Category Archives: North America

Airport Art

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So many people with so much time to spare, at least while awaiting their planes, gives airports an unrivaled audience. I think Calgary started it with exquisite native artifacts.  Some of my favorite NA airport art today follows:

This huge bronze Haida canoe, speaking to all travelers (especially those tall people squeezed into ever smaller seats on ever longer flights), catches my imagination every time I pass  through Vancouver.

More sailors are in Amsterdam’s excellent small sampling of their Reijksmuseum (sp?) where I found these youngsters.

A little South, in Seattle, the suspended flocks of birds is an oft repeated idea (Remember large flock of geese in the Eaton Center, Toronto 35 years ago? Was that the first?) which I’ve yet to see done to perfection.

Seattle  has other excellent pieces, some a little hidden

Last week, in Philadelphia, these ornate shoes by Sharon Taffet  raised the spirits of jaded travelers delayed by fog and bad weather from off-shore tropical storm “Sean”.

And in Minneapolis there is a great dynamic image of an insurance company’s umbrella which shatters into myriad small umbrellas as you walk by, and then reassembles. A good future project to photograph and link to YouTube – Any volunteers going to MN soon?

Away from the airport, in a New Jersey glass fabrication shop, I stumbled on this just approved mock-up section for the 185 ft. tall facade of the base of the nearly completed (2013 est.) World Trade Center tower, NYC, replacing those so sadly lost on 9-11.  Interesting to see this grey evening image and try to imagine how dramatic it will surely appear when installed with lights, etc.  Architects must have great imagination.

Indiana Images Last Weekend

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The Indianapolis Art Museum has a travelling treasure show of 700 year old exquisite Ife copper cast heads found only 70 years ago in the grounds of a Nigerian royal palace. They left no written record at all – not to be missed if they come to your local museum:

Ife Copper Casting

Dashing out to get to the Norville wedding we passed an eyecatching sculpture and I neglected to note the artist’s name.No problem – back in Ohio my free “Google Goggles” ap for my phone scanned my photo and in no time at all told me it’s “Mobius Ship” by Tim Hawkinson from CA. A good play on “Moby Dick” and “Mobius Strip”.  Technology gets better all the time.

And then back by night on US highway 24 just in time for deer hunting season. They suddenly appear out of the dark. I’m still recovering from the shock. This one was worth $3000 damage to our insurance company. Quick braking and a small swerve right probably brought the impact speed down to around 55 mph and perhaps prevented it coming in the window.  Everyone in Ohio and Michigan has their similar story. Worst is when it comes in the window and is still kicking!Even though the road was wide open with no trees it was very hard to see until a large head appears trotting across front of you. The only answer I can imagine is to restrict our driving to daylight hours, or at night at least use high beam lights as much as possible.

Fall in the Adirondacks

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When the sun shines in October driving through the Adirondacks can be gorgeous:

 


 Friday evening we arrived in Baltimore to deliver honey and hockey sticks and eat fish and chips with Kepler and friends by a tributary creek of Chesapeake Bay.

Then on Sat. drove North for 5 hours to Rhinebeck for tennis with S&J, Alen & Hazel, Prosciutto+figs drizzled with raw comb honey. Alen’s famous Irish oatmeal and Burket croissants were eaten for breakfast Sunday before more tennis and then the 11 hour drive home while finishing a good 11 CD book of Isabel Allende: “Daughter of Fortune” about Valparaiso and the California gold rush of 1849.

The bees were glad to see me again. I’ve squished 150 hive beetles in 2 days.  Only about 1 in 10 of them fall into these little plastic traps with salad oil in the bottom.

The remaining 9 out of 10 hide in little cracks or in empty comb cells. If I turn one over a bee eagerly grabs it by the legs (as in the picture above) and flies off with it, but if they are right way up the beetles have too hard a shell for the bees to be able to do anything.

Now that the temperature is getting too cool for them to want to fly much I have to lay a stick bridge so they can get back into the hive after I’ve knocked off a big bunch from the lid when I go into the hive to chase the beetles. Once one crosses the bridge she’s quickly followed by the hundred or more stumbling around in the weeds.

I don’t know if they are practicing clustering to keep warm for winter but they are up to something. I put my ear to each level of the hive and hear quite a different buzz from each one but don’t know what they’re trying to tell me yet. The cluster on the left below was hanging from a honey comb frame I’d removed while looking for beetles. It was from the top box so the queen should not have been there.