A Touch of France

I am so low on material that I have to resort to phone cam shots from my office window. This one got some interest on Flickr. It looks north on Broadway and I 70 during a thunderstorm. The domed stadium without a football team is on the left and the Four Seasons Hotel on the right.

The hotel has a strange LED system on that brick fin that sticks out of it. It's usually illuminated at night but this was midday. This was taken on July 7 so why is it, so to speak, flying the French flag a week before le quatorze Juillet? I dunno. Maybe it's a test.

The next two weeks at work are awful. I'll post as often as I can.     

What Little I Saw

There was a second day of protests in St. Louis on Tuesday. As I write this late that evening there has not been more violence. Two thousand National Guard troops are on the streets. People are demanding to know where they were last night, when many businesses in Ferguson were burned or looted. Paranoid theories are in the air. Some of them may be right.

We knew that there would be a march or rally downtown. Our office building is off in a corner of the district and we didn't expect trouble. However, about 2 in the afternoon we saw a crowd of people coming up 4th Street. A few hundred people marched up an exit ramp from Interstate 70, strung themselves across it and blocked the busy highway for about twenty minutes. These pictures were taken from our office windows. I didn't have a very long lens with me and they are greatly cropped. As you can see in the pictures below, a group of police in full riot gear pushed the protesters off the road. We saw no violence but I read later that the police used pepper spray.

This is a very hard time for us. There was conflicting eye-witness testimony about what happened on the day of the shooting. St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCullough's conduct has been sharply criticized. Most people don't know that McCullough's father was a St. Louis policeman who was shot to death by a black man.

People have fierce opinions, which may or may not be based on the ambiguous evidence. It's a good time to leave The Lou for a while. More soon from another location.