Last month I took a trip on the Clipper City. It was a beautiful day.
My friend Peter helped work the ship lines. In addition to being fun, it also earned him a free drink.
For the anniversary of Henry Hudson coming into New York Harbor, many replica ships were sailing around the harbor.
It’s a little out of date, but there were some amazing photos taken when the Space Shuttle repaired the Hubble Space Telescope. The Sacremento Bee compiled some of great photos of the repair mission, but I think the photos by Thierry Legault of Atlantis moving in front of the sun were the best.
My vacation to California took me to Monterey, where my friends Barbara and Raj got married. Monterey is beautiful and the weather was nice and cool. There are wild animals throughout the bay.
Cormorants, sea lions, and sea otters
The day after the wedding, everyone was invited to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
Black Sea Nettle
Decorator crab
Sea anemone
Warty sea cucumber
The Aquarium also hosts shorebirds that are being rehabilitated.
There was a special exhibit of seahorses
What aquarium would be complete without penguins?
A couple of weeks ago I went to San Francisco for vacation. I posted a few photos from my cell phone, but I also took my hefty, large camera. Well, not so hefty and not so large, but small enough to fit in my pocket.
We start out our vacation by walking over to Fisherman’s Wharf. Sea lions are all around the wharf, but a ton of them congregate at Pier 39. They are a lot of fun to watch, but they smell quite bad.
You can see Alcatraz from Fisherman’s Wharf. We saw neither Sean Connery nor Nicholas Cage.
After seeing the Sea Lions, my friend Patti and I walked up a long staircase to Coit Tower. Patti held the tower up.
We were visiting San Francisco to see my friends Barbara and Raj get married. It was a fun wedding in Monterey, California. Congratulations Barbara and Raj!
[More photos to come later….]
I’m a huge fan of Richard Feynman; as a kid, his auto-biographies were inspirational. If you haven’t read them, I recommend picking them up: Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and What Do You Care What Other People Think?. If you haven’t heard of Richard Feynman before, you can read a nice vignette about him by W. Daniel Hillis titled Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine.
Earlier this summer I went up to Rhode Island for a weekend.
My friend Patti drove us up to Charlestown, Rhode Island. She was coming from Pennsylvania, and we met for lunch in Beacon, NY at a restaurant called Homespun Foods. We ate a few sandwiches and picked up some food for later.
There had been a couple of large storms a few days earlier, and the normally calm shores had waves of well over six feet.
The shorebirds and gulls didn’t seem to mind. Whenever a large swell hit the tidal pools they dashed away.
The snails also seemed very happy.
Seaweed makes a great wig.
Charlestown has a large briny bay with fish and cormorants.
In the past couple of days, Condé Nast has announced that they are closing four magazines, including the 68-year old Gourmet. I’ve written about the number of ad pages in a newspaper section before, and Condé’s latest actions remind me of Time Inc. (In fact, the parallels are a bit creepy: both Time Inc. and Condé Nast used the same consulting firm, McKinsey, to determine how to cut their budget.) There have been many reports of lower profits in publishing divisions this year.
These closures remind me of a couple of pieces I’ve read on the web recently, including an essay by Clay Shirky, Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable and a piece on Slate regarding Warren Buffet’s views on newspapers. I think the quote at the end of the Buffet story is right on the money:
Simply put, if cable and satellite broadcasting, as well as the internet, had come along first, newspapers as we know them probably would never have existed.
I think the same could be said for many news magazines as well.
I have a lot of friends who work in or with the magazine industry. But I think that it would be unwise to believe that industry will be anything but a boutique industry ten years from now.
I’ve been up to the house of my friends Phil and Karen several times this summer. They have a home that sits on the Hudson River between the Bear Mountain Bridge and West Point.
Phil and Karen have a butterfly bush: every time a butterfly stops by their house, it cannot resist stopping at this bush.
Phil and Karen let a friend moor his boat off their dock. Occasionally, we go out for a ride on the Hudson. West Point looks very nice at sunset.
The train ride leaves from Grand Central and runs along the Hudson–it’s a beautiful trip.
My friend Peter turned 40 in August. His significant other, Valerie, threw him a surprise birthday party at Stella, a restaurant in the South Street Seaport.
Peter works in the wine industry, so my friend Patti made a wine bottle cake. To celebrate the birthdays of my friends Anne and Mike, she added a wine “bible” (also made of cake), written by them.
Darrin, the chef at Stella, roasted a small pig.
I meant to post these photos a while ago. In summer, I took a trip to the Bronx Zoo. One of my favorite places in the zoo is the Butterfly Garden. I love visiting the zoo and don’t go there enough. When you enter the garden, you are given a sheet showing all of the butterflies–it’s fun to figure out if you have seen them all.
