tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-90069166913256218712012-05-31T06:17:44.675-04:00O.T.I.S.: Odd Things I've Seenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07550697553375558251noreply@blogger.comBlogger233125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9006916691325621871.post-81070048655929846092012-05-29T18:45:00.001-04:002012-05-29T18:45:46.670-04:00

B18 Bomber Crash Site 05.29.2012 Woodstock, NH   A good hike will include majestic views of nature, encounters with non-confrontational wildlife, and a sense of distance away from the civilized world. A great hike, on the other hand, will include all that plus the twisted wreckage of a 70-year old bomber crash…like at Mount Waternomee in New Hampshire...Mystic Aquarium 05.23.2012

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May 29, 2012 — A good hike will include majestic views of nature, encounters with non-confrontational wildlife, and a sense of distance away from the civilized world. A great hike, on the other hand, will include all that plus the twisted wreckage of a 70-year old bomber crash…like at Mount Waternomee in New Hampshire. On the night of January 14, 1942, a Douglas B-18 Bolo bomber was returning

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Exiting the small mock-up of deep-seasubmersible Alvin. May 23, 2012 — Mystic Aquarium has been on my list of New England sites to see since I moved up here five years ago. Partly because many people have recommended it to me, but mostly because I love seeing slices of the ocean. Stick a glass-fronted cross-section of salt water and rocks in front of me, and I'll stare at it for hours even if

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May 20, 2012 — Last August, I cleaned up the two-story, barn-sized outbuilding that takes up about 10 percent of the small property that I call my small property. The building’s about 120 years old, and in just the two years that we’d lived here at that time, we’d already stuffed it to the point of reality-show intervention. In the course of so doing, I uncovered a rectangular plank in the

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May 16, 2012 — I’ve missed spring cleaning by a couple months, and, honestly, will probably continue to miss it by a few more seasons. However, I have been afire lately with cleaning up and sorting our massive collection of pictures from our numerous jaunts over the years. So, here are some pictures of random sites I dug out from the cobwebbed corners of my hard drive. They’re oddities that I’d

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May 12, 2012 — Today I went to see the new Dark Shadows movie. It was generally what I expected. Over the past decade, Tim Burton’s gotten better and better at making weird stuff bland. But I’ve covered that topic before when I wrote about my visit to the Tim Burton exhibit. As to the original 1960s Dark Shadows, I can’t call myself an aficionado (mostly because I have trouble pronouncing it),

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May 6, 2012 — “Is it Halloween?” The question was asked by my two-year-old daughter a couple of weeks ago. The question wasn’t really her fault. She’s only been through two calendars in her life, so she’s still somewhat of a rookie when it comes to holidays. Also, she’d just woken up from a nap and was groggy. Oh, and our living room was decorated with jack-o-lanterns, witches, skeletons, and a

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April 28, 2012 – Being ahead of your time is great if you’re an Olympic sprinter or a Victorian time traveler. It can kind of suck, though, if you’re a scientist. Take Tesla. Born in 1888 in what’s now Croatia and becoming a U.S. citizen at the age of 35, Nikola Tesla had hundreds of patents, developed AC/DC power distribution, invented radio, and made inroads into wireless technologies that

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April 22, 2012 — I like to hike. I do. Just not for its own sake. I like hiking when it has a definite destination…a life-changing view, a set of ruins, Dr. Livingstone. Otherwise, I often find hiking trails a bit monotonous. Tree, tree, rock, dude in a hockey mask, tree, tree, rock. That’s why I really dig the Andres Institute of Art…which, I know, sounds like I’m changing the subject.

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April 15, 2012 — New England isn’t really an area much known for its zoos. But it does have a few. The ones I’ve visited, though, have been small, relatively sad things that make you feel slightly guilty for paying the admission fee. But I’m not anti-zoo. Far from it. People need to see exotic animals up close. We do. To have that experience makes us better animals. It’ just that bad zoos…well,

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April 13, 2012 — Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery is a great cemetery both for its idyllic environs and the massive amount of history decaying within its dirt clods…you just have to watch out for its resident vampire. Opened in 1849, this cemetery in the Virginia capital is located on 130 acres right on the James River. There’s nothing too city about the cemetery, though, with its natural layout

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April 10, 2012 — We may not have invented time travel yet, but we do already suffer from some of the side effects. Let me illustrate. A few months back I cancelled cable. Not everybody’s, just mine. Ten years ago, that would mean my evenings would involve a lot of conversing with neighbors over back fences and pacing hallways bemoaning existence. Today, with Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and

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April 7, 2012 — A church with a dome. It's pretty common in concept. However, it’s a bit more uncommon when that church is more than seven centuries old, that dome is the largest brick one pimpling the entire planet, and the whole thing overlooks one of the coolest cities in the world. Oh, and when its interior is heavily coated with the End Times. Located in Florence, Italy, the Basilica di

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April 1, 2012 – I’m too old to get excited about theatrical releases, but a part of me still does. Although these days it’s because that means the movie is that much closer to hitting Blu-ray, which means it’s that much closer to streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime, which is when I’ll probably finally get around to watching whichever one piqued my interest. Lately, I’ve been noticing that

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March 30, 2012 — Thanks to this commercial, we all know who killed U.S. founding father Alexander Hamilton in a duel: Aawon Buhh. But what the commercial doesn’t tell us is where it happened. It was New Jersey, in the town of Weehauken…and they have the death rock to prove it. Alexander Hamilton is one of the big names of early United States history. He was a leader in the Revolutionary War,

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March 28, 2012 — Madam Tussaud and her famous wax figures have a pretty amazing history that goes back all the way to the late 1700s. Hers is a global entertainment empire older than Disney and Ripley’s combined…and it’s based almost entirely on insect secretions. Tussaud’s original name was Anna Maria Grosholtz. She was born in France in 1761 and learned her craft from a physician with an

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The famous "Harvard Mastodon." Been matriculating here since 1846. March 24, 2012 — Any day spent at a natural history museum is a day well-spent. And, because I’m paid by the hyperbole, I might even go so far as to say it validates being born. Take the Harvard Natural History Museum. In just a couple of hours, I walked beneath the massive skeletons of whales, saw more meteorites than in a

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March 21, 2012 — I would love to say that some of the most formative words of my pre-teen years, the ones that stuck with me, guided me, and comforted me in my most uncertain hours were pulled from the pages of Mark Twain or the stanzas of Robert Frost or the lyrics of Bob Dylan. Instead, they were these: When that clock strikes half past six, babe, time to head for golden lights. If you

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March 19, 2011 — Iowa is another state whose Welcome signs I’ve never passed in my life. I don’t know much about it and have no real feelings toward it, really, other than being impressed by the fact that its name almost has as many syllables as letters. I do know that, on those occasions when I try to anthropomorphize a map of the continental United States, I do so in profile, and Iowa is

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March 17, 2012 — My biggest fear in proposing to my wife wasn’t the answer I’d get. It was how security would react. You see, I was planning to propose to her overseas. At a castle in Ireland, to be specific, which meant a flight, and that meant airport security. It can really ruin what is probably the biggest surprise a guy will ever be in charge of in his life if he’s forced to empty all

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March 11, 2012 — The path to spiritual enlightenment in Spain is apparently up an extremely thin set of cables to the top of a very tall mountain. Of course, that’s not what I was searching for. I just wanted a couple of photo ops with a 1,000-year-old religious icon and maybe a swing through its gift shop. Montserrat is a wide, ragged range of peaks in Catalonia, just outside the city of

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Bashful Christ hates gettinghis pic taken. March 8, 2012 — There are a million reasons not to drag yourself out of bed and spend Sunday at church. The Catholic Church, more than any other Western religion, kind of gets that and, as a result (direct, I think), has erected amazing cathedrals that not only make you want to attend every week, but even make atheists want to see them on their

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March 3, 2012 — My brain in Spain went kind of insane, and I only visited Barcelona. That ancient city of more than 1.5 million sprawls from Mediterranean beaches full of nudity to medieval stone alleyways full of restaurants to wide modern streets full of whatever the Spanish word for scooters is. It has uniquely parceled up its 24-hour days according to some secret timetable that I wasn’t

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February 20, 2012 — At some point even on the best road trips, the phrase “road trip” becomes a curse word. For me, a few weeks ago, it was somewhere around hour 12 or 13 of a single-day, solo, 18-hour road trip. It was snowing, dark, I had already exhausted my entire itinerary, and I still had miles to go before I slept. The road trip was to visit sites for my upcoming book, The New York

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February 15, 2012 — In my personal life, I take the idea “Everybody makes mistakes” as license to do so with complete abandon. In what passes for my professional life, though, I try to avoid them. Unfortunately, I seem to be somewhat magnetized to mistakes. Take my book, The New England Grimpendium. Every other sentence in it is a factual one that needed to be quadruple-checked and, while I

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