Tuesday

journalism / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on Let us all be upset together
2
Jun 20

Let us all be upset together

I don’t know who needs this — goes the well-meaning message on social media, which was instantly copied to the point of becoming a satirical meme all it’s own — but here are a few seconds of quiet video of the creek.

We walked down there on Sunday. Kids play there. Sometimes little, sometimes small. Always it’s fun. It’s a place filled with the screams and the shrieks and the joy of families doing things that young families should be doing. It’s a place where people create soggy memories and stay cool and promote wonder and it’s all free, because it’s a stream. The cost seems to be trampled grass, and occasionally a bit of litter, but someone keeps this area nice and tidy.

And sometimes, like that little moment there, it is nice a quiet.

It was a nice and warm summer day today, 89 degrees and definitely not spring any more.

It was slow, except for the swift parts, which only punctuated the slow parts. Highlighting them, if you will.

We’re going to talk about the news.

First, look at the source. Ahead of Trump Bible photo op, police forcibly expel priest from St. John’s church near White House RNS is an 86-year-old outlet and it is affiliated with no less than the Missouri School of Journalism. This is a place with history and bona fides. And there’s a lot more to that carnival you saw last night than you realize.

The church appeared to be completely abandoned.

It was, in fact, abandoned, but not by choice: Less than an hour before Trump’s arrival, armored police used tear gas to clear hundreds of peaceful demonstrators from Lafayette Square park, which is across the street from the church.

Authorities also expelled at least one Episcopal priest and a seminarian from the church’s patio.

“They turned holy ground into a battleground,” said the Rev. Gini Gerbasi.

Bishop Budde, who oversees that church, got in front of The Washington Post immediately. She called in to CNN and they cut off a three-way panel, in fact interrupted a retired three-star general mid-sentence, to express her outrage. And here she is on PBS:

Much of the talk is about clearing out that path for this gigantic overreach — there’s no two ways around this, the administration overreached and it’s hard to imagine them not realizing it almost immediately — and it should be. And people see the violence in New York, California, Philadelphia. I also watched really spotty coverage of riots that followed peaceful protests in my hometown early this morning in anger and despair. I also watched a reporter I know there get mugged by looters. And this happening in smaller towns, too.

In Little Rock, like a lot of places, reporters are catching it from all sides:

Not for nothing, but that would have been me 18 years ago. It could be my peers and friends and former students today. It could be my students tomorrow.

This is a paragraph or two after we should remind ourselves what terrible injustice brought that on and why we are here. Let’s remember who brought us here. And those authorities are doing this too:

They’re doing it in great numbers. When police across the country know that people are watching them more closely than ever, this has been their reaction. That’s instructive.

160 Threats to Press Freedom in the United States—This Week (Part I):

In this spreadsheet, I identify 160 threats to press freedom that have transpired amid the George Floyd protests in the United States this week.

Let’s note: Not every item is equal in gravity. Some instances are simple and you may be well reasoned to wonder “How could the police avoided that?” Others are serious violations of press freedom by an over-militarized state.

I include arrests, police beatings, pepper spraying, shootings with rubber bullets or other projectiles, incidents where police forced journalists to the ground, forced them into pepper spray, or wrongly denied them certain access.

[…]

Many of the incidents I document came after or seemingly because journalists identified themselves as press. Many had press badges on, gave verbal indications, wore press vests or helmets—and many were blatantly ignored or targeted for that.

It’s going to get worse. It’s going to get better. There’ll be no rhythm or reason to how it waxes and wanes, this pain and this anguish. But so long as we’re referring to American cities as “battle spaces” and, God, help us from that, and this sort of thing is taking place …

It’ll keep happening. And let’s let this ring with the clarity of the bells: This is happening to all of us.

memories / photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on Well that settles it, I need a better light box
26
May 20

Well that settles it, I need a better light box

This weekend I was walking around and found a big mound of pea gravel at one of the near condominiums. I like that gravel. It always reminds me of home, traipsing around in creeks, playing in the woods, filling days with the wonder and curiosity of a child with far too much energy and enthusiasm.

I could stand beside a stream and peer through those rocks for ages, looking for interesting shapes and colors, hoping to find a cool arrowhead and never doing it. But always finding crinoids and being fascinated by them. (I found those last month, and now there’s something else to collect. I’ll try to do it without lamenting all of those that I put back over the years.)

Anyway, those rocks always make me think of summers and things I had and people I’ve lost and wishing for ways to get them back, if only in your mind and only for a moment.

And this weekend I found a few that had some nice sedimentary pieces. The color changes were interesting.

I saved the best ones for last, so keep scrolling.

And here’s the thing to notice here. Look how the photo quality changes.

These are all in a cardboard light box. You can see tons of DIY guides online, and I was just rushing through this today, but the point of a light box is quality and consistency.

This one isn’t getting it done anymore. And the rushing didn’t help. Plus, you’re always just working around an extra cardboard box.

Instead of all of that, I’m going to wind up making a more substantial, third version. Because the subjects in them should all look like this:

That rock is cool and that picture is great. The background blends right in to the page’s background, which is the point.

I know this is what you’re here for, random observations about half-baked projects, and pictures of even more random objects. I could have told you about today’s sweaty run or this morning’s Zoom meeting. Or the Zoom meeting that came after that. I wonder if I could run during a Zoom meeting. There’s always the emailing. I can get 300 words discussing email as easy as putting on a comfortable t-shirt. I could write another 450 or so words out of how many of them don’t get replies.

I started watching a documentary in Spanish! We could discuss that. And I’m looking forward to a bike ride tomorrow.

This evening was the highlight of the day. We had a two-hour Zoom chat with some of our students, just for fun. It’s so nice to hear from them and see them interact with one another and to watch them laugh.

The theme tonight was show and tell, and it was a big hit. One guy showed off a choice baseball jersey from his massive collection. Another showed a cool bat collection he has, including one he got at his bar mitzvah. Someone talked about a really cool plant, there was a camera and some celebrity photos. One guy showed us his grandfather’s sailing trophies, which was also really cool.

Show and tell, it turns out, is still pretty awesome. Give it a try. And if your crowd isn’t receptive to it, consider the crowd.

I didn’t show off these rocks. Maybe next time I’ll show off a new light box.

Covid-19 / IU / photo / podcast / running / Tuesday — Comments Off on I apologize for the rant below
19
May 20

I apologize for the rant below

Today I ran four miles. Fourth run in a week, following almost four weeks of not running. So this, I guess, is brought to you by the number four. It’s interesting how quickly you can come into and out of phase with running. And I am not, by nature, a runner.

Or a model. Or a photographer. But my hair game is on point.

Last weekend I noted that the night before I celebrated the 45 minutes where my hair was at it’s most presentable peak of long-short. Now we enter into the short-medium phase which lasts an inordinate amount of time and offers no good looks. But you’ll wish for those days when medium-medium arrives, should it come to that.

Yes, I too need a haircut. No, it isn’t really bothering me that much at all. Mileage varies, and I’m fine with that. We can all roll our eyes at one another, which is a great way to take in the grandeur of our sans-haircuts, our home-haircuts and our “I just couldn’t wait another minute to see my barber/stylist” contemporaries.

One day I realized that, despite my lights and my green screen and everything else my webcam still shoots at a pitiful 720, and that meant that slightly longer hair and formerly nice shirts with tiny spots on them were back in play again. That’ll do for now. I’m not even ironing the shirts. Oh, you see wrinkles? No, my wifi is just seizing up.

Besides, no one is looking at my hair, they’re concentrating on that typo from my last email. I dashed off a note last night related to one of today’s Zoom calls. I consulted it this morning to make sure I had the meeting topic well in hand. And that’s when I found the typo. It was one of those where there are two words that sound the same, but mean wholly different things and when you use the wrong one you look feral and uneducated. Never mind that I was still corresponding at 8:01 p.m. There was an obvious error and it will now shame me for all of my days.

I talked with a history professor who has built out a food program at the university and, this summer, they’ve collaborated on creating a meal and delivery service. There’s a lot you can’t get to in an interview like this, but if you look up Carl Ipsen‘s research interests this all make sense.

And it’s a small scale effort, relative to these big food banks staffed out by the National Guard. But the man brought two or three different units of the university together, even as it scaled down in a pandemic. And from that they created an effort that feeds 70 or so meals a day, and counting, to members of the campus community? That’s something.

People doing things, like the famed chef who’s creating that menu that Ipsen talks about, the people preparing the food, the drivers bringing things in from farms and food plants … people taking the initiative of the moment and making it productive, they’re going to be the unheralded glue of all of this. We’ll talk nurses and doctors and truck drivers and shelf stockers, and we should. There are also a lot of other people doing a lot of good, big and small. We’d all do well to acknowledge them.

That’s much more inspiring than the tiresome binary argument over Covid etiquette.

Decency is not in short supply, the mention of it just doesn’t get the lift that jerks do. This is not a new phenomenon, and we’d do well to think of that, too.

Covid-19 / cycling / photo / podcast / Tuesday / video — Comments Off on The usual much ado
12
May 20

The usual much ado

All of that sun on Sunday was so nice and lovely, but the passing shadows told the tale. When I stopped taking pictures of the birds it was because the sun had scooted beyond the houses and was focusing on something else. A chill took over from the sun. Because that’s going to be the natural conclusion of things around here in May. I went inside because I was shivering.

And yesterday, Monday, I went on a bike ride and shivered some more. It remains the second week of May and jackets are required.

It was a quick and short ride. Today, a short and slow run. First time out in a while, dashing off a casual little 5K:

Because if you asked me to actually work through a 5K right now I could only laugh at you.

We talked the performing arts! Dance! Theatre! Musicals! I mentioned a classic Italian and sounded learned:

Of course, it is a conversation with the chair of a high quality program, so we know who the real learned person was. These conversations are fun, but here soon, as the reopening begins, or continues, or begins to continue, we’ll have to start thinking about some of these are framed. Which is just as well. We’ve had about 15 of these sorts of episodes now and a little change of pace is called for.

Which is why it’s cold, and I’m shuffling on slow neighborhood runs. See? The pace, she changes.

I’m getting to the point where I could do for some change. Thursday will mark nine weeks at home. That’s a lot, and I’m a homebody. One mustn’t complain overmuch. We have our health, and the health of our loved ones. We are still working. And sure, we have missed out on some activities, but those are relative inconveniences. It is easy to get caught up on the personal inconveniences. It should be easier, still, to maintain one’s perspective. I read that story about cruise ship crews and I think of the few I’ve been on, and the gracious and kind people who spend their lives working hard and working long hours for small amounts of money to make sure people have a wonderful experience, and this is happening in their office. It’s a terrible thing. My office is all-but-closed and we’re working from home offices. And, if that gets too stuffy, I move to the living room, or the kitchen island, or the deck as I did one day, or the front porch as I did another day. So I’ll stay quiet about what I need. My chief complaint, then, is the weather, which is out there while I’m in here. What I can complain about is inconsequential at the moment.

I sat on the deck all afternoon Sunday, I had a bike ride yesterday, a run today, and tomorrow it will be cold again. I’ll have a Zoom meeting or two. We’ll read about something sad that has happened somewhere, and something sweet and endearing that took place elsewhere. I’ll probably watch something I have had in a queue for a while. It’ll be Wednesday. (Or so I’m told.) And it’s all downhill from there. Patience and grace.

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on This weather
5
May 20

This weather

These are highly variable days, if the variation you seek is gray and damp and cold, then this is the time for you. The time for this, alas, is not May.

… 7, 8, 9, 10 …

There. All better now. Anyway, as I so often say, now apparently a full six months out of the year, Michigan has one job: Keep Canada in Canada.

And for six months of the year Michigan is lousy at its job.

For the record, the first snowfall this past year was on Halloween. I’m still running an electric blanket 186 days later just to knock down the chill in the bedroom at night. Such that, when my lovely bride retires to the bedroom before me she asks if I would like it if she turned on the blanket on my side of the bed. “No, but thank you,” I say. While thinking “It is, after all, May.”

And then I retire to the bedroom later, after working on this or that or typing away at this or that or just staring at the wall and discover it is cold bordering on silly in the bedroom and I go to sleep with the blanket on the third highest setting.

In, once again, May.

We said in March, “Ya know, if you have to stay at home and stay inside, at least this is the time of year to do it.” Sitting at home calculating the scant few hours of gray not-night probably would summon ill spirits. We lost out on the end of the school year, saying goodbye to a crop of students, and we’re losing spring because ‘Thanks, Michigan’ and a lot of the early long days because of the weather. And those senses of loss, big and small, will somehow compound upon themselves. These aren’t the really important things we’re losing, loses which will be a burr in the psyche for the entire age, I fear.

Forty degrees in May is plenty enough, thanks, is what I’m saying.

Not enough degrees. You know what I mean.

Anyway, we went on a walk, and I wore a jacket in May. Here are three photos.

It rained this morning:

And these raindrops are marching off to … somewhere else in the cycle of life, I’m sure. They’ll be absorbed by the plant and turned into something a blade will come along and cut down sooner or later.

Or an animal will come along and knock the droplets into the soil where it will eventually seep in ever smaller bits and drips until it joins the water table and follows the natural path to a nearby stream.

Or it will evaporate.

Do you think raindrops — the ones you assign personality to, I mean — have any thoughts on that when they’re up in the clouds? I bet it’s a lot of “I’m excited to see where I land this time!” It’d be better than worrying about it. “I’m going to land in a dog bowl again, I just know it.”

Sometimes I see a raindrop on a leaf or a flower and I wonder. It’s a childlike thing, I suppose. Intellectually, I know the whole system is basically devoted to capture, but when you see it like this the engineer in you has to wonder about efficiency.

There’s going to be more seasonal inappropriate wardrobe choices over much of the next two weeks. And then, of course, suddenly it will be summer.

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