May 2006

Here is a tribute to my grandfather John Sheehan, my mother’s father, whom I never knew. John fought in World War II as an Army staff sargeant. Sunday my mom showed me his ribbons for the first time (click for larger images).

       
He had three medal bars: yellow & green (probably a unit citation), red and white (good conduct medal), and dark green with brown, red and white stripes (European/African/Middle Eastern Campaign medal) with two stars showing he fought in two campaigns.

WWII caused many folks to meet who otherwise wouldn’t have met. One such case is my French grandmother, Gisèle Wyatt, meeting John, an American G.I. stationed in France. If it hadn’t been for the war, my Irish American grandpa would certainly never have been in France.

After the Allies liberated France, Gisèle was working as an interpreter for the French and U.S. armies. Through these connections, she and John met. They married in France, and Gisèle came to the U.S. on a war bride ship. These photos show (1) my grandma working as an interpreter and (2) my grandparents in Boulogne sur Seine, early 1946:

Gisèle’s father was a photographer and took these two photos showing the first U.S. military trucks (supply vehicles) which arrived in Boncourt, 19 August 1944 (département d’Eure-et-Loire, France):

An upcoming Open Source radio program will feature online photo tools like Flickr, a photo management and sharing application. Open Source wants to “talk about this latest wave of image making/taking/sharing technology, and its wider cultural and social implications. What does it do to the practice of photography, and what does it do to us?”

I’ve been exploring photos on Flickr a lot lately. One of the most interesting aspects of it are the photo “pools,” where people submit photos on a particular theme. For example, there is a Project Spectrum pool for folks participating in that craft-along.

Two themed photo pools I recently discovered are:

This is Europe photo pool
This is America photo pool

Looking at both pools, and comparing them, was fascinating. The European photo pool was what you might expect - scenery, buildings, people in landscapes - beautiful photos of beautiful places. When I went to the American photo pool, the first photo was of a car crash (Warning: not for the feeble-stomached). A few down, there was a photo of Elvis impersonators, and then a martini glass with pills in it. Is this America? And what does the difference in the photo pools signify? Perhaps Europeans have a greater sense of place. A greater sense of history, of longevity. America isn’t just scenery, it’s a combination platter of all these crazy scenes, ideas, sensations.

Other places on Flickr are simply cool images of things you never would have imagined, like “Boat Books” in Greece -

There is a photo pool for Seattle in general, Guess Where Seattle?, and one devoted entirely to my good friend the Seattle Public Library!

The Seattle library is also in the news ridiculously this week as a place “to begin a sexy date” - Seattle Weekly article Perfect Summer Sex. Hmm…

This part of the world turned green this month! Just in time for Project Spectrum’s May color.

Mosaic created with fd’s Flickr Toys.

Thanks to Amanda for coming up with the summer reading challenge 2006! While I don’t think I can read 28 books like her, I’m making my list and checking it twice. I’m committing to 14 books between June 1 and August 31. The list below is a challenge because normally I read a lot more fiction than nonfiction. I reserve the right to change some titles but still read the same number and in the same proportion.

FICTION

1. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte - June read for Knit the Classics (KTC)
2. July KTC read TBD
3. August KTC read TBD
4. At home in Mitford by Jan Karon
5. La Lenteur de Milan Kundera - June reading for French reading club I’m planning to join!
6. Suite Française d’Irène Némirovsky - next read for the French club
7. Waiting for the barbarians by J.M. Coetzee

NONFICTION

1. Slipping into Paradise: Why I Live in New Zealand by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson
2. The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Goldhor Lerner
3. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn (finish it - I’m on chapter 10)
4. Learned Optimism by Martin Seligman
5. Written by Herself, Vol II, Anthology edited by Jill Ker Conway
6. Becoming Visible: Women in European History edited by Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz
7. Woman: An Intimate Geography by Natalie Angier

This weekend was the University District Street Fair, which always seems to kick off the rainy part of summer! Yay! I hadn’t gone to the street fair in a few years and so enjoyed myself thoroughly.

Saw Artis the Spoonman, here he is with his panoply of spoons in front of him. For the uninitiated, Artis is a Seattle musician with “faster-than-the-eye-can-track” spoon playing. He takes all kinds of spoons and sometimes other cutlery and uses them as percussive instruments, hitting them on each other and on various parts of his body. It’s a hoot to watch! His songs are tongue-in-cheek critics of culture and politics.

He was playing with Slim Pickenz, a local band playing tunes “from the Depression era, to help us survive this current depression.” In their sweetly appropriate costumes, the duo picked out lively, foot-tapping music

And this crazy guy was a video game aptly named Admiral Fry Brain.