Mother Seaton, first American saint. Nations first Catholic seminary. Anything else? Babe Ruth. Edgar Allen Poe, see? That right there is why one would think the whole place is so spooky. Because of him. Baltimore is so spooky it even freaked out Edgar Allen Poe. That is my impression. There should be something about ships. Tall sailing ships. We put these models together as boys. Let me think. Shipping there is a big deal, you know. U.S.S. Constellation, a 3-masted war sloop. Cool boat. Baltimore undoubtedly has a lot of rats.
Wooden model. $648.30 by Old Modern Handicrafts. You should buy one. Kidding. I know you're not interested. Ours were plastic. This is a lot better. Dusting is a problem. Either glass case or housekeeper with a delicate touch. Baltimore, having the real thing is just so totally historically ace. Baltimore has more historical ships than this but they're not as good, and actually, the real thing is a bit cheesy. Also the U.S. Naval Academy at nearby Annapolis. Baltimore Oreos, home of the famous cookie. Kidding again. Also, Chef Duff and his entertaining Ace of Cakes.
Oriole VS Cardinal. Just for the heck of it.
Now, here are two very good looking birds.
Oh, orioles make hanging basket nests. Wow. Jackson Pollock eggs.
What do cardinal's nest and eggs look like? Stunning eggs. Much simpler nests.
Baltimore oriole's nest and eggs win. Tough choice though. Oriole is a better housekeeper and family bird while cardinal is a more confident stylist.
Their geography is such the force of waterways suggested mills. I'm interested in their early grain mills. The early settlers preferred rye bread. I imagined their milled wheat to be be all whole wheat minus the husks. I imagined the stones flattening de-husked wheat seeds to powder but that is not what they did. The ground grain is graded for different purposes by sifting through various screens, their term "bolting" originally "boulting." Romans bolted their wheat to seven grades of flour. So, not all their bread was 100% whole wheat as imagined, but all of their leaven was natural piggybacking or airborne, what we call sourdough.
Don't ask me about present day happening in Baltimore and their dilapidated unhappy Democrat plantation with all their high profile non-Baltimore plantation rebellions because I don't know anything about that. It doesn't come through. I do know historically plantation owners were terrified of revolts. There they were, the plantation owners, out there in the country isolated away from the unhealthy city in summer, with more people in bondage than available enforcement and there is always news coming in of happenings in Jamaica. Now, they are doing a lot of talking but not to me. All of the talking, and there is a lot of talking, is amongst themselves and for themselves. They're working out their own problems and they've made clear all that has nothing to do with me, in fact I and my profiled type are excluded. But that needn't wreck a whole city, there's a lot else going on there besides plantation rebellion.
Seems every time you turn around there's another hard luck story you're going to hear. And there's really nothing anyone can say. Oh, I never did plan to go anyway... to Black Diamond Bay.
6 comments:
I'll bet Galveston is nicer this time of year.
The Oriole wins for pleasant song and moderation in using it.
Baltimore has a history of vicious rioting. Some of the first fighting in the Civil War featured unruly Baltimore crowds attacking Northern regiments passing through town on the way to garrison the District of Columbia. (The rail lines weren't continuous in Baltimore, regiments had to detrain on one side of the city and march a mile through city streets to reach the rail head of the line to Washington City.)
We don't have nice birds like that around here. No exotic birds. There are a lot of seagulls around trash sites and I'm all, "what? what? how did you get here? There aint no ocean around here?" And come to find out they're totally trash gulls having forfeited their sea-worthiness. For now they sail upon the gusts and gales of garbage scented winds and ride aloft the thermals rising from the dissolving garbage below. And the smell of the whole place is unbearable the stink quite incredible but the birds do not seem to care. They're all unaffected and stinking themselves. And that's why you don't really want them around. So there's that. And also hummingbirds are exotic and most extraordinary of all in their way, I think, not everyone has those, but nothing so big and bold and outrageous as pelican or stork or penguin. We have eagles, and that counts for a lot. Hawks too.
Nothing here that counts for teams. You cannot have the Hummingbird Hockey team, for example.
Although, one time James was stopped at a light with a gas station right there with a sign that read "Go Aves" and for the life of me I could not make sense of it and I consider myself rather good with semiotics. This is right up my alley, should be easy but it wasn't. This confounded me as I rolled in my mind what birds had to do with anything. "Go birds" why would they be saying that? At length and with much sputtering and massive confusion as I worked out the possibilities none of them right and then finally FINALLY, "Go Avalanches" a SPORTS TEAM ! I had it! The gas station was encouraging sports. As gas stations do.
And my brother is looking at me like, honestly, you really are a perfect idiot sometimes. I honestly never do know when you're putting me on. But I wasn't. I actually am that thick.
Who would think a gas station would randomly say "go aves" It simply did not make sense.
And yet it makes perfect sense to sports-minded people, that is, everyone else.
Salad Dressings:
French
Italian
1,000 Island
LO CAL
"I wonder, reading this upside down, what that is. I heard of house dressing, and place-dressings like Southwestern dressing, or Key West dressing what have you but I never heard of local dressing. This is Black Hawk Colorado, what could it be?"
"You're joking again, right?"
"No, I'm not joking. How do they expect us to know what local dressing is? "
*laughs*
"Come on."
*laughs*
"Come on. Help a brother out."
Baltimore used to be heavily influenced by its large German-American population and was a very gemutlich city, not that different from Philadelphia. All over now, needless to say. And not only for racial reasons. No American city can be an ideal bourgeois locus because that is no longer wanted. The ascendant type and ideal is now, believe it or not, the hipster. And so you get hipster cities, Portland, Oregon and Portland, Maine. The old, staid, well furnished Baltimore ideal is not only passé, it's not even on the radar.
A seagull up close sounds like an umbrella, from feather rustling.
I fed one outdated tunafish one winter. He seemed to like it.
Rural Ohio has only single widely isolated seagulls. They mostly live in malls.
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