Pursuits : Elizabeth Thomsen

The Central Diner is in Millbury, Massachusetts, just outside of my hometown of Worcester. My aunt and uncle live in Millbury, so I have visited the town many times over the years, but somehow I never get to the downtown area, and had never seen the diner.

Yesterday I had a meeting in the area, and afterward I decided to finally go see the diner and photograph it. When I arrived, I was rather shocked to find it in this condition. I was sure it was closed and perhaps headed for destruction.

Fortunately, however, that doesn’t seem to be the case. From what I read, it’s going through a restoration, and I look forward to visiting it again and taking a new picture when it’s done.

During the three summers I spent in the beautiful, seaside city of Dalian, China, I loved watching the yangge dancers performing in various squares and parks. Yangge is a style of folk dance that’s performed for recreation and exercise in squares and parks, especially popular with middle-aged and older women.
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In honor of Memorial Day, I put together this little video of Any Bonds Today, a song by Irving Berlin, sung by Bing Crosby, with images from the Library of Congress and National Archives. Just a first atempt at using Movie Maker.

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Jonathan Coulton is my favorite singer-songwriter, and I especially like the fact that he releases all his music with a Creative Commons license and encourages people to make videos and otherwise use it.

This one’s not new, it’s been around for a couple of years, but somehow I missed it until recently, and right now I am in the mood for something as silly as Mr. Fancy Pants :

“Chances are your pants are not as fancy as the pair
Of very fancy pants that Mr. Fancy Pants will wear
When everybody’s marching in the fancy pants parade
He’s gonna pass the test
He’s gonna be the best
The best in terms of pants”

Mr. Fancy Pants — Flash video by Mike Young, self-proclaimed Insane Game Designer, with photographs from Flickr.

Last Tuesday I participated in a professional meeting at Tower Hill Botanical Garden in Boylston, Massachusetts. It’s a beautiful place, and I enjoyed walking around outside during the breaks to take a few pictures of flowers and statues.

But after the meeting, I headed off on a quest to get the picture I really wanted, a shot of Chet’s Diner in nearby Northborough. I have been wanting to get this one for my collection, but I seldom seem to be in that part of the state.
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In the summer of 2002, my daughter Kristin, her friend Alejandra and I went to China. My daughter Meg was a Peace Corps volunteer there, and we met her in Beijing and took the long train ride together across China to the city of Deyang in Sichuan province. Meg had lived there the previous summer during her training period, staying with a wonderful family who had become her true Chinese family.
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Encyclopedia Britannica hasn’t had it easy these last few years. To quote Michael Arrington on TechCrunch :

“Encyclopedia Britannica often is used in case studies as a definitive example of how new technology can disrupt a business. Everything was great for the nearly 250 year old privately held company until the Internet came around and a Category Five hurricaned on their parade. According to Comscore, for every page viewed on Britannica.com, 184 pages are viewed on Wikipedia (3.8 billion v. 21 million pave views per month). In short, they are a classic example of the Innovator’s Dilemma”

Britannica just announced an interesting new initiative. They are giving free, one-year subscriptions to the Encyclopedia Britannica Online to “people who publish with some regularity on the Internet, be they bloggers, webmasters, or writers.” These accounts allow people to add links to Britannica articles, and to create widgets that link to a group of articles on a particular topic. Anyone following these links will have free access to the article…the idea, of course, is that some of those people may decide to subscribe to Britannica.
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Here’s a simple little video interview Carl Stevens of WBZ Radio did with Bobby Fennell, state lawmaker and owner of the Capitol Diner in Lynn. It’s just a few minutes long, the camera work is shaky and no one says anything particularly profound, but I think it’s great to capture, save and share these little glimpses into interesting places.

“He’s hard at work. He’s not cooking up legislation, he’s cooking breakfast!”

• Capitol Diner : It’s the Real Thing — My blog posting on this diner

Instant Karma — “Before Polaroid fades into history, let’s remember how influential — and cool — the art of the snapshot, and the cameras themselves, could be” [Mark Feeney, Boston Globe : March 16, 2008]

Polaroid announced last month that they would no longer produce instant film was just an inevitable step in the long, slow decline of Polaroid and the world of instant photography. Instant film photography, killed off by digital photography. In the world of cameraphones, Flickr, photoprinters, who needs instant film cameras?

But Polaroid really was once so cool. In Feeney’ words:

“…there are those who remember when it was the Apple of its day: feisty, ubiquitous, pioneering. The Polaroid Land Camera was like the Mac, with all other consumer cameras PCs. There was the same sense of engineering superiority and cultural cachet.”

When I was a child, my engineer father had a serious camera with a light meter and a lot of accessories. He took slides and wrote the technical data on the frames, and he carefully ordered and organized the slides in trays for the projector. My mother had an old Brownie box camera, later replaced by an Instamatic, totally point-and-shoot. She had some of her older photographs in albums and baby books, but most of her pictures were just tossed into shoeboxes, undated and unlabeled.
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Years ago, when my daughters were still in high school, we discovered a Boston-based band called Hypnotic Clambake. I don’t remember where we first heard them — we used to go to a lot of random concerts, fairs and events back then. But we heard them somewhere, bought a couple of cassettes, and some of their songs became part of the background music of our family life back then. Their music was a witty and lively mix of styles — folk, Zydeco and Klezmer among other things.
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