Photo: Accumulated

"Accumulated" (Flickr)

Unless you've been sleeping since Christmas Day, you'll have heard about the blizzard that dumped a whole bunch of snow on the northeastern United States last weekend. I had a snow day on Monday -- which was really a no-brainer since the nearest subway line wasn't running and there was no way in hell I was going to make it to the next-nearest. (Turned out there was no way in hell I would have made it even to the nonfunctional nearest line, but I didn't find that out until I went out for a few groceries.)

So, I took a picture of the snow that built up on the windowboxes out back. Just to give you a sense of scale, each of those boxes is about two feet long and maybe five inches high -- and the snow, as you can see, is taller than the boxes. And just to give you a sense of magnitude, behind those windowboxes is the only side that isn't sheltered.

Duly Noted: Plane Crash in Park Slope

If you also read Brownstoner, you might have seen that Green-Wood Cemetery will be unveiling a memorial today to the 134 people killed when two airplanes collided off of Staten Island. The wreckage of one, La Guardia-bound TWA Flight 266, landed on Staten Island (1) near where the collision occurred; the other plane, United Airlines Flight 826, bound for International Airport (now JFK), crashed at the intersection of 7th Avenue and Sterling Place in Park Slope.

Of the passengers and crew on those two flights, only one survived the initial crash. But that survivor -- an 11-year-old boy who had been thrown into a snowbank -- later died; half a dozen people on the ground were also killed.

Weather conditions at the time of the collision were what could be called, at best, sketchy: it had snowed earlier, and rain and fog still lingered (2). And while neither flight had reported any mechanical problems, but the United flight was apparently having trouble with its navigational receivers. Either way, it had strayed a dozen miles off course and into that of the TWA flight.

Witnesses speculated that the United flight's pilots were attempting an emergency landing in Prospect Park. On the face of it, it's not an unreasonable supposition, since the park is only a few blocks away from the crash site at Stirling Place and 7th Avenue, but it's uncertain whether the pilots still had control of the plane.

Further reading:
Wikipedia has an article about the crash; the "References" section contains a few sources not linked to here.

In addition, the New York Times has been running a series of articles about the anniversary.

• "A Collision in the Clouds" (December 12)
• "How It Happened" (December 14)
• "Scarred Roofs and Jet Parts" (December 15)
• "Sights and Sounds" (December 16)
• "50 Years Later, Traces of an Air Crash Linger in Rusty Metal, and Memories" (December 12)
• "The Neighborhood in 1960" (December 13)
• "The Boy Who Fell From the Sky" (December 16)
• "A Little Brother Remembers" (December 16)

The last two articles are about Stephen Baltz, the 11-year-old who survived the initial crash, but died a day later.

Additional stuff:
Brooklyn Public Library's "Brooklynology" blog had a post about the crash, as seen through one photographer's lens; it had not worked its way through my feed reader when I initially published this post.

Yarn Harlot on Tour!

The Yarn Harlot (Stephanie Pearl-McPhee) is currently on a tour which tonight brought her to my neighborhood Barnes and Noble. She spoke, and read a little from her most recent book, Free Range Knitter.



Really, she talked as much about publishing as she did about knitting, often sticking to the overlap of knitting and publishing/blogging. Things like she's learned not to say that she writes/blogs about knitting if she can at all avoid it: somehow writing/blogging about knitting is automatically not a "real" book/blog to many. (I think people who think a book/blog about knitting isn't a "real" book/blog need to be stabbed repeatedly with sock needles, cut up, carded and spun.)

The whole thing had a vaguely This American Life sensibility to it. I wonder if Ira Glass would be willing to extend the "American" part to include Canadians.

And there were the obligatory photos-of-crowd-with-Sock she posts on her blog -- and, apparently, sends to her mom. I'll come back with the link to her post when she gets it up. And if you're familiar with her blog, you'll know she posts sometimes posts pictures of people with their knitting. Quite a few people tonight took pictures of her with our knitting. I offered her a choice of two projects and she suggested both:



One's a scarf, using the "Ostrich Plumes" pattern from Barbara Walker's Second Treasury of Knitting Patterns. The other is the "Silk Purse" pattern (in wool) from Véronik Avery's Knitting Classic Style. And the junk stuff on the left's mine, but I was practically tied to it and couldn't put it anywhere.

---

UPDATE:
Pearl-McPhee's blog post about this stop is up. It can be found here.

Sign Gone Missing

Earlier this afternoon, I noticed that the post office on Seventh Avenue between Second and Third Streets in Park Slope is missing its sign. The most likely reason I can come up with is that it's being replaced, but personally, I'd much rather they used the money they're spending on a sign to clean up the interior.

Photo: Face

A sculptural decoration on what used to be John Jay High School in Park Slope. I'm not sure if it's supposed to represent something, but I didn't exactly research it, either.

Signs of Misdirection

I have a thing for signs. Especially signs that seem to say something they don't mean. Or, alternatively, have been modified to say something they don't mean. I've seen a few posted on Gownus Lounge recently. One features a sign with a misspelling which, like confusing its and it's (and inventing its'), leaves the capabilities of the sign's poster open to debate. Another sign was merely bent, but in such a way that could very easily create confusion.

Similarly, I spotted a few such signs on my own. One of them suggests that East 90th Street and Madison Avenue is not an intersection, but a single street.


Another sign was deliberately modified, to create a similar effect I'm calling the "all paths lead to 10th Ave":


My contribution to the rash of misspelled stuff is this sign, in front of a soup store that is now (perhaps fortunately) long closed.


But I'll close with a few messed-up one-way signs. (I once saw one that was pointing straight up. As in vertical. If only I hadn't been in a moving car at the time!)

Mere News: Buy in Brooklyn is the talk of the borough

I just found three more items with a Buy in Brooklyn connection on my Google News page -- and no, I didn't do a search for them.

The Brooklyn Paper has a story today about the Snowflake Celebration. (The article also references the Umbrella Experiment briefly.)

And speaking of the Umbrella Experiment, The New York Times has a pair of stories about them. One, dated November 30th, gives a good chunk of background. The second, dated December 2nd, is more of a progress report.

News off the Blogs: Two Links

Two Links off The Gowanus Lounge to report this morning.

The first item, "Park Slope Snowflake Celebration Update," notes that many of Park Slope's retailers will be participating in the Brooklyn neighborhood's first Snowflake Celebration on the 13th (website here). Many will be open late and offer discounts just for this one event. The whole thing is organized by Buy in Brooklyn, who are also behind The Great Umbrella Experiment (Link 1; Link 2).

The second item is a "Bklink" subtitled "F Train Gets C's & D's." The line does just that, as reported on the 2nd Avenue Sagas blog.

Photos: It must be December

Yesterday, it was bitterly cold. Bitterly cold. Despite this, I took this picture:


We even woke up to snow this morning. Compare the picture above to these I took today:

Photo: Park Slope, Late Fall

Park Slope, Late Fall
Originally uploaded by The Loopweaver

I've been quieter than usual today, so perhaps it's time for another foliage photo. I took this one over the weekend and finally got around to uploading it yesterday. It promptly got a comment: so promptly, in fact, that the uploader was still thinking, and hadn't registered that the photo was fully uploaded.

But I would have liked this shot, even if someone hadn't commented so quickly.