17
Oct 19
Oct 19
If the joke weren’t on sail I’d be walking the plank
Question: How much did the pirate pay for his peg and hook?
Think about it for a second. You’ll want to get this right.
It’s OK, we’ve got time. I’ll be here when you’re done. I don’t mind.
No, really. It’s Thursday evening and this is important. So make sure you get it right.
Got it? Are you sure?
Good! OK, give it a shot. How much did the pirate pay for his peg and hook?
An arm and a leg.
Sometime over the summer I found myself in one of those pernicious little traps of the online retail world. If I spent beyond a certain threshold I would get free shipping on my entire order of high end, but now clearance priced polos. I had already placed the items I wanted and needed in my cart. And I still had to pump something like 12 bucks or so into the thing to save the 15 dollars. Fifty bucks gets you there! You know the phenomenon.
Problem was, there wasn’t much else I wanted or needed. And the retailer, while having decent clearance prices from time to time, skips over middle-of-the-road retail prices and heads directly to a you-better-have-a-lucrative-and-hopefully-legal-side-hustle price category.
But! I found socks! Lots of nice socks. Finely darned things, too. And on clearance! So I picked up four pair, just enough to hit the free shipping threshold. ($51.96, thank you very much.)
Good thing, too. This happened at TV tonight:
You’ll forgive the lines in the foreground. This is a picture of the monitor on the jib, which overlays the rule of thirds grid for composition purposes. The point is, look at those guys. I have to step up my sock game. Next week, it is on.
So thank you, silly retail customer psychology trick. You’re going to put me back in the sock game.
Someone remind me to follow up on this.
And though it’ll be close to Halloween, I promise I won’t wear the pirate socks.
You know …
…
… the Arrrrrgyle.
16
Oct 19
Oct 19
It only starts with Halloween puns
I didn’t order spooky soup or vampire vegetables or poltergeist pasta, but there were ghosts above my lunch today.
I did have a scary sandwich, though.
And we once again had the now age-old conversation about teaching tech versus teaching principles.
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“You do not need,” I said, “a $20,000 camera to teach the principles of videography. Some of these I can teach with just this piece of paper.”
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Look! Composition!
The point being not that paper replaces a camera — though if you had some good stock I suppose you could create your own camera obscura — but that you can do a lot with with a more basic, straightforward, efficient camera. Especially when you’re trying to teach the basics.
It’s easy to get distracted by the shiny new toy, but to teach tools in a perpetually (and rapidly) evolving industry is to shortchange your students. Mostly, I was just pleased with myself. That paper-camera composition joke was on the short list for the day’s Best Point List.
Went for a run this evening. Just a quick, slow little 5K around the neighborhood. It was fun, except for the parts where I still have to do intervals. I’m almost done with those, I think, thankfully. I’m 17 miles into my run recovery. Still wrapping my foot. Still feeling pretty decent, except for the boring walking part. But I’m not up to running full speed — which isn’t fast, mind you — but I can blur a camera phone:
We’re starting to get a bit of secondary color in the neighborhood, though. The pecan trees are shedding their nuts. There was, briefly, a tailwind. Mostly just the mild sort that hits you in the face and chills the sweat off the skin.
Television! Time flies. Why, it seems like just yesterday that she was here, tripping over herself, learning how to do the TV thing. Now she’s a cool, calm, confident and self-possessed TV person at a station up north. She dropped by a segment last night, a total surprise.
And some news:
Are you following me on all the social media? You should follow me on all of the social media. There’s tons more fun stuff smeared all over the Internet, because the world has forgotten that we should host these things on our own platforms. Look me up. There’s genius and keen insights to behold and enjoy.
