Monthly Archives: December 2012

My 2012 Report Card

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Erendira Wallenda
Angry Birds
Swing Low, Sweet Chariot by John McCrady, 1937
PhotoFunia
The Best Bike in the Whole World
Flowers for Mom

Anne was completing her fourth grader’s report cards last night. She has twenty students, so she had twenty report cards to do. With each report card’s completion she would tick off another 5%, until she made it to 100%. Her work and the end of this year inspired me contemplate a blog post that summarizes the year 2012. I started wading through the archives, but I soon realized that the scope of this endeavor was too daunting. Then providence intervened in the form of my blog’s annual report from WordPress. The WordPress report is a bit heavy on crunchy numbers, factoids and statistics. They are probably too boring to most of you, but allow me to leaven those figures with some insights.

The gallery of photographs that accompanies this post highlights the most popular of 2012. Some visitors came searching, for Erendira Wallenda, M is for the many things she gave me lyrics, PhotoFunia, swing low sweet chariot and angry birds gif. Some like PhotoFunia and M is for are perennial favorites. I am the number one search return on Google for the lyrics M is for the many things she gave me. My brother, Chris’s photo of Erendira Wallenda became the biggest hit of the year, after her husband, Nik Wallenda walked a tightrope across Niagara Falls.

Another interesting facet of the WordPress report is a world map of where my visitor’s came from. Naturally, most came from the US, followed Canada and the UK, but I also got visits from the likes of Afghanistan and Haiti. For some reason I didn’t get any visitors from China, but I did get some from Mongolia. Maybe I’m banned in China like I am in the in the MRH school district. Still, I’ve been visited by almost 150 countries.

This blog had about 50,000 views in 2012, up from 35,000 in 2011. There were 590 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 2,024 posts. There were 847 pictures uploaded. That’s about two pictures per day. The busiest day of the year was June 15th with 947 views. The most popular post that day was the one with the Wallenda photos. Ababsurdo is my number one referrer, still beating out both Facebook and Google.

Wreck of the USS Inaugural

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Flood Wall Art

This year’s drought is driving the Mississippi River’s water level to a record low in Saint Louis. Forecasts have the river hitting that record low in just a few weeks. These low river levels are playing havoc with river barge traffic. Hundreds of barges line the river’s edges, with no way to move. The low water is also uncovering ghosts from the past.

Low levels have revealed the wreck of the USS Inaugural. It sits on a sandbar just south of the MacArthur Bridge. The USS Inaugural (AM-242) was an Admirable-class fleet minesweeper during World War II. This sweeper was launched in October 1944, and was commissioned in December. The ship was decommissioned in 1946 and turned into a museum ship on the Arch riverfront in 1968. During the Great Flood of 1993, the boat was ripped from her mooring and grounded about a mile downstream, where she remains today.

Since breaching, it has been noticed that the 3″ gun (the one forward near the bow) was stolen from its mount sometime after mid-August. It weighs approximately 1,700 pounds, so it was not exactly a two-person job to walk away with it. Smaller 40mm anti-aircraft guns had previously disappeared. One is rumored to be found in Cementland, the Bob Cassilly art project, in north Saint Louis.

I bicycled downtown to see the Inaugural. I ended up wandering around for a while in the industrial expanse that is the Saint Louis riverfront south of the Arch. Eventually, I found the wreck. There was a crowd there, but on the way back I was passing alone through a rather sketchy area of abandoned warehouses, which is crisscrossed with both highway overpasses and railroad trestles. Even on large group rides, I’ve felt nervous riding through this area. Today, a car with two men in it pulled along side me and matched pace with me, even as I slowed to just a few miles an hour. More than a few long seconds later, another cyclist rounded the corner ahead and the car took off.

Last summer, I was invited to accompany several of my co-workers on a photographic expedition to this dilapidated warehouse district. Only, this time it would have been at two in the morning, instead of two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. My colleagues felt safe though, because they were carrying handguns. I didn’t go and nothing happened to them, but if you ask me that was like looking for trouble with a flash attachment.

Anne’s Explorers

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Today, Anne led Rey, Dave and I down to the Arch to view the Maplewood Richmond Heights Elementary School’s exhibit that is now on display there, School as Museum. For those not familiar with the place, underneath the Arch is the Museum of Westward Expansion. In cooperation with the National Park Service, MRH Elementary has taken over one of the galleries there.

The Arch Grounds Under a Dusting of Snow

The Arch Grounds Under a Dusting of Snow

The overall purpose of this project is to give the students an opportunity to explore museum functions and practices. Students in grades 2nd through 6th worked with National Park Service staff to learn more about museum functions and practices. The following three questions were posed as guidelines for this exploration:

  • How does a museum collect and protect artifacts?
  • How are museum exhibits designed?
  • What does a museum curator do?

Through a series of visits to both the Arch and the Old Courthouse, students learned about the roles and functions of museum personnel and how they preserve, exhibit, collect, interpret and document museum artifacts. These experiences tied into the actual design and development of an exhibit by each grade on a topic of their choice.

This fall Anne worked with the fourth graders. They chose to study European exploration. In this unit the students learned about European exploration in the 15th and 16th centuries. They examined artifacts, read secondary sources about different explorers and analyzed the dominate motives for European exploration.

The display they choose to share is of the inside of an explorer’s ship. This portion of the overall exhibit is intended to be walked through, as though you are actually on a ship. Once aboard this vessel, you are introduced to five explorers; you can stop and admire their portraits or stop and listen as their bust comes alive to tell you their tale. Anne is seen below, posing before the 4th grade exhibit.

Anne In Front of the 4th Grade Exhibit

Anne In Front of the 4th Grade Exhibit

After the Arch, we walked over to Laclede’s Landing. Once, a warehouse district, it is situated along the Mississippi, just north of the Arch grounds. It is now a restaurant and entertainment district and we headed to one of the older establishments there, Hannegan’s. Named for Robert Hannegan, a Saint Louis politician, Hannegan’s interior decor is modeled after the US Senate’s dining room.

I don’t know what the connection between Hannegan’s the restaurant and Hannegan the politician is, except that there are some of Bob Hannegan’s artifacts on display in the restaurant. The most interesting one that I saw was a letter to Hannegan from FDR saying that he would be happy to run with Hannegan’s suggested running mate, Harry S Truman. Hannegan was the Democratic chairman in 1944. Then we sent Rey on his way back to Tennessee.