Connecticut has a State Heroine and despite my supposedly stellar Connecticut public school education, I’d never heard of her. Prudence Crandall ran a successful academy for girls in the 1800s. After she decided to admit a student with black skin color, most parents withdrew their children. She stuck to her principles and had to close the school, but turned around and opened an academy for African-American girls. Students came from all over the Northeast. The neighbors were, to put it mildly, not happy and the students endured harassment and vandalism. Connecticut then passed the “Black Law,” disallowing out-of-state African-Americans from attending school in the state. Prudence Crandall persisted and was arrested. The resulting county and Superior Court trials and appeal resulted in the case being dismissed on a technicality. The school remained open until a violent mob descended one night, leaving Crandall with the realization that her students would not be safe. She married, closed up shop, and moved away. The Black Law was repealed in 1838 and Crandall eventually received a small pension and formal apology from the state. In 1995 she was named the State Heroine and her old schoolhouse is now the Prudence Crandall Museum.

San Francisco Chronicle art critic, Kenneth Baker, doesn’t hold back in his review of “Chihuly at the de Young,” the de Young Museum’s exhibition of Dale Chihuly’s glassworks. He caps off his views on the empty, non-intellectual nature of Chihuly’s work with the statement: “The history of art is a history of ideas, not just of valuable property. Chihuly has no place in it, and the de Young disserves its public by pretending that he does.” In short, it’s not art. A craft perhaps, but not art. It’s just pretty glass. Angry readers blasted him with email, though a few did agree with his criticism.

LEDs are the focus for the future of lighting, even as manufacturers struggle with the business model of selling a bulb that will last for decades. “We are not spending one dollar on research and development for compact fluorescents,” says the CEO of Philips Lighting. Their R&D; is invested in LEDs. The success of LEDs in lighting effects for public buildings seems assured. In the home the price of an LED bulb needs to be low enough for consumers to see value in its longer life, with manufacturers still taking a profit, or perhaps the home lighting design paradigm needs to change.

The Seattle Mariners are having two “Peanut Controlled Area Nights” where 2 seating sections are cleared of peanuts for the comfort and peace of mind of baseball fans with peanut allergies.

My husband forwarded me an email that had a photo of a cat sitting on a Roomba (the robot vacuum cleaner). That cat, of it’s own free will and curiosity, has learned to turn on the Roomba and ride around on top, sitting upright, presumably for amusement or perhaps ease of transportation. The cat’s owner caught it in the act, two rooms away from the docking station. My second thought was, of course, this needs to be captured on video for YouTube (my first thought was “OMG!!! LOL!!!”). The next day, my husband sent me a YouTube link of a different cat riding a Scooba. Which led me to several videos of cats and even a rabbit riding on robot vacuums. The problem with these Youtube videos is that you can’t be sure that the cat sat on the device entirely of its own volition. I found one where the owner seemed to have stuffed the cat in a box, placed the box on top of the Roomba, and turned it on. So it was difficult to find one that captured the spirit of the original email where the cat took everything into its own paws. This is the closest I found.

Too late for travel planning, I discovered that Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet have been touring together as Yazoo (Yaz) this summer. Their New York appearance garnered New York Times coverage and their last performance is in the L.A. area this week with the Psychedelic Furs. The two had not reunited as Yazoo in concert since disbanding in 1983. A four-disc box set with remastered albums and videos was recently released. (bonus video link for geeks: Clarke demonstrating synthesizer programming circa mid-1980s)

Sunset magazine’s August issue features a “One-Block Feast” concept where the staff sourced and prepared a meal entirely from local ingredients. The one-block aspect was stretched to include wine grapes from the Santa Cruz Mountains, olives for oil, seawater for salt, and organic milk but they otherwise grew crops, kept bees, raised chickens, made vinegar, wine and beer. The most interesting parts of the story are revealed online in the team blogs where the seeming perfection illustrated in the glossy pages dissolves into the everyday challenges of fully-occupied employees trying to sustain a second career in a craft. The vinegar team confesses to starving their ‘mother.’ Team wine finds a stranger passed out next to their outdoor stash of Chardonnay and Syrah, an apparent victim of helping himself to a magnum. And Ophelia, a fowl perhaps too aptly named, has to be taken in for emergency surgery by the chicken wrangers while the beekeepers deal with an ant infestation.

If you keep cash and jewelry in a fake soup can, be careful when you donate to a canned food drive. A woman in Vancouver, Washington was inadvertently a little too generous with her canned goods but luckily recovered her can safe two months later after volunteers were advised to watch out for it.

Before any spectacle begins on stage, the audience inside the Metropolitan Opera House are treated to the sight of the chandeliers rising dramatically up to the ceiling. It’s an experience cited by some as reason enough alone to attend a performance at the Met. A gift from the Austrian government, the “sputnik” space-age crystal chandeliers are going through their annual summer cleaning, and the 11 that light the lobby are headed back to their Viennese birthplace for refurbishing. Swarovski is sponsoring the effort and donating new crystal. They will be back in time for the start of the Met’s 125th-anniversary season in the fall. More of the lights will be re-worked next summer.

The silence from the annual SR-520 bridge closure this weekend reminded me that it’s been one year since different types of quiet pavement were installed as a test on the stretch near where we live. A graph on the WSDOT site shows the results of decibel measurements each month since last summer’s paving. The rubberized asphalt and polymer-modified asphalt have met up at the 100 decibel mark, still beating out the new control pavement. But it’s a five year test so these numbers don’t mean much yet.