Category: photog’s Corner

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

14APR2022 – OCF Update-Camera Girl Finally Frees the Slaves

photog Current Events, photog's Corner , , ,
Winter, Sony A7 III, Voigtlander 10mm f\5.6 lens, 22APR2021 – Photo of the Day

Today was a day of toil.  About a week ago Camera Girl was  in her garden, supposedly turning the soil with a pitchfork.  I say supposedly because after ten or fifteen minutes of effort the pitchfork was still stuck in the ground and the ground was having the best of the argument.

Finally she gave up and complained bitterly of her fate.  Being the gentlemanly parfait knight that I am, I mocked her.  I said, “Sure women are always saying how they can do anything a man can but apparently that doesn’t apply to pitchforks.”  She sot me a look that seemed to imply something about the quality of that night’s dinner.  So I displayed magnanimity.  I said, “You poor weak creature, I will turn the soil for you, only not today.

Well, apparently “not today” was today.  So I went out to the west field and starting singing road gang spirituals.  And to be honest, between the matted weed roots and the stupid liner that someone put in the soil was incredibly tough and heavy to turn.  But three hours of working like a hired field hand got it done.  About half way through it occurred to me that I could have rented a rototiller.  But by the end I was so satisfied with myself that it was worth it.  I showed up afterward in the kitchen drenched in sweat and covered with dirt but extremely pleased with myself.

I preened in front of Camera Girl and lectured on the difference between man’s work and woman’s work.  I mentioned that I left some clean up of weeds and liner next to the garden.  And that she should get that squared away as soon as possible.  She mumbled something under her breath but I pretended not to hear her.  Then I headed up for a well deserved shower.

Remarkably shortly after i finished working the skies opened up and it poured to beat the band.  Probably some of the seedling I put in this week may be washed away.  But some of them will make it and I ‘ve got more for next week too.  As long as we don’t have a repeat of last spring when it rained for forty days and forty nights, things will be fine in the garden.

This year we intend to grow a lot of butternut squash because Camera girl makes a great chicken soup with it.  And we’ll grow lots of zucchini and eggplant.  This year we’ll put in some thorn-less raspberries and I might move my blueberry bushes to make it easier to protect them from the birds.  Most years they get more than I do.  And I have to remember to put out the egg cases that the praying mantis laid over the winter.   I sure don’t want them hatching in the house.

So it was a work day but I’ll be sure to find something to be outraged about in the news when I check it out.  Enjoy your Thursday night.

photog Forced into the 21st Century Kicking and Screaming

photog Current Events, photog's Corner , ,

Life here in Dunwich has become complicated of late.  I need to get a new PayPal account open for a project I’m working on.  But now you HAVE to have a cell phone number to do that.  Very aggravating.  I attempted to get the cheapest plan (~$15/mo.) and the cheapest phone but now that combination has bitten me in the butt.  The phone won’t do the things that the plan needs to make it work.  I spent several hours on with technical support trying to get things working.  They sent detailed but cryptic instructions for accomplishing this.

Some of these instructions were like some kind of athletic game show event.  Turn on the phone, tap-hold an app, put it on the front screen, pull out the sim card, throw it in the air, catch it with the other hand, pat your head and rub your stomach, sacrifice a goat, say Beetlejuice three times and finally slam the phone into my forehead.  And sadly it still didn’t work.  But I’ve been accepted onto next season’s Survivor show.  Apparently they think I’m willing to do anything.

Well, so be it.  I’ll probably get a different phone or plan or both but it has allowed me to wallow in self-pity.  I actually had a nightmare last night that was probably brought on by the angst I was feeling about my status as a technophobe.  I dreamt I was designing and installing a pharmaceutical process train.  And after it was completely done I could see that it would be a death trap for the operators.  It would allow highly flammable solvent fumes to come in contact with electrical components that weren’t rated for the hazardous service.

And in the nightmare I was trying to convince management to decommission the equipment I was commissioning without ever using it.  It was one of those dreams where it’s obvious there’s no escape but you have no choice but to keep looking for the way out.  Maybe I should have blamed Putin’s Price Hike.

Well, anyway, somehow I have to resolve the great smart phone standoff and a whole list of other chores.  I’ve got to sell some old lenses, plant some seedlings, get business advice from an expert, make some insurance decisions and figure out what to write about today.  And that doesn’t include the fact that I have to catch up on the novel.  The last few days I let things slip.  Well really I’ve been trying to resolve a problem with the plot.  I need to invent some new characters.  And it has demotivated me.  But I think I figured out what to do.

And it’s raining today.  But it’s been a good few days on the site.  On Saturday and Sunday I got linked by two aggregators and that accounted for five or six hundred extra readers those days.  That was enjoyable.  So there have been some wins and some losses.  Okay.  So, on with the parade!  Maybe I’m the the Master of Ceremonies today or maybe I’m the guy with the broom and the trash can cleaning up after the elephants.  Either way, I’m moving forward.

Geometry and the War Between the Sexes

photog Current Events, photog's Corner ,

On Mondays Camera Girl is in charge of Princess Sack of Potatoes.  Which makes me her errand boy for anything that needs doing.  So today she wanted me to get the memory card from the game camera so she could show her protégé what kind of animals had eaten the food she stole from me.  Now, sure, the scraps she gives the wild beasts living in the forest are probably not premium protein anymore.  Bits of chicken fat and skin and whatever doesn’t end up on the menu for me probably shouldn’t arouse my sense of outrage.  But in these days of skyrocketing food prices, I’m acutely aware of threats to my survival.

But I digress.  I brought the memory card in and popped it in the card reader slot on my laptop and reviewed the numerous files.  But what we discovered was that Camera Girl had miscalculated the line of sight of the camera.  She threw her largesse too close to the camera’s location and thus the viewpoint was mostly above the location of the food.  Therefore, mostly what we saw were the animals before and after they were feeding and typically at the edge of the photo and moving away from the camera.

I respectfully brought this situation to Camera Girl’s attention.  But she said she did what I told her to do.  I carefully and calmly reminded her that I showed her the line where the camera would see the action but assumed she wouldn’t put the food right below the camera because it was elevated from the ground.  She told me what she thought about my assumption using a popular breakdown of the spelling of ass-u-me.

I thought this distinctly unfair.  But what I decided was to provide her with a clear target.  I said, “Do you see the pole banged into the ground?”  She said yes.  I continued, “Do you see the rainwater drain that ends near the pole?”  Again, she said yes.  I finished, “The line segment formed by the pole on one end and the end of the drain pipe as the other endpoint is the acceptable area to put the food.  Do you follow me?”  She said no.  I slowly and calmly said, “Huh?”  She said, “That’s not clear.  How will I know if it’s on that line?”

I remained calm.  I could see I was dealing with a non-Euclidean geometer and she was trying to involve me in a topological debate.  Therefore, I changed tack.  “Imagine the two points I said were the endpoints.  Instead think of them as two opposite points on the circumference of a circle.  In your mind envision a circle with those two points on the circumference.  Anyplace inside that circle will be an acceptable target for your animal slop.”  She shook her head and walked away.

So why did I write about this?  Well, I think it represents a microcosm of the male/female dichotomy.  Men use logical simplifications to model the world.  We like reasoning our way through problems.  Women want simple concrete rules to follow.  They don’t want to discuss theory.  At least that is the way women used to be.  Nowadays I’m not sure what they are.  Maybe they’ve become like men.

But even if they’ve adopted some of the practices of men I doubt if they’ve changed their nature.  There is a difference in the way the brains of men and women work.  We go about things in different ways.  And from my point of view, I think there is an advantage to this dichotomy.  These two ways of looking at things provide checks on each other.  Too much theory can lead to error based on differences between the map and the territory.  But at the same time without the imaginative leap and the simplification that modelling can provide many problems would never be solved.

I started to expound on this dichotomy to Camera Girl.  She told me the garbage pails needed to go out on the road today and walked away.  And so it goes.

25MAR2022 – OCF Update

photog My Fiction, OCF, photog's Corner

Today was a fiction writing day, or rather reading day.  I’ve reached the 25% mark on the book and so I reread the thing to see if it was any good.  Surprisingly, I thought it was very good.  I would read it!  Of course 25% is just a beginning so there’s plenty of stuff to figure out and more characters to introduce but the story is defined and the feel of the book has been established.  And the ending is coming into sharper focus.  I think I’ve decided to end this first book with a definitive bang.  It means I will have upped the ante in a really big way but I think it’s the way to go.

I figured 25% was the correct point to make sure the book wasn’t terrible.  But it also tells me I’ll have to pick up the pace.  In fact one of my friends said I need to declare a finish date and stick to that.  That seemed harsh to me which means it’s probably true.  I just checked the start date of the document and I’ve been working on this thing for six months!  So I need to pick up the pace for sure.  My goal is to finish the first draft by June 30th.  That only three months but I feel I have to push myself.  That’s about 6,000 words a week which is a good amount but not impossible.  But what it does require is at least two days a week devoted just to writing.  So discipline will need to be instilled.  Unfortunately that is my weak suit.  Well growth is painful.

Other than that today, it’s been a pretty nice day here and we went for a walk in the woods.  Camera Girl found a dead mouse near the front porch and told me how bad she felt seeing it.  I reminded her that she’s terrified of mice and that the mouse’s family is out there eating her bird seeds that fall to the ground below her feeders and living in my tool shed.  This made her shudder and she walked away greatly conflicted.  Women suffer from emotional thinking which speaks well of their sentiments but serve them poorly when it comes to taking practical steps to deal with the world.  If I didn’t put my foot down we’d have racoons, opossums, foxes and deer lvivng on the porch and the animal food bill would break me.

I haven’t seen any interesting news today.  Just the same blah, blah, blah.  I’m sure Biden will say many stupid and incoherent things in Europe this week and Putin will be blamed for almost everything since original sin reached humanity but I haven’t detected anything new going on.  When I see something good I’ll put something out.  Till then enjoy the weekend.

The Story of Amasis and Polycrates (and photog)

photog photog's Corner ,

One of my frequent readers, Ed, said that my story of lucky laziness reminded him of Heinlein’s story of the man who was too lazy to fail.  Well, to give an alternate interpretation here is the story from Herodotus that informs my expectations for the future.

Back in the fifth century B.C., Polycrates conquered the Greek island of Samos.  He made a treaty with the Pharoah Amasis of Egypt and after they exchanged gifts they corresponded and became good friends.  Now Polycrates embarked on a career as a conqueror, bringing his navy of one hundred triremes to bear, he conquered many islands and plundered the mainland.  He eventually earned the reputation for being unbeatable and protected by fate.

Eventually Amasis heard the same rumors and became concerned for his friend.  He wrote and warned Polycrates that anyone who never had any misfortunes was marked by the gods for disaster.  He recommended that to avert disaster Polycrates should take his most prized possession and cast it away so that no one could ever find it again.  Amasis felt this would save Polycrates from his fate.

Polycrates took this advice seriously.  So, he took a ship out to the middle of the ocean off Samos and in view of his men he tossed his favorite possession, a seal ring, into the deep and then headed home terribly depressed by this loss.

“But on the fifth or sixth day from this it happened that a fisherman, who had taken a fine and great fish, and desired to make a gift of it to Polycrates, brought it to the door and said that he wished to see Polycrates. This being granted, he gave the fish, saying: [2] “O King, when I caught this fish, I thought best not to take it to market, although I am a man who lives by his hands, but it seemed to me worthy of you and your greatness; and so, I bring and offer it to you.”

And of course, the ring is in the fish.  Polycrates is ecstatic and afterwards writes Amasis to relate the amazing occurrence with the ring.  When Amasis reads the letter, he knows that Polycrates is doomed and not wishing to see a friend destroyed he writes back to Polycrates dissolving their friendship.  Years later the Persian satrap of Sardis, Oroetes had Polycrates ambushed and killed.

So that story seems to jibe with my idea of how crazy good luck works.  If you have nothing but good luck then at some point you’ve got to run out.  And then the bottom drops out.  Seems fair.  Besides, the first half of life is the most fun.  If you can have that without grief, I figure it’s reasonable to go over the falls in a barrel somewhere at the tail end without squawking about it.  Anyway, that’s my take on it now.  We’ll have to see if I can be so stoic about it when the rubber meets the road.

Now the funny thing about the story is that many years ago I was on a fishing trip with my father-in-law fishing for striped bass out on Long Island.  He was literally the Old Fisherman of the Sea but for the whole day we didn’t catch anything.  Skunked.  But right at the end of the day, far off, he sees a patch of water that’s boiling with activity.  He starts up the motor and shoots over to it and we start catching huge bluefish.  We catch so many we fill up the boat.  But suddenly I notice that my wedding ring is gone.  The blue fish slime is slippery stuff and the ring must have slipped off while were fishing.  Now my father-in-law was an expert on bluefish and he assured me that a flashing gold ring would have been snapped up by such a huge school of bluefish without a doubt.  So, he laughed at me and said it was up to me to come back someday and try to catch the fish that ate my ring.  And once again my luck holds up.  If a man loses his wedding ring there’s no better way to lose it than when in the company of his father-in-law.  It’s always been a good story ever since.

Years later when I read that story in Herodotus it struck me how lucky we didn’t find the ring in any of the fish we cleaned that day.  I might have ended up like Polycrates and Camera Girl would have been a very pretty widow.

Rockefeller, Musk, photog?

photog Current Events, photog's Corner ,

In the last week or so I’ve taken the first halting steps toward setting up an on-line business.  In reality it’s sort of several businesses.  One is a self-publishing account on Amazon.  Another is a creator’s account with a photo products sales site.  And finally, there is an account with a custom photobook seller.

But of course, it’s an enormous amount of bother.  One place requires a PayPal account and I had let my account lapse this year so now I have to open a new one.  Then I have to figure out how to pay my taxes on time and whether I should incorporate and whether I should do that myself or pay a lawyer.  I also have to figure out how to advertise my products.  Of course, Orion’s Cold Fire will be central to my marketing plan.  I’ll add links to the store fronts and shamelessly hawk my wares whenever an unsuspecting reader comes looking for political commentary or brilliant movie and book reviews.

What I’ve discovered is that all this business stuff is frightfully distracting from the stuff I like to do, namely take pictures and write stuff.  But what is also true is that participating in some kind of business of your own is very exciting.  What it requires is disciplining yourself; becoming your own boss.  And for someone like me that is extremely challenging.  I have always been the worst employee anywhere I worked.  I find it extremely difficult to work in a manner that doesn’t seem logical to me.  So, if a company tried to get the engineers to perform regulatory clerical functions (that is, validation) my eyes would glaze over and my output would slowdown to a crawl.  Eventually they would be forced to provide me with an assistant who could perform the requisite paperwork handwaving to satisfy the FDA that we didn’t add Ebola virus to the batch by using the equipment I had designed, purchased and installed using good engineering practices, which I saw as my proper function.

So now it will be necessary for me to convince … me(!) that I should perform all the clerical and bookkeeping and sales and marketing handwaving that is necessary to make money in a business.  I have to confess that I’ve already had a few discouraging moments as I realized how many hoops I’ll have to jump through to coordinate all the various requirements needed to transact business in a businesslike manner.  I would much prefer just winging it and paying for my mistakes as I go along but hard experience has shown me that that can be awfully expensive.  The IRS really has no sense of humor at all.

As I embark on this journey of discovery, I find myself full of unbridled enthusiasm and unwarranted optimism.  I’m sure reality will quickly rein in my naïve ebullience and after being knocked around by cruel fate I will reach the correct mind set of all proper businessmen, callous cynicism and calculated misanthropy.

So, consider this your fair warning.  When links appear to lure you to my commercial products don’t be fooled into thinking they represent anything other than what they are; crass commercialism and the single-minded pursuit of the almighty dollar.  Come to think of it, after the fiasco with Russia, it’s not so almighty anymore.  But you get the picture.  Caveat emptor!

The History of Dunwich – Part 1 – It’s Annoying Origins

photog Humor, Life in Dunwich, My Fiction, photog's Corner , , ,

The origins of the site on which Dunwich sits are shrouded in mystery.  A mystery based on profound indifference and shoddy scholarship.  Legend claims that in the earliest epoch it was the Latrine of Yog Sothoth.  It is believed that the current stratum of bedrock is completely composed of metamorphized coprolite.  Professor Obadiah Bishop of Miskatonic University spent forty years of his academic career studying this coprolite formation and determined that it was almost entirely composed of triceratopsian dung formed from an exclusive diet of poison sumac.  This is thought to explain the funk that emanates from the ground, groundwater, crops and inhabitants of the present day site.  It is also believed to explain the almost constant, frenzied scratching that all Dunwichians indulge in.

The original human inhabitants of the area were members of the Pocnipnarrawampamuckutucs (sometimes shortened to the Muckutucs) tribe.  The Muckutucs were despised by the other tribes because they smelled awful, had thirteen fingers and two rows of teeth.

When the first European settlers arrived, they interbred with the Muckutucs and their descendants had twelve fingers.  Which was an improvement.  But no teeth.  Which was not.  Over time these anatomical oddities became the hallmark of the Dunwichian ancestry and somewhat explained their status as loathed outcasts and pariahs.  Suffice it to say that the rest of New England chose to avoid Dunwich like the plague.

But the American Revolution saw a change.  The patriotic fervor that swept through the rest of New England did not neglect Dunwich.  A company of stout Dunwichians headed up by “Captain” Nehemiah Hoadley marched east to reinforce the colonial army at Lexington.  But when the Boston regiment got a look at the Dunwich contingent approaching from the west, they abandoned their ambush of the British and blasted away at these toothless mutants, mowing them down to the last polydactylous humanoid soul.  After this Dunwich refused taxation by the US government until almost the time of the Civil War.

It was during the nineteenth century that the first truly disturbing events began to occur in and around Dunwich.  In 1824 on the site of Phineas Goodgroates’ orchard, a thousand ton, three-hundred-foot-long caste-iron cylinder fell out of the sky and flattened Phineas’s apple trees and because he was apple picking that day, flattened Phineas too.  This metallic meteor came to be known as the Codpiece of Cthulhu because of the inscription on its side identifying it as such.  The arrival of this piece of sartorial ironmongery was taken as an event of ill-omen.  Opinions varied, although with respect to Phineas all agreed it was definitely a bit of tough luck for him.

But by 1830 the populace had calmed down and normalcy reasserted itself until in the fall of that year when Caleb Sillwright’s turnip patch was similarly bombarded by the aptly named Moustache Comb of Azathoth.  At this point there were calls to abandon Dunwich altogether or at least to install some kind of gargantuan clothes rack above the town in the hope that the Elder Gods would take the hint and stop dropping their effects on Dunwich.  Luckily, cooler heads prevailed.

To be continued.

11MAR2022 – OCF Update – It’s a Blooming Miracle?

photog Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , ,

Today Camera Girl excitedly announced that one of her bulbs had bloomed in front of the house.  She said it was yellow and I couldn’t miss it.  But it was so small that I passed it three times before I finally saw it.

I tried to be as upbeat as I could be but I don’t know. I’m going to have to buy a magnifying glass and install it on top of this flower along with some signage.

It’s pretty enough.  But it’s not exactly eye-catching.  Well, it was covered by snow yesterday so maybe it’ll increase in size later on.  But I doubt it.  From now on I’ll have her read the descritions on the flowers she buys and specifically avoid ones described as microscopic.

On a different note we got our tax papers finished today and the accountant showed that we’ll get something less than three thousand dollars back from Uncle Sam and the rest of the thieves.  I intend to plow the money directly into some get rich quick scheme that involves a time machine and oil futures.  Right now the details are still coming into focus.  Or we might get the snow-blower fixed for next year.  Right now it could go either way.

Fat Tuesday and Lent

photog Humor, photog's Corner , ,

When I was an Italian American kid back in Brooklyn, Lent was a truly annoying time of the year.  Meat was taken off the menu and fish was substituted.  But being poor people, we were served this awful white fish of some sort or other, breaded and fried.  It took a lot of ketchup to make that stuff palatable.  When Camera Girl and I got married and set up our own household I was overjoyed to hear that her family wasn’t observant of the Lenten abstention.  We two decided to go for the appearance over the substance.  So, ashes on Ash Wednesday and beef, chicken and pork remained on the menu.  And when Easter arrived, I put in a request for lamb.  Now Camera Girl hates lamb so unsurprisingly it’s probably ham nine out of ten years and lamb once a decade.

You can see why for the last 45 odd years I’ve never concerned myself with Fat Tuesday.  Eating a lot of bad food just to prepare myself for Lent has no rationale for me.  But I told Camera Girl it was Fat Tuesday today and asked her what delicacy would be for dinner.  She looked at me with naked disdain and said she didn’t know yet and not to expect anything great.  This is why women shouldn’t be allowed to vote.  Their judgement is clouded by a lack of strategic thinking.  Here was her big chance to impress the boss (me) with her ability to think on her feet and all she can come up with is discouraging words.  What was needed was a big bold flexible outlook.  What I got was negativity and defeatism.  Terrible.

So, I’m forced to imagine what I might want to get if Fat Tuesday were a real thing in my home.   What comes to mind immediately is some kind of Cajun cuisine.  Some kind of gumbo or jambalaya.  Maybe something with alligator and craw daddies or whatever the hell they eat down there.  And some kind of French pastries with espresso or some other type of strong black coffee with lots of sugar in it.  I would sit out on my balcony as a parade of demented masked and costumed drug fiends shimmied by on their garish and outlandish floats and requested the crowd to throw beads at them for some perverse reason.  I see myself wearing a white suit and brandishing an ornate walking stick as I regally wave a benediction at the inebriated bacchants.  Possibly I would be entertaining a small gathering of the decadent descendants of the plantation aristocracy now reduced to the status of penniless moochers at my table.  We would discuss the antebellum origins of the Mardi Gras and the rumors of voodoo and vampirism in the neighborhood.  I would tut-tut derisively and hold court on the true goings on; the cult of Cthulhu down in the swamps and bayous and how a recently discovered stone idol proved that the re-emergence of the Cthulhu from his dream death at the bottom of the Atlantic was imminent.

Or something like that.  Well actually, Camera Girl was pulling my leg.  She’s making lentils and rice in pastiche, which in Camera Girl’s family is green peppers preserved in oil and vinegar.  Which is one of my favorites and come to think about it is a pretty good meal for Lent.  Well, forget about the whole Cthulhu thing and also the decadent plantation jazz.  Maybe I’ll have some black coffee instead.

Leptons and Bosons and Quarks, Oh My!

photog photog's Corner, Science

I was wandering around the interwebs and opened up an article that asked “What Does the Grand Unified Theory Mean?”  Okay what could I do?  I haven’t read anything much on particle physics since undergraduate days when I took a course that was called, quaintly, “Atomic Physics.”  When I signed up for the course I immediately thought in my best Bill Murray voice, “Back off man!  I’m a scientist.”

Well, the article is a rambling incoherent mess.  Which told me that my grasp of particle physics is woefully insufficient.  So I found this book on-line, Elementary Particle Physics, TIMOTHY L. BARKLOWAND MARTINL. PERL,  Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. I’m going to try and glean enough about the standard model to be able to tell if the popular accounts are at all accurate.

I put this up just in case anyone else gets the bug.