Kirk Douglas Park

July 29, 2012 — In my dreams, Kirk Douglas Park always seemed more, I don’t know, Kirk Douglas-y. And there were Saturn 3 references everywhere.

Located on Guy Park Avenue Extension in Douglas'
hometown of Amsterdam, NY


Should be Cactus Jack-costumed Douglas.

Should be a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea mural.

Something from The Vikings here.

Playground should be Spartacus-themed.

I find little fault with caterpillar-shaped
playground equipment.









Our Lady Queen of Peace Statue

July 22, 2012 — When I see exotic, expensive religious art and architecture, I think, “Couldn’t that money have been put toward important humanitarian uses?” When I see plain, humble churches, I think, “Shouldn’t the front office of the creator of the cosmos look a bit more extravagant than that?” I’m a jerk for wanting it both ways, sure, but I’m still a little peeved about that whole “born destined for hell” thing.

Still, I do know that creating a remarkable, eye-catching work is the best way to get me to tread on holy ground. Like the 33-foot-tall stainless steel statue of Mary at Holy Spirit Catholic Church in New Castle, Delaware.


Located at 12 Winder Road, the statue can be seen for miles around, especially on the much-in-need-of-salvation corridor that is I-295 and the Delaware Memorial Bridge. The statue is open to the public, though, so you can park and see it up close, if you want to put off going to New Jersey for a little while.

The more than four-ton statue has been ornamenting the lawn of Holy Spirit since 2007, and is a slightly larger version of a similar statue, both by local artist Charles Parks. The original was created in the 1980s for a church in California, although it was displayed in Wilmington for a while before its cross-country trek. Since that time, the blessed in Delaware have always wanted their own giant stainless steel mother of God.


I’m never sure how they go about picking the subjects of religious art, whether it’s Christ, Mary, an apostle, a saint, a pope, some random character from the Bible. I’m guessing it’s the same process toy companies go through when releasing licensed action figures. Sure, they could make more obscure characters, but Luke Skywalker will always sell. So they release a thousand versions of him, while other characters never get the toy treatment. In this analogy I’m not sure if the Holy Mother or Christ is Luke Skywalker.


Whatever the decision process, Holy Ghost chose Mary. I assume because nobody agrees on the appearance of the Holy Ghost (I’ve always imaged him as Space Ghost).

Much like the Mothman statue in Point Pleasant, West Virgina, Mary’s a shiny one. More than unholy demons would be burned by this girl on a hot summer day. She’s set on a little dais and surrounded by the Stations of the Cross, and you can get right up close to her metal robes. If you donate $100, they’ll even place your name in the metal heart that adorns her breast.

I will admit that seeing the statue firsthand has certainly changed me. I now know the miracle I want. I could care less about weeping statues and stigmata and images in toast. I want Giant Stainless Steel Mary to animate and walk across the bridge. She does that, I’m going to put much more credence in that loaves and fishes story.




Dighton Rock


July 20, 2012 — Is there a more boring topic than a rock? Ha. Trick question. Rocks are one of the most interesting things on this planet (which itself is basically a rock). We fill our metaphors with them. Stick them at the head of our dead. Build castles, pyramids, and other lasting works of architecture from them. We carve them into breath-taking works of art. Heck, we even make pilgrimages to them. Rushmore? A rock. Everest? A rock. From the Rock of Gibraltar to Ayers Rock in Australia, rocks are pretty awesome.

And while Dighton Rock is no Ayers Rock, it has its own reasons for people to visit it. Like bearing petroglyphs that nobody’s been able to decipher in more than 300 years.

As a result, this is kind of a short story.

The 40-ton, sofa-sized glacial erratic was discovered by Europeans sometime in the 1600s in a river bed of what is now Berkley, Massachusetts. One of its sides was relatively flat, encouraging some unknown person or persons in the past to carve enigmatic patterns across the entire 11 x 4 face of the rock.

The tides of Taunton River covered Dighton Rock it for most of its life in the modern era, exposing it for just a few hours each day until the 1960s, when it was moved inland and had its own museum built around it. So now it’s a big rock in a building.


Throughout the centuries, everybody from Cotton Mather to J.W. Ocker has written about this boulder. Theories on the source of the petroglyphs include everything you’d expect: Bored Native Americans, bored Vikings, bored colonists, bored Chinese, bored Phoenicians, bored aliens. Wait, bored Phoenicians? Seems unlikely. I’ll stick to my usual theory for matters such as this one: Some dude.

Translation of the markings is a problem for a few reasons. First, due to the wear over the centuries, no one’s really sure what the exact petroglyphs are. Second, no one can seem to agree on what language they’re from. Third, they’re probably meaningless doodles anyway.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t try to decipher them for yourself. Today, the rock sits in an 85-acre park named after it off Bayview Avenue in Berkley. The website says that the small museum keeping the rain off the rock’s runes is open by appointment only, but it was open when we randomly dropped by. I assume somebody else made the appointment.


The museum is right on the water and small, with only two rooms. The first is a foyer of sorts with information on the walls covering some of the various theories as to the origin of the markings. It also has a pair of model ships on display, one of Magellan’s Caravel Victoria and the other of de Gama’s Nau Sao Gabriel.

The back room is completely taken up by a circular floor-to-ceiling glass case with a thin walkway around it. Inside that tank squats the Dighton Rock like it’s the main feature of a zoo-sized terrarium.

The rock is lit from below, to highlight the engravings, I assume. They definitely needed something. I could barely discern the markings, which were just a foot or so away from me. Images of the rock online show markings that have been enhanced with chalk or some such, or they just skip the photo in favor of illustrations of the petroglyphs.


When I visited, the door to the glass cage was actually unlocked, so I entered the enclosure and inspected the rock up close. Not that it helped. The markings are just really hard to make out [with]. I was also tempted to copy this guy, but I’m a coward/responsible person.

In the end, I think the moral of the Dighton Rock story is that you should carve inscrutable things into every boulder you see. You’ll make the future a more interesting place.



Edgar Allan Poe’s Graves, Revisited

July 15, 2012 — Edgar Allan Poe’s grave was one of the first sites I visited for OTIS. And as is true of most of my posts from those early days, it’s a little painful to read and sorely lacking in photos. Just hadn’t quite gotten my blog legs yet. Well, I returned to Poe’s grave a couple of weeks ago. This time, I’ll keep the commentary short and include lots of pictures, especially since the graveyard itself merits more attention than I originally gave it.


Westminster Burial Ground is at the corner of Fayette and Greene Streets in downtown Baltimore. It’s about 225 years old and part of the purview of Westminster Hall, a Presbyterian church that was built about six decades after the cemetery and then secularized into an event hall in the 1970s.

Poe’s grave, where he is interred with his wife Virginia and mother-in-law Maria, is marked by a tall white pillar at the front corner of the cemetery, just inside the gates. He was moved to that more prominent spot in 1875 after being buried in the Poe family plot near his brother and grandfather in the back of the cemetery. That original burial location is marked with a raven-engraven tombstone.

That last paragraph is 100% of the cemetery’s worldwide fame, but the rest of the yard is one of the more interesting small cemeteries I’ve ever visited. It’s less than 40,000 square feet in size, with much of that taken up by the ex-church, but that small bit of space is packed with stones and mausoleums of every geometry, giving it a more genuine necropolis feel than many large graveyards.

Basically, it’s a perfect place for Poe.


It even has unintentional catacombs, thanks to the fact that the church was built atop pre-existing graves. To visit those, you have to make a reservation for the few times per month that they conduct tours. The rest of the graveyard is open daily, whenever the gates are.

Since my post on Poe’s grave five years ago, I’ve been to more than a dozen Poe monuments and sites on the East Coast. This one is still my favorite.





Grandfather Poe, whose genes carried all
the recessive macabre traits necessary to
make an Edgar Allan Poe.


The information placard besides this age-bent marble
memorial stated that it had garnered the interest of
Ripley's Believe it or Not! 





And I've yet to time my Balto visits
for when the Poe House is open.

Hampton Beach Sand Sculptures


July 12, 2012 — In general, I’m not the type of person who seeks out sand sculpture contests…but then I heard about one near me where second and third place were depictions of Hell and the alien from John Carpenter’s The Thing, respectively. That’ll make me visit your sandbox.

So I headed east for Hampton Beach, part of New Hampshire’s scant 18 miles of ocean coast, to see what eternal torment and an R-rated monster would look like in beige rock particulate on a family beach.

Like thousands of other coastal towns, Hampton hosts an annual sand sculpting competition. The creations are judged, awarded prize money, and treated with a solution of glue and water so that they’ll last for a couple of weeks and give New England beach goers something to stare at besides water that’s always too cold to get in.


Fortunately, I made it the day before the planned obsolescence of the sculptures. There were eleven in total, cordoned off from the rest of the beach with an orange fence. Subjects included the Avengers shilling sponsors, a naked fat woman, and the first-place winner, an image of a shrouded female that looked like it belonged on the cover of a paperback with a title like The Grim Reaper’s Girlfriend.

I just looked that title up and it’s not on Amazon, so I’m going to write that book. Agents, call me.

As to the two horror sculptures I was there specifically to see, they were…whimsical. Sand sculptures can’t help but be that, apparently, even when they’re depictions of skeletal Satans and gloopy shape-shifting extraterrestrials.

Oh, and sorry about the quality of the photos. Caught the sculptures at a bad time of day for shadows and they don't allow you to get within "tripping and falling headfirst into them" distance. Better pictures can be found at the Hampton Beach Facebook page.

"Continuum"
"Hell's Sandbox"

"The Thing"
"Stairway to Heaven"
"Road Warrior"
"Protecting Sacred Treasures"
"I Am the Beholder"
"Chaos + Order"
"Goin' to the Chapel"
"Metamorphosis"




My Days in Three Frames

July 9, 2012 — A couple of weeks ago I went on road trip with destinations in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina. It wasn’t technically an oddity hunt, nor technically a vacation. The first two states were about visiting family. The third was because my wife had a photography assignment there.

Of course, that’s not to say I didn’t do any oddity hunting or vacationing throughout. In fact, I did plenty of each. But instead of cluttering everybody’s Facebook feeds with rivers of photos, I decided to limit myself to one post per day on the OTIS Facebook page, each one made up of a collage of three photos that attempted to sum up my entire day: My day in three frames.

And I mostly stuck to it. I was able to do it for all 12 days I was away except one, and only two or three times was I moved to post an additional individual random photo from my day.

However, I didn’t post the collages with any explanation or captions, and I got enough questions about some of them that I thought I’d gather all 11 posts together with a bit of explanation. Here goes:


June 22: Found a snakeskin for a curio cabinet I've yet to buy, flew a dinosaur kite I got for my birthday a couple of months back, and caught frogs. Because that's what I do at my folks' house. 


June 23: I firmly believe that catching a live snake is resume-worthy, even if it's just a garter snake. I have three taste buds, two of which are dedicated to Maryland Blue Crabs and the third to Old Bay seasoning. And we celebrated my niece's first birthday.


June 24: Got to visit three oddities on this day, a church-turned-cafe called Beans in the Belfry (which I've already posted about), Crystal Grottoes Caverns in Boonsboro, and the 50-year-old John Brown Wax Museum just over the state line in Harper's Ferry, WV. Those latter two have OTIS entries forthcoming.


June 25: Spent the day in Baltimore, where these days it's uncertain whether images of ravens are meant to honor Poe or the local NFL team. Of course, I try to visit Poe every time I'm in town. And then, among a few other cemetery jaunts, I posed on the platform that once bore the cursed statue, the Black Aggie. It's the last site of four that I needed to visit for an OTIS post that I've been putting together since before there was an OTIS.


June 26: In Virginia, where I visited an old town jail turned museum, peered through a hole in a retired train car, and met an emu...because southern hospitality demands that one stops and says "hi" when you see an emu near the side of the road.


June 28: On the way to the Outer Banks of North Carolina, I stopped at a still-standing slave auction block in Fredericksburg, saw a massive statue of Neptune at Virginia Beach (which I've also already posted about), and then topped it off with dinner at a shark-themed restaurant in Kill Devil Hills, NC, called Mako Mike's.


June 29: The path to the beach is paved with good intentions. There, I became an expert at catching mole crabs, also resume-worthy, in my opinion. We then went to Roanoke Island, site of the infamous Lost Colony, and visited a permanent outdoor stage where they've been performing a play based on the mystery for the past 75 years.


June 30: Visited the Wright Brothers memorial, on the exact spot where they changed the world, found my first ever mermaid purse, and had dinner at a Mexican restaurant with a large desert lizard in its foyer.


July 1: Spent the entire day on Ocracoke Island, the site of the Blackbeard's death. There, among other sites, I checked out a Blackbeard-themed gift shop, saw one of the oldest continually operating lighthouses on the East Coast, and met some of the Outer Banks' famed wild horses, although these guys had been domesticated at some point.


July 2: On our last full day in NC, we said goodbye to the beach at sunset, where some dolphins returned the farewell, and then went back to Roanoke Island to visit its small, but impressive, aquarium.


July 3: Woke before the dawn for the 12-hour road trip home to New Hampshire, but still found time to stop in Delaware to see a 34-foot stainless steel statue of Mary. And, in conclusion, Popeyes.

You'd think that 33 pictures would be plenty to sum up a 12-day trip, but looking back on them all in macro like this, there were quite a few oddities and experiences that I had to leave out to meet my "three frames" criteria. Those are stories for other days, I guess.

Still, after doing it for almost two weeks, I gotta say it was a great way to frame up each day. Of course, it’s not something I’d do regularly, since most of the time, I’d only be able to post screen caps of television shows. 










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