This news about the cause of most ovarian cancers, and therefore a way to prevent them, should be widely known. So here it is with a gift link.
Tell your friends with ovaries and fallopian tubes!
As we get older and/or don't want to have children / more children, and especially if we are having some kind of abdominal surgery, removing the fallopian tubes can be added to many kinds of surgery and prevent this deadly cancer.
My maternal grandparents went to the 1939 World's Fair in New York City, according to the journal my grandmother kept during those years. I recently found a couple of postcards, unwritten, that may have been keepsakes from that stay.
One them is for the Chesterfield Hotel, a Midtown establishment that was in existence from the 1920s through the 1960s:
According to Ephemeral New York, it was an "unspectacular midcentury tourist and show folk favorite." They have a few details on minor events that happened there. It was 18 stories, with 600 "outside" rooms (I guess that means rooms with windows, because there were 900 rooms in total).
Copies of this postcard or one very much like it are available for sale online for a few dollars.
The other postcard is for a Chinese restaurant that is lost to the mists of time as far as the Interweb is concerned:
However, its address at 30 Pell Street in China Town is still the site of a Chinese restaurant, and sure enough, Street View shows us that the building is still the same with a different coat of paint, and there is still a vertical sign in place, though it's now in Chinese:
The current restaurant's name is House of Joy. Whether it is, as the back of the postcard says, a "Modern Chinese Restaurant... Serving Real Cantonese Dinners at Popular Prices," I cannot say.
I didn't look into the second Pennsylvania environment builder very much before deciding to go there during my recent road trip. (Daughter Number Three-Point-One scouted it from Atlas Obscura.)
The Beasts of Beaver Meadow is farther off the beaten path than Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden, at least from the direction we were coming from. We traveled some almost-back roads to get there, and I wasn't sure online maps would stay with us the whole way across rural Pennsyvania, so I had written the directions down. They consisted of "this road becomes this road becomes this road," then "turn right then left at this area that's very hard to describe"... and things like that. So I'm glad the 5G or LTE or whatever it was stayed in place well enough the whole time.
We eventually found the Beasts at 1200 Berwick Street in Beaver Meadows. They aren't that far east of I-81 and the substantial city of Hazelton, but we were coming from the southeast, so the shortest way was a circuitous route.
The Beasts were created by Joseph Woitko from concrete, glass, car parts, and other found objects, so classic outsider artist work.
Woitko is clearly into the macabre. There were a lot of skulls:
He frequently use some molds with his concrete work, like the ice cream cones in this castle (I think it's a castle):
I didn't see everything (for instance, I just realized there are pieces on the opposite side of the road).
As a side note, the steep and somewhat treacherous slope on the woodsy, shaded ground was covered with sweet woodruff, a nice ground cover. I've never seen so much of it on one location:
All in all, it has more of a haunted feel — whether that's intentional or not.
Too much escapism here at Daughter Number Three in the last couple of days, so it's time for some more worry! (Sorry about that.)
Yesterday, after seeing an Australian poll showing a surge toward the Right, a person on BlueSky asked
what’s going on with the world man. why is the far right resurgent everywhere? it’s easy to blame whatever policy boogeyman (neoliberalism, housing shortage, immigration, etc etc) but I think it has to be something deeper.
maybe lived memory is dying out of how evil fascism is
Another person, whose bio says they study the Third Reich, reposted that with this comment:
More to the point, this is happening in *non-white* countries as well: Japan, Turkey, and India have huge far-right nativist blocs. So it's not merely white supremacy or nostalgia for the days when the West ruled.
Nor is it happening purely in developed post-material countries.
In turn, a sociologist named Katherine Alejandra Cross posted the previous two, along with this:
It's impossible to exonerate the internet, and social media in particular here. It allowed for the efficient networking and ratcheting-up of our worst impulses at unbelievable speed and scale. In-group/out-group dynamics are as old as the hills, but social media is a particle accelerator for them.
One response to Cross's thought, from a person named Mecha-Herz, may be correct, I'm afraid:
And counter to some of the arguments about eventual equilibrium after the introduction of the printing press, radio etc., I'm not convinced we can meaningfully adapt to these new technologies. Our brains are not evolved to deal with this shit.
Pennsylvania, it turns out, is not the greatest place to look for environment-builders and outsider artists, according to Roadside America and Atlas Obscura. There are finds in the Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas, sure, but in the rest of the state, not so much.
There are two exceptions in the parts of the state I covered on this trip, though. The best one was Bill Rhodes People Friendly Garden, which I found on Atlas Obscura. It's at 248 S. 3rd Street in the nice small town of Hamburg, which is about two-thirds of the way from Harrisburg to Allentown (north of Reading).
Rhodes is a welder, but he's also a sculptor who — unlike many reusers of found objects — paints his objects.
The garden seen from above on one of the balconies.
Rhodes also renovated the historic duplex adjacent into several unique apartments, one of which he occupies. He's been there 25 years. The gardens are a fun accompaniment.
My photos don't do the place and the work justice.
This is the Seussian head of the blue-bodied creature in the next photo.
The water wheel was spinning, of course.
A warthog?
I asked Bill where he gets his found materials. He said he goes to a lot of flea markets, generally. He has two intermodal containers, one stacked atop the other, set up behind the building, that are full of pieces waiting to be used.
Overall, it's quite an enterprise, and if you're anywhere nearby, it's worth going out of your way to visit.
I'm just back from my summer road trip, this time to a family reunion in the Delaware Water Gap in southeastern Pennsylvania. I'll have a few more posts about particulars, but here are some random photos from along the way.
First the ones from the road:
This is where the onions come from.
This attorney billboard, seen along the highways around Chicagoland, is very confusing to people from Minnesota, where pond hockey is a real sport in the winter.
Apologies for the fuzziness of this image but I had to zoom in with my not-so-great phone camera. It was nice of that deer to cross right in its crossing spot, wasn't it?
As seen in the elevator of one of the roadside hotels we stayed in.
While at the family reunion, I got a chance to touch the Appalachian Trail... which, believe it or not given the part of the country I am from, I have never done before.
There was Japanese knotweed everywhere, including next to the entrance to the Appalachian Trail and along every stream. Ick.
In the historic (and unrenovated) municipal building in my home town, I was amused by the sign on the inside of the second-floor door, which was standing open and had a rubber door-stop keeping it that way.
This was the first time I have seen any of the new all-electric U.S.P.S. vehicles in person. Very exciting! I don't know if there are any of them in Minnesota or not.
Just before we left for home, I stopped at a yard sale and saw this concrete evil baby... or proto gnome... or what is it? It was $5.00. I did not buy it. I have a feeling I will regret that for a long time.
Am I losing my mind, or does he not look like the very image of a Bond villain?
Is he trying to look like one?
As ICE and DHS generally (and the National Guard and other paramilitary operations) ramp up their unconstitutional and violent actions around the country, I suspect this frame from a recent Tom Tomorrow cartoon will come in handy, so here it is for sharing as needed:
Did you hear that 2,000 National Guard troops will be quartered in D.C. for the next two years, based on a $292 million contract that was awarded for four apartment-style buildings?
The new contract is cheaper than the hotels the Guard member have been staying in, of course, but it's still a lot more expensive than sending them home — which is what should have been done months ago. And it sucks up a bunch of the housing in the D.C. market, which I'm sure is not a good thing for regular people.
Quoting that Military Times article,
The new arrangement comes on the heels of a May 28 report, meanwhile, that assessed that the 2,000-plus National Guard troops to have participated in the D.C. task force have had “no measurable effect on violent crime.
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As always, here's the reminder that you can support Tom Tomorrow by signing up for Sparky's List.
Thanks to Vince Mpls for reminding me that today is the anniversary, and in fact the 175th anniversary, of the enactment of the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux.
It forced the Dakota Nation to cede 21 million acres to the U.S. government, much of it in Minnesota.
According to the Wikipedia page for the treaty, "The U.S. paid the Dakota an annuity the equivalent of 7.5 cents an acre and [then] charged settlers $1.25 an acre." In addition to this obvious financial chicanery, the treaty's translation for the tribes was also deceptive in describing other terms. And then delayed payment of the compensation over the next decade left the Dakota starving and directly led to the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862.
The treaty was the brainchild of Minnesota's governor, Alexander Ramsey — namesake for my home county here in Saint Paul — and Henry Sibley, until recently another unassailable Minnesota big name. Sibley's name was only recently removed from one of our local high schools (as was Ramsey's). I've yet to hear anyone talk about changing the name of our county.
A giant painting of the treaty-signing used to hang in the Governor's Reception Room at the Minnesota State Capitol until the building was renovated 10 years ago. After the work was completed, there was a big discussion about whether to return it and three other paintings to their prominent locations, given their content.
After much process, the treaty-signing painting and another one were rehung in a different, less prominent room on the third floor, with contextual information to accompany them. Two others were put into storage. This page on the Minnesota State Historical Society website gives a bit of information about that outcome.
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Those divergent acreage payments are about $3.00 and $50.00 in 2025 dollars, according to the inflation calculator.
A.R. Moxon had a recent essay about one of the big problems underlying our current polycrisis. I think of his subject in terms of the 20 (or 30 or whatever) percent of people in this country who, as Heather McGhee put it in The Sum of Us, will drain public pools instead of share what is clearly easy to make available to everyone, or as Jonathan Metzl showed in Dying of Whiteness, would rather die of preventable illness than extend Medicaid if it means "those people" also get to have it.
Moxon calls this regressive supremacy, and its opposite progressive humanism:
Progressive humanism is the belief that all people matter and deserve life, that generative human value springs from an inextricable and diverse mutually cooperative interconnectivity, and that we have a natural responsibility and moral duty to take the natural human system we have inherited and use our energies and skills to progress and improve it.
Regressive supremacy is the belief that only specific types of people matter and deserve life, and then only to the degree that they conform to specific and rigid hierarchical roles and doctrines; that all other human beings, who must earn life, get what they deserve and deserve what they get, because they are the natural property of the people who matter most.
I recently read about the results of a thorough qualitative research project* carried out in several states (mostly in the South but also the Midwest), mostly focused on committed Christians. The way they were described would clearly put them all in the regressive supremacy camp.
The researchers tried to make their subjects' world view make sense by referencing Jonathan Haidt's six types of morality, and how that differs between liberals and conservatives. (Haidt says conservatives value loyalty, sanctity and authority over liberals' valuing of fairness and care/compassion.)
Give me a break. This is not a new insight, I know, but the people in the research say they adhere to the Bible when it's clear they have no interest in anything resembling Christ's teachings.
Everything they promulgate is fear-based, trying to instate order on behalf of authoritarian personalities who make them feel safe. And it's also usually to obey the big father they've been taught is over all of us, according to some preacher their parents indoctrinated them into following.
I'm tired of this and these people.
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* I can't find the link to the research because I got so down-hearted reading it that I closed the tab. I'm trying to remember who referenced it so I can retrace my steps.
My dad had a friend who was an electrical engineer in the mid-20th century, and inherited from him a bunch of paper calculators and slide rules used for various tasks. Partially because I'm a pack rat and partially because they have some cool graphics, I brought them along, thinking I would do something with them... some day.
Well, today is the day, and posting their pictures here is the something. Then I will see if a vintage shop is interested in their physical versions.
I don't have any particular commentary on these, or knowledge about what most of them were used for. Resistors, ohms, what have you. Sure, a couple of them are obvious, and others are not:
I find the human ingenuity in the making of these physical artifacts itself — with their sliders, grommets, die cuts, and various meaningful colors — the most interesting part.
