Reading my post from yesterday one may think I have something against Smith Island, Maryland. Nothing could be further from the truth! Between the nature, the solitude, and the food, it has been on our list of places to visit for the better part of this decade. Stars seem to be aligning for August of this year, so fingers crossed.

We have been watching some videos in preparation, and An Island Out of Time (YouTube link) were 25 minutes well-spent. The island has been getting less and less hospitable for humans compared to the mainland, and it has nothing to do with its supposedly sinking.

Another one on our travel list: Calvert Cliffs State Park — home to the most fossils per square foot on the East coast, and neighbor to the state’s only nuclear power plant.

Chesapeake Bay is a natural wonder of the world and Maryland has its best parts, making it clearly the best state in the union — no contest.

Duck (🦆), North Carolina.

This morning’s story in The Washington Post on a slow-rolling climate disaster has this as the subtitle:

Maryland’s iconic Smith Island faces one of the nation’s most dire forecasts for rising seas, but real estate is booming

In the story we learn that the “booming” real estate market means that

More homes have sold on Smith Island in the last three years than in the previous 11 combined, according to sales data.

…

Woutila and Pueschel lived in the Baltimore suburbs for years, but she always dreamed of living on a sailboat and he of owning waterfront property. As they scouted real estate listings, they hit upon a marshy plot in the middle of the Chesapeake: Smith Island.

Waterfront homes run roughly from $100,000 to $200,000 — far less than most spots on the mainland — so it was one of the few places that fit the couple’s budget. In comparison, a two-bedroom condo on the water in Annapolis recently sold for $530,000 and a small home near a dock in Shady Side, Md., went for $360,000.

Framing is everything: a journalist’s “real estate boom” is a thinking person’s exodus.

If there was my type of a long-form article, it would be the making-of any complex project. Like of The Last Unicorn (via Robin Sloan), or Back to the Future (warning: Twitter thread), or Frasier (to which I keep coming back).

And I have never even seen the first one — though I do plan to now!

This is our second time traveling to the Outer Banks. [Note: Henceforth OBX. ] The first was seven years and two children ago, when I attended a grant-writing workshop held at an upscale resort in Duck, NC.

We were further down south this time, in Kill Devil Hills, ⊕ [Note: Yes, these are actual town names. There is also, of course, Kitty Hawk, as well as Nags Head. I’ll take those over European place names — looking at you, Vienna VA — any day. ] in accommodations that were decidedly more homely — and it was great!

1. Not sure how general knowledge of OBX is — I certainly didn’t know anything about them before coming — so I will summarize the geography thusly: a thin strip of sand oriented north-to-south parallel to the Eastern coast of North Carolina, famous for being the Wright brothers’ chosen site for their glider tests and, ultimately, humanity’s first flight.
2. That thin strip of sand is perilously close to perishing: there was a moderately severe storm on our first day and parts of the road closest to the beach were half-flooded for days; waves are picking at the beach little by little, often helped by clueless beachgoers who make coastal erosion into a family event, little shovels at the ready; so, you’d better see it while it’s still there.
3. And there is more than the beach there to see: the Wright Brothers National Memorial, for one, but also Jockey’s Ridge state park which was even better for being so unexpected (we found out about it by my scrolling around the map and wondering what the big yellow splotch was — incidentally, a random scroll around the map is an excellent way of semi-spontaneous trip planning, if you’ll pardon the oxymoron).
4. I still find it amazing that, with everything else being commodified and price-tagged, the beaches of North America are still mostly free. And that there are so many of them. Yes, the Mediterranean see is warmer, friendlier, better to swim and wade through, and just plane nicer. But the beaches, on top of being hostile to feet, are also much more crowded and much too often open only to those who can pay for a lounge chair.
5. Last month the digitizer on my 5-year-old iPhone Xs Max stopped working and I could no longer postpone an upgrade. What a good thing that I did! It turned out that the touch screen was not the only broken part — the image stabilizer was also dead for who knows how long and I thought I was just very bad at taking sharp photos. Anyhow, this was a well-documented trip.
6. Photo processing has… changed in these 5 years, to the point that this is probably the last time I would bring a DSLR on vacation. I barely got it out, I still haven’t transferred the few photos that were there, and I shudder to think I will have to process them myself — mostly by lightening the shadows beneath the glaring sun, something the 14 Pro Max that I got can do much better on its own and without being asked. It’s magic.
7. Sun blocking technology has also changed. Yes, the sunscreen is now amazing, but the better news is that you don’t have to use that much of it with all the clothes and headwear protects from the sun without being uncomfortable to wear or (this is the new part) get wet. My pale-skinned easy-to-burn 10-year-old self would have loved going to the beach a whole lot more if these were around back then.
8. To the last two points, here is some of that breakthrough technology in action:

“After ‘Barbie,’ Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox”:

I.P.-based filmmaking has become so commonplace that Gerwig—who made her name acting in tiny mumblecore projects—was caught off guard by complaints that she’d sold out.

I.P. being, of course, the acronym for intellectual property — amusing, since there is absolutely nothing intellectual about the properties in question. The movies have never been so colorful yet depressing as they are now.

I recently attended a residency graduation party at an academic medical center, for the first time since the pandemic. Two things struck me:

1. So. Many. Awards. For the residents. For the faculty. For the ancillary staff. There were nearly as many awards as there were graduating residents.
2. No roasting of the graduating house staff, or even a hint of humor of any kind. This used to be the highlight of any graduation party.

Award inflation is akin to grade inflation: they have become currency for further post-graduate training and, more importantly, faculty promotion. With the recent focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, a whole new spectrum of accolades has opened up. So yes, there is a reason for all those plaques being thrown left and right, but it was funny nevertheless to see faculty speed through the list of graduates, then spend the next hour patting themselves on the back.

The lack of a proper roast was more concerning. Has the environment become so fraught that the residents are concerned about offending anyone? Humor is to dialogue what beavers are to a river: sometimes a nuisance, but also the hallmark of a healthy ecosystem. Or should I say good humor; when done lazily and as an afterthought, roasts too often devolved into a series of racial and sexual stereotypes. I imagine that is why some places have done away with them, which is also a lazy, unimaginative thing to do — you would think that with all the stress on DEI, the graduates would if anything be more capable of doing a character/personality rather than race/orientation-based roast.

What I hope DEI workshops did not teach them is that they should go out of their way to avoid making people uncomfortable. Sometimes people should be uncomfortable, and making them squirm just a little bit at the highest peak of their career-to-date is the best time for it. They will have the entire rest of the night to pat themselves on the back.