lives that can sometimes be harsh.
Efforts to slow global warming are hamstrung by politicians, businesses, and other opposition to acting more seriously to reduce the burning of fossil fuels. So researchers are looking into such interventions to cool the atmosphere as spraying salt aerosols into clouds to deflect sunlight and, in a safer approach, sucking greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane out of the air and burying them.
The sunlight blocking might could pose some dangers, such as changing weather patterns and the ocean currents affected by them. And it could lead to geopolitical conflict. Could international agreements to approve such climate interventions be struck, given that different countries and regions would of course be affected differently by such projects?
Much better to summon the political courage to slash fossil fuel burning as much as most scientists recommend.
Are We Quake Ready?
Did many readers feel the 4.8-on-the-Richter Scale earthquake centered in New Jersey on Friday?!
I’ve long been impressed by how people in such earthquake-prone places as Taiwan calmly go about their business knowing that disaster can happen at any minute with only seconds of warning, unlike, say, with a hurricane, for which there are typically days of warning. And they know how to start cleaning up the mess fast, even during aftershocks, such as those following the 7.4-on-the-Richter scale tremblor last Wednesday in plucky little Taiwan.
Even a small earthquake can be very unsettling, as I discovered myself 25 years ago during a visit to Taiwan. I was at a business meeting when I saw the water in our glasses jiggling. Others at the gathering, mostly Taiwanese, looked up with tight smiles and then we went on with the meeting.
We in southern New England felt a magnitude 5.8 earthquake centered near Richmond, Va., on Aug. 23, 2011. It was a reminder that the ground even around here is not as solid as we might have hoped. I was working that day in my old office at The Providence Journal. We stood up when the mild shaking stopped and asked our office mates: “What the hell was that?’’ The quake did considerable damage in Virginia and Washington, D.C.
It could have been much worse. Consider the Nov. 18, 1755 quake, estimated at between 6.0 and 6.3 on the Richter scale and centered near the coast of Cape Ann. It’s believed to have been the worst quake in New England since the arrival of Europeans, in the early 17th Century. It did a lot of damage but apparently didn’t kill anyone. A quake like that today could kill many people and do billions of dollars in damage. Let’s hope that our building codes are up to the challenge.
‘Do You Know What Time It Is?!’
There’s a bill in the California Assembly that would make it illegal for employers to make a habit of contacting salaried employees after scheduled work hours except for emergencies and work-schedule matters.
The idea is to address a downside of the 24/7 connection that technology, especially cell phones, supports. Yes, too many Americans have an unhealthy work-life balance and technology is a big reason.
Well, employers should show compassion for their people and only call them when it’s about issues that what most reasonable people would think important. But one person’s importance could be another’s unimportance, and there are far too many variables in workplace life and interpersonal relations in general to defend such a bill, which constitutes regulatory over-reach.
Some readers may remember the old rule not to call anyone before 9 a.m. or after 9 p.m.
In any event, if your boss keeps calling, texting or emailing you at home after work for what you feel is no good reason, it may be time to find another job.
All hail the very smart Ken Block, a software engineer, systems expert, businessman and conservative-leaning Rhode Islander who recently published Disproven: My Unbiased Search for Voter Fraud for the Trump Campaign, the Data that Shows Why He Lost, and How We Can Improve Our Elections.
(Mr. Block, by the way, would probably be a good governor, a job he ran for in 2010 as the candidate of the Moderate Party and in the 2014 Republican primary race, which he lost to Allan Fung.)
The book blows up the brazen Trumpist lies about the 2020 election. But the cult’s lies will continue unabated. It’s all hands on deck for those (declining numbers of ? ) Americans who want to preserve our increasingly fragile democracy.
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With the rise in the Republican Party of isolationism and kleptocratic neo-fascism that favors dictators like Putin, European nations and Biden Administration officials are wisely considering ways to continue to help -- whatever happens in our presidential election -- Ukraine and protect Europe from further Russian aggression. (Consider that Poland, the Baltic States and Moldova are taking especially urgent steps to protect themselves from invasion.)
The U.S. is now mulling, for example, transferring primary oversight of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group from America to NATO. European nations are rapidly increasing their military spending because of the tyrant’s continuing threats. They accept, unlike members of the Trump cult, the obvious menace posed by the murderous sociopath in the Kremlin. But then, Trump cultists tend to envy and admire Putin.
The idea is to better protect Western allies in case Trump’s anti-democratic and anti-Western (and thus anti-American) regime takes over again. Ukraine is fighting desperately to thwart Putin’s barbarism and, in doing so, is fighting for us. If the dictator succeeds there, he’ll greatly intensify his campaign to weaken the rest of Europe, and the West in general, including with more invasions.
Remember: The European Union is by far America’s biggest economic partner and we share (or used to share?) many cultural and political values with it. Indeed, you might say that the U.S. is an invention of Western European intellectuals. But European nations that have been long been American allies are losing their trust in us, a trust that has helped protect the West since 1945.
The amazing ignorance, seasoned with cynicism, dishonesty and sloth, of many GOP/QAnon pols about history and foreign affairs, has put American national security in peril. But then, many of these pols are terrified too: They fear offending Trump and his followers, whom he eggs on to violence.
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The (barely) Republican-controlled U.S. House spends more time on recess/vacation than any House in recent memory. It’s on vacation yet again, even as bills to address the migration flood in the Southwest and desperately needed aid for Ukraine are in limbo. But then, many, perhaps most GOP/QAnon House members don’t care about governing. They’re slobs. Rather, their main goals are to narcissistically appear as often as possible on far-right-wing propaganda media machines while continuing to help as much as they can their uber-rich donors get richer and more powerful. Truly what the late mostly comic (and libertarian-tending) writer P.J. O’Rourke called A Parliament of Whores.