Piedras Blancas sunset

 

Seven years ago today we enjoyed watching this gorgeous sunset
at the Piedras Blancas Elephant Seal Rookery in San Simeon, California.

 

 

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“Swim competition allows a 50-year-old biological male to swim with 13 year-old girls.” That’s the headline of an October 24th Rebel News article by David Menzies that begins:

 

“The Markham Pan Am Centre just north of Toronto was the venue for the Richmond Hill Aquatic Centre’s Fall Classic swimming competition last weekend. And the classic Sesame Street song came to mind: ‘One of these things is not like the others; one of these things does not belong.’

“Rebel News was tipped off by concerned parents that there was something perverse happening in the pool at Richmond Hill Aquatic Centre’s Fall Classic swimming competition this past weekend October 20 in Markham Pan Am Centre.

“Namely, at one of the swim races on Friday, 10 competitors took part. Nine of the competitors had much in common: they were female and they were either 13 or 14 years of age. Alas, the tenth competitor was Nicholas J. Cepeda, a.k.a., Melody Wiseheart, a member of the Orangeville Otters Swim Club. That’s right: somehow, 13 and 14-year-old girls were swimming against a 50-year-old biological male. Unbelievable.

 

 

“So it was that Rebel News visited the Markham Pan Am Centre on Sunday, October 22 to get answers.
And those answers were hard in coming…”

 

You’re welcome to read the full article.

 

© 2023 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

Beach morning glory: white

Botanists know the white-flowering beach morning glory as Ipomoea imperati. At Port Aransas on June 3rd the white flowers significantly outnumbered the purple ones produced by Ipomoea pes-caprae. Here are broader and closer views of the white flowers, with a tiny spider on one in the second picture. Everywhere we looked, practically all the leaves had beach sand on them. These plants have apparently learned to cope with lesser amounts of sunshine making it through to the leaves.

  

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Title IX is a section of the American legal code that “protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive federal financial assistance. Title IX states: ‘No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.'”

As has too often been the case in recent years, many universities have taken to enforcing Title IX in ideological ways that deny due process and a presumption of innocence to people accused of violating it. In one such case, reported Reuters on June 2nd:

A federal appeals court on Thursday ruled a former assistant professor of physics can sue Cornell University for gender discrimination over claims it disciplined him following a “skewed” investigation into a female student’s sexual harassment claims.

The New York-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ revival of Mukund Vengalattore’s Title IX claims came in a case that one judge said was an example of a “disturbing trend” of threats to due process for university faculty accused of misconduct.

That judge was José Cabranes of the Second U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In his concurrence he wrote:

This growing “law” of university disciplinary procedures, often promulgated in response to the regulatory diktats of government, is controversial and thus far largely beyond the reach of the courts because of, among other things, the presumed absence of “state action” by so-called private universities. Thus insulated from review, it is no wonder that, in some cases, these procedures have been compared unfavorably to those of the infamous English Star Chamber.

As alleged, Cornell’s investigation of Vengalattore denied him access to counsel; failed to provide him with a statement of the nature of the accusations against him; denied him the ability to question witnesses; drew adverse inferences from the absence of evidence; and failed to employ an appropriate burden of proof or standard of evidence. In other cases and other universities the catalogue of offenses can include continuing surveillance and the imposition of double jeopardy for long-ago grievances.

You can read more from Judge Cabranes’s concurrence in a “Notable and Quotable” item from the Wall Street Journal.

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

Beach morning glory: purple

The term “beach morning glory” is ambiguous: people use it for Ipomoea imperati and for Ipomoea pes-caprae, both of which grow on coastal sand dunes, often even together. One easy way to tell them apart is that the former produces white flowers and the latter purple flowers, as shown here at Port Aransas on June 3rd. Other vernacular names for the purple-flowering species are railroad vine (presumably because it tends to grow along railroad tracks), goatfoot morning glory (which is what the Latin pes-caprae means), and bayhops. Both kinds of beach morning glory have thick and leathery leaves, but those of the white-flowering species are only about 1.5 inches long, while those of the purple-flowering species reach as much as 3.5 inches in length. I found one of those larger leaves that had turned conspicuously yellow, and it contrasted nicely with the day’s blue sky.

 

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All photographs are illusions.
Speaking of which, here’s an interesting article about optical illusions.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

New Zealand: up and down at Tunnel Beach

Three years ago today we visited Tunnel Beach about five miles southwest of Dunedin.

I took the first picture from the edge of a cliff looking down at some bull kelp in the surf below.
Doesn’t it remind you of the long, flowing hair in a Botticelli painting?

The next two photographs, taken from the beach, show natural designs on the walls of a cul-de-sac.

And here’s the view looking back up at the adjacent sculpted rocks:

Living in Texas, I can’t help but be reminded of a pair of outsized cowboy boots.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Rust and paint patterns on the Sibonga pier

Late in the afternoon on December 23, 2019, we walked out to the tip of the Sibonga pier that juts into the Cebu Strait in hopes that we might enjoy a good sunset. While waiting, I got intrigued by the rust and paint patterns on the structures that boats tie up to. Not knowing what those things are called, I searched online. A few sites call objects like these bollards. A few other sites refer to them as mooring dolphins. Perhaps there’s not one universally accepted term in English. Anyone who knows is welcome to tell us.

Here’s a closer and more abstract view of the first one:

Could patterns like these have inspired the Abstract Expressionist painters?

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: more views of the Pancake Rocks

Five years ago today we visited the famous Pancake Rocks at Punakaiki on New Zealand’s South Island.

You can read a little about the geology of this site in an article at Te Ara.

This renewal of pictures from New Zealand reminds me that we can renew something but we can never new something. Likewise we can reveal but we can’t veal; reproach but not proach; retract but not tract; we can replenish but we can’t plenish; etc.

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Pelicans

Most of the birds that followed the Galveston-Bolivar ferry on October 7th were either gulls—two of which you saw a few posts back—or brown pelicans (Pelecanus occidentalis), which you’re seeing now.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Ogunquit

A year ago today we spent time inside the Ogunquit Museum of Art
in the town of the same name on the Maine coast.

Afterwards I clambered about behind the museum taking pictures of the rocks and tidal pools.

I never posted any of those photographs in 2018, so to make amends I’m showing you a few now.

As always, patterns and textures beckoned. So did colors, whether muted or bright.

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

Organic and inorganic

At Southwest Harbor in Acadia National Park on June 10, 2018, I photographed things organic and inorganic.

Jackson Pollock‘s got nothing on me:

© 2019 Steven Schwartzman

What a wave

Our first contact with Maine’s Acadia National Park came on June 8th. That afternoon, arriving from New Brunswick, we visited the Schoodic section of the park, which is not connected to the main part across the Mt. Desert Narrows. Like other sites we’d already been to on the Atlantic coast, this one had rocky outcrops standing against the sea. In one place I noticed how the rocks caused crashing waves to hurl their water upward.

The difficulty for a photographer was that incoming waves didn’t consistently break in the same spot, so it was hard to know where to aim. I chose a high shutter speed, put the camera in a mode that would take several pictures a second, and then stood waiting, looking through the viewfinder in the direction where some waves had already splashed up, hoping my reflexes would be good enough to press the shutter release button as soon as a wave seemed to be beginning to break. Given the difficulties, most of the resulting pictures didn’t turn out great. Still, I was happy with a few of them. The one I chose to show here pleases me because, while we usually think of waves as horizontal, the water in this one formed a vertical arc. If you look beyond the wave, you might reasonably think you’re seeing portions of a man-made wall; in fact those rocks were all natural.

© 2018 Steven Schwartzman