Image of the Week for 02-08-10
Drizzly Night Lights.
Ending Sentences with Ellipses …
An Attempt to Demonstrate That My Existence is Far More Uninteresting Than YoursImage of the Week for 02-01-10
The combination of dust, sediment, assorted aquatic pollutants, and the sun in just the right place at the right time resulted in some interesting color patterns on our pond.
(Yeah, I know the same pond was featured as the IotW three weeks ago …)
Image of the Week for 01-18-10
The MiL’s tomcat, Hector.
Black cats are notoriously difficult to photograph clearly, but I was actually able to obtain this shot
with the iPhone app Gorillacam (thanks, JTD) …
Better Late Than Last Year
It took me a year, but I finally got around to uploading my photos from my trip to Baton Rouge and New Orleans on January 15, 16 and 17, 2009.
Here are links to the Flickr sets:
- Baton Rouge, January 15, 2009
- New Orleans, January 16, 2009
- Audubon Insectarium, New Orleans, January 16, 2009
- Baton Rouge, January 17, 2009
- One Photo Hour sets from January 15th and January 16th
I had so many photos from our visit to the Insectarium that I had to put them in a separate set. To get the full effect with my rambling narrative and all, it would probably be best to start with the first image and go from there.
Oh, you know I can’t finish this entry without posting some of my favorite images:
Making Sense of This Week
I met Mr. Nash a little over a year ago when he came into The Store. He was a friendly, amicable gentleman, trying to get back on his feet. He was preparing to open a business that involved upholstering furniture, and he needed some help with business cards and other promotional materials. He was also applying for a federal grant to subsidize his cost for these promotional materials. I assisted him with his application, faxing off the necessary papers once I figured out what we were going to do for him, and then I designed the business cards and the flyers. The check arrived from the government and he was set up and on his way.
Last August, he was attacked and beaten and left a bloody mess in the middle of the street in that part of town. An anonymous 911 call brought the police and paramedics to his location. He was unresponsive and airlifted to the hospital in Shreveport. There were no witnesses to the incident and, to this date, no arrests have been made.
He passed away at the hospital in Shreveport on January 12th.
There was no obituary in any of the local newspapers. The news of his death was tacked on to the end of another police report in the newspaper.
What is wrong with this universe?
It has been quite a turbulent week. The local water crisis (which took place on Palindrome/Binary Date Day; don’t say you weren’t warned), the Leno-Conan feud, the crisis in Tahiti, Tennessee’s search for a new football coach … and the death of an innocent man, starting his own business at the age of 54, assaulted for no reason, his attackers nowhere to be found.
This new decade doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
Godspeed, Mr. Nash …
Image of the Week for 01-11-10
With weekend temperatures barely getting above freezing (for the first time in many years), this is the first time that our backyard pond has been completely encased in ice.
Scrapings from the Draft Queue
A new year has begun, and it is once again time for the annual purging of the Draft Queue, the “waiting room” of this blog where postings are born and either mature into (relatively) insightful ramblings of interest and are released into the wild of the blogosphere, or they do not … and these half-formed ideas meander about in the Draft Queue, hoping to one day be re-discovered and molded into something readable. But today is the day that these fragments of a post are kicked out of the system and deleted forever, but not without one final send-off, because, after all, they were MY ideas at one point in time, and I can’t just let an idea die.
In the middle of November, in the heat of NaNoWriMo 2009, I had this dream about the merging of the “Twilight” movie franchise and Facebook. This was right at about the time that “New Moon” was hitting theaters, and so vampires and werewolves and inappropriate love affairs were at the forefront of the news, and it was impossible not to roam the internet without hearing about it, so it’s no wonder that the concept invaded my subconscious. In this dream, users of Facebook had to choose whether to be humans or vampires or werewolves or some other sort of mythical creature, and then they could “attack” their friends for points and prestige. That was basically it. This dream would have been an addition to “The Dream File” category, but, as mentioned earlier, it was the middle of NaNoWriMo, and I had other things to blather on about.
Speaking of NaNoWriMo, I also started a post-NaNoWriMo entry entitled “The Plot Sickens” which was to contain some late thoughts on my story. Reading back over the two meandering paragraphs that I had written so far in this entry, it is easy to see why I did not finish it … a very jumbled dissertation on one character’s split personality disorder. Blah blah blah. Click. Delete. You didn’t miss anything.
In October, the classic album “Bustin’ Out with the Brandon String Trio” was posted online by Jon Wiening, who promptly took it down because of technical difficulties in some of the mp3 files. It hasn’t shown up since, or if it has, I haven’t found it. At the time, I began composing my love letter to the Brandon String Trio and how this was one of the greatest albums of the 1990s, with a link to the album. But, no link, no post. And I never did quite get past the first paragraph of the entry, anyway. If the album ever resurfaces, I’ll just start over.
There’s a rant about our local Big Annual Christmas Festival that went from the working title of “Anti-Tourism” to “Grimace Time” to the bottom of the pile. This is all I actually wrote: “It’s that time of year again, time for That Big Annual Christmas Festival, the one weekend a year when the residents of our quaint southern town get considerably irritated over the traffic congestion on our two-lane roads.” The basic argument of the post was that there’s this big great Christmas Festival that brings in thousands of dollars of revenue and yet the locals, who have lived through it year after year, always get grumbly when the tourists invade for the weekend. The tone was rather negative and totally counter to the sparkliness of the holiday season, which is why I never quite got around to writing it.
I had started an entry entitled “Knobs and Handles” on October 31st, written shortly after I had watched “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” on DVD for what I am pretty sure was the first time ever. Pretty sure. I owned the Disney LP record which came with a picture book of the story, but no matter how many times I listened to the record or read the book, the story made absolutely no sense. Granted, as far as Disney live-action movies go, this one was a little surreal: the psychedelic colors when the bed engaged in teleportation, the animated bit involving a soccer game between animals, and the final climactic battle featuring nazi soldiers versus empty suits of armor … for some reason, the movie made a lot more sense 30 years later. I was going to write an extensive dissertation on this topic, but then the aforementioned NaNoWriMo began, and I never came back to this subject. Perhaps it is for the best.
The queue is now clear. Prepare to be filled again …
The Year of Binary Numbers
My checking account balance at the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010:
And I did not realize this until after I had made all of my payments and then wrote everything into the ledger … so it’s not like I was thinking, “Hey, I’ll pay five more cents to Capital One just so that I can make my balance work out that way!”
(On a completely unrelated topic, note that my “I”s are not capped at the top and the bottom … I made a conscious decision halfway through 2009 to make my “I”s a single line — which oftentimes confuses them with “1″s — all in an effort to compress more letters into a smaller space and to write faster. Really.)
Numbers are going to running wild this year, especially this month. January 11th and 22nd are going to be palindrome number dates (011110 and 012210, respectively) and the 11th will also be a binary number day, as will the 10th (011010), as will the 10th and 11th days of October (the 10th of October — 101010 — also has the distinction of being “Wish Day” for a certain friend). What does all this mean? Not sure, but if something monumental happens on the 10th and 11th of next week, I can say that I predicted it, and if absolutely nothing happens, then everyone will have already forgotten about what I said anyway …
Image of the Week for 01-04-10
Tunnel of Lights.
It was a tough call this week … the other contender would have made it in if it wasn’t ever so slightly out of focus.
One last look at the Christmas Lights for this season (30 new images and videos uploaded today).
