Ah, the calm before the storm. I have this weekend completely off before the next seventeen days of misery and isolation. So, I’ll enjoy these two days to the hilt and then, “abandon all hope ye who enter here.” For what it’s worth it seems like Trump is enjoying himself a lot more than Kamala. Her cackling has diminished and her ranting seems to have replaced it. From everything I’ve heard she is a truly awful person that makes those around her miserable. If she loses, I wouldn’t be surprised if her marriage ends and many of her other connections to human society.
The latest “controversy” is that Democrat voters will be using the branding ,LA (get it, comma la) on their clothing to get around the restrictions against wearing the candidates’ names or images at the polling place. So, we’ve reached back to, I guess, kindergarten or at most grammar school in our tactics. What’s next, will the Democrats be telling “yo mamma” jokes?
Anyway, the weather around Dunwich has been remarkably mellow for this time of year. I understand we’re expected to have a string of three or four 75-degree days ending on Tuesday. That’s phenomenal. But because I’ve gotten used to fall weather, it’s almost too warm for comfort.
I wrote that post about Sony adding focus bracketing to their firmware update for my A7IV camera. I intended to wait until after my captivity before updating the firmware but it’s killing me to not try it out. I think I’ll bite the bullet tomorrow morning. I have this dead luna moth that I found this summer and I’d love to play around with focus stacking it. Well, we’ll see. Tomorrow is a busy day. We have a kid’s birthday party coming up and I’m sure Camera Girl has a laundry list of honey-do’s lined up for me. And honestly there are several things I should be working on anyway. So even if I update the camera I may have to wait.
It should be interesting to see how the country changes regardless of who “wins” the election. I think there’s a growing cohort that realizes that something is very broken with our whole social order. The fragmentation now extends to a polarization by sex. Younger women and men are lining up in opposition to each other philosophically. I really do believe we are seeing the beginning of a permanent split. Basically, women who have accepted the new template for living for a career will not be having children. And that means that men will have to find wives who want to have children elsewhere. I guess mail order overseas brides will become more the rule than the exception and over time the cat ladies will die out. Well, that’s a solution of sorts.
The “October Viewing” movies has been fun for me but it’s gotten me thinking about what a monster is. Is it only freakish creatures like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster or can it be a man like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates? Obviously, the actual humans are scarier because they really exist. When you hear about the things that Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer did to their victims you understand that inside they truly are monsters. So maybe creating fairy tale creatures like the movie monsters is a way of distracting ourselves from the true horrors that we don’t want to contemplate. But our society has grown up and now we prefer to scare ourselves with realistic monsters. I remember when I read Thomas Harris’s “Red Dragon” back in the 1980’s it struck me as an interesting crime story and nothing more. But when I thought about the way that that the murderer selected his victim families by working in a photo lab that developed family home movies, it chilled me to the core. If a motivated psychopath could select his victims without any direct connection to him then how could anyone hope to protect his family from this random agent of horrifying destruction? Basically, you can’t. Random chance rules all of our lives. That I found horrifying. So maybe I should include “Psycho” and “Silence of the Lambs” in my October Viewings. Or maybe that would take away some of the fun. Well, October is waning I better hurry up and make up my mind. What do you folks think?
Psycho is better than Silence, although both are good.
Human monsters have always been the worst since we became the apex predator.