Related are these, images from 1903 taken by carrier pigeons equipped with miniature cameras activated by a timing mechanism. Dr. Julius Neubronner, German film amateur, invented the cameras.

“In New Bedford, fathers, they say, give whales for dowers to their daughters, and portion off their nieces with a few porpoises a- piece. You must go to New Bedford to see a brilliant wedding; for, they say, they have reservoirs of oil in every house, and every night recklessly burn their lengths in spermaceti candles.”

This article in the New York Times outlines the results of a scientific study that suggest pigeons can learn abstract math in the same way that monkeys can, although “no testing has been done with numbers greater than nine, so whether a pigeon can count large numbers of bread crumbs or popcorn kernels is a question still open to investigation.”

Whether they can get up into the double digits or not, I continue to be proud of these guys for being so smart and interesting!

These fortune-telling birds were in Mexico City:

(photo by Evan Scott)

For a small fee, one of them picked out a fortune for me that came in a tiny envelope (it’s hard to describe the emotion that miniature, shiny stuff like this makes me feel). The fortune itself was a little enigmatic, in terms of grammar. Even my Spanish-speaking friends couldn’t quite make out what’s going to happen to me, but I think the consensus was that I’ll be overcoming obstacles to reach a positive outcome.

This is the inside of Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, a really wonderful library in the Centro filled with murals by artist Vladímir Kibálchich Rusakov. It would be worth going back for this place alone.

In a patriotic start to the new year, I went yesterday to see a re-enactment of the Continental army’s first flag raising on Prospect Hill in Somerville, which originally happened on during the Revolutionary War on January 1st, 1776. We sang songs, learned about the historical context of the flag raising and heard from American luminaries like Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Somerville mayor Joe Curtatone.

Re-enactors and local historians are sort of heroes of mine, and it was really cheerful to see whole families dressed up in colonial costumes. There was even a fife and drum!

Glad to be on the banks of the Hudson in Troy, NY for the week between Christmas and the New Year. This is the Troy Gasholder building (a hometown point of pride).

The sociological filmmaker Richard Broadman made MISSION HILL AND THE MIRACLE OF BOSTON, which is set in the midst of the urban renewal projects that changed Boston in the 1960s and 70s. The city and powerful institutions want to redevelop the Mission Hill neighborhood, dreaming of a “New Boston,” but as you can see in the movie, neighborhood residents know the history of the area and feel that the space belongs to them. Broadman records their stories to make a complicated social history document, and it’s not short on local color (my favorite line: “everybody just wanted to save enough money…to move out to Somerville” – pronounced “Summavull”).

IF IT FITS is a film by one of my favorite filmmakers, John Marshall about the city of Haverhill, MA. By the 1970s the city was was in bad economic shape – the main industry of shoe manufacturing is in decline and the municipal leaders of the former “Queen Slipper City” spend most of this movie figuring out what to do about it. My hometown of Troy, NY, reminds me of Haverhill (it was the “Collar City” for its detachable collar factories, which have shut down for obvious reasons), and this verite film captures the crises that afflict a lot of post-industrial cities in the US. 16mm verite filmmaking and local politics are a great combination.