Tag: Heimatkunde
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Deeply familiar
Vintage.es has some pics taken by an early railroad photographer in Kansas and New Mexico. The Kansas scenes are deeply familiar. Here is the railroad running along the banks of the Kaw. This is where Polistra lives. (See the icon above).
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Soundscapes
Sarah Hepola’s latest smoky podcast is intensely based in NYC, with NYC sounds in the background. She’s discussing the difference between NYC and Dallas soundscapes, garbage trucks and jackhammers vs crickets and frogs. Reminded me of a couple items I’ve done on the subject. From 2022, a fable based in NYC’s earlier soundscape, dominated by…
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Waiting for water
This winter was especially hard on plants. Nov and Dec brought heavy snow, which didn’t get a chance to melt until late March. My front “lawn” was mostly killed by the snow and the shovel-thrown salt from the sidewalk. Yesterday I noticed a few barely visible sprouts in the dirt. Overnight we had 1/3″ of…
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Wrong product
Article in Catholic Thing discusses adapting to a smaller church. The stats are clear and drastic. Catholics are dying and leaving fast, except in Mexican parts of town. And even there, evangelical churches are taking over from Rome. Example: In my working-class mixed race neighborhood, there are four Evangelical churches within easy walking distance. Each…
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Vector thinking 2
While writing previous item about lots and maps and houses, I asked “What if maps were done as vec…. The answer came before I finished thinking the question. Maps WERE done by vectors until quite recently. Metes and bounds was strictly vectorial, and it closely resembled the newly discovered bee vectors. The example given by…
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Liminal ramps
I enjoy the Liminal Spaces section on Reddit. The term is defined visually, not verbally. Seems to be long narrow repetitive views, like hotel halls or stairways or sewers. Many of the pics are from night-shift workers who have more responsibilities than duties. I used to work such jobs and enjoyed patrolling the rooms and…
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Be your own magnet
Lately I’ve been trying to expand the analog side of my life, after retracting into a digital shell during the hottest part of the NAZI TORTURE. I was functioning in OBEYING ALL ORDERS VERBATIM SIR! NAME RANK AND SERIAL NUMBER SIR! mode. Now I’m trying to recapture the analog/digital proportion that I had before the…
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Yes sir, she’s my puzzle
One neighbor has been playing a puzzling form of music for many months. Not annoyingly loud, just weirdly monotonous. It sounds like tuned bongos or tuned snares. At first I thought it was a school band practicing their marches, but there’s no school band nearby. I never hear any bass guitar or other actual instruments,…
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Gaia is pleased
Part of a Driver’s Dream cartoon from Motor Age 1913: Meanwhile here in Spokane, the screechily Gaian city “government” is tearing down a pedestrian bridge over I-90 as part of its long-term mission to make life miserable for pedestrians. This is pleasing in the sight of Gaia, because it means more dead peasants. = =…
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Super-random thought
On this morning’s walk, my old eyes thought I saw some miniature writing on the pavement. First thought: Micro-graffiti! Neat idea! Turned out to be a piece of plastic food wrapper, transparent with white letters, so it looked like white paint on the asphalt. Still a neat idea. In other forms of art, miniatures are…
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Rats leave sunk ship
Protos continues to track a semi-local connection to the Sammy story: Moonstone Bank chief legal officer Joseph Vincent, a former top banking regulator, has left the financial firm, after being with the bank for just eight months. Vincent joined Moonstone, one of the smallest banks in the country, which gained national attention late last year…
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Launderette
Protos writes up a peculiar story about a tiny bank in a Palouse town that ended up as a node in Bankman-Fried’s crime syndicate. Farmington is a typical leftover small town between Spokane and Pullman. It briefly flourished as a rail terminal, then faded down to the magic number of 150. The Farmington Bank remained…
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Neighborhood puzzle
A week ago I heard an odd noise around 5AM. Sounded sort of like a skateboard but not quite. I peeked out the window. It was a young man pulling an office chair down the street. I could see a piece of paper on the chair. AHA! I’ve done the same thing a few times.…
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Allocation, allocation, allocation
One of the programs in my bedtime playlist featured Bing singing Kokomo Indiana. Got me thinking about songs and cities and states. There were two other popular Indiana songs, Gary and Back Home. Gary and Kokomo are novelty songs, mainly having fun with the syllables, not intended as a tribute. Back Home was a proper…
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Instant sale
For ten years I’d been walking and watching one vacant apartment building in the neighborhood. The renovation process was LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG at the start and fast at the finish. Five years of occasional activity, followed by five months of real work. They rented the apts on 11/25/21. Then they immediately started building two new houses across…
Polistra's Mill 