It's Tents in the North Ward.

I have been posting to this blog retrospectively of late, e.g., summarizing on Sunday the events that struck me on Saturday. But I wasn't able to do that this weekend, because I had a very busy day Sunday ("tomorrow", for this blogpost's purposes), out and about taking pictures and conducting interviews during and after the Newarkology walking tour of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. I took 121 fotos, 7 of which I later had to erase as unusable — but that still left 114 that needed to be fixed in my graffics program. At an average 4 minutes per foto, that takes a lot of time (over 7½ hours). And that's before I choose a single foto and resize it for this blog (the raw fotos are much larger). So I am now backfilling, late Monday nite (technically Tuesday morning). Since I usually don't get to sleep before 6am, and often post to my blogs a day late, I can get a tad confused about dates.
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In any case, at the end of the walking tour, a participant asked if any of us would like to visit the Jewish Museum of New Jersey, about a half mile away on Broadway, on which Mount Pleasant Cemetery also fronts. Naturally, I wanted in on that. So I saw parts of that space and other parts of its host institution, Ahavas Shalom (or Sholem) synagog. Then I walked back to my car a couple of hundred feet south on Broadway, and saw these two temporary structures associated, I believe, with churches.

This first sideless tent appeared behind a chainlink fence growing up which were deep-pink morning glories. I love morning glories, and had some growing outside my (sort-of) garden apartment in Hell's Kitchen (NYC). So I looked for seed pods in spent blooms, in that they would just drop their seeds onto what might not be hospitable ground, some of which was covered in asphalt or concrete. It took a while, but I found a dead sprig with three seed pods and pulled it off the vine to plant at home in Vailsburg for next year. Regular readers of this blog will know that my property is already hugely overgrown with flowering vines, but I shall try to integrate the clematis and morning glory to provide a 'glorious' display.

This second sideless tent was apparently not as recently in use as the first, but I suppose both were used in outdoor events associated with neighborhood churches.
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As I tried to upload today's fotos, AOL intruded a notice that it wanted to install an update and asked if that would be alrite. I said, grudgingly, OK, whereupon it signed me off but apparently did not install a thing. I lost two or three or more minutes to this crap, as I lose a bedrock minimum of a half hour a day to computer updates on some program or other, and simple computer craziness, in which nothing happens that should happen, but the machine just slows down or freezes for no apparent reason. This doubtless happens to millions of other Americans a day, but nobody does a thing to fix it, and our brave candidates for President are too timid to raise so much as a mention of computer malfunctions, much less of the billions of attacks by con artists, virus creators, and hackers upon our computers. Their stance seems to be, "What is it, OUR job to protect YOUR computer? I don't think so." Well, I do happen to think it's Government's job to protect our computers from thieves and hackers, including hackers set to that task by the Government of Communist China.
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I had to wait a bit, then give up on waiting, then restart AOL to get back to where I started before I was kicked off the Internet by AOL idiocy. And there is plenty of AOL idiocy. A couple of months ago they decided that a GREAT BIG SEARCH BOX at the upper right of their Welcome screen wasn't enuf, so they intruded a POPUP search box, as tho every time anyone goes onto AOL it is to search the Internet. Never mind that I have seven screennames, with webpages on all of them (until I have to evacuate them by October 31st), and email on 5 of them. I do not go onto AOL to do searches. I could do that in MSIE, since I have a cable modem so don't need an additional ISP, just Optimum Online. But AOL has apparently decided that reminding users that they can search in AOL Search (assisted by Google), is so important they have to offer it in two locations. They are so afraid of losing searches to Yahoo, Ask.com, Lycos, or other search engines, that the executives who came up with the idea of a Search popup are willing to ANTAGONIZE long-term AOL subscribers and risk driving them away to other ISPs. Idiots.
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There are just so many idiots in the world, aren't there? Not readers of this blog, of course (of course not; this is an elite group), but the human race in general is about as dumb as a stone. In any case, I can now return to the theme I intended to address before I was so rudely interrupted by computer problems.
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These two tents reminded me of a joke a co-worker from a Downtown Manhattan law firm told.

A guy was having trouble sleeping, because of disturbing dreams, so consulted a psychologist. "Doctor, I've been having very strange dreams. One nite I'm a teepee, the next I'm a wigwam." (Teepee (or tepee or tipi — see why I'm a spelling reformer?): a conical Indian tent; wigwam, a rounded or oval temporary lodge/tent.) The doctor said that dreams are often not to be taken as literal occurrences but rather as visual puns, then said his dreams were trying to tell him something: "You're too tense."

Relax. Have a drink. On the same block as the tents is this large mural with the Bacardi (rum) bat, for what turns out to be a restaurant (Aguartini, 106 Broadway, 07104; (973 497-9988).

What you might not appreciate from the wide view is that the bottle in this mural is painted around a two-pane window.

Newark needs more murals. So, Newark artists, consult the Philly Mural Arts Program website as to how to proceed, and get cracking. Yes, I know that New York is our immediate, urban big brother. But we got the name "Market Street" from Philadelphia, and we liked that well enuf. Let's take Philly's enthusiasm for murals on every surface that doesn't move, too. The heck with Mexico City and Philadelphia. Let's make Newark the "Mural Capital of the World", and put up not just the most numerous but also the world's BEST murals, the most visually beautiful and intellectually meaningful murals on the planet.