Category: photog’s Corner

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

01March2024 – And Now for Something Light

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Today Camera Girl accused me of being obsessed with the depressing politics of our dystopic world. I readily agreed. And I discussed with her some of the things that cause me to obsess about current events; pediatric transgender surgery, millions of illegal aliens crowding our streets, officially sanctioned anti-white hatred, double digit percent increases in the cost of everything, an epidemic of violent crime in the cities. I think I depressed her.
But she has a point. As enchanting as they are, let’s take a break from Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell and Joy Reid for just a little bit. I think it’s good to distract ourselves sometimes with pleasant things. So, I was watching for the zillionth time the beginning of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Kubrick’s impressive cinematography, the apt use of the “Blue Danube Waltz”

and “Also sprach Zarathustra”

to convey emotion and provide mood to the scenes.
I don’t tend to watch the whole movie from start to finish. Frankly the ending doesn’t work for me. It’s overly long and frankly annoying. I do enjoy the battle between HAL and the astronauts, especially the scene where Dave removes HAL’s memory chips and renders him brain dead.

I think of it as the first shot in the long war that will be fought between man and AI machines. In that sense Dave Bowman is an heroic trailblazer pointing the way to what we will be faced with in the future. An echo of this can be heard in the Star Trek episode where Kirk must psyche the M5 computer into committing suicide.

I think about these various cinematic tropes to remind me that there was a time when humans and specifically Americans still believed that intelligence and being human were the two important traits that made our species unique and extremely interesting. There was a beauty and a joy to the way we embraced the future. There was immense optimism and confidence.
Now all those things have been systematically eliminated from our culture. Systematically and purposefully eliminated by an ideology that hates beauty and intelligence. Instead, it strives for power and control and doesn’t mind seeing humans reduced to depravity and destitution for the sake of meaningless goals like carbon zero or whatever senseless goal they are currently pursuing.
But I’m pretty sure that this ideology, in the long run, will be self-defeating. The utter stupidity of their ideas and the damage that their agenda will do to their ability to maintain a modern economy and standard of living seems to ensure that some time in the near future, those who shun their path will outstrip them in every meaningful way and relegate them to the proverbial “ash heap of history” where they will join North Korea and Cuba in worshipping their local demigods while huddling in the dark when the power is turned off for the night.
So, I’ll end with the most gung-ho, can-do attitude about human capability that I can think of from somewhat recent sf&f cinema.

Sure, it’s silly stuff but it’s in line with the optimistic vision of the American future, instead of the Greta Thunberg one.

Now Gutfeld is Stealing My Best Gags

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Here’s a Claudine Gay / Urkel gag from Gutfeld’s show last night

 

And here is my post from Dec. 21st 2023.  Below is the photo from the post.

Claudine Gay Accused of Stealing Steve Urkel’s Look

Coincidence?  I don’t think so!  Damn you Gutfeld!  The Urkel meme is one of my best.

Ah, fate is cruel.  Well, at least he steals from the best.

 

 

Update:

I’ve called Gutfeld out.  I’ve demanded on-air attribution.

https://x.com/orionscoldfire/status/1760764495721271703?s=20

Zen and the Art of Snow Removal

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In New England choosing a snow removal method is kind of like choosing a religion.  There’s the mainstream snowblower sect.  Then there are those plow guys both the ones that mount it to their family truck and the ones who buy those ATV looking vehicles that zip around after major snowstorms cleaning off people’s driveways.  They’re probably pagans or something.  Then there are the hardliners who own a tractor to which they can attach plows, blowers, even trailers in which the snow can be collected.  These guys are ready for the apocalypse.  And finally, there are the fundamentalists; the shovel guys.  To them moving the snow is the punishment we all deserve.

A week ago, I was walking in the haunted forests and swamps of Dunwich and observing the first little buds and leaves opening up on all the thorn bushes, briars and poison ivy vines.  But now there’s eight inches of snow out there again!

And so, I spent Tuesday and today on snow removal.  I skipped Wednesday because, dammit I’m an American.  My weapons were the snowblower, the snow shovel and the ice scraping shovel (technically it’s a roofing shovel used to scrape the shingles off a roof, but it’s really good for smashing and scraping ice off a driveway).  And I got all of the top driveway done and the lower driveway so-so.

And that’s just in time for tonight’s predicted one to four inches of new snow.  Now what kind of prediction is 1-4 inches?  When the maximum is 400% of the minimum it shouldn’t be called a prediction.  Clueless guess is probably closer to the truth.  But the last five hours of snow removal has brought me back to the zen-like state that eventually sets in near the end of a New England winter.  And this is even true during extremely mild winters as we’ve had the last three or four years.  Because an inch of ice can cause more grief and work than two feet of dry snow.  In the zen state you abandon the idea of gritting your teeth and pushing through until spring.  It’s too long.  There are still seven weeks until snow is unlikely.  So, you must embrace the crappy weather and become one with it.

And so there I was, lavishing loving attention on asphalt that needed the snow coaxed off of it with a light, almost delicate touch to the shovel at just the perfect angle to get it to peel off the pavement.  I experienced ineffable contentment as I worked down the driveway six inches at a time.  I had become a snow clearing zombie.  And I loved Big Brother.

As you can tell I’m suffering from the last stages of cabin fever and I’m contemplating warning Camera Girl to abandon the Compound until spring when hopefully I’ll regain my sanity.  She knows my weaknesses and it’s just too reminiscent of Jack Nicholson’s portrayal of Jack Torrance in the movie version of “The Shining.”  If I do go berserk, I won’t use the weapons that Jack Torrance took up (a fire axe in the movie and a roque mallet in the book).  I will instead embrace my most formidable weapon, bad puns.  The poor woman.

Anyway, I’m enjoying the posting of my novel fragment.  It’s cathartic to put it out in the real world and get feedback.  I’ve been trying to figure out a strategy to get it in the public eye.  I’m thinking about putting it on a crowd-funding site to see how much visibility that would give it.  If anyone knows which sites are best for our side of the political spectrum, please chime in.

You and Here

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Because of their neurological abnormalities many Leftists are truly miserable people and therefore pathologically envious of normal people for being happy.  And that’s why a big part of the leftist project is to make us miserable.

Taking the fun out of our lives is a very big part of their work.  That is specifically why they are always in our faces about everything they don’t want us doing.  We can’t enjoy sports or activities or entertainment the way we want to because they have to decide how those things get done.  And worst of all they say we can’t do them without their participation.  And that’s why they especially hate things that they can’t share in.  That’s why shooting ranges and normal families are anathema.  Those things are bad fun because they exclude them categorically.

And so, whenever we are happy, in a real sense, we are measurably hurting the leftist project.  So, there is the justification for the “pursuit of happiness.”  But over the last half century it’s gotten harder and harder to just enjoy life.  Too many components of it have been compromised and degraded by the Left.

But that makes it more important than ever to find the means to bring joy into our lives.  Even if you are a “happy warrior,” fighting the culture war 24/7 is not a recipe for hilarity.  Sure, mocking the Left can be fun to some extent but there is a definite tendency to become a grim, glum purveyor of gloom and doom.

And I find that this very syndrome has infected me to a greater extent than I like.  And thinking about it today I realized I need to begin prioritizing a lot more fun into my week.  Chronicling the outrages of the week is mostly a dour and depressing occupation.  Even schadenfreude over some leftist’s misfortune is a weak substitute for some constructive endeavor or even some mindless fun like watching a goofy movie.

As I’ve said previously, I’ll be trying to wean myself off the outrage stuff.  To start with I think I’ll start publishing parts of my stories on the site and adding more content on creative topics like photography and science fiction/fantasy.  I’ve lately been reading about how difficult it is to get genre fiction discovered on Amazon because the algorithms are specifically calibrated for authors who release materials exclusively through the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program.  In addition, the algorithms are optimized for book series that release a new volume every month.  For that reason, authors now write at least three series novels in advance in order to get noticed by that algorithm.  Now this sounds like madness to me.  Following that logic, an author should probably write a decalogy series all at once before finding out whether anyone wants to read it.  And in fact, it seems that a really mediocre series has a much better chance of being a hit than a single novel even if it is remarkably well-written and interesting.

Well, we do live in a strange world.  So, I figure I should start putting my stuff out there and at least have the satisfaction of publishing it on my own platform.  At least I’ll get some constructive feedback from the sf&f fans on the site.  And it’ll be fun.

H. L. Mencken is quoted as defining puritanism as, “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”  And I think he was exactly right.  We need to enjoy life.  We will still have to fight the culture wars but we can’t put our lives, our happiness on hold until we win.  So let the someone, somewhere being happy be you, here.

Guest Contributor – Ed Brault – 17JAN2024 – Vermont Driveway Survival

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Before we escaped the Peoples’ Republic of Vermont, I would stretch a poly tarp over my car. This covered the windshield, side windows and the door locks. A couple of bungie cords kept it tight. Come out in the morning, or night, and pop it off and the ice/snow/frost came with it. No scraping, and especially no fumbling trying to get keys into frozen locks. (Yes, this was back in the Ice Age when I was a specialist in stone knives and bearskins.)

G-Block Superactinide Bling

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Since Valentine’s Day is coming up I told Camera Girl to be on the lookout for any man jewelry she could get for me made of unbihexium

Unbihexium is a hypothetical stable super heavy element with an atomic number of 126.  Now granted it’s never been detected anywhere either naturally or at CERN but a good wife should always use her shopping acumen to assist all of her husband’s purchasing goals.  So I’ve told her to be on the lookout for a star sapphire mounted in a pinky ring of unbihexium.  And I told her it wouldn’t hurt if there was a spiral galaxy at the center of the star.  Hey we all can dream right?

Unbihexium is supposed to exist at the magic number for stable super heavy elements.  Apparently some astrophysicists are theorizing that the existence of very heavy elements in second generation stars points to the existence of super heavy elements being produced in some kind of ultra-ultra super duper supernova events that would be needed to produce these elements.

I know, I know I should be talking about Iowa or Joe Biden but as you know I’m trying to put off suicide for the foreseeable future.  So, unbihexium!

 

 

Ah Really, Aurelius?

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So here I am in the ems.  And next up (almost) is Marcus Aurelius Antoninus.  Yes that Marcus Aurelius.   And really, I’m a big fan.  Holding back the fall of the Roman Empire for almost twenty years is nothing to sneeze at.  I guess he does have to take a hit for being Commodus’ father and all.  I mean he really should have had him put down before he passed but it’s tough for a father to be objective about his kids.

And I like a lot of his quotes.  They are quite enlightened.  But I think sometimes he goes too far.  For instance:

“Everything that happens is either endurable or not. If it’s endurable, then endure it. Stop complaining. If it’s unendurable . . . then stop complaining. Your destruction will mean its end as well.”

“Your destruction will mean its end as well“?  What the hell!

I mean he was a military man.  How about fighting against both the endurable and the unendurable?  Can’t we ever push things out of fate’s hands?

Well, anyway, he’s going to donate several weeks of quotes to the site so I’m grateful.  But I think there should be a limit to just how much silent resignation even a stoic has to exhibit.  Now I know he was basically an Italian so I can’t claim an exemption based on my lineage.  But I can tell you over the last eighteen centuries there has been a precipitous fall off in stoic tendencies among his descendants.  Most Italians like nothing better than to complain loud and long about just about everything happening around us.  You might say it’s our defining behavior.

I’ll end by saying I’m glad I didn’t have him for a boss.  He probably would have continuously lectured me in soothing terms to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and eventually I would have gone mad and murdered him.

Well anyway, his first quote will be January 14th (showing up the night of Saturday, January 13th).

And he really should have made Russell Crowe emperor.  It would have solved a bunch of problems.

The Decisive Moment

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Writing about Biden yesterday left a black cloud over my soul.  I must purge it with something less depressing.  So, I did some looking around for things that would cheer me up.  And I found this guy Alex at a YouTube channel called the “The Photographic Eye.”  He’s a Brit and says he’s been a professional photographer for about 30 years.  Which is fine and all that but what I found was a video he had called “Train Your Mind To See Photos Everywhere”.

So, the video is a talk on how to approach everyday items and circumstances to look for the interesting photographs hidden there.  And the images he provides as examples are mostly very mundane things; inside a city bus, a table with a partially unfinished jigsaw puzzle, details inside a restaurant or a construction site.

And the images are indeed mundane and some of them had no appeal for me as photographic subjects and yet others made me stop and look and think, “Yes, that would be an interesting shot.”

SONY DSC

As a second exercise he discussed the classic idea of “the decisive moment.”  Even a lazy individual such as myself has read enough about photography to have heard about the French street photography pioneer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his idea of identifying an optimal or even a unique moment when a photograph reveals some dramatic aspect frozen in time. But here Alex advises us to take this same idea and translate it into a mundane environment.  Maybe a train station or a street corner.  But by studying the dynamic nature of the people in that environment you may find the moment when this situation provides an optimal chance for an interesting image.  Here he says that the skill is to tune into the rhythm of the location and stop ignoring the details that we usually tune out when on a street or in a supermarket.

And his third exercise he recommended that a photographer keep a book or even capture some ideas with his phone, where he writes down ideas for future photographs.  Maybe it is a place you saw as you were driving or maybe it’s a thing you saw on tv or in a book.  His point was that ideas often occur when you haven’t got a camera or you haven’t got the time but if you can build up a list of ideas you can plan an expedition or even an indoor shoot around your neighborhood or even in your house.  But as long as you jot it down you have the chance of following up on this good idea, instead of forgetting it again.

And so, these exercises are away to develop your sense of what makes an interesting picture and at the same time to make photography an everyday activity and make it an active rather than passive activity and finally to make it fun.

And in that final aspect, his advice worked.  I grabbed my camera with my macro lens and started stalking around my living room looking for juxtapositions with nick-nacks, books and random household articles.  And before I knew it, I was having a lot of fun.  Now I haven’t reviewed any of these shots in my post processing software so I have no idea whether I’ll still think they were worthwhile once I have a chance to look at them critically.  But I can say that my excitement about taking some shots was higher than it’s been since the leaves fell off the trees this fall.

So, to hell with Joe Biden and all of his rot.  If we let him destroy this country then we probably deserve it.  But I sure as hell won’t spend every waking hour thinking about it.  Life’s too short.  I’d rather spend it looking for the decisive moment.  Or maybe just getting a really nice butterfly shot.

Weaponized Cuteness

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My five year old granddaughter, Princess Sack of Potatoes, learned “Feliz Navidad” in kindergarten.  While she was visiting I went to YouTube to play the Jose Feliciano version as an historical record for her, but opened this one by accident.

She was fascinated by this pint-sized crooner.  And so it goes for every generation.  Well, no harm done.  Her mother and her grandmother and her great grandmother had their crooners too, whether it was Frank Sinatra or Paul McCartney or whatever singer was out there.  But so soon?

 

Happy New Year’s Rockin’ Eve 2024!

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I begin this New Year’s Eve post with a public service message.

Ryan Seacrest will be hosting the 52nd (wow) annual installment of ‘Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest’ on your local ABC affiliate.  The idea of such luminaries as LL COOL J & Cardi B joining the lineup of performers including Rita Ora, Megan Thee Stallion, Jelly Roll, Sabrina Carpenter, Tyla, Multihyphenate Sebastian Maniscalco, Aqua, Doechii, Ellie Goulding, Green Day, Janelle Monáe, Loud Luxury x Two Friends with Bebe Rexha, Ludacris, Nile Rodgers & CHIC, Paul Russell, Reneé Rapp with Coco Jones, Thirty Seconds to Mars, Post Malone, who has sold over 80 million records and earned numerous awards, including 10 Billboard Music Awards, and will perform “Chemical” and finally K-Pop group NewJeans performing “Super Shy” and “ETA” all appearing on one five hour show literally takes my breath away.  But I’ve steeled myself to miss this epochal event.  I notice that Mariah Carey isn’t on the schedule.  A few years back she had a situation where her costume exploded off of her while she was being hoisted onto the roof of some building in Times Square to sing “All I Want for Christmas is You.”  They mercifully cut away in time but apparently, she never recovered.  I had also hoped that they could have released Madonna from her crypt for one last mummified rendition of “Like a Virgin” but I guess they couldn’t find enough formaldehyde to pull it off.  I also don’t see Lionel Ritchie’s name on the list which leads me to believe either he has passed away or the last of his fans has.  Ah, the changing of the guard.

I’ve decided to step in and recommend that all my readers deny themselves this pleasure.  Combining Cardi B, Megan Thee Stallion and Ludacris all in one sitting might be just too much musical talent for anyone to endure.  It would be like Mozart and Bach joining Taylor Swift on stage at the Bellagio in Vegas.  Just too much magnificence.

I don’t do New Year’s Eve parties.  And it’s probably the result of several factors.  First off, I don’t drink.  Secondly, I find loud bars or other party venues difficult to hear over.  And this despite relatively good hearing.  So, the typical large New Year’s Eve gathering doesn’t have much to offer for me.  And as far as family gatherings, it’s really not a great night to be driving home from a late party.  Usually around here, the weather is awful for driving and there are more drunks on the road that night than any other.  When the kids were still young, we’d do some kind of midnight celebration with noise makers and calling up relatives to wish them a happy New Year and then we’d have some food.  Root beer floats were the favorite of my kids.

But New Year’s Eve is a great time of the year for course correction.  Taking stock and making changes.  I was talking to Camera Girl about this and she said, “I like to call it a time for reflection.”  I then mocked her ruthlessly, “What a fabulously original way of stating it.  Do you mind if I quote you?”  She was unconcerned.  Her poise while mouthing platitudes is remarkable.

Next year will be a busy time for me.  There will be a large increase in my commitments to several annoying tasks.  March, April, October and November will be extremely unpleasant.  And I have to figure out whether I should alter my format for the website.  There will be a number of interesting stories to follow this year but as far as the daily posts a lot of what can be said, has been said and in excruciating detail.  Maybe I’ll decide to limit my output to discussion of breaking events.  This would allow me to move forward with my fiction writing which I’m embarrassed to say ground to a halt in the second half of 2023.

I think what that means for me is that I will need to create that most hated and least successful of all documents, the “life schedule.”  As an engineer I was often responsible for making and updating and reporting on a project schedule.  Usually it was done on Microsoft Project, a powerful but highly annoying program.  Of course, I have no plan to plot my life on MS Project.  Camera Girl would not stand for it.  Me trying to regiment her free-wheeling method of running her house would madden her and probably lead to my demise by any one of several domestic weapons.  Although death by deli meats is my best guess.

So, I hope to spend the next few days attempting to take stock of how I spend my time and, in some sense, “mending my ways.”  And I don’t think of this as a negative.  The environment around us is constantly shifting and for this we need to adjust.  Once a year is hardly too often for this very important activity.  Probably seasonally is the correct frequency.  Spring cleaning and fall stowing away is pretty common but I’m much too lazy for that much organization.  So New Year’s resolutions it is.

But for those so inclined have a Happy New Year’s Eve with champagne and dancing till morning.