Month: March 2022

Rockefeller, Musk, photog?

photog Current Events, photog's Corner ,

In the last week or so I’ve taken the first halting steps toward setting up an on-line business.  In reality it’s sort of several businesses.  One is a self-publishing account on Amazon.  Another is a creator’s account with a photo products sales site.  And finally, there is an account with a custom photobook seller.

But of course, it’s an enormous amount of bother.  One place requires a PayPal account and I had let my account lapse this year so now I have to open a new one.  Then I have to figure out how to pay my taxes on time and whether I should incorporate and whether I should do that myself or pay a lawyer.  I also have to figure out how to advertise my products.  Of course, Orion’s Cold Fire will be central to my marketing plan.  I’ll add links to the store fronts and shamelessly hawk my wares whenever an unsuspecting reader comes looking for political commentary or brilliant movie and book reviews.

What I’ve discovered is that all this business stuff is frightfully distracting from the stuff I like to do, namely take pictures and write stuff.  But what is also true is that participating in some kind of business of your own is very exciting.  What it requires is disciplining yourself; becoming your own boss.  And for someone like me that is extremely challenging.  I have always been the worst employee anywhere I worked.  I find it extremely difficult to work in a manner that doesn’t seem logical to me.  So, if a company tried to get the engineers to perform regulatory clerical functions (that is, validation) my eyes would glaze over and my output would slowdown to a crawl.  Eventually they would be forced to provide me with an assistant who could perform the requisite paperwork handwaving to satisfy the FDA that we didn’t add Ebola virus to the batch by using the equipment I had designed, purchased and installed using good engineering practices, which I saw as my proper function.

So now it will be necessary for me to convince … me(!) that I should perform all the clerical and bookkeeping and sales and marketing handwaving that is necessary to make money in a business.  I have to confess that I’ve already had a few discouraging moments as I realized how many hoops I’ll have to jump through to coordinate all the various requirements needed to transact business in a businesslike manner.  I would much prefer just winging it and paying for my mistakes as I go along but hard experience has shown me that that can be awfully expensive.  The IRS really has no sense of humor at all.

As I embark on this journey of discovery, I find myself full of unbridled enthusiasm and unwarranted optimism.  I’m sure reality will quickly rein in my naïve ebullience and after being knocked around by cruel fate I will reach the correct mind set of all proper businessmen, callous cynicism and calculated misanthropy.

So, consider this your fair warning.  When links appear to lure you to my commercial products don’t be fooled into thinking they represent anything other than what they are; crass commercialism and the single-minded pursuit of the almighty dollar.  Come to think of it, after the fiasco with Russia, it’s not so almighty anymore.  But you get the picture.  Caveat emptor!

18MAR2022 – OCF Update

photog Current Events

So today Camera Girl’s getting taken out for her birthday.  I’ll tag along for the free food so I’ll be negligent on the site until later on.  Seems like a slow news day but I’ll think of something to rant about later.

The photo of the day will be pictures that I took at that auto show last Sunday.  I’ve got about a hundred shots so I may have to mix in other things so as not to bore non-auto-enthusiasts.

Today we’ll hit 70 degrees and there’ll be sun so it’s a pretty good day to be out in the world.  I hope everyone who’s footloose and fancy free today gets out and gets some air.

Talk to you soon.

Marty (1955) – A Movie Review

photog Movie Reviews, Reviews , , ,

Ernest Borgnine stars as Marty Piletti an Italian American living in the Bronx.  He’s a 34-year-old who works as a butcher in a small shop and supports his widowed mother in the house where he grew up with his brothers and sisters.  But all of them, even the younger ones have gotten married and only Marty is left hanging out with his friends who talk about women all night long but mostly can’t get a date.  None of them are matinee idols and Marty is probably the homeliest of the bunch.

(Spoiler Alert – Skip down to last paragraph to avoid spoilers and read recommendation)

When his mother, who worries that Marty will never marry, harangues him to go out to the Stardust Ballroom to find a girl, he laments that he’s been rejected countless times and is tired of it.  But he agrees to go and initially things go as usual.  Girls he asks to dance brush him off.  But a man comes by and asks a favor.  The other man is on a blind date and is unhappy about his date’s looks.  He wants to tell the girl that he has to leave but then have Marty take her home so she won’t feel abandoned at the dance.  Marty objects to the idea so the man finds someone else willing to escort the girl home for a five-dollar fee.

Marty follows the two men and witnesses the girl being callously rejected.  She refuses the offer to be brought home and the two men leave.  The girl is visibly devastated and leaves the dance floor and heads for an outdoor space to be alone.  Marty follows her and sees that she is crying.  Trying to cheer her up he approaches her and asks if she’d like to dance.  Overwhelmed by emotion she sinks her face in his shoulder and cries while Marty nervously pats her shoulder to comfort her.

In the next scene the couple are dancing and we meet Clara Snyder.  She is a twenty-nine-year-old school teacher.  Her relatively plain face has meant that like Marty she has never been in love.  The two hit it off tremendously.  Normally shy and tongue-tied Marty talks garrulously and exuberantly to this stranger.  And Clara is charmed that a man is so genuinely enthusiastic to be in her company.  They spend several hours talking while eating pie in a local diner.  At the end of the night Marty asks Clara to go to the movies the next night and they agree that he will call her next afternoon to decide on the details.  They both end the night deliriously happy to be in love.

But next morning his mother has had a change of heart and fears that if Marty gets married, she will be cast aside.  She tells Marty that she dislikes Clara even though she barely met her.  She tells Marty that Clara is old, unattractive and probably of loose morals because of her college education.  Also, Marty’s friends that saw Clara tell him that she’s a dog and not worth his time.  Now Marty allows himself to be persuaded by the people around him and fails to call Clara in the afternoon.  We see Clara at home that evening watching television with her parents and quietly crying.

But spending the night with his loser friends snaps Marty out of their spell.  He mocks their endless vacillation about what to do and their loveless lives.  He declares that he had a good time with Clara and if he has enough good nights with her, he’ll get down on his knee and beg her to marry him.  He then leaves them and heads to a phone booth to call Clara and change his life.

Marty is a straight forward story of two lonely people and the marvelous accident that brings them together and changes their lives for the better.  The movie has heart and even with the changes in social behavior between 1955 and today the humanity of the two main characters shines through and provides a timeless message, that there is beauty within.  Highly recommended as a date movie for couples.

Funniest Headline of Week – Chris Cuomo Accuses CNN of Smearing His Journalistic Integrity

photog Current Events , , ,

How is it possible for CNN to smear Chris “Fredo” Cuomo’s journalistic integrity?  Think of the list of absurdities.  Cuomo is not a journalist.  Neither Cuomo nor CNN have any kind of integrity.  CNN never hired Fredo to commit journalism on their network.  It could never happen on that cable channel except by accident and in passing.

Fredo wants $125 million dollars from CNN for this “smear.”  I think the judge should just broker a deal where CNN gives custody of Don Lemon to Fredo and calls it a wash.

We live in the age of miracles and wonder.  And the wonder is how we can keep going with people this stupid in charge.

17MAR2022 – Camera Girl’s Birthday

photog Current Events , , , , ,

Today is St. Patrick’s Day and Camera Girl’s birthday.  Usually we celebrate with corned beef and cabbage and I bring out my bag pipes and kilt and parade through the grounds of the Compound at 6am, noon and 6pm.  Well maybe I ,made that last part up.

Camera Girl hates when anyone mentions her birthday, so I make a fuss about it just to annoy her.  It’s one of the joys of marriage, irritating your spouse.

Back in the old days New York City had a very important St. Patrick Day’s parade that involved tens of thousands of Irish policemen and firemen dressed in kilts and playing bagpipes.  On WPIX, Channel 11 they would have a televised broadcast of the parade usually hosted by “Captain” Jack McCarthy.  Captain Jack was the television host of the kids television shows that played Popeye the Sailor Man cartoons.  I think at one time he used to host the Three Stooges show but that got handed off to the other Irish tv host Officer Joe Bolton who wore a police officer’s uniform and twirled a billy club.

Irish culture in New York City back in the late ’50’s and early ’60’s was extremely stereotyped apparently.

One time Officer Joe Bolton showed up at the parish carnival to sign autographs and he dragged along Moe Howard of Stooges fame.  Moe looked awful.  Apparently the Stooge lifestyle was running down at that point.  I didn’t try to get Moe’s autograph.  But I listened to Officer Joe playing a medley of songs on his banjo.

So all that being said, I wonder if St. Patrick’s Day still means anything to the Irish in America.  Sure, it’s been turned into an excuse to get drunk like Cinco de Mayo and Super Bowl Sunday but do Irish Americans still celebrate it?  I wonder.

Well anyway, it’s Camera Girl’s birthday and that’s a big deal in this house.  We’ll have our traditional dinner and I’ll put on the Quiet Man as a tribute to Irish American cultural history.  That’ll have to do.

The History of Dunwich – Part 1 – It’s Annoying Origins

photog Humor, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner , , ,

The origins of the site on which Dunwich sits are shrouded in mystery.  A mystery based on profound indifference and shoddy scholarship.  Legend claims that in the earliest epoch it was the Latrine of Yog Sothoth.  It is believed that the current stratum of bedrock is completely composed of metamorphized coprolite.  Professor Obadiah Bishop of Miskatonic University spent forty years of his academic career studying this coprolite formation and determined that it was almost entirely composed of triceratopsian dung formed from an exclusive diet of poison sumac.  This is thought to explain the funk that emanates from the ground, groundwater, crops and inhabitants of the present day site.  It is also believed to explain the almost constant, frenzied scratching that all Dunwichians indulge in.

The original human inhabitants of the area were members of the Pocnipnarrawampamuckutucs (sometimes shortened to the Muckutucs) tribe.  The Muckutucs were despised by the other tribes because they smelled awful, had thirteen fingers and two rows of teeth.

When the first European settlers arrived, they interbred with the Muckutucs and their descendants had twelve fingers.  Which was an improvement.  But no teeth.  Which was not.  Over time these anatomical oddities became the hallmark of the Dunwichian ancestry and somewhat explained their status as loathed outcasts and pariahs.  Suffice it to say that the rest of New England chose to avoid Dunwich like the plague.

But the American Revolution saw a change.  The patriotic fervor that swept through the rest of New England did not neglect Dunwich.  A company of stout Dunwichians headed up by “Captain” Nehemiah Hoadley marched east to reinforce the colonial army at Lexington.  But when the Boston regiment got a look at the Dunwich contingent approaching from the west, they abandoned their ambush of the British and blasted away at these toothless mutants, mowing them down to the last polydactylous humanoid soul.  After this Dunwich refused taxation by the US government until almost the time of the Civil War.

It was during the nineteenth century that the first truly disturbing events began to occur in and around Dunwich.  In 1824 on the site of Phineas Goodgroates’ orchard, a thousand ton, three-hundred-foot-long caste-iron cylinder fell out of the sky and flattened Phineas’s apple trees and because he was apple picking that day, flattened Phineas too.  This metallic meteor came to be known as the Codpiece of Cthulhu because of the inscription on its side identifying it as such.  The arrival of this piece of sartorial ironmongery was taken as an event of ill-omen.  Opinions varied, although with respect to Phineas all agreed it was definitely a bit of tough luck for him.

But by 1830 the populace had calmed down and normalcy reasserted itself until in the fall of that year when Caleb Sillwright’s turnip patch was similarly bombarded by the aptly named Moustache Comb of Azathoth.  At this point there were calls to abandon Dunwich altogether or at least to install some kind of gargantuan clothes rack above the town in the hope that the Elder Gods would take the hint and stop dropping their effects on Dunwich.  Luckily, cooler heads prevailed.

To be continued.