September 2015 – Page 2 – To Hither and Yon

2015 Vacation Destinations: The Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City

For most of my visit to New York City, the changes I saw from my 1988 trip were relatively minor — different stores in Times Square, that sort of thing. The amount of time that had passed didn’t really hit me until, of all things, when I went to the ladies’ room at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine (from here on in, I’ll just call it “St. John the Divine”).

St. John the Divine is an Episcopal cathedral at 110th Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Morningside Heights. The cathedral, begun in 1892, is being built in the medieval style. Rather than putting stone over a steel structure, St. John the Divine is all stone. And this is why I say that it “is being built.” Original estimates of construction were that it would take literally centuries (some sources say as many as 700 years). They hired British stonemasons to come to the United States and train local residents in stonecutting.

Money for construction ran out sometime in the late 2oth century. As a result, St. John the Divine may remain unfinished forever. The scale of the project and the beauty of the building made an impression on me. Alex is taking European (or possibly World, I can’t remember what they’re calling it) History this year and so I insisted on visiting the cathedral so that he could see what the medieval cathedrals looked like in their youth. I recall that there were still stones in the side yard during my first visit, but as they are no longer doing any work on the cathedral, those stones are gone.

As to the scale of the cathedral, St. John the Divine bills itself as the largest cathedral (though Wikipedia puts it just barely second after Seville Cathedral), and the fifth-largest church building (Wikipedia puts it fourth), in the world. I tried several times (until Alex got really bored with the process) to take a good picture showing just how massive the cathedral is. I think the best shot I got was this one:

Aisle of St. John the Divine — One of the aisles of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, New York City

St. John the Divine is accessible to wheelchair users, though they do give some tours which are not wheelchair accessible.

Oh, and about the bathrooms. When I was there in 1988, the restrooms were in a temporary structure. It has been a long time, but I seem to recall the stall doors were plywood. I needed a restroom again this year (I honestly did not say, “I wonder what the restrooms look like these days” and seek them out). I knew which direction they were from my first visit. They are now an apparently permanent part of the building, which was disorienting enough. But they look worn, like they’ve been there, well, for at least a quarter of a century.

National Geographic: National Geographic Partners (The Deal with 21st Century Fox)

Several of the people in my life are upset about the deal, announced on September 10, 2015, that 21st Century Fox now owns a 73% stake in National Geographic. National Geographic has gone on the record as saying that this is an attempt to raise money. They now have nearly a billion dollars to spend funding science and exploration (which, from what I can tell, triples the money available). And that’s a good thing.

The reason people are upset is because of the stake that Rupert Murdoch has in 21st Century Fox. They have termed the 21st Century Fox deal as “Rupert Murdoch just bought National Geographic.” I’ll admit that I don’t like Murdoch. I don’t like what he stands for. I don’t like his politics.

However, he did not “buy National Geographic.” I spent six years as a corporate paralegal, so I know something about how corporations work. As I said before, National Geographic Partners is a partnership with 21st Century Fox having a 73% stake. And from what I’ve seen, Murdoch has a 40% stake in 21st Century Fox (40% of 73% is around 29%, so that’s the amount of control that Murdoch, in particular, would have over National Geographic if he chose to exercise it). This makes him the largest shareholder, I think, and as such, so long as his decisions continue to make money for the shareholders, they aren’t likely to fight him. But 40% doesn’t make him “owner” of the company; if the shareholders who hold the other 60% decided they don’t like the way things are going, they can override him. By the way, for $27.02 as of the close of trading on September 10, you can become a shareholder in 21st Century Fox and have a say, however small, in National Geographic Partners.

Additionally, as of June, 2015, Murdoch is no longer Chief Executive Officer of 21st Century Fox. His son James is now running the company and James’s politics seem to be very different from his father’s. In fact, while researching the “Murdoch now owns National Geographic” question, I found a piece in which James says, of his new position as CEO of 21st Century Fox “I don’t let my politics get involved in my business.” He doesn’t come right out and say that he disagrees with the politics of Fox News, but that sure sounds to me like the disagrees with the politics of Fox News.

One of the things that has my friends upset is that Murdoch is a climate change denier, and one of the focuses of National Geographic is charting the development of climate change. However, James is not a climate change denier. In an interview from 2009 with The Guardian newspaper, James says, “All of the climate prediction models suggest we’re on the worst-case trajectory, and some cases worse than the worst case. That’s my depressing take on it.” He also, by the way, points out that science may be able to fix climate change if we listen to the scientists and give them a chance to do so.

Most of the executive positions at National Geographic will stay with people from National Geographic. The position of Chairman of the Board of Directors will change annually. This first year, the position will be held from someone from National Geographic and if I’m reading the reports correctly, someone from 21st Century Fox will be Chairman next year, then it will revert to someone from National Geographic.

The biggest reason I think that there is no reason to panic right now, however, is that this partnership between National Geographic and 21st Century Fox has actually been an evolving process over nearly 20 years now. National Geographic and 21st Century Fox have been in a partnership producing television shows together since 1997. If Murdoch merely wanted to use National Geographic as a soapbox for climate change denial, we would have seen it already.

Perhaps I’m wrong. If I’ve ever said that I was perfect, then I was wrong (though I do try really hard never to make the same mistake twice). But I don’t believe that this is the end, and that Murdoch is going to have some kind of pernicious influence on the magazine. From where I sit, Murdoch is not even going to really be a part of this at all. He did two things relating to this project. 1. He gave some money to 21st Century Fox 30 years ago (when it was still 20th Century Fox), which 21st Century Fox turned into more money, and then 21st Century Fox gave that money to National Geographic, and 2. he fathered and raised a non-climate-change-denying son whose level of input into the partnership is, at this moment, undefined.

My Travel Memories: Lion Country Safari, Loxahatchee, Florida

Lion Country Safari is a drive-through wild animal park with its primary focus, as the name implies, on the animals of the African savannah. Lion Country Safari was founded in 1967 as an attempt to bring a real safari experience to the people of the United States. The park originally only had a pride of lions, but over the past nearly 50 years the park has grown to over 900 individuals of over 20 species.

Traditionally, the animals have walked free, but safety concerns have led the owners of the park to install fences between the cars and the lions and chimpanzees, in particular.

However, during my visits to Lion Country Safari, at least two during the years before 1977 and one 2002, all of the animals, including the lions, roamed freely through their habitats; today, you can still have that experience with the herbivores such as the zebras and giraffes. On some of our trips, the animals got right up to our car, which is an amazing experience. On others, the animals were farther back in their habitats, so it didn’t really matter if they were free-roaming or not. An animal way back there might as well be behind a fence. You kind of have to take your chances on each visit. Apparently the animals are more active and therefore, more interesting, in the morning and while it is raining, so take that into account when making your plans.

Since Lion Country Safari is a drive-through park, it is as handicap-accessible as your vehicle is. There is now a walk-through park that I don’t seem to recall from other visits. The website for Lion Country Safari says that the walk-through park is designed to be handicap-accessible, though a wheelchair user may need assistance getting into and out of the petting zoo area.

National Geographic, March 2014, Part 2

I thought I wasn’t going to be able to finish this issue prior to the scheduled posting date of September 8. But I did. Whew!

Quicksilver, by Kenneth Brower, photographs by Brian Skerry

Quicksilver is a picture of overfishing, which seems to be a common theme in National Geographic in recent years, told through the population of bluefin tuna. Bluefin tuna live in all of the world’s oceans except, traditionally, for the Arctic Ocean (this has apparently changed in the months since this issue went to press).

Along the way, we see how important bluefin tuna are to Japanese culture. The first bluefin tuna of the season is subject to a bidding war that raises the price far above what a bluefin normally would cost. In 2013, the first bluefin tuna went for $1.76 million. We also watch scientists who are studying bluefin tuna using tracking devices to watch the movements of the fish. Scientists used to think that different populations of bluefin stayed to their own oceans, but the use of tracking devices has put an end to that idea.

Hopefully with proper studying and fishery management, the population of bluefin tuna will rebound and reach numbers that will ensure that people will be able to eat bluefin tuna long into the future.

Star Eater, by Mark Finkel, photographs by Mark A. Garlick

Star Eater starts off on the cheerful note of the expected extinction of Earth’s sun. This made me nervous. Contemplating the death of the universe is a nice thought experiment, I guess, but it’s not really something that makes me comfortable.

Things become a lot less personal in the second paragraph, though. This is when we start to talk about the forces that cause the creation of a black hole.

The rest of the article is about the way that black holes function, only now I’m more confused than ever. In one paragraph, Finkel tells us that black holes “roam the galactic suburbs” and, later, that some are “star-shredding, planet-devouring Godzillas,” but then later, he says “A black hole has no more vacuuming power than a regular star.” I am now thoroughly confused. So there are stars that wander the galaxy and the star-shredding Godzilla would have done it anyhow even if it hadn’t been turned into a black hole?

Then we talk about the relationship between the black hole and time. Finkel tells us that if you were to fall into a black hole, time is so elongated there that we would never see you fall in. You would just be stuck there on the edge of the black hole, from our perspective, “for an infinite amount of time.” But earlier Finkel told us that at the time this magazine went to press, a gas cloud was headed towards the black hole and that we would see a ring of debris form around the edge of the black hole as it eats the cloud. Why will we see the debris of the gas cloud form, but the person on the edge of the black hole would never fall in?

I actually very, very briefly considered studying astronomy at one point, and I’m glad that the consideration was very, very brief, because I’m clearly not smart enough for this.

People of the Horse, by David Quammen, photographs by Erika Larsen

The horse evolved in what is now North America. During the era of the Bering land bridge, some horses moved to Eurasia and then an extinction event happened in North America (perhaps they were hunted to extinction), leaving North America horseless. Horses were domesticated in Eurasia, and then thousands of years later, Christopher Columbus and future colonizers brought horses back to North America, where horses settled in as though they were at home, largely because they were. Many nations of Native Americans embraced them and made them part of their culture. And they are still a major part of Native American culture today.

Quammen gives us a little of the history of the horse, but People of the Horse is largely about the relationship between modern Native Americans and their horses. We meet Toni Minthorn, whose family didn’t have enough money to provide their children with toys. The family had 47 horses, however, which saved Toni’s self-esteem.

People of the Horse goes into the events of the Native American rodeo in great detail. I won’t even try to summarize, because I couldn’t do justice to it without quoting Quammen in detail. However, if you need information on the Native American rodeo and the Indian Relay, this article is definitely a good resource.

Call of the Bloom, by Susan McGrath, photographs by Merlin D. Tuttle

I love bats. Sometimes living in Texas gets me down (particularly when the temperature is over 100 degrees Fahrenheit), but the abundance of bats is definitely a plus. Just yesterday (as I write this; it will post about six days later), Alex and I were in Fort Worth, and we saw the wings of several bats in the parking garage. So, yeah. Bats.

There are numerous species of night-blooming flower and if you think about it, with nothing to pollinate them, the flowers would have died out. Sometimes the pollinator is a moth or the rare nocturnal variety of bee, but quite often the pollinator is a bat.

Call of the Bloom goes into the mechanics of how nectar-drinking bats find the flowers that produce the nectar, including having dish-shaped leaves that bounce the sound of the bat’s cry back at them strongly. We also see how those flowers have evolved to make it easy for the bat to get the nectar out While the bat is drinking the nectar, the stamen will drop pollen onto the bat, and the pollen sticks in the bat’s fur, where it remains until it falls off into the next flower. Interestingly, while many night-blooming flowers have smells that are pleasant to the human nose, the flowers that attract bats don’t necessarily smell so good to us. McGrath describes the smell as being like cabbage, sour milk, and skunk, among other smells.

The Mexican free-tailed bat is the bat that summers here in San Antonio, and they are known to drink some nectar. The night-blooming cereus, which does have a pleasant smell to the human nose, is one of the plants that bats pollinate.. I am tempted to get one for my front yard (so that the bats don’t get into conflict with my dog) and see if I can attract some bats next summer.

2015 Vacation Destinations: Central Park Zoo, Central Park, New York City

I’ve known that there was a zoo in Central Park for probably as long as I’ve known that there was a Central Park. I wasn’t sure where it was, but I suspected it was close to the center, pretty much where it turns out that the reservoir is. I don’t know why I imagined it was there. Partly it might be because it seemed that a zoo should take up a pretty decent amount of space, I think, and tucked away in a corner didn’t seem like it would be big enough for a zoo.

The movie Madagascar didn’t help that notion, by the way. Animals like lions, zebras, hippos, and giraffes need lots of space. According to the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Lion (Panthera leo) Care Manual, a lion needs at least 0.22 acres. That’s just a little smaller than the average lot size for a home in the American suburbs. Turns out that the Central Park Zoo doesn’t have any lions, zebras, hippos, or giraffes. There isn’t enough room for them. Just about the only parts of the zoo in the movie that look like they do in real life are the sea lion pool, which really is in the center of the zoo, and the clock with the arches underneath it. The clock, called the Delacorte Clock, is off to one side, rather in the middle. In fact, while researching this post, I found that the zoo from the movie is more similar to the zoo as it was before they remodeled it in the 1980s. The brick buildings with the arches and the enclosures with bars are very prominent in pictures from before 1980.

The history of the Central Park Zoo goes back to the mid-19th century when a bear cub was given to a messenger boy who worked in the park. Eventually, park employees collected other animals, and the city formed a menagerie. There was nothing like a menagerie or a zoo in the original plans for the park, which the architects, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, had made. Vaux suggested the menagerie be moved to the perimeter of the park between 77th and 81st Streets, where the American Museum of Natural History stands today. Olmsted suggested putting the zoo in the North Meadow. They broke ground for the new menagerie, but after the first foundations were laid, construction stopped and the menagerie ended up in the building that had previously held the arsenal for the New York State Militia, in the southeast corner of the park.

I wonder if there are any kind of cropmarks visible where those old foundations were laid. I recently had the experience of seeing a sort of cropmark (though from the ground level) in Lockhart State Park, and can’t help but think that there might just be some kind of difference in the grass of the North Meadow where the old foundations are under the dirt.

In 1934, the haphazard menagerie that had accumulated in Central Park was replaced by a new six-acre zoo, which was constructed in less than a year. The centerpiece of the new zoo was a sea lion pool, which is still there today. The sea lion pool was unusual for the era, because the designers looked at the way that sea lions live and designed it accordingly. These days, ideally every zoo has habitats designed in a similar way (though the San Antonio Zoo has fallen behind just a bit on that score — more on that in a future post).

In the 1980s, they renovated the zoo, getting rid of the old enclosures with the bars and designing new habitats that were more in keeping with the ways the animals live in the wild. This is also the era in which the zoo got rid of all of its large animals, sending them to zoos that had more space and could better care for them. The only large animals they kept were a pair of polar bears, each of which were euthanized when they developed inoperable tumors. The old polar bear habitat was later renovated and now houses two grizzly bears.

The current zoo, which opened in 1988, houses over 130 species in its relatively small area. One of the most popular, from what I saw when I was there, were the penguins. There was barely room to move in the penguin house and this is likely for two reasons. One, of course, is, as mentioned before, Madagascar (though we never did see the penguins smile and wave). The other is that for a time the Central Park Zoo’s penguin habitat had a gay couple, Roy and Silo, who made the news and also were the subject of a children’s book, And Tango Makes Three, about Roy and Silo raising a chick together (which also made the news). Roy and Silo split up when Silo fell for a new, female, penguin.

The zoo layout is kind of erratic. Visitors enter from the southwestern side and then the visitors go around the central part of the zoo, the Central Garden, in a clockwise direction. There are a whole bunch of exhibits behind the western part of the Central Garden. Somehow, following the natural flow of the zoo ended up with us missing the turn for the red panda exhibit, so once we were done with the penguins (which should have been the last stop), we looked at the map and had to backtrack to the turnoff for the pandas. Overall, though, it is a very nice zoo considering the space they have available (I do wish the red pandas had a little more space). The layout and traffic pattern of the zoo, combined with the fact that we had to backtrack, led me to completely miss the Arsenal Building that used to be the home of the menagerie. I didn’t even get an accidental picture of it.

I quite liked the Tropic Zone building. It had a lot of birds and also had a nice little display of short-tailed fruit bats. I love bats. It’s always fun to watch them fly, and they eat mosquitoes. Anything that eats mosquitoes is my friend.

The Central Park Zoo is quite hilly. This means that handicapped visitors might need additional assistance to get to some of the exhibits, and others might be off-limits entirely, depending on the wheelchair user’s stamina (and possibly his or her concern for the laws of gravity). The Central Garden and all of the buildings of the Central Park Zoo are wheelchair accessible.

References:

Accessibility – Central Park Zoo

Central Park Zoos: NYC Parks

National Geographic: March 2014, Part 1

Okay, so I can write up whole issues at a time, but I really cannot do justice to that many stories at once. So I guess I am going to go back to doing two or three articles at a time. If someday I am far enough ahead that I can paste several posts together into one entire issue, then I’ll do that. Either way, though, from now on, the most articles I will write up at one time will probably be three, no matter how they end up being posted.

Syria: The Chaos of War: Damascus: Will the Walls Fall? by Anne Barnard, photographs by Andea Bruce

That titles’s a mouthful. I’m not sure if Syria: The Chaos of War is going to be a series, or is just the title of this section of this issue, so I’m putting it in the title section here just in case.

The Syrian Civil War and/or Syrian Revolution, depending on whom you talk to, has been going on since 2011. This article is a look at what was the current state of the capital city, Damascus, in March 2014.

Damascus, the site of the conversion of the Apostle Paul, has always prided itself on being cosmopolitan. In the city, Jews, Christians, and Muslims have lived and worked in relative peace for centuries. That peace is now being threatened by the ongoing war. As this article went to press, no fighting was taking place within the city, but the military was stationed in the city and was shelling the suburbs. In words and pictures, we see the people of the Old City of Damascus living their lives as best they can in the middle of a war zone.

Syria: The Chaos of War: Journey Without End, photographs by Lynsey Addario, text by Carolyn Butler

Journey Without End is a pictorial of refugees fleeing the war in Syria. We see refugees in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, and there is a map showing where in each country the refugees have settled.

Where the Greenstone Grows, by Kennedy Warne, photographs by Michael Melford

In Where the Greenstone Grows, Warne and Melford take us to Te Wahipounamu, part of the Te Wahipounamu-South West New Zealand World Heritage Area. We get a glimpse into the history and culture of the area, focusing on the nephrite jade, known in Maori as “pounamu,” that gives the area its name. Warne talks about the type of nephrite jade known as inanga pounamu, which takes its name from whitebait fish that are a delicacy in New Zealand and also the connection of the World Heritage Area to Gondwana, the southern part of the land mass known as Pangaea.

I am saving up for a trip to New Zealand (our goal is to go in 2019), and Alex is something of a rock hound. I suspect we may be taking a trip to the beaches of Te Wahiponamu.

My Travel Memories: Food at the Magic Kingdom, Walt Disney World, Florida

On my first and probably second trips to Walt Disney World (assuming those trips would have been around first and third grades), we mostly ate crummy hamburger and hot dog type food from the “quick service” outlets like the oddly named Pinocchio Village Haus.

Then when I was in I think it was fourth grade (I really wish we could find those photo albums!) my teacher mentioned that there was an actual sit-down restaurant upstairs in the castle. This was the also oddly named King Stefan’s Banquet Hall. I say that this name was odd because King Stefan was Sleeping Beauty’s father. Cinderella’s father didn’t have a name, and besides that, he wasn’t the king and wouldn’t have belonged in a castle. As the 21st Century approached, the suits at Disney apparently decided that a woman could be the host of her own damn banquet hall and the name was changed to Cinderella’s Royal Table.

My teacher told me that we had to have reservations some number of months ahead of time, so one of my parents (likely my mom) got on the phone and made them. And it was wonderful. I was kind of an unusual child. Most “kiddie foods” like hot dogs did little for me, unless they were very good, and I was a teenager by the time the chicken nugget became a common thing (discovering that one of my friends loved McNuggets may well have damaged our relationship permanently). I did like fried chicken, but it had to be an identifiable part.

I loved King Stefan’s Table, but it was expensive, so it was a one-time thing. Fortunately, EPCOT was on the horizon by then, and that would change my eating-at-Disney habits for good. But that’s a story for 1982 and not for Before 1977.

I do have one last Magic Kingdom eating experience to share. It fits in with the theme of “food at the Magic Kingdom,” but doesn’t fit in chronologically. When my now-ex and I went to Walt Disney World in 1992, we bought a cookbook called Cooking with Mickey, Volume II. This book had a recipe called “Freedom Fighter Chicken.” My first thought was that sounded more like a superhero from a funny animal comic than an entree, but it’s really good. It has chicken and vegetables in a sauce made from white wine and white wine Worcestershire sauce. Freedom Fighter Chicken comes from the Liberty Tree Tavern in the Magic Kingdom, which neither my folks nor I had ever noticed was there during our 1970s visits, but I’m pretty sure it must have been, and it probably served real food at the time. In 2003, my folks, my now-ex, my son, and I all went to the Liberty Tree Tavern for dinner. Freedom Fighter Chicken is apparently a lunch menu item, because dinner is a family-style Thanksgiving dinner, which, as one would expect, was a little steep, but very good thus worth the money.