The Medici Lions of Florida
Florida's Medici lions once again proudly protect the Bridge of Lions that spans Matanzas Bay between St. Augustine and Anastasia Island.
I made a bit of a fool of myself getting these shots. Some of the photos were made with fish eye lens to get a broader perspective and to emphasize different parts of the marble lions. There's a lot of spatial distortion with a fish eye so I walked right into the statue while trying to get the best angles with the fish eye camera. The thousands of motorists behind me, trapped in a massive traffic jam caused by protesters (yes, Donnie, the crowd was HUGE and it was 99% anti-Trump) surely thought I looked a bit odd. I'm quite lazy about setting up a tripod and prefer to just snap a lot of photos and hope that I get the one.
The Bridge of Lions c1925 is a product of the exuberance and excesses of the 1920s Florida land boom. It is also one of the greatest remaining landmarks of that era. It was designed not merely to carry cars, but to be a work of art. And as such, it cost ten times as much as more prosaic bridges constructed nearby at the same time.
The bridge was renovated in the early 2000s, modernizing the structure while retaining all of the artistic elements of the original bridge. The current bridge's west entrance (above) features manicured gazebos, landscaped palm walkways and a new publicly accessible dock extending into the bay. See video of the area on my YouTube channel @phillipsnaturalworld.
The Medici lions are a pair of marble sculptures, exact copies of the originals located a the Loggia dei Lanzi (aka Loggia della Signoria) in Florence. The first lion originates from a 2nd-century marble that was first mentioned in 1594, by the sculptor Flaminio Vacca. The second lion was made and signed by Vacca, also in marble, as a pendant (one of two art works that forms a pair) to the ancient sculpture at a date somewhere before 1598 (as variously reported in the literature).
The original lions were required by Ferdinando I de'Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had acquired the Villa Medici in 1576, to serve as majestic ornaments for the villa's garden staircase, the Loggia dei leoni. The Bridge's lions conception are attributed to Henry Rodenbaugh, the vice president and bridge expert for Henry Flagler's Florida East Coast Railway. In the early 1920s Rodenbaugh organized the bond issue to finance the new bridge and selected engineer J. E. Greiner to design it.
Above, notice how to fish eye gives a broad perspective with me and the lion more-or-less as we appear in real-life, but the outer edges of the image are distorted and the light posts lean inward.
Castillo de San Marcos
A few hundred yards down the promenade from the Bridge of Lions is the Castillo de San Marcos, the oldest masonry fort in the continental USA c1672. The fort was designed and built while Florida was a part of the Spanish Empire.
The fort's elegant, artistic-looking points are called bastions, angular structures projecting out from the curtain wall. This style of fortification was dominant from the mid-16th century to mid-19th century. Bastion fortification offered a greater degree of passive resistance and more scope for ranged defense in the age of gunpowder artillery, compared with the medieval fortifications they replaced.
At various times in its past the moat was water-filled (below). Today it is not, but surely with climate change and rising seas it will again be water-filled some day soon.
The masonry star fort is made of a stone called coquina (Spanish for "small shells"), made of ancient sea shells that have bonded together to form a type of stone similar to limestone. In several places along the coast of Florida this coquina is above ground and once-available for mining.
The coquina for the Castillo de San Marcos was mined from across the Matanzas Bay on Anastasia Island's King's Quarry (today Anastasia State Park). It took 23 years to construct the fort using Cuban and Native American laborers.
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Two different views of the San Carlos Bastion. On this day this was my favorite shot as there were fewer tourists to get in the way and the light and shadows were very nice.
Looking at the lovely angles all laid out for eternity in coquina, Florida's only available stone at the time, facing SE toward the San Pablo Bastion.
Above and Below: The San Carlos Bastion as seen from (above) the top of the moat) and below from within the moat.
Below, the obligatory photo in front of the entrance sign. Only 89 more National Parks and Monuments to go, then I will have seen them all. Being a Floridian, this was of course not my first trip to the Castillo but it was perhaps my warmest trip ever. It was 85° (29½° C) on January 22, 2017. Yeah, this is winter now. The long sleeves, hat, long pants are to protect my fair skin from the blistering hot sun.
Matanzas Inlet Birds
After protesting against Trump, posing with the Medici Lions, touring the Castillo and lunch at Longhorns, we decided to head out to the beach and check out the Matanzas Inlet Seagulls. It was not disappointing.
There were several hundred humans on the bluffs of what remains of the spit of sand between the two Matanzas inlets (the main inlet and a second low-lying area that is flooded in storms). This area is called Rattlesnake Island by locals. The several hundred houses along the beach of Rattlesnake Island are barely hanging on to what remains of this sand spit today. Thousands of tons of boulders have been brought in to shore up old SR A1A but one more big storm and it will all be washed away.
I had to climb down a clumsily constructed stairway and wade through the surf to get out to a point where I could photograph the birds.
Of course I could not resist walking through the flocks of birds which sent them swarming around me in a scene like Hitchcock's 1963, THE BIRDS.
Video of the birds is on my YouTube Channel @phillipsnaturalworld
We the People
Greater than Fear
Artist Shepard Fairey has released a set of three politically charged posters titled "We the People." The posters feature a Muslim woman, a Latina woman and an African-American woman.
An interview with one of the authors of "A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda."
Since the election, progressives have been huddling on social media to plan ways to stymie, if not stop, President-elect Donald Trump. Last week, new inspiration came in the form of a link leading to a 23-page Google document titled "Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda." In clear, confident prose, it lays out a well-reasoned, step-by-step strategy for building a grassroots movement to challenge Trump and his Republican allies in Congress. And it openly acknowledges that its playbook is cribbed from a surprising source: the tea party.
Spend enough time with some of the worst-case climate scenarios, and you may start to assume, as I did, that a major demagogue would contest the presidency in the next century. I figured that the catastrophic consequences of planetary warming would all but ensure the necessary conditions for such a leader, and I imagined their support coming from a movement motivated by ethnonationalism, economic stagnation, and hatred of immigrants and refugees. I pictured, in other words, something not so far from Trump 2016.
I just assumed it wouldn’t pop up until 2040.
This kind of worry is speculative—very speculative—but it is not ungrounded. A large body of scholarship suggests that climate change could exert grave effects on international politics this century. Planet-wide warming will dry out regions of the world already riven with ethnic and political strife, all the while impoverishing and destabilizing the Western powers that backstop global order. A recent study even argues that climate-triggered environmental shocks will exacerbate the very divisions that authoritarians have historically sought to exploit.
So to now watch a demagogue ascend to the presidency, after running a campaign that appealed to racism and xenophobia, has felt less like the sudden apparition of an unfathomable nightmare and more like the early realization of a seasonal forecast. You can hear the long-predicted gusts, the rain pounding on the roof and the groaning thunder. It’s all just happening four decades earlier than the weather person said.
Freshly energized protesters are taking to the streets by the hundreds of thousands, members of Congress are being confronted in their districts by constituents angry over health care, and wealthy donors are turning fear into action.
Eight years after Republicans united after a stinging electoral defeat to oppose President Barack Obama, Democrats are channeling an even deeper anxiety over President Trump—and a far shallower defeat—into a newfound burst of organizing
We've Read:
Aaron Rodgers Connects With His Hometown, but the Family Huddle Is Broken
The feud involves a woman, and Aaron is not on speaking terms with the rest of his family. Hummm. . .
The Walking Dead changes course with its February 12, 2017, mid-season premiere
and. . . the gang fight their way back from nearly dead. . .
. . . but will it be enough to bring viewers back or has the show run its course?
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