Trombonist with Qatar Symphony, playing “Peter Gunn”
I’m not the world’s greatest fan of Henry Mancini, but I’m probably in the top 100. I love his melodies, his rhythms, harmonies and versatility. I love his direction of a good band, which he always put together.
I also love to find good arrangements of his compositions, and was happy to find this brass ensembler arrangement of “Peter Gunn,” from the Qatar Philharmonic Brass, in 2016.
3 Comments | 
Geography - Physical, History, Jazz, Music | Tagged: Henry Mancini, Jazz, Music, Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra | 
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Posted by Ed Darrell
What did Dallas look like the night of Friday, March 20, 2020? It was the first night of the “shelter in place” protocols in Dallas to try to stop the COVID-19 virus.
I’m a sucker for interesting drone photography. I love a video done to a good piece of music, and even better when it seems the music and the moving pictures take each other in their arms and dance through three or four minutes, putting a smile on our faces.
TheWellDelivers.com (@TheWellDelivers) put this together, with drone photography by Cash Sirois, and music by a band I don’t know, The Bastards of Soul.
And it’s close to perfection.
KERA-TV, our local public station, uses the film in the interstices between the end of a program that doesn’t quite fill its slot, and the next program’s start. I looked for it under KERA’s name, but couldn’t find it. KERA has a couple of other films I really like, including “The Million Dollar Monarch,” and “The Chip that Jack Built,” a joyful honorific to the Jack Kilby who invented the integrated circuit and won a Nobel for it.
But it’s unfindable from KERA’s site, for me. I caught the credits on one of those showings, and found it by looking for Cash Sirois.
(I hope Raul Malo comes back soon, on a night I can see him.)
A few other television stations have similar films about their cities. These could be a good geography exercise, or maybe part of a project if geography teachers still assign students to report on one state or city.
More likely, it’s just an enjoyable way to see some of the sights, and to get an idea of what it means to record history, to capture history in the making.
Have you seen other films we ought to know about?
Wash your hands. Cover your sneezes and coughs.
More:
2 Comments | Capturing history, Dallas, Geography - Physical, photography, Video and film | Tagged: Capturing history, COVID-19, Dallas, photography, Video and film | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Recently ran across this photo of Utah’s Mt. Timpanogos in the snow. You can see how majestic the mountain is dressed in white, and how its glory can bring awe and joy to people in the valley.
Photo found on Wikipedia, from January 2008.
Leave a Comment » | Geography - Physical, geology, Mount Timpanogos, photography, Travel, Utah | Tagged: geography, geology, Mt. Timpanogos, photography, Travel, Utah | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Wesley Aston is a Utah-based photographer whose work I’ve admired for some time. He photographs the rocks and skies of Utah, so much of which I trekked as a youth (less, later). One of my great pleasures was to sit on a mountainside, probably long after we should have gone down the trail to safety, to watch thunderstorms push over a mountain range, plunge into a valley and rush toward us, or maybe away from us.
At the time I wished I had photographic equipment that had not really been invented yet in non-governmental circles, to capture those scenes.
Aston does that. He’s got the equipment. He knows how to use it.
This is the kind of work that should be standard fare in geography classes in public schools, but is not.
We can enjoy it here, though.
Mr. Aston posts his work at Instagram, some on YouTube. You should study it.
2 Comments | Geography - Physical, Natural history, photography, Time-lapse photography | Tagged: photography, Time-lapse, Wesley Aston | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Oops. Misattributed, misidentified photo. Turns out this is really from the Atacama Desert in South America. Point still stands, but I got hoaxed on the identification of the photo.
Even just in cracks in the desert clay.
Near Hanksville, Utah. Alt National Park and Forest Service photo. Atacama Desert, South America.
Hmmm. Too far south, too dry an area for me to recognize the species right off the bat. Anyone got suggestions?
See: www.facebook.com/AltNPFS/photos/a.827680717399205/1281923281974944
Leave a Comment » | Geography - Physical, History, National Parks, Native Plants, Natural history, Public Lands | Tagged: National Parks, Nature, Public Lands, Science, Utah | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I wonder what a similar film of the U.S. would look like? Has anyone done it?
It would probably have to be 400 seconds, at least.
Description of the film from Friends of the Earth:
It’s difficult to get a picture of what the United Kingdom really looks like. Imaginations and assumptions can distort decisions that affect our lives. We often hear the idea that there is simply no more room in the country. In reality, just six per cent of the UK is built on.
‘The UK in 100 Seconds’ is a provocative and thought provoking film that rearranges the United Kingdom’s land into 32 categories and divides them over 100 seconds. Each second equates to 1% of what the country looks like from the air.
Made by guerrilla geographer Daniel Raven-Ellison and filmmaker Jack Smith, the film was made by travelling from Tongue in the north of Scotland to the New Forest in the south of England. Each second of the film covers roughly one metre of Raven-Ellison’s walk through moorland and peat bogs, down a runway and over a dump.
Made in collaboration with Friends of the Earth, the film gives an honest reflection of what land looks like and how it is used in the United Kingdom and raises some challenging questions. A major inspiration for Raven-Ellison making the film is the amount of space that is used for feeding livestock and the question – what if we made more space for nature?
4 Comments | Conservation, Geography - Economic, Geography - Physical, Natural history, Natural resources, Nature, Travel, trees, Video and film | Tagged: Conservation, Film and Video, Forests, Nature | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM, Department of Interior) great photographer Bob Wick captures a photo that separates the redrock lovers from everybody else.
The road seems to dead end in the mountains ahead. Nobody visible in the land for miles around. It’s either incredibly desolate and lonely, or among the most beautiful, everyday views among rocks of incredible beauty you’ll ever see and remember forever.
Caption from America’s Great Outdoors, Tumblr blog of the U.S. Department of Interior: Heading south from Hanksville, Utah, towards Lake Powell, highway travelers bisect the remote Henry Mountains – the last area mapped in the lower 48. The 11,000-foot forested peaks of the main mountain range rise to the west, while two distinctive summits, Mount’s Ellsworth and Holmes, jut skyward from the rolling red sandstone mesas to the east. Known as the “Little Rockies,” these peaks are studied by geologists around the world as a classic example of igneous rocks, formed deep within the earth’s mantle, thrusting through the overlying sandstone layers. The Little Rockies have been designated as a National Natural Landmark for their geological significance. The peaks also provide habitat for desert bighorn sheep and numerous birds of prey. Photo by Bob Wick, Bureau of Land Management, @mypubliclands
Outdoors people in Utah usually know the Henry Mountains. There’s a buffalo herd there, open to hunting. It’s an amazing rock formation in the middle of other amazing rocks, a towering landmark for miles.
Hanksville would have to be invented by a good fiction writer if it didn’t exist, a desert town where everybody stops who passes by, with nothing really to commend it but the fact that it’s there, and populated by people of great character. Who names a town “Hanksville?”
Who wouldn’t like to be on that road?
1 Comment | Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Geography - Physical, Outdoor Recreation, photography, Public Lands, Travel, Utah | Tagged: Bob Wick, Department of Interior, geography, Henry Mountains, photography, Travel, Utah | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Images from “Powers of Ten,” 1977 edition. From IconEye
Back on October 10, 2010, we celebrated “Powers of Ten Day: 10/10/10.”
We’ve only got two tens in the date today, but the work of Charles and Ray Eames deserves remembering at least every October 10.
It’s a classic film, wonderful in its earliest versions in the 1970s, long before CGI. In 2018, I think it stands up very well.
AMNH’s “The Known Universe” is a cool film. Putting up that last post on the film, I looked back and noted that when I had previously written about the brilliant predecessor films from Charles and Ray Eames, “Powers of Ten,” the Eames films were not freely available on line.
That’s been fixed.
I like to use films like this as warmups to a year of history, and as a reminder once we get into studying the history of space exploration, of just how far we’ve come in understanding the universe, and how big this place is.
Of course, that means wer are just small parts.
The Eames’s genius showed the scale of things, from a couple picnicking in a park, to the outer reaches of the universe, and then back, zooming into the innermost reaches of a human down to the sub-atomic level.
There’s a series of these films; this one, published on YouTube by the Eames Office, was done in 1977, one of the later versions.
How can you use this in class, teachers? (I recommend buying it on DVD, as I did; better sound and pictures, generally.)
Uploaded on Aug 26, 2010
Powers of Ten takes us on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports us to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds we view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only a s a speck of light among many others. Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, we move inward- into the hand of the sleeping picnicker- with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. Our journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell. POWERS OF TEN © 1977 EAMES OFFICE LLC (Available at http://www.eamesoffice.com)
At the Eames Office Youtube site, you may find the film in with Mandarin Chinese, German, and Japanese translations (no Spanish?). If you’re unfamiliar with the work of this couple — you would recognize much of the stuff they designed, I’m sure — check out a short film on an exhibit on Ray Eames (which has concluded, sadly):
More:
The very recognizable, famous Eames Chair and Ottoman, from Herman Miller. Ideally, you can sit in your Eames Chair while watching “Powers of Ten.” Herman Miller image.
Yes, this is an encore post. Defeating ignorance takes patience and perseverance.
3 Comments | Art, Geography - Physical, Mathematics, Science, Video and film | Tagged: Art, Charles and Ray Eames, film, geography, History, Mathematics, Powers of Ten, Science | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
From @BestEarthPix on Twitter:
Frustratingly, the only information from @BestEarthPix is “Oregon, USA.” It’s a mule deer, in a lake. Which lake? Who was the lucky/skilled photographer? No details.
Can you supply details? The photographer should get credit, I think.
Update: This site, 500px, attributes the photo to Stijn Dijkstra. But Amazon.com/UK leads me to believe this is a sunrise at Yellowstone Lake, with a deer’s profile PhotoShopped in. See “Sunrise at Yellowstone Journal” and this photo.
From “Sunrise at Yellowstone Lake Journal,” available from Amazon.com/UK
Further update: It’s a stock photo from Alamy, PhotoShopped.
The Flat Mountain arm of Yellowstone Lake at sunrise, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 2016. Image courtesy Neal Herbert/Yellowstone National Park. Gado Images/Alamy Stock Photo
How disappointing, and maddening, that what looks like a great image turns out to be faked.
2 Comments | Geography - Physical, photography, Travel, Wildlife | Tagged: geography, Oregon, photography, Travel, Wildlife | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Jeff McGrath (@youtah) on Twitter: Utah Lake is just stunning right now. This was taken at the Northern End with my drone while flying for recreational fun. #utwx #dronephotography #recreationaldrone
Northern end of Utah Lake, near Lehi, probably near the old boat launch and harbor near where the old amusement park Saratoga was (now a town loaded with housing tracts).
My grandfather, Leo Stewart, Sr., came into the world 30 or so miles south, in Benjamin, Utah, named after a family patriarch of sorts, Benjamin Franklin Stewart. When he was very young, my grandfather said, they’d boat out a half-mile or so into the lake and look down into 20 feet of water, and pick the giant trout they’d want to hook. That was in the late 19th century, of course.
In that sorry time 30 years later, some fool introduced European carp into the area, for more game fish. Carp dig up the shallow bottom and muddy the water. In my youth along the lake you could never see more than six inches into the lake. Because it was so far from everything else important, a steel plant was built at Geneva, about midway between north and south ends of the lake, during World War II — in case the mills in California were bombed. U.S. Steel eventually ended up with the plant.
From our home on the Lake Bonneville bench, 800 feet or so above the lake, we could watch the steel mill’s pouring of slag at night, a little flow of artificial magma to light the sky and look cool. The mill also dumped chemicals into the water which further clouded the view.
Tip of the old scrub brush to Utah State Parks.
2 Comments | Geography - Physical, History, photography, Utah | Tagged: History, photography, Utah, Utah Lake | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Tourists in Arches National Park. Arches is one of five National Parks in Utah.
Utah.com lists the days in the coming year when entry to National Parks is free. Utah.com is a promotional site for Utah, where several National Parks are big tourist draws — so they have a bias.
It’s a good bias!
Alas, only four days so far:
FREE National Park Entrance Days 2018
January 15: Martin Luther King Jr. Day
April 1: First day of National Parks Week
September 22: National Public Lands Day
November 11: Veterans Day weekend
Four free days to split among five National Parks in Utah: Arches, Canyonlands, Zion Canyon, Bryce Canyon, and Capitol Reef. National Monuments are probably included in the free admission days, so you can add Timpanogos Cave, Rainbow Bridge, Dinosaur, Promontory Point and others.
There’s a lot to see in Utah’s mountains and redrock country — and that doesn’t include the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Flats.
Leave a Comment » | Geography - Physical, National Parks, Public Lands, Travel, Utah | Tagged: geography, National Parks, Public Lands, Travel, Utah | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Ethnographer? It’s a person who makes a systematic study of a people and its culture, a subdivision of anthropology, sociology, history and geography all at once.
Milan Karanovic, trained as a priest, studied folk and cultural trends of Bosnians, roughly from 1900 to World War II.
And this is his typewriter:
Typewriter of Bosnian ethnographer Milan Karanovic. Take careful note of special keys to accommodate Bosnian spellings. Typewriter on display in the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Halabi.
Photo of Milan Karanovich, National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. “Zivot i rad” translates to “life and work.” Image by Jonathan Halabi.
Milan Karanovic was born in 1883 in Great Novljansko Rujiška. In his teens he moved to Sarajevo, graduated high school and attended seminary, graduating by 1909 and assuming duties as a parish priest (Orthodox?) in the Krajina region village of Rujnić. We know he published a study of the “village” of Sarajevo in 1907. On the wrong side of local authorities in World War I, he spent much of the war in prison. His publications resumed by 1925, and proliferated through 1937. He died in 1955.
The typewriter is an Optima Elite. I’m guessing this model was made during or after World War II; Optima used the Olympia name into World War II. After the war, Olympia factories in the zones controlled by the Soviet Union changed to Optima. Judging from photos, this machine may have been built in the 1950s, giving Karanovic only a few years to use it. I’m open to the idea that the Optima name was used earlier — this history of corporations and machines is out of my range. If you have better information, please feel free to contribute in comments.
Leave a Comment » | Anthropology, Geography - Physical, Geography - Political, History, Technology, Typewriters | Tagged: geography, History, Milan Karanovich, Technology, Typewriters | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
Spring comes a few hours earlier every year as the planet warms; plants that used to blossom in March and April, now blossom in February. Mexican plum blossoms in Dallas, Texas, February 17, 2017. Photo by Ed Darrell, iPhone 6; please share with attribution.
Spring comes earlier every year in Dallas. Our Mexican plums used to blossom in March and April; for the past three years, we’ve had blossoms well before spring even comes. Last year we had a cold snap that took the young fruit out, after a premature blossoming.
It’s a sign of creeping global warming. Every year I marvel at Al Gore’s powers to convince our Mexican plum to blossom early, part of the “global warming conspiracy” so many fear.
That is, this is a symptom of global warming that cannot be faked, that is from observation, and not from models.
With flowers on fruit trees come hopes of a bountiful harvest. Dreading the underlying meaning of such an early blossom does not change our hopes, nor the birds’ hopes, for a good plum harvest.
More:
4 Comments | Botany, Climate change, climate_change, Geography - Physical, Global warming, History, Science, Texas | Tagged: Botany, Climate change, flowers, geography, Global warming, History, Science, Spring, Texas | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
I follow Phil Plait to get smart and stay informed about the stars and the universe.
Sometimes it’s just the sheer beauty one finds that wakes you up.
Phil posted this on Twitter, a lunar fogbow:
From Twitter, Phil Plait: Göran Strand (@astrofotografen) captured a VERY rare sight: a lunar fogbow! http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/12/26/g_ran_strand_photo_of_a_very_rare_lunar_fogbow.html
Plait’s explanations are fun:
Göran Strand is an amazing astrophotographer whose work I’ve highlighted here many times. He has an astonishing skill in making beautiful photographs out of rare and bizarre phenomena.
It’s not just a beautiful photograph. It’s a rather rare phenomenon beautifully captured by Göran Strand, and wonderfully explained by Plait at his blog at Slate:
And here he is once again: That photo above shows that’s quite uncommon sigh: a fogbow! But this being Strand, even that’s not unusual enough. For him, it had to be even more difficult to track down. That’s not just a fogbow, it’s a lunar fogbow!
Fogbows are similar to rainbows, in that they’re caused by water droplets, but in detail they’re very different. In a rainbow, sunlight is bent and reflected inside a raindrop, and sent off at an angle. The drops are big compared to the wavelength of light, so they act a bit like mirrors. Each color of sunlight, though, bends at a slightly different angle, separating them, creating the multihued rainbow.
Plait’s got more good science explanation. Go see.
Strand has photos to sell in various formats. I see in a lot of offices, “inspirational” posters with good photos and occasionally-pithy-but-often-banal sayings and platitudes, hoped by bosses to spur productivity on the cheap. Order up a sizable print from Strand, get the full description of the photo, and mount it in your office instead. You’re likely to discover than genuine natural beauty from awe-inspiring photos spurs creativity and productivity more than the stock photos and stock sayings.
Those photos are starting points for learning, too, teachers. Real photos, worthy of any history, economics, geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, geological science or environmental science class.
Try ’em and see.
More:
2 Comments | Astronomy, Geography - Physical, Moon, photography | Tagged: Astronomy, Göran Strand, geography, Lunar fogbow, Moon, Phil Plait, photography | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
National Science Foundation tweeted this out: “#photooftheday: Moai under the #MilkyWay. #space #galaxy #astronomy #science http://bit.ly/2ffTmVZ Image credit: Anne Dirkse”
More:
1 Comment | Astronomy, Geography - Physical, Milky Way, Travel | Tagged: Astronomy, Easter Island, geography, Milky Way, Travel | Permalink
Posted by Ed Darrell
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Ed Darrell on Texas's Colorado River
Come on in, the water's fine. Come often: Cleanliness is next to godliness.
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
