Gusterfell

I stopped into the new Brooks Brothers store this afternoon. Turns out it's a new store concept for BB called "Country Club." Rather than focusing on business and dress clothes, as at most locations, this line is almost entirely casual and sportswear, in keeping with the Newport scene. In addition to ours, BB has opened similar locations in Palm Beach and the Hamptons.

^ I've been to the Parrot with parties of a dozen or so several times. Given advance notice, they can accomodate groups well enough. If we went there, we'd probably want to go midweek. That place is crazy busy on summer weekends. I'd certainly second the reccomendation, though. Their menu is literally a book, and the food is quite good. The building is indeed gorgeous.

Tonight at three minutes and four seconds past 2 AM, the time will be 02:03:04 05/06/07.

I'd be up for that. Sounds like fun.

In many ways, Bristol is "Newport's beautiful little sister." That would make a nice ad campaign for the town itself.

It would probably be anatomically possible if their home planet has less gravitational pull than ours. That said, I've never heard their world described that way, nor do descriptions of the greys portray them has having trouble dealing with Earth's (presumably stronger) gravity. Somewhere I read a plausible article theorizing that the greys may have evolved from a dolphin-like ancestor, much as humans evolved from primates. Dolphins on earth have large empty spaces in their skulls, which they use to produce sound for their echolocation systems. Perhaps if the greys have similar voids in their skulls, that big head isn't as heavy as it looks.

If I can play the skeptic for a moment, most likely the black areas aren't hiding anything. To me it looks like three rectangular photos stitched together to create one image.

I agree with your first two reasons, but I think the sudden availability of limitless free energy would boost the economy. Sure, the established energy industries would collapse, but virtually every other industry would see explosive growth as their single greatest operating expense is suddenly eliminated.

Wow, that surprises me. URI's campus is at the top of a hill.

^I seem to remember hearing that they planned to continue the catering business, but for the time being have no plans to reopen the market. I would love to see that change... I miss the market.

Thanks, all! The view from there was spectacular, as you can see. It was bitterly cold, though. 25-ish degrees, with a stiff wind. If you look closely at my pics, that's ice along the riverbank in the foreground. Here's another view from the same overlook, this time facing to the north of the previous views. The forested area at right is the extreme nothern tip of Manhattan Island:

Manhattan as seen from the Palisaides Parkway yesterday afternoon:

^I haven't seen that book, but it sounds like a great one. I'll have to see if I can track down a copy.

Providence skyline this afternoon from Portsmouth, maybe a dozen miles away.

^The Cliff Walk is actually private property, each section being property of the owner of the adjacent estate. However, by longstanding legal precedent the walk must also be maintained as a public right of way. The original forty steps were built by the landowner in the mid 1800s, to help his children access a small (and now mostly eroded) beach at the base of the cliff. This of course also became a popular stop among people strolling the walk, and have been maintained ever since. Today's steps are the third or fourth staircase, the original wooden one being long since replaced. In the 'Gilded Age,' when the mansions were in their heyday, the Forty Steps were a popular evening gathering spot for servants of the various estates, with dancing, drinking, and other such merriment. Anyway, great title for the off-topic thread.

Oh, I don't doubt that the government would have a motive for attacking its own citizens. What about the internal Republican party memo discussing how "another Pearl Harbor" would be perfect for cementing Republican power? I don't know if I believe the 9/11 conspiracies, but I haven't seen anything that leads me to disbelieve them either. Why hasn't bin Laden been captured yet? Maybe he's still working for our government, creating a new bogeyman to scare the public, now that the Soviet threat is gone.

Been done before. In the early years of the cold war, the military released (non toxic) chemicals over Minneapolis to test dispersal patterns. Supposedly it is geographically similar to Moscow. In this case though, I'd think it more likely that terrorists of some sort were conducting the test. On the other hand, there is the conspiracy theory that the feds were behind 9/11. Regarding the O'Hare UFO: I'm always more skeptical when there is a rush to suppress a UFO story. I once saw an interview with a former Area 51 worker, who tested aircraft like the stealth fighter and bomber back when they were ultra-classified. He basically said the military secretly loved the UFO nuts, because their insistence that these things were extra-terrestrial in origin distracted attention from the truth. He claimed there was even an inside program to play up the UFO theories. The O'Hare UFO was seen by enough people with knowledge of weather phenomena, that the official story doesn't ring true. Furthermore, why suppress information about a weather anomaly to the point that it takes a FOIA request before the witness accounts are made public? What are they hiding?

^Yep. Both projects are luxury condos. The second one is an addition to the existing Westin hotel, and will contain hotel rooms as well as condos. The existing hotel tower is behind the new one in that pic. The governor looks like he's fallen asleep in the first pic.

I was wondering if the little white building to the left of the Westin might be the Hilton. If so, E@B should be quite prominent from this angle. Their names escape me at the moment, but those other tall buildings might be the apartments along 95 south of the Hilton. I think the tanks are Field's Point. If you picture the contours of the upper bay, I think the foreground land at right is Barrington, and the bay runs between that and the tanks, then jogs left toward the skyline. I could be wrong, though, as I'm still trying to figure out the perspective myself. For example, I can't decide if the State House is blocked by the central skyline (gasp! Tear it all down!), or if it's hiding somewhere over by the Westin and Biltmore. As for the photo itself, it is 10x optical zoom. I didn't use any digital zoom, if I remember correctly, but I did crop and enlarge by 30% for posting.

Sorry for the douple post, but here's another pic I took back in August of the skyline from Cory's Ln. I'll have to get down there again, now that Westin II is topped out and the summer haze is gone:

That is scary! I'm glad you're OK. That's the sort of thing I worry about when I photograph in an unfamiliar area.