Quote of the Day (Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, on Summer in the Everglades)

“Sometimes the rains may last only a few weeks in May. After that the summer is a long blazing drying time of brilliant sun and trade winds all night under the steady wheeling of the stars. The great piles of vapor from the Gulf Stream, amazing cumulus clouds that soar higher than tropic mountains from their even bases four thousand feet above the horizon, stand in ranked and glistening splendor in those summer nights; twenty thousand feet or more they tower tremendous, cool-pearl, frosty heights, blue-shadowed in the blue-blazing days.” —Marjorie Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass (1947)

(The image accompanying this post, of a storm in Everglades National Park along the main road to Flamingo, was taken in May 2010 by MathewTownsend.)

Photo of the Day: Sakura Park, NYC

Sakura Park, located between Riverside Church and International House in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York, tends to get lost because of its giant landscape neighbor just slightly to its west, Riverside Park. It deserves better.

You wouldn’t know it because the trees were not in full bloom when I took this photo in April of this year, but the park gets its name—unusual for New York City—from the more than 2,000 cherry trees given to the city’s parks from Japan in 1912.  (“Sakura” is Japanese for “cherry blossom.”)

Quote of the Day (George F. Will, on a Ballpark’s ‘Loudest Noise’)

“At a baseball park, the loudest noise should be supplied by the spectators.” ―George F. Will, A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at One Hundred (2014)

Will’s starting point for this remark, as indicated by his subtitle, is his beloved, venerable Wrigley Park. Mine in this photo is the far newer PNC Park, home of baseball’s Pirates, which I saw one morning, several hours before gametime, on a visit to Pittsburgh last year. (For another angle on this latter park, see this other image I took and posted last year.)

Photo of the Day: Vanishing Point, Alpine Boat Basin, NJ

This seemed like a natural follow-up to my post yesterday showing the Alpine Boat Basin. What caught my eye here were not so much the boats in the background, but instead how the eye was led in that direction by the ditch--a photographic counterpart to the concept of perspective employed by so many Italian Renaissance painters.

Quote of the Day (Elizabeth Gilbert, on Wishbones and Backbones)

“Stop wearing your wishbone where your backbone ought to be.” ― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia (2006)

Photo of the Day: Alpine Boat Basin, NJ

The Alpine Boat Basin is located about seven miles north of the George Washington Bridge on the Hudson River. I was there on a picnic early this summer without a camera, and was so impressed with what I saw that I vowed to return. I did so a few weekends ago, when I took this picture of the public marina.