Category: photog’s Corner

Here you will find the stuff that shouldn’t be mixed in the other categories but interest me. caveat emptor.

Return and Roundup

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner , , ,

I have returned from the Great White North!  I had a quick get-together with the Coffee Walk Brotherhood.  Much booze was imbibed and many cigars were smoked (not by me) and much wet wood was forced to burn using mass quantities of medium length hydrocarbons.  It was a great success with midnight bull sessions and even some very good guitar and singing from the two musicians in the gang.

It ended off with a hearty breakfast while the television aired Caddyshack in all its 1970s glory (“Yo, Lama, how ‘bout somethin’ for the effort?”).  So, after a total of about eight hours of driving I return to the Compound a tired but spiritually enhanced individual after communing, consulting and otherwise hobnobbing with my fellow wizards.

Unfortunately for me I have two very long days Monday and Tuesday so my output will still be constrained but on the positive side I finished my initial re=read of my book and found some clarity for my march to completion and publishing (yaaay!).  Anyway, here I go.

So, the dissident right community has had an outpouring of grief over the passing of the ZMan.  I’m interested to see if his readers find a way to keep their community intact.

I saw that the Supreme Court provided some relief to the Trump administration on the endless lower court injunctions against his immigration and other efforts.  I haven’t had a chance to read much on the details but supposedly it will now require class-action law suits to allow these judges to foul up the works.  Maybe this will slow down the interference somewhat.  But we’ll have to see.  And I saw the good news that SCOTUS ruled that parents of school children can opt out of public-school LGBTQ indoctrination classes and “learning materials.”  Good for them.  It’s part and parcel with the first amendment and freedom of religion.  Hopefully this can be built upon to rein in the blue states.

As for the Israeli/Iran war it looks like Trump may have been able to thread the needle and tamp down the fires.  Anyway, let’s hope so.  Maybe this will force him to end our support for that other war that’s raging out of control.  But I’m not holding my breath.

And finally, here we are almost halfway through Donald Trump’s first year in his last term and it seems he’s starting to make a dent in the “resistance.”  I think it is now apparent that ignoring the Left’s whining and temper tantrums and just going forward with his priorities (like deporting illegal aliens and forcing changes in the trade imbalance and off-shoring of jobs) is a winning strategy both objectively and optically.  Keep it up Mr. Trump!

So here I am at the brink of July but my calendar is cluttered with annoying responsibilities in the short term.  Hopefully by Wednesday the clouds will have parted and serenity and summertime relaxation will be reestablished.  But regardless, we must soldier on.  Okay, I’m halfway back to normalcy and the universe hasn’t exploded around me so I’ll call it a win and move on.  Next!!!

You Have to Acknowledge the Losses

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

I’ll be travelling Saturday and Sunday.  I’ve got a meeting with the boys up in northern New England.  I’m driving up Saturday morning and driving home Sunday late morning.  Then I have two long days at work Monday and Tuesday.  So, posts will be on a best-efforts basis.

But my life has always been (from my point of view) on a best-efforts basis.  None of us has much (if any) control over the vicissitudes of life.  The weather, our health, the actions of family, friends and especially enemies and total strangers intervene to make the best laid plans of mice and men playthings for the gods.

So, all that is true.  But working our way through all of the twists and turns of life is infinitely compelling.  Even if we have a mundane, even boring week we hear about someone’s disaster, someone’s tragedy.  Someone sentenced to death, someone struck down with awful injury.  And when these are good friends; good people, you’re stunned for a second, “How could that be?  I just saw him.  He was solid and animated; busy!  How could he be dead or dying?”  But very soon he’s gone.  Pretty soon you struggle to remember details of recent visits.  People fade out of our lives.

Well, it’s a matter of bandwidth.  I can only concentrate my mind on a very few things at a time.  So, the periphery has to stay there at the edge.  If someone I haven’t seen in almost exactly fifty years dies, even tragically, only a moment can be spared to acknowledge the loss.  You can only hope that the last fifty years were packed with significance and striving for some lasting impact on the people around him.

I guess what’s important for me is to reflect on whether I have achieved any lasting impact on those around me.  I know of at least one affirmative.  I have impacted Camera Girl in a lasting way.  She has been irritated by me for fifty years now.  That’s got to be significant to her!  To a lesser extent I’ve left some impact on my children and an even more tenuous impact on their children.  I’ve had friends and family in my life.  That counts for something.

Well, I guess it’s the nature of life that as we age, we begin to anticipate death.  How will it intersect with life?  How much warning will there be?  I’ve known some people who were terrified of it.  I’ve known others who were serenely calm about it.  I remember many years ago as a teenager I was working in a hospital and I asked a middle-aged man why he was in the hospital.  He smiled at me and said, “I’ve got a touch of the C.”  I looked at his chart later and he had metastatic bone cancer.  He died a day later.  But he took it all in stride.  So, there is a continuum of human attitude toward mortality.

Recent events around me have got me thinking of such things.  I used to say that the break even point in life is fifty.  If you were allowed fifty years of healthy life then you couldn’t rail against fate as having played you dirty.  If you didn’t dawdle fifty would allow you to raise a family and leave a mark on the world.  Of course, as you get older you can see how sixty and seventy enhance the satisfaction of seeing the future come to fruition.  But the fifty number still makes sense to me as a break-even point.

Okay, enough maudlin sentiment.  Mortality is a fact of life.  But every once in a while, something around you catches your attention and you realize that the stage is changing.  Faces appear and then disappear.  You have to acknowledge the losses.

Dunwich Slips Into Permanent Dumb

photog Country Music Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, Music Reviews, photog's Corner, Photography

Dunwich is a strange place.  Although most humans here appear to be sentient, they’re not.  Many of them continue to breath and move and even talk without even the tiniest shred of gray matter.

First Selectman Cthulhu called a town meeting last night and tried to explain why they should finally vote to accept the 2025/2026 budget during this third referendum.  But regardless of how many citizens he ate, they would not agree to a budget.  Finally after he was developing acid reflux, he asked them why they would not agree.  Their spokeswoman was a vapid forty-something who stood her ground and said, “Why do we need a budget?”

Cthulhu was so flabbergasted by this lack of understanding that he dropped the six Whatleys he was about to swallow and just broke down and wept.  Finally he composed himself and just walked off right through the south wall of town hall and hasn’t been seen since.

In his absence I took it upon myself to explain to this rube just how government worked.  I explained that a budget allowed us a framework for stealing the public’s money and also provide a basis for increasing this theft on a yearly basis.  This actually worked and she thanked me for the clarity of my explanation.

Seriously, this question was actually raised at a town meeting, “Why do we need a budget?”  I think the millennials have reached that point where maintaining a viable civilization is very doubtful

21JUN2025 – An Interesting Day

photog Book Reviews, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , ,

A recent post called “Where Will We Be in 2,500 AD”  reminded Ed of an old song from 1969 called “In the Year 2525.”

“Remember this one?

In the year 2525, if man is still alive

If woman can survive, they may find

In the year 3535

 

…    (very long series of verses)   …

 

Now it’s been ten thousand years

Man has cried a billion tears

For what, he never knew, now man’s reign is through

But through eternal night, the twinkling of starlight

So very far away, maybe it’s only yesterday

In the year 2525, if man is still alive

If woman can survive, they may find”

 

And that produced this comment by me:

“I remember it well. I was in the family station wagon heading for Long Beach Island on the Jersey shore for the summer vacation when it came on the radio for the first time. I was reading a science fiction anthology edited by Robert Heinlein called “Tomorrow, the Stars.” Life was simpler then.”

Well, of course that got me thinking.  As I remembered that was a pretty good anthology.  But unfortunately, it was a trade paperback from 1969 so it fell apart about fifty years ago or so.  Curses!

But Amazon.com has some redeeming value.  I found a hard back copy (seventeen years older than the paperback I owned but in much, much better shape) and purchased it for a very reasonable sum.

And, as remembered, there are several very good stories inside; C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Silly Season,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “The Report on the Barnhouse Effect” (I forgot he was the author), Isaac Asimov’s “Misbegotten Missionary,” William Morrison’s “The Sack,” Fritz Leiber’s “Poor Superman” and several others that I still like.

So now that will allow me to enjoy some excellent short science fiction from the golden age (or was it the silver age?).

And I’ll need it.  I was reading Heinlein’s posthumously published alternate novel to his “Number of the Beast” alternate universe story; “The Pursuit of the Pankera.“  But I just couldn’t read it straight through.  Just like in the “Number of the Beast” the four main characters just talk way, way too much.  It was like an endless struggle session to see who could out-Heinlein who.  I also developed a strong antipathy for his character Hildy.  I wanted a monster to squash her when she started hectoring them.

I will admit it was better than “Number of the Beast” but I couldn’t finish that one either.  Maybe it’s me but after his illness in the ‘70’s I don’t think his writing ever recovered the vitality it had before “I Will Fear No Evil.”  Or maybe something changed in me.

But anyway, Heinlein’s picks in the anthology I’ll be rereading show good taste at least in conventional science fiction from the 1950s.  Thank goodness he didn’t have access to his continua craft in his old age and could go back and change his story selections for that anthology.  I’m not sure I’d enjoy them.

Today I also received my handy-dandy manual chain saw doo-hickey (in the same box as the book).

It’s the chain for a chain saw with carabiners on the ends to allow it to be used using human power.  I went back to my downed tree and took a three-foot length from the trunk and it only took about twenty minutes of sawing.  Of course, I took another twenty minutes of breaks to restore strength to my tired old arms but still this is a factor of ten faster than it took me to cut the last chunk using the bow saw.  My next gambit is to see if I can attach the ends of a chain to the frame of my bow saw.  That would make it more convenient to use.  Alternatively, I could imagine attaching the chain to the rear wheel of a stationary bicycle and really improving my efficiency.  I guess I’m anticipating a future without gasoline or batteries.  But I do think strangely.

Well, it was an interesting day.

The Beatings Will Continue Until Morale Improves

photog Country Music Reviews, Current Events, Life in Dunwich, Music Reviews, My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner, Photography

Today is the first day of the new OCF editorial regime.  I’ve noticed over the last year that the quality of my posts has been inconsistent.  And I believe the reason for this problem is that sometimes I’m covering old ground again.  I’ve said about all there is to say about some of the political issues of the day and I’m just banging the drum, so to speak.

And this is not a good thing to be doing.  In addition, I really need to finish my book and get it published and see if fiction writing is something I want to do.  So these two separate situations point me to a change in the way I run my website.  I’ll continue to post the photo and quote of the day, same as always.  As far as a daily post, I’ll put something up but if I don’t have a topic that’s truly crying out to be covered then I’ll put something else up.  Maybe some photos that I like or a link to a song or a video that caught my attention.  This will free up more of my time for fiction writing and it will prevent me repeating myself and boring the readers.

I think this is a good idea and I expect it to improve the site significantly.  Anyway, I’ll give it a try and see how it goes.

Summer Solstice 2025

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family , ,

June 20, 2025 at 10:42 PM EDT is the Summer Solstice.  This is a point of inflection for my year.  For the last couple of months, the longer days temporarily color my mood brighter.  Added to this is the knowledge that the days are still getting even longer.  Even if the weather is often not optimal, I revel in the astronomical ascendancy of the Sun.

But starting on June 21st the days will be growing shorter.  Now granted this is the fairest time of the year.  The sun is tropical and the heat sears into my soul.  And this is like an elixir of youth for my tired old bones.  But psychologically I recognize that the rollercoaster has reached the top of the highest peak and for a split second it is poised between rising and falling.  Just long enough for us to look around and see heaven around us just before the bottom drops out of the ride and we plummet back to Earth.

And so, for the next two months I drink in every photon of sunlight and revel in kids free from school and looking to fill up their time with play.  I see that there’s a new Superman movie coming out soon.  Maybe it’s a woke nightmare.  Maybe Superman is a Biden/Harris supporter.  But maybe he’s still fighting for truth, justice and the American way.  I’ll find out.  And if it’s any good I’ll bring the kids.  We’ll spend way too much money on lousy popcorn and watery soda.  But We’ll get to debate the strengths and weaknesses of the 2025 son of Krypton.  Who knows, maybe he’ll surprise me.  Or maybe we won’t see it because the reviews are terrible.  But we’ll find stuff to do.

I have a feeling this is the summer we do some fishing.  Dunwich is mostly soggy so there are plenty of lakes and ponds full of what pass for bass and trout.  I think I can get most of them to cast a line in the water.  I haven’t been fishing in twenty-five years.  That’s a long time.  I think it’s time I did.

Objectively speaking, I’m a relic.  I’m much closer to the end of my life than the beginning and now I can actually feel it.  Even maintaining my present vitality requires discipline and work.  And even that is a matter of delaying the inevitable.

And yet, every day is a gift.  We interact with our fellow creatures and try to be useful and positive.  Encouraging the young and facilitating the efforts of those trying to make it a better place.  Those are things that even a relic can accomplish.

So, here’s the official beginning of Summer 2025.  I will do my darndest to make this a successful season for me and Camera Girl and the rest of the clan.  I’m looking forward to all of my rituals and all of the little joys of summer.  Barbecues, local baseball, fireworks, the Dunwich Fair, Fourth of July, Labor Day and all the rest.  We’ll make sure we feel the sun before it retreats back into the hell that is New England Winter.

At least, that’s my plan.  Enjoy.

Bullet Ants Won

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner, Reclaiming the Family

Today Camera Girl put me in charge of two of my grandsons one nine and one twelve, for one hour.  She had fed them twice and occupied them all morning with games and movies.  She just needed enough time to start up her dinner and clean up after their plates and bowls.  So, I said, “Sure, no problem, we’ll go shoot some pool.”

So down to the first floor and the pool table.  After they fought for five minutes about who would break, we began the game.  But apparently watching each other (and me) take our turns was too infinitely boring.  I attribute this time dilation to the bowls of ice cream they had just inhaled.  Glucose, sucrose, lactose and galactose were coursing through their blood streams at concentrations that reduced their attention spans to milliseconds at most.

So, they started wandering around looking for something to fiddle with.  First, they found the lat-machine.  I only had a hundred pounds on the cable but neither of them weighs close to that much.  So, I see them suspending themselves from the bar.  And then I notice they’re swinging from it and I have to step in, “Hey, hey cut that out you’re gonna get hurt!”  Finally, they listen and move on to the weight bench so I have to start yelling again.  That’s all I need is for one of them dropping the bar on a foot or something.

So, we compromise and they start taking turns on the rowing machine.  At first, they’re still taking a turn at the pool table but soon enough they’re just cycling back and forth between them doing a couple of hundred meters each on the machine.  Having been completely abandoned at this point I cleared the table and came over to where they were rowing and watched as they amused themselves with something that I considered tedious exercise.

Mercifully, after a half hour, they wore off their sugar high and we went back for another game of pool before starting back upstairs.  With twenty minutes left I convinced them to take a walk around the yard.  They put on their rain boots and we walked around in the soggy air.  It was gray and humid but walking is always good therapy for kids.  It engages their muscles and makes them receptive to speech.  I asked them about their plans for the summer.  They had none.  I asked them what they were doing tomorrow.  They said swimming in my pool.  This was news!  I said, “Okay, let’s just check with your mom.”

Then they found a small rubber ball and began an impromptu game of soccer.  It quickly became animated and eventually spirited (violent and combative).  Then the ball ended up in the pond (swamp) and that was that.  By that point, Camera Girl came looking for us.  My hour was up.  I had fulfilled my responsibility honorably and she released me from bondage.  Now they would spend another two hours watching a movie about dragons and warriors and then head home for dinner.

But the movie ended about a half hour earlier than their departure time so they began to get antsy.  Camera Girl was trying to stop them from playing soccer in the living room so I tried an experiment.  I turned on the movie “Them!”  Well, it was like hypnotism.  As soon as the black and white image of the New Mexican desert appeared on the screen, they became catatonic.  They sat down and didn’t make a sound.  I knew there wasn’t enough time to reach the good stuff so I advanced the DVD to the first ant attack.  Adolescent boys and giant ants.  Magic.

It is remarkable how much mental energy is expended herding adolescent boys.  They have an amazing propensity for changing gears and battling each other.  But herd them we must.  Letting them get bored is a big mistake.  Their ability to get into trouble is remarkable.  Without supervision and organized activity, the number of broken windows and smashed electronic equipment would become prohibitively expensive.

On the drive home, we spent the time discussing whether giant carpenter ants were less deadly than giant army ants or giant bullet ants.  Bullet ants won.

All God’s Children

photog photog's Corner, Religion ,

Over the course of the last thirty years more and more exoplanets have been “discovered.”  In most cases the astronomers use changes in stellar light output measured by their instruments to infer the diameter of a planet transiting in front of its star.  And what they’ve discovered is there are thousands of these planets.  In fact, they seem ubiquitous.  Everywhere we look we find them.

And this has convinced an awful lot of people that life must be ubiquitous in the universe too.  And that intelligent life must be common too.  This would go a long way to encouraging the crowd who believe that human beings are nothing special and any belief in the divine origin of the human race is completely unfounded.  The story goes we’re just some monkeys that got a little smarter than the other monkeys and have become a blight on the face of “Gaia.”

I have to say, I completely disagree.  I look at the Earth and compare it to the other planets in our solar system and I’m struck by how many factors conspire to make Earth a paradise while leaving all of the other planets different flavors of hell.  Everything from the effect of our large satellite, to the strength of the magnetic field to the balance between elements and compounds that make up the oceans and atmosphere, to the exact orbit of Earth around the Sun.  And that’s not to mention the remarkable way terrestrial life has shaped the environment in remarkable ways.  Plant life has increased the oxygen content of the atmosphere and life has changed the environment in innumerable ways.

And then we have the fossil record demonstrating the prodigious changes that have gone on for billions of years to produce the current flora and fauna of this remarkable world.  From the one-celled origins of life to the present-day complexity of creatures as varied as hummingbirds and blue whales; birds of paradise and Siberian tigers; dragonflies and giant pandas.  And us.

I’m sorry, I cannot believe that all this is just the random result of fermions and bosons rattling around the aftermath of the “big bang.”  To quote the immortal words of Vizzini, “Inconceivable.”  And I know he was dead wrong every time he said it but that is my rock bottom intuition.  All of this is purposeful.  All of this was directed.  We are here because life has meaning and human life is the soul behind the giant mechanism.  We are the witness and the object for which the whole dizzying array was created.

We are the guests of honor in a parade that stretches out to the detectable limits of the universe and back and forth in time from, “Let there be light” to the end of “Revelations.”  We’re here to make sense out of the wonders of creation and to use them to figure out the full potentialities of the human mind and soul.

And I don’t believe for a minute that we’ll destroy ourselves utterly.  History has shown just how stupid and cruel we can be.  Humans can be more vicious than any predator.  There are no depths we can’t sink to.  But that is lowest part of our nature.  We have not yet begun to figure ourselves out.  We’re still ignorant children.  But we will grow up and we will grow out of our ignorance.  And then we will become what we are supposed to be.  God’s children.

There’s Gotta Be

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

Now all the stuff comes at us left and right.  Today is Father’s Day and that’s great.  But also, I went to the high school graduation commencement ceremony for one of my grandsons.  It was raining so we were sitting in raincoats on chairs covered in plastic with another sheet of plastic over our legs.  So, it wasn’t exactly relaxed and carefree.  But you come out to support the family and these ceremonies have their logic and things will go according to this logic.  There are the two main speeches by the kids with the best grades and there might be a poem from the poet laureate (imagine, at eighteen!).  And all that’s fine.  It’s all about beginnings and endings and growing up and moving out into a larger world.  And that’s great.  The kids are thinking about all the friends they’ve made and all the growing up they’ve done and being excited for the future.  None of the sentiments are all that original.  But that’s not the point.  For the adults it’s nostalgic and for the kids it’s marking the day and saying goodbye to childhood.  All good.

But then they send up this girl whose speech is associated with some kind of a prize.  Maybe the speech was what won her the prize.  Although if that were true, I have to wonder who is in charge of the curriculum at this high school.

First of all, it was way too long.  The valedictorian’s address took about seven minutes.  This other thing seemed to go on and on.  Of course, maybe it just seemed to go on for hours.  The thesis was that the classroom was the only place where she was happy.  And she hammered away at all the other parts of life where she was unhappy.  Home with her family, between classes at school, at events with “friends,’ working on projects with her classmates and interacting with other people in general.

She described how only in the classroom did she feel accepted and valued by those around her.  Her family, her friends, her classmates in general and just random members of the human race made her feel unappreciated and negatively valued.

After this had gone on for what seemed forever Camera Girl and I looked at each other with the same expression, “What the hell is this!”  So, I looked around and I could notice at least a few of the spectators had a pained confused expression.

Finally, it ended and there was applause but compared to even the poet laureate it was short and half-hearted.  Later on, I was thinking about this speaker.  She was sort of odd looking.  Short, heavy, noticeably unattractive and her expression was a sort of grimace.  And I wondered whether her speech had been vetted by whoever is in charge of the commencement.  I’m guessing not.  Maybe that’s part of academic freedom.  The speakers are free to say whatever they want.  Well, if that’s so then I would at least hope they would make an effort to choose for speakers only those who weren’t undergoing a mental breakdown.

Honestly, I wouldn’t allow someone that morose to speak in front of a crowd of high school students and their friends and family.  It might convince them that the faculty and the administration were nuts too.  I think this girl is symptomatic of the general breakdown of mental health in this generation.  This girl’s maladapted view of life seems to have been selected as a virtue by whoever selected her to speak.  I think we were supposed to empathize with her point of view.  I didn’t empathize with her.  All I felt was sympathy for her friends and family for having to live with someone so messed up that sitting in a classroom was preferable to all other forms of human interaction.  I’m guessing she is part of the LGBTQ “community.”

I guess in a way I should take comfort from the experience.  When school ends this week, I’ll be seeing my grandkids.  And we’re bound to get along better than the antisocial nightmare I listened to.  When I see the graduate, I have to ask him what he thinks of the girl who made this speech.  There’s gotta be a story behind that trainwreck.  There’s gotta be.