Panning the arch

kw: travel notes, landmarks, photographs, genealogy

Late yesterday we returned from a five-day road trip. I was on a genealogical expedition and my wife accompanied me. We followed I-70 across five states into Missouri, where we stayed at Marshall, the county seat of Saline County, and paid a few visits to Malta Bend, where my father was born, and a goodly number of his ancestors. Drive time each way was a day and a half. We started out last Tuesday early, stayed the night in western Indiana, and arrived in Marshall about lunchtime Wednesday. The Marshall Public Library has a wonderful (though small) Genealogy Room with very friendly people to help.

A couple of hours there made it clear we had plenty of family graves to locate, in three cemeteries. One family was split between two cemeteries because of the fears of one couple that a property was not being well maintained. Fortunately, when we visited, we found it is being well cared for. So here is the rundown.

We first visited Ridge Park Cemetery in Marshall, where the caretaker showed us how to find the graves of the stray couple, the parents of my father's cousin. Then we had dinner and checked in to our hotel. The following day we went early to the Malta Bend cemetery. There we found ten of my father's ancestors' graves, and those of eighteen other relatives, including, sadly, five children and infants.

Some of the gravestone inscriptions faced west, and some faced east; a few faced north or south. There was no geographic pattern, such as facing walkways. It seemed instead that some people would face a grave to the east in anticipation of resurrection, while others would face it to the west as a symbol of the sunset of life. So while I photographed everything, I decided to return in the afternoon.

We went into Malta Bend to look for landmarks my father had marked on a map and an aerial photo. Only three buildings remained. The town had about 420 people in the 1920s, and there are about 250 now. It is a dying town. There are no stores, only two churches still operating, and people do all their business at Marshall or, if they want to drive 80 miles, in Kansas City. Before getting lunch we went to Little Grove Cemetery, south of Malta Bend. We found nine graves of interest there. It is about half the size of MB Cemetery, and both are smaller than one of the 26 sections of Ridge Park Cemetery. In the afternoon, back at MB Cemetery I was able to get much better pictures of almost half the gravestones. In total I got pictures of 39 headstones and several plotstones that announce a family group. Before returning to Marshall, we drove west to Grand Pass, population 52, where one of my great-grandfathers grew up. We saw no buildings of any great age there. For a dying town, it has had a complete turnover of construction in the past century.

I also obtained copies of many documents at the library, mostly lists of cemetery "residents", but also the record of an ancestor who was in the Civil War, and the surprise information that one couple I'd thought had died in Ohio, instead had died in Malta Bend and were buried there. That solves one family conundrum.

We turned in early, and awoke quite early Friday to watch the wedding of William and Katherine. Then we had breakfast and took off, arriving at our hotel in Springfield, Ohio in time for a rather late dinner. We slept well and drove home Saturday. On Friday, however, we took an extra hour to go into St. Louis to see the Gateway Arch.

Though we have passed by St. Louis a few times, the fastest route uses Hwy 270 north of the city, and we had never seen Gateway Arch. Fortunately, parking was not too costly, and there is no admission at the Arch unless you want to go up inside to the top. We are both fearful of heights (though we did visit the Empire State Building last month), and did not want to take the time either.

Getting to the parking garages proved a bit of a challenge. The usual approach, which the car's GPS unit took us down, happens to be partway under water because of the flooding on the Missouri River. We took some side streets, which are all cobblestone in that area; very difficult to drive on! However, we soon stumbled on a garage that advertised "Arch Parking" at a reasonable rate and parked there. It was right on the edge of the Gateway property, but the walk was still about a quarter mile.

The Arch gave me the chance to try some rather challenging panoramic photography. The grounds are simply not large enough to photograph the Arch with ordinary lenses. This is my best attempt. It is composed of three horizontal pictures, taken from an angle that I could get both "feet" in one frame. The panorama stitcher in Windows Live Photo Gallery did a fine job with them.

Then I followed the Arch's shadow to a spot where I could take the next panorama. It is composed of eight images, and it is evident that the stitcher has centered the fisheye simulation at the center of the final image. I had been expecting the ground to come out flat. Silly me! There are also a couple of fitting glitches. I tried using the Canon Stitcher, but it would not properly put the images together at all.


From the opposite side, on the stairway down to the river, I tried again. This time I was far away enough that I could use four images. Again, Stitcher failed completely, but the Windows Live software did a pretty good job with no glitches. The flat ground sure seems to swoop, though.


Both panoramas make it clear that I need to include lots more surrounding material for such projects, so I have something to crop out for a final image. I could probably use a circular mask on the backlit image. These two pictures are fun, but that is about it.

The trip was enjoyable though tiring. We have concluded that we'll fly in the future. A 2,200 mile trip is too much driving for a two-day visit. I have plenty to keep me busy with the family tree, for the next few months.

Road trip travel day

kw: travel notes

This may be the only post I get off today. My wife and I have been on a road trip. For reasons of security policy, I don't blog about travel while on the road.

Most of the trip has been on Interstate 70. At least through western Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri it is also the Blue Star Memorial Highway. We saw these markers at every rest stop we used, and we used a lot of them, because we stop frequently to change drivers or to stretch our legs.

This was a genealogical trip, and quite successful. More to come...

Spring is struggling in

kw: travel notes

We spent most of the day to visit our son, a 1½-hour drive away, where he attends Rutgers. On the way back, I found myself observing the changes NJ Hwy 1 goes through between New Brunswick and Trenton. Though New Brunswick is not a really large city, where Hwy 1 passes through it there is the distinct big-city feel of heavy traffic in lots of lanes. There are shopping centers and malls down both sides of the road for several miles until you approach Finnegan's Lane opposite Franklin Park. Then the built-up area recedes and trees line both sides, and there is one lane less (two each way), though the median is still marked with paired concrete walls.

This lends the highway more of a "rural connector" feel, which it retains until one approaches Princeton Junction, a few miles north of the I-95/295 intersection where we pick up Hwy 295. We stay on this until the cutoff to the Barry bridge into PA, and after a couple miles on 95, it's local roads the rest of the way home. Ah, suburbia! Gets my blood pressure back to normal.

The biggest fish tank

kw: photographs, travel notes

We are on the road, currently in Atlanta, Georgia. We spent most of today at the Georgia Aquarium. Its main tank is billed as the largest in the world. It is designed to accommodate six full-grown whale sharks. At the moment they have four juvenile whale sharks, ranging up to 22 feet (6.7 m) long.
This lovely specimen is probably Alice. A guide had just named them for us, but by the time I took this picture, I am not sure, so it might be Trixie. The two males are named Taroko and Yushan.

Adult whale sharks are from thirty to forty feet (9.1-12.2 m) long, just a little longer than the largest basking sharks, which also approach forty feet in length. While we saw many other things, they'll have to wait just now.

In the air PHL to PDX

kw: travel notes, photographs

Note: click on any picture to see a 1-2 Mpx version.

I use the Philadelphia airport only once or twice a year, so every time I do the artwork in the terminal has been changed. This exhibit was an eclectic collection of art, some to be worn and some to be shown, mainly in metal and enameled metal such as this cute piece. It is about eight inches tall.

We are on our way to Oregon for Thanksgiving with my Dad and his wife of one year. We've been holiday hosts for so many years, it is good to have someone else take care of things this time! But our son's college schedule limits the length of our trip. We'll be there just two full days plus whatever time remains of today, our first travel day. Getting across country, each way takes a full day.

I learned something about the Philly airport. In the past, we've gotten there only a little over an hour before a flight, because we usually fly at 6am, a less popular time. But we were expecting a real zoo, and the last time, we were almost an hour getting through security, which made me a bit anxious. So we timed our arrival for about 3:45. That turned out to be too early! The airline staff weren't there yet and the e-ticket kiosks were not turned on yet. So we sat for half an hour: scheduled opening time is 4:15. By that time, there were a lot of people there, but still not the crowd I'd expected, so we got our bag checked right away, zipped through security, and had a full hour before boarding time.

In Chicago, we had a 2+ hour layover, which a late plane stretched into more than three hours. That gave me plenty of time to get good images of the Field Museum's Diplodocus and put together this panorama. The Field Museum uses the skeleton to advertise their store, the corner of which can be seen at lower right.

If we were willing to pay for a nonstop all the way to Portland, we could be done with the whole trip in six hours plus the two in PHL. Instead, we were 3.5 hours in O'Hare waiting for the four-hour ride to Portland. Going back, we'll have our layover in Dulles Airport (Washington, DC), then a 1-hour hop to Philadelphia. I've never used Dulles before.

In the air, the land below was under clouds until we got past Minnesota. I had a window seat and, in preference to watching the movie on a tiny screen fifteen feet away, just watched the landscape. Though I took a few pictures of the landscape, the air was hazy almost everywhere until near the end of the flight.

As we got over Oregon, I was able to see the Cascade volcanoes. This is the best of the images I took. It shows Mount Adams right in front of Mount Rainier. I boosted contrast quite a bit. We're looking sideways through fifty or more miles of blue sky, and I only partly compensated for that. I love mountains.

The last leg of our journey was an hour's ride on the light rail to where Dad could pick us up.

Disappointment on the Brandywine

kw: sightseeing, photographs, travel notes

Just east of famed Longwood Gardens is a rather minor attraction, Brandywine Battlefield Park. We made it a quick trip, to plan a longer visit later. I composed a framing shot of the Visitors' Center and found that my camera's battery didn't have enough charge left to focus the shot. This turned into an even briefer trip. We took a quick look at the Ring and Gilpin houses and headed home.

This is the Benjamin Ring house (photo from a friend), Washington's headquarters during that part of September 1777. He was hoping to forestall a British advance on Philadelphia, and chose this farmhouse with its overlook of Chadd's Ford.

Washington's forces were defeated September 11, 1777 (the original 9/11), and the British forces went on to ravage Philadelphia about two weeks later.

There is a re-enactment of portions of the battle over Labor Day weekend, just a month from now, an event I hope to attend. I'll make sure my camera's battery is fully charged!

Griffith Park Observatory Renewed

kw: travel notes, sightseeing

When I lived in Southern California I went to the Griffith Park Observatory several times a year to see a planetarium show, and usually to look through their telescope. Late on the second day of our trip (Saturday, May 16), I took my wife there. My brother had returned to his conference on Mayan studies, and his daughter took our son (her cousin) to hang out with her friends.

The park was so full we had to park a half mile from the observatory and walk up. I shot this picture from a spot near where we parked. The small dome on the left (east) houses the "nighttime" telescope, the large central dome is the planetarium, and the small dome at the west end (in front of the main dome from this perspective) houses the solar telescope and spectrograph used in the exhibits at the west end of the building. You can see in the picture that the western dome is open and facing the Sun. The building faces north.

The basement of the building, which used to be inaccessible to the public, houses two new attractions, the Gottlieb Transit, shown in part here, and the Nimoy Theater, which was not running any shows when we visited. We were short of time, so we didn't see any planetarium shows either. We just scoped out the museum and scientific displays on the main floor and the new Gottlieb exhibits.

The planet models seen here are Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune; Uranus is behind Saturn's ring and the smaller planets are off-view to the left. There is an exhibit below each, giving a succinct list of facts about each planet. The dark globe at lower right gives viewers some idea of (moderately) deep space. Seen from a particular angle, one sees the Big Dipper. You can barely see a distorted dipper shape from this angle. The seven bright stars in the Dipper are at quite different distances, so looking at the constellation from different angles you see it as aliens might see it from other parts of space.

This is a replica of one of Galileo's telescopes. It is about a meter long. I was surprised at how small the objective lens is, only about 2 cm (3/4 inch). My first telescope, made at age 11, has a diameter of 7.6 cm (3"). However, this was sufficient for Galileo to discover craters on the moon and the larger satellites of Jupiter.

This is part of a planetary and science history in the east wing of the main building. They also have the "donut hole" from the Palomar telescope's mirror. The entire mirror was polished to perfection, then the central meter was cut out for light to get to the prime focus and other instruments.

Until a few years ago, the "donut hole" was used as an indoor telescope (with a 55 foot focus!) that people could use to look at a small picture of Saturn in the other end of the building. Now it is on display against a wall, and its optical path is blocked by a scale model of the Palomar observatory.

A great uncle of mine was working at CalTech in the 1940s, and was one of the polishers of the big mirror. He and two dozen other men, chosen because their hand temperatures were the same, polished the mirror by hand. In the 1970s I worked in CalTech's Physics machine shop, and did some work that was carried out in the same room where that mirror was ground and polished. I was also working on a telescope, but this one was a radio telescope, made of lots of metal tubes that had to be very exact lengths. It was my boss's job to get the lengths right and mine to fit them together and attach the panels that made the reflecting surface.

The telescope we can look through, opened after dusk most evenings, is larger than most amateur instruments, but not considered all that large. It is 12.5 inches in diameter (32 cm), but is a refractor, using lenses instead of the mirror optics that most amateurs use. It is of superb quality, sixteen feet long, with its main focus f/15 to reduce secondary "rainbow" from its achromatic objective lens. I love looking through it. The beauty of a refracting telescope is that the objective has no obstructions, so images are perfectly clear without spikes or other artifacts. A reflecting telescope's mirror nearly always has a second mirror in front of it, to take the image out to where you can look at it. Light scattering off this "central obstruction" degrades the image a little.

I regret that we only had about 90 minutes to spend at the Observatory. We had a family dinner to get to, and congratulations to confer on our niece, in preparation for her graduation the next day.

Pacific Asia Museum

kw: travel notes, museums

Our second day in California, we slept in, then got together with my brother and visited the Pacific Asia Museum. He's probably the best museum guide on the planet. He has been to museums everywhere and knows his antiquities. He also knows many of the curators. However, Pacific Asia was new to him.

As a geologist and rockhound I was particularly interested in the Jade exhibits. This piece, about a foot (0.3m) tall, is Chinese. Two minerals go by the name Jade, jadeite and nephrite. Both minerals are hard, tough, and very thermally conductive—when you hold jade in your hand, it doesn't heat up quickly, compared to most stones.

Most jade from China is nephrite, while most jade from the United States is jadeite. Nephrite is a little easier to cut and carve, and is sometimes called "soft jade". The green color in this photo is very close to the real color of the stone; jade is famous for being hard to photograph, because its green color is often outside the color gamut of both film and digital imaging.

I once made a bracelet of several pieces of jadeite from Wyoming. My prior experience was making cabochons of agate, jasper or petrified wood, which are all forms of microcrystalline quartz. I was very pleased with the smooth cutting jade. Though it is also of hardness 7, somehow jade doesn't wear out a grinding wheel as quickly as quartz, and the cutting is easier to control.

The museum's collection is very comprehensive. However, because their name is Pacific Asia, they don't include any material from the Americas. That is little loss, because Pasadena is full of museums, such as the Norton Simon and Getty museums, that are chock full of Western art.

The major temporary exhibit, in which photography was not allowed (and I didn't cheat), traces the ethos of Samurai and Bushido in modern Manga, those thick, action-packed "comic books" from Japan that are becoming so popular here. But there were other exhibits from Japan, and my wife (who is Japanese) and brother (who spent half a year in Japan learning ivory carving) had a lot to say!

The most intriguing to me was an exhibit of netsuke, which are little fob-like objects, typically carved from the teeth of whales or swine—you'd be amazed how big a hog's tusk can get.

This is a closeup of a case with eighteen pieces. Though it is not evident in any of these, every piece has a hole in it, for stringing it. Something of value was on the other end of the string, and the netsuke would be slipped through a loop on one's costume, as a holdfast. The string could be used to retrieve the valuable object from a pocket, but guarded it from being dropped.

These days, netsuke (the word is both singular and plural) are valuable in their own right. It takes about 100 hours of carving for a skilled carver to produce one piece, and some intricate ones may take half a year to produce, 500-1000 hours! Good ivory carvers command more than minimum wage, so even a "common" piece will cost you US$1,000, or at current rates, ¥100,000 (The Japanese use a different Yen symbol when writing prices, but I don't know how to show it).

In the gift shop, they had a number of Tibetan singing bowls on sale, with wooden strokers. My brother showed me how to stroke the rim to produce the ringing sound for which they are famous—it is quite Philistine to just ding them with the stroker like it was a mallet. It takes a bit of pressure, and you drag the stroker around and around. Gradually a tone is heard, which can get quite loud with a minute or more of stroking. It is generated by a "circumferential mode", a vibration along the circumference of the bowl's rim. A truly unique sound, and so beautiful I can understand why the bowls are used to calm one's mind for meditation.

If you're ever in Pasadena (my home town!), look up this museum.

A hiccup - and a lecture

kw: travel notes, conferences

I was traveling with wife and son for a few days, and got away just one blog post before the laptop began crashing every time it tried to connect to WiFi. Now that it is working again, I have some catching up to do.

We were in California for the college graduation of my brother's daughter. The day of our arrival, my brother, an archaeologist, was speaking at a conference on Mayan culture. His topic was the ball game Ulama, and its possible significance as a passion play.

Here he is speaking on the significance of the details of this stone ring. He made the case that it represents the eye of a macaw (large parrot), which had great religious significance to the Maya. The written and carved classical Maya language used a great variety of abbreviation techniques. When a scribe had the leisure to do so, he would depict the head of a macaw fully, somewhat stylized. There were several more brief forms, and the most brief was a stylized eye ring with the "dots" representing the nubbly skin around a macaw's eye.

If the ring in the Ulama court represents a macaw's eye, then the game over which it is watching could represent a myth of creation and rebirth. My brother thinks this is why the winner, not the loser, of the game was sacrificed. Just as a Christian passion play is expected to end with the death of Jesus—you don't root for him to "get away"—, because He is going to be raised from the dead, so the Mayan game ended in the death of one or more members of the winning team, and their blood was then used ritualistically to invoke life from the gods. 

The modern version of the game is played, not for life or death, but for status, among the cluster of Mayan communities that still play. I was surprised to learn that scholars no longer think that the goal of the game was to put the ball through the hole in the ring. Many ancient ball courts have no such rings, but all are "watched over" by various figures, usually some kind of depiction of the macaw. The game, like its modern version, was probably played more like volleyball, to induce the opposing team to miss.

It was interesting to sit with him after the lecture as his colleagues came by to either support or question his thesis. It was a quiet way to spend the time after a long day of travel.

Travel to the smog

kw: travel notes, successes, stereophotography

On the way out to California again, with a much smoother experience this time. I like flying through DFW when going coast to coast, because it makes six hours of air travel into two three-hour legs with a break in between. Contrary to my experience in April, there were no weather problems or canceled flights. When we landed and the plane pulled up to the gate, there at the next gate was our next aircraft. The notice board shown here told it all. I was particularly glad because this time I had my family with me, and shenanigans like winding up at the wrong airport would have caused multiplied stress. Two smooth flights, a nice mix of talking with my wife and son, reading and working crossword puzzles made the day about as good as a travel day gets.


On the way into the Ontario airport, we descended through the top of the smog layer. I remember in decades past this would be very brown or orange, but it is not that intense any more. The two images that make up this pair were taken a few seconds (and thus about a thousand feet horizontally) apart.

I took care to clip these from the original images to show a good stereo pair of the mountains, properly framed. The images are in order for straight-eyed viewing, NOT crossed eyes. Hold a sheet of notebook paper so that it nearly touches your nose, and is lined up with the center, the boundary between the two halves of the image. Relax until the right eye sees the right part and the left eye sees the left part, and the mountains will be in 3D. The foreground will not appear in 3D because it is too close, and most of it moved completely out of the frame.

We landed at midday, which gave us time for a few other events before the day ended, but that is a subject for another time.

What I did the other three hours

kw: travel notes, mishaps

I have to hand it to the Customer Service folks, at American Airlines: they did a fine job straightening out the mess. Kudos to them all.

As it happened, on the way from Philadelphia to the Ontario, CA airport, I had a four-hour layover in Dallas. After an hour wandering around photographing the floor art, I had a bit of lunch and read a while. Then I decided to check my flight. I had noticed, when getting on the Skyline train, that there was a lot of wind. It was a portent.

I went to the gate my flight was to leave from, and asked if the flight was still projected to be on time. I was told it had just been canceled a few minutes earlier, and the screens were not updated yet. The flight was on a S-80, a somewhat small jet, and jets that size were all grounded because of a windstorm that had come up. My flight was canceled, the next one to Ontario was also canceled, and my next chance to get there was the 8:20 pm flight, if there was space.

I was advised to try to get on a flight to Orange County, the John Wayne Airport. For that, I'd have to go the opposite terminal. This required, if I didn't want to walk the skybridge, the longest Skyline trip that is currently possible. Luckily, it only takes ten minutes.

At the new gate, I was told I could indeed get on one of the flights to John Wayne. They could not guarantee whether my luggage would get properly transferred, however. I soon found out why. The clerk clicked keys for a couple of minutes, handed me a boarding pass, unlocked a door and took me right onto the plane. It was a flight that had been delayed for a mechanical problem to be fixed, and it took off ten minutes after I was on board. The clerk said as she left, that the baggage claim people at JW would take care of me.

Fortunately, she was right. I got to Orange County without trouble, and went right to the BC office. The clerk there said my bag would probably be on the 8:30 flight I'd decided not to wait for, and suggested we use the normal claim procedure. The earliest I might get the bag would be just after midnight. She gave me an overnight kit (toothbrush and toothpaste, razor and cream, and a few other amenities), and sent me to the car rental counters with suggestions how to get a good "out one airport, in another" deal.

I did get such a deal without problems, and for less than I'd been expecting to pay. After checking into my hotel, I went to the nearest Wal-Mart and bought the smallest quantities of underwear and socks I could find, and a $12 shirt. That was the right decision. I gave the night desk at my hotel instructions to wake me if the bag came in, and went to sleep.

I awoke at 3am and called AA's baggage claim people. They said the bag had been found and would be delivered after 8:30 am. Though I was on East Coast time, I managed to get some more sleep. Just as I was leaving for my first conference meeting (in my $12 shirt, but no suit), the courier called to tell me he'd deliver the suitcase before noon. I connected him with the hotel people and went my way. When I returned about 1 pm, there was my bag. The mischief the weather had done, several competent people in a row had undone. Now I can get on with the conference.

And why didn't I post earlier? I used up a lot of my laptop's battery editing the photos at the Dallas airport. But I could not get a free wireless connection. Then when I got to my hotel in California, I didn't have the charger cord (it was in the missing bag). Now, after the first day of the conference, I have a bit of time to get these two posts out before I crash for the night. I expect I'll sleep well! Thank God, and thank all the people who helped me the past thirty hours.

Art in only one Terminal

kw: travel notes, art

This post refers to Thursday, April 2. For reasons to be posted later, I could not get online until this evening.

Thursday was a travel day. I'm in California for a church-related conference. For some reason, the best connection I could make for getting from Philadelphia to the Ontario, CA airport required a 4-hour layover in Dallas. I was at the Philly airport plenty early, so I did what I usually do, wandered around looking for artwork to photograph. Except for a couple of clever advertising posters, there was nothing in all of Terminal A. I hadn't been in this terminal before, but it is the most Philistine of the terminals in this airport.

Once I got to Dallas, I was having trouble finding art at first, when I happened to look down. I flew into Terminal C and out of D, and in Terminal D I found these large mandala-like works, about a dozen of them, spaced among the gates. They are something like 20 feet in diameter, and not all are this kind of mosaic. This one was one I could get partway up the Mezzanine stairs for a better angle. However, I did distort the image a bit so it is easier to see the pattern. I resized it by 0.5x horizontally.


At one of the other pieces, I walked around it and took several nearly vertical images with a wide-angle lens. This is a stitched panorama of three of them. If it weren't so hard to get people off them for a photo, I'd have gone all the way around. Oh, well.


There are also a couple larger installations in the corners of the terminal. I'll save them for later.

It may not be "really Mexico", but it sure isn't the USA.

kw: travel notes, Mexico, impressions

I've lived in Southern California three times, including my birth in Pasadena. Here I am pushing sixty, living on the East Coast, and in all that time, I've never crossed the border to visit Mexico.

A visit to see my Brother in a little town south of San Diego afforded the opportunity, so we took along our passports and spent half a day in Tijuana. The first thing my brother warned me was that there is no tort law in Mexico. Half an hour later, in "the Cecut", a museum operated by Centro Cultural, he showed me an example, a concrete ramp that swept to the next floor, with nothing preventing me from a skull-cracking if I wasn't looking after turning from an exhibit nearby.

The museum is great, and all the taxi drivers at the border know how to get you there. The fee was US$5 (55 pesos, or MX$55, if you bothered to change currency). After a couple of hours there, we got lunch--a great lunch--and walked a mile back to the border.

I'd been told to expect a lot of beggars, and to have a pocket full of dimes. I did so. I gave most of them to children. At first, I thought the kids were four or five, until I caught sight of their mothers hovering nearby. Most of these women were scarcely five feet tall, and these kids were about ten. Anybody twelve and older has a job.

The kids don't really beg. They have some little thing to sell, chiclets, cheap necklaces, little cloth hankies. The kids come up to you with a handful or little box full of such items. Few are actually sold; most gringos give them a dime and a smile and pass on. The mother, nearby, has their supplies when they do sell a few. There were a few wheelchair-bound amputees. When I ran out of dimes, I gave one of them a quarter, and my last quarter to a nurse just at the border crossing, who was holding a can I didn't bother to read.

A very strange mall sits just inside San Ysidro, CA, a quarter mile or less from the border. It is a lot like an outlet mall near Lancaster, PA or Buellton, CA; but it is for Mexicans who want American goods. Are you bilingual? Easy to get a job there. As we were leaving, we found ourselves at the end of a very long line (we were on foot; we left the car in San Ysidro, in a $5 lot). It took 90 minutes to get to the border, have our passports blinked at by an INS clerk, and return to the US. The wait would have been much longer, in both directions, had we driven.

It was my first visit to a third world country, though I got scarcely a mile beyond the border. A friend later said I hadn't really been to Mexico. Well, it sure wasn't California!

I have had great sympathy for the Mexican people, and now I have more. They number 110 million, somewhat less than Japan, about one-third of the US total. Yet their economy is less than $200 billion, while ours is close to $100 trillion; 400-500 times as large.

The trickle of cash earned by "illegal immigrants" is as much as a quarter of the entire Mexican economy. Perhaps we ought to just annex the place and be done with it!