Posted on
by

Blue Line to Wonderland

I love that Boston has a subway station called Wonderland.

I mean, you can actually answer the question in the Disney theme song! (The route does in fact go under land, though the Blue Line may go over hills as well.)

And since it’s the north end of the line, all the direction signs read like this one.

Apparently it’s named after an old amusement park in the area that ran from 1906-1911, and later a dog racetrack that picked up the name in the 1930s.

I wonder how many Boston kids have looked for tiny doorways hidden in the walls, or white rabbits hopping through the train stations.

Posted on
by

A small cloud shows a spectrum, cut by a contrail that also cuts through part of a circular halo.

I noticed the halo around the sun as soon as I walked out the door for lunch on Thursday. The rainbow cloud? That appeared as I walked past a building. I saw it as soon as the southern sky came into view again.

The colors got more intense over the next few minutes, and I kept taking photos until my phone locked up. I stood there watching the colors intensify, then fade, while I pulled out the battery and waited for the phone to reboot.

A man who’d been sitting nearby, buried in his phone, looked up wondering what I was taking pictures of. He’d never seen anything like it before, and wondered what it was, and fortunately I was able to answer.

At the right angle, ice crystals in a cirrus cloud refract sunlight to produce a feathery rainbow effect. The circumhorizon arc runs parallel to the horizon, and while it can be long, it’s usually only seen in fragments like this. I’ve only seen a few of these myself, and it’s been years since I’ve seen one this intense. I took this photo through my polarized sunglasses, but the colors were bright even without them.

When my phone froze, he offered to send me one of his pictures just in case mine hadn’t actually saved. Fortunately they had, and I actually posted to Flickr several hours before his message made it through the cell network.

Within a few minutes, the cloud had drifted out of alignment, and the colors had faded completely.

An hour later, on the way back from lunch, I noticed a longer patch in a smoother cloud layer, but it was faint enough that I could only barely see it with my sunglasses on. Without them, it faded completely into the glare.

If I’d had my better camera with the zoom lens, I would have gotten some better shots of just the bright cloud. Then again, I wouldn’t have been carrying it with me to lunch, and the effect was gone in the time it would have taken to run back in and get it. So it’s probably just as well I stayed and watched instead.

Funny thing: I posted a cropped view on on Instagram featuring just the arc fragment and contrail. When I went back to look at the #rainbowcloud tag last night, I found no less than SIX other photos of what was clearly the same cloud at various points in its five-minute lifetime!

Posted on
by

Landscape Renovation: Painting the Grass Green

To save water in this multi-year drought, California cities, homes, and businesses have stopped watering medians, replaced landscaping with more drought-tolerant plants, cut back on watering lawns just enough that the grass won’t completely die, and switched to reclaimed water for irrigation (often with signs letting you know it’s recycled — partly so that you don’t try to drink it, and partly so that you don’t call the water police on them).

But some places just can’t accept “Brown is the new Green.”

Manhattan Village Mall, it seems, doesn’t want to appear downscale with brittle yellow-brown grass, so they’ve set up their landscape for renovation, giving that lawn a fresh paint job.

Literally.

I looked up close: it’s powdered green paint.

Green Grass Paint

It’s way too green compared to anything else I’ve seen this summer short of Astroturf, and that includes the office building near work that still over-waters their lawn to the point that it’s sometimes muddy when I walk out there at lunchtime.

It’s also just blue enough to look wrong, though it didn’t quite come through in the photos. There are plenty of plants with slightly blue leaves and stems. But not grass – at least not that’s popular around here.

Oh, wait! I should’ve looked to see if they had some roses!

Posted on
by

After four ant-free years, we’ve been invaded by ants that smell like nail polish when you squash them. Some of the stranger things that we’ve found ants going after over the past few weeks include:

  • Children’s medicine. The ants don’t care about the antihistamines, just the sugary syrup. We washed everything out and now keep the liquid medicines in a ziplocked bag.
  • A forgotten party favor with a bundle of jelly beans in it, in a box at the top of a bookshelf in our bedroom. From our wedding. 11 years ago. D’oh!
  • A poster frame. More specifically, the dead bugs that had crawled into the open spaces in the tape who-knows-how-long-ago and gotten stuck. Eeew.

And of course the more typical targets like the kitchen trash can.

Now, while ants are new to this apartment, the place we lived before gave us a constant struggle. Some of the more spectacular cases were:

  • The pantry and liquor cabinet. Ants were trying to crawl through the threads of every screw-top jar or bottle they could. We got in the habit of wiping the tops before closing them.
  • The refrigerator and freezer. There was just enough room for them to crawl in, but they couldn’t handle the cold. The ants in the refrigerator got progressively slower farther from the entry point, and a pathetic swath of frozen ants coated part of the freezer door. We patched the gap using model magic.
  • Underwear.

…yeah, I can’t really top that one.

Posted on
by

Limited Edition 4 of 7 Dr. Pepper Can: Captain America

I guess collecting is sort of the point with a lot of media tie-in packaging (well, that and cross-promotion, of course), but I really have to wonder how people typically collect food packages. I mean, do you keep the can unopened and hope it doesn’t leak? Do you drink it even though the can won’t be in mint condition anymore?

Oh no. I just had a horrible thought about those Minions-labeled bananas!

Posted on
by

I stopped frequenting Barnes & Noble a while back because they were so determined to sell you a Nook and get you out of the store, never to return. (That, and for a while we had a great indie bookstore nearby.)

Now they’re selling vinyl records.

And holding events.

They’re doing Throwback Thursdays and a Fangirl Friday.

I don’t know if it’s a desperate attempt at relevance or a brilliant return to form.

I certainly know it’s not corporate-wide, though — or at least not evenly distributed — because a week later I went to another Barnes and Noble, one near a full-blown mall, and walked straight into the giant NOOK pavilion.

No sign of any events aside from a mention of filming during the Harper Lee book launch. Vinyl was being plugged in the music section in the back, but not right up front.

On the other hand, no one was staffing the NOOK pavilion, and half the tables were empty. So maybe it’s still being phased out?