End Of The Skating Season

There's a heat wave headed to western Wisconsin and that signals the end to a great skating season. I took one last spin around the rink early this morning and made this video. Notice how the snow from the surrounding snow bank melted and refroze overnight, making a perfectly smooth perimeter. 

When I was boy, I hated ice skating. I told my mom (who was an excellent skater) "Mom, my ankles are too weak." I hated going to the rink. Later, when I realized what fun I was missing, I bucked up. Of course we only ever skated outdoors in the winter. 

When I finished college in Madison, I moved briefly to Cleveland, Ohio. I was introduced to pair skating by my landlord and we used to go to an indoor rink to find women to skate with. There was something so romantic about locking arms and skating as couples to the mighty Wurlizer organ music. Unforgettable. 

Pere Ubu, Final Solution (1976)

A proto-angst ridden number from the past with direct links to bands like Sonic Youth in the future. I don't think Pere Ubu ever had a commercial success, but that doesn't matter, they're still great. They're still around too.

French Wit And Wisdom

Years ago while living in Cleveland, I signed up for a "correspondence course" to teach myself French. In the pre-internet days, the University of Wisconsin-Madison offered a number of such courses.  They sent me assignments which I completed and sent back through the mail.  I haven't done this sort of thing recently, but back then at least I had the feeling of connecting with a real person.

The French course had two textbooks, both written by a UW-Madison professor, Joseph Palmeri. There was a grammar book with exercises and there was a companion reader entitled French Wit And Wisdom:

The book is a real treasure. You can see how well worn mine is. It's clearly Palmeri's labor of love and reflects a lifelong harvest of pithy French wit on all of life's salient topics.

Here's the table of contents:

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The book is bilingual, having the original French on the left-hand side (along with author and citation) and Palmeri's translation on the right. This is a sample page set concerning work and happiness:

The book is available on Amazon. Check out the review by his grandson: link

That Chicken had a lot of Gall!

Gallium, named after France (or was it a chicken?), lies just west of Germanium in the periodic table. An imaginary (Imaginot?) line separates them. Actually, both Gallium and Germanium are metallic but a clear demarcation runs diagonally east of Germanium, separating the metals from nonmetals--the "haves" and the "have nots" in terms of sharing the electronic wealth:

Once upon a time I briefly worked for an oil company in Cleveland. An older material scientist (whose name escapes me) once showed us interns a neat trick in the lab. He melted some Gallium metal (it melts in your hand) and showed us how a sheet of Aluminum will absorb Gallium (like dissolves like even liquid metals). The older gent, who was a British ex-pat, explained that during WW II, the RAF feared that the Germans would sneak over and sabotage their planes.  In those days, aircraft were often made of unpainted Aluminum.

Here is a video showing how Gallium wrecks an aluminum coke can. Imagine some nefarious kraut doing that to an airplane's wings.

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Actually, Aluminum is not absorbing--rather, Gallium is invading.

The reason that Gallium liquifies is related to why Copper is so ductile and bears repeating: if you give an atom a perfectly filled sub shell along with one extra electron (the 31^st one), the metallic bonding will be weak and non-directional. It all makes perfect sense to me.

Urban Reclamation: Help Wanted-None

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Spuren Noch Zwei

Cleveland (1984)

Spuren Noch

Cleveland (1984)

Hart wie Kruppstahl

I forgot to mark this yesterday:

On this day in 1796 the city of Cleveland was founded by Gen. Moses Cleaveland.

linkage

Urban Reclamation: Gardens On The Tracks

Cleveland Flats (1984)

That photo is for Jason (the commenter) who likes photos of weeds growing where you least expect them.

Urban Reclamation

     Cleveland Flats (1984)

Suburban Reclamation

Taken somewhere in Cleveland (1984)

Il Ponte Rotto (Cleveland)

A photo I took of a broken bridge across (or near) the Cuyahoga river in 1984:

A photo of the original Ponte Rotto in Rome along with its history can be found here.

Update:  I found some recent photographs of the Jefferson Avenue Bridge here and here

And: This is my favorite photo of the Ponte Rotto:

Notice how close the modern trastevere travesity comes to the old Ponte Rotto.

They're Fixing A Hole Where The Rain Gets Out

Somewhere east of Cleveland, OH (1984)