Month: April 2025

Make Way for the Expedition!

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, Photo Study, photog's Corner, Photography , ,
Voigtlander 10mm e-mount trees in vertical

Camera Girl is an excellent wife.  She understands the nuances and challenges of being married to a profoundly disorganized man.  And what she has done is become my enabler.  She knows how lazy and easily distracted I can be so she goes out of her way to find things in the real world that can help me in my stated goals.

For instance, I’ve been complaining about needing a photography trip to get a bunch of new pictures.  So, she took it upon herself to research day trips to photogenic locations.  Car shows, museums, stuff like that.  Well, she asked me if I want to go to a botanical garden on Friday.  Apparently, the weather is going to cooperate and she was able to get discount passes from one of her library friends (she loves discounts passionately).

“Perfect!” I said.  And so tomorrow morning I will assemble my gear and she will act as my native bearer or sherpa guide.  With her carrying all the weight, my inner vision will be free to unlock the mystical dimensions of the secrets of nature.  Like a modern-day Leonardo da Vinci (only without all the gayness) I will frame the photographs that will capture truth, beauty and small insects everywhere I go.

Like Frank Buck and Ali “bringing ‘em back alive” or Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquering Everest, we shall conquer new frontiers of arboreal greatness together.  I with my Sony 90mm f\2.8 macro lens and A7IV camera and Camera Girl with her 83-pound backpack with forehead strap to take some of the weight off of her shoulders.  To some this may sound excessive.  On the contrary, I’m leaving behind the laptop, larger tripod and the flash gear.  Everything I packed is critical; the portable generator, my yoga mat and the collapsible hammock for my 1:30 pm siesta.  After all we’re not barbarians, are we?  And she knows that the roll of a good producer is to, “keep the talent happy.”  After all, without my perfect composure and comfort the whole thing will be for naught.  Remember, art is the hardest thing in the world.  We must be perfectly in tune with the astral plane or it will collapse like a deck of cards or some other analogy.

As the kids would say, “I’m stoked.”  And I predict the most amazing results from this expedition.  I do intend to bring along some other lenses.  The 10mm Voigtlander should be useful for capturing some of the vertical shots of the trees and I’m considering bringing the Sony 200-600mm zoom for any shots of birds up in the higher branches.  And I guess I’ll bring the Sony 35mm f\1.4 for some landscape shots.  I’m not sure if I’ll bring the new 135mm f\1.8.  It’s kind of an in between lens.    Not really long enough for wildlife but too tight for landscape.  But it has great bokeh for backgrounds so I probably will bring it.  Ah, decisions, decisions.

So, I’ll be away for a chunk of the day.  The site will be quiet but I’ll be home in time to catch up with everything.  “Ali!  Where is my elephant gun you lazy heathen!”

Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better

photog Current Events, Trump , ,

I have lived through the Space Race, the Arms Race, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Kennedy Assassination, the Vietnam War, the Oil Embargo, Watergate, the Carter Presidency, the Iran Hostage Crisis, Stagflation, the Various Arab-Israeli wars, Black Monday, the First Gulf War, Bill Clinton, the Dot Com Bust, the Y2K Panic, 9/11/2001, Afghanistan, Iraq II, the 2008 Bank Crisis, Obama’s Race War Incitements, All of the lawfare against Trump, the George Floyd Color Revolution, the COVID scam, the 2020 Election Fraud, Biden’s Fake Presidency, the Ukraine Debacle, the Green Energy/COVID/USAID looting of the Treasury and the assassination attempts on Trump.

That’s a lot of dysfunction.  If you look at the scope of how much mismanagement and dishonesty has been the focus of our lives for the last sixty odd years you can’t help but ask yourself if maybe the problem is that we are being “led” by terrible people.  Looking at the awful things going on I believe that those running this country are either purposefully evil or incredibly stupid.

Or both.

And now look at where we are.  Every attempt by Donald Trump to even partially repair the damage done by Biden’s open border policy is being stymied by partisan federal judges.  It’s like every stalemate we’ve ever experienced when the Right wins an election.

All of what I’m saying is obvious.  In fact, we saw the same thing in Trump’s first term.  In some sense Trump must have expected all of this to happen.  Maybe he has a plan to move all of this along.  But what I’m trying to express is a reality that resists any real progress being made in Washington.  It’s an institutional mindset that resists any attempt to untangle the strands of bureaucracy and administrative control that protect the status quo.

Probably what is needed is someone with the courage to cut the Gordian Knot.  And it really will take courage.  I think what it will take is for Trump to defy these federal judges.  And I think I’ve figured out the ploy.  What will be needed is to have a judge declare someone in contempt of court and then have Donald Trump issue a pardon for the contempt action.  Of course, he’ll probably have to issue the pardons every day for the whole length of his presidency.  But it should allow him to get his work done and really, really annoy those judges.

And I think I must be a genius or everyone else is an idiot if they don’t see how this will work perfectly.  Remember during a campaign rally in Sioux Center, Iowa, on January 23, 2016, Trump said “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”  Well now it’s literally true.  He can pardon himself or anyone else he’d like from whatever crime he needs to commit to fix all of our problems.  All he needs is the courage and the mental clarity needed to carry out the campaign.

So, Mr. President get to work writing the executive orders and the pardons for each of the contempt decisions by all of the various judges that are working against you.  It will be wearisome and highly annoying but you will be fixing the ills that Joe Biden and his predecessors inflicted on us.  And it will tick off a lot of horrible people.

This Happy Breed (1944) – A Movie Review

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This Happy Breed is a fictional portrayal of life in working class England from the end of the First World War to the eve of the Second world War.  I won’t give any spoiler warnings because it’s not that kind of movie.  It’s an intimate look at a family in suburban London between the wars and all of the important and trivial things that make up human life.

Frank Gibbons (played by Robert Newton) returns from war to his family; wife Ethel (played by Celia Johnson), his teenage son Reg, his daughters Vi and Queenie, his mother-in-law Mrs. Flint and his sister Sylvia, all living under his roof.  His next-door neighbor Bob Mitchell is a war buddy and becomes Frank’s best friend.  And Bob’s son Billy will eventually become Queenie’s boyfriend.

Over the course of the twenty years that the movie covers we watch the children grow up, navigate the troubled economy of Britain between the wars, fall in love, marry and in one case die tragically.  Children rebel against their parents’ expectations and mores and come out the other side older and sadder and much like their parents.

The movie is a slice of life in three acts and a total of nine scenes spread across those twenty years.  I guess what I liked about the film is the feeling of believability about the characters but at the same time the likeability of most of them.  Even though they were Brits and from a time period before I was born, they felt strangely familiar.  And I was invested in their stories.  You could actually care how things turned out for them because they were decent people trying to muddle through their lives during a period of history when England was still reeling from the loss of a generation of young men in World War I and staggering under the global economic changes that would reduce them to a poorer nation.  Frank and Ethel love their family and try their best to steer their children in the right direction.

There are moments of pathos and humor.  And the acting is top notch without any flashiness or highbrow dialog.  Just simple people living their lives.  I’m not sure who I would recommend this movie to.  First remember that for Americans the British locale might make it a little strange.  But actually, I didn’t think it was off-putting.  Events like the death of their king or the 1926 General Strike might seem unfamiliar but not mysterious.  If the description I give here doesn’t sound interesting then give this a pass.  But I consider it a gem of a film that I’m surprised I never saw before.  Highly recommended.