Some parts of my job I rarely, if ever, talk about. Working on the monthly, annual, and now decennial sales charts is one of those things. There was a lot of math involved for the decennial tables, limited as they are, but before I got to the math there was a lot of thinking. JustContinue reading “I Was Told There Would Be No Math”
Revisiting the Washington That Never Was
You haven’t lived until you’ve digitally clipped mid-19th-century cursive from a scan of a faded and dirty print. This is B.F. Smith’s landscape of Washington, showing projected improvements in the capital city — the Washington Monument, a stone bridge across the Washington City Canal — from 1852. I found this on the Library of CongressContinue reading “Revisiting the Washington That Never Was”
The Cosmic Dance
I went to Big Lots yesterday. I didn’t intend to go to Big Lots — it was T.J. Maxx I wanted to visit — but while at Big Lots I snapped the photo above, of the crescent moon and Venus just after sunset. I wanted to go to T.J. Maxx because I’ve seen reports thatContinue reading “The Cosmic Dance”
Revisiting Swampoodle Grounds
A week and a half ago I discovered Adolph Sachse’s “bird’s eye view” map of Washington, DC, circa 1883-1884, and I was able to find where my ancestors lived in Washington from the Civil War to the mid-1880s. There was something else I was interested in. Swampoodle Grounds. Swampoodle Grounds, also known as Capitol Park,Continue reading “Revisiting Swampoodle Grounds”
Starring Snoopy, a World Series T-Shirt
After writing on Tuesday about an unlicensed Monty Python/Beatles t-shirt that amused me, yesterday saw a package stuffed in my mailbox — an unlicensed Washington Nationals World Series t-shirt. After the Nationals won the World Series, my Facebook feed was filled with ads for unofficial Nats World Series merchandise. Especially unofficial t-shirts. I bought anContinue reading “Starring Snoopy, a World Series T-Shirt”
A Silly Walk Across Abbey Road
My Facebook feed — and yours, too, I’m sure — is filled with ads for bootleg, unlicensed t-shirts and has been for at least three years. I was going to write “months” there instead of “years,” but I remember that, when I was in Chicago on business in 2017, I saw someone wearing an unlicensedContinue reading “A Silly Walk Across Abbey Road”
Exploring an 1883 Map of Washington, DC
A few months ago, the novelist Howard Weinstein posted to Facebook a link to Edward Sachse’s “Bird’s Eye View” map of Baltimore in 1869, and I poured over it, finding the location where my great-great-grandmother and her father lived at the time and the church where my great-grandparents might have married in 1900, as itContinue reading “Exploring an 1883 Map of Washington, DC”
An Angel Tree Package
This morning I turned in my Angel Tree package at work. This year, it was for a seven year-old boy. When I was seven, my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. The book is well-loved and sits, to this day, on the bookshelf in my dining room. I tried to getContinue reading “An Angel Tree Package”
Moonrise at Sunset
I happened to turn around and caught a glimpse of the rising moon through my office window.
The Coldest December
On December 6, 1917, two ships collided in Halifax, Nova Scotia’s harbor. One of the ships, the Mont-Blanc, carrying munitions en route to Europe, caught fire and, shortly after 9 o’clock local time, the cargo exploded, laying waste to the city and surrounding communities, killing (officially) two thousand and injuring nearly 10,000 more, in what’sContinue reading “The Coldest December”