Diamond in the dump

 

Occasionally you'll find a gem buried in the Internet garbage heap.  

The Last Museum is a new online website that brings together 5.8 million art works on one free platform. Not a functioning museum in itself, the website pulls collection records and images from thousands of institutions around the world. Why travel?

The Last Museum is the kind of sophisticated reference tool we didn't even dream of when I was a working librarian. Users can search by themes, moods, colors, subjects, or descriptive phrases without knowing an artwork’s title or artist. In other words, searching through ideas instead of just keywords.

However, this massive BOT scraping of digital content is somewhat controversial in the museum world. Although many artworks have entered the public domain, some institutions still claim rights over their own photographs, scans, or digital reproductions of those works. The debate on that goes on. 

Also interesting-- the creators/developers of The Last Museum remain completely anonymous! 

As far as I'm concerned, a good use for brilliant tech minds that might otherwise cause mischief on the Internet.

Anyway, fun to play around with on a rainy day.  

Smoked out

 

 

The air was OK while in Twisp, but we hit heavy smoke for most of the drive yesterday. It was especially bad along the Columbia River and through the Wenatchee area (above.) Those poor people, living under that fug all summer. My nose is still tickling and sneezing this morning from the irritation. 

Rain relief is on the way, and it can't come soon enough across the state.

This is the first week of school in Seattle, and for the next 9 months, we time our comings and goings with the middle school drop off and pick up hours. That is, unless you want to walk a block in the rain with your groceries. Welcome home. No parking spaces were open in front of our house to unload yesterday. 

But with roads dry and traffic fairly light, it was an easy drive overall. I bought peaches, pears, squash and a bag of organic Honeycrisp apples ($1.29 a pound) at Lone Pine to make applesauce and wrap up the canning for the year. The pears are few and far between in the Carlton orchard, which was somewhat of a relief to Amanda and Tom. 

And the seasons, they go round and round:

"Be aware of the season you are in and give yourself the grace to be there."

Kristen Dalton