We hope you have noticed the recent addition to the EphBlog sidebar - the pictures are randomly drawn from over 2000 Williams-related photos on Flickr. Clicking through on these pictures will take you not only to some excellent photography, but snippets of life like the following from “stenz”:

Chadbourne on the Williams College campus. My senior year, my friends and I lived on the top floor of the house.

I first kissed my wife here after watching a really awful movie (Event Horizon), which she will never let me live down. I kept a different schedule than my friends (up late and at the art studio and then slept in until lunch), so I was usually gone while crazy things were happening, but I was there in the morning when everyone else was in class. That meant I usually was the one who got in trouble with the cleaning person and forced to clean up things I wasn’t part of - but I figured it was just karmic retribution for other events in the past for which I surely had been a terrible person.

Some notable clean-up events I can recall were after an apple war (someone was nice and left out a bowl of apples, which my suite mates were less nice about [w]hen throwing around the house), another was a jar of spinach dip going into my toilet, a few brooms and such being thrown out windows or awful pictures off of the internet being hidden in various places, and then the big one was after nationals a bunch of drunk xc guys absolutely destroyed my room and finalized it by coating it all with Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion - the room never really recovered from that one.

If you have Williams-related photos you’d like to share, we encourage you to contribute them (tagged with “williamscollege“) to Flickr.

A few months ago, Jonathan Landsman posted a nice tribute and request for donations to thank me for all of my Photo IDs and other Williams photos. Jonathan’s idea was to give me a “pro” account at flickr so that I could upload all of my pictures and have more flexibility in organizing and storing them, and possibly also allow me to get other photography equipment. Thanks to readers’ generous gifts, I now have a pro account and enough money to renew this account in the future (it is $25 a year).

I have been working on uploading all of my Williams photos to flickr. When I upload them, I can give them tags, which describe what is in them. Here are some that might interest you (you may have seen some of the photos before if you are a frequent EphBlog reader):
EphBlog, Williams, Track, Student Center, Williams-Mystic, Photography winter study class. Here is a list of all my tags.

I am working on uploading all of my Williams pictures. Some of the categories are woefully incomplete right now, especially the running ones — I have hundreds of running pictures, of which only a tiny fraction are on flickr. I think I have put up all of my EphBlog pictures and scenic pictures of Williamstown, which you can access from the links above.

What to do with the rest of the money? I was planning to pool it with some of my own in order to buy myself a camera — the camera I have been using belonged to my parents and I knew I was going to have to give it back to them this vacation. But then for Christmas, they gave me a wicked awesome camera all my own. So now I don’t need a camera. And I received 3 GB of memory cards, so that should be enough. Thus, I am planning to use the rest of the money to buy:

1. A tripod. As in this picture of the Congo church, readers pitied me for lying on the ground to take nighttime pictures, and suggested EphBlog could provide me with a tripod. This may occur.

2. More years of being a pro on flickr. If I fail to renew my pro account, I can only see my most recent 200 pictures. This would be sad. I will probably pay flickr $25 a year from now on, and it makes sense for this money to come from EphBlog for a few years after I graduate, as long as I keep posting pictures of Williams and occasionally link from EphBlog to those pictures.

I’ll let you know when I have a full set of photos up, and when I spend more of the money. Thanks again, everyone.

Friday brought the first real snow of the school year, and although it didn’t stick much on campus, the snow did stick at the higher elevations of the Dome and the Greylock Massif. Here are two photographs, the first of the Dome and second of the Greylock Massif.

The photograph of the Greylock Massif shows a particularly nice detail of the view from Paresky: the mountains and Congregational Church’s roof line echo each other almost perfectly when seen from the second-floor balcony, from which I took this photograph.

Here’s a photograph I took earlier this week of the Village Beautiful from the summit of Mt. Prospect. The trees have been a bit slow to turn because of the recent mild weather, but the view was still fantastic.

I was in Williamstown recently (the same weekend that Dave was giving his talk, except that I missed it to make it to a wedding). My wife, Katie Davis ‘00, lead a discussion group at a teacher conference. While she did that, I wandered around campus taking photos.

Here is a link to my Williams College Flickr Set. I don’t know that any of them are anything new compared to the excellent work that Diana Davis ‘07 has been providing us, but for those interested in such things, there you go.

I have about 1000 photos, literally, that I took that day and it is taking me some time to weed through them and find ones worth adding to the set - so it may grow over time as I try to squeeze in time to review them. I have been adding my memories/thoughts on various shots, please feel free to add any of your own as well.

I am interspersing this one in the middle of all the construction pictures, because really Williams is beautiful; the construction does little to diminish that. Here are some students relaxing on the Science Quad on a beautiful fall day.

One of my favorite sights around campus these days.

Happy birthday, Diana! Just over two weeks ago, I posted a call here for donations towards a gift from Ephblog to Diana Davis ‘07, whose awesome pictures have embellished this site for years. I asked people to make donations towards converting Diana’s free photo site with flickr into an unlimited pro account, which costs $25/year.

In total, contributions to Diana totaling $140 came in. Thanks to your generosity, we have enough to give Diana her first year of Flickr and make a substantial additional contribution to her “get a camera” fund (after borrowing her parent’s for her college years, Diana’s decided it’s time to get her own). The $115 leftover after purchasing her pro account will help her towards a good camera, or a nice accessory for it (get a good case too, Diana!). I’m sure she’ll let us know.

Did you love pictures postings like this one of Pine Cobble, from our very own Diana Davis ‘07?

Or this one of a little slice of semesterly life?

For many months, Diana’s taken and shared with us pictures both of the beautiful and the memorable mundane, snapshots not plashy enough for the alumni review or calendar but which capture real Williams in an invaluable way. And she made a game out of it for us.

Would you like to show your thanks for the years of weekly Friday photo ID posts we’ve all enjoyed?

Recently I asked Diana why she hadn’t added any photos to her flickr account in ages. She told me she had reached her limit: on flickr, a site for storing, sorting, and sharing maximum-quality digital photos, you can have a free account with a usage limit, like hers. If you do, you can use nearly all the site’s features, but only for 200 photos. Now, well all know Diana has many, many more than 200 photos.

My chat with Diana and wish to see more of her work gave me what I think is the perfect idea for how we can thank her. A yearly “pro” account on flickr is $25, and I think we should buy her a year to let her sort and share her work. She has “many gigabytes” of pictures that she wants to share but no way to store the high quality files, nor tag them so people in the pictures could easily see all the pictures of them or their friends. Flickr will let her do this, in fact it is probably the leading service for this purpose, and she already has work there.

If you are interested in chipping in any amount of money to get Diana the gift of a flickr account from all of us, please read the rest of this post. She, by the way, has no idea (until she sees this message) that we’re doing this). Let’s get a lot of us together on this and really show her our appreciation.

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An anonymous person with an east-facing window in Morgan gave me the following picture and commentary to post.

Bright and early on Sunday morning, Williams custodians were viewed shoveling snow and chipping ice off of the roof of Lasell Gymnasium. Surprised at being photographed in this endeavor, they cheerily greeted the camera-wielding student peering out at them from a window in Morgan East. Williams custodians always seem to be in the best of spirits.

There are five more photos, all by the same student, in the extended entry.

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Climbing Far is a little more difficult than usual today.

The snow has stopped falling, but the wind is blowing incessantly.

There is a wall of snow on each side of the sidewalk.

The trees along the sidewalks have the obligatory patch of snow a few feet up. The Photo ID aspect of this post is to say why they have that patch there. The first time I saw these patches of snow, in middle school, I was confused. But then I figured it out. Now it’s your turn.

This one is a self-portrait, on purpose.

These bikes are not going anywhere.

I like the snow on the ivy. (See the full-size version.)

The stairs show the snowdrifts.

May your holiday be as festive as the Thompson Chapel has been since November.

And may your tree, if you have one, be more beautiful than this one, and not as tall.

Kinda pretty, isn’t it?

(The smattering yesterday may technically have been the first snow, but I’m not counting that, because it didn’t stick and look pretty.)

Williamstown’s foliage is usually gone by the time Homecoming rolls around, so here are some photos from early October 2000 to jog some memories (of the leaves and what the campus used to look like). Full size individual images are available by clicking the thumbnails or captions. The full photoset (in zip format) is available here.

Cole Field

Adams Theater Downstage

“Pave paradise…”

Path to Greylock

Morgan Ivy

View from Pine Cobble

Science Quad leaves

Near WSB on Route 2

Science Quad

St. Johns Church

West College

The wedding of my friend and teammate Kenny Marines ‘01 to Jen Greene ‘02 was listed in the New York Times’ wedding announcements on Sunday. Congratulations to a long-standing and lovely couple, and best of luck to them as they begin the rest of their lives together.

David, I don’t know whether they met during Winter Study (and I doubt that they lived across the same quad, as they were a year apart), but they were definitely a Williams couple, so that’s one more for you.

Though I knew about the nuptuals since the summmer, the reason I found out about the announcement was because David Lat (formerly of Article III Groupie and then Wonkette, now running a legal tabloid called AboveTheLaw) listed Ken’n'Jen in his Legal Eagle Wedding Watch post today and in fact, named them this week’s winners. Lat’s commentary is highly complementary and quite amusing — one might even call it gushing. (emphasis below is mine):

Résumé score: 8.7. Both are Williams College grads. She went to Brooklyn Law (cum laude), clerked for a bankruptcy judge (in the S.D.N.Y.), and will be going into bankruptcy — the department, not the financial state — at Simpson Thacher (the other highlight of their credentials, besides Williams). He’s an associate at the Tishman Speyer real estate firm.
…
Balance score: 8.7. Hard to gauge the impressiveness (or profitability) of Kenny’s employment with Tishman Speyer; but it seems to us that Jennifer has the edge.
Beauty score: 9.4. Yes, this is one of the highest scores we’ve awarded in a long time — but check out that photo! They’re both gorgeous. If she’s 5′8″ or above, she belongs on a runway. And so does he. You know someone is truly beautiful when they look great even with a shaved head. It’s all about the features.
Overall score: 8.80.
Additional comments: Extra points if this is a multi-ethnic union. A rabbi officiated, so one or both of them is Jewish; but we’re guessing that Kenny is Latino, based on the names of his parents (Emelania Fernandez and Juan Marines).
…
THIS WEEK’S WINNING COUPLE: Jennifer Greene and Kenny Marines. Their exceedingly high beauty score gave them a lead over the two other couples that they never relinquished. Congratulations!

Several days ago, David begged for Williams photos, so here are some. These will be of particular interest to all of the rising seniors who picked into Morgan for next year, when their future rooms did not even exist yet.

This is Morgan Hall as seen from Spring Street. There are other views in the extended entry.

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I am apparently the official photographer for the infestation. (See the entry below for photos of the chalkings.) I take this job very seriously. Thus, I have attempted to take artful, specific pictures of the infestation today. The product of that effort is below.

Outside the Route 2 entrance to Hopkins Hall

On the way from Stetson to Mission

As usual, click on a picture for the full-sized version. There are more caterpillars in the following link:

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Here are some more caterpillar chalkings. Some of them are hard to read, because they are in highly trafficked areas, but so it goes with chalkings.

There are about 10 more exclusive, never-seen-before on the Internet pictures of chalkings, now with high resolution so that you can make it your background or something, at the following link:

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Here are some pictures of the caterpillar infestation that has recently appeared on the Williams campus. Caterpillars are small, but they are all over campus. At first glance, these pictures may seem not to have many caterpillars in them, but this is not the case. The best way to appreciate the scope of the infestation is to click on the small picture that is here, so as to bring up a very large version (may take some time to load). Then you can carefully look at it and see the caterpillars hanging from the trees and covering the surfaces. It’s truly disgusting.

Exhibit A: Hopkins Hall. The caterpillars are all over the railings and the steps, as well as hanging from the archway.

Exhibit B: In front of Morty’s house. This tree is tall, with its lowest branches (pictured here) at least 15 feet above the ground, but the caterpillars are hanging down to face level.

Exhibit C: If you are walking from Morty’s house towards the Greylock Quad, you don’t walk on the sidewalk. And if you’re riding your bike and don’t notice this in time, you’ll be very sorry.

Exhibit D: The back entrance of Bronfman. Absolutely horrendous. I have heard multiple accounts of people rushing out of this door in a hurry, only to stop in horror at the caterpillars dripping from every twig. (The doorway itself is not pictured here.)

There are more graphic images if you click on the following link:

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Here are the caterpillar chalkings. I took these pictures starting in the Odd Quad, walking to the science quad, and then to Hopkins Hall.

There are two chalking camps: Pro-caterpillar and Anti-caterpillar. There is also some disagreement on the spelling of “caterpillar.” There are about 20 more pictures, the last of which are the best, if you click on the following link:

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Here is a picture of some caterpillars at Williams.

If you click, you will get a picture so big it will make your skin crawl along with your computer screen. Maybe now you are not so glad that David asked for a picture of some caterpillars…

Last month I dispelled the myth that Williams-Mystic students live on a boat. This week I am going to show you the wonderful thing that started the rumor: the offshore voyage.

Each Williams-Mystic class takes a 10-day trip on the Corwith Cramer at the beginning of the semester. The trip has two purposes: first, to learn about boats, about living on boats, about all the words associated with boats, and how to navigate and eat and sleep and wash and go to the bathroom on boats; and second, to get to know your classmates. Students arrive in Mystic, CT and within a week they are off on a boat.

As you see in the picture above, students steer the boat. Students are divided into three “watches,” which alternate running everything about the boat. Below is a picture of a typical watch. Very observant and informed people will notice that this watch contains a current Williams student, a recent alum, and a 1980s alum:

Students actually steer the boat almost 24 hours a day, except for an hour or two in the afternoon when there is class. “Class?” you ask, “on a boat?” Yes. We learn about weather by predicting it (see below), about the laws of the ocean, about the animals (visible and invisible) in the ocean around us, about poetry about the sea, and so on.

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Students at Williams-Mystic cook all of their own food, and so we had frequent get-togethers, especially in the early part of the fall when it was pleasant outdoors. It was like a 1950s pot luck, including even an occasional pasta casserole, but often we made quite haute cuisine, such as sliced avacadoes. The above picture is in the combined back yard of three of the student houses, with the main parking lot for Mystic Seaport in the background.

Occasionally we had themed food events, like brunch or, pictured here, Minnesota Night. One student was from Minnesota, so he and his girlfriend (who was visiting from her college) made two kinds of jello salad called Green and Orange, a hot dish called Hot Dish, red drink, scalloped potatoes, and Special K bars.

Of course, with all this delicious food, we often had leftovers. We would eat it for lunch, but sometimes it was just so delicious that we had some left over, and then leftover from that… The table in this picture shows you how much food my house had left over at the end of the semester, when we invited the other houses over to eat it. So you see, the food budget is quite sufficient at Williams-Mystic. (The girl in the picture is actually an Amherst student.)

Last week I dispelled the myth that Williams students live on a boat by displaying pictures of the houses they live in. This week I am going to dispel the myth that Mystic students just have fun all the time and never work.

Mystic Seaport, the museum “campus” that Williams-Mystic uses, has a library that is essentially one big rare books library, in the sense that every book in it is rare. Thus, it is an invaluable resource, and people come from all over the world to use it.

This picture shows a Williams-Mystic student doing research with a rare book in the library. Each student does a history research paper using the primary source documents in the library, and that is what is happening here.

For example, my paper was about “sea mail” in the 1800s, which was the way that wives on shore wrote to their husbands at sea and vice-versa. I wanted to see how the fact that the system was so unreliable (many letters never arrived) and took so long (often six months to a year) affected what people wrote in their letters. So my research consisted of wearing white gloves to carefully read the fragile letters, written in brown ink with a fountain pen and often illegible nineteenth-century handwriting. It was awesome. I read love letters for research purposes. What could be better than that?

David is all about advocating for student papers to be available online, so I wouldn’t dream of telling you that Williams-Mystic is academically rigorous without providing proof. In each of four classes (in addition to a final exam) we had to write a final paper, three of which were original research papers. My final papers appear below. I hope you enjoy them. I am putting them in order of how interesting they will probably be to you: Oceanography first because it has entertaining pictures and diagrams, history second because it has lots of fascinating primary source quotes, and policy last because it has 74 footnotes.

Oceanography: Analysis and models of a micromarsh at Mystic Seaport

History: A study of whether the fact that sea mail was unreliable and slow in the eighteenth century led letter-writers to write differently

English: A defense of Captain MacWhirr, the main character in Typhoon by Joseph Conrad

Policy: An analysis of aquaculture on Deer Isle, Maine (where I live)

By the way, these papers received, not in this order, B, B+, A-, and A (so now you know the standards are not just “everybody gets an A”).

This photo series is so that the Williams community will know a little more about what goes on at Williams-Mystic. The first thing I’ll do is dispel a common myth, which is that Williams-Mystic students live on a boat.

Williams-Mystic students live in houses. Specifically, I lived in this house. The houses are right across the street from Mystic Seaport, a museum with 100+ buildings and 150+ boats. The houses are very nice, probably the nicest houses that most of the Williams-Mystic students will live in for a decade or two afterwards. They are former millworkers’ houses from when there was a velvet mill on the Mystic River. Four students live in this house and two others, and there is one larger house with six students.

There are interior photos, and much more commentary, below.

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Did you think I wasn’t putting up pictures anymore? Well, I am. I’m going to be rolling out a lot of pictures one of these days. But before I do that, here are some pictures from a photography class this past Winter Study taught by Cesar Silva of the math department. I took the course, so some of the pictures are mine, but many are others’. You can see them all here. I’ll just give you a taste of the great pictures taken in this class (three more in the extended entry):

Tricia Chambers ‘06:

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Yesterday, it snowed quite a lot in Williamstown, four inches or so. It was a beautiful snowy day, with snow sticking to the branches and people trudging around in boots.

Here, two students outside of Morgan take advantage of Winter Study in one of the best ways that I can think of.

Hopkins Hall and Thompson Chapel through the Sawyer “porch”

Current progress on the Paresky Center

After the success of my wildly popular [with a certain alum -- ed.] Photo ID series, I shall now embark upon a photo series with a different goal. I will be posting pictures of the Williams-Mystic program, with the intention of educating the wider Williams community about what goes on there.

You’ll notice that this series is not a “Photo ID” series, per se, because I don’t expect that very many EphBlog readers would be able to identify the pictures I post. However, I was surprised to find out that a number of Williams-Mystic alums do read EphBlog and EphPlanet, and they are welcome to add information, clarifications, and memories in the comments, just like a regular Photo ID post.

Ready? Okay.

I didn’t actually take this picture, but it’s better than any that I took, and I think it’s important to start off with the Charles W. Morgan. In the beginning of the 20th century, the Mystic Seaport Museum existed, but it was not doing well. Right before the Great Depression, Mystic received the Charles W. Morgan, which was the last remaining wooden whaleship in existence. Suddenly, Mystic Seaport started flourishing. Whereas it had had 2000 visitors per year, suddenly it had 20,000 visitors, and soon 200,000 visitors per year. (These numbers are approximate. Glenn could give you the exact figures.) So the Morgan saved the seaport, and the seaport gave birth to the Williams-Mystic program.

Williams-Mystic students become relative Morgan experts. Every history class begins somewhere interesting on the Seaport grounds, and one history class begins on the Morgan, with all the students crowding into the fo’c’s’le (FOKE-sull), the inside of the bow (front) of the boat where the crew lived. Thus begins an eight-minute talk on the importance of the focsle to those living on a whaleship — it was the only place where the higher-ranked crew was customarily not allowed to be, and the dismal conditions occasionally encouraged mutiny.

Those that choose “squad skills” for their maritime skill climb the rigging, climbing up the masts and standing inside the hoops that whalemen used to stand in for hours at a time, scanning the horizon for a puff of steam from a blowhole. Additionally, in the spring semester on Herman Melville’s birthday, there is an event called “Moby on the Morgan,” where Moby-Dick is read aloud in its entirety over a 24-hour period.

By the way, Williams-Mystic has rolled out a new, and much improved, version of the Williams-Mystic site. It has some great pictures and good background information, if you’re interested. Also, the Charles W. Morgan recently made it to the AP wire when trees blown down by Hurricane Katrina were donated to Mystic Seaport to be used in the major overhaul of the Morgan that is scheduled for 2007.

Note: I inadvertently published this post when it was still in draft form. My apologies! I will post Williams-Mystic pictures on Fridays.

It has come to my attention that many people do not know that there is a building called Spencer other than Spencer the row house. This evening, I walked around the art building and took pictures of what I saw — some of the general building, and some of individual paintings.

Here, for instance, is one hallway:

The art building is really big. It is basically all white, with lots of student work up everywhere. This is the first time I have ever been inside since coming to Williams, partly because I couldn’t get in. Tonight, though, I was determined, and I found the way in (not the main entrance — that’s locked). Keep reading for about 20 more pictures, including some interesting student work.

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I usually put up photos once a week or so, but now I’m going to show you somewhere where you can get updated photos of Williams at any time of the day or night! Wow.

There is a camera on the rightmost column of Chapin Hall, which sends pictures to this page. Right at this very moment, for instance, you can see a rather nice sunset over the mountains (see below). At night, you can’t see anything, but in the daytime, you can see the current status of the new student center.