National Geographic July 2013, Part 1

I still can’t access the text version of these issues on-line. I wonder why they even have that functionality if you can’t get to it.

While digging around I found that they do have an Android app finally.  I wonder if I’d be able to read the issues on my phone, or if the text would be too small. Maybe I’ll try it tomorrow.

Field Trip on Mars, by John Grotzinger

Grotzinger is a geologist who was the project scientist on the Curiosity rover for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Grotzinger still works on the project, but stepped down as project scientist in 2015.  In Field Trip on Mars, we get to see how Curiosity does its geology work.  Curiosity drills through rocks and analyzes what’s inside them.  The scientists with the project were able to see that Mars once had water capable of sustaining life with the very first rock it drilled through.

As the magazine went to press, Curiosity was heading into a crater towards Mount Sharp, a mountain that, according to Grotzinger, looks more Earthlike than other places that rovers have been sent to.  Curiosity reached Mount Sharp on September 11, 2014.

It All Began in Chaos, by Robert Irion, photographs by Mark Thiessen, Art by Dana Barry

Kind of off-topic, but every time I look at the credits for this article, I see “Diana Barry” as the name of the artist.  Diana Barry, for those who aren’t Anne of Green Gables fans, was Anne’s raven-haired childhood friend from that series.

It All Began in Chaos is about the early formation of the solar system and our evolving understanding of it.  We start with Newton’s idea that the planets move in perfectly circular orbits and then to the idea that orbits are elliptical and the to the idea that orbits are elliptical right now and are likely to stay that way, but that no one can know for certain what will happen in the future because there seem to have been unexpected events in the solar system’s past (for example, Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn apparently used to be much closer to the sun than expected, then something happened to move them).

As to the future of the solar system, all scientists can do is speak in percentages like with meteorology because things are still moving and drifting and something like the event that may have moved three of our four largest planets to the outside of the solar system could always happen again.  We just don’t know.

This article was also one of the first times I’ve felt the passage of time from when the article was written (aside from the few articles I’ve read from the 19th century, of course). Irion tells us that in July 2015, New Horizons will fly past Pluto and take pictures of the dwarf planet and its satellites. This flyby happened almost a year ago now.

My Travel Memories: The Return to Detroit and Cincinnati

The first time we visited Detroit, it seemed like a nice enough city.  Of course, looking at the long term, Detroit was about halfway declined by then (Detroit had peaked in the 1950s).  The decline, however, was much more obvious to us in 1987.  Maybe we just visited more obviously declined neighborhoods on this trip, but we found that to be really sad.

Cincinnati was also kind of depressing as well.  In 1980, my mom and I had spent the day at Union Terminal, which was, at the time, a shopping mall.  When we returned in 1987, the mall was closed.  We had, at that point, no idea that three years later Union Terminal would reopen as the Museum Center.  We had had dinner in the rotating restaurant atop the Quality Inn which is now a Radisson in 1980.  That restaurant was closed as well.

I’m hoping to redeem the memory of that trip to Cincinnati, at least, the weekend of the total eclipse in 2017.  We won’t be able to see the eclipse in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, which will be where the eclipse will be total for the longest period, as the trip back to San Antonio will take too much time.  If all goes as planned, we’ll be going up through Memphis and Nashville to Cincinnati and then across to either Kansas or Nebraska, depending on where we can get a room at this point.  Then we’ll come straight back and go back to work and (likely, though the calendar hasn’t been released yet) school the next day.  And we don’t need to stay right on top of the eclipse site, since we’ll be driving.  We can stay a bit out of the way and drive to the eclipse site.  Having our car will also open up more possible places to see the eclipse.  If the place we stay ends up being overcast that day, we can go northwest or southeast until we find a place that’s open.

National Geographic January 2016, Part 3

I still can’t get to the text version of the articles on the website despite, again, being logged in.

Riding the Rubber Boom, by Charles C. Mann, photographs by Richard Barnes

So, earlier today, I was reading an Atlas Obscura article on the American Geographical Society library at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  One of the maps that they have is of Fordlândia, a town that was set up by Henry Ford to grow rubber for his automobile manufacturing operations. The article describes it as a “lost jungle utopian city,” so I had to check it out.  The Wikipedia article on Fordlândia said that the town failed in part because of the development of synthetic rubber.  So, armed with that little bit of knowledge, I began reading Riding the Rubber Boom, which is about farming natural latex rubber in Southern Asia.  If synthetic rubber caused the failure of Fordlândia in the early 20th century, then wouldn’t there be even more difficulty making a living from farming rubber today?

Well, as the saying goes, it’s more complicated than that.  Latex is as big as it ever was.  We still need it for things like car tires and, even more crucially, for airplane tires.  We also need it for latex gloves and condoms.

As for Fordlândia, the site chosen was too far north and too dry for growing rubber trees, for one.  They also had a nice monoculture going, where all there was was rubber trees.  And, as I’ve mentioned before, monocultures of trees are vulnerable to pests and diseases because they can easily move from tree to tree.  If there are other species of tree in between, though, it becomes more difficult for the pest or disease to travel across the space between the trees.  The pest or disease in question here is a fungus called Microcyclus ulei, which damages the leaves of the tree, killing it.  Fordlândia got infected by M. ulei, so it was just a matter of time.

The rubber farms in this article have a relatively new variety of rubber tree that are more cold-tolerant, so at least they will avoid that failure on the part of the developers of Fordlândia.  However, the farms are also monocultures, but since M. ulei is native to South America, the trees are, so far, safe from it.  However, it will only take one spore being introduced at the wrong time to doom entire farms. The UN has recommended that anyone who has been in the area where M. ulei is present for the previous three weeks and who has arrived in Southeast Asia be inspected, but, at least as of press time, none of the countries in question have followed through on the suggestion.

Kingdom of Girls, by Jeremy Berlin, photographs by Karolin Klüppel

Kingdom of Girls focuses on Klüppel’s photographs of the girls of Mawlynnong, India.  For some reason (no one is apparently sure what), Mawylnnong has a female-dominated culture.  Property passes from mother to daughter, rather than from father to son.

South Texas Destinations: Brackenridge Park, San Antonio, Texas

I really need to start a list of places I’ve written up so that I don’t repeat destinations.  On the other hand, so long as I don’t say exactly the same thing each time, I suppose that several writeups on the same destinations might be acceptable.  It’s not like I am likely to run out of things to say about any given destination.

Also, I’m now two months and almost a week out from my trip to Chicago and a return to Northern Illinois Destinations. I had planned to post this on June 2, but it’s been storming lately and I’m old school — I unplug my computer when there’s thunder and lightning.  This has cut into my writing time. I’m writing this very early in the morning of June 3, and more rain is expected, but it doesn’t look like it will storm any time soon.

I was hoping to find my photos of the San Antonio Museum of Art before now, but I haven’t.  Failing that, I was also hoping to make a trip out to the museum to take some new pictures, but that didn’t happen either.  So, on to another park (and then to three destinations within the park).  That should buy me another couple of weeks before I need to get those pictures.

George Washington Brackenridge was a “Yankee” from Indiana who made a fortune, near as I can figure, selling cotton on the black market during the Civil War. After the war finished, Brackenridge moved to Texas.  He settled in San Antonio, where he founded the San Antonio National Bank and its sister institution the San Antonio Loan and Trust (I believe that the San Antonio National Bank that existed in the late 20th Century and is now known as Vantage Bank Texas is a different bank).  Brackenridge designed the headquarters of the San Antonio National Bank, which still stands on Commerce Street and, at the time I’m writing this, is a law office.  I’ve always wondered where the vault was in the bank.  Perhaps someday when I’m downtown I will knock on their door and ask.

Brackenridge also was involved in the San Antonio Water Works Company, one reservoir of which is now on the property of the San Antonio Botanical Garden.

In 1869, Brackenridge bought a house near the headwaters of the San Antonio River and enlarged it into a mansion, which he named Fernridge. He purchased land alongside the river to the south of Fernridge as well, though I’m not sure how much of the land between the two, which is now the campus of the University of the Incarnate Word, Hildebrand Street, and the Miraflores estate, he owned.  The land to the south of Hildebrand, which was owned by Brackenridge, was, at first, part of the San Antonio Water Works. Two of the pumphouses still stand in the park today, one is at the northern end of the park and the other is near the clubhouse for the Brackenridge Park Golf Course.

The land which is now Brackenridge Park was also the original headquarters of the Alamo Cement Company (which has had several names, including the Alamo Portland and Roman Cement Company).  In 1880, two men, William Lloyd and George Kalteyer, realized that the stone near the river was of a quality suitable for making cement.  They founded the Alamo Cement Company and set up operations.  Some of the buildings of the company, including the kiln, still stand in the park today.  The quarries are now the sites of the Japanese Tea Garden and the San Antonio Zoo.

Alamo Cement factory kiln, San Antonio, Texas
The smokestack of the kiln of the Alamo Cement factory.

Brackenridge’s original gift to the city was of 199 acres.  Brackenridge was fairly progressive for his time, supporting women’s right to vote. Brackenridge did live to see the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which gave the vote to most American women. There was a hink in that women who married foreign nationals between 1907, when the Expatriation Act, and 1940 lost their citizenship.  Some women who married  foreign nationals got to retain their citizenship after 1920, when the Cable Act was passed, but the Expatriation Act was not repealed until 1940.  There were also practical barriers, such as literacy tests and poll taxes, to voting for immigrant and non-white women in much of the country as late as 1966.  But that’s all beyond the scope of this blog post.

Brackenridge was also a prohibitionist.  The argument went that alcoholism (and alcohol use in general) was hurting the people of the United States, women and children in particular, and so prohibitionists wanted to make alcohol illegal.  And they got their way for 13 years.  Prohibition didn’t work out. Illegal production and sale of alcohol flourished which just exacerbated the problems that the prohibitionists had wanted to stop.  Additionally, since the sale of alcohol was illegal, it wasn’t taxed, which hurt the economy. Since Brackenridge was a prohibitionist, he forbade the drinking of alcohol in the park.  In a twist ending, though, Emma Koehler later donated an additional 144 acres to the park.  Koehler’s late husband had been owner of the Pearl Brewery.  Since Koehler’s money had come from the sale of alcohol, she allowed consumption of alcohol in her gift.  This divide is still present today.  In the Brackenridge gift, there is no consumption of alcohol, but it is allowed in the Koehler part of the park.

Today, Brackenridge Park holds three pavilions, 1.7 miles of walking trails, the San Antonio Zoo, the Japanese Tea Gardens, sports fields, the Sunken Garden Theatre (an outdoor venue for plays, concerts and other kinds of gatherings), a golf course, and the Witte Museum.  The park also has several interesting bridges across the San Antonio River, including a cement bridge carved to look like wood and an iron bridge which was moved to the park from St. Mary’s Street downtown (see image below).  I will be doing writeups on the zoo, the tea gardens, and the museum in future South Texas Destinations postings.  The Museum Reach portion of the River Walk goes around the golf course and then through the park.

St. Mary's Steet Bridge, Brackenridge Park, San Antonio, Texas
The St. Mary’s Street bridge in Brackenridge Park. I cannot for the life of me remember how I managed to get this angle on the bridge. I think that the river must have bent right there. I do know that I was not standing in the water when I took this.

Most of Brackenridge Park is wheelchair accessible. I’ll try to cover specifics as I write up other parts of the park.

National Geographic January 2016, Part 2

This is ridiculous.  I’m having the worst time ever getting to the online version of this issue.  I’ve had to log in twice now. My browser used to keep me logged in and I used to be able to just get to it by searching Google for the issue number.  Now all I can get while logged in is a photograph of the pages.  When I try to get to the text version, it keeps telling me “This National Geographic content is only available to subscribing members” and gives me a link to a login screen.  And I can see that I’m still logged in behind it.  I’ve actually sworn at this thing.  Twice.

Well, I guess I’ll have to make the best of this bullshit.  I’m not happy, though.  Having to zoom in to read the text is a pain in my left buttock.

In other news, I did make it to an average of 8,200 steps per day for May, finally.  I couldn’t remember if the number I got on the final day of the month was the final count, or if it would drop at midnight, so I put in a couple thousand extra steps so that I had one day of wiggle room.  I ended up with 8,467 steps on average for the month.

Bloody Good, by Elizabeth Royte, photographs by Charlie Hamilton Jones

I got a kick out of the title that the website gives this article, Vultures are Revolting.  Here’s Why We Need to Save Them. The mental image of vulture revolutionaries amuses me.

Bloody Good focuses on the life and current plight of vultures in Africa and Asia. Some of the vultures in these areas are critically endangered.  Vultures reduce the number of animal carcasses rotting in the sun, which means that they also reduce the chances that people and livestock will be made ill by the kinds of illnesses that develop from rotting meat.  I know that vultures have a bad reputation, but there’s one photograph of cape vultures in South Africa that is truly beautiful.

We have traditionally had a lot of black and turkey vultures here in Texas.  I made sure that Alex grew up appreciating the good they do for the environment. We once actually found the remains of a raccoon at Guadalupe River State Park and we had seen vultures in the park earlier that day. Now I didn’t get cozy enough with the bones and fur that remained to see if there were beak marks on them, but the corpse was just to the side of the walking path, so I suspect that if the poor thing had been left to rot, someone would have removed it, or alerted a park ranger so that it could be removed.

By the way, it looked like the poor thing had become tangled in fishing line, so please be careful when you go fishing to always account for all of your fishing line before you go home.

Into Thin Ice, by Andy Isaacson, photographs by Nick Cobbing

I’m somewhat nonplussed by the title here.  I think that the usual saying is “on thin ice,” and the focus of this article (aside from — what else? — global warming) is on boats that examine the Arctic by attaching themselves to ice floes, so the word “on” would seem to apply there. But it’s the editors’ choice what to name the articles, even if it is somewhat cumbersome.

And, of course, the ice is melting more rapidly than is traditional and scientists are very concerned.  The warming oceans are releasing carbon dioxide into the air, which will hasten global climate change.

Stay tuned for my next National Geographic recap in which the rubber plantations of Asia are about to precipitate an ecological catastrophe.  Unless I can knock out the rest of July 1889 by then, in which case my next National Geographic writeup will be about the rivers and valleys of Pennsylvania in great detail.

My Travel Memories: The Car Ferry and Frankenmuth, Michigan

After Wisconsin, we repeated the trip that we made in 1980, this time from Detroit down into Ohio.  In order to get to Detroit, we could have driven back down through Chicago or up through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and back down.  Instead, we took the Badger, a car ferry that, at the time, traveled back and forth between Kewaunee, Wisconsin, and Ludington, Michigan.  Nowadays, the route goes between Manitowoc and Ludington.

I’ve always had a little problem with motion sickness.  It first really showed up when my folks took me deep sea fishing back in the 1970s.  I was miserable.  It never occurred to anyone to bring some kind of motion sickness medicine.  When I got older, we went on the Wendella Boats (a future Northern Illinois Destination) and I discovered that, so long as I can get fresh air, I’ll be okay.  Unfortunately, the car ferry was in 1987, long before Internet-based FAQs.  I didn’t know what I was getting in for, and didn’t know if I’d have access to fresh air.  As a result, I took a Dramamine before we left and spent most of the trip dozing in and out of consciousness.  It was a nice convenient way to travel from one state to the other, however, even if really industrial.  The Badger was originally built to carry train cars, so the Queen Mary it ain’t.

I was still a little drowsy until we got to our next stop, which was in Frankenmuth, Michigan.  Frankenmuth is a nice little town full of white people, much like Door County.  The difference is that where Door County was settled by Scandinavians, Frankenmuth was settled by Germans from Bavaria.  And you can tell that is where they are from, because the town center has lots of kind of stereotypical looking Bavarian buildings.  I suspect that Frankenmuth looks more like Bavaria than Bavaria does (and in 2019, I’ll be visiting Bavaria and will be able to put my theory to the test.

Frankenmuth was the final destination that was new to me on our 1987 trip.  My next travel memory, and the final post on our 1987 trip will be a little bit about the return to cities like Detroit and Cincinnati.  I should be posting that one on June 4, if I continue to keep up with my schedule.

And My Pedometer Counts Had Been Going So Well . . .

I know that getting a consistent 10,000 steps per day is not really likely to happen in my life at the moment.  I walk a lot, but I just stand still for even longer and standing is exhausting in itself.  So, when I first started using the SHealth app on my phone, I counted my steps for a couple of days and then added a couple hundred more to push me a bit harder.  The total I came up with for the day was 8,200.  And, over the first year and a half that I used the app, I got so that having an average of 8,200 steps per day for an entire month got to be pretty easy. I didn’t necessarily make it every day, but I did more days than not, and was able to make up the excess so that I got the average nearly every month.

Then May 2016 happened.

I got off to a kind of weak start because May 1 was a Sunday and I generally don’t work Sundays.  Alex and I went to see a movie and then walked for about 20 minutes, which works out to about 2,000 steps.  So that’s an average of 2,000 steps per day for the month of May.  Then I was off on May 4 and didn’t get an early enough start to do much walking.  By the time I got my act together, it was starting to get too warm to walk.  On May 7, I worked the municipal election, so I didn’t get my full steps that day, either.  Then I came down with some kind of virus on May 16.  For the next week, it took a Herculean effort to even hit my goal for the day, much less start on the shortage.

So now it’s about bedtime on May 25 and I only have six days left in the month.  I also am still 47,000 steps short for the month, which means that I need to average 7,800 steps per day for the next six days.  Two of these days are my days off, though.  If I don’t do any walking on either of those days,  I need 12,000 steps per day on the four days that I’m working.

Will I make it?  If I remember to do so, I will post on June 1 and let you know.

National Geographic January 2016, Part 1

So far, this issue is going much better than the previous one. Let’s see if I can keep up this momentum.

A couple of times in my life I have traveled somewhere just in time for something interesting to happen.  The most notable of these was my family’s trip to the UK.  I had breast cancer in 2001 (it’ll be 15 years this October and I haven’t seen any sign of it since then, so I’m pretty sure I’ll be okay at this point) and decided that I wasn’t going to die without ever having been to the UK, so we made our plans.  As we finished the plans, we realized that we’d be there just in time for the Queen’s Golden Jubliee celebrations.  We also were in London on June 7, which was the day of the World Cup match between England and Argentina, a match that England was apparently expected to lose, but which it won.

How does this tie into my National Geographic project?  For 2016, National Geographic is doing a series on the National Park Service in honor of the Park Service’s centennial.  I didn’t even know that 2016 was going to be the centennial for the National Park Service when I planned a three-national-parks-and-a-national-forest trip which includes the oldest National Park, Yellowstone.  This was a complete coincidence.

How National Parks Tell Our Story — And Show Who We Are, by David Quammen, photographs by Stephen Wilkes.

Just like it says on the label, this article goes into the history of the National Park Service and tells how they decided on a single vision for national parks.  The photographs in this one are awesome, even for National Geographic photos.  Wilkes set his camera up at an elevation and took thousands of pictures of parks (Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and West Potomac Park) over one day.  Then he pasted them together into panoramas showing the vantage point through the night and the daytime.

This Is Your Brain on Nature, by Florence Williams, photographs by Lucas Foglia

This is Your Brain on Nature is about the health benefits of getting out and getting some “green time.”  Williams even goes so far as to say that people may have lower incidences of physical ailments if they live within half a mile of green space.  On the other hand, there is the “urban advantage,” where people who live in cities tend to have have longer, healthier lives than those in rural or suburban areas.  Some of the “urban advantage” probably comes from access to health care, and others come from being able to walk to destinations rather than having to travel in a car to get there.  I wonder, too, if the presence of urban parks makes a difference.

South Texas Destinations: San Antonio Botanical Garden, San Antonio, Texas

When my now-ex and I were first married, we lived in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago. We used to visit the  Chicago Botanic Garden (link to follow after I come back from my August 2016 trip to Chicago) on a fairly regular basis. So when we came down here to Texas and found ourselves with nothing to do one day, we decided to check out the botanic garden here in San Antonio.  And, while it was not as elaborate as the one in Chicago (and was much, much smaller!), we liked what we saw.  I have maintained a membership to the garden on and off for the last 23 years.  I love having a membership because there’s no pressure to spend all day at the garden.  If you want to drive on down there and visit the conservatories then leave, you can.

The site that now holds the Botanical Garden was originally the city reservoir.  It’s kind of hard to tell unless you’re at the very top of it, but the land is on top of a hill and the city was able to use gravity to deliver the water to homes in the area.  This period lasted for about seven years, from 1883 through 1890.  According to the Botanical Garden website, local residents began to worry about the reservoir becoming contaminated and so it was abandoned. The land of the reservoir and the surrounding area became the San Antonio Botanical Garden 90 years later, in 1980.

Today, the garden has lots of smaller gardens within it, including a Japanese garden given to the city by our sister city of Kumamoto in Japan; a series of conservatories; an area of small houses that demonstrate different ways to landscape in a water-conscious way without just yanking out your lawn and putting in rocks (a pretty common approach here, I’m afraid); an assortment of formal gardens; and my personal favorite, the “Texas Native Trail.”

The Texas Native Trail takes up quite a bit of space, so I’m going to focus more on it.  There are three sections to the Texas Native Trail.  The northernmost part is set up to display the plants of South Texas. The South Texas area has an adobe house from the 1880s.  Just south of the South Texas area is an area set up to resemble the Pineywoods of eastern Texas.  This section has taller trees than you find in most of San Antonio surrounding a man-made pool.  The pool is home to an assortment of animals, including ducks and turtles.  The far end of the pond has a reconstructed log cabin first built in Fayette County in the 1850s.  The southernmost section of the trail is set up to resemble the Hill Country with prairie plants and a waterfall.  The Hill Country section has two historic structures, the Schumacher House, which was built in 1849, and the Auld House, which was built in the 1880s.

san antonio botanical garden pineywoods pond
The pond in the Pineywoods section of the Texas Native Trail

The garden has a restaurant, housed in the carriage house of Daniel J. Sullivan, an Irish immigrant who set up a bank that helped fund cattle drives.  The house, which stood on the land at the corner of 4th Street and Broadway, was razed in 1971.  The carriage house stood there for another 17 years.  The owner of the land, the Hearst Corporation (who owned the San Antonio Light newspaper) offered the carriage house to the Botanical Garden if they could move it in three months, a task that they (with the aid of the San Antonio Conservation Society) completed successfully.  The carriage house is currently the entrance to the Botanical Gardens and I believe that there are offices on the second story.

I say that the carriage house is currently the entrance because the gardens are undergoing an expansion. Much that is currently there will remain, but there is an empty plot of land between Funston and Pinckney streets.  The garden owns that land (which has been used for overflow parking in the past) and they are adding new features to it, including a new parking lot and entrance to the gardens.  The projected opening for the new section is in the spring of 2017.

The garden has a number of events throughout the year.  There are art exhibits and educational programs.  They have nighttime events and plants sales, as well.  One of my favorite events (and one that I plug to everyone I can) is the Dog Days.  For three or four weekends a year, you can bring your dog to the garden for a fee of $5 per dog. That $5 goes to animal-related charities. I try to take my dog (who is a little old lady now) at least once a year because she enjoys getting out and meeting, not the other dogs, but the people at the gardens. And the charities that the garden supports are worth it.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that the garden is as wheelchair accessible as it could be.  Some of the paths are steeper than ideal and/or loosely packed sand/gravel/wood chips and, of course, some of the historical buildings are not accessible.

National Geographic August 2013, Part 3

Let’s see if I can finally knock this issue out and then get back on track.

Secrets of the Maya Otherworld, by Alma Guillermoprieto, photographs by Paul Nicklen

We go to Mexico in this article to investigate a phenomenon known as a cenote, which is a sinkhole that is filled with water.  The water of some cenotes is exposed to the surface, but the one we’re concerned with here, the Holtún cenote, has formed a cave above the water.  The archaeologist that we are following in this article, Guillermo de Anda, found signs of human sacrifice in the cave on earlier expeditions and had a theory that the cenote was used as a sort of natural clock, marking the two days a year when the sun is directly overhead.

De Anda and his partner, Arturo Montero, found that the sun does reach directly into the cenote when the sun is at its peak on those days and they have a theory that the location of Chichén Itzá may have been determined by the position of the cenote.

Parade of the Painted Elephants, by Rachel Hartigan Shea, photographs by Charles Fréger

In Parade of the Painted Elephants, we visit the Elephant Festival in Jaipur, Rajasthan, India.  The festival features elephants, which are working animals for most of the year, being decorated with paint and jewels.  In what must have been 2012, Fréger went to the festival to photograph the elephants and got his pictures just in time.  I say that it must have been 2012 and that he got them just in time because the festival has been cancelled twice, once in 2012 and once in 2014, because the organizers didn’t send the correct documents to the Animal Welfare Board and, out of concern for the elephants (they didn’t reveal, for example, the chemicals used in the paints that year), the Animal Welfare Board shut the festival down.

Next up, January 2016.  Finally.