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history / Indiana / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
23
Mar 17

This post solves no mysteries

I saw this truck a few weeks ago and thought of this joke. But, that day, he left before I had the chance to take a picture. And you really need this snapshot for this:

Do you ever see trucks that make you think the people in charge of creating the shell corporations or government fronts aren’t even trying? There’s a company in town with vans that say “Commercial Service” on the sides. What is that? The generic handyman? Is that like those no-brand-name vegetables you can get at the grocery store? And where do those come from, anyway? A white truck with the word “Veggies” in big block lettering on the side? Probably picked those up at a place called “Farm.”

Commercial Service. Circle City. Uh huh. I’m on to this. And it has nothing to do with the sort of things I’ve been watching on Netflix recently.

Circle City is a second-generation family concern, founded in 1946. Joe Corsaro’s son, Daniel, has been running the operation for the last 40 years. I watched a brief video where one of the family members, another Joseph Corsaro, said they ship to “roughly 14 states.” Phrasing like that jumps out, doesn’t it?

I looked in the newspaper archives. Seems there might have been at least two families with that name. One Joe Corsaro became a police officer. While I’m not sure if that’s our guy, the other big newspaper mention is from 1919, when a Joe Corsaro, 10, accidentally shot his little brother, Peter. In 1920 Peter, then just 6-years-old, was hit by a car.

Peter lived. A book called Indianapolis Italians told me his business name. The About Us section on that site says he bought a newsstand in 1946, grew it for decades, sold it to his kids in the 1980s and stayed on until he died in 2002. Considering his 1919 and 1920, that’s not too bad.

And it is that sort of attention to detail that really does make you wonder whether it is all a front.

More spring:

Yes, most everything is blooming now. Why, I even saw some weeds in the neighbor’s floor bed.

I’m sure there are some in ours, as well. The neighbor’s you can see from our kitchen window. I just haven’t yet look that closely at ours. So, you might say, I have looked for no clues.

Here’s something else you have to look closely at:

I no longer have a young fighter pilot’s eyes. I’m fine up close, but I lose some detail at distance. Even still, I had to get within eight or 10 feet to see it. Even then I was thinking, What kind of stick-figured character with no feet would hula hoop anyway? And why do it on this little access road? The motion lines were actually selling me on the idea, but the asymmetrical eyes made me look a bit closer.

The mysteries of the ages are always around us.

IU / memories / photo / Wednesday — Comments Off
22
Mar 17

Nothing special, except what is

As a shutterbug, and nothing more, I take a few thousand photographs a year. Not a lot compared to photographers, but enough to have a little volume to it. Put another way, enough to make it impressive that I remember the circumstances or least the location of many of them, but not so many photographs that knowing any background is a lost cause. And I’ve done this for … a lot of years now. Sometimes you take more, sometimes you take less, of course. Sometimes you’re holding a real camera, sometimes it is just your phone. Sometimes you’re studying the moment trying to get it just so. Other times, you’re just shooting from the hip, as it were. Nothing special.

Sort of like this:

I was walking from here to there in Franklin Hall, walking south I suppose because this is the late afternoon and that’s the sun beaming in from Presidents Hall, which must be to the west, relative to my position here, of course. And if there is anything I’ve learned in the thousands of photos I take every year over the course of many years now I’ve learned that I seem to like shots of repetition and that I like those dramatic times when the sun breaks through into the moment. Also, I’ve learned that that moment is fleeting. I took five shots of the above, for example, and two of them gave me that big burst of sun. There’s nothing special about that.

Well, there’s a big ball of fusion out there and we are at a happy and safe distance that allows for the magic to happen here on earth so that animals could grow and then other things could happen and our ancestors discovered tools and ate the right things and then languages were formed and more, better tools were built and then storytelling became a thing which led to larger aspirations which meant exploration and experimentation and then domesticated plants and animals and societies and boats and the new world and electricity and this building and you, and me, here, today. So that part is spectacular, sure. But of this picture itself, there’s not much special, really.

But it did remind me of a similar picture I took in another school building about 20 years ago. Looking west, sun exploding in, overwhelming the settings and the sensor and throwing everything in silhouette. I wonder how far in my giant box of old print photographs I’ve have to dig to find that. It is a giant box, organized in no particular fashion. But as soon as I rounded the corner and saw the sun coming through the Franklin Hall windows and then through the glass in the doors of Presidents Hall I thought of that other photograph. Probably hadn’t in years. But it was right there, in my mind, another empty hall, another silly reason to take a photograph, another thing to file away. Nothing special to it.

You wonder what becomes of all of the things you file away in your mind, but then they sometimes comes right back. Maybe that’s the most special thing of all.

Shooting a talk show tonight:

The topic was helicopter parents of student-athletes. They should have brought in specialists and experts.

adventures / Bloomington / cycling / photo / Specialized / Tuesday — Comments Off
21
Mar 17

Tuesdays, we ride

OK, OK, I’ll stop writing about the eventual oncoming of spring. We’ll just assume that it is here. Until, that is, another cold snap comes through and drops snow or ice or both on us, and then we can all grimly shiver under four layers of blankets. But until then, spring:

I mark it because more trees are now in bloom than not. And also because the almost-warmth in the air has a sense of dedication and staying power to it. Or maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Who can say. What I can say is that we went for a bike ride this evening. One of the groups of the 300-strong local cycling club meets near our house for Tuesday and Thursday rides and they are a nice group of people. If the right combination of folks are there it is a challenging group. But this is early in the year and I will need a few more miles in me before I am ready to seek out something really challenging. So today we didn’t even go down the big hill — which required turning around and coming up the big hill.

It kept us fresh for a few late evening photos:

Two of the strong guys from that group were there, and we hung on to their wheels. They’d also gone down the big hill and the people behind us had, too. But I came up a little slope to get to the beginning of the group ride and knew I wasn’t trying that hill today. Sometimes you know, you know? And they say that wisdom is in listening to what you already know.

At least I said that. Perhaps others have too. Let’s see.

No, no one has ever said that. Lhamo Dondrub said something similar, and wiser: “When you talk, you are only repeating what you already know. But if you listen, you may learn something new.”

But that’s the Dalai Lama for you.

I’m never this enlightened on my bicycle. Well, almost never. Usually I’m breathing too hard. After the fact, when my legs are resting and my lungs aren’t burning, sure, I can think up all sorts of things about hills. Also, hills are always much shorter in my imagination and memory than in reality, as we’ll soon see.

adventures / cycling / Monday / photo — Comments Off
20
Mar 17

Notes that end the winter, and start the spring

It is the first day of spring, when everything should be new and possible, or impossibly new. It has been cold and damp and gray, because we have no respect for meteorological certainties.

But things are blooming on the ground. Last week, in the snow, the carefully installed pansies and daffodils were bent over low by a wet snow. And while that stuff is gone, the dampness is hanging over and clinging to us. The chill is made downright cold because of the damp, and upgraded to demoralizing based on the gray skies, because the gradient suggests it will never ever change.

So, on this, the weekend that prefaces spring, we had a dismaying end to winter. As for the winter itself, mild. Not so bad. A few harsh and cold days here and there and just a few small snow showers to hide from. It was, as they say, a mild one. But it has persisted enough, and the new has not yet begun with the proper zeal required by my discriminating tastes. (Rain today. Pleasant tomorrow. It is a fickle start to the season.)

So, on Saturday, I stayed inside and worked on a puzzle:

I received three puzzles at Christmastime. And I said they would be terrific winter weekend projects. As I am officially over the season, and the season has yet to be over itself, I am puzzling in protest. This is Declaration of Independence. I did the borders first, and then the historically accurate doodles along the bottom — Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams and Franklin. Then I slowed down as I worked on the signatures, because I went back to this book. It was also a gift a few years ago, about the origins and fates of the 56 men who signed the broadside.

And, of course I had a helper:

So that was Saturday. And yesterday, we actually saw the sun. It was the second time in a week, and such an exceptional occurrence that I’m now counting the times it happens each week. And I go outside. So, yesterday afternoon, a bike ride:

First one of the year. Felt like it, too!

Friday / photo — Comments Off
17
Mar 17

That looks pretty comfortable

Sometimes, the sofa is comfortable. Sometimes it isn’t. It all comes down to where you are and how you are and how you’re feeling. It shows its age every now and again, and it is getting to that point where you sometimes have a two-point maneuver to exit the thing. But it still sleeps pretty well.

Or so I thought.

Sometimes the sofa isn’t comfortable. You could sit on any of the chairs or any of the beds or, really anywhere. But sometimes you find yourself on the sofa and it just isn’t working. Sometimes it just doesn’t fit your needs.

Which is why we have throw pillows:

I bought gas this morning:

This is notable only because of how little I have to do that now. This is I think the second, but definitely no more than the third time I’ve filled up this year. Used to be a once-a-week thing. But, now, my commute is a little over four miles, and we carpool and I ride my bicycle when circumstance allows, so I don’t have to get gas very much. That’s a nice improvement.