CJC.org

This is a neat site on Cleveland skyscrapers, containing a lot of photographs, a bit of Cleveland’s architectural history and interesting facts. For example, the paucity of downtown skyscrapers — compared to Chicago and New York — is due as much to geology as well as smaller populations. Cleveland doesn’t have bedrock just below the surface, like Midtown Manhattan, so it’s relatively costly to sink piers that far beneath the surface.

The site is handier to use than this book I picked up shortly after moving here, Cleveland’s Downtown Architecture, by Shawn Patrick Hoefler. The book is informative, with a variety of good architectural photos, but, inexplicably, doesn’t give the street addresses of all the buildings, nor does it have an index. For a newcomer, who doesn’t know where anything in the city is, this was frustrating.

The Terminal Tower’s observation deck was open on weekends for the first time since, I think, 9/11, to mark the Tower’s 75th anniversary. We went up there to take some photos a few weeks ago, but no one had seen to cleaning the windows before the deck opened. It also didn’t help that the sky was hazy, so we didn’t have any good shots. The observation deck is tiny — a dozen people would be sufficient to crowd out all the windows — and appointed like a musty mid-century lounge, though with a few cheap late-century folding tables scattered around. Not nearly as nice as the Empire State Building’s deck. Oh, well.

Yesterday, Grace and I were down near the Science Center to throw around a frisbee for a little while before dinner. I wandered over to the grassy plaza just west of the Center, where I noticed a number of educational signs at the far end, near the lake. A couple of these were devoted to Lake Erie birds and fish in the typical science center way. A couple were more interesting: there’s apparently a giant salt mine underneath Cleveland’s lakeshore. There was also a bit about the bulk carriers that ply the Great Lakes and another piece about the relative sizes of the Lakes.

Blossom is the Cleveland Orchestra’s equivalent to the Boston Symphony’s Tanglewood: the weekend venue during the summer, when the Orchestra plays in an open-air pavilion and the audience sprawls out on the surrounding lawn with their picnics. I don’t think New York City actually has an equivalent: the Philharmonic’s parks concerts aren’t as frequent or regular, and Blossom isn’t free. The ticket costs for Blossom and the minor hassle of getting there (a little under an hour from Cleveland; closer to Akron, actually) probably keeps the crowd there smaller and more interested in the music. The frequency of performances — every weekend for the summer — also allows greater quirkiness in the selection of music: you don’t need crowd-pleasers each and every show, though the Cleveland Orchestra has that, too.

We went the past couple of weekend. A few months ago, we bought a ten-pack of tickets for $120, compared to the regular lawn ticket price of $18. The ten-pack also includes four upgrades to assigned seating in the covered pavilion, so it’s a good deal. Having already paid for tickets also makes it more likely that we’d actually go to Blossom, rather than just talk about going, so we’re forced to see a little bit of the cultural scene around Cleveland.

As said, it’s a bit under an hour’s drive from downtown Cleveland to Blossom. Taking I-77 south to exit 143 is faster, cheaper and more pictureque than taking I-80. The road winds past cornfields and forests once you get off the Interstate, and the turns are well marked. There are a few farm stands on the way, and the route intersects biking and hiking trails, I guess along the towpath of the old canal system in the area. We took the I-80 route on the way back, because these roads are straight and well lit; we didn’t want to navigate the curving roads in the dark, even though there’d be a lot of other people going the same way.

Try to arrive an hour earlier, or you’ll be stuck in the unpaved parking lots a long walk away from the venue. That, and the lawn will be crowded and you’ll be forced off to the side. Almost everyone brings a picnic. We came with fruit salads and cheese in this cooler we’ve had for years but never really used until now. Folding chairs are good, but the ushers will enforce a height restriction on the chairs if you sit towards the front; I picked up a couple of short-legged chairs that also doubled as backpacks from Wal-Mart during the week (the pouch is big enough for sweatshirts and beachblankets, but not enough for our cooler). If you have assigned seating, you can’t take most of your picnic gear with you. Everyone leaves neat little piles of folding chairs, coolers and blankets on the other side of the low wall on the edge of the pavilion when they take their seats, so this apparently isn’t a problem. Besides the usual concession stands, Blossom also has a regular restaurant, but we haven’t tried it.

Here’s a panorama (made using Autostitch from a set of handheld shots off the 50 f/1.8D) of the scene at Blossom, just before the music begins:

We used our first pair of upgrades last week for pieces I hadn’t heard of. The Clarinet Concerto was relatively new, written in 2002 or somesuch by a Serbian composer residing in the Cleveland area. The middle movement is actually amazing. The main piece, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, didn’t interest me as much, but then I’m a philistine: I was finishing up Harry Potter during the piece.

Last night’s concert was sort of space themed. The Orchestra did Richard Strauss’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra”, perhaps best known as the theme from 2001, followed by Holst’s The Planets, with accompanying NASA space imagery displayed on giant screens: computer animation generated by forty years of unmanned discovery. Between each movement, a commentator would introduce each planet, though he seemed to attribute a certain prescience to Holst that really wasn’t there; the piece was written in 1914 and the composer’s themes and qualities for the planets derive more from mythological and astrological roots than from any contemporary scientific knowledge: Mars is the bringer of war because that’s what Mars/Ares does, after all. But this concert was, nonetheless, fortuitously scheduled: not only is the shuttle flying again (though perhaps only for this one mission), but another planet was discovered that day. I hadn’t heard The Planets in a while — where is the CD? — and it was good to hear it live.

Here are the photos from both concerts:

A couple notes on the old Honda Civic:

I just changed the bulb for the right headlamp. I had noticed the low-beam wasn’t working back in late May, but hadn’t gotten around to changing the thing until now. I was careful not to drive this car at night, so it wasn’t that much of an issue. Unfortunately, the previous ricer kid owners had put in some sort of blue-ish lamps and had lost/damaged/screwed-up the plastic mount. They had fixed it with a wad of duct tape. Replacing the bulb involved carefully peeling back the duck tape, finding the fancy bulb had melted a little, chipping away the melted bits with a screw driver, then prying off the bulb, all before putting the new, regular bulb in place and carefully refastening the wad of duct tape. (Note the gunky prongs on the bad bulb.) The back of the headlamp has to be dealt with at some point, but I have two lights in front now.

More seriously, when I was coming back from judo the day Thursday before we left for Alaska, I heard a horrible screeching noise coming from the back of the car as I was turning onto Detroit just outside the rec center. Pulling aside and looking, there was this arm (formerly) attached to the right rear wheel that was now dragging on the ground. The judo instructors were leaving just behind me, and helped me get the car into the West Boulevard RTA parking lot across the street, so I wouldn’t be in the street anymore. By the time I got it into spot, that wheel was visible tilted in from the top. I called Grace and I called AAA for a tow.

Note that car advice from passing kibitzers is very bad. One guy took a look and thought it was a brake issue, and thought I could make the 4-mile drive home, though I should watch out for potholes. The main judo instructor correctly noted that I had basically lost a wheel, and I was in no position to drive. He said a flatbed tow would be necessary.

The tow took a while — flatbed tow trucks are apparently in high demand — and the judo guys checked up on me about 30 minutes into the wait. Grace had gotten there by then, and we were just sitting around, watching the buses go by. An RTA police car had also driven by to see if everything was alright, though some pesky kids were bothering me for a screwdriver to fix their bikes even though I was obviously on the phone trying to arrange the tow. I didn’t understand what AAA meant by “tow services” and hadn’t arranged for a service station to receive the car, so we spent a good chunk of time after the tow truck arrived trying to get in touch with Motorcars Honda to see if we could bring the car to the downtown service center. We never got in touch with anyone, and the best thing was to tow the car there and stop by early in the morning to arrange for service. I rode with the good natured tow truck driver and would hit the keyless remote whenever a pothole set off the car’s alarm. I gave the guy a big tip; we had held him up for a while and he was nice about it.

After dropping Grace off at the hospital in the morning, I got to the service center just as they were opening. One of the appointment guys there had seen the car and had seen dangling arm and how it had gouged into the concrete as the car was being unloaded from the tow truck. He knew someone was coming by, probably early. Since we were leaving for Vancouver the next day, I told them to take their time and get the cheaper (but not immediately available) Honda replacement part. They kept the car on premises until we got back, without charging us storage fees (the guy said that they’re only going to get annoyed if someone dumps a car there for days without telling them when they were going to pick up).

Total repairs were around $800, for the bolt on the arm, as it worked its way loose, gouged out the unibody, and the mechanic there had to do some fabrication to get everything back in place. This part normally doesn’t come loose, and the best explanation is that the ricer kids had loosened the bolt a long time ago trying to install something on the bottom of the car and hadn’t tightened it all the way. The arm had been coming loose for years. It was lucky I was making a slow turn when it came loose, rather than on the highway, and that I was across the street from a parking lot.

The service center noted a few other things that had be taken care of, most notably the CV joints, both of which have broken boots and contaminated bearings. Jack and I will try to take care of this later in the summer, as the joints are now occassionally making the click-click-click sound on turns. There’s also a minor of a fluid leak; the service center would have to clean everything off before they can look for it. Beyond that, the car’s still running reasonably well.

The pizzas from Friday ultimately came out sort of triangle shaped, because I wasn’t very good at shaping the dough into classically round pies. Some of the dough was also undercooked, because I wasn’t very good at making a uniform thickness. I suppose the two problems are related: they both concern rolling out the dough properly.

At the end of the day, I used this dough recipe I found on a rec.food.cooking thread, which called for making a sponge to aid the fermentation, and then a period of overnight refrigeration for retarding further fermentation. I also used AP flour, and wound up using about 5 cups by the time the flour came together.

Make the sponge
===============

Mix together the following.

1/2 t yeast
1 3/4 C water
2 C bread flour

Let it sit at room temperature until it bubbles up but before the bubbles begin to fall, about 4-6 hours depending on temperature.

Mix the dough
=============

To the above sponge, add the following

2 C bread flour
3 T extra virgin olive oil
2 t salt
1 3/4 t yeast

Knead the dough until smooth, about 5 minutes. Let it sit covered at room temperature for 15 minutes, then refrigerate for a day, at which point it’s ready to use. Remove it from the fridge 30 minutes before you roll it out so it warms up a bit and is easier to handle.

Toppings were:

Sauce
====
1 28oz can tomatoes
1 6oz can tomato paste
3 cloves chopped garlic
2 T Italian seasoning
1 T sugar

Stew this for 30 minutes or so. There was plenty of leftover sauce for use at other opportunities.

Cheese — a mozarella and provalone mix
Brocolli — blanced
Red Onions — sliced, raw
Italian chicken sausage — sauteed to about done and then broken up

Shape the dough, put some sauce on — not too much — followed by cheese and other ingredients. With the oven well-preheated at 475F, bake for about 12 minutes, checking often. The dough was on the Silpat, supported by a cooking tray. The pies were easy to get off the Silpat with a large spatula. Though the second pie did leak some tomato sauce over the side, it was easy to clean up and didn’t interfere with the non-stickiness of the Silpat.

The end result was not the best pizza evah, but serviceable on a first try. I did get some browning on the bottom of the crust, but, as noted, the dough wasn’t of even thickness and undercooked in parts.

History did not turn on its hinge yesterday. 7/7 will simply become another stanza in the litany of atrocities that go back to 3/11, to Bali, to 9/11 — when history did turn on its hinge and our perception of the world changed. It was London’s worst day since the Second World War, but I don’t think anyone’s mental frameworks were rocked. In the end, these bombings will have only confirmed people’s ideas about the world: Al Qaeda and its cognates are a cancer in the world and must be eradicated, or Bush/America is at fault for Iraq/Afghanistan/the imperfection of the world at large (people who are exquisitely tuned to manipulation by their government but are utterly unsuspecting that media-savvy terrorists may be manipulating them, too). And so we muddle on until the next time.

And there will be a next time: London is used to terrorism and is perhaps the most surveillance-dense city in the world, with a security camera for every several dozen residents. But this wasn’t enough. The cameras may help in finding who bombed the city, but they did not deter nor prevent. Defense is in a free society not possible: the attackers only have to get through once to cause havoc. This calculus becomes grimmer as weapons become more powerful, and we do not want to be a closed society. I believe that our “offense” — clearing the way for liberalism in illiberal lands, to strike at the ideological center of gravity of the death cults — will win through in the end, but it will take decades and generations. In the meantime, we will again be horrified when we turn on the news in the morning, some day after tomorrow.

There are some rumors of change, though. The NYT Op-Ed pages have this piece by Thomas Friedman, where he sounds a bit like Paul Berman, though years late and without taking the further intellectual steps towards how we may help Muslim societies extirpate their cancers. I’ve seen a few pointers to this Christopher Hitchens interview. The crevasse is a good metaphor, but I’m not sure how many have yet crossed over into this new mental landscape. And so we wait for the next time.

It seems to be Madrid again, but I feel closer to London than to Madrid, knowing some people there (friends and co-worker) and having visited.

I’m not sure if anything new needs to be said that wasn’t already said about Madrid. It’s still early, regardless.

News comes in slowly. I found out about the bombings first at news.google.com this morning. NPR is on the radio now, but, after starting off the hour with a report on the bombings, they moved on to Bush and the Kyoto Accord (the London police chief got much less time than Bush did: arguably, what’s happening in London right now is more important than the no-change excerpt from Bush). Blair’s remarks were apparently not broadcast live. Presumably, these terrible events will start filling the airwaves later today.

Besides the usual media sources, windsofchange.net has a post up; it’s too early for other sites as of yet. Actually, now that I look again, Instapundit has a post up, with links to elsewhere as usual. Similarly, Command Post has something with links to elsewhere.

A few months ago, Instapundit also noted that the media seems to be in pre-9/11 mode, covering shark attacks, missing (white) teens in Aruba, Michael Jackson and so on. Alongside the steady drumbeat on Iraq, everything had faded into trivialities, as if there was nothing important going on in the world. No longer, perhaps.

Well, here’s BBC reporter’s blog. There’s also the UK Blogs RSS Aggregator.

It’s about 10AM EDT now, and Cleveland’s NPR station is talking about some Walgreen’s strike. I’m under the impression that NYC’s NPR has switched over entirely to the BBC radio stream.

I’m going to try making pizza later this week (Friday?), as part of the general yeast-bread making experiments over the past month. Here’s one blogger’s guide to doing this: BillyReisinger.com :: The Ridiculously Thorough Guide to Making Your Own Pizza.

I don’t have a pizza stone — I was thinking of going to Home Depot and getting some terra cotta tiles — but I’ve seen a few notes about using the pizza pans instead of a stone on rec.food.cooking. I do have one of those Silpat things, so I’ll probably give the pizza cooking a whirl on that, with structural support coming from a cooking sheet or the like.

The basic dough (according to this site) for two large pies is:

• 1 1/2 Cups – Warm Water (not hot!)
• 2 Tbsp. – Sugar
• 1 Envelope – Active Dry Yeast (not the quick kind)
• 2 Tsp. – Salt
• 4 Tbsp. – Olive Oil
• 4 Cups – Flour (whole wheat or all-purpose for thinner dough; bread flour for thicker, chewier dough)

This is given a single rise, then a punch down and cooling.

The given cooking temperature of 425F seems a low compared to some other things I’ve read, which generally calls for 500F and above. We’ll see how this turns out.

The yeast bread results have been inconsistent so far, as I don’t seem to get good texture — nice holes from CO2 bubbles — very often. Typically, the bread I’m baking is very dense, and I’m not sure why.

Here are the fireworks pics for Cleveland’s July 4th show.

The fireworks were shot from an area near the mouth of the Cuyohoga River, with the best viewing areas in the East Flats. Most spectators were camped out on the grassy slopes near the RTA station there, next to the vans from the radio station that gave a bit of musical accompaniment to the show. Dusk was around 10PM, and the show lasted about 20 minutes.

I had hoped to shoot from the Detroit-Superior Bridge, but, when I got up there, I saw that the fence around the walkway was too tall, and the bars too closely spaced. A pity: it’d be easier to move around for foregrounds with Cleveland’s picturesque industrial ruins — the old, permanently raised railroad bridges in particular. The Flats was a bit lower, and harder to move around because of the crowds. I did see someone else with a DSLR and tripod camped on the grass, but he moved almost as soon as the fireworks started. I suppose he concluded that he was in the wrong spot, but the view seemed OK by me.

This was my first real outing with a tripod. The ball-head is nice, but sometimes hard to get level with. The heavy 80-200mm lens also made things a little more complicated. I also wish the D70 had a cable release: I used a short timer for a number of the tripod shots during dusk. The lens was also a bit too long for where I was at, and I didn’t bring a second one. I had expected to shoot a block or two back from where I wound up, up on the bridge.

For the fireworks shots themselves, I set the camera to fully manual, with the focus set at a point just short of infinity. The first few minutes were spent diddling with the aperture and shutter speed, so I could get reasonably exposed multi-second shots. In th end, I didn’t have a typical exposure time: I changed it from 2 or 3 seconds, down to around 1/30 second, and back again. I seemed to get reasonable results with the fireworks on either of these general shutter speed settings. The shots that didn’t work were 4 or more seconds: there was too much light captured with such a long exposure time, and the pictures came out very cluttered.

The last half of the shots were junked because, when moving around to get different foregrounds, I accidentally changed the focus on the lens to something considerably less than infinity. All of these latter shots were out of focus. A couple were sort of vaguely OK, but for the most part these shots were trashed. Too much autofocus usage leads one to take focus more or less for granted, I suppose: I never checked focus after setting things initially.

Cleveland will have another set of fireworks tonight, July 5th: the orchestra will be performing at Public Square. Following the concert, fireworks will be shot above and behind Terminal Tower. Possibly, we’ll go to that, too, but it’s relatively late, and we get up early nowadays. And, it looks like rain.

The world moves on: I’ve updated the blog software from version 1.2 to 1.5.1.3 in response to this security notice. PEAR’s XML module has also been updated to address the general issue.

In the meantime, various things will be broken/odd until I get the various pieces updated or rewritten, but the site’s overall functionality should still be there.

A couple thousand shutter releases later:

• Get fast lenses. The 200mm with teleconverter will be better than a cheap 300mm if the 300mm is a couple stops slower. You won’t have much of a choice of where you’re shooting from if you’re in a tour group. To get acceptable handheld shots on a long lens on a rocking boat, you need a fast shutter speed and a big aperture.
• I’m not sure how useful a tripod would have been, because there was little choice of where you’re shooting from. In a group, you won’t have the time and maybe not the space to set up a tripod shot. For wildlife, you’re probably going to be handheld and may well be shooting from a bus over some guy’s head. Even for landscape shots, you may be shooting from the vestibule of a moving train. Spending money on fast lenses will be better than spending money on a tripod you can’t use.
• Something like a Bigma would have been nice for the tiny dots that turn out to be distant bears. But I’m not sure how feasible it is to handle a slow lens with a long focal length, especially on buses and trains.
• Get circular polarizing filters for all your lenses. We got incredibly lucky with the weather and had sun almost every day. The polarizer will help a great deal with these conditions. You can’t Photoshop polarization in postprocessing. I shot a lot of landscape with the 50mm because I didn’t have the step-down ring to get a polarizer on the wide-angle for half the trip.
• Get a fast CF card. You’ll want this for wildlife shots, since you may well take 50 shots to try to get the right moment when the whale puts its tail out of the water. Even for the geological shots, you can have glaciers calving icebergs and want to rattle off a half dozen shots in a couple of seconds.
• Take lots of shots. The marginal cost is basically zero. Make sure you have a laptop to dump the photos to overnight. Many of the subjects you’re shooting will demand a lot of shots to see if you get the right one out of it. The first eagle flying overhead used up around 40 shots. (Then you realize that eagles are like pigeons up there.)
• Bring lens to cover the wide to the telephoto ranges. The Nikon kit lens on the D70 is fine for the wide-angle. The 80-200mm with teleconverter was sufficient for most animal shots (though we got lucky with the caribou near the pipeline), though a little more reach would have been great. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how much more reach would have been possible given the shooting conditions. The 50mm f/1.8 was handy, too, because you’re going to take a bunch of indoor shots, more than you think.
• GPS in the EXIF would have been amusing, but that’s the $3500 Nikon DSLR body.
• Instead of bringing along an older Nikon film body as a second camera, I think it would have been worthwhile to have just bought another D70 and sell it on EBay afterwards. We may even have made a profit, given the cost of developing 15 rolls of film. Certainly, in taking 2000 shots on this trip, I’ve taken saved enough on development costs to have paid for my camera body. But this is in retrospect: I didn’t expect to take so many shots.
• AutoStitch totally rocked for automatically stitching together scans of the Denali flight map, as it was larger than our scanner bed. This was far better than my lame, labor-intensive attempts to do it in the GIMP, especially since I don’t know how to use it (at least I knew to use semi-transparent layers). I’m not sure how well it’ll work for actual panos, since we didn’t try to do that on this trip. Next time.