Author: photog

First Annual Orio’s Awards

photog Current Events, OCF, Photo Study, Photography ,

Year end award ceremonies are usually pretentious and subjective.  This leaves the viewers angry and jaded.  Not to be outdone by Hollywood and the mainstream media I am announcing and presenting this inaugural edition of the Orio’s.  Named for the website and embodying the timeless desire of all photographers to fill up space on his blog I am stepping forward and picking the five best photos from the last three hundred and sixty five “photo of the day” submissions.  I have absolutely no objective basis for my selection other than first impressions as I rapidly scanned through the shots from the last twelve months.  Well, here they are.

  1. Two Ducks in Freezing Water

This aptly titled work captures the essence of water fowl floating on a freezing pond.  I will say that Mrs.  Mallard seems to be giving Mr. Mallard the stink-eye for something that he is pretending he didn’t do.  There’s no way he gets away with it.

 

2. Come into my Parlor Said the Spider to the Fly

What is there to say about the visceral appeal of this stunning visual statement?  The drama of a lion bringing down a wildebeest on the Serengeti is (sorta) on display as arachnid faces off against the disgusting metallic sheen of the bottle fly.  Is there really any winner here?

 

3. The Wheel of Time

This fossilized ammonite shell reminds me that most of my life has been spent going around in circles.  Is it really about the journey if you end up in the same place you start from?  Oh well.

 

4.  Oh My Stars

I can’t think of any snarky wise cracks for this one.  I just like the way it looks.

 

5.  Make a Wish

Regular readers probably know that I kind of like the way that milkweed seed pods look after they explode.  Nuff said.

 

So that’s it.  A whole year will elapse before we find ourselves here again to rate and praise the best of the best of the best!  Well, save up your excitement and the seconds will pass like seconds.  Thank you for your attention and hopefully all comments should be equally light-hearted.

31DEC2024 – Quote of the Day

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[Isaiah’s Job; The Atlantic Monthly (June 1936) (Part 7)]

The picture which Isaiah presents of the Judean masses is most unfavorable. In his view, the mass-man — be he high or be he lowly, rich or poor, prince or pauper — gets off very badly. He appears as not only weak-minded and weak-willed, but as by consequence knavish, arrogant, grasping, dissipated, unprincipled, unscrupulous. The mass-woman also gets off badly, as sharing all the mass-man’s untoward qualities, and contributing a few of her own in the way of vanity and laziness, extravagance and foible.

Albert Jay Nock

Never Go All in Against a Witch

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family ,

Some of the grandkids were over today to complete my transformation into a beached whale.  More food appeared from heaven knows where and eggnog and desserts rounded out the meal.  And after some talk of this and that we got down to a high stakes game of Texas hold ’em.  The game was played completely for pride with no cash changing hands.  The chips were divvied up and play went on for hours with fortunes waning and waxing almost at random.  All except Camera Girl.  She is not only a canny bettor but also possesses supernatural luck.  And finally, it came down to her and me.  I was holding a pair of aces and the flop was nothing to write home about.  She and I were betting very heavily.  On the turn an ace showed up.  The final card was a second queen.  We had put most of our chips in the pot and I went all in.  I showed her my two aces and she showed me her pair of queens.  Four of a kind!  I accused her of witchcraft and spent the rest of the game railing at her from the sidelines.

Luckily coffee was served shortly after the game was over and I could gracefully move on from my somewhat unsportsmanlike behavior to my more dignified pose as pater familia and patriarch of a great nation.  All question of who beat whom in a meaningless game of chance was left behind and more important matters took center stage.  Discussions about which were the best Christmas toys or gifts were spirited.  The remote-controlled planes seemed to be the people’s choice.  I watched some cellphone video of these battery powered wonders buzzing the neighborhood at remarkable speed and surprising acrobatic agility.  The remarkable thing was how they survived the crashes I witnessed into the ground and trees.  It seems the drone revolution has reached the adolescent fraction of the American population and it is being enthusiastically embraced.  I was happy to see that these flying wonders did not include munitions of even the mock variety.  A small victory for world peace.

Tomorrow is work.  But I’m hoping it will be a short week and I’ll be able to extend the family fun a while longer while the kids are still off from school next week.  It’s heartening to see that simple games and food can still serve as an adequate excuse for fun.  No video games were played.  We even left the television off.  Sibling rivalry and parental scolding were not absent and some folks were too drowsy from food to avoid snoozing on recliners but for the most part the generations showed sufficient tolerance for each other to bridge the boomer/millennial/zoomer chasms of culture and conditioning.  And even that most fraught relationship, father-in-law/son-in-law was carried through with mutual regard and tolerance.  Having now been on both sides of that relationship I have equal respect for both partners in that arrangement.  It’s a strange but important set of rituals that bind up families and benefit everyone.  But for grown men it will always be a somewhat awkward interaction.  Luckily the wives and daughters can help to smooth out and buffer the whole dance.

I was thinking of writing something about the H-1B visa squabble going on.  But I’ll leave that up to various talking heads to battle it out.  Trump should be smart enough to figure out which way the wind blows on immigration, legal and illegal.  If he can’t figure it out, he’s not going to have a very productive presidency.  Instead, I’ll spend a little more time calculating the odds of getting a four of a kind in a Texas hold ‘em hand.  Now that’s an important question.

30DEC2024 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

[Isaiah’s Job; The Atlantic Monthly (June 1936) (Part 6)]

The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.

Albert Jay Nock

Tom’s World – 29DEC2024 – Sandy Springs

photog Americana, Guest Contributors, TomD ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

Speaking of homogeneous ethnic enclaves, I grew up in Sandy Springs in the 50’s and 60’s, a North Atlanta suburb populated almost exclusively by what were known as WASPS. As far as we were aware, there was no crime at all until drugs started to come into the scene, which would have been the latter half of the 60’s. But, even then, there was no evident violent crime.

I assume that this idyllic period during my formative years is behind my conviction that the present world should somehow achieve that status.

But even Sandy Springs doesn’t exist any more except in name. The monster that metro Atlanta has become ate it decades ago. The woods behind the neighborhood containing the abandoned POW camp have been replaced by high rise offices; the quarry with the lake at the bottom where we kids used to take our .22’s to shoot water snakes is long ago filled in..

And I’m of an age where I won’t exist a lot longer either but that’s okay. It seems that my world is gone and some nightmarish creation taken its’ place.

An Object Lesson in Civics

photog Camera Reviews, Country Music Reviews, Current Events, Music Reviews, Photography Reviews, Trump , , ,

I was getting together with some New York City friends.  We were at a local Chinese restaurant that we have been known to frequent.  Full disclosure, I had the chicken chop suey because the kung pao chicken is too spicy so soon after my Christmas gorge fest.

We eventually got around to talking about Daniel Penny and his surprise acquittal by a New York City jury.  And then we talked about mayor Eric Adams and his trouble with the FBI.  It was agreed that he was being targeted not because he was guilty of the crimes he probably did commit but because he had complained about the outrageous scourge of illegal aliens that the city was being forced to house and feed.

I said I thought that maybe after Trump takes office, he might cut a deal with Adams to have pressure put on the judges and prosecutors persecuting Trump in exchange for a pardon on the charges the FBI has brought against Adams.  Of course, I said this tongue in cheek.  New York Democrats will never stop attacking Trump until he cuts off federal funds to New York.  So, if he helps Adams, it will only be because he wants to make a deal with Adams to deport the New York illegals.

And then we talked about New York City’s future.  Basically, the crime and dysfunction has gotten so bad that even “safe” neighborhoods like Shore Road in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn were experiencing levels of violent crime never seen before, even in the 1990s.  And outrages like the illegal alien who set a female subway rider on fire and watched impassively as she burned to death.

I asked whether it seemed likely that the disastrous conditions would elicit a powerful reaction to restore law and order and save the city.  The answer I got was no.  They felt there wasn’t the will to fix things.  The elites who sponsored Bill de Blasio and Eric Adams as mayors wouldn’t change course no matter the consequences.  The were intent on enforcing progressive policies regardless of the consequences.  Of course, my friends freely admit that these elites will eventually abandon New York City for safer suburbs once their families are at risk in the city.  And once the people with the money abandon New York City it will begin to look like Philadelphia and Newark and eventually Detroit.  So that was their take.  New York City is in its death spiral.  The crime that the Democrats unleashed after the summer of George Floyd will be the cancer that kills Gotham by the sea.

It’s a funny thing.  Several years ago, I returned home to my old neighborhood.  And it was basically unrecognizable.  The new immigrants there had taken over and made the place their own.  Well, even if it made me a little sad to see my childhood memories thoroughly erased, I could understand that it was the nature of cities like New York.  But knowing that the city would be utterly destroyed is different.  It’s completely unnecessary.  A city full of immigrants from all corners of the earth needs law and order even more than some homogeneous ethnic enclave.  Everyone needs to feel like the law is there to protect them from chaos.  The fact that the progressives have declared law and order racist is proof that they don’t deserve to govern.  But it may take the destruction of every blue city to prove to everyone in this country that fact.  Oh well.

29DEC2024 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

[Isaiah’s Job; The Atlantic Monthly (June 1936) (Part 5)]

Why, if all that were so — if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start — was there any sense in starting it? “Ah,” the Lord said, “you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.”

Albert Jay Nock