FDR
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Yesterday Mitzi and I walked across the Hudson River on the Rails to Trails Walkway Over the Hudson bridge. After that we visited the Franklin Roosevelt Home National Historic Site.
Apologies if the text on the grave stone is hard to read, it really is a very simple monument.
We toured the house, which was interesting. Our National Park Service tour guide gave a very animated presentation. I learned a few things I hadn't learned in the Ken Burns documentary, or perhaps I missed them.
Roosevelt was something of an amateur architect, and was responsible for the design of the expansion of the family home. I don't think I'm being unfairly critical if I say it's pretty clear he was an amateur. (I also think it's past time for the NPS to do some exterior preservation on the home.)
What was surprising to me was that Roosevelt refused to install an electric lift in the house to get to the bedrooms on the second floor. Instead, he used the baggage lift, which was apparently a block and tackle arrangement and hoisted or lowered himself from either floor.
The tour guide also mentioned at least one of the realities of Roosevelt's condition. Someone turned him in his bed about every half hour, and if I didn't misunderstand the guide, Eleanor slept in a separate bedroom at the home so she could get some sleep for that reason.
After we toured the house, we visited the Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum. There was so much there to see, we could easily have spent hours in it. Having just walked three miles round-trip over the bridge and stood for over an hour for the tour, we only spent a little over an hour in the museum, and I spent most of my time in the special exhibit about why he chose to run for a fourth term. He believed he might not live through it, but he wanted to establish the United Nations.
I saw the letter Einstein sent Roosevelt about the possibility of an atomic bomb, which was great, because I had recently finished that section of Rhodes' book. (It came as a surprise to me, though it probably shouldn't have, that bureaucratic inertia nearly kept the United States from developing the bomb; and it was likely the British who were most responsible for pushing the United States into serious efforts to develop the bomb.)
I'll have to return to Roosevelt when we get back home. He truly was a great president, and a great man. But, as I've come to understand, all men and women are flawed, often deeply, in ways large and small. So "greatness" doesn't imply perfect, or saintly. And many traits we might admire in Roosevelt we might criticize in another president for the direction those traits are put toward.
As I stood at the gravesite, I tried to feel some of Roosevelt's optimism, I tried to imagine tapping into some kind of energy from that place. I couldn't. Perhaps that's no surprise either. That's a Roosevelt trait, not a Rogers one.
He was a leader for his time.
Would that we had one now.
✍️ Reply by emailStar Trails and ISS
Current Wx: Temp: 79.95°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 83% Wind: 6.91mphWords: 196
Get a text from NASA whenever the International Space Station should be visible overhead, weather permitting. Tonight's pass was at a reasonable hour and I had enough time to prepare. I used my E-M1 Mk3 with the mZuiko 8mm/f1.8 fisheye. Since I wasn't exactly certain where it would appear in the frame (Appeared in the southwest, tracking northeast, max elevation 73°), I basically just pointed the camera straight up with the long axis of the frame along the SW/NE line.
I set everything up in the screened enclosure, because the mosquitos are thick right now, but I still had to do the test exposure to make sure I'd gotten the settings correct. (I hadn't. Needed to bump the ISO.) I was only out there a couple of minutes but I think I got bitten three or four times.
Also visible are at least five satellites (StarLink?) and several aircraft. There are some patches of moving clouds also visible. The small bush was moving in the breeze, which wasn't much of anything to feel!
This also doesn't get old, though the mosquitos do keep me from doing it as often as I might like.
✍️ Reply by emailBluebird. Smilin' at me?
Current Wx: Temp: 77.7°F Pressure: 1012hPa Humidity: 92% Wind: 4mphWords: 18
Wasn't a great opportunity because of the light, but it turned out well, I think.
Muggy out there!
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20:52 Wednesday, 12 July 2023
Current Wx: Temp: 80.78°F Pressure: 1013hPa Humidity: 90% Wind: 8.05mph
Words: 263
I post a lot of my pics to Flickr, and I did so with the ISS shot from last night. I export the images to a folder on the desktop that Flickr Uploader watches, and automatically uploads them to, well, Flickr. Hazel also watches that folder and deletes the images 24 hours later. There is no setting to automatically delete images in the uploader app.
Since I posted the ISS shot here in the marmot, I used an AppleScript that first gives the image a title and then a caption. I use the Title for the note name in Tinderbox, which becomes the title of the post in the marmot. The caption becomes the alt-text that hopefully provides some useful information for the visually impaired.
You can enter a name and a caption in Photos in the Info window, but the fields are tiny and it's fiddly to hit them. With the script, I get a little text input bar with the cursor already there ready for input. It's far easier than mousing around to the Info window and trying to nail that little target. There's probably some way to do it with keyboard navigation, but I haven't looked for it. I just haven't given many of my images titles or captions.
Flickr uploader can grab the title and caption and use them in Flickr, as can be seen here.
I think I need to make another little script just for adding titles and captions for images that might make it to Flickr, but wouldn't necessarily be a post in the marmot.
✍️ Reply by emailPlatycryptus Undatus
Current Wx: Temp: 78.78°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 79% Wind: 4.61mphWords: 536
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Mitzi spotted this on the wall this morning. I took the opportunity to play with the TG-6. I haven't practiced very much using the macro feature. This is a single frame using the flash. I took some stacked images using the LED lamp, but I thought this one showed the eyes a bit better.
Anyway, not a great photo, but something I don't see very often at home.
Rained quite a bit yesterday, but we got our little hike in early. I guess we're picking blueberries today. Maybe. Well, Mitzi is anyway.
We watched the utterly forgettable Family Plan on Apple TV+ last night. They have some kind of Samsung TV streaming service on the smart TV here, and we've watched some of its programming. It's pretty generic, decade or more older reality TV stuff, a couple of movie channels that seem to play the same old movies over and over. So I've been streaming movies from my iPhone via AirPlay.
We watched The Good German the night before, before I knew George Clooney was adding his voice to the cacophony of chaos.
The Good German deals with, as a plot element, Operation Paper Clip. In the movie, a file Clooney is looking for mentions that the contents were moved to Operation Overcast. I hadn't heard of that before, so I wondered if it was a fictional creation, or something real. Turns out, was the official name of Operation Paperclip, which was something that emerged because of all the paperclips holding all the dossiers together.
Anyway, looking into that led me to Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America, by Annie Jacobsen. That's available on Kindle Unlimited, so I've started that book. I was somewhat aware of the effort to enlist former Nazi scientists in American research efforts after the war, but I wasn't aware of the extent of it, mostly Von Braun and the rocket people. It was far more extensive than that, and involved some pretty unsavory people.
(Anecdotally, one of the gunners mate (missiles) techs aboard BAINBRIDGE (CGN-25, not the DDG) told me that the launcher logic sequencer for the Mk 10 launcher was designed by a former German scientist or engineer. He supposedly had a breakdown or went nuts after designing it, because it was so complex. No idea if there's anything to that story, but it stayed with me.)
Before getting into the Paperclip book, I went looking for something in my Apple Books collection, and started reading The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany 1944-45, by Ian Kershaw.
So I have three books going right now, Heather Cox Richardson's, Jacobsen's and Kershaw's.
They are all kind of related in the sense that I'm trying to understand how supposedly good people can be persuaded to do horrible things, go on to do them with great efficiency, and how, after a conflict, we can look the other way and do business with people who did horrible things. Also, how people who did horrible things are sometimes remediated into being somehow "respectable" people. This also speaks to the Confederacy, Robert E. Lee, "heritage not hate," and so on.
Everything is contingent, I guess.
✍️ Reply by emailETTD
09:52 Sunday, 12 July 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 70.77°F Pressure: 1023hPa Humidity: 67% Wind: 3.85mph
Words: 83
Lindsey Graham.
I anticipate the online conspiracy industry to be posting theories regarding Russia, Ukraine, Iran and Democrats at any moment. Probably already have.
You only have one life to live. How will Graham be remembered? What did his life mean?
Did he expect to have enough time to fashion a redemption arc? Did he just not care? Did he die happy, having achieved "power" and "influence"?
It's wrong to celebrate anyone's death, but I for one will not be celebrating his life.
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