Olivia

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.

So, I Was Going to Write About the San Antonio Museum of Art. . . .

I figure that since my last South Texas Destination, Denman Estate Park, was the home of a major donor to the San Antonio Museum of Art, I maybe should write up the museum next.

At first, I thought that I should make another trip to the museum, but I’ve been there dozens, or maybe even scores, of times over the last 23 years that I’ve lived in San Antonio, so I don’t actually need to go there again before I can write knowledgeably about it.

Then I went looking for my pictures from my last trip to the museum and couldn’t find them.

I know that my last trip to the museum was after my dad moved down here in 2009. In fact, Alex, my dad, and I went to lunch at La Gloria at the Pearl Brewery and then hiked down the Riverwalk to the museum, and the oldest Yelp review I can find for La Gloria is from 2010, so we can probably make that the earliest start date. I think we must have gotten there after 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, because the museum has traditionally had free admission then and I don’t recall paying admission, though that’s actually immaterial.

The trip must have been before June of 2014, however, because that’s when I got my Galaxy S5 phone. I originally thought to look at my Google Maps timeline to see if that trip is on there and found that neither the Pearl Brewery nor the museum is on my timeline.

I have opened and looked into every folder in my photos directory between those dates and had no luck. I’ll keep digging just in case, but I think they’re gone. It’s a pity, too, because there were some pictures that I was really proud of in there.

So it looks like I’ll have to go back to the museum after all. I might be able to return to the Pearl and to the museum on Saturday, May 21, but the museum might be pretty crowded then and I might not be able to get any really good pictures without multiple strangers hanging around in them. Also, Alex and I are both recovering from a pretty nasty respiratory virus. I feel a lot better, but I’m several days ahead of him and he got hit harder than I did.

Alex spends Memorial Day weekend (for those not in the United States, that’s the weekend before the final Monday of May) and nearly all of June with his dad, so this Saturday is going to be our last Saturday together until June 25. We have plans with my dad on Sunday, so that’s out.

So, it looks like if we can’t go on May 21, I won’t be writing about the museum until at least June 25 and at that point I might as well wait until Alex gets back from his dad’s and then go before noon on a Sunday or after 4 on a Tuesday when we can get in for free.

So I guess I’ll start working on a different South Texas Destination just in case. Maybe I’ll do the Botanical Gardens. I can find lots and lots of pictures from there (we’re members and get in for free). . . .

My Travel Memories, Door County, Wisconsin

During our trip to Wisconsin, we spent a day touring Door County. If you look at a map of Wisconsin, Door County is that thumb that sticks up into Lake Michigan.

Door County is full of small towns that are, well, not so ethnically diverse. The population is largely white and largely of Scandinavian descent. It is a beautiful place, though, and is home to 11 lighthouses (all of my pictures of which are with my now-ex). We walked around in a park and my mom thought that it looked like it would be a nice place to live. I thought it might be nice for a while, but that I’d go nuts being so far from a city.

We also went to a fish boil. Watching the fish being cooked was really fascinating. They put the fish in a basket and put the basket in boiling water. Then they put some kind of fuel on the fire beneath the pot and the fire flares up. Unfortunately, the eating of the food is less exciting. It tasted okay, but it lacked a certain something. I also had the really disconcerting experience that no matter how much I ate, the amount of food didn’t seem to decrease at all. This led my primary memory of the fish boil being my mother grousing at me because I wasn’t eating. I’m glad I did it the one time, but it wasn’t the kind of experience I’d ever care to have again.

National Geographic August 2013, Part 2

Apparently that sugar story, and my dad’s reaction to it, created a real antipathy in me towards this issue. I’m just having the hardest time ever reading it. I may break down and go forward to January 2016 soon and just read this one whenever I can bring myself to do so.

Additionally, I’m sort of experiencing a reading detour at the moment. For several years during my childhood, my dad bought me one Nancy Drew mystery book a month. I’ve been planning to read them for the last, oh, ten years or so, and in this last week or so, I’ve begun that project. I’m now up to #14, The Whispering Statue. They’re pretty dated, of course. Nancy wastes a lot of gas driving to places where she can make phone calls and things of that nature. One detail that I didn’t remember from my childhood stuck out at me — several of these books make an attempt at multiculturalism. For example, we meet a Native American woman in The Secret of Shadow Ranch and The Mystery of the Ivory Charm features several characters from India. The child character, Rishi, has trouble with the first person singular pronoun that’s kind of distressing for me. It’s established that Rishi speaks Hindi, and Hindi does, in fact, have a first person singular pronoun.

Anyway, on to the lions of the August 2013 issue of National Geographic:

The Short Happy Life of a Serengeti Lion, by David Quammen, photographs by Michael Nichols

I’m somewhat confounded by this title. The article is about the social structure of lion prides and their assorted coalitions of males. We follow one two-member coalition of males, C-Boy and Hildur, as they mate with the females in their prides and fight off invaders, most notably a four-male coalition that are referred to as the Killers.

Lion prides are only females, generally grandmothers, mothers, sisters, and aunts. Males work in small groups that affiliate with the prides and father their children. When a new coalition of males moves in, they kill off or drive away the cubs, which causes the females of cub-bearing age to go back into estrus and then the new males father new cubs on the females.

In this article, we find that the biggest cause of death for lions is other lions. Males will, of course, kill the offspring of other males, and males will kill other adult males. Males will occasionally kill females (and it is from this that The Killers got their names — they are the prime suspects in the deaths of several females that were being studied).

Overall, this does not sound like a happy life to me. But then again, I’m not a lion (at least, I would expect that someone would have told me if I were . . . ) so maybe that is happiness for a lion.

Living with Lions, by David Quammen, photographs by Brent Stirton

Living with Lions leads off with a picture of a man with no arms being bathed by another man. This led me to believe that this was going to be another article like the one on leopards moving into cities from December 2015. It isn’t. The meat of this article is about lion conservation.

The home range of the lion has shrunk over the past millennia. According to Quammen, at one point, lions spread at least as far north as France, as evidenced by the lions in the cave drawings in Chauvet Cave. And now the lion is confined to Africa and even that habitat is shrinking. Lions do come into conflict with humans, but things like the human population expanding into the territory of the lions and trophy hunting are causing a lot of the drop in population.

We also meet a group called the Lion Guardians. They are members of the Maasai tribe, who traditionally have hunted lions, to protect the lions instead. They are paid a salary and trained in how to track lions with radio collars and they track the lions and prevent lions from killing livestock. As of 2013, the program appeared to be working, and lion killings were on the downswing.

South Texas Destinations: Denman Estate Park, San Antonio, Texas

I think I’m done with downtown destinations (though I reserve the right to revisit downtown at any time in the future). I should probably start to write up some of the parks that I’ve visited in the last few years. I guess I’ll start with the park that I visited on Saturday, April 23, Denman Estate Park.

Gilbert M. Denman, Jr. was an attorney and philanthropist who lived in San Antonio. Denman donated many Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artifacts to the San Antonio Museum of Art (review to follow). When Denman died in 2004 at the age of 83, his only heirs were two cousins, and so the executors of his estate broke his real estate into two parcels and sold one to the City of San Antonio and the other (which contained the structures on the property) to the University of the Incarnate Word. The 12.52 acre parcel that belongs to the city has become Denman Estate Park.

When you arrive at Denman Estate Park, the first thing you notice is Denman’s mansion. This is now owned by the University of the Incarnate Word and you can photograph it, but it is private property and there are signs saying that trespassers will be prosecuted.

As you travel down the 0.36-mile path, there will be a labyrinth on your right-hand side. I like to walk the labyrinth when I visit. After the labyrinth, the path goes around a pond. On the far side of the pond is a pavilion donated to the park by the city of Gwangju, South Korea. The pavilion was built in Korea and then disassembled, shipped to the United States, and reassembled by the artisans who built the pavilion. There are signs saying that people should stay off of the pavilion. A friend who works in the construction industry says that the pavilion was built with traditional methods. There is not a single nail in the whole thing. This means that it is probably not going to fall down if you go up in it, but it also doesn’t comply with San Antonio municipal building codes and thus is unfit for human occupancy in the city. Also, keeping people out of it will keep it looking as nice as it can for as long as it can. So just admire it from the ground and don’t go up in it.

Denman Estate Park Pavilion, San Antonio — The Gwangju Pavilion from the far side of the pond, Denman Estate Park, San Antonio, Texas

There is another branch of the path that passes down through a wooded area behind the pavilion. I think I’ve only been down that path once or twice, and it’s a very nice, shady walk.

In front of the house is a statue of a mermaid labeled “AMA MARIA ” and with a set of coordinates. In Spanish, “Ama” is “he, she, or it loves,” so I assumed that the name is in Spanish. It isn’t. The statue is part of a charity art project to raise awareness of the state of the world’s oceans. The explanation for the “AMA” name is that this is the title used for female pearl divers in Japan and Korea. It looks like there are nine of them in existence, and the website tells how to purchase one, if you have €15,000 plus tax (and shipping if you live outside of Europe) burning a hole in your pocket. AMA Maria belongs to the University of the Incarnate Word, but she is on the park side of the house. I’m not sure if she’s on private property or not.

Denman Estate Park is a nice little park to visit if you happen to be in the neighborhood or if you have half an hour or so to spare. The main path is labeled Level 1, so it is wheelchair accessible. The path behind the pavilion is unlabeled, but it seemed to be no higher than Level 2 to me. There are some waterfowl in the park. The Sebastapol geese seem to be the most aggressive of them, and I’ve never had them do more than hiss at me. If you happen to have any ornithophobes in your group, you may want to be cautious on your visit.

National Geographic August 2013

Sugar Love (A Not So Sweet Story), by Rich Cohen, photographs by Robert Clark

This is not the first article in the issue, but I wanted to get it out of the way. My dad handed this issue to me and said, “This will prove to you that I’m right. Sugar is poison.” And, in fact, one of the scientists they quote in the article says so, in exactly those words. Then, they provide us with a graph showing how diabetes is increasing right next to a graph showing that sugar consumption is decreasing.

Come on now, if Tyler Vigen can show a correlation between US Spending on science, space, and technology and suicides by hanging, strangulation, and suffocation, surely the folks at National Geographic can do better than that. As an aside, Vigen’s Spurious Correlations website is a great way to kill an hour or so.

I have to admit that I came to this with a bias. An old friend who is an evolutionary biologist once explained how we’re eating a lot more food than we used to and, this is important, the calories in that food are now more bioavailable than the used to be. We eat more frozen dinners and restaurant food and Lunchables than we did decades ago. We also eat a lot less fiber, and really the more I read, the more I think that fiber is really kind of key here; fiber lowers “bad” cholesterol, effects hormone levels for the better, and increases insulin sensitivity. She explained that our ancestors probably went through something very much like our current obesity epidemic once we started cooking our food. Cooking breaks down the foods and makes, you guessed it, the calories more bioavailable. Her belief is that those whose genes could cope with the additional calories used those extra calories to build smarter brains capable of things like language and music and civil engineering.

Cohen also tells us that people are eating less fat and are getting larger. If Americans really were eating that much leaner, wouldn’t McDonald’s now be a salad bar restaurant? It isn’t. They still serve deep-fried all sorts of things. The deli at my store used to sell roasted chicken legs. No more. Now, unless one of the few fresh salads available (and the last time I had one of those, it tasted like old refrigerator) or sliced meats and cheeses it’s deep-fried (I don’t eat much at the deli since they got rid of the roasted chicken legs). Taco Bell’s new thing is cheese, sour cream, and meat in a deep-fried shell. Meanwhile, my local salad bar place just closed. If you can’t tell, I’m not real persuaded that low-fat dieting is the culprit here.

Oh, and I’m not a professional editor, but shouldn’t “not so sweet” be hyphenated? It’s a compound adjective modifying “story,” isn’t it?

My Travel Memories: Manitowoc, Wisconsin

When I added “Wisconsin” to my tag list, for some reason WordPress wanted to turn it into Switzerland. I mean, it has some of the same letters, but the two words aren’t that similar.

I’ve actually been to Manitowoc three times. Our first trip was to visit my dad’s cousins who live in that area in 1987. I later found out that my now-ex-husband (whom I hadn’t started dating yet in 1987) had a friend who lived there. I called her on the phone when we were there the second time (which would have been around 1990). Then my now-ex and I went there sometime in the late 1990s. No, I think it might have been the early 2000s. I seem to remember that Alex was there. I think it was the year that we went up a week early for Thanksgiving and spent that extra week in Wisconsin, but don’t quote me on it.

While we were in Manitowoc the first time, we visited the Wisconsin Maritime Museum (home to the USS Cobia submarine) and stumbled across Lincoln Park Zoo and Beerntsen’s Confectionery Shop. I remember the submarine more than the museum. Apparently they’ve enlarged the museum quite a bit since 1987, so perhaps there wasn’t much to it besides the submarine back then.

Lincoln Park Zoo was, sadly, kind of depressing back in 1987. Again, photographs seem to indicate that the zoo has improved markedly in the last nearly-30 years. In 1987, the three of us were all alone and most of the animals were in chain-link-fence enclosures. At least the pictures show other people in the zoo. So that’s hopeful.

Beerntsen’s is an old-fashioned ice cream parlor. They also make chocolate candies in-house. I won’t talk much about food in this blog, but I think that ice cream is probably fairly universal (though I’m not likely to want to eat mung bean or green tea ice cream or flavors like that on a regular basis). I am, actually, a sucker for combinations of mint, marshmallow, and chocolate in sundaes. This all started at Valentino’s ice cream parlor at the Old Crown Point Courthouse in Crown Point Indiana (That reminds me — I probably should write up the courthouse sometime. Is it a travel memory or a Northern Illinois destination (despite actually being in Northwestern Indiana?)?). Anyway, they had a chocolate-and-marshmallow sundae. A few years later, the man in line in front of my family at a Baskin-Robbins ordered a sundae with mint chocolate ice cream and marshmallow topping and it was all downhill from there. Back in the 1980s, Beerntsen’s had a chocolate and marshmallow sundae, so of course I had to try it. I seem to recall that it was awesome.

And, of course, I absolutely loved Manitowoc Breakwater Light. I don’t know if you can still do so today, but back in 1987, you could walk right up to the lighthouse along the breakwater. I think we took some pretty good pictures of the lighthouse in our 2000s visit, but those pictures are still with my now-ex and so the only picture I have of the lighthouse is yellowed with age. The first time we walked out to the light, it was foggy, so the fog signal was going. I grew up in the Chicago area, but in a landlocked area, so this was my first experience with fog signals, which was pretty cool.

I don’t know if I’m ever going to get back to Manitowoc, but I certainly would like to return someday.

National Geographic December 2015, Part 3

I’m just having the worst time getting my schedule back together. Let’s see if I can get this post out now and get my Manitowoc post written today. That’ll get me back on schedule.

Out of the Shadows, by Richard Conniff, photographs by Steve Winter

Out of the Shadows is about the increasing contact, and conflicts, between humans and leopards in places like India and Africa. All over the world, humans are encroaching on the territories that previously had been dominated by top-level predators such as leopards. Sometimes the predators retreat, but sometimes, as is happening with leopards, the predators adapt.

Conniff takes us to some places where leopards and humans are coming into conflict and lets us into some of the research on how these two species can coexist peacefully.

Personally, I am always struck by the camera trap photographs of big cats. In the December 2013 issue, we had the article Ghost Cats. I had the same experience there. For some reason, the automatic cameras they use in their camera traps make the cats seem to look almost like they are taxidermied. Are the shutters of the cameras that fast? Or is there some other mechanism at work that makes the cats look, not just like they are not moving, but like they are actually stationary?

Remnants of a Failed Utopia, by Rena Silverman, photographs by Danila Tkachenko

Tkachenko visits places that used to be communist and photographs the buildings and machines that they left behind. For this project, Tkachenko photographs these structures in snow, which diffuses the light, making for haunting images of a “lost civilization.” For some reason, the images chosen for this issue have almost no color (for example, there are only traces of color in the photograph of the Bartini Beriev airplane, which made me wonder at first if Tkachenko also used black-and-white film.

Sorry About the Missing Post

My home is in the area where the hail hit on Tuesday, April 12, 2016. Fortunately, I’m not in Helotes, which is a suburb just outside of FM 1604 (commonly referred to as “Loop 1604”) and was pretty much the hardest hit. Their H-E-B (a large supermarket chain) and Walmart stores were both closed by hail damage.

However, my father’s and my cars were parked outside and both sustained pretty bad damage. Fortunately they were under a tree, so it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. My dad has an appointment to get his damaged glass replaced next week and if that works out as smoothly as the people on the phone promised I’ll be getting my damaged glass replaced soon after that.

Nevertheless, worries about my car, and my roof, and debating whether to make a claim (I finally did so, but I may withdraw it depending on how my dad’s glass replacement works out) took up far more of my mental faculties than I could spare this week. I’m finally getting it together and finishing up the December 2015 National Geographic, so expect that writeup on April 19 followed by Manitowoc, Wisconsin, on April 21.

South Texas Destinations: Tower of the Americas, San Antonio, Texas

The 1889 World’s Fair had the Eiffel Tower. The 1893 World’s Fair had the Ferris Wheel. And the 1968 World’s Fair had the Tower of the Americas.

Tower of the Americas, December 25, 2015 — The Tower of the Americas, getting on towards sunset, Christmas Day, 2015.

The centerpiece and theme structure of HemisFair ’68, the tower still dominates the skyline of San Antonio today. The Tower of the Americas is known largely for four things:

Fireworks. Traditionally, the city’s official Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve fireworks display have been set off with the Tower as a backdrop.
The annual Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Lonestar Tower Climb and Run. This is a one-mile run followed by a quick jog up the steps in the core of the Tower. Climbing the steps of the Tower sounds like fun. Running up the steps does not sound like fun.
The rotating restaurant at the top of the Tower. For years the restaurant was operated by the same people who run the Jim’s restaurant chain. In 2004 the concession was taken over by Landry’s. Landry’s is a Texas chain of seafood restaurants that are nicer than casual dining, but not so fancy as what you normally think of when you think of a “fine dining” establishment. Traditionally, my family would go to the Landry’s that used to be on Riverside Drive* when we would go up to Austin to watch the bats at the Ann Richards/Congress Avenue Bridge. We could drop in in our jeans and t-shirts and not feel out-of-place. The Chart House Restaurant, the restaurant in the Tower, is fancy. Lots of tourists probably drop in in their jeans and t-shirts, and I’m sure they get fine service, but if you go, you probably want to wear your nicest jeans and a polo shirt instead, perhaps.
The observation deck. This is what most people go up in the tower for. There are two levels — an interior section that had historic photographs showing what things used to look like in the direction where you are looking and an exterior level that has only plexiglass and wires separating you from the outside. It was very windy in the exterior observation deck the day we went.

*This restaurant is, as of the time I’m writing this, a Joe’s Crab Shack.