Just in case someone thought they had missed it

Several months back the city bunny_hugger's parents live in held a photo contest. They've got a couple of sister cities and wanted to celebrate a quarter-century of their oldest city-sisterhood. In part this was by finding photographs that they could share to represent the city, to themselves and to their sister cities. bunny_hugger entered five photographs into the contest and, after not hearing anything for a couple months, supposed the project had evaporated. Not so: she learned earlier this week at least one of her photos had been selected, and that there'd be a small but ``international'' program celebrating the sister cities and the winning photographers. Also that there would be food and ``libations'', a choice of word that brought us unexpected delight, and doubts about what that meant.

We met up with bunny_hugger's parents --- her father cancelled his plans to see all of the homecoming game --- and went to it. Her father declared he was not going to wear a mask to the event, a moment that felt so bizarre and out of character that I'm flipping between not processing that it happened and feeling like now I've had an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment.

The ceremony was held in a ... I'm not sure what kind of space, but downtown. They had set up an Eiffel Tower backdrop, as two of the sister cities are in France (neither of them Paris). They had a video link set up with one of the sister cities, and did a good bit of chatting with their counterparts over there. Also trying to figure out why the video link wasn't working. Their tech person talked with us a bit about the challenges of doing this: the people who spoke computers didn't speak French or Spanish (or, on their side, English), while the people who did speak French or Spanish (or English) didn't speak computers. So every attempt at fixing a bug involved two rounds of shaky translation. Despite that during the short and well-managed presentation there was only one prominent stretch of nothing quite working and people trying to tell their counterparts to press tab or to unmute something or whatnot.

Despite the program starting late it moved extremely well, and finished ahead of schedule. Many people were thanked --- the whole hour felt very academic conference-y, right down to the audience applauding a whole lot as if we weren't sure when was the right moment so we'd best cover our bets. The four photography-contest judges got particular thanks, and then they started to call up people whose photos had been selected. bunny_hugger was the first named person to be there, so wasn't sure whether she should come up to the front of the presentation. They did want her there. And also admitted that while her photos were on display, both here and in the sister cities, her first name was mis-spelled in France. Which is wild because on the drive down bunny_hugger and I were talking about how while my (last) name is often misspelled or mispronounced, her name never is.

They had passed out 'maps' to see where the photographs of all four involved cities were. The map, half the size of a standard sheet of paper, has lots of dots and it's not even clear, like, are these on the sidewalks, on the outsides of buildings, inside storefronts, or what. bunny_hugger asked an organizer if she might know where her picture was, or what picture was selected, and was promised that she'd get back to her. We suppose this will not happen. Apparently there's not a central list of what photo is where --- you're supposed to discover this --- but they should have a list of winning photographs at least.

The libations proved as good as their name: they had flutes of champagne to toast their sister cities and 25 years of participation in the project. Also food, a now-rare-for-us meal eaten indoors. We were disappointed to see it was tuna salad on croissants, but ate it since letting it go to waste would be worse. And bunny_hugger realized later on that it was not tuna but chicken salad, explaining (a) why I thought it had none of the oily taste that I like in tuna fish and (b) why she found a small bone in hers. The meals also came with some vegetables and dip, and a lovely little tart.

After this, which was all done in under an hour and a half, we went back to bunny_hugger's parents home. Her father then vanished to attend the second half of the homecoming game. The local team (his alma mater) won, so that was also a very successful part of the day.

Now for my own photographs, of Niagara Falls.

People walking up to the Bridal Veil Falls, seen through my 21x optical zoom.

Not sure what this structure used to be but it's now a zip line station, launching people preposterously far down into the canyon. We never saw how they got zip-line harnesses back up.

Looking down to the Canadian dock for ferry tours.

And over there's the United States dock for the ferry tours.

Side shot looking up to the power station.

And here's a nice broad view of the canyon leading up to the falls, Canadian side on the right.

Trivia: A 1499 reference work to the epigrams of the Roman poet Martial, Cornu Copia (The Horn of Plenty), by Italian humanist Niccolò Perotti, appears to be the earliest known book to have numbering on every page. The head of the index notes and explains this, as a guide to how any sought text could be found. Source: A Place For Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order, Judith Flanders.

Currently Reading: Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age, Lori Garver. Turns out I had read Squaring the Circle before; I mis-read the old checkout dates on the book. Anyway, this is one of bunny_hugger's birthday gifts to me.