What’s my elevation?

 

Weather changes quickly in the Catskills

 On Thursday early afternoon, sunny, in the high 40s:

9.09, Friday morning:

Saturday afternoon, 2.39:

An early taste of winter

 Delaware County is west, and a higher elevation, than Ulster County’s Phoenicia.

Dr. Joyce Wallace, Pioneering AIDS Physician, Dies at 79

From her New York Times obit, 10/27/2020:

Dr. Joyce Wallace, a Manhattan internist who treated prostitutes for AIDS, occasionally brought streetwalkers home with her when they had nowhere else to go.

Once, when her son, Ari Kahn, was about 12, Dr. Wallace, who had to get to the hospital to see her patients, left him at home with a prostitute who was H.I.V. positive and going through heroin withdrawal. It wasn’t clear who was to take care of whom. Ari ended up making pizza for them both. When Dr. Wallace returned, she took the prostitute to a drug-treatment center; the woman eventually overcame her addiction and got a job at a research foundation that Dr. Wallace had started.

“On one hand, it was grossly irresponsible,” Mr. Kahn said of the incident in an interview. On the other hand, he said, it was typical of his mother’s extraordinary capacity for empathy, and she helped a lot of people.

If the Shoe Floats

 Over the decades, a mass of flotsam from a freighter accident has inspired scientific discovery, urban legend and, now, an art exhibition commemorating the Great Sneaker Spill of 1990.

The Great Sneaker Spill might have gone unremembered had it not been for the enterprising scavengers who washed and resold the flotsam and Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer who, alerted to the spill’s existence by his mother, later used it as the basis for a study of little-known currents. That bit of science earned Mr. Ebbesmeyer the sobriquet Doctor Ocean and, for a time, a guest spot on the couches of late-night talk shows.

Early this year, Andy Yoder, an artist in Washington, D.C., who specializes in repurposing everyday objects, happened upon the legend of the Great Sneaker Spill and decided to commemorate it as a means of highlighting the continuing degradation of our marine environment. Creating 250 Nike replicas from recycled trash, Mr. Yoder then arranged them on store shelves in an immersive installation, “Andy Yoder: Overboard,” that went on view on Oct. 24 at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center in Vermont and also online.

Want some advice?

 

Balmy October day in the Catskills

 2.45 pm, on Friday 23 October 2020: (felt great):

You looking at me?

 

Traveling through Dutchess County, NY.

Happy Birthday, Rita Hayworth

Margarita Carmen Hayworth Casino (October 17, 1918 – May 14, 1987). Great dancer. Fine actress. Cultural icon. How many associate her with Shawshank?

Dancing with Fred Astaire, in You were never Lovelier (1942):