You think you had a bad morning….

“The Great Boston Molasses Tragedy, occurred on January 15, 1919, in the North End neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts.

Near Keany Square, at 529 Commercial Street, a huge molasses tank 50 ft (15 m) tall, 90 ft (27 m) in diameter and containing as much as 2,300,000 US gal (8,700,000 L) collapsed. Witnesses stated that as it collapsed, there was a loud rumbling sound like a machine gun as the rivets shot out of the tank, and that the ground shook as if a train were passing by.

The collapse unleashed an immense wave of molasses between 8 and 15 ft (2.5 to 4.5 m) high, moving at 35 mph (56 km/h), and exerting a pressure of 2 ton/ft² (200 kPa). The molasses wave was of sufficient force to break the girders of the adjacent Boston Elevated Railway’s Atlantic Avenue structure and lift a train off the tracks. Nearby, buildings were swept off their foundations and crushed. Several blocks were flooded to a depth of 2 to 3 feet (60 to 90 cm).

Today, the sites of the molasses tank and the North End Paving Company have been turned into a recreational complex, officially named Langone Park, featuring a Little League ballfield, a playground, and bocce courts.“

Oh, Wikipedia, how I love thee. 

More.

The Great Reformation

I came to the important and mind-searingly simple realization that in order for this blog to be anything like a success, I would have to allow myself to be much more pithy than I tend to want to be as I’m writing for it. Perhaps the pretentiousness of monikering (I know… it’s not supposed to be a verb. I like it that way.) this site in such a way that every post ought to be a “minor literary work” (Thank you, Merriam-Webster) had gotten into my head a little too deeply. I really felt like in order to put anything up, I would really have to put Something up. Every post, an illumination. Every thought, an invention. This was the space for the minor aristocracy of my mental hierarchy.

But today I decided that my blog needed a little bit of democratization; an egalitarian movement; genuine self-revealing, entertaining pithiness.

So I sat down and thought, “Pithy. Pithy, pithy, pithy. What’s pithy?” and tapped my computer’s keys impotently. It was really rather pathetic.

Anna’s Recital Photos

Anna’s junior recital is coming up, and she asked me to take the pictures for her poster. We ended up in La Mirada park, having more fun with the photo shoot than I could have hoped for. Here are some of the highlights…

Hayden and Melissa Engagement Photos

I had the pleasure of going to a nearby park with the ever wonderful Hayden and Melissa to get some engagement photos taken. Here are two of my favorites…

Torna da Roma

Buongiorno!

I’m glad to be back from a fantastic trip. Hopefully I’ll get the next sentiments post up in the coming week or so, but until then, I figured that some photos would be in order…

In partenza per Roma…

I get the chance to travel to the Eternal City with a group of students from the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. We’ll be studying art, architecture, and aesthetics as a general philosophical category. Needless to say, I am most determinedly not bringing my computer with me. I return on the 24th of this month, and will continue posting sometime in that general temporal vicinity.

For the trip, we read a great number of great books, but two in particular stand out so completely that I feel all but compelled to recommend them. These are Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art?, which, like most of Tolstoy, is beautiful, compelling, and deeply flawed, and Dorothy Sayers’ article Toward a Christian Aesthetic, a very intriguing exploration of the relationship between Trinitarian/Incarnational theology and aesthetic theory… the result is a beautiful vision of a Christian aesthetic. Consider them Grossly recommended.

With that, therefore, I bid you, by the power of the Google Language Translator, addio.