Month: March 2004

Way back when my wife was merely my college girlfriend of just a couple of weeks, in the long days of yore (1991), I met the future in-laws pretty much by surprise when they trekked from their home in Idaho for the funeral of her grandfather. A month of two later, I met the grandmother, a spry old widow who, at the time that I first saw her, was climbing into a John Deere tractor to drive it from one relation’s farm to another relation’s farm. (This, as some of you may know, took place in Iowa farm country.)

Some years later, that spry old lady made it from western Iowa to Western New York — about a 950 mile trek — with another old widower named Orville for our wedding, at which she brought the house down at our reception with some pretty vigorous dancing.

Sadly, her health had been in decline over the last two years, with a pretty serious decline commencing over the last couple of months. Yesterday, it ended. She passed away peacefully at the age of 79.

The wife and daughter will be leaving for Iowa tomorrow to attend the funeral; unfortunately, we decided that we couldn’t afford for me to miss a week of work, so I will be staying home. (My wife is salaried, so she won’t lose a week’s pay, but being an hourly employee, I would.) While the idea of five days of having the place to myself is attractive in itself, the manner in which the opportunity arose isn’t.

Alas.

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Vintage view of the Peace Bridge between Buffalo, New York and Fort Erie, Ontario.

The Peace Bridge forms one of the busiest border crossings between the US and Canada, if not the busiest (although I seem to recall hearing that the Detroit-Windsor crossing is busier). Opened in 1927, the Peace Bridge is still going strong, although in recent years there has been much controversy in the region over the Bridge’s future. All sides concede that the Peace Bridge’s three-lane capacity is insufficient for current needs and must be at least doubled to six lanes, but how to do this has been a real sticking point. Some people — including me — want a “signature” bridge, something bold and architecturally striking (see some possible designs here), preferably a cable-stayed concrete bridge that could be built mostly by local construction companies. Others, however, advocate a “twin span” approach, which is exactly that: erecting a nearly-identical neighbor to the Peace Bridge, likewise built mainly of steel (which would have to be brought from elsewhere, as Buffalo is a steel-town no longer).

While I do want a “signature” bridge — although, quite frankly, people who think that we could build something as iconic as the Golden Gate Bridge are being a tad unrealistic — I do admit that the Peace Bridge as it stands is a fine-looking bridge, and if it is completely replaced, I would hope that it wouldn’t be demolished. Suggestions along this line include making it a “trucks only” bridge, or converting it to railroad use. I like the latter idea, if it would mean enhancing Buffalo’s status as a shipping city, which was supplanted years ago with the opening of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

This image, although vintage, comes pretty close to the way things look there today. The elevated portion of the bridge in the foreground is called the Parker Truss (it’s on the American side of the bridge), and it spans a section of the Niagara river — clearly visible in this image from the same collection — that was dredged and deepened to allow for ship passage. The Parker Truss had to basically be shoehorned into the original bridge design to allow for minimal height clearance for ships. This, I believe (although I may be mistaken), isn’t much of an issue anymore because the only boats that use that part of the river (the Black Rock Channel) are recreational craft and the rowing teams from the local colleges. (Always a cool thing, to see them out on the water.)

One thing I’ve noticed when crossing the Peace Bridge is that if there are people unfamiliar with the region in the car with you, they will ask where the Falls are. They think, “Niagara River, ergo, Niagara Falls.” And they’re right — but the Falls are about twenty miles downstream. The Peace Bridge spans the Niagara River very close to its starting point as the outlet for Lake Erie.

(The site linked by the picture is an excellent compendium of Buffalo in the first half of the 20th century, when it was still a city on the rise.)

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Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept. (NYT registration required)

No, really? You mean, the whole “Teach abstinence and nothing else and the little tykes will never ever try things out” strategy might not be working? Ye Gods!

And then there’s this article by John Derbyshire, who apparently can’t write about anything about how icky he thinks gays are. The gist here is that somehow, allowing gay marriage will completely remove the topic of gender from public discourse. Ummmm….yeah….The website only offers a couple of teaser grafs, with the helpful note at the end that “You can read the rest of this article in our current issue!” Well, maybe I will, but only if you guys promise that the rest of it is as stupid as the grafs quoted.

Derbyshire gets paid to write stupid stuff. I get paid to change light bulbs at The Store. Go figure.

(links via Pandagon and Matthew Yglesias)

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The Novels of Terry Pratchett, reviewed as an ongoing project. This guy’s one of those authors I never think to look for either at the library or at the bookstore, but people are always telling me how good he is. So I suspect I’ll just go right on occasionally thinking that I should really read him one of these days.

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Warren Ellis did this a few months back, but in a hosting change his old archives disappeared and he did it again yesterday: he encouraged readers to take photos of themselves and send them to him. The Internet, as he says, is indeed made of people. Start here and just scroll down.

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Happy Birthday (belatedly) to PZ Myers, who takes advantage of the encroaching grayness of his scalp to do a little science.

And I should probably give him a birthday present in the form of a link (what else could a blogger give?), so, PZ, here you go! Start sharpening the knives!

(link via Sean)

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At last, the pace at which my “To Read” list has been bloating may abate somewhat, with Will Duquette out of commission for a while.

And I’ll bet he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Congratulations to him and family (now plus one), and I look forward to his undoubtedly-forthcoming reviews of Goodnight, Moon, Pat the Bunny, and the entire Curious George mythos!

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Always do your research before you commit your crime.

This particular crime could also be cross-referenced under Lesson 38, “Do not overreach.”

(via He Who Modulates)

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If you ever wondered what it’s like to be a famous fantasy novelist from Toronto and to go on tour to promote your latest novel, Guy Gavriel Kay has you covered. He’s keeping an online journal of his book tour for The Last Light of the Sun, which I guess is the closest we’ll ever come to a GGK blog. Check out his March 9 entries; apparently someone approached him with a copy of The Lions of Al-Rassan and not only asked for an autograph but asked him to change the ending. Wow.

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Lynn Sislo apparently hates the idea of the [topic] For Dummies books.

I think she’s a bit off on this one. I own a number of Dummies books, on a number of different subjects, and generally I have found each one to be an excellent “Introductory” book about the topic in question. For instance, the HTML skills I have employed to rework a standard Blogger template into the current look come from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Web Page; I’ve learned a lot about wine from Wine for Dummies; Personal Finance for Dummies was a good starter book on various matters of money (although a year-and-a-half of unemployment rendered that knowledge useless, as we begin digging out of our “paycheck to paycheck” hole). Ditto Magic for Dummies, Management for Dummies, and even Poetry for Dummies.

Yes, these books are targeted toward people who are pretty starting from a “zero point” in those particular subjects, but this seems to me a good thing. Every Dummies book tries to give a fairly brief and readable account of “the basics” of any particular subject, and every one of them includes a lot of information as to where to go for continued explorations. They are most certainly not, in my experience, a kind of “Here’s all you need to know about this, and now you don’t have to bother doing any more than this, either” which is how Lynn seems to be viewing them. They’re more the equivalent of a 101-level class in college. I don’t see these books as “dumbing down” anything; rather, they serve as “Invitations” and “Introductions” to various topics.

Finally, in looking at the post and article Lynn links, I see that the Dummies books aren’t specifically mentioned in the article — what they are talking about, apparently, is some series of books that “rephrases” Shakespeare, translating him, for today’s young kids. Now, I’m not sure that this is such a good idea (although I sometimes think Shakespeare is either taught too early or mistaught when it is), but this doesn’t really represent the Dummies line of books, which are in no way equivalent to the kind of thing you’ll find in, say, Cliff’s Notes. A Shakespeare for Dummies might explain things like blank verse, iambic pentameter, the structure and nature of Elizabethan drama, and the like — and it’s a good thing to have that stuff explained if you’re going to read Shakespeare.

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