L'école des Beach-Arts

Tina Davidson dry fits "found art" from the beach into an U-shaped mirror frame constructed from a pine board and a couple of lengths of lath.

Rather than writing or photographing or riding trains or cogitating on important cultural matters, I've been spending my time building a new medicine cabinet for our rustic cabin's bathroom in what might be called the Lake Superior Beach Arts Style.

This is to scour the sand in front of the Writer's Lair for tiny objets d'art (pretty stones, agates, fossils, sea glass, insect galls, tiny clamshells, shreds of birch and pine bark, acorns, miniature evergreen cones and bits of oddly shaped driftwood).

Then the items are encrusted atop and around a mirror frame crafted out of pine in the barn shop. Finally the frame is affixed to a wooden cabinet built to fit the hole in the plywood wall that once held a cheap (and now rusty) metal cabinet from the hardware store.

Slathering on the adhesive grout.

The technique is actually quite simple and makes a fine pastime for small children and ham-handed grandfathers. For me the project involved a couple of false starts, for I'm a longtime member of the Measure Once, Eff Up Twice Club.

First, when building the frame, I had a fight with the router (didn't lock the bit in the chuck tightly enough) and after the loose bit slashed up the wood, it fell out of the chuck and went spinning and caroming at umpteen thousand RPM around the shop floor like a maddened top, requiring me to do a frenzied toe dance to avoid getting my ankles carved up.

Of course I had to start all over again, and from then on things went well, but later on I forgot which way the hinges went on the finished mirror frame, necessitating fitting and refitting until the light finally dawned. Eventually (and with only a little swearing) I got 'er done, as they say in the Upper Peninsula.

Placing the treasures in the frame.

Construction of the cabinet and mirror frame was hardly brain surgery, but it did take some care and minor tweaking.

First, I built the medicine cabinet carcass out of leftover 1x6 pine, and gave it a 1/4" mahogany plywood back (from shop scraps) and a couple of 4-inch shelves. Then I test-fit the cabinet into the wall and achieved success after power-sanding a few rough spots off ragged edges. Finally I applied several coats of clear satin acrylic varnish and set the carcass aside to dry.

Next, I ripped an 8-foot-long 1x4 pine board on the table saw to 2 1/4 inches wide, then glued and nailed two 8-foot-long, 1 1/8-inch wide quarter-inch-thick pine laths to it. This formed the material for the U-shaped (cross section) mirror frame to receive the "beach art."

When the glue dried, I routed a 1/4" deep by 3/8" wide rabbet all the way along one edge. This cut the depression that would receive the mirror. (Of course Eff-Up No. 1 occurred here, and I started over.)

Sprinkling sand over the items embedded in the still damp grout.

Next step was to use the table saw and miter guide to cut two 20" and two 16" pieces out of the U-shaped board with 45 degree miter corners, then glue and nail up the pieces (with a pneumatic nailer; I can't hammer a nail without bending it) to make a mirror frame, making sure the rabbet ran along the inside edge.

Patting down the sand gently to embed a thin layer in the grout.

Sometimes getting everything square with a $99 Home Depot table saw can be tricky, but this part of the operation went swimmingly.

Next I brushed several coats of clear satin acrylic varnish onto the frame, sanding lightly between coats.

While everything dried, Tina Davidson, who is an accomplished artist as well as a family friend and house guest, took over the project. First she combed the beach in front of our cabin for goodies. She came up with quite a haul of small treasures.

Spraying gloss varnish onto the work.

Next she placed the completed frame on a table and carefully dry-fitted all the found-beach-art items into it until she was happy with the arrangement.

After that, she and the Lady Friend carefully removed the items and placed them in their original order outside the frame for the next step.

This was to use a putty knife to butter a 1/8-to-1/4-inch-thick coat of acrylic adhesive tile grout (emphasis on the adhesive; ordinary grout won't grip) into the U-shaped depression all around the frame. Both care and a little speed are needed here, for the grout sets in about 30 minutes.

Then Tina and the L.F. carefully pressed the tiny items into the grout until they bottomed on the wood underneath.

Finally, they sprinkled a thick coating of dry beach sand onto the whole thing, gently patting the sand down with their fingers so that a thin layer would sink into the grout.

The cabinet base, affixed into the wall.

After the grout had dried overnight and we shook and brushed off the loose sand, we sealed everything with half a dozen coats of quick-drying spray gloss acrylic varnish. You can use flat or satin varnish if you prefer, but gloss brings out the highlights in the stone and wood.

The next day we drove an hour east to Houghton to pick up a mirror at a glass company there. (Ontonagon has none.) We specified 1/4 inch thick silvered glass rather than 1/8 inch, for strength, and ordered it 3/16" shorter in each dimension than the mirror frame cutout.

Finally, we covered the back of the frame with quarter-inch plywood.

After the aforementioned struggle with the hinges, the job was done, and I'm as proud of it as I am of any of my mystery novels.

Finished and up on the wall. That's the shower curtain in the mirror.

Agawa Canyon

The Agawa Canyon Tour Train during its 90-minute layover in the Ontario gorge.

The report on my trip last week to Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and the Agawa Canyon Tour Train is now online at my train travel blog.

The gist: It's a great ride, but probably not for the Disneyland-and-Wisconsin Dells crowd.

In bed with the enemy

Years ago I had a good friend and colleague, one quite a bit higher up the editorial ladder from my modest rung, who refused to attend social events involving politicians or public servants of any kind. As we went out the door to hoist one with a local alderman or cop, he'd shake his head and hang back.

"You don't socialize with the people you cover," he'd say when pressed.

Some of us thought he was being needlessly priggish, perhaps just covering for an innate shyness, an inability to relate to others outside the office. It's important, we journos told ourselves, to know our subjects fully, and to do so we need to experience their company in friendly and relaxed surroundings. We need to see them when they let their hair down.

On the other hand, every time I read about Washington journalists hanging out after hours with Capitol Hill pols and federal government functionaries, even to throwing huge parties for them, I've wondered about that wisdom. How honest and objective can a journalist be if he's drinking buddies with the people he's writing about? Can he throw a chum under the bus for the sake of truth and enlightenment if it should come to that?

Over the last few days, as revelation after revelation has burst in London of News Corporation writers and editors partying with Scotland Yard honchos and members of Parliament (even at their country houses) during the years in which a titanic phone hacking scandal struggled to emerge from a massive cover-up, I kept thinking of my old colleague.

Maybe he wasn't so shy and stiff-necked, after all. Maybe he was smarter than the rest of us. Surely he was prescient.

Off to the Agawa Canyon

Courtesy of the Algoma Central Ry. Click on the map for larger version.

In a few days I'm driving the 5 1/2 hours across the Upper Peninsula from Ontonagon to the Soo to ride a train -- the Agawa Canyon Tour Train of the Algoma Central Railway.

The train runs 114 winding miles northward from Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., through the thickly forested Canadian Shield to Agawa Canyon, said to be one of the most spectacular rubbernecking sites in Ontario. It's an all-day trip, leaving at 8 a.m. and returning about 6 p.m. The train stops at the waterfall-bedecked canyon for 1 1/2 hours so that passengers can debark to hike and lollygag, then heads back to the Soo.

I'm making the trip wearing my field reporter's cap for Trainweb.org, and will be an on-board guest of Canadian National Railways, owner of the Algoma Central.

Past reviews of the journey on TripAdvisor.com have been all over the map. Some people hated it, some loved it, and many were indifferent. The two 2011 reviews so far posted on TripAdvisor, however, are four- and five-star, leading me to think that the winter refurbishment of the train has been a success. Many of the coaches have been replaced by rebuilt cars from the recently defunct Rio Grande Ski Train, which once carried skiers from Denver to Winter Park.

One of the new attractions of the train is a GPS-driven on-board narration (in five languages) of the tour that tells you exactly what you're seeing as you see it. Out of curiosity I asked the CN marketing people if they provided a printed script of the narration for the deaf and hearing-impaired -- and they do. They emailed me a link to the script for printing out, and I'll be carrying it on the train.

Full report to come.

Draggin' dictation

When I saw David Pogue's breathless encomium to Dragon Dictation for the iPad 2 in his New York Times column, I said to myself, "Henry, you've got to try this one. It's free. And it might even work."

I have "deaf speech" that was once described as sounding like "rusty bathtub pipes." My production is breathy, my enunciation muddy. I'm understandable in a quiet room if my interlocutor pays close attention. In the presence of background noise or human impatience, I might as well be shouting down a bottomless hole.

I once took speech therapy until the returns began to diminish. At the age of almost 71 there isn't much point in subjecting myself to that kind of hard work anymore. After all, I'm not about to address the British Empire on the eve of World War II.

Still I hope for a breakthrough. Perhaps the easy-to-use Dragon Dictation app, which translates spoken words to text, might be a useful engine for sharpening my speech--if it could reproduce what I say with any accuracy. Perhaps a bit of practice would increase that accuracy, however incrementally.

So I downloaded it to my iPad 2 and gave it a try.

Here is what I said:

"In this grave hour, perhaps the most fateful in our history, I send to every household of my peoples, both at home and overseas, this message, spoken with the same depth of feeling for each one of you as if I were able to cross your threshold and speak to you myself."

Here is what Dragon Dictation said I said:

"Gran Mammo human Pidfile Net-Arping couldn't you think badly of voodoo mind him through okay Omega ring to message spoken with a PaymentInfo caring bridge women in favor and go to the print FoodGang. Close to you."

Your Majesty and Mr. Logue, you have nothing to worry about from the likes of me.

Happy Father's Day

As part of his annual Father's Day email to me, my second son offered the following. It is too good not to share with the rest of the world. (Dramatis personae: Conan and Annie, parents; Emmet, 5, and Alice, 2 1/2.)

As a special treat, I will provide a transcript of Saturday morning's breakfast table conversation:

Conan: Emmet, did you go to the pool yesterday? Please eat your waffles.

Emmet: When there's danger, you need a Space Ranger! Wheeeeeoooooo Wheeeeeooooo (siren sound).

Alice: Yeah, and you have a peanut butter hat. I went pee in the pool. Do you have a microphone hat?

Annie: Alice, we don't dunk our bacon in our milk. Would you like me to cut your bacon for you?

Emmet: . . . And then Jack bonked Quinn, and Quinn bonked Bobby, and I said, "Do you want to be arrested?"

Annie: Alice, don't. Please don't.

Conan: Wait--Alice, did you pee in the pool?

Alice: Yeah! On your mud hat. On the cement. Do you have a paper-airplane hat?

Annie: She peed on the pool deck in front of everyone. Mortifying.

Emmet: So I bonked Quinn and then he bonked Jack again. Donna's teeth are far apart. Dad, show me your teeth.

Alice: ... and I climbed up on the roof, and peed all over, and told the police officer, "You get them. I am a princess!" Where is your bucket?

Conan: My bucket?

Alice: For your bucket hat, you Foopie. You are a bucket hat. You Foopie. Foopie, foopie, foopie, foopie.

Emmet: Alice!

Annie: People were staring. Emily Maines came up and said the kid she was babysitting for did the same thing. The weird thing was, Alice had pooped in the potty like 10 minutes earlier. She needs to connect that you can pee and poop in the same go.

Emmet: Alice! Stop it! Why do you keep saying Foopie?

Alice: . . . Foopie, Foopie, Foopie, Foopie . . .

Conan: What time do we have to be in Downers Grove?

Annie: After naps. Although Alice never naps anymore. I don't know why I pretend that's an actual time of day.

Alice: You have banana soup, you Foopie. And mud soup!

Emmet: After Quinn got out of jail, he went right back up and bonked Jack again.

Alice: May I have some more bacon please?

And that, Conan assures me, is a typical breakfast-table conversation at their house.

An iPad 2 comes to my house

I have succumbed. Surrendered. Thrown in the towel. Gone over to the enemy.

Three weeks ago I bought myself an iPad 2.

A year ago I resisted mightily, choosing to buy a new netbook rather than the original iPad. To me the iPad was a toy, not a tool. Also, it's just an iPhone on steroids. And it was not so hot as an e-book reader, because you can't use it in the sun.

But realities and fealties change. In my travels I found myself humping a netbook, a Kindle, an iPod Touch and a cell phone everywhere. Most of those devices did their discrete jobs very well and still do. The netbook is fine for writing and editing, the Kindle for reading, the iPod Touch for playing -- but the cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone's keypad is lousy for old-man texting. (Being deaf, I don't do voice calls.)

Still, four separate tools to do four separate jobs are a lot to keep track of when you're traveling. Each doesn't weigh much, but added up they start to load down the baggage. Keeping track of them while getting the full-monty patdown at airport security is a nightmare unless you're traveling with a companion who can keep an eye out for light fingers.

And so when the iPad 2 came out earlier this year, I started to think that maybe a single device that can do all four tasks reasonably well might be what I needed.

So I took the $629 plunge on a 16-gigabyte Verizon G3 model from B&H Photo in New York. (No sales tax plus free shipping.) I don't listen to music and don't watch a lot of movies, so don't need the extra memory of the 32GB and 64GB versions.

The G3 cellular capability, I reasoned, would allow me to send and receive texts outside free wi-fi range just about anywhere in the country, even on the wild shore of Lake Superior in upper Michigan, and Verizon's minimum $20-per-month, no-contract plan for 1GB of data is affordable. Since I'm almost always around a free wi-fi node, 1GB probably will work just fine for texting (with the free TextNow app) and light Web surfing with Safari.

The iPad 2's touch-screen "keyboard" is just fine for texting succinct messages to family as well as cab dispatchers while I'm on the road. It works well with the IP-Relay deaf telephone relay service, too, and I can jot short Facebook entries or comments without much trouble with the Friendly app.

That keyboard, however, is absolutely useless for writing, even with two excellent apps, iA Writer and Apple's Pages, at least with my arthritic fingers. For that I bought a compact and lightweight $66 Apple wireless keyboard, and that makes text entry quite usable although I wouldn't want to do heavy editing with the iPad. Much too clumsy.

Using the New York Times app (I'm a paying subscriber now) on the iPad is an absolute joy. So is the sophisticated app for New Yorker subscribers, as are the apps for free news from NPR, BBC News, CNN, the AP, Bloomberg and al-Jazeera. The free Intellicast weather app, with its colorful moving radar map, keeps me informed about malevolent thunderboomers. The game apps for solitaire (SolBox Free) and Scrabble keep me from getting bored.

And I've discovered the Netflix streaming video app, which for $8 a month allows me to watch unlimited movies and TV shows with subtitles on the iPad. Only about 30 per cent of Netflix' content is subtitled at present, but the provider promises to raise that figure to 80 per cent by the end of 2011.

I can download captioned movies from Apple's iTunes and watch them with Apple's own movie app, but downloading a single $4.99 film can take a couple of hours on a slow 801g wireless connection. One movie eats up about 3 or 4 gigs of memory on the iPad, and once you've started you have just 24 hours to watch it to the end. Streaming on Netflix is more efficient, and you can pick up where you left off at any time.

Gotta be careful with that, though. Yesterday the receptionist in the doctor's office was giving me dirty looks as I watched a Netflix foreign film -- until I realized the sound was turned up all the way. Quickly I muted the iPad, but not soon enough for her.

I haven't yet explored the iPad 2 for photography use, but can see that it may make a good "photo bank" for storing backup files from my camera during out-of-town trips. There are lots of apps, some of them free, for simple processing of photos.

As for e-books, I wouldn't say the Kindle and Apple iBooks apps make reading on the iPad 2 as restful as it is on the genuine Kindle, but indoors it comes close. So much so that the Lady Friend says she actually prefers the iPad to the Kindle for that task.

In fact, she's threatening to hog the iPad 2. To save our marriage I just might have to get her one for her birthday.