Common Sense and Whiskey

The Golden Horn, Istanbul, Turkey - Wednesday HDR

2013-05-15T16:27:47-04:00

Shot at sunrise from the lower level of the Galata Bridge toward Beyoglu as nine exposures, processed as an HDR in Photomatix, finished in Photoshop. Texture and a spin through Pixel Bender to make it like an oil painting. Click to see it bigger. And there are currently 357 more photos from Turkey here.

Funny Place Names

2013-05-14T13:13:40-04:00

These two maps are really entertaining. Just click through and go see:

Map of Orkney, Map of Shetland

Photo Quiz #178 - Where in the World?

2013-05-03T10:38:37-04:00

Not an easy quiz this week, so here are three photo clues. Can you name the country? Extra credit for naming the capital city, which is shown in the middle photo.

Place your bets and click through for the answer. And a good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.

And the answer is ............................................ it's Madagascar, and the capital city is Antananarivo. That's the Zoma, the Friday market in Antananarivo pictured in the middle.

See more photos from Madagascar in the at Madagascar Gallery at Earthphotos.com. And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.

It's Ukraine. Ukraine, I tell you.

2013-05-01T17:02:47-04:00

Bill

Chernobyl 27 years ago

2013-04-28T19:46:15-04:00

“There has been an accident at our nuclear power station. We ask you to be calm. Gather up your necessary things, what you need for three days: food and clothing. At 1400 hours a bus will be sent to your home, and you are to take a seat on it.” - Nina Melnick, local radio news reader, 26 April, 1986.

Photo Quiz #177 - Where in the World?

2013-04-26T11:06:36-04:00

Two big, expansive views over a capital city. This week's quiz is, what country is it capital city of? And name that capital while you're at it. Clue: I don't know, looks kind of, almost ... Balkan, doesn't it?

Place your bets and click through for the answer. And a good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.

And the answer is ............................................ it's Bulgaria, and the capital city is Sofia.

See 997 more photos in the Cities Gallery at Earthphotos.com.

And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.

One More Look at Pripyat and Chernobyl - A Dozen Photos

2013-04-23T09:37:26-04:00

Photos from a March visit to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine. Click 'em to make 'em bigger. More photos here.

Kindergarten inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, near Chernobyl, Ukraine.

The lobby of the Palace of Culture, Pripyat, Ukraine, inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

School inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

School inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

Inside the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, Pripyat, Ukraine - HDR.

The Supermarket on Lenin Street, on the central square, inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

The gymnasium at the Palace of Culture, inside the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, Pripyat, Ukraine - HDR.

That's Chernobyl reactor 4, the ruined one, on the right. The New Safe Containment is the structure under construction on the left. It's an arch (as you can see through the trees) which will be jacked up in the air on legs one section at a time, until it's tall enough to slide on tracks over to the right to cover reactor 4. This photo from March, 2013.

The amusement park at Pripyat, Ukraine, inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone.

Kitchen inside the 30 kilometer Chernobyl exclusion zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

Inside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Pripyat, Ukraine.

Sochi Olympics Watch #15 - Wait. We LOVE Puppies.

2013-04-18T16:08:56-04:00

We'll Just Sterilize the Little Bastards.

Sochi Olympics Watch #14 - Kill the Puppies

2013-04-18T10:32:06-04:00

In an article with the headline Stray animal extermination to safeguard Sochi Olympics, a government official named Sergei Krivonosov says Sochi plans to kill more than 2,000 stray cats and dogs ahead of next February's Olympics "to ensure the safety of visitors...."

It's always a warm, secure feeling when your call is being recorded for your safety and convenience, or you have to turn off all electronic devices for your safety and convenience. It's heart warming that Russia plans to show its passion for your safety by killing animals.

Forgotten History

2013-04-15T09:47:36-04:00

The RMS Titanic sank a hundred and one years ago today. Ships were dispatched from Halifax to recover bodies, since Halifax was the nearest big port with continental rail connections.

The Mackay-Bennet, a Halifax-based steamer normally used for laying communications cable, led the effort. Two days after the sinking she set out with a cargo of coffins and canvas bags, an undertaker and a preacher.

Over the next four weeks two ships from Halifax followed, the Minia and the CGS Montmagny. Altogether they and the SS Algerine, sailing from St. John’s, Newfoundland, recovered over three hundred bodies. Some were buried at sea, but 209 bodies returned to the Halifax shore.

Just 59 were sent away to their families. The rest, including the Titanic’s unidentifiable and unclaimed victims, were buried in Halifax, and local businesses donated bouquets of lilies.

•••••

An even more horrible tragedy still lay five years down the road. In 1917 Halifax harbor fell victim to the greatest conflagration of the Great War. I don't know if it's just me, but polling people I know, it sounds like nobody else knew about the largest man made explosion before Hiroshima, either.

Halifax, Nova Scotia

Halifax is a good-looking, purposeful, working town. With a population just under a million, it hosts 200,000 cruise ship passengers a year and some 40 percent of Canada’s defense assets. Nova Scotia is the world’s largest exporter of lobster and Christmas trees.

It doesn't look at all like a place afflicted. Perched on two rocky shores, Halifax and it's sister city Dartmouth, across the water, enjoy refuge from Atlantic storms, set back from the ocean. Still further back, the Bedford Basin affords a strategic ice-free port, invaluable in wartime.

With one of the world's deepest and most protected harbors, Halifax always prospered in wartime, from the Napoleanic wars and the War of 1812, and continuing to the onset of World War One, providing men and materiel for various war efforts.

Canada entered the Great War in 1914 as a colony, when Britain declared war on Germany. Canadians were just about unanimous in support. Halifax boomed, and harbor traffic ultimately rose to seventeen million tons a year, from just two.

By 1917, businesses were bursting. Industry struggled to keep up with demand. A quarter of the men in Halifax were serving overseas.

Foreshadowing the U.S. experience in World War Two, women took jobs formerly thought of as men's work. Ultimately, women's suffrage came to Canada in 1918, two years ahead of the United States.

The U.S. held to a position of neutrality. But after a German declaration of U-boat warfare against Atlantic supply lanes and the sinking of both merchant and passenger ships with Americans onboard, the U.S joined the Great War in April 1917.

The first regular, systematic convoy of war material from Canada left Sydney, Nova Scotia’s easternmost harbor, on June 24th, 1917. By October as many as 36 supply ships were assembled for each convoy.

The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax describes a typical convoy as five ships abreast with two corvettes out front and one on each flank.

Typically, freighters with deck cargo of tanks, trucks and tankers, other freighters with aircraft, and maybe a heavy lift ship with locomotives sailed alongside rescue ships and an oiler with fuel for the corvettes. A destroyer carrying the escort force commander brought up the rear.

Convoy traffic moved to Halifax from Sydney during winter, owing to the back bay, the ice-free Bedford Basin. The basin, with a surface area of just six and a half square miles, was jammed with ships.

•••••

By winter 1917 a jittery uncertainty had prevailed across the twin cities for months. The Canadians dragged submarine nets across the harbor each night to prevent German U-boats from sneaking in.

Thursday, December 6th, 1917: The SS Imo, an empty Norwegian relief ship en route from Rotterdam and bound for New York to load civilian relief supplies for Belgium, was keen to get a move on at first light.

Coal for its boilers had arrived too late the day before, trapping it in the Bedford Basin, behind the submarine nets, overnight. The Imo had to bide its time another night. It was later than ever.

The same submarine nets prevented the French ship Mont Blanc, arriving from New York laden with war supplies, from sailing into the harbor to join up with a convoy. It spent the night outside the nets.

There was a time, just four years before, when a munitions ship like the Mont Blanc wouldn’t have been allowed into the back bay. But with the outbreak of the war, control of the harbor transferred to the British Admiralty, which allowed munitions ships in.

The Mont Blanc carried a formidable and fearsome load - 5.8 million pounds of picric acid, 200 tons of TNT, and ten tons of guncotton. 35 tons of benzol, a high octane gasoline, were stacked in drums across her decks.

Picric acid was a relic of the time, an explosive chemical compound used in artillery shells by the Allies. It was less stable than TNT, which largely replaced it for war applications between the World Wars.

So worried was the New York port authority that when loading the Mont Blanc, they lined its holds with wood secured by non-sparking copper nails before putting on the cargo, and stevedores who loaded the ship wore cloth over their boots.

Both ships, the Imo leaving the Bedford Basin and the Mont Blanc coming in, were intent on making time, and Halifax became ground zero in its own unique horror.

Riding high in the water, the empty and impatient Imo was ready to move. Captain Haakan From, a Norwegian, having sailed twice through Halifax before, must have felt familiar with the harbor. He may have been driving the Imo too fast.

The Narrows is the smallest space between Bedford Basin, the protected back bay, and the twin cities of Halifax and Dartmouth. It’s scarcely two thousand feet wide, and it’s precisely where the Imo and Mont Blanc collided.

Benzol spilled from the drums onto the deck of the Mont Blanc. Fires broke out. The smoke was so thick, the crew couldn’t tell if it was the benzol or the picric acid that was burning, but everyone knew it didn’t matter.

All too aware of what lay ahead, they bailed out frantically for shore, for safety. Townspeople, meanwhile, unaware of the Mont Blanc’s deadly cargo, gathered at the waterfront to watch as flames engulfed the ships.

Halifax’s fire crews raced to the waterfront, responding with horse drawn wagons. The fire chief arrived aboard the town's only combustion engine fire truck. He and most of the town’s fire brigade were incinerated.

When the big blast came, it laid bare two square kilometers. The Mont Blanc became the most potent bomb exploded until Hiroshima. The windows in most of Halifax’s houses were blown out or, more accurately, into their inhabitants faces.

The Mont Blanc exploded into the air and rained fire back down on the town. It's big gun landed two kilometers away. Rocks sucked up from the sea floor fell onto the town, with deadly shrapnel.

The blast was so terrific that a tusnami took the water away and back in across the opposite, Dartmouth, shore, where a settlement of native Micmac indians was entirely washed away.

The town burned. Heating in Halifax homes in those days came predominately from coal and wood stoves, most of which were in full use in winter. The heaters overturned in the blast, setting further fires.

At nightfall a blizzard began, the worst in years, with temperatures plunging to 10 to 15 degrees fahrenheit. People who survived the blast died in place, trapped, frozen in the blizzard.

Halifax was in shock. Rumors swept it. Word spread that the naval artillery stores at the Wellington barracks would explode (they didn't). Dazed and traumatized victims, many with their clothes and even skin burned right off of them, fled like zombies.

Halifax was being bombed by the Germans. Or maybe it was a naval bombardment. Some thought Halifax’s unique hell came from German zeppelins.

Some people were lucky, if only by comparison. People told of being lifted up and deposited up to a mile from where they lived. In the end, as many as 9,000 people lost their homes, some 6,000 were injured, and 2000 were dead.

Photo Quiz #176 - Where in the World?

2013-04-12T10:06:52-04:00

Can you name this European capital? And what's the name of that river? A good weekend to all from CS&W and EarthPhotos.com.

And the answer is ............................................ it's Budapest, capital of Hungary.

See more photos in the Cities Gallery at Earthphotos.com.

And take all the CS&W photo quizzes.

Chernobyl, Kyiv & Istanbul - Wednesday HDRs

2013-04-10T11:08:18-04:00

Now that spring has arrived here in the southeast U.S., Chernobyl looks like a cold and forbidding place. It was a cold and forbidding place, matter of fact.

Here are a few HDR photos from last month's travel. Click them to make them bigger. There are 35 photos posted so far to this gallery at EarthPhotos.com. One or two more go up most days.

First is the gymnasium at the Palace of Culture in Pripyat, Ukraine. Pripyat was the town built specifically to service the Chernobyl nuclear power complex. At the time it was evacuated, it held some 45,000 scientists, engineers and their families. The average age was just 26.

-----

Same building, just on the central square, along with a supermarket, government buildings, a restaurant and a hotel. The rug says "CCCP 60," to commemorate the USSR's 60th anniversary, which was a little over three years before the accident.

-----

The Great Patriotic War Museum in Kyiv is just about all in Ukrainian, with just little laminated cards to read in English, but much of the story being told is visual, anyway. The lands between Berlin and Moscow had it tough. They were flattened from one direction by the Germans, then from the other by the Russians. This monument is in an underground walkway outside the museum.

-----

There's a restaurant atop the Legacy Ottoman Hotel, just above the Eminonu ferries, with this fine view of the Golden Horn. Arrive about 5:00, as we did, and you have the whole place to yourself.

-----

There's a warren of alleyways between the indoor part of the Grand Bazaar and the waterfront. Here, men line up for a little work. Somebody dropped off there bundles of merchandise, and these guys are carrying them who knows where.

Chernobyl, Istanbul, Kyiv, London

2013-04-04T20:36:52-04:00

London, Istanbul, Kyiv and Chernobyl. 25 pictures so far. Click here. Then under 'styles,' click 'slideshow.' Make 'em as big as you can.

One or two more most days, right through April.

Wednesday HDRs - London, Istanbul & Kyiv

2013-03-27T14:06:46-04:00

The three cities (besides Chernobyl) that we visited earlier this month. Everybody takes this tourist picture of London, so I decided to do something else with it - first tonemap it and then make it up to look like an oil painting. Man, it was cold that day.

Sometimes I think there is no city greater than Istanbul. Here's the Haggia Sophia at twilight.

And this is St. Sophia's Cathedral in Kyiv. (Kyiv is the Ukrainian language spelling. Kiev is Russian.) Kyiv is full of cathedrals. There are several more waiting on my hard drive.

Click 'em to make them bigger. There's a new photo or two a day from this most recent trip showing up here at EarthPhotos.com and here, more slowly, on Flickr.

St. Michael's Cathedral, Kyiv, Ukraine HDR

2013-03-24T10:43:00-04:00

Bill

Chernobyl Reactor #4

2013-03-23T15:24:21-04:00

The concrete blocks on the buildings to the left and center comprise part of the old sarcophagus built to contain radiation after the 1986 accident. This is as close as they'll take you, about 300 meters.

A new sarcophagus, an arch, is being built off to the right and behind this photo. It will slide on tracks right over the top of the old one. But radiation levels increase at higher elevations, making it unsafe to work at the top of the construction site, above thirty meters.

The really clever engineering solution: First they've built the top of the arch on the ground.

"We then attach some legs to that, which are the next part down. The structure is then jacked 30m into the air, the legs swing in and are tied together to prevent them from spreading out flat. We remove the jacks, add another pair of legs, jack that up another 30m and the process is repeated until we get the arch structure 110m up in the air," Dr. Eric Schmieman explains in this article.

Being Recep Tayyip

2013-03-22T17:11:57-04:00

“To see me does not necessarily mean to see my face. To understand my thoughts is to have seen me.” - Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

A penny for the thoughts of the Turkish Prime Minister as he surveys his world this weekend.

Almost forty years ago the leader of Cyprus fled a military coup. With cover from the upheaval, Turkish troops invaded the island’s north and still control it today. None of the rest of the world recognizes Turkey’s legitimacy there, but the Turkish flag still flies and Turkish Airlines runs nine domestic flights from Istanbul daily.

This weekend the Prime Minister will be watching as turmoil roils the other side of the island. Brought to ruin by exposure to Greek banks, the two largest banks in sovereign Cyprus have been closed for a week. Without a bailout, they are insolvent. The European Union, into which Turkey has been steadfastly denied an invitation, threatens to eject the “legitimate” half of Cyprus by Monday.

Nicosia, where ethnic Turkish and Greek Cyprus meet, is 225 miles across the sea from Aleppo near Turkey’s border with Syria. It’s Turkey’s longest land border, and as the PM surveys his domain from Ankara, the Syrian opposition meets under Turkey’s auspices in Istanbul.

A UNHCR map dated March 5th shows 185,000 Syrian war refugees living on the border within Turkey. Last June the Syrian military shot down a Turkish F-4 Phantom II military jet and at peril of being dragged into active combat, the PM bit his lip and took it.

Ten months ago Syrian forces withdrew from the Kurdish desert to defend Aleppo and Damascus. In January fighting broke out between Kurdish and Arab militias in Syria’s far northeast. The Turkish Prime Minister will be wary of a pan-Kurdish movement spanning Syria, Iraq and his own southeast emerging from the Syrian conflict.

So now comes Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s boldest gambit.

Erdogan is a former mayor of Istanbul. Twenty miles across the Sea of Marmara from Istanbul on Imrali Island sits a man vilified by Turkish media as “The Baby Killer.” Abdullah Öcalan is leader of the Turkish Kurds, a fifth of the population, and leader of a waxing and waning guerrilla war blamed for some 40,000 deaths. Since his arrest in Nairobi in 1999 (he had been based in Syria before being forced to flee) Öcalan has been one of just six terrorist-prisoners there, held in solitary confinement.

Last Wednesday March 13, in the first of a series of choreographed moves, the PKK, the organization of the Turkish Kurds, released eight Turks held for a year. Yesterday, on the occasion of the big Kurdish spring festival of Nowruz, Abdullah Öcalan called for PKK forces to cease fire and withdraw from Turkey to their base across the border in northern Iraq.

Öcalan has been allowed to meet in prison with Kurdish lawmakers. It’s said he sent a hand written letter authorizing Kurdish guerrilla leaders to lay down their arms, in return for guarantees of peace, and protection of the Kurds in a new Turkish constitution.

•••••

Prime Minister Erdogan is in the maximum third successive parliamentary term allowed by his party, the AKP. He eyes the Presidency, now largely ceremonial. Speculation is that support from Kurdish lawmakers would give him the parliamentary heft to pass constitutional reforms redefining the powers of the presidency, for which he would stand as the AKP’s candidate in 2014.

Erdogan is widely popular and in firm control, but “The Baby Killer” facilitating his continued rule in return for peace and constitutional guarantees of inclusion for the Kurds may be a tough sell. Last month 50% of Turks advocated military force to resolve the terrorism problem. They have been taught to revile the imprisoned leader of the Turkish Kurds for more than a decade.

The ironies are plenty. Today Turkey is the biggest foreign economic player in Iraqi Kurdistan. 20,000 Turks have moved to Erbil. Turkish VakifBank opened there last month. 1500 trucks cross the border every day in each direction. Turkish and Atlasjet Airlines offer daily flights from Istanbul, and Turkish another to Sulaymaniyah. The Turkish consul general in Erbil says trade with Iraqi Kurdistan “... is equal to what we have for Syria, Lebanon, Jordan combined.”

•••••

Prime Minister Erdogan will be watching as the situation on Cyprus (brought on, in turn, by calamity in another of Turkey’s neighbors, Greece), comes to a head next week. Meanwhile, with a refugee emergency in his own country, opposition groups meeting under Turkish auspices in Istanbul and accusations of the use of chemical weapons, what good can he hope for from across his Syrian border?

What’s remarkable is that those aren’t his biggest challenges.

Erdogan will now try to forge an enduring peace with the Turkish Kurds. In the process he will need to at least partially rehabilitate the Baby Killer, Abdullah Öcalan before a skeptical Turkish public. If he can manage that, writing a new constitution to allow his continued rule may seem like the easy part.

Haydarpasha Train Station, Istanbul

2013-03-21T17:46:34-04:00

Just a quick first photo now that we're back and I can edit on the big screens at home. This is the Haydarpasha train station on the Asian side of the Bosphorus in Istanbul. Click it to make it bigger. Photomatix, Photoshop, and the texture is a shot taken in Chernobyl, from which lots more is to come.

More in the Turkey and HDR Galleries at EarthPhotos.com.

Snapshots, Chernobyl Exclusion Zone

2013-03-17T14:37:02-04:00

Yesterday we arranged a visit to Chernobyl, about 110 kilometers north of Kyiv. You must have a permit to travel inside the 30 kilometer "exclusion zone" around reactor number 4. Here are a few first photos. Starting with the second one, they're all from inside the exculsion zone.

Click through for more.

Posted from Kyiv. More when we get back home.

From Kyiv

2013-03-17T07:53:08-04:00

In the center: Maidan Nezalezhnosti, Independence Square, Kyiv, Ukraine.