I first headed to the East Village, not far from the museum, to see if I could grab lunch at teany, a vegetarian restaurant co-founded by Moby.  teany had been closed since last June because of a fire, but had been making noises about reopening since February.  I took a chance and stopped by, but alas, it was still not open (it has reopened since I was in NYC).

I ended up getting a falafel sandwich from a street vendor on my way over to the museum.  I took in the exhibit, which was fun to look at – most of it was original art from published works, and there were a ton of artists involved.  However, in general, the stuff by artists I’m familiar with was stuff I’d seen before.  The vast majority of the artists were new to me, though, and there was a lot of funny and interesting work to look at and read.

I left there and headed up to the con at the 69th Regiment National Guard Armory in midtown.  There was a line to get in, which I waited in for a bit before I realized that I could just walk right in, given that I had bought a ticket online (I got to go to a separate table where they looked up my registration and sent me on in – I should have remembered that from last year).

Once inside, I headed down to the panel room, as a panel I wanted to see was starting in 10 minutes.  It’s a good thing I didn’t wait, because there was already a long line to get into the panel room!  The panel was supposed to start at 2:00, but the con staff ended up starting to let the line in at almost 2:15.  The room filled up quickly, and I thought I might not get to to see it, but I ended up standing in the doorway.

The panel was on the topic of alternate treatments of superheroes in comics, and featured artists who had done superhero work but more often (or primarily) did more alternative comics.  The specific people on the panel were the reason for the large crowd: Paul Pope, Frank Miller, Kyle Baker, Jaime Hernandez, and Dean Haspiel.  I snapped a few cell phone pics from my doorway perch – here’s the least bad-looking one:

The guy on the far left was the moderator.  The artists proceed left to right after that in the order I named them.

After that, I had a couple of hours to wander the convention floor:

There was a brief signing by Hernandez I was able to hit, and I managed to visit Ted Rall during the hour he was at his publisher’s booth.  I discovered that Rall is a Mac user!

Other creators I visited and/or bought merchandise from (but did not take pictures of) included Pat Lewis, Raina Telgemeier, Bill Roundy, Monica Gallagher, and R. Sikoryak.

One of the things Mr. Sikoryak is known for is doing slideshow presentations of his comics.  The last panel of the day, which I attended, was him and a few other artists showing slideshows of their work, with parts performed by professional voice actors.  It was a blast, and there were even a few slideshows at the end with images in 3-D.  They passed out glasses to the audience for those:

Yes, it’s blurry – it was another cell phone picture and the room was dark.

The end of that panel marked the end of the con.  I made my way back toward downtown, looking for a place for dinner.  On the way, I happened by Gramercy Park:

where I noticed this sign:

Asking people in Manhattan not to honk?  I wonder if this law actually works…

On my walk I also saw this rather curvy building on 3rd Ave.:

I ended up eating at a little Afghan restaurant called Khyber Pass on St. Mark’s Place.  After that, I headed back toward Grand Central Station, but had some extra time, so I wandered over to Times Square.  Who should I meet there, but Hello Kitty!

She was doing what she does best – waving Hello.

Despite all the light and billboards and entertainmentplexes (or perhaps because of them), there isn’t really anything I find interesting in Times Square.  One neat thing I saw as I headed for the train station again was a Scottish band playing on the sidewalk:

I didn’t stick around long enough to find out who they were or anything, though.  Just part of the New York color.  With that, I left the big apple.

Something that’s interesting about the park is the variety of different types of forest and other vegetation found there.  The first trail we hiked was through a fairly deciduous forest, with some tall pines (and wild blueberry bushes!), and it came out on a tidal bay, pictured here:

Here’s a slightly different part of the bay, seen at a different point on the trail:

I don’t know exactly what this thing is for, but I would guess it’s supposed to be visible from well out in the water:

The next trail was a boardwalk that went out onto a dune and barrier island:

Dune grass:

A sandpiper:

The estuary between dunes and shore:

After that, we took a short trail that went through a salt marsh.  Here’s a picture of the marsh grass:

According to one of the signs, some of what grows there is known as elephant grass, which can get as tall as 3 meters!

On the way back from that trail, near the parking area, I spotted this critter:

To give you an idea of its size, here it is in front of my foot:

Next we went on a trail through a cedar forest.  The cedars are traditionally considered sacred by the Mi’kmaq Nation, and the tribe has a wigwam near the trailhead for teaching visitors about their customs and culture:

Nothing was going on inside while we were there:

The trail itself certainly had a number of cedar trees, some of which had a strange-looking moss growing on them:

We went on one more trail after that, which supposedly contained an abandoned beaver lodge, but at the point where a sign talked about the lodge, it was completely hidden from view by bushes.  No pictures from that trail.

The total hiking distance was around 10 km, and we spent about 4.5 hours there (including a break for lunch).  It’s a lovely park, and I hope to go again sometime.  If you should ever find yourself there, though, bring some mosquito repellent, because there are great hordes of the insects there.

The company makes small machines for every step of the fiber milling process (from raw fiber to yarn), and they also run a mill operation themselves.  This is the mill building:

And here is the mill store, where they sell yarn, batting, and various woven and knit objects:

Since the last time we’d been there, they had also opened up a tea room, where we had lunch:

I also had a pot of lovely, local blueberry tea with lunch.

Of course I had to take pictures of the various animals on the property, including llamas:

Pom-pom ducks:

Chickens, one of whom had very feathery feet:

Inquisitive goats:

and some young birds in a cage, which may be some sort of game bird:

There was also this little dog behind the counter in the store:

You can see pictures of individual machines on their site, but here’s a bunch of them in the mill:

Next: Canadian National (Park)

Here are some views along that beach.  The water is the Strait of Northumberland, which flows between NB and Prince Edward Island.

The water was cool in some places, and warm in others, and those places seemed to vary on different days.  We also were there at different tide levels.  In most cases, there were a number of sandbars sticking out of the water, and those seemed to be favorite places for building sand fortifications:

Usually there were a number of gulls around:

But also little beach dwellers in the water:

The water left interesting patterns in the sand:

Next: Trip to the Island

A white wreath hangs on the balcony railing where King was shot:

Photography is not allowed inside the museum, so I have no pictures to show of the interior.  Much of it is not necessarily worth photographing, as it has a lot of informational text on wall displays, with some images to illustrate.  The whole museum is structured so that visitors traverse it in a linear fashion, and are following a timeline of the African-American struggle for civil rights in the U.S.  It starts in the days of slavery and progresses forward, but most of the length deals with the events of the 1950′s and ’60′s.

There are certainly some eye-catching exhibits, though, such as a bus from the period, which visitors can walk through, and which has a statue of Rosa Parks sitting in a seat near the front.  There’s also a lunch counter mock-up with statues of student protesters sitting at it; a partial, burnt-up bus illustrating the Freedom Rides exhibit; and a garbage truck flanked by statues of striking sanitation workers, wearing “I am a man” signs.  The tour of that building finishes with visitors walking by a preserved version of one of the rooms from the time, right by where King was staying, and being able to look out the window onto the spot on the balcony where he was shot.

One then leaves the building, and crosses the street.  One goes through this gate (which was slid to the side when I went through – I took this picture after the place closed).

This leads to a tunnel, which goes into the basement of this building:

One then ascends to the top floor and goes through an exhibit all about the investigation of the assassination.  This includes being able to look at the bathroom from which James Earl Ray fired the shot.  The small window in the middle of the picture below is that bathroom window:

The main floor of the building finishes the museum, with exhibits dealing more broadly with other struggles for rights and equality, and detailing some progress made in Memphis and the nation since the ’60′s.  The place was certainly money and time well spent.

After I left the museum, I walked West toward the mighty Mississippi.  At one point I got to a stairway that descended to a road, across which was a park by the river.  Here’s a picture taken from that stairway:

Here are views of the river taken from the riverbank – looking North:

and looking South:

I walked North along the river for a while, which took me back into downtown.  I came upon a smaller park on the edge of downtown, and was a bit surprised (though maybe I shouldn’t have been) to see the name of the park:

I wouldn’t think too many people would want to commemorate the Confederacy, but then there was a big fight to keep the Confederate flag atop the South Carolina capitol a few years ago.

Soon after that park, I came to a city visitors’ center, which was closed, but had this mosaic egg out front:

From there I moved away from the river a bit, and headed North up a different street.  I encountered this interesting piece of sculpture:

I went inside that large part on the left, which had a bench around the interior.

I could look up at the high part:

and then I went back outside and looked up through the high part:

I also took some pictures of the sculpture’s underside:

A bit further North is The Pyramid, which is a currently-unused arena:

In front of the place is this statue:

Just past the Pyramid was a bridge over to Mud Island, which has a parks and residences on it.  I walked across, taking a couple more pictures of the water – this time of the narrow channel that runs between the Tennessee bank and the island (known as the Wolf River).  This is looking South:

That’s the island to the right, with the Interstate 40 bridge going over it.  This is looking North, with ripples cause by a boat heading in to dock:

Technically, the ‘island’ is a peninsula.  If you look at a map (or satellite photo), it is connected to the mainland at the Northern end.  I did venture that far, though.  Once I crossed the bridge, I headed across the main road, and into another park, where I could look across the large part of the river, and watch the sun set on the Arkansas side:

I then headed back the way I’d come to go back to the hotel.  On the way, I was passing under I-40, and saw these bears propped against a column:

Perhaps they were put there as a memorial to someone?  Your guess is as good as mine.

My room turned out to have a few amenities I’m not used to from past lodging experience.  For one, in addition to a couple of chocolate squares on the night table, there was also a plate of confections:

That’s a white chocolate-covered strawberry, a petit-four, and a white mixed-nut cluster.  It turned out that they put a new such plate in my room every evening (and it was the same stuff each time, except that one night the cluster was dark chocolate instead of white).

The room also had an lcd tv, which wasn’t of much interest to me since I didn’t watch any tv while there.  It also had a nice Bose radio instead of the usual cheap alarm clock.  Here are other pics of the place:

And here is the view out one of the windows:

Including a little architectural feature:

The room was in a section of the building that jutted out, so another window had a view of the building wall, and the edge of the roof:

Later on, I was on the roof, and took a picture of that window from above (the one with the rounded top):

The rooftop had some nice views of the city (and the river):

Also on the roof was this structure, which one could not enter:

But it had these creepy-looking paintings of children in the windows:

Here is the neat sign on top of the place:

The Peabody is also home to the “World Famous Peabody Ducks“.  I had not heard of them (or the hotel, for that matter) before I planned this trip, but apparently they are pretty well-known.  The ducks live most of the time in an enclosed area on the roof called:

In their palace, the ducks have their own little fountain, as well as a miniature version (not exactly to scale) of the hotel:

At one point they were all partaking of some salad:

Part of each day, the ducks are not in the palace.  They are led in the late morning to the fountain in the lobby of the hotel, and there they stay until 5pm.  I got a few pics of them in their daytime workplace:

The ducks seem to be a major attraction, as people come to the lobby in large crowds (whether or not they’re staying at the hotel) to see the twice-daily duck marches.  Duck logos are printed on all of the hotel’s materials, stationery, etc.  Did I mention that they even have duck-shaped soap?

That soap in now in use at our bathroom at home.

Next post: a different kind of palace.

As I did last year, I drove to Norwalk, CT, and then took the train into Grand Central Station.  I was able to walk to the convention from there, as they were holding it at a new venue – the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Ave.  It was about 16 blocks South of the train station.

On my way down to the con, I discovered that several blocks (6 to 8?) of Lexington were closed off for a street market of some kind:

There were several booths selling clothing, jewelry, souvenirs, etc.  as well as lots of food and drink booths.  I needed to get some lunch, so I got a chicken kabob/pita sandwich, and ate it while I walked the rest of the way.

The con was supposed to start at 11:00am.  I got to the building at 11:40 and found that they hadn’t started admitting people yet.  Apparently, movers were late getting con supplies there and unloading, so the organizers were still getting setup.  The line to get in snaked around the corner and halfway up the block on 26th St.  After I got in line, many more people lined up after me, eventually snaking around the next corner.

Here’s the line in front of me:

and behind me:

I was standing in the sun, and hadn’t brought a hat (or any sunscreen).  Fortunately, I had my laptop bag with me (sans laptop) that I was able to hold on top of my head (and managed to balance it there for quite a while).  It provided much needed shade.

While waiting in line, I saw this gold topped building:

Not sure what it is (I haven’t tried looking it up – anybody know?).

The line finally started moving around 12:30, and within 10 minutes I was inside.  Unlike previous years in the Puck Building, they had all the exhibitors in one big space (so big I couldn’t get it all in one picture):

A brief rundown of people whose tables I visited, in no particular order:

• Spike
• Dylan Meconis
• Bill Roundy
• Laura Wilson
• Chris Hastings
• Pat Lewis
• Meredith Gran
• Jim Ottaviani

Jim O. was supposed to be debuting his new book at the con.  It’s called T-Minus, and it’s about the space race leading up to the moon landing.  It was written by him and drawn by Zander and Kevin Cannon.  Unfortunately, Jim’s agent, who was supposed to be bringing the copies of the book for Jim to sell, never showed up.  Jim sold plenty of his older books, but it was still disappointing for him.  The Cannons were there as well, at a separate table, and they had some copies they’d apparently gotten from their local comic store.  I ended up buying the book from them, and then taking it to Jim for a signature.

I went to a few panels during the day.  The first was the Comics Bakery panel.  That’s the name of a collective of 4 artists: Raina Telgemeier, Dave Roman, Marion Vitus, and John Green, and the panel was them going through the history of how they all met and started collaborating, and eventually got married (well, they’re 2 married couples).  Here’s a pic of 3 of them (Vitus, Green, and Telgemeier) during the panel:

The room where the panels were held had murals on all 4 walls of scenes from the Revolutionary and Civil Wars (it is a National Guard building), which made for an unusual backdrop for the presentation (why no, there’s nothing distracting about Confederate soldiers being bayonetted by the Union Army!).

The second panel I sat through was less interesting.  It was about the state of comics publishing, and had 7 publishers on it.  Not much to report from it.

The third panel was about the humor magazine Humbug.  I had never heard of it before this con, but it was apparently published for 2 years in the late ’50′s, and involved 5 writers/artists, some of whom had worked for MAD Magazine.  Two of the founding members were on the panel: Arnold Roth and Al Jaffee (left and center, respectively):

They talked about working on Humbug, and various other topics that may or may not have been related, and were pretty funny throughout.  Jaffee was the reason I was there, as I am very familiar with him from reading MAD.

This was him talking to the moderator after the panel.

Al Jaffee wrote and drew various features for MAD, including ‘Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions’.  He also was responsible for the MAD Fold-In, which was always on the inside back cover of the mag, and featured an image and question, which yielded a different image and the answer when you folded the right side over to meet the left side.

After the panel, Roth and Jaffee were doing a signing.  I have a bunch of old issues of MAD from the ’60′s that my Dad had collected, and though they’re falling apart, I still have most of the covers.  I brought a few fold-ins with me for Jaffee to sign.

Click here to see the fold-ins, and to “fold” them.

The con ended for the day at 7, I went and had a lovely dinner at a Middle Eastern deli, and then walked back to Grand Central to head home.  The end.

On the way home from my Michigan trip in early July, I made a stop in upstate New York.  Many times before I had passed by the town of Seneca Falls, and this time I finally took the opportunity to stop and visit the Women’s Rights Historical Park located there.

This small park commemorates the convention held there in 1848 to demand legal equality for women in property, education, work and religious life, and, of course, to call for women to have the right to vote.

There’s a 2-story visitors’ center there, which has a display of statues on the first floor.

Some of them represent famous organizers and attendees of the convention, and others are meant to be generic attendees (i.e. they’re not supposed to be anyone in particular).

On the left here is Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with Frederick Douglass in the middle.

Here are Lucretia Mott and her husband James.

The central figure here is Martha Wright (sister of L. Mott).

Mary Ann and Thomas M’Clintock:

and Jane and Richard Hunt (left and center), who hosted the meeting that led to the convention:

Beyond the statues there was a wall showing various images of the fight for equality.

The stairs led up to the main museum, with several exhibits showcasing the history and achievements of feminism.  Included here was another statue of an important figure who wasn’t at the 1848 convention: Sojourner Truth.

There were a few signposts that gave a timeline of events, and from which I learned a few things I hadn’t known before.  For instance, before women gained suffrage nationally, a handful of states and territories granted the right to vote regardless of gender.  The first was the Wyoming territory in 1870.  I also learned that the first woman elected to Congress (Jeannette Rankin) was elected before the 19th amendment, in 1916.

Adjacent to the visitors’ center is the skeleton of the chapel in which the convention was held.

Just down a slope from that building is a fountain in the form of a wall with water flowing down it.  Carved on the wall is the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments:

and a list of the attendees:

It’s definitely an inspirational site to visit, and I’m glad I took the time to stop by.  One of the sad things I reflected on was the fact that practically nobody who participated in that convention actually lived to see national suffrage.  The 19th amendment was ratified in 1920 – 72 years after the convention (which forms an interesting symmetry with the fact that the convention itself occurred 72 years after the founding of the country).  It’s also surreal to think about the fact that suffrage occurred less than a century ago – women have only enjoyed the right to vote in the U.S. for 88 years.  There has been progress since then, in gaining gender parity in several other arenas, but there remains quite a ways to go.

Maybe it will take less than another 160 years to finish the work started in Seneca Falls.

The restaurant is located in Ithaca, NY, which is just far enough from expressways in the state that it isn’t a convenient stop if one is crossing through. I figured I should finally take the extra time required to go have a meal there, and see just what the place is like.

It’s located in an old building that’s been made into a little mall. This is the building:

And here are exterior and interior entrances to the restaurant:

They have a very large repertoire of recipes, as they’ve put out more than a dozen different books over the years. As a result, they don’t have a set menu – they offer small lunch and dinner menus that change daily.

I had a bean burrito with onions, peppers and hot sauce, served on a bed of brown rice. Also had a bottle of local ginger beer, and a blueberry-apple cobbler for dessert. The food was good, but ultimately no better than I’ve had at other vegetarian restaurants, and somewhat pricier.  I’m glad I made the trip once, and I’ll certainly eat there again if I find myself in Ithaca, but I won’t go out of my way to return to the place.

The trip to the city began with me driving down to Norwalk, CT, where I got on a train into Manhattan. That let me off at Grand Central Station, where I got onto the subway. Before going to the subway, though, I had to be a typical tourist, and take some pictures of the station’s famous main concourse (hey, I’d never been to Grand Central before). I took some pix from the topof the steps, showing other tourists taking pictures:

and then I went down to the railing on the landing to get a less obstructed view of the floor:

The con was held at the Puck building in Soho (it’s located just South of Houston St.), which is a couple of blocks from the actual museum.

I got to see a number of comic artists I like, and have photos of some of them. First off, one of the first people I saw was Andy Runton, who does the cute all-ages comic Owly.

I had him sign a book that I’d brought, and I picked up a copy of the first book and got it signed for my nephew, who will have his 4th birthday this Fall (don’t tell him!). The person who had been in line right before me had given Andy a present – a little crocheted Owly:

Most of the convention took place on the first floor of the building, but there was also some space being used on the seventh floor. For some reason, while there was air conditioning in the former space, the latter didn’t have any. The temperature in NYC that day was in the upper 90′s. When I got up to floor 7, I felt extremely sorry for the artists up there. I’m glad I went up there, though, as I got to meet Spike, creator of Templar, Arizona (which I reviewed here not so long ago).

She was doing sketches for free of her characters, so I asked for one, and she spent quite a while working on it. I was amazed she went to that much work for free. Of course, I have pre-ordered both book collections so far of the strip, and mentioned that. The money from those pre-orders is what allows her to pay for the print runs of the books. Still, since she had gone to the effort, and it was so stifling up there, I bought her a soda (what are fans for if not to do favors for artists, after all?).

One of the guests of honor at the con, and someone whose presence made me feel I had to be there, was Lynda Barry. If you don’t know who she is, you obviously weren’t reading alternative weekly newspapers in the ’80′s or ’90′s. She drew the very long running Ernie Pook’s Comeek, as well as writing a couple of novels and some other comics. As her contemporary Matt Groening has said, she is the funk queen of the universe! I happened to go to the table where she would be signing just before her scheduled signing time. I ended up being 4th in line when she started. She was very friendly and enthusiastic, grasping my hand in both of hers when I greeted her. I bought her new book, What It Is, which is sort of a treatise on writing, and had her sign a couple of strip collections. I pointed out that one of the books was my favorite, because of the dialogue on the cover. She said she didn’t think she’d read that dialogue since the book was published in the early ’90′s.

Some pics of her:

Toward the end of the day, Shaenon Garrity was signing at the Friends of Lulu table.  I had found out only a few days earlier that she was going to be there, making a rare East Coast appearance.  I took advantage of the opportunity to have her sign a couple of Narbonic books.

Other artists I visited (but did not take pictures of) include Jim Ottaviani, Keith Knight, Pat Lewis, Jessica Abel, Jennifer Camper, Mo Willems, and Stan Yan.  I recommend them all.

While on the sweltering seventh floor, I took some pictures of the view.  This is looking West along Houston St.:

and this is looking North, sort of along Lafayette:

After the con floor closed for the day, I went for a walk to look for dinner.  Before actually settling on a restaurant, I wandered over to the Hudson River area.  There’s a bike path near the water, and I saw this memorial along the path:

Then I wandered out on a pier (I forget the number) to see the river proper.  This shot looks downriver:

In the distance you can see the Statue of Liberty:

This is the view upriver:

A firefighting boat was parked at the pier:

and heading back to dry land, I saw this view of the city:

I had dinner at a nice Indian restaurant, in which I was the only diner.  This was probably because they had no air conditioning.  I didn’t care, as I just wanted t get off my feet and eat something.  After dinner I walked around a bit more, then went to the Lulu Awards ceremony at MOCCA itself.  Following that, I skedaddled out of town and headed for home.