Well, it’s Tuesday. Time to clean out the bookmarks I’ve been meaning to read. I’ll post them here, to avoid reading them properly. It’s the only way I can delete them without feeling foolish.
The most beautiful bridges in the world
Not hardly. Most of the included examples are ugly, with a fair amount of silly mixed in. What you’re looking at, is people deciding to call things beautiful, when they know in their bones that they’re not, to make some sort of pointless point. The tattoo parlor is also based on this principle.
Violet Hensley, Oldest Living Country Legend, Dies at 109
She made her Grand Old Opry debut when she was 99 years old, so remember: if you’ve been neglecting your fiddle lessons, there’s still time.
A controversial Alzheimer’s surgery is said to reverse symptoms — here’s what scientists know
I assume that it’s labeled “controversial” because it works. That’s where we’re at these days.
What we’re currently listening to at the Cabaña Sippican del Sur:
Yma Sumac, eat your heart out.
Home Depot Tops Earnings Estimates and Holds Its Outlook Steady, Amid ‘Frozen’ Housing Market
You mean you can go to a big box store and buy stuff to fix the busted stuff in your existing house, instead of buying a new one and then adding new stuff, and they can make money on it? That’s crazy talk.
Mayor Cecilia Patrón Strengthens Ties with South Korea in Mérida
There are over 7,000 Korean descendants living in Mérida. This explains the noodles and ice cream combo food stalls. I guess. What do I know?
IBM Simon Retro Advertisement and Tutorial:
Boy, except for the Sears catalog, no company had ground floor opportunities in massively profitable products, that did nothing to capitalize on them, like IBM. Some serious 90s vibes for you in that video.
Shattered skeleton in Scottish castle is first confirmed death from trebuchet
I was kinda hoping it was one of those Nork kinda executions and they launched the poor bastige using the trebuchet, but it was not to be. The effect was mostly the same, I imagine, without the fun ride for starters.
Well, that’s it for today. Feel free to put your favorite bridge in the comments. I suspect our list will differ greatly from Conde Nast. I’ll start:
8 Responses
Been a long time crossing, bridge of sighs (Robin Trower)
Of course that’s the first thing that came to mind. I can’t say I’m a connoisseur of bridge architecture or aesthetics. I do think that some cable-stayed spans have a certain understated elegance about them, but others just look weird. I could insert a digression here about what constitutes “beauty”.
One nice thing – in looking up that track, I see that Rick Beato interviewed Robin Trower. I’ve bookmarked that for the weekend. Yeah, I’m a fan.
Well Sipp I gave you bridge article a glance. You’re right some of those bridges are just plain. I couldn’t help but notice they left off an important one but then again not many know about it. It’s on my buddy Shawn’s property and I built it with my own two grubby hands. The first time I built it it was anchored a by an enormous Oak on one end and a 2 ft diameter willow tree that had been pushed over by the stream and then grown up parallel to the earth. It was a cable suspension bridge with a 2×12 bed extending 24 ft with 2x4s on the side for rigidity and two bys underneath of it for the cables to attached into. I came back the week after I built it and found that debris washing down the stream had damaged the bark on that Willow and the whole thing was rotten inside and my little bridge was the last straw. it was laid on the ground dead. I would have noticed except for the whole riparian zone was knee-deep in weeds and vines.
I rebuilt it in 2020 and it’s still standing. well hanging. I built it sitting on the ground but hung from trees by cables so that when the stream floods it can move sideways without being destroyed. zero engineering involved. when my buddy Shawn’s kids and their friends have to cross it there is much trepidation to be had. it saves me three small steps or one very large step down into the stream bed and wet boots.
Hope all you and yours are well, later Leon.
Sears and Roebuck is a classic example of missing the boat. They had Amazon except on paper and using telephones, long before Jeff Bezos was even a glint in the milkman’s eye. So what did they do during the 1990s, as the internet was ramping up? They de-emphasized their catalog division and eventually closed it, to focus on their in-person stores!
As for bridges, I like this one:
https://www.dhr.virginia.gov/historic-registers/060-5066/
This is the Virginia bridge I like. Want to see it on my next trip up to New England.natural bridge Virginia
Here in Dallas, the city is bisected by the Trinity River, a slow moving meandering alluvial river, characteristic of so many Great Plains rivers, which once or twice a year becomes a raging flood. More than a century ago, the Corps of Engineers raised a pair of levees, about a mile apart, to contain the floodplain and prevent flooding downtown, which has worked quite well.
However, this means there’s a large area between the levees that can’t be used for anything except hiking trails (pack heat!) and dumping the bodies of murder victimes. People moving into this city are absolutely driven to distraction by the existence of this river bottom and desperately fling about for something to DO with it – because you can’t just leave a piece of undevelopable land alone, no, it’s got to be something “signature” that “says something about our city”. Of course we oldsters feel like it ALREADY says something about the city, which is “hey, we’ve got a slow moving meandering alluvial Great Plains river here, that occasionally turns into a raging flood and the bottom land has to be constrained…”
So, the latest boondoggle has been that “we need to construct SIGNATURE BRIDGES across the Trinity River, to SAY SOMETHING about our city and make it WORLD CLASS!”
Now, they’ve had several perfectly functional viaducts across the Trinity River bottoms for generations; low bridges, set on many posts, with a little gap in the posts to jump across the actual river bed. In other words, exactly what sensible people (like the ones that lived in the 1910s) would build to cross a long, low, usually dry but occasionally flooded river bottom. But these aren’t SIGNATURE enough and they don’t adequately say “this is a WORLD CLASS city!” Nope, we need SIGNATURE BRIDGES.
So, the city fathers (using our money) had a famous architect design two cable stayed suspension bridges, to be our SIGNATURE BRIDGES. Now the purpose of a suspension bridge is to span places where the ground is too far below to have pilings down to it (think Royal Gorge, Golden Gate) and/or vessel traffic below prevents the use of pilings (think George Washington and Brooklyn). But ! what we’ve got here is a long low area, maybe 3/4 mile long, where the bridge is never more than 40 feet above the ground, except for a little stretch maybe 50-100 feet across where it jumps over the actual river bed! So, what to do?
Well, they left the plain old perfectly functional concrete viaducts, and put fake cable stayed suspension bridge hardware on either side of them, holding up almost nothing (more about that in a second). In other words, these SIGNATURE BRIDGES are just applied decoration pasted onto the sides of two perfectly functional 100 year old concrete post and beam bridges. So how’s that for a waste of tax money?
But wait, it gets sillier. I said “the cable stayed decorations (oops, structure) hold up almost nothing.” Yes, ALMOST nothing. On one of the SIGNATURE BRIDGES, the cable stayed decorations actually DO hold up something – a 10 foot wide bikeway. Except – that the designers, or the contractors, fouled it up so the bikeway isn’t safe to be on (think Tacoma Narrows), so it’s been closed and barricaded off for years now with no remediation date.
GRRRRRRRRR… My tax money, flushed neatly down the toilet for exactly ZERO useful end.
ha, ha I live in Grand Prairie so hopefully they didn’t waste my money…. but yes interesting to look at but all for show. I really like that arch bridge that heads over to oak Cliff out of South Dallas.
Yeah, but the streets get worse every year, none of the traffic lights are synchronized, homeless everywhere, the schools are a disgrace, and what they come up with to spend money effort and time on is “signature bridges”?
Saturday AM, and I’ve finally gotten around to listening to that YouTube video. (What a strange construction that is.) I’d heard of Yma Sumac, no relation to the plant, but I don’t recall ever listening to her. You sent me off on a meander, leading to a comparison of vocal ranges. I suspect I’d rather listen to Sumac than Minnie Ripperton. I hadn’t before heard of “whistle range”, but there it is. I used to have quite the range myself – such things go away with age and disuse. Well, disuse at least.
Nice album. Not my usual fare, though I have some Bebel GIlberto around here to add into my listening mix. Probably some Astrud Gilberto too.