On This Day: "Oh, the humanity and all the passengers screaming around here."

On May 6, 1937 in Lakehurst, New Jersey. the German passenger airship LZ 129 Hindenburg caught fire and was destroyed during its landing. That voice on the audio and video reports has haunted me since the first time I heard radio reporter, Herbert Morrison, describe the accident.

Trafalgar Square's reinvigorated fountain

Now, if they could only get rid of the dirty pigeons! When I lived in London, I'd pass through the square en route to Embankment tube station to catch a Circle Line train for the ride home, stopping occasionally to watch one of the many demonstrations taking place.

Guardian

... As Joel Schobs, the engineer in a chlorine-scented lair deep beneath the square's flagstones, cranked up the pressure and eased open valves that had been closed for a lifetime, the plume in the western fountain gradually and almost imperceptibly rose.

Within a minute it was visibly taller than its twin. Within two it was high enough to splash the bronze cloak of General Charles Napier. Within five it was a spurting glory, 35 feet high – higher than anyone has seen it in at least 30 years and probably twice as long as that. The ducks that arrive every summer from nearby St James's Park quacked ecstatically.

"Not bad, is it?" said Richard Genn, who is in charge of the square for the Greater London Authority and has supervised a year-long £190,000 project to restore the fountains to their intended glory. ...

The original Victorian fountains had nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with reducing the amount of open space and the risk of riotous assembly. The police post concealed inside a granite column in the corner, often wrongly called the smallest police station in London, was added in the great depression of the 1930s: it was linked directly to Scotland Yard and has slots through which the solitary occupant could fire on any rioters.

[Photograph: Zak Hussein/PA]

TRAIN TRAVEL II: TAKING THE 13:20 FROM NAARDEN-BUSSUM

24oranges

Three lesbian couples will be married next week on Tuesday, 21 October in the train. The idea of having lesbian couples marry in the train is part of a reading campaign of the NS (Dutch railways) called ‘Nederland Leest’ (’The Netherlands reads’).

The campaign features Harry Mulisch’s book ‘Twee vrouwen’ (’Two women’), a book with a homosexual theme, which explains the preference for lesbian couples.

I'm queer and am a voracious reader, but what kind of stunt is this? If I were on my honeymoon trip on a train, I sure as hell wouldn't be reading! (Better pull down the train compartment curtains!)

TRAIN TRAVEL

LarryE at Lotus has a good post up about the joys of train travel and congressional approval to up the funding for Amtrak

"When you fly, you see clouds. When you drive, you see pavement. When you take the train, you see scenery."

This summer I took the train from Port Kent, NY to Syracuse. I hopped the ferry from the King Street dock in Burlington to Port Kent and walked up a rather steep hill (200m) to the simple train station and took the Adirondack, traveling right next to Lake Champlain (I could have dived right into the lake!) to Schenectady. Laid over there a few hours and took the Lake Shore Limited to my destination. Perfectly delightful trip. I met a retired DC couple en route to Montreal ("We take the train everywhere," they told me); a Japanese student returning to her graduate studies at Baylor after a summer train holiday to major East coast cities; a young woman Gothamite meeting her sister from Buffalo mid-way in Rochester for a weekend get-away; an Amish family returning to their home in central New York.

While chatting with a few of the friendly Amtrak staff, I learned there is
a move to extend the Ethan Allen Express from Rutland to Burlington. I sure hope so, but the train tracks are used for freight or are quickly being replaced by bike and hiking paths along scenic routes of central Vermont.

SHIT HAPPENS

TWO not-so-unrelated stories from the Netherlands

A growing mountain of manure

The Netherlands is faced with a growing excess of manure from intensive farming, with the surplus due to reach 8% by 2015, newspaper Trouw reports on Monday.

Quoting figures from the agricultural economic institute LEI, the paper says tougher environmental rules mean farmers can spray even less manure on their fields than they used to, while the quantity of manure being produced is going up.

The stress and urge of rail travel - without facilities

Travelling by train is a relaxed and environment-friendly way of getting about. You can leave the car at home and sit back with a newspaper or book and a cup of coffee. It is a way of travel much to be encouraged.

But beware. In future you will have to forego the cup of coffee, because Dutch Rail plans to drastically reduce the number of toilets on trains and railway stations.
---
People with bladder disorders will be the hardest hit, but most of us have been caught short at one time or another. And what happens if there is a delay during the journey?

If the advice given to one bladder patient is anything to go by, we will all be expected to carry a plastic bag just in case.

I suppose people with fecal incontinence will have to wear diapers? Or else the other passengers will have to climb over ev'ry mountain!

(via DutchNews.nl)

Oh Mary!

I wonder if the Desert Fathers would have liked to experience this in their mystical moments... Mother Earth rising out of the desert?

GROUP NEWS BLOG - Virgin Galactic announced plans to build a gigantic vagina in the New Mexico desert.

Want to bust your cherry in space? Try Virgin.

Virgin straps its customers into a penis shaped space ship, gets them off thrusting and lifting their trembling separated legs and bodies hard against gravity all the way... Read all about it.

New York & Philly Taxis on Strike

Here's a round-up about yesterday's stoppage. The strike is about the use of GPS technology in cabs, paying fares by credit card. Hizzoner Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of Gotham, claims that "consumers" will like it, and the use of GPS has nothing to do with the privacy rights of hacks or the customers who ride in the cabs. NPR, in it's reports I heard yesterday, just focused on the economics and profits; nowt about the potential misuse of these machines. What's next? CCTV cameras?

Watching you watching me

WASHINGTON — Next time you go to the airport, there may be more eyes on you than you notice.

Specially trained security personnel are watching body language and facial cues of passengers for signs of bad intentions. The watcher could be the attendant who hands you the tray for your laptop or the one standing behind the ticket-checker. Or the one next to the curbside baggage attendant.

They're called Behavior Detection Officers, and they're part of several recent security upgrades, Transportation Security Administrator Kip Hawley told an aviation industry group in Washington last month. He described them as "a wonderful tool to be able to identify and do risk management prior to somebody coming into the airport or approaching the crowded checkpoint."

The officers are working in more than a dozen airports already, according to Paul Ekman, a former professor at the University of California at San Francisco who has advised Hawley's agency on the program. Amy Kudwa, a TSA public affairs specialist, said the agency hopes to have 500 behavior detection officers in place by the end of 2008.

Read the rest, from McClatchy.

Have a nice day.

Bumps and potholes in Bicycleland

RADIO NETHERLANDS WORLDWIDE Press Review June 21, 2007 - Trouw reports on the appalling state of bike paths in the Netherlands and says that repairs will cost 650 million euros. The paper says "Bumps, holes and loose paving stones" are responsible for most of the accidents.


AD reports that 47,000 cyclists have to go to the emergency room every year after an accident involving just one bicycle. The total number of bike accidents in the Netherlands is around 70,000 per year.

The Royal Dutch touring club, ANWB, and the Dutch Cyclists' Union say that they have had 18,000 complaints about bike paths so far this year. An ANWB spokesperson said, "It's just the tip of the iceberg."

Green Jay

For obv reasons, I delighted in this post over at left i on the news - Eli's been down at South Padre Island, Texas; check out other recent
Texas Gulf Coast bird photos here, here, and here that he's taken this week and posted for our enjoyment. Joy!


The Green Jay is one of those tropical species whose range in the United States only extends to the extreme southern tip of Texas. This one was photographed at Laguna . And this picture, as striking as it is, doesn't even do justice to the richness of color, since it was photographed in the shade (I could never get a good shot of one in sunshine).

Laguna Atascosa National Wildlife Refuge