I haven't been back to see the giant Duplo* giraffe since I took the picture of
the last open thread to have its name but as noted in that thread, the place where it lives was once a dirt field. Not even grass grew there and it was a perfect illustration of what "barren" means. Then they added a new stop to the T. Assembly.
Where the train goes, commerce follows and buildings and businesses grew with the speed of flowers in Death Valley after a particularly strong melt water hit in spring.
To fully understand the situation, though, you need to understand the orange line outbound in the direction of Oak Grove.
In the city the orange line is a subway, but shortly after North Station it loses all sense of itself. It goes above ground, but it can't decide if it's a ground train or an L (elevated train) between stops it flirts with being an L but comes back to ground level for the actual Community College and Sullivan Square stops. Then it runs on the ground for a while, across the water, and into Wellington. Just when you think it's decided to be a ground train it goes full on L, including the stop, for Malden Center. But then it comes back to ground not long after and stays there, unless you count an ephemeral underground trip to avoid messing with traffic, until the end of the line at Oak Grove.
Assembly was added shortly before it crosses the water outbound (or shortly after if you're inbound) while this "subway" is firmly above the ground. One can look across the distance, down the road, and see the giraffe.
It gives me something to do. But even with my camera fully zoomed in the giraffe is small, it's only visible for a second (figurative, I haven't timed it), and the picture is being taken from a moving train.
I've been trying for
ages to get a good shot. I try every time I pass in daylight and there are few enough people on the train that I can make an attempt without disturbing other passengers. Last time I passed that way, I finally got the shot.
Even with the camera way zoomed in, it's still really small, that combined with the "moving train" factor accounts for the blur and the grain. This is barely scaled down, but severely cropped.
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* Duplo blocks have twice the dimensions of Lego blocks** and are primarily intended for younger children. Mind you if you're building a giant giraffe you probably find the larger size desirable as well and they've been designed to be compatible with ordinary (system) Lego bricks so that they don't become obsolete when the child becomes old enough to deal with the greater fine motor skills, and necessity not to eat their toys, that the regular bricks entail.
** Which makes them eight times as large since there are three dimension to a 3-d object. Twice as long, twice as wide, and twice as tall equals eight times the volume.
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Friday Recommendations! What have you been reading/writing/listening to/playing/watching lately? Shamelessly self-promote or boost the signal on something you think we should know about - the weekend’s ahead of us, so give us something new to explore!
And,
like on all threads: please remember to use the "post new comment" feature rather than the "reply" feature, even when directly replying to someone else!
Political season is kind of over, so I guess I'll stop adding this note, but do remember that some people need a place to get away from . . . you know. We've been keeping the open threads a space where that can be done. If you really want to talk about such things:
The
post-election thread here is still open to new comments, and I'll probably make a new thread at the Slacktiverse since "the election is coming" has entirely different concerns than "the election happened, what now?", but until I do,
here's the (still open) old one.
