Author: photog

If It’s Not One Thing It’s Another

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Uncategorized ,

Here in Dunwich, there are only two seasons; Winter and July.  So now in the first few days of winter there is a nostalgic feeling for the summer that was.  And we exchange stories about how one day it stopped raining for several hours and light appeared in the sky.  And we named that light, “the sun” and we danced around pointing at it and declaring it a miracle.  It’s good to celebrate the good times in our lives.

Today Camera Girl was purging the kitchen cabinets of old food stuffs.  And it made me sad.  There was a whole package of mounds bars that I really like but I forgot to eat any of them because I was on a diet.  And now just because of some fake expiration date she’s gonna chuck them.  Most unfair.

Back last year before Christmas I told her I wanted some traditional holiday treats that I remembered from my childhood.  I said I wanted chestnuts roasted on an open fire (or in the oven).  And dried figs.  This really annoyed her because she said this was “a stupid idea.”  Now she says that a lot about my ideas so I don’t pay attention when she says it.  After I whined on about having these things for a while, she rolled her eyes and shrugged her shoulders and added them to her Christmas food list.

On Christmas Eve she handed me a pan of chestnuts and told me to cut Xs in them with a very sharp but poorly designed knife she kept for just such an occasion.  And after cutting my thumb several times and her preparing and cooking these delicacies, every last one of them turned out to be rotten.  And when I tried one of the figs, I suddenly remembered why they were always left over after Christmas.  It’s literally like chewing on vulcanized rubber.

So, today, seven months later these same figs are going to be donated to the flock of turkeys and the murder of crows that Camera Girl attracts to her bird feeding area.  Now, I’m no fan of these avian moochers that live off of my hard-earned dollars but even I feel pangs of guilt about what might happen if one of these neo-dinosaurs manages to swallow any of these figs.  Besides the obvious risk of bowel obstruction and subsequent agonizing death, there is the very real risk of radical mutation.

Anyone who has watched as many radioactive mutation movies as I have knows what happens when you combine backyard wildlife with atomic energy.  And nobody is going to tell me that those figs aren’t some kind of atomic mutation gone terribly wrong.  They’re probably a product of Kazakhstan and were the result of fallout being used as insecticide.

Well anyway, I tried to warn her.  And when she ignored me, I went outside and spoke directly to the crows.  I warned them.  More than once.  Of course, I didn’t bother with the turkeys.  They’re idiots.  But the crows are intelligent.  I only hope they believed me.  Otherwise within a week; or at most two, there will be sixty-foot-tall crows lurching around those bird feeders.  And two-hundred-foot-tall turkeys too.  And let’s be honest.  I’ve always been a little unfriendly toward these flying rats.  With the odd pebble chucked now and then and the unkind epithet thrown from time to time I’m not exactly on their nice list if you catch my drift.

Now Camera Girl has nothing to fear.  She’s a regular St. Francis of Assisi to the local wildlife and they practically work for her.  But me, not so much.  I’ve been considering my options.  I think my best bet is to make some kind of crow suit.  Since they’ll be so big, I can hope that maybe they won’t be able to tell that it’s fake.  I think I can imitate the caws and squawks that they make.  The only thing is they might not believe that a crow can drive a car.  Or cut the lawn.  And they may think it’s suspicious that I never fly.  But maybe if I make believe that one of my “wings” is broken maybe that will work.  The other problem is they may think I’m a hatchling and carry me back to their gigantic nest.  Would I be forced to subsist on road kill that they provide me?

So, you can see I live in fear.  My only other option is to go out to the bird feeder and eat one of the figs myself and become the Amazing Colossal photographer.  It would be a horrible existence.  I’d have to turn an old circus tent into a loin cloth and it’s a cinch I’d always be banging my head on bridge overpasses.  But I guess it’d be better than to end up eaten by a giant turkey.  So that’s my plan.

Of course, I could just do nothing and hope that none of that stuff will happen.

Hmmm.

You know what, never mind.

David Brooks Admits the Truth

photog Current Events , ,

They know.  We know they know.  They know we know that they know.

The only question is when it all blows up.

What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?

“Daniel Markovits summarized years of research in his book “The Meritocracy Trap”: “Today, middle-class children lose out to the rich children at school, and middle-class adults lose out to elite graduates at work. Meritocracy blocks the middle class from opportunity. Then it blames those who lose a competition for income and status that, even when everyone plays by the rules, only the rich can win.””

…

“But there’s a larger context here. As the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell wrote decades ago, “History is a graveyard of classes which have preferred caste privileges to leadership.” That is the destiny our class is now flirting with. We can condemn the Trumpian populists all day until the cows come home, but the real question is when will we stop behaving in ways that make Trumpism inevitable.”

03AUG2023 – Make a Start, Make a Start

photog Current Events, OCF , ,

So, what to write about today.  Today was a day to get back on the exercise track.  I’ve been playing around with switching up the lat-machine and barbell patterns and reintroducing the rower.  The rower tends to aggravate my back so I dropped it about six months ago but I have a theory that if I improve my form then it won’t tweak my back.  Today my back’s a little sore but I’m telling myself that it’s not bad enough to shut down the experiment.  Well, we’ll see.  I’m mixing high rep, low weight with high weight, low rep sets with the rower in between for aerobic balance.

And I know nothing about exercise or how it should be done but after starting the weights a few years ago I haven’t managed to injure myself so I’m pretty satisfied that the benefits I’ve seen justify the effort and that I should continue to do it by trial and error.

Yesterday’s red pill about the truth of the regime we’re living under was a bit of a downer.  So today I want something more upbeat.  But what?

I was thinking of reviewing the movie “Glengarry Glen Ross” that I was watching last night.  It’s a movie that I watch every few years because I once worked in a boiler room sales operation that was similar to the one in the movie and I can attest to the accuracy of the portrayal but it’s such a bleak, black comedy that it would just continue the black mood I was in.  But surprisingly, the movie and my real-life experience with the dark side of the marketplace ended up having the opposite effect on me.  So instead of reviewing the movie I wanted to think about the basis of the movie.  Selling.

And this positive outlook appeared because I remembered what it was like dealing with an insane workplace reality and I remembered that the lesson I learned was that these dysfunctional places were fake.  They were diseased simulations of real things that functioned correctly.  And so, the trick was to distinguish the differences and avoid the fake.  In the film, the salesmen are selling worthless real estate to unsophisticated people.  The various salesmen use slightly different variations on a hard sales pitch that attempts to get the buyers to believe that an incredible investment opportunity existed if they would buy this land immediately.  Otherwise, the opportunity would disappear forever.

The reality of course, is that the opportunity would exist indefinitely because the supply of worthless land was inexhaustible and the value of the property was completely imaginary.  So, these salesmen had an impossible job.  They were essentially robbing people of their hard-earned savings.  And every day they had to start again from scratch because none of their buyers would ever be return customers or provide testimonials as satisfied customers.  And that is the tension in the movie.  There is a mandate to increase sales and the only difference between the successful and unsuccessful salesmen is their skill at lying.  Al Pacino’s character has an innate sense of the psychological tendencies of his “marks.”  He knows how to make buying his product an exciting experience.  He is selling himself.  The other salesmen are not as gifted.  Their patter sounds hackneyed and unconvincing.  Their appearance belies their claims that they are highly successful and providing a valuable service.  The movie shows us the evil side of selling.

But experience with the marketplace will show you that there are also people that provide the real thing.  These are people who have products that have real value.  If you need a manufactured product and must pay a large sum to have something custom made, you need to know that the manufacturer is competent and, just as important, honest.  And truth be told, the only way to know the difference between the real and the fake is by long painful experience with the marketplace.

You have to know who’s out there.  You have to have dealt with the whole gamut of vendors and manufacturers and know who now has the quality craftsmen working for him and who is no longer spending the money to keep up his quality either in terms of components or craftsmen.  And the same goes for almost any product.  There is real and fake.  And the only way to learn the difference is by knowing your craft and sometimes by painful experience.  But a part of it is knowing people.  It’s funny, but the stereotypes about the dishonest salesmen are actually true.  Most of the time you can read the conman by his patter and his facial expression.  But that’s assuming you know enough about the product you’re buying to force him to lie.

And that raises another truth.  Caveat emptor.  Don’t buy things that you can’t rate.  Understand the qualities that define the thing you’re buying.  Educate yourself.  Don’t tempt a merchant by your ignorance.

But the encouraging thing is that there are still a lot of decent people selling their products and services.  And if you do your homework, you’ll find them.  And if you don’t, you’ll get sold some underwater real estate in Florida by Al Pacino.  And you’ll deserve it.

I’ll save that review of the movie for another day.