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photo / Thursday — Comments Off on The best views
12
Dec 19

The best views

Every now and again you should really consider how far digital photography processing has come. You can do this with the camera you have right now, if you shoot something in the dark, and quickly, and from the hip, perhaps while driving slowly, as if you are preparing for a turn.

Which is what I was doing, having driven the last bit of the day’s drive west, it was time to turn south (ha!) into the subdivision where we keep all of our things. The way the house is oriented, the way things surround it, you get only the most brief sunset. So, sometimes, if the timing is right, I can see a bit of sunset on the ride to the house.

It was the second best view of the day.

The best view was having lunch with The Yankee. We don’t do a lot of food photography around here, so there’s not a picture, and I hope you’ll just take my word for it.

I guess, then, that makes this the third-best view of the day:

It was a five-mile run, the longest of my very slow rebuild. We have two solid three-mile routes in the larger neighborhood area, and there’s a solid 10K, too, but I’m just making stuff up at this point. The problem with running something in-between is that you have to get back to where it is warm, and dry, and where you don’t have to run. So there was some willful backtracking through another neighborhood. These were roads I ride on my bike. But that’s a different speed — which changes a lot of our perceptions – and in the daylight.

The house with the fountain, though, has found a Christmas duck.

It’s both genius and maniacal. Who would design this? Who would approve it? Surely there must have been a board meeting, a marketing whiz all agog over the idea — imagine the images in the bulk mailers — but an MBA asking How is this going to scale?

Market research, says the market research firm, says people with fountains need giant ducks with winter caps and scarves. And over the second martini that started to make a little sense to more people around the table. And here we are.

I can’t remember if I’ve seen this before. Last year, maybe. But it could be a false memory. How silly would it be, and how impressionable would the mind be, to think to itself, while you’re running “Oh, yes, this was here last year.”

So I’ll have to see if it is there next year. If I remember. On a day when I don’t have two other great views. This duck deserves a promotion.

books / journalism / Monday / photo — Comments Off on A random assortment from Monday
9
Dec 19

A random assortment from Monday

On Saturday, Poseidon had the howling cat blues:

He looks like a different animal with his mouth open. It’s weird.

Phoebe, meantime, was unimpressed.

What’s nice is that, as you can just see from that side view of the window, it was a gorgeous day. You can even see it based on the light bouncing off this Chick-fil-A window:

That’s one merry dairy cow, I said on Instagram. And not enough people appreciated that word play and my taking advantage of every chance possible to point out that, for decades now, Chick-fil-A has been using the wrong breed of cattle in their promos.

But it was a lovely day to make that argument. Today, today was less attractive in every way.

I used to count how many times I’d seen someone leave their cart in this particular parking lot’s handicapped spots. It’s a rural area. There are a lot of older people shopping in those particular stores. I visit once a week, or so, on a regular errand and I have met plenty of people that might take advantage of that spot.

The last thing anyone that needs a handicapped spot wants to deal with, besides the rain and the cold and whatever condition they feel like that particular day, is the laziness of a person who can’t push the cart to the corral not 25 feet away.

I’m sure you were just in a hurry.

So I pushed the cart up to the store. Someone ought to.

Every once in a great while you get to read a real treat of a story. I consume a lot of news, part of the job, and over the years I’ve written or read almost every kind of formula covering most any kind of story you can put in front of your eyes on any given day. They still have value, but you sometimes just know where a story is going.

But once in a great while, you get a treat. Here’s one now.

The first time he spoke to her, in 1943, by the Auschwitz crematory, David Wisnia realized that Helen Spitzer was no regular inmate. Zippi, as she was known, was clean, always neat. She wore a jacket and smelled good. They were introduced by a fellow inmate, at her request.

Her presence was unusual in itself: a woman outside the women’s quarters, speaking with a male prisoner. Before Mr. Wisnia knew it, they were alone, all the prisoners around them gone. This wasn’t a coincidence, he later realized. They made a plan to meet again in a week.

On their set date, Mr. Wisnia went as planned to meet at the barracks between crematories 4 and 5. He climbed on top of a makeshift ladder made up of packages of prisoners’ clothing. Ms. Spitzer had arranged it, a space amid hundreds of piles, just large enough to fit the two of them. Mr. Wisnia was 17 years old; she was 25.

You can’t excerpt a story like this, to give it justice, and you will find yourself glancing over at the scroll bar and sad to see how you only have so much of the story to go. You’re going to want it to go on, like a great book. You’re going to run through almost every emotion possible. And you’re going to want to keep reading it. So go read it.

Speaking of books …

It’s dense. It’s detailed. We’re starting to catch up to the period on electricity. I’m going to finish that one, some day.

Friday / friends / IU / photo / Twitter — Comments Off on Friends, let us weekend
6
Dec 19

Friends, let us weekend

My friend Bryce took this picture of me, outside the studio this morning. It was an ambush job which, as a shutterbug myself, I appreciate. This was somehow the only pose I could imagine at the moment:

I assume that was because my mind had already been melted for the day after an early meeting.

Also, in looking at it, this is the photograph that told me I needed a haircut. And some go-to poses for photographs.

Anyway, the morning show was in the studio this morning. It was their last show of the term. We have one more night of productions, next week, shooting our last two shows of the semester.

I’ve been looking for a new fall guy for stories. Somehow, this never occurred to me until today:

It’s a big fib. My roommate was a great guy. He dated nice people. But it’s just far enough removed to not seem mean-spirited, but close enough to feel plausible.

I mean there was that one young woman he dated from back home. She really worked him over at one point. Set him free for other people though, but not until after many, many nights of ballads and conversations trying to figure out what just happened.

What just happened was … hang on … let me check his social media. OK, good, that’s not the woman he married.

See? Seems realistic.

Got in a nice little 5K this evening. And then I got the laundry in the washer. I did this because I like having laundry done before the weekend, but completely forgot about that fact on Thursday. So I’m doing laundry on the weekend. It’s a nice domestic feeling, knowing the clothes hamper is empty, the dresser and closets are full and there’s no noise coming from the laundry room.

It’s better than the alternative, washing clothes tonight, wondering if I’ll forget to finish all of this and have to put clothes away on Sunday night. What a modern sadness: I must go to the office tomorrow, I must sort the socks tonight.

Thursday, then, is an ideal time for laundry. Someone please remind me of this every other week.

But now it is time for the best part of postseason football:

friends / IU / photo / Thursday — Comments Off on Revved up
5
Dec 19

Revved up

I saw this car at lunch today.

I was walking downtown to meet a former student. He graduated in the spring and moved to California and has an interesting-sounding job that should set him up nicely for networking and he’s enjoying California and snow and surfing and taking photographs. He gave me a hug. He showed me his new camera.

This is a 1945-ish Plymouth. It’s difficult to say, because this basic body design dominated the decade for the car maker. The engine was pushed forward, the trunk was bigger, there was more glass. And it boasted, boasted, 84 to 91 horsepower.

Just parallel parked outside a little pizza joint, as one does. It is difficult to imagine seeing people preserving 1977 Toyota Celicas, taking them downtown for a slice.

It was nice to see an old friend, even if it only seems he’s been gone for a few minutes. He said he got a good deal on a red eye and decided to come make a few rounds. I wonder if that’s a thing people in California do, to tell others about it.

Two former students of mine are working out there now. Graduate, point the car west. I’m sitting here. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. How could you not? Their Instagram accounts are full of the beauty of things. At least we saw the sun today.

That’s two days in a row!

Tomorrow? Cloudy. Chance of rain.

I guess all the clouds are good to help reduce the chance of paint oxidation on old cars.

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off on On plastic (700 words)
3
Dec 19

On plastic (700 words)

We have wooden blinds in part of the house. We have plastic blinds elsewhere in the house and I have installed or replaced almost all of them, because no one, no thing and no circumstance appreciates the fine molecular structure that holds those things together. Do not stare at the blinds, because if you sneeze while you are considering them I’ll have paid for the juco classes for the blinds salesman’s grandkids.

The wooden ones are made of something more sturdy. The cheapest balsa wood, most probably. They are nice, attractive. They have about 14 strings descending from the top of the window, and cats love that. So we’ve tried to neatly coil and stow those away, like sailors. Because that’s what cats do to you, they make you put everything away. They make you improve your sleight-of-hand game, because they’re always around when you have to hide things.

A lot like kids, you might say. Yes, but children grow up.

On the front of the wood blinds, hiding the lightweight metal frame which hides the inner workings, is a nice molded plastic valance. It looks like an attractive routed, wooden molding. If I didn’t have these on the windows, you would never notice. If you noticed they weren’t there, you’d just think I was a bachelor. I’m not a bachelor. So the downstairs windows, where the 93 strings responsible for tacking to the window and driving the clipper ship across the water, have wooden blinds and valances.

A little piece of plastic which comes from some back-alley plastic manufacturer in some faraway land holds the valances in place. Two valances per blind. Except for the one on the left-most blinds in the living room, the ones nearest the TV, the ones directly across from my customary seat. See, that little piece of plastic had broken off. We assume it was either a cleaning accident or a micro-nuclear explosion at the nanoparticle level. Well. This evening I got tired of the ineffective temporary solution (tape) and resolved to create an effective temporary solution (anything else).

This requires removing the blinds — haven’t I paid enough into the karma bank for the year? — to implement my solution. I didn’t have to go with the fake fix, though, because I found the broken part of the old valance clip, inside the blinds casing.

Still with me?

I went to the super glue drawer. (You don’t have a super glue drawer? I have three different brands in my super glue drawer, each operating with varying levels of ineffectiveness.) I glued up the broken piece.

This is the plastic I’m working with. When the glue cures, the blinds must come out of their holding pieces once more. I removed the one valance clip from the frame of the blinds, allowing me to run the nice molded plastic valance that looks like an attractive routed, wooden molding, through both of the clips, and then re-attached it all. I fixed the glued one. I broke the other one. (Fourth thing I’ve broken in a week!)

I glued that one back together … and that didn’t work.

Super glue is a con, but you can trust the Internet. A quick search showed me the same pieces of cheap plastic on Amazon. I ordered it from my miracle device, sitting comfortably in the living room. They’ll arrive next week, as I have chosen the slowest possible delivery method and these delightful pieces of plastic will take the scenic route through Canada (or Oklahoma, the Internet isn’t clear on this point) before they take on their arduous job of holding plastic up all the live-long day.

You know how you’re never supposed to read the comments? Sometimes you shouldn’t read the reviews. The third one on Amazon says, and I quote directly and in its entirety, “is ok.”

Who needs flying cars? This is the world we live and work and play in! I ordered more of the thing that breaks easily without interacting with another soul! They gave me an option for free returns too. So, if they aren’t coming from Canada (or Oklahoma), but rather from space, they’ll have a nice trajectory into orbit. Maybe they’ll hold something together up there.

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