Pretty Places - Photos

New Mexico

Sri Lanka

England

Japan

Greece

Montana

California

Mountain Clouds - Photos

Flatirons,  Boulder, Colorado

Switzerland

Lenticular cloud over volcanic peak

Breckenridge, Colorado

Greenland

Lenticular clouds   -  Japan

Amelia Earhart - Still a Mystery Ending

Amelia Mary Earhart was born in Atchison, Kansas on 11 June 1897; at the moment no one can say with any certainty the date of her death.  Amelia say her first airplane at the age of ten, and was not impressed, saying it was "a jumble of rusty metal and wooden parts."  She was the 16th woman in the world to be granted a pilot's license, and she was the first person, male or female, to fly across both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  She was married in 1931 to George P. Putnam.
    She decided that she would break the final record left at the time - to fly completely around the world.  She and a group of backers purchased a Lockheed Electra L-10E for this flight.  She and fellow pilot Paul Mantz flew to Hawaii to begin their around-the-world trip, but the plane flipped while taking off, and had to go back to California for repairs.
    In 21 May of 1937, she and navigator Fred Noonan left for the record flight from Oakland, California, crossing the United States first.  They left the US from Miami in June.  The following photo was taken in Natal, Brazil on 11 June 1937, just before they left that country:

On 2 July 1937 Amelia and Noonan left Lae, Papua, New Guinea just after midnight, heading for Howland Island.  A Coat Guard cutter was tailing the airplane, and they received a message at 8:43 am on 3 July 1937 stating that the plane was low on fuel and was trying to get a visual sighting of the ship.  That was the last communication from Earhart and Noonan.

   There was a $4 million search for the aviatrix.  As no wreckage and no bodies were found, she was legally declared dead on 5 January 1939.

   There have been many suppositions regarding her death.  It was widely believed that Earhart and Noonan ditched the plane into the ocean and drowned, or were killed upon impact.  It was also speculated that this flight around the world was performed as a spy mission for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and that when she and Noonan went missing, they had been captured by the Japanese.

    In 1940 a skeleton was found, along with small pieces of a plane on Gardner Island, which is now known as Nikumaroro and is 350 miles from Howland Island.  The person who examined the bones felt that the arm bone lengths matched a man who was 5 feet 5 inches tall, rather than a woman, and so the Earhart skeleton theory was pooh-poohed.

    Around 2005,  an aerial photograph of the reef around Nikumaroro showed what some people believed to be the strut and wheel of an airplane that mated Earhart's Electra. In 2007 an expedition of engineers, technical experts, archaeologists, anthropologists and researchers went to Nikumaroro seeking for unambiguously identifiable aircraft artifacts and DNA.  They found bronze bearings that might have belonged to Earhart's plane, and a zipper pull that might have come from her flight suit.

    Artifacts found on Nikumaroro in the following five years have included improvised tools; an aluminum panel, possibly from an Electra, made using 1930s manufacturing specifications; an oddly cut piece of clear Plexiglas, the same thickness and curvature of an Electra window; and a size 9 Cat's Paw heel dating from the 1930s, which resembles Earhart's footwear in world flights.  But nothing is definitive proof.

    Now a photo that was "lost and misfiled" in the National Archives is receiving some attention.  Retired US Treasury Agent Les Kinney found the photograph in 2012 in a now open "formerly top secret" file, and states that several reports, including one that was 130 pages long had been destroyed.

This photo was taken in mid-July 1937 in Jaluit Harbor, on Jaluit Island in the Jaluit Atoll of the Marshall Islands.  The photo shows Jaluit Harbor, with several local inhabitants, a Caucasian man looking at the camera, a figure with short hair and wide shoulders sitting on the dock end with back to camera, and the Japanese merchant ship Koshu Maru which has a 38-foot-long airplane sitting on it's deck.  It is believed that the white man is Fred Noonan, the person sitting is Amelia Earhart, and their plane is on the ship.  This brings the speculation that the two aviators were captured by the Japanese as spies, and it is theorized that both died in prison on the island of Saipan while in Japanese custody....  

    Doug Carson, a well known digital analyst states that the first of the three above photos is authentic.  He states that he is "99.7 percent certain" the the original photo has not been tampered with, or manipulated in any way.

    Kent Gibson, a facial recognition expert, states that he believes that it is "likely" that the two figures possibly identified as Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan are those two people.

    What do you think?

Different Views

Cherry blossoms and Mount Fuji

Beach art

Water is necessary for all living things

Bluebells in Sweden

A merlin on Assateague Beach driftwood - by Rockadee

Abandoned building in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

Around the World

Hallstatt, Austria

 

Pacific coast of Mexico

 

Osezaki Lighthouse, Japan

 

An old water mill

Here and There

A fall dawn

 

Beach at Ducie Atoll, Pitcairn Island

 

An unusual house in Japan

 

A fall sunset on Chincoteague Bay

 

Unusual Homes

Japanese house with cable-car connection to the mainland

 

The kettle house in Texas

 

A concrete "tree" house...

 

A painted "Hansel & Gretel" house in Bavaria, Germany

Too Much Information!

Oh, my gosh... What a day in the news business. Between the huge earthquake in Japan, and the resulting tsunami waves in Japan and Hawaii and on the US west coast - and then our own little wild fire here in Boulder... I don't know which way to look next. It is so hard to grasp that the earthquake was so large that it moved the entire land mass of Japan eight feet to the east. And watching the film of the tsunamis was like watching the original Poseidon Adventure in miniature, but at the same time, hugely magnified.....

We've had high winds forecasted for today since last Sunday - and the winds have been about 25 to 35 mph, with gusts up to 63 mph, all day. Some idiots just west of Lyons decided to go on ahead with a "controlled burn." Within 15 minutes it was an un-controlled burn, and it currently covers over 300 acres to the northwest of us. So far, no structures have been damaged, but 223 homes have been evacuated. And the fire has ended up in the northeast corner of Lefthand Canyon. Now, Lefthand Canyon is a long, meandering, multi-branched canyon,and if it sounds familiar, it's because that's where the big fire that started 9 September 2010 was located. Of course, this is about 7 to 10 miles to the northeast of the first fire, but it's still poor old Lefthand Canyon.

I saw Dr. Pohlman this morning regarding my fistula. I'm having surgery on Tuesday morning, so I've already informed Lucy's and the Rs' owners that I won't be out walking their doggies on Tuesday and Wednesday. Dr. Polhman says I should be absolutely OK for walking by Thursday. I'm currently at Lynn's house, playing with Tessa and the three kits, and looking at the smoke to the northwest.... Hopefully, this weekend will be a little less eventful for the whole world!