Friday

Covid-19 / Friday / photo / running — Comments Off on Wild carrots
24
Jul 20

Wild carrots

There was email and a Zoom meeting and a look to the weekend, which would be nice enough, a change from the week, but it will look like all of the recent weekends. It’s a weird experience.

The stasis.

I’ve stopped looking at various social media platforms for related reasons. I’ve long since quieted most of the wacky people, but now you can live vicariously through the photographs of others and wonder what that’s about. Shouldn’t you be inside? Should I be out there?

It all varies based on locales and your circumstance and how you choose to see the moment, which is much longer than a moment.

Maybe that’s what it is. This moment is very long; I am getting a little fidgety over it and it’s really just getting started.

Also the blog is suffering. The poor, long-suffering blog is suffering. We’ve got a nice enough house and we’re enjoying warm weather but there’s only so many times you can tell the same story about walking down the hall to the home-office. (I flipped my desk around last week, and I didn’t tell you about that, dear reader. It makes for the third office move since the spring. I’m considering a fourth.)

I’m going to have to get back into some hobbies or find some new thing to learn. These are tense times, indeed.

Went out for a run today. It was my third run of the week. My first week running in a few months. Even though I’m running a mile at a time, we’re still calling it a run. I figured I’d do the shorter distances to get the times down and so far it’s working!

I found a bit of Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota) after my little jog.

You can eat them. The flowers are battered and fried, but don’t eat too many leaves. No idea how many is too many. The leaves can also give you blisters. And the plant has been used medicinally and as a dye.

Some places look at is as a beneficial weed. It can help with tomato growth and lettuce production. It attracts the right kind of insects in some areas. Some states list it as a nuisance or noxious weed. It’s native to the area where the Himalayan and Hindu Kush mountains bump into one another. It moved to Europe and southwest Asia between the 11th and 14th centuries. It made it’s home in China, India and Japan in the 14-17th centuries. It’s naturalized in the U.S., Canada and Australia.

I took a picture of it just to have something to put in this space for the day, but I’m getting an education. You can learn all about it, all about it, here.

Friday / podcast — Comments Off on A little weekend listen
17
Jul 20

A little weekend listen

Ahhh, the weekend. You’re upon us once again and you feel exactly like last weekend, which is also to say you feel exactly like Monday through Friday.

Normally there are the rituals of your week which help delineate your work week from your time off. Mine have now been reduced to … turning off Slack, closing the browser tab containing the work email and walking downstairs. Most importantly, for two wonderful days, I’ll have one less tab open.

So what’s up for your weekend? I’ll go on a bike ride and have Chick-fil-A — curbside takeout, of course. I still don’t think the local store is offering dine-in services, which is more than fine. I’ll spend some time reading and re-reading the county’s mask mandate. There are 12 bullet points worth of exceptions to the mask mandate and it’s a four page document, which is a lot of words to say “Wear a mask.” Also we’ll largely be staying inside since the heat index will be reaching the triple-digits for both Saturday and Sunday. So, yeah, the weekend will be spent trying to find ways to make this weekend unique from the last few, which I’ve basically described, in toto, in this paragraph.

Today, though, well, today was nice enough. I got to meet a professor who had just turned in her tenure packet. It was almost time to celebrate. But first she had to record an interview with me.

We talked about not-for-profits and what’s going on in that sector of the economy when the economy is in the shape it is currently in. It turns out, quite a bit is going on. You should give it a listen. It’s a fun and informative little program. And quite helpful if you’re looking for a new volunteer project.

What are you looking for this weekend?

Friday / Twitter — Comments Off on Some social media stuff
10
Jul 20

Some social media stuff

I spent most of the morning in Zoom meetings.

The rest of the day was a blur for reasons I already don’t understand.

Anyway, a tweet:

A story that, I dunno, is probably going to require followups:

Local health officials were optimistic; two months and more than $40 million later they’re losing patience.

According to multiple public health officials, it is unacceptable that as many as half of the files in the state’s contact tracing database are missing vital information.

On May 11, Indiana began to supplement the efforts of local health departments by creating a centralized contact tracing call center. The state is paying Virginia-based outsourcing firm Maximus $43 million to oversee centralized tracing. Although public health experts recommended more, 500 workers were hired in May.

Just before the deal was inked, the company sent a donation to Indiana Gov. Eric Holcomb’s reelection campaign. That wasn’t its first foray into Indiana politics.

Maximus did not respond to a request for comment—either on its political contributions or the quality of contact tracing.

But the issues Indiana is facing run deeper. Health officials worry contact tracing issues could be costing Hoosier lives.

And since we talked about the sports here yesterday, how about a video? I know all these guys. Nice guys. Smart guys. Future-of-sports-broadcasting guys.

And one more tweet to begin your weekend.

More on Twitter, check me out on Instagram and more On Topic with IU podcasts as well. And have a great weekend!

Friday / music / television / video — Comments Off on 750 quick words on Trek
26
Jun 20

750 quick words on Trek

I’ve lately been idly listening to Star Trek while doing other things. Today we met the Klingons for the first time again, which means we’re on episode 26, a third of the way through the run of the original series … and it’s just about ready to get good, I guess. They had a narrow window through which to reach out and impact the world, when you think about it.

The third season is almost universally panned, the first 10 or 12 episodes of the series have a few interesting moments, but once you remember that this is the series that bred continuity into the zeitgeist, it was woefully inconsistent. And that’s even after allowing for the production values of the day and the new genre they were helping to pioneer. It’s all over the place.

This is how you met the universe’s running baddies on a Thursday in mid-March of 1967:

And the next week, this episode plays itself out. Kirk and Spock beam down to head off the enemy threat. The locals aren’t bothered at all and perceive no threat. (It’s an allegory, you see.) The threat appears, and John Colicos is warm and real and full and does a lot with a little, to be honest. Now the good guys are trying to blend in with the locals to subvert the threat. This goes poorly, and Spock told you so, what with his cool calculations and his odds.

There’s a fanfic out there somewhere that reveals he was just making up numbers, and, when confronted by this charge, he runs away crying. There has to be. After all, one of the dramatic devices they routinely revisit is Spock telling everyone who will listen just how bad the odds are. And, of course, they emerge from the problem relatively unscathed, minus a few red shirts. No one ever calls him on this. Ever.

So Kirk and Spock, having failed to talk the backward and humble-looking Organians into coming under their protection, try to take matters into their own hands, but then then Organians stop all of this by making both the Federation members and the Klingons hot. Ow!

Because, I guess, having people mimic a warm stove eye was as inexpensive a special effect as the show runners could pull off.

Someone out there has compiled some of the original shots next to the 2009 remastering, which is what I’m watching on Netflix. This is a fine and fun bit of side-by-side video.

Note how George Takei is playing Sulu when they first come under attack. Note how Colicos is almost licking his lips, “A shame, Capitan. It would have been glorious.” It’s a moment at the end of the episode that’s so beautifully, rhythmically paced that it sets the whole mood for the ever-changing archenemy-cum-tense-ally. It’s a shame it took 30 years to get him back into the franchise.

And, too, note how not every update is a good one. Specifically, when the humble Organians return to their natural form. In the original it is a brilliant white light. In the reworked version they take on the lighting effects of a bad rave.

It was good for it’s time, this episode, I’m sure. It’s hailed as a classic, and it holds an 8.6 rating on IMDb. But today its interest is purely historic. This one sequence goes a long way toward guiding the rest of the entire franchise:

It also sets up the biggest plot hole in the entire Trek universe. If the energy beings abhor conflict and can stop it this quickly, the Federation should have drawn any number of enemies to this planet, playing this out over and over, creating new allies across the quadrant. Or the galaxy. Or whatever they called it that week. (They were really loose with the language in the early days. It’s amazing that fans found it in their hearts to forgive the show for that.)

Also, this episode figures into one of the big musical hits of the late 1980s.

And a segue like that lets us wrap this up with our favorite game, The Passage of Time. That episode originally aired in 1967. That song was a hit in 1988. We’re (much) farther removed from that song than they were from that episode.

Within the franchise, the time between us and the debut of Deep Space Nine is greater than the time between the Deep Space Nine’s beginning and the episode above. Deep Space Nine debuted in 1993.

Remember, this was an allegory then, but what is it today?

cycling / Friday / photo — Comments Off on More little things
19
Jun 20

More little things

Today’s bike ride was all about hill repeats. We would go out to one of the lakes and find a great big hill and go up and down it a few minutes at a time. This particular torture apparently makes me a better climber. as I am not a climber and still no better at it, clearly I’m doing something wrong. There are many reasons, I understand them all.

Anyway, being a sunny and warm Friday, we decided to avoid the lakes because there are often boats pushing trucks toward them. We went on campus instead, which was delightfully quiet.

So quiet, in fact that we saw a guy spraying a bit of herbicide on one of our trips up this great big hill we found. He stood out because he was there, I guess. How often do you note a guy just doing his job? Someone else did, too. On my next trip up the hill two police cars rolled up, and then a third cruiser. On the next trip a fourth cruiser was out front of the building. They took his ID, talked to him under a shade tree. He’d shed the high pressure sprayer that was on his back. And the conversation, whatever it was, took forever. For my next eight or nine trips up the hill they stood there chatting.

Eventually the fourth and the third cruisers melted away, and some time after that the first two officers that rolled up moved on as well, leaving the guy to pack his stuff up and go about his day.

The worst part of it all is that just after the police left we were done with our hill repeats. So the poor guy probably thinks the two people who were riding up and down the hill, up and down the hill, up and down the hill, were the ones that called in the four cops on him. We were not. I am not one to think a guy with a high pressure sprayer on his back and obviously tending to weeds is a bad person. But, then again, I have a long record of being pro-landscaping.

Pictures of small things time. I picked up these crinoids a few days ago down by the lake while The Yankee swam. For this installment I remembered two important steps in light box photography.

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, you see, so the tricks are coming back one by one. I don’t know all the best techniques because I’ve only dabbled in this style of photography. Probably on the next batch or two I will peak. Maybe, on the next batch, I’ll remember to focus!

Anyway, there are around 600 crinoid species left in the world, but a few hundred million years ago there were many more sorts of these little creatures. Limestone beds are good places to find these fossilized fragments.

I’m using three lamps and a translucent storage box for this and I suppose it’s coming along nicely for a project that has cost me no money and doesn’t have to be perfectly perfect. But wouldn’t it be nicer if it was?

Well, there’s always next week for that. For now, it’s time for the weekend.

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