how now brownpau
I snapped this panorama from the Harbour yesterday as Tropical Storm Hanna approached; that’s the last bit of sun we see till Sunday. Being an obsessive weather geek, I am of course following the storm closely on We Love DC, and have multiple tabs open for radar, NOAA reports, local news, webcams, weblogs, and Twitter. So for today, I’ll be at Hanna Watch.
After some soul searching, I have come to the conclusion that I will never engage in the following activities on Twitter, and repent of all times in the past that I may have purposefully or inadvertently done any of them:
I might occasionally post a Twitter link to something particularly notable on my site, but I feel shouldn’t cross-pollinate my content or hammer the stream with multiple automated posts from third-party services. Those of you who do engage in some of these practices on Twitter in moderation, please do not regard this as a negative judgment on your activity. This is just an informal code of Twitter conduct to which I will hold myself in order to better serve the ends of my online presence.
And now, just a few more photos from our Labor Day weekend:
At top, Amy found King Friday in a closet. So this is where he went after Mr. Rogers’ sad passing and the subsequent fiery destruction of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe: the harsh, real world of the suburban sprawl. At lower left, Amy explains how Four Squares works on the playground of her childhood school. And at lower right, I could not leave New Jersey without a picture of The World’s Tallest Water Sphere, shot from the parking lot of a Union County strip mall, one of many which give the state its distinctive local flavor.
We were riding a bus back into New Jersey Saturday evening when we saw the sunset. I took out my camera, but the sun and moon are always a lot smaller than your average point-and-shoot can resolve decently, plus the ride was too bumpy and the light too dim to get a good photo or standard video at full zoom. Instead I decided to go into Continuous shooting mode, hold down the shutter button, and got a series which I could later put together into this video, cropping each frame so the sun was as close to center as possible. I repeated the video four times to make up for the series not being long enough, added some mixed loops from Garageband, and voila, artsy sunset timelapse video.
We went up to New York City Saturday afternoon, lunching at Soba Nippon and checking out the art at NY MoMA. This was my first time visiting MoMA, and oy, what a crowd. But the mess of people (a more yuppie-ish art-viewing audience than one would see at the Metropolitan Museum or National Gallery, by the way) made photos of them viewing art as much fun as the art itself.
Note to self: next time start on the top floor and work way down. The paintings are mostly on the fourth and fifth floor, and we were primarily there for those. Full photoset here.
Here’s a quick nighttime video of the Lower Trenton Bridge taken from the Amtrak Regional while crossing the Delaware River. The bridge is most famous for the slogan affixed to its side in bright red neon letters:
A brief history of the sign, which was Trenton’s slogan back in the early 20th Century, when the city was a booming industrial town.
Friday night, Trenton station. Light rain outside as the remnants of Fay chase us north. There are people about to be hit by a hurricane along the Gulf Coast. Pray for them.
So how do I reconcile being a prolife Christian with supporting a pro-choice Democrat?
I’m not going to cop out with a “pay grade” excuse. I believe life begins at conception, but I stand that we can do a lot more to save the unborn by being involved at a personal and community level rather than demanding that the judiciary tell more women “No.” Have you supported an orphanage or adoption ministry lately? A pro-life pregnancy crisis center? If you have, good, keep it up. That, and conversing with scared, pregnant friends in a loving manner, does a lot more than standing in front of the Supreme Court with red “LIFE” tape on your mouth.*
Need an adoption ministry and orphanage to support? I recommend Home For Good Foundation. For a pregnancy crisis center, Gateway in New Jersey needs help. That’s how I make up for voting Obama. Don’t judge, don’t hate; love, do and give.
* You know what? The first time I saw kids standing in front of the Supreme Court with red LIFE tape on their mouths, I thought it was a pro-choice protest, with the idea being that the “life” movement was stifling rights to free speech or something. Turns out it’s supposed to symbolize how the unborn cannot speak for themselves. Unclear metaphor.
And now, some disjointed thoughts.
Obama gave a grand, eloquent acceptance speech at the DNC Thursday night, appealing to American history and ideals to express the core principles of the modern Democratic party. He alternated between combative and conciliatory, attacking the Bush administration’s policies and the McCain campaign’s smears on his character, while also offering an olive branch of compromise to political and ideological opponents — among them Republicans, Clinton supporters, both sides of the abortion and gay marriage debates, and even small-government Libertarians.
At no point did I see him resort to fear. There was reference to 9/11 but no attempts to rouse national trepidation by invoking the spectre of shadowy evil poised to attack.
I was especially struck by his description of “the ownership society,” his party’s argument for increasing government’s role in defending the little guy, not leaving the disadvantaged “on their own” — an argument those on the far right frequently dismiss as “nanny state socialism,” but which, when balanced with good judgment and real world personal responsibility, offers Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s promise of “Freedom from” as well as “Freedom of.”
There were a few sticking points for me:
The next day, John McCain announced that his running mate would be Sarah Palin. After putting out so many ads smearing Barack Obama as an inexperienced celebrity, it hasn’t escaped anyone’s sense of irony that John McCain chose to run with a former beauty queen who has been governor of Alaska for shorter than Obama was a senator. Still, I wouldn’t be surprised if he continues to air those “ready to lead?” TV spots even after completely undercutting his own campaign’s negative angle — all it takes is a healthily selective attitude of doublethink to keep calling Obama inexperienced while at the same time pulling for even less experienced presidential backup. If this is just a bone thrown to the most rabid Hillary supporters who would vote for McCain just to spite Obama, then it’s obvious that such voters would have gone Republican anyway if Hillary weren’t a factor.
With Biden and Palin, we now have both major party running mates coming from states with only three electoral votes each. And I’m not the first to see the Battlestar Galactica resemblances.
I was in a doctor’s waiting room this morning when the news broke. The general tone of conversation went, “Palin? Palin?! He’s been callin’ Obama inexperienced and not ready to lead and now he gets Sarah Palin? Oh, you see Obama’s speech last night? I cried! He’s gonna be president!” And I looked on in amazement as the talk went on to Obama and his speech and Palin was forgotten.
(Well, maybe not too much amazement, this is DC after all.)
Remnants of Tropical Storm Fay came to DC Thursday and Friday, darkening the sky, dumping rain on the city, and providing some lovely nimbostratus cloudscapes:
