Belle Isle Memorial

  

Belle Isle -- Beautiful Island Indeed

In the middle of the Detroit River -- between the Detroit waterfront and the Riverside Drive in Windsor, Ontario -- Belle Isle is a small island beloved by the people of Detroit. 

It was therefore the perfect place to memorialize Detroiters who have been lost to the Coronavirus pandemic. It seems especially fitting that the memorial would take the same form as many other ceremonies this year -- a car parade. 

Lagniappe

Near the end of the story, people wax nostalgic about the radio program of Martha Jean McQueen. Her prayerful pronouncements voiced over the music of Rev. James Cleveland are typical of the excerpts I could find online. 

EVOnline at NERC 2020 - Join us Nov 2

 

The EarthView team is proud to be part of the NERC 2020 online conference for social studies educators throughout the northeastern United States and beyond. The 50th anniversary of this illustrious gathering is taking place fully online. EarthView has been featured at several real-world NERC meetings, and we are very happy to continue the tradition.

As the awkward staging of the welcome message above suggests, Covid-19 safety was a key consideration as we made EVOnline field trip that will be part of our session on Monday, November 2. Please join us -- registration is free but is required by October 26 (one week in advance). 

The webinar session begins with a "field trip" comprising about a dozen brief presentations using the EarthView globe and some of our EarthMap giant floor maps. This will be followed by a discussion of the use of such maps in learning geography and social studies, with Q&A moderated by Andrea Weng, the president of our BSU Geography Club. We will conclude with our team's recommendation of resources for online learning at all levels.

A link to the entire presentation will be made available on this blog post after the event; it will include links to individual segments of the field trip, for use in classrooms and by those teaching and learning at home.

See the NERC 2020 page for registration and the World Beyond Borders page for details our session. Please register (for free) by October 26 to receive the Zoom link for our session and to arrange for PDP credits if needed. 

Ten Shillings, Six Pence: 10/6

My favorite librarian habitually checks the National Day calendar, looking for things that might be fun to celebrate, and this often inspires special meals in our household. It also leads to odd discoveries, such as the Mad Hatter Day.

Chapeleiro Maluco

The "holiday" began in Colorado in 1986, simply as an excuse for "crazy" or whimsical behaviors, especially involving the wearing of hats. When I posted this photo online, a friend in Brazil immediately commented with the Portuguese version of the term, and some virtual chuckles followed.

As detailed in a Mad Hatter Day article in the Panache section of Economic Times, the manic character is associated with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, though he never used that exact name for his character the Hatter. The article explains why today's date is used to celebrate the character. 

It errs, however, in associating the "madness" of haberdashers with their use of lead; mercury was the real culprit, as mentioned in the video above. It is an easy mistake to have made: both are metals known to be neurotoxins, and in reality the toxicity of mercury is gravely serious. In fact, I am justifying the time I am spending on this blog post by the fact that I am sharing it with my Environmental Regulations class later this morning. We will make some comparisons between mercury and dichlordiphenyltrichloroethane, which we have been studying for the past few weeks. 

Mercury and DDT are different in many ways, but both are subject to biomagnification in fatty tissue and were in use for decades before their toxicity was understood. Both exemplify the limitations of free markets when managing environmental risks.

Coffee Creek Quality

 
One-minute excerpt of S5E1 of Schitt's Creek, a fair-use clip for educational purposes. May be blocked in some locations; may not be used on monetized sites.

"Coffee Movie!" or "Library Movie!" are expressions we use in the Hayes-Boh household to express our joy when encountering our favorite subjects in a film or a television show. A fantasy sabbatical project of mine, for example, would be to string together all of the coffee references in M*A*S*H; my favorite librarian even has a television tag for entries in her famous "Library" Books blog.

Our pandemic television roster now includes Schitt's Creek, a series to which we are late arrivals. The low-brow veneer covers some rather clever humor in a series that is essentially an inversion of The Beverly Hillbillies. Some scenes are set in a café, but the one that caught our attention takes place in the lobby of the very modest motel that is more central to the series. 

John first mentions coffee as nothing more than a caffeine vehicle -- fuel for a tired person. Stevie tries to discourage him, suggesting that even his low expectations of quality will not be met. 

Coffee quality matters, even when expectations are low. Coffee passes through 50 or more steps from seed to cup, and choices at each step affect quality. Sometimes I can tell that nearly every step went awry.

On June 26 of this year, I was pleased to be part of a wide-ranging discussion of coffee quality with two worker-owners of one of my favorite coffee companies: Equal Exchange. This was a public presentation via Zoom, for citizen-consumers all over the United States. If you have not already seen it, I invite you to watch the archive video, as we talk about the positive correlation between the relationships with farmers and the final quality in the cup. 

I provide links and put the discussion in context with two separate blog posts -- Fair Trade on my Aw, Professor blog and Micro Quality on this one. 

Virtual Café

I try to learn something new about coffee every day. Friends who grow coffee or are otherwise involved in the coffee industry often help to make this happen -- as do those who have studied coffee with me. Sometimes they recommend a new café or ask me a question to which I do not know the answer. Most recently it was a coffee alum sharing this video and asking "what is this contraption?"

@quincylk

Your 4th @ owes you a coffee at ##QuincysTavern! ☕️☺️ ##quincys ##coffee ##asmrtiktoks ##asmr ##asmrvideo ##goodvibes ##dnd ##dungeonsanddragons ##cottagecore

♬ Wouldn't It Be Nice - Ukulele Version - Acoustic Guitar Revival

I had never seen one of these, but told her that it is similar to a vacuum press. These are more popular in Japan than in the U.S., though I do have one. It is shown in somewhat improper use in the 1961 "This Is Coffee" video that I show in my classes. But this is clearly more complicated -- on my second viewing I realized that it is, among other things, a steampunk variant on the usual model.

To learn more, I decided to find the café online. For a while, my endeavors were quite confusing. Eventually, I learned that the cafè is an extension of an elaborate persona developed by the barista shown above. The Dungeons & Dragons reference is not immediately clear, but to those whose misspent youth included countless hours gathered around graph paper "dungeons" and rolling dice, the elaborate nature of this faux café does seem a reasonable outgrowth of the game. 

I don't think we I can replicate this coffee, though I'm sure one of my industry friends will tell me if I can. Meanwhile, the virtual tavern is a delightful place to visit for wit and insight on many topics. 

Lagniappe

As I was closing some of the many open tabs in my browser, I noticed that my search for "vacuum press" has also revealed the name of this contraption. It is a balance syphon coffee maker and it is available from a certain global retailer. I will see if it is available elsewhere before I decide whether to add one to my fleet of coffee makers.

Not So Long Ago

 

The image above has been circulating online this year. If someone can tell me the original source, I would love to add a citation. I could spend the rest of this week commenting on it, because it relates to so much of what is wrong in the United States today. I will, in fact, no doubt be editing this post. 

But for now I am using it to refer to one of the many ways in which the "get over it" response to racial injustice is wrong: the practice of redlining. I have heard the term for many years, but learned only recently that maps were published with actual red lines on them. The importance of this practice is included in a PowerPoint file posted by Shane Wiegand for the Landmark Society.

More specifically, a digital atlas of such maps has been published as Mapping Inequality by the University of Richmond. This is a very important resource that details the practice and allows users to see how specific urban neighborhoods were characterized for the purpose of lending authorities during the 1930s. It is impossible to suppose that such stark definitions of desirable and undesirable neighborhoods could be without consequence today.

#FightEvilReadBooks

On the eve of autumn -- just as the air crispened and my favorite librarian updated our living-room altar for the season -- I chanced upon this image of the 2020 edition of the #FightEvilReadBooks t-shirt. Yes, it apparently is a series, one of many nifty items for bibliophiles offered by Out of Print.

The design serves as an important reminder -- and in these benighted times we need these often -- that the best antidote to ignorance and bias is simply to read well and read broadly. National hero Rep. John Lewis (taken from us this summer, a week before the loss of my own mother) put it well when receiving the National Book Award: Just Read (please listen to his words, even if you are already convinced).

Reading is also the most reliable pathway to good writing, as I detail on my Writing Tips page.

For more specific advice on reading in an ecosystem designed to thwart genuine learning, I recommend the lessons from top journalists that I describe in my 2017 Emotional Skepticism post.

Fire Resistance

Forests have evolved with fire. Humans entered forested landscapes very late in those complicated relationships, with results that have ranged from problematic to catastrophic. In California, for example, more land burned this week in early September than in all of last year. 

Fires have been. getting more dangerous, expensive, and common. This story gives the best quick overview of how this situation has come about, why it cannot be solved easily, and which human factors can be addressed. 

Five minutes is not enough time to thoroughly explain all of this, but sharp NPR reporters found the right experts to introduce the problem and some remedies.

To learn more, please explore some of the other forest fire posts on this blog or take my Land Protection class (GEOG 332) in Fall 2021 to learn more. 

Acknowledging Lands

I have lived in many parts of Turtle Island:

• Pauquunaukit (Wampanoag)
• Carrizo/Comecrudo & Coahuiltecan
• Hohokam, O'odham, Sobaipuri, Tohono O'odham (Papago)
• Adena, Hopewell, Miami, Shawandasse Tula (Shawanwaki/Shawnee), Wazhazhe Manzhan (Osage)
• Piscataway
• Kaw (Kansa), Kiikaapoi (Kickapoo), Očeti Sakówin (Sioux), Wazhazhe Manzhan (Osage)
• Manahoac
• Nacotchtank (Anacostan), Piscataway

These are the original inhabitants of all of the places I have resided in the United States, known by their current names (in reverse order of my time residing in each):

• Bridgewater and Fairhaven, Massachusetts
• Pharr, Texas
• Tucson, Arizona
• Oxford, Ohio
• Catonsville and Annapolis, Maryland
• Kansas City, Missouri
• Nokesville, Chantilly, and Herndon, Virginia
• Washington, District.of Columbia

I highlighted in blue the names that were familiar to me at the time I lived in some of the places. As a non-indigenous resident of Massachusetts, Ohio, and Arizona, I have been aware of some but not all of the indigenous people of those places. In Arizona, I had occasional indirect contact with Tohono O'odham people during ceremonies, including one to which the public was invited on their reservation land and another that was an ecumenical service at my church there. In Massachusetts, I have had the privilege of much more direct contact and friendship with Wampanoag neighbors and colleagues. 

Sachem Rock in what is now West Bridgewater, Massachusetts

In Ohio, the university I attended and the lake where I did my master's thesis were named for the Miami people, but the people themselves had long ago been forcibly removed to Florida (not to the part where the relatively new city by that name is located) and then to reservations elsewhere. To its shame, the university used a slur for its team names, and alumni who will not accept the new Redhawks name can still find the old logo in online stores. 

I notice two things about the geography of the indigenous land uses. First, 

I found the names of indigenous people associated with each of my homes by sending the common names by text to 907-312-5085. More information, caveats, and a Facebook Messenger option are posted on the Land Acknowledgement page established by Code for Anchorage (Dena'ina Elnena).

Plantation Discourses

The story of Dutch podcast partners Peggy Bouva and Maartje Duin began with an awkward conversation about the connections between their families. Both live in Holland, but Duin -- a journalist -- discovered that they were connected by a plantation in the former Dutch colony of Suriname.

They discuss their podcast, their friendship, and their travels together in a recent appearance with Joanna Kakissis on NPR's Morning Edition. (Careful listeners will notice that "slaves" is used as a noun in the introduction to the conversation, though "enslaved persons" is used in the conversation itself. This reflects a growing recognition that it is dehumanizing to identify people solely by the bad circumstances or crimes that have affected them.)

Although the podcast itself appears to be available only in Dutch at the moment, Google Translate offers some sense of the summary of each episode of The Plantation of Our Ancestors in other languages, and includes links to other resources, some of which are available in English. These include Mapping Slavery NL, which portrays historical places relating to slavery on the map of the Dutch colonial empire.

The description of the mapping project highlights on advantage Dutch and some other European folks have over those of us in the United States: they know that their countries were part of the metropol, that is, at the centers of global empires. Denial of its imperial nature is a treasured myth in my country, even though no empire has ever been bigger.

As pro-slavery statues are toppled by vote, by edict, or by protestors, some decry the loss of history. In most cases, however, the history remains to be uncovered, whatever happens to icons of bronze men on bronze horses. As we finally grapple seriously with the ongoing implications of slavery, conversations such as those between these Bouva and Duin are essential. 

Lagniappe 

Even at my seemingly far remove, I have derived a benefit from the ill-gotten glories of Holland's trafficking in humans. Among the artists supported by that immense wealth are both Rembrandt and Vermeer. My answer to the Getty Art Challenge of 2020 was a recreation of Vermeer's The Geographer. 

My entry in the Getty Art Challenge, special edition for Pride Week.