Lakes Nearby

In the past week or so (Aug 14~20, 2022) we’ve wandered to nearby geographic features that might be interesting to photograph.

First we visited Wilgress Lake. (Google Map) It’s right beside Highway #3 and has some amenities such as washrooms, picnic tables and a dock.

I noticed a strange pattern in the water below the drone. It appears as 8 round shapes around a central round shape and is only there in the subtle shades of colour in the water. I tried enhancing that section of the photo to bring it out – that is what you see below.

Strange pattern in Wilgress Lake Pano

The next lake on that journey was Jewel Lake.

Jewel Lake is a popular spot. There are cottages in the area around the lake, a provincial park and a small resort (Facebook) at the south-west end that this picture was taken at.

Greenwood BC advertises itself as Canada’s Smallest City. The population was under 700 a few years ago.

If you ever watched the film Snow Falling on Cedars (1) you’ve seen Greenwood – it stood in for the American city in the movie. Some of the painted signage can still be seen fading on buildings.

Back over a century ago this area had a lot of active mining going on. Mines produce Ore and ore needs to be processed and smelted to turn it into something useful with $$ value.

There used to be a smelter in Greenwood. Built by the BC Copper Company at the turn of the century it first fired up in 1901. You can learn a bit more about that on this web page and what the city is doing to preserve it on this page. All that is left now is the smoke stack, the flume, some foundations, a reservoir and the slag pile. The video only shows the stack and the slag – I’ll try and get the other parts at a later date.

The city is working on the site so going to the actual stack would have entailed trespassing so I settled for coming at it from a distance.

I got the drone to circle the stack and later on I added some music I created adhoc using RemixLive on a Chromebook. I’m having fun using the ‘make a soundtrack’ function to help drive the ‘learn the music making tool’ process.

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A few days later I found myself at Christina Lake so before I returned home I stopped and popped the drone up for a couple of shots.

Christina Lake is a popular summer spot with a provincial park, campgrounds, camper spaces, lake front properties and, of course, the Lake.

As I look at these I’m struck with this thought: Most of my output has been shared on Facebook and most of the people viewing that are familiar with the area. For those who have never been here to take a gander around one of these lakes is to view something without context. If I had markers floating in the spherical panos that showed Grand Forks is over here, Greenwood is over there, Vancouver is way over there . . . then maybe these pictures would have some contextual meaning to some of you.

Something to think about for the future.

Using New Technology to Present Historical Information

Since I moved to this little town one of the things I’ve been involved in is local history.

My first job here was in the Boundary Museum. I was the last employee left when it was removed from it’s original location in a struggle with the City back in 2007.

I’ve been a member of the Boundary Historical Society for a few years now. Twice I’ve been President. One of the things BHS does is present historical content in book form written by the people and families who lived and made it. They’ve produced 18 of these Reports since the 1950s and 3 of those books I did the layout for.

History doesn’t stop happening. Sometimes you get to live through historical events. If you’re not too busy living through it you might be able to record events and changes for later presentation.

I’ve been working on this little project over the past year. It was spawned by ‘historical flooding’ our town experienced in 2018.

This has resulted in an entire residential sub-division being removed to restore a flood plane . . . all the buildings in that area will soon be gone forever. You can hear more about this in the video.

My crazy idea

While working on aspects of recording and reproducing the area for posterity I’ve realized that new technology can help bring the past to you. To your pocket.

Normally when people think history they imagine visiting a museum or archive. Or maybe a Historic Point of Interest. Speaking of those I made this a while back – it’s along the same vein.

An earlier version of this idea

The museum is almost never on the site of most of the history it houses and presents. The on-site Point Of Interest displays are limited in how much content they can display,

What if all / most that other content could be available to you at the location? Kind of like having a museum in your pocket.

Niantic is the company that helped bring Pokemon Go to the world and now is making that technology, they call it LightShip, available to the world . . . check out their launch video

Did Silent Movies come with notes for the musical accompaniment?

This evening I came across an old film, Tillie’s Punctuated Romance, showing on Turner Classic Movies. It was a silent film from 102 yeas ago.

Initially I thought it was a Charlie Chaplin film because that’s who I saw and recognized right off. But as the movie progressed I noticed that Charlie wasn’t playing the adorable little tramp he was famous for. Then when the inter-scene title graphic showed up it was clear it wasn’t a Charlie Chaplin movie at all – he was just one of the actors. It was a Marie Dressler movie. (That’s her on the right)

This prompted me to find out who this woman who billed higher than Charlie Chaplin was. And it felt almost like was visiting a different world . . .

A quick idmb.com search found her for me. She was born in 1868 and did theater from the age of 14 and was on Broadway by 1892. In 1910 she had a hit with a play called “Tillie’s Nightmare” which was turned in the film I was watching in 1914.

(the 1910 mention was just the latest in a string of coincidental references to 1910 I’ve noticed now that I’m republishing a pair of newspapers from 1910 online – but that’s a different story)

Her career in films floundered and she didn’t get her real traction until talkies in 1930. For the next 3 years she was a Star winning the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1933, the fourth time it had been awarded. At imbd there are two videos with her. You can watch the whole film I mentioned above and a trailer for Dinner At Eight. If you look at the billing for that movie, a movie with Jean Harlow, two Barrymores and Wallace Beery you will notice that Marie Dressler gets top billing. She played Tugboat Annie and if you’ve ever seen the TV or movies of that name you’ll know that Annie is no beauty – yet she billed above Harlow! Her film success was relatively short – she died of cancer in 1934. I feel like I’ve just discovered her. (I used to watch the TV show Tugboat Annie when I was young and remember liking her – not the same actress though)

She was from Canada and I can’t recall ever hearing of her. As a Canadian I’m a bit embarrassed on that bit. But she isn’t forgotten – she has a website as well as a posthumous Star on the Hollywood walk of fame.

In the film there’s a scene in a movie playhouse. And there beside the screen is the upright piano and the player is providing the sound track to the film. Which is how it was done in those days. I knew that already.

At some point I turned to my friend and said: I wonder when the soundtrack we are listening to was created?

The film was a Silent one so any actual prints would not include music or sounds but the version TCM was showing us did have music.And that music switched tempo and style on the fly with each different camera angle or scene change.

And then we wondered if the theaters got any guidance for the musician who had to accompany the film or not? Maybe something like ‘Marching music here, romantic music here, suspense now’ or did they expect the pianist to watch the film before everyone else and make it up as they went?

So now I have more research to do. You can follow up on this at Wikipedia and find out about cue sheets and scores. Those are the things that they sent along with the films . . . most of the time. And you thought that was what this blog post was about? Okay the title might have given you that impression but it was just part of the information I had to impart. Sound cues was question but Marie was a (re)discovery.