Heaneyland!

This many pictures are worth one blog entry

Rose and I took a short trip to Boston this weekend. On the way there, our bus stopped at a Roy Rogers, which had this sign on the gate to its playground:

I think some variation on that might not go amiss on the subway.

I have a backlog of other photos that I've been meaning to post. Here are two (taken by Rose) from my recent set at the Slipper Room: Adam Izetelny backing me up on bass as I sing "Your Favorite Song" (which I hope to record an MP3 of at some point), and Lorinne singing lead on "Dear John" (available here with me singing instead).

Rose and I went to see the corpse flower at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden when it was blooming, and we took pictures of it, but everyone was getting hustled through the greenhouse pretty quickly and the photos aren't as impressive as they might be. But I did get this excellent picture of a dragonfly while we were there.

Before our visit to see the corpse flower, Rose and I were in San Antonio for the yearly National Puzzlers' League convention. Our first picture, naturally, was of the Burger King banner by the airport shuttle to Newark, which, Rose noted, seemed a tad desperate in its attempt to appeal to members of today's plugged-in culture.

One of our afternoons in San Antonio was spent wandering from museum to shop to gallery to other shop to other museum in the downtown area, including the Alamo, which is just as uninteresting as you think it is unless you are predisposed to be interested in the Alamo. I was much more entertained by the cheesy Buckhorn museum, which was filled with taxidermified two-headed calves and wax figures and beer bottles and all manner of random stuff, including this face shot into a sheet of metal by a sharpshooter.

There was also one small gallery in which the proprietor never stopped talking. We'd look at a print of a lithograph by Dali that was on sale for some (not unexpectedly) exorbitant amount of money, and he would tell us that Dali was a very famous painter known for his fantastical, surreal images, and so forth. This sort of thing went on with everything we looked at, sending the clear message that he considered us to be a pair of bumpkins who had not even the slightest knowledge of art whatsoever, and needed everything spelled out for us. This made us want to avoid looking at any of the art, lest he find more to tell us. In the back of the gallery was an old card catalog cabinet with a bikini-clad plastic girl posed in one drawer. We thought this was charming and asked if he'd mind if we took a picture of it. He immediately mocked us, saying, "Why would you want to take a picture of that? All this art, and that's what you're interested in? Well, go ahead, if you want." We wasted no time in leaving after that.

On another day, we visited the San Antonio Botanic Garden. I won't try posting all the shots from there that I liked, but I am particularly fond of this butterfly photo. (The butterflies were one of the most memorable things about San Antonio -- they're small, but there are tons of them! Everywhere! At one point, we were surrounded by a cloud of them.) Also at the garden, there was this; I like to call that photo "Site of Future Historical Marker". Oh, and, of course, leave it to me to go to San Antonio just to take a picture of a bunny statue.

Before that, Lorinne and I had a jaunt to the Coney Island Aquarium, where we checked out jellyfish and discovered that no matter how creepy you think crocodiles (or alligators, or whatever) are, they're creepier when you can see them standing up underneath the water. But I'll always remember the Electric Signal of Mormyrid, which we thought sounded like some sort of quest object in a poorly written fantasy novel: "We seek the Electric Signal of Mormyrid, for the mystic light of the Orgel Lamp of Ikea doth grow dim!"

I think that's about all the photos I wanted to post. I'll leave you with one more photo from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden: a somewhat disturbing koi feeding frenzy at the pond in the Japanese Garden.

Posted by Francis at 02:00 AM