Union League Ducks

090812_01ducks
Originally uploaded by lb_philly.

After a buffet dinner of kid food (hoagies, mini cheeseburgers, fried chicken, roasted potatoes or fries, etc.) plus a healthy salad alternative, we boarded our two DUKWs and headed out for the Delaware. It was getting late and spitting rain, so the route was changed and we went right into the Delaware first. For some reason I don't fully understand, our Duck went in first and then hung around until the second Duck came in. (Their captain wasn't waiting for them at the ramp so they had to wait. Our captain was on board.) So we got two runs around the part of the river where the Ducks go...about 3/4 mile south of our entry ramp. I think we were in water for close to an hour.

Not great photographic conditions for a point and shoot so my photos have an impressionistic quality, like a lot of Pissarro cityscapes. You can click through and see the other 11, if you're interested. We enjoyed ourselves tremendously.

Seen in the Macroscope....

I had a plot fragment from an older science fiction novel floating in my head, and threw myself on the mercy of the LiveJournal hive mind, which promptly yielded author and title: Piers Anthony, Macroscope. That sent me to Teh Intarwebs to get a plot refresher, to Amazon to order a copy of the book, and then to the Internet Archive for an online edition of Sidney Lanier's poems, which figure importantly in the novel, especially "The Marshes of Glynn."

This 1880s-vintage volume has a Memorial by William Hayes Ward at its beginning and there I found this delicious observation:

While we do not talk so much of genius now as we did a generation ago, we can yet recognize the difference between the fervor of that divine birth and the cantering of the livery Pegasus along the vulgar boulevards over which facile talent rides his daily hack.

In reading this Memorial, I also find that Lanier, a musician, was commissioned to write a cantata for the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which we consider to be more or less the end of the Greater Civil War Era here. Which makes it all work-related, sort of. (EDIT: Turns out he was commissioned to write a poem. Someone else did the setting, which looks like a piece of livery hackery to me.)

The Marshes of Glynn on Bartleby.com, from the Harvard Classics.
The Centennial Cantata, text by Sidney Lanier, music by Dudley Buck, from Google Books

Bleah.

The Philadelphia Eagles have signed Michael Vick.

Good thing I don't like football.