Down To Watkins Glen
NPR
"Jackson Pollock's painting Number 1, 1949, is a swirl of multi-colored, spaghettied paint, dripped, flung and slung across a 5-by-8-foot canvas. It's a textured work — including nails and a bee (we'll get to that later) — and in the nearly 70 years since its creation, it's attracted a fair bit of dust, dirt and grime."
"That's where conservator Chris Stavroudis comes in: His job is to clean the painting using swabs, solvents, and tiny brushes. For the last several months, he's been hard at work, once a week, in full view of the public, in a gallery at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles."
"Pollock used all sorts of paints — oil paint, house paint, car paint, radiator paint — and they all aged and got dirty in different ways. Working with the Getty Conservation Institute, Stavroudis did tests to see what kind of cleaning was needed."
Spies Are More Common, and Boring, Than You Think
"One former American counterintelligence officer estimated that there were about 100,000 foreign agents spying on the U.S., working for about 60 to 80 nations. To put that in perspective, there are about 50,000 coal miners in the U.S., or half the number of foreign spies."
"But I wonder if the actual number of foreign spies isn’t larger yet. John Negroponte, former director of national intelligence, admitted in 2006 that the U.S. was deploying about 100,000 spies around the world. Given that the U.S. is the world’s technology and military leader, and yet has a relatively small share of global population, is it so crazy to think the number of people spying on us is larger than that?"
Towards Wysox
World’s Oldest Edible Ham in Smithfield, Virginia – Gastro Obscura
"The 115-year-old piece of pork wears a brass collar and was once a man's "pet ham.""