Month: August 2021

The Dog Day

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It’s a hot one, a scorcher.  I was out there trying to get some shots of hummingbirds and I think they were watching me from the shade of the trees saying to each other, “Is he crazy?  We’re not going out in that sun for a little sugar water!”

But this is real summer.  You can see all the moisture the ground has soaked up over the last month or so rippling into the air as currents of chromatic diffractions of the solar photons pummeling the ground.  I put on my floppy hat and brave the noonday sun in quest of photographic knowledge.  And there’s scant little of that.  Even the usually reliable bees and butterflies and even the dragonflies have taken refuge out of the sun, the cowards.

Camera Girl and Princess Sack-of-Potatoes took to the pool after lunch and of course as soon as I went in for lunch, supposedly, the hummingbirds were everywhere, on the flowers, at the feeders, even hovering between the girls at the side of the pool.  I shouted out, “Fake News!”  But her haughty sneer let me know I wasn’t fooling Camera Girl.  I knew she spoke the truth.

I will go back out after four.  At that point the sun’s blast will be merely Saharan and therefore survivable.  I will say that this tracking autofocus function still requires a fair amount of skill, of technique that I am sadly lacking.  But persevere I will.  I must know the answers.  Are my old lenses useful or ballast?  I will find out.

After conferring with my grandsons I recognized their seasonal anxiety.  They sense the end of summer vacation.  They reminded me not to waste the days that we have left.  Labor Day is right up the road and after that there’s nothing on the horizon until Halloween.  So I must get out there and see what I can see.

I think tomorrow I’ll head for the local lake.  I want to see if any water birds are around.  That would be a nice tame autofocus-tracking target.  I’m tired of trying to capture Larold running at full tilt.  The camera doesn’t stand a chance.  Last year there was a bald eagle at that lake.  I don’t suppose I’ll luck out and it’ll be there but you never know.  In an unrelated photographic idea there is an old colonial graveyard nearby and I thought I’d go over there and do some closeup photography of the old stones.  Nothing that will show the whole stones but more the texture of the erosion on the carving.

Haven’t seen much wildlife this summer.  There was a bear on the property recently but he didn’t do any damage surprisingly enough.  Last year he flattened one of our bird feeder polls.  And speaking of birds Camera girl has been reading about some mysterious bird ailment that is killing the birds.  So of course the first thing they tell her is “Stop feeding the birds!”  Blah, blah, blah.  I told her do as she pleases.  If feeding the birds is going to cause the apocalypse then let her rip.  I figure it’s bird COVID.  So why shouldn’t they get a taste of it too?

Well, the silly season is ending in three weeks or so.  Then we’ll have the atrocities in Washington to bemoan, only I’m all out of outrage for the inevitable.  I figure codified election fraud is in our immediate future so bring it on.  But it will wake up a mess of normies.  Maybe that will do some good.  So enjoy the rest of the summer and I’ll be here when you get back.

And here is the dog himself Larold the Wonder Dog.

Vox Day’s Website Shut By Google

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Vox is currently posting at Gab and says he’ll announce his new web location soon.  Vox is very outspoken about the COVID vaccine and this is especially irritating to the social media companies with their lockstep with government approach to COVID.  Vox’s other sites, Castalia House and Arkhaven are unaffected as far as I could tell.

Vox feuds with lots of folks on both sides of the political spectrum but he has been very prescient about many important things going on.  He was a very early and staunch partisan for Donald Trump.  And he has written some very useful things about dealing with SJW’s (social justice warriors).

And of course when they go after someone on the Right making believe that it couldn’t happen to you is ridiculous.  Virtue signaling can’t help people on our side of the aisle.  Sticking together can.

Edit:  And Vox must be remembered for the masterful way he punked the Hugo Awards a few years back.  His Rabid Puppy campaign had a ridiculous dinosaur pornography story named Space Raptor Butt Invasion successfully nominated for the sacred Hugo for best science fiction story and that alone should ensure him a place in history.

Update:

Vox has his backup website up

2nd update

Vox has activated his permanent new site.  Congrats for getting up and running so quickly.

 

Where, When and How Does Sanity Reappear?

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The more that happens the less sure I am that we’re near the bottom.  In fact, there does not seem to be any bottom.  When New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Atlanta, St. Louis and Portland have all become the new Detroits and freedom of speech has been ended and Washington decides who can work and live and even walk down the street, then what further outrage is left as unthinkable?

The sex of newborns is to be left off birth certificates.  Children will be sexually mutilated by their parents or social workers if they can confuse a grade school child into acting confused about its sex.  Sexual deviants will be brought into the classroom to proselytize children about sodomy.

Voting fraud is being codified in the Congress of the United States and the President is openly abandoning the borders of this country to millions of additional criminal aliens.

Maybe it will have to get much, much worse before the citizens of this country finally reach a point where they risk taking a stand.  Maybe when the government begins confiscation of private property.  Let’s say they decide to tax 401K savings at some prohibitive rate in order to use this money for slavery reparations.  Would that be enough to trigger direct action?  How about if as part of the equity they’ve been talking about they change the tax code to punish people who suffer from the stigma of whiteness?  Perhaps taxing them at a triple rate compared to everyone else?

But maybe not.  I’ve seen no indication that large numbers of people are even close to saying, “No more!”  Maybe there is no limit.  Maybe we’ve just become empty men.  Maybe there’s no fight left in us at all.  Are we just the frog in the slowly heated pot?  Will we just let ourselves be cooked as long as it’s done nice and gradually?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.  Here we are almost five years after Trump’s election and we’re farther in the hole than we were in 2016.  I’m beginning to believe there is no point at which the people of this country will stand up and tell Washington they’ve had enough.

The only hint that anything stands between us and the Oligarchy is Ron DeSantis in Florida and maybe Greg Abbott in Texas.  So how about this, those two guys are up for re-election.  The first sign that there is no hope is if they don’t get re-elected.  Let’s call that the first test.

Next sign is if they cave or are forced by the federal government to change direction and obey Washington.  That’s the second test.

These two are both negative tests that only have to be avoided.  But even if we pass both of these the third is a positive test.  Within two years one of them has to score a major victory against the Oligarchy.  And what would that be?  For me that would have to be a showdown where the feds had to back down.  Let’s say one of those two governors crushed the Antifa/BLM movement in all the cities in his state.  That would qualify.  Or if one of them nullified one of the major unconstitutional federal laws like affirmative action or cracking down on illegal aliens.  One of those things would make me believe there was hope.

I’ll say all three of these things would have to happen before the midterms.  I think that’s long enough to wait.  If nothing happens by then I’ll assume nothing will and I’ll start looking for a new home.  If any of you are thinking about these things too, I recommend that you put some kind of time limit on these things.  Otherwise, I have a feeling you’ll end up like the slowly cooked frog, comfortably numb.

Testing the Minolta 200mm f\4 Macro and Sony 135mm f\1.8 A-Mount Lenses with Sony LA-EA5 Adapter on  Sony A7R IV Camera – Part 4 – The Verdict on Tracking

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This will be a short post.  I just want to put this question behind us.  I’ll summarize my observations.

The tracking and eye tracking does work on the A-mount motor-less lenses.  But the autofocus on these lenses cannot keep up with an even moderately fast moving object.  Even a person walking toward the camera will have a very low keeper rate.  With a rapidly moving animal like a dog running it’s hopeless.  The software is doing its part but the mechanics of the autofocus system is just too slow to keep up.

Now I happen to want to use it for something much less demanding.  For butterflies, bees and hummingbirds the animal is hovering or flitting inside a very small area and this allows the lens to reacquire focus quickly enough to be useful.  But this is a much less demanding application of the tracking program.  It is sort of the exception to the failure of these lenses to track.

I’ll be performing more tests once the weather over here improves on hummingbirds and butterflies with the tracking program.  But I felt it was important enough to break this information out separately.

10AUG2021 – OCF Update

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Today I was on guard duty.  I fit in a little photo time and got a chance to participate in a zoom with the guys but it was a day that didn’t leave much time for writing.

But I did note a few interesting news items.

Cuomo resigned.  Too bad.  He would have driven the MeeToo girls crazy if he had hung in.  He’s such a sleazy guy that just seeing him with a D after his name makes me feel happy.  Oh well, Andy, we hardly knew ye.

But now what about Fredo?  Does CNN need the brother of a disgraced NY State Governor?  And that’s even supposing he could read and speak English fluently which he can’t.  Mother of mercy!  Could this be the end of Fredo?

I saw that Abbott in Texas successfully petitioned the Texas Supreme Court to block that leftist judge who wanted to shield the runaway Dem legislators from arrest for dereliction of duty.  That’s a good first step but he still needs to find a way to lure them back into Texas for arrest.  Maybe he can tell each of them he has won a million dollar lottery and it must be claimed in person.  Or maybe they can just tempt them with police officers posing as underage children for them to molest.  Either probably will get some results.  After all they’re Democrats.  Look at the pedo in the Arizona legislature.  He was the one celebrating his gayness.  In hindsight maybe not the ambassador for the LGBTQ movement.

I had the grandkids over today and the younger ones were in the pool but one of the senior ranks and I started watching the Lord of the Rings movies.  He’s a fan of the Two Towers so we dove in there.  A little too much Gollum in that disk for me.  He’s truly annoying.  We both decided that they should have given the Ring to Sam and he would have finished the mission before the end of the siege of Helm’s Deep.

I’ll have an installment of the photo series soon and I may have a political post later.  But right now family beckons.

Chicago PD Turns Backs to Lightfoot at Hospital of Shot Officer

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Thirty police officers at the bedside of a cop who was shot during a traffic stop along with his partner who was killed turned their backs on bug-eyed Mayor Lori Lightfoot when she came to speak to them at the hospital.  And the officer’s father who is also a retired policeman gave Lightfoot a piece of his mind.

Good.  The whole force should take a sick week and officially announce to the gangs that they’re free to go visit Lightfoot at her den and eat the City Council too if they’re hungry.  All these cities need to see what defunding the police really would look like.  It would be very educational.