Towse: views from the hill

Congrats to the ESA. This is all so wicked cool.

Back in May 2002, I wrote a column for Computer Bits (cleverly titled Magritte, Monet, Matisse and more … ), which covered Web resources and tools for people searching for art work and other images on the Web.

As an example of what was possible I talked about the Joneses, a pair of old-timers whose portraits hang in our living room.

We knew how the Joneses were related to us. Their only child had married John Wesley Brittan. Mary Alista Jones and John Wesley Brittan had had a son, Nathaniel Jones Brittan, who married Isabella (Belle) Fallon (daughter of the notorious Thomas Fallon). NJ Brittan and Belle had three children. Their daughter Carmelita Brittan was his nibs’ grandmother. The Joneses, therefore, were his nibs’ great-great-great-grandparents. (I think I got that right.)

What we hadn’t been able to figure out for years was who the artists were who painted the portraits. All we had to work on were scribbles on the backs of the portraits.

E 7 [7? -ed.] Coe, Artist / 1829 — it looked like to us — and

FSpencer, Artist / 1827

But who were Coe and Spencer and why had they painted the portraits of the Joneses?

We tried for years to track down the artists using art catalogs and art encyclopedias, and, eventually, the Web. Resources on the Web continued to improve and finally, in 2002, we found information about the artists and identified them as Elias Van Arsdale Coe (AKA Elias V. Coe) and Frederick R. Spencer.

E.V. Coe’s biographical information mentioned that he had married his cousin Phebe Burt in 1821 and had died in 1843 in Warwick, Orange Co., NY.

Bingo! Mary Jones’ maiden name was Burt and she was from Warwick, Orange Co., as well.

At the time Spencer painted the portrait of Jones (1827), biographies say he was “an itinerant portraitist, traveling to Utica and Albany in search of commissions.” Jones, at the time, was in the Legislature in Albany.

When I wrote the article, the paintings were up on the wall and were difficult to bring down and check the inscriptions on the back. I’d misremembered the dates. Correcting that information today, the Spencer portrait was painted in 1827 and the Coe in 1829.

The paintings are intended to hang side by side:

What’s up with all this?

Well, the Web’s a wonder. I wrote the article in 2002 and Google makes it available to anyone searching for information on Coe or Spencer.

Last year I got an e-mail from someone in Warwick who was interested in the painting by EV Coe and wanted further information. Last week someone who had bought a Spencer at auction sent me an e-mail. He’d found my Computer Bits article and thought I’d be interested in information about some Spencers recently donated to the Museum of the City of New York.

I’d promised the person in Warwick that we’d take some proper pictures of the Coe portrait, but the pictures never turned out right because the painting was on the wall and the lighting was dreary. I promised her photographs of the painting when we took it down to move up to San Francisco, but we still haven’t moved it.

Last month, though, we took down the paintings when we put up the tree and today we rehung them, but not before I’d taken some pictures.

So, for the interested party in Warwick, some closeups of E.V. Coe’s portrait of Mary Burt Jones:

and for the guy who sent me a note last week, some closeups of Frederick R. Spencer’s portrait of Nathaniel Jones:

.

The Web is a wonder.

Update: Swapped in a different link for Thomas Fallon. The new link is a Google seach for /”thomas fallon” “san jose”/ which not only eliminates all those other Thomas Fallons in the world but also gives a pretty good idea of the controversy swirling around the gent in the quaint ville of San Jose.

I’m a writer.

I used to write software in the olden days when I was a senior software engineer par excellence. I quit my last job in 1992 and the folks who knew me hired me back as a temp, as a tech writer, writing the manuals that had never been written (by others on the project!) for the software that’s still in use to this day.

(His nibs and I went to a reunion for alums for that company in a pub last week, and what an entertaining time we had.)

In the process of writing the documentation, I discovered something on the order of fifty or seventy bugs or, um, questionable pieces of code implementation. (Not mine, I swear!) My favorite was the one where someone had assigned a -1 as a tag to shut the process down, never expecting that a buffer overflow might look an awful like a -1. That bug took a while to spot.

I quit the tech writing gig when the documentation manuals were finished and graduated later in the 90s to writing non-fiction bits, eventually writing about the Web, like duh. what an obvious choice. Writing freelance never brought the money that writing tech did, which never brought the money that writing code did, but I’m happy.

Even though I’m relatively happy with my writerly efforts, my heart is really in the fiction writing, the crime writing, the writing that scares me half to death because I know what snide things I’ve heard others say about this person’s work or that person’s.

His nibs, I know, throws books across the room, books that friends of mine have written. I quake in fear that someone will throw my work across the room.

… but I need to deal with that. Someone somewhere will throw my work across the room.

I was talking with my writerly friend Trev a while back and he gave me the best definition of “writer” as any I’ve ever heard. We were talking about my WIP. He asked if anyone had read it. I said, “No. Not yet. It’s in rewrite. There are some discordant plot points that need massaging.”

Trev said, “A writer isn’t a writer until that writer is read.”

I always have a keen interest in knowing how other writers work. I stumbled over Sandra Scoppettone’s Writing Thoughts this week and felt write (heh) at home.

This year — this year for sure — I’ll get my crime writing into shape to be read by my gang, who are waiting anxiously to get a first peek.

This year for sure.

Zefrank.com has set up a pretty amazing create your personal kaleidoscope tool.

Ooooooooo. Psychedelic.

Dated 31 Dec 2004, here is a collection of 100 things BBC News didn’t know this time last year, including

1. Street brawlers sometimes arm themselves with potato peelers, according to the Home Office, which wants to make them banned weapons.

2. Farmers plant their crops up to three weeks earlier than 15 years ago. In the 1960s, temperatures from January to March averaged 4.2C; it rose to 5.6C in the 1990s.

3. Brussels sprouts have three times as much vitamin C as oranges.

4. Crows apparently like the taste of windscreen-wiper blades.

[...]

Interesting collection of factoids.

On the issue of gay rights, I continue to strongly support civil marriage. We cannot – and should not – require any religion or any church to accept gay marriage. But it is wrong for our civil laws to deny any American the basic right to be part of a family, to have loved ones with whom to build a future and share life’s joys and tears, and to be free from the stain of bigotry and discrimination. – Ted Kennedy

Hear, hear.

A suicidal Czech failed to kill himself with a chainsaw. Earlier he had tried to hang himself from a tree branch but the branch snapped and he broke both legs in the fall.

Maybe he should heed the signs and realize that suicide is not in his cards.

Shuji Nakamura settles his patent lawsuit with Nichia Corp. for a measly 840 million yen ($8m). Last year the Tokyo District Court had ordered the company to pay 20b yen, but the Tokyo High Court mediated the lower settlement.

What do you think the patents for GaN-based blue LEDs are worth in the long run? The Tokyo District Court put the value at 60b yen and said that Nakamura was due a huge chunk of that because he had contributed 50% of the labor and effort behind what will bring his former company bucketloads of money.

He says the award is too little. The company says the award is too high.

$8m is nothing to sneeze at.