The best thing about this mural is the way the cigarette smoke...

... continues beyond the door onto the wall and around the corner.

I framed the image from a Google street view in Alicante, Spain.

What's happening, Dnipro???

If you're wondering why I'm Google-Street-Viewing around Dnipro, read the next post.

"In 2015, Seattle cleaned up a 20-year-old 'gum wall' that had become a local landmark. The job took workers an estimated 130 hours to fill 94 buckets with 2,350lb of gum..."

"... but the respite didn’t last long: according to the Seattle Times, a flash mob began to 're-gum' the wall two days later."

From "Sticky situation: Mexico City's sisyphean battle with chewing gum/Streets across the world are littered with gum, and although many cities have tried and failed to eradicate these sticky circles, Mexico City continues to wage this seemingly unwinnable war" in The Guardian.

The photo at the link bears witness to the fun of the street art that is The Gum Wall.

I looked up the address so I could find it in Google Street View:

I look up an address of great 19th century importance and am astonished to see that it is one block from where I used to live.

I had no idea. And it looks so nondescript today. I took this screen shot from Google Street View:



And yet, what was important about it was at the basement level, and you had to enter it through that hatchway in the pavement that you can see in my Google grab. That is, it was inconspicuous in its heyday.

(The place is named and Wikipedia-linked at the end of the previous post. I made a new post to highlight this amazing photograph and the strangeness of my proximity to it... half a lifetime ago.)

"He liked packing up and leaving just like that, going west. He liked getting a role that would take him somewhere he really didn’t want to be..."

"... but where he would wind up taking in its strangeness; lonely fodder for future work.... Sam promised me that one day he’d show me the landscape of the Southwest, for though well-travelled, I’d not seen much of our own country. But Sam was dealt a whole other hand, stricken with a debilitating affliction. He eventually stopped picking up and leaving.... Long, slow days passed.... Sam walked to his bed and lay down and went to sleep, a stoic, noble sleep.... I was far away, standing in the rain before the sleeping lion of Lucerne, a colossal, noble, stoic lion carved from the rock of a low cliff.... A long time ago, Sam sent me a letter. A long one, where he told me of a dream that he had hoped would never end. 'He dreams of horses,' I told the lion. 'Fix it for him, will you? Have Big Red waiting for him, a true champion. He won’t need a saddle, he won’t need anything.'..."

Patti Smith writes about Sam Shepard (in The New Yorker).

It was interesting reading that today. I love both Patti Smith and Sam Shepard, but I was just reading — also in The New Yorker, the July 31st issue — an essay called "Can Poetry Change Your Life?" by Louis Menand that said something pretty mean about Patti Smith's writing:

A writer with a playlist of culture heroes must also have a list of the undeserving, the fake, and the fallen, and [Michael Robbins, in "Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music."] does not disappoint us. He writes of the poet James Wright, “It is easy to feel that, if fetal alcohol syndrome could write poetry, it would write this poetry.” He suggests that Robert Hass “has made a career out of flattering middlebrow sensibilities with cheap mystery.” Of Charles Simic: “If the worst are full of passionate intensity, Simic would seem to be in the clear.”

He calls Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” “wimpy crap.” He says that Patti Smith’s memoir “Just Kids” is “highly acclaimed despite her apparent belief that serious writing is principally a matter of avoiding contractions.” His reaction to Neil Young’s memoir is “It’s depressing to learn that one of your heroes writes like a composition student aiming for the earnest tone of a public service announcement.”

I don't know what you think of that writing in Smith's tribute to Shepard, but I think there are about 13 contractions in that short essay. If I were in the mood to imitate Smith's lofty, arty style, I'd blithely, slyly drift from talking about contractions of the 2-words-are-one-word type to an earnest metaphor involving the contractions of childbirth. But I'm just about never in that mood. I'm more in the mood to look up "the sleeping lion of Lucerne" and see if I can get it in Google Street View.

Yes. Here it is:

"Because of Bob’s mixed blood, he was often teased as 'the little yellow boy' or 'the German boy.' He was described as shy, resourceful, and clever."

"In 1957, Marley and his mother moved to Kingston, settling in a dense, ramshackle neighborhood referred to as Trench Town. Marley fell in with a crowd that dreamed of making music. He formed a group with Neville (Bunny Wailer) Livingston, Peter Tosh, Beverley Kelso, and Junior Braithwaite. They eventually called themselves the Wailers, and their sound fused American-style soul harmonies with the island’s jumpy ska rhythms. Under the guidance of Joe Higgs, a singer and producer, the Wailers were a local sensation by the mid-sixties. But island stardom brought little financial security. After moving briefly to Wilmington, Delaware, where his mother had relocated, Marley returned to the Wailers in 1969, just in time for a revolution in Jamaican music: the jolting, horn-inflected styles of ska and rocksteady were slowing down. Reggae was the new craze."

From "Manufacturing Bob Marley/A new oral history shows just how much of his story is up for grabs," an article in The New Yorker (about this book, "So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley").

There are many interesting things in that article, but the most interesting thing to me was that Bob Marley lived in Wilmington, Delaware in the 1960s. I look up his address — 2312 Tatnall Street — and find it in Google Street View:



Google calculates how far that was from where I lived — 5.5 miles. I left in 1964, and he didn't arrive until 1965.

50 years ago today: Day 1 of the 12th Street Riot.

Wikipedia has the history of the Detroit riot that would go on for 5 days. There were 43 deaths, 1,189 injured, and 7,231 arrested. Ending the riot took the Michigan Army National Guard (sent in by Governor George W. Romney) and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions of the United States Army (sent by President Lyndon B. Johnson). This is the account of the first day, 50 years ago:

In the early hours of Sunday (3:45 a.m.), July 23, 1967, Detroit police officers raided the unlicensed weekend drinking club in the office of the United Community League for Civic Action, above the Economy Printing Company, at 9125 12th Street. They expected a few revelers inside, but instead found a party of 82 blacks celebrating the return of two local GIs from the Vietnam War. The police decided to arrest everyone present. While they were arranging for transportation, a sizable crowd of onlookers gathered on the street. Later, in a memoir, Walter Scott III, a doorman whose father was running the raided blind pig, took responsibility for starting the riot by inciting the crowd and throwing a bottle at a police officer.

At the Greenhouse Café...

... you can talk about anything you want.

(And here's where I encourage you to use The Althouse Amazon Portal when you do your shopping.)

"He's not welcome here. You're in working class Paris now. He'll be at the Élysée, at the Eiffel Tower, he's not going to come here."

Said a Parisian man, interviewed by NBC, blogged here. So I thought I'd take today's virtual walk beginning at the place where NBC said this man was standing, which was the Barbes-Rochechouart metro station.

The Black Ball:



Pussy's:



Royal Food:

"I heard everybody saying it needs to be cut, it needs to be cut. Why doesn't someone get a mower and cut it?"

Said 64-year-old Jordan Wenzel Sr., who has been fined $500 for mowing the lawn in Luther Parker Cemetery in Muskego, Wisconsin.

A sign outside the cemetery asks people not to mow. City officials want to keep the native wildflowers and prairie grasses on the graves like they would have been during the Civil War. The area is an official designated natural area and the municipality wants to keep it that way. But a Veterans group thinks the vegetation shows neglect. In April WISN 12 News reported on how The Sons of Union Veterans of the Civil War is suing the city for not taking care of the graves.

Here's an article from back in April about the lawsuit:

Under Wisconsin law, veterans' graves must "receive proper and decent care" from cemetery owners. The lawsuit filed in Waukesha County Circuit Court Tuesday is seeking a declaratory judgment on whether the way Muskego is caring for the cemetery is proper and decent....
"We'd like them to clean it up and honor these veterans' graves. [Homer Clark and Jonathan W. Smiley] died in battle. Their bodies were embalmed and shipped back home and buried there and we believe this is a desecration of their graves," [said Bob Koenecke, [leader of the Wind Lake chapter of Sons of Union Veterans]....

Muskego has never mowed the grass at the cemetery since taking it over in the mid-1960s; the land is considered a natural area that features Big Bluestem Prairie Grass, Indiangrass, Culver's Root, White Wild Indigo and Shooting Star wildflowers, Muskego city forester Tom Zagar said. To move the plants to another green area in the city would not be the same because it's a remnant prairie and not reconstructed prairie....

"It's unfortunate that they couldn't understand the important context of the historic vegetation around them. To wear the uniform was a tribute, the guns were a tribute, (and) we felt the plants were a tribute," [Muskego city forester Tom] Zagar said.

Which of these statements is closest to how you feel about this problem?

Wenzel's a hero. It's wrong to fine him.

I applaud Wenzel's civil disobedience, but he must pay the fine. The city should lose the lawsuit, because it is not taking "proper and decent" care of the graves as required by state law.

I'm charmed by Wenzel, but what he did was wrong. Nevertheless, the city should lose the lawsuit.

Let the people decide whether the cemetery should be mowed. Don't sue the city. If your idea of how to care for the graves is the best, it should be able to win in the political arena. If you can't get the majority of the people to want to change the policy, it shouldn't change.

The city has chosen the best policy. This is remnant prairie, long cared for as prairie, and respecting its history is in harmony with respecting Civil War history. It should win the lawsuit, and it is right to fine Wenzel.

This is remnant prairie, so the city should not even be permitted to mow, even if the majority were convinced that mowing is better. I'd be happy if the court interpreted the state law to mean that "proper and decent" care makes prairie preservation mandatory.

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: The cemetery is smaller than you may be picturing. Here are 2 pictures of the site I made using Google Street View from 2 different points of view:





AND: Poll results:

Canadian man killed by the whale he saved.

"They got the whale totally disentangled and then some kind of freak thing happened and the whale made a big flip.... This is something he loved and there's no better feeling than getting a whale untangled, and I know how good he was feeling after cutting that whale clear."

That's one for the (grossly overinflated) annals of Died Doing What He Loved. I say grossly overinflated for reasons you can easily see at that last link, which goes to a Google News search for that phrase. It includes, to give the most vivid example, a worker who died using a water-blaster to clean out the slag in a tank at a power plant.

The phrase also appears in a context you probably already know: "Pompeii Victim Apparently Died Doing What He Loved." It's grisly humor, and I was going to say that after 2000+ years, people retain no connection, no empathy, but millions of people experience genuine empathy contemplating the crucifixion of Jesus, and I remember when I first saw the casts of the victims at Pompeii and felt real empathy.

I took a moment to reflect among the remains of Pompeii. Here's a photograph from my mental journey:

At the Moscow Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

I'm not in Moscow, of course, just doing selections from Google Street View.

And here's where I encourage you to use The Althouse Amazon Portal.

One more:

At the Red Square Café...

... I've got another photograph, so you get another café. The photo is a selection from Google Street View. I'm not in Moscow, of course. But I'm thinking about Moscow.

And, one more time: The Althouse Amazon Portal. It's also a great place to visit virtually.

In the Moscow marketplace.

2 selections from Google Street View. I'm exploring Moscow because Russia is much in the news today. Here at Meadhouse, we were watching CNN and MSNBC — so many happy, even exultant faces. It was a veritable feast, TREASON! was on the menu, and the hosts were encouraging the guests to go ahead and order that most expensive item. The salivation was audible.

At the Moscow Mess Café...

... you can talk about things that don't already have posts this morning. The Don Jr. email issue already has 2 posts, so please go to one of those to talk about that. But I did choose Moscow as the place formy Google Street View grab. I needed a picture to amuse you and mark the location of a "café." I like photos of things that are kind of messed up, even though I like things to be clean and orderly in real life. But real life isn't like that, so it's best not to nurture too much of a fetish about simplicity and neatness.

Anyway, I have to remind you that it's a "Prime Day" at Amazon, so it's an especially good time to use The Althouse Amazon Portal.

At the Belmarket Café...

... park your scooter and come in! Talk about whatever you like (and consider using The Althouse Amazon Portal)

***

The Google grab is from Trieste, which has a fascinating history that I learned about only after looking at a map and saying "Trieste looks like it should be in Slovenia."

First impression — Slovenia and Hamburg.

One thing I like to do in Google Street View is pick a general place (perhaps something related to news I've been following) and drop in the quite randomly. I'm intending to look around, but it's uncanny how often I love the very first thing I see.

Yesterday, I parachuted into Slovenia — I was thinking of the First Lady — and this was the first sight:



Today — with the G-20 business — I dropped into Hamburg, Germany, and saw this lone, stately figure. I'd call this Arrangement in Blue and Red No.1 (if you'd get the reference):

At the Red Car Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

And please, if you're doing some shopping, use The Althouse Amazon Portal.

Thanks to all who enjoy anything about this blog — the nanas of Kazakhstan, the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the geographically puzzling forest, the ripping into MSM propaganda, the live-feed of Trump in Poland, the history of the Free and Independent Republic of Frestonia (just to name this morning's topics).

In the golden forest...

... where in the world are we, and what would we see from this geographic point if we turned around?

The photo is just a Google Street View grab that I made yesterday.

Later, I will give you another Google grab that answers my question.

ADDED: Here's the other view:



The location is Kazakhstan. Somewhere in Kazakhstan. It's a big place, and I'm sorry I didn't record the name of the city. I'm not engaged in a Geoguessr-type activity. It's an exercise in photography, not geography.

Street view: Dakar.

A Google grab I made a few days ago. I liked the colors, the painting, the mystery.