Jennifer Ewing's Spirit Boats

San Francisco artist Jennifer Ewing has been exploring spirit boats through painting and sculpture. The article on her website about her Spirit Boat Series makes for wonderful reading--I don't want to attempt to paraphrase, as her writing is as beautiful as her paintings and sculptures.

If you're interested in exploring boats as an artistic metaphor, or especially in creating boats for personal mental and/or spiritual journeys, explore her website. There are also other locations with photos of her creations:

• Her page at artspan.org has nine images
  
• Search "jennifer ewing" "spirit boat" on Flickr to retrieve photos from Anna L. Conti's photostream of Ewing's paintings at the Royce Gallery and of her studio and installations.
  
  

So Ends This Day

The Friends of the San Francisco Maritime Museum Library send along this announcement:

So Ends This Day—The Portuguese in American Whaling

Saturday, January 22, 2011, 6:00 p.m. In the Maritime Library. Donation: $5 (general public); $4 (Library Friends and SFMNPA members)

Historian and author Don Warrin will discuss his new book, So Ends This Day—The Portuguese in American Whaling 1765-1927. In it he tells the story of the Portuguese crewmen who ultimately came to dominate the American whaling industry in its final days on the Pacific coast. Copies of the book will be available for sale and signing.

TIA: The Friends support the Library where I work.

Online Historical Newspapers

Randy Seaver at the Genea-Musings blog posted an interesting list of historical newspaper sites as his Tuesday Tip for Jan. 4, 2011.

The second and third sites on his list have one entry per site--that is, on each of these sites, for example, the California Digital Newspaper Collection is one entry, even though it currently contains twenty-one titles.

The first entry, however, Miriam Robbins Midkiff's Online Historical Newspapers Website, is far more useful. Newspaper titles are listed geographically, currently covering Australia, Canada, and the USA. The site is not comprehensive, and encourages sending in suggestions for new entries. (The New York Times, for example, isn't listed, even though the title is available online back to 1851--for a fee.) Also, look through the listings carefully--the San Francisco Call is listed as San Francisco Call as well as Call, but using the find feature of a browser with a significant word (like "Call") ensures seeing all entries. Newspapers typically available via library subscriptions seem not always present, but over all, it's a very comprehensive list and very useful.

What's the most popular public room on the Minerva?

According to David Simpson's article in the Daily Mail, it's the library.

He writes about a library that sounds absolutely wonderful under the headline, "Cruise holiday on Swan Hellenic’s Minerva: Who needs water slides when you have a library?" And it's not just any library; it has been cared for by the same person for fourteen years, Victoria Kennedy, and assembled over fifty years to help passengers learn about the places they're visiting. A measure of its success is the passengers' repeat booking rate: 92 percent.

I found one site with a photo of the library, and it looks very comfortable. Plus, they have puzzles!