Diversions

Miami Street Photography Festival

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This is a cool event that runs concurrently with the big annual Art Basel art show in Miami Beach in early December. (The MSPF is hosted by a gallery in the Wynwood arts district, which is near downtown Miami rather than Miami Beach and is a fun area to visit during Art Basel.)

The street photography festival is a recent event and has been growing by leaps and bounds, perhaps reflecting the renewed popularity of this type of photography and the fact that there are no other events quite like it. There is a lot of great work on display if you are into this kind of thing — check out the 2012 and 2013 finalists galleries for a sample.

Other street-photography links:

iN-PUBLiC

OBSERVE

Urban Picnic

Street Photographers

Street Photography London

Gypsy Retail in the Autumn

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My daughter and I spent almost all of last Saturday at our booth in the parking lot of a local Beall’s, in the heart of what would pass as the new downtown of Bulverde, Texas if Bulverde could be said to have a downtown of any sort. There is a sort of Old Downtown Bulverde, at the crossroads of Bulverde Hills Drive and Bulverde Road, where the post office is (in a teeny Victorian cottage covered with white-painted gingerbread trim) and around the corner from one of the original settler’s farmsteads, complete with an original stone house and barn now repurposed into an event venue. There is a small airfield nearby, and astonishingly enough, Googlemaps show a polo ground. But the landscape all around is that of the lowland Hill Country low rolling, patched scrubby cedar, and occasional stands of live oaks. Everything – including a perfectly astounding number of single family housing developments are scattered unobtrusively here and there among the hills, the cedar and the oaks.

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History Friday – The Last of Her Ilk

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I was going to write about another mildly notorious woman an imperishably ladylike and competent professional gambler who was a figure of note in her day on the Texas frontier for History Friday, but I noted the departure of Deborah, known to her family as Debo, the last of the notorious Mitfords, from this mortal plane. Yeah, it was in the Daily Mail website, but they had a number of lovely archive pictures of her, taken throughout her life which through no particular fault of her own was spiced with notoriety. Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire which sounds like a made-up title for one of those horrible regency romances was privileged and burdened, I think in about the same degree.

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History Friday: The Southern Belle Spy

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(An archive post for Friday – I wrote this for the Unusual Historicals website last year.)

She was the very last person in the world whom anyone in Richmond, Virginia, would have suspected of being a spy … well, almost the last person, as her abolitionist sympathies were not a secret. But she was a genteel lady of certain years and a very Southern sense of gentlemanly chivalry ensured that her activities went unsuspected and unhampered all during the Civil War. Elizabeth van Lew, if not a classical Southern belle in the Scarlett O’Hara mode was pious, eccentrically addicted to doing good works, and from a wealthy and well-established old Richmond family. Of course she couldn’t possibly be up to anything more than visiting the captive Union officers held as prisoners of war in a comfortless converted tobacco warehouse, bearing genteel gifts of food, books, clothing and writing materials, or being a regular Lady Bountiful towards the families of Richmond’s freed slaves. Everyone knew of her families’ eccentricities her mother was a Quaker from Philadelphia, don’t-cha-know.

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New! The Essential Chicagoboyz Bog-Roll Reserve

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Against the day when the danger of a zombie apocalypse is wiped from the earth…

Why, yes – Chicagoboyz shop at Costco or Sam’s Club. It is always more economical to purchase the staples you know you will need in bulk.