Art in the lobby

There is almost always some sort of art exhibit in the Core Building. At the end of the school year the art classes display their efforts.

One student liked the style of Jackson Pollock.
A class in mosaics was offered this semester, and there were a number of pieces from that class. None was more striking or stranger than this female torso.
I know the student who painted the picture below. I will have to ask her if she is in her Degas period.
Update: The assignment on the last picture make a picture without using a brush. It was done with chopsticks and a pallet knife.

The blooming trees

The magnolia trees are blooming this week, and they are spectacular.
Some interesting tidbits about magnolias--they are pollinated by beetles, not by bees, many species are native to the U.S., and most of the trees planted here are probably hybrids. The magnolia is the state flower of Mississippi.

Also blooming, though you might not recognize the flowers as flowers, are the Norway maples. As its name suggests, it is not a native tree but an import from Europe. Although a great many have been planted in Rensselaer, conservationists consider it a weed and would like to see it eradicated.
(You cannot make maple sugar from Norway maple. You need sugar maple trees for that.)

Silver maples are a native tree, but they bloomed a weeks ago and are busy growing their seeds.

Earth Day and the Cystic Fibrosis 5K

On Saturday morning I stopped by Brookside Park to see how many people were running in the 5K run that was supporting research on cystic fibrosis. It was a rather small group of runners, but there was a very large crowd.

They ran the same route that the Santa Shuffle runs in December. I noticed that the one mile mark was different this year. In the past it was almost certainly short. I wonder if they used a site like the USATF site to find the mile marks. By the end of the race the runners were very strung out. Some of the young runners do not seem to have run much and found that 5K is hard to do without some training.
I do not know if they will post any results. The hospital race is one of the few local races that does.

However, most people were not in the park for the race but for an Earth Day celebration. You could get a free red-oak sapling to plant in your yard from the Master Gardeners.
On the other side of the shelter the Lion's Club was selling hot dogs and refreshments.
South of the shelter The Nature Conservancy was giving away wild petunias. (Wild Petunia--sounds like a hippy from the 1960s. I wonder if Desert Survivor has them where she lives and if they will ever appear on A Plant A Day.)
Also in the back was the city recycling truck with bales of plastic bottles. Did you recycle any of them?
It was the north side of the shelter that attracted the kids. There were a variety of games, and this blow-up structure in which kids could bounce.

Little 500 race and other weekend events

On Saturday, April 19, the annual Little 500 go-kart race was held. In addition to the race, which is not all that interesting to watch, there were a number of other events. I missed the football and volleyball scrimmages or games, but got some video clips of other things that were happening. I may have jinxed the girls softball game--when I came, the other team had a big inning, which gave me some good video, though I feel bad about showing the highlights for the visitors rather than the home team.



There are a lot more pictures here. (If you look hard enough, you will even find me in one of the pictures.)

Toad chorus announces spring

I finally heard the songs of the toads in the seasonal pond east of Weston Cemetery. Unfortunately, when the toads try to get to the pond, they must cross a road, and a lot of them do not make it. On Sunday morning I saw six of them that had been killed by cars.
There were four near the main entrance to Weston Cemetery. They had been run over repeatedly and were very flat.
If the tadpoles make it to tiny toad status, many will have to cross the roads in the other way and there will be a repeat of the carnage.

My rant for Earth Week: The people who oppose wind farms often talk about the number of birds that will be killed by the rotating blades. The mere thought that anything could be killed by these blades strikes some people as reason to oppose wind farms. I wonder if these people ever get out of their cars and look at what is on and along the roads of American. There are dozens of birds, mammals, amphibians, or reptiles killed on every mile of even moderately busy roads. (And if we were worried about non vertebrates, it would be tens of thousands per mile. Check out any country road after a heavy rain for dead earthworms.)

A few years ago I thought it would be interesting to offer an offset to the wind-farm bird kills. Just as Al Gore says it is OK for him to use as much energy as a dozen normal people use because he offsets his carbon footprint, it would be OK for the wind farms to kill birds if for every bird they killed they saved a bird somewhere else. I could provide that service for a fee. I would go to the animal shelters, adopt cats, and kill them. Fewer cats, more birds.

It is good to rant every so often. I find it hard to take seriously the Al-Gore type of environmentalists, who talk the talk but cannot walk the walk. (By the way, electricity is fungible. That means paying for "green" electricity from the grid is nonsense.)