Now with enhanced security!

 This Quality Inn and Suites, where I stayed last weekend on the world's slowest drive up to Boston, should consider evaluating their security practices.

On top of the in-box, at the reception desk, so they'll be handy, for the night shift.

Bathroom Renovation

My apologies for the desultory and inconsistent bloggery exhibited here at antarcticiana over the recent seasons. In the brief few months of this year my personal life has gone from dismal and unfocused, even ruined, to completed, ordered, and joyous. This swing of the pendulum has taken its toll on my blog output. At the one end, I was too depressed and distraught to really see any point to it. And at the other, the exciting revelation that I had found my life partner made all that time spent online seem a waste of moments possibly spent with her.

She, however, has a job, so I can't blame all my lack of output on romance. I still do have much time to sit around and write things of little importance, during the day. So the rest I blame on a long-overdue renovation of the petite bathroom here at the homestead. Although I didn't do anything like the lion's share of the work myself, I have fussed and fidgeted enough to fill the days, making countless trips to Lowe's to purchase bits of this and that. In fact, there are still some days left to go. Bathrooms take time, like fine wine.

Although one of the many sub-themes of this eclectic blog is the  "greatest outhouses of the world," until now we have not given any coverage whatsoever to interior bathrooms. But on a (comparatively) recent trip to Louisville we were able to use a bathroom of such magnificence that it seemed appropriate to, in the vernacular, "go there." Off to be spectators at the famed Kentucky Derby, we stayed at the invitation of a dear friend in his Louisville manse, a spectacular residence now on the Kentucky state registry of historic homes. Each and every room was charming and well-appointed, but none so remarkable, perhaps, as the Delftware guest bathroom.

This is, you will have gathered by now, not my bathroom, and not my renovation. (I promise to post photographs of my own water closet soon--I sense a new theme developing.) In Louisville we washed and relieved ourselves using appurtenances decorated by the late ceramicist and artist Mary Alice Hadley. According to the Hadley Pottery creation myth, Miss Mary Alice in 1939 combined her artistic talents with the clay-tile glazing expertise of her Kentucky antecedents to create some dishware for the family houseboat. Her whimsical plates proved so popular that Hadley was urged to go into business, and the pottery bearing her name still operates in Louisville. To judge from the current Hadley Pottery listings on eBay, the company made rather a specialty of what are for my taste overly cute prancing ponies and childlike floral motifs. Her personal bathroom is a different matter.

The famed claypits of Louisville were not only useful for producing teacups and coffee mugs. In the days when the United States manufactured things, Kentucky was a source for toilets, sinks and baths. As the story goes, Hadley, when renovating her own powder room, shut down the assembly line at the local toilet factory long enough to custom-decorate her own bespoke crapper. Entering the john at the Hadley house, one is transported to the aqueous depths of Atlantis. One dives, hopefully not literally, into a world of starfish, bowl-swimming snapper and waving blue kelp. The tub is ruled by Neptune himself, together with a mermaid concubine.

Ms. Katherine Dixon, my lovely fiancé, in Derby finery, in front of the lovely Hadley House.

Seaglass Manufacturing Facility

The south shore of Sultanahmet is marked by a long waterfront promenade, divided from the sea of Marmara by a beach made of jagged, craggy boulders. Here, men fish, by the hundreds, casting lines baited with up to a dozen tiny, wriggling silver fish. On weekends, a grassy waterfront park is thronged with barbecuers and chattering families. Traffic zips past behind, the four lane highway dividing the city from the water. It's a bit like Havana's malecon, except that Istanbul has twenty million inhabitants. Nonetheless, the water is a sparkling, Mediterranean blue.

Among the weekend diversions on offer is target shooting, with air rifles. Early in the morning men set up these impromptu ranges, clambering over the boulders to string lines of balloons and build thickets of empty beer bottles on the rocks, some ten meters below the waterside walkway. They don't seem to have prizes; one pays, I think, for the rental of the airgun and the purchase of some rounds of ammunition. It's all about hitting things, firing, popping and shattering. Pity the hapless fish that surfaces too close behind. I would also advise against swimming.

The strings of balloons lining the coast are weird, but somehow beautiful; the longer lengths of them, hanging like inflatable laundry above the surf, suggest an intervention by Christo. But by afternoon the rocks are scattered with popped ballons, and shards of bottle awaiting the tide that will churn them into seaglass.

A Day at the Races, Part Two

As I noted below my last post, the Kentucky Derby, perhaps not an easy way to make money, is nonetheless money in the bank for any aspiring street photographer. The hats, the alcohol and the fevered viewing of the horses compile into countless revelatory and unguarded moments. Here's a second series from a weekend in Louisville:

In and Out of the Money, at Churchill Downs last Saturday

Part One in a photographic series on the Kentucky Derby:

 

Finger Lickin'

43rd Street and 8th Avenue, Brooklyn Chinatown

Le Globale Warming est arrivé...

Mayday, Mayday, on May 1st, at Lowe's. This morning your Red Hook neighborhood home improvement superstore was laying out the largest stock of airconditioners I've ever seen. An unpleasant barometer of the warming times to come. I wanted to yell "too soon, too soon!"

Everglades Hospitality

How about trepanning?

Somewhere deep in the swamps off Route 41, the Tamiami trail.

¡Vete p'al Carajo!

A place to gas up, in more ways than one.

According to a Wikipedia article entitled "Spanish Profanity," the literal meaning of the word carajo is "crow's nest," as in the lookout at the top of the mast on an old schooner. This was news to me, and I rather suspect it would be for many speakers of the language. Much more frequently, throughout the great Iberian diaspora, carajo is an insult, a "swear." Its strength and implication varies across the vastness and diversity of latin america, with usages that include approximate equivalents of "oh, sh*t!!" and "go to hell!" Indeed, upon looking for, and then entering the Miami restaurant named "El Carajo," one is apt to exclaim "What the f*ck!?"

Although the owners of the El Carajo combination tapas bar, wine cave and British Petroleum gasoline filling station franchise pay homage to the nautical in their signage--their logo is a flag flying above a masthead roost tilted aslant by a Caribbean breeze--one imagines that they fully embrace the word's many meanings. It takes not a little sense of humor to open a full-on faux-Spanish cava in the back of a generic convenience store. Here the bewildered, walking in to prepay their gasoline, are likely to find, just beyond the cash register and the standard gas-station amenities, a group of men seated on stools around a table, pouring and sampling a selection of Iberian wines, each with half-a-dozen semi-used crystal glasses spread out before him.

 

 Not unexpected in your average gasoline station convenience store.

Rather less expected, in an adjacent aisle: this extensive selection of fermented grapes.

 Unexpected to the point of unique? The Spanish taverna dining room, complete with fake brick arches.

 Where some gas stations might have a hot nacho cheese dispensing machine or a slurpy gun, El Carajo presents this selection of fine Iberian cakes and pastries, behind curved glass.

Flan with your fill-up?

 From tortilla Española to black Angus sirloin, to go!

 The most unprepossessing façade.

 Never fear, El Carajo also carries the usual "convenience" selection of emergency cosmetics, candy bars, and sodas, like these emery boards. KD's fetching pink and green ensemble is by Mossimo for Tarjay.

 (17th and South Dixie Highway, and if you don't know, now you know....)

That's how we roll. ¡Vete p'al Carajo!