G + K (+ tropical setting) = cool. and folk art is cool, too.

This is the National Geographic Photo of the Day for today:



Pretty cool. The Photo of the Day site says that

Roads on Hawaii’s Big Island are often flanked with miles of "Island graffiti," like this love note. Instead of spray paint though, bits of white coral harvested from local beaches are arranged into messages, which seem to glow against the island's black lava expanses.

But tourists beware: Removing the coral from beaches is illegal. And disturbing an already-posted message is considered rude and supposedly brings bad luck.

I like that you can almost see another message in the distance, which sort of substantiates the claim that there are "miles" of this stuff. I wonder what they mean by "tourists beware" though. Does that mean that local people are allowed to move the coral from the beaches? And does mentioning that messing up an existing message is "rude" aim to stop said tourists from creating their own messages with the coral that said locals have already, lawfully, moved?

Maybe there's another interpretation. Either way, me likey.

This afternoon I went to the Coastal Artisans' First Saturdays Art Market in downtown Mobile. I met Ruth Robinson, a local folk artist who walked me down the street to a gallery to see more of her work. Her biography says, "I grew up on a farm in Grand Bay, Alabama, where my grand daddy farmed until the day he died. We had cotton, watermelon, corn, hogs, chickens, cows, and a mule." The house she grew up in was a brick house, one that her grandfather built for his family in the 1930s. Not a small feat for a former sharecropper who worked his way up to buying the land from the planter. Anyway, here's a picture of Ruth with some of her pieces.