Category: photog’s Corner

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

24JUL2021 – OCF Update – Summer Event

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Ah, the great day has arrived.  The cleaning (by me!) and the cooking is all done.  An armada of tables and chairs have been arrayed with plates and silverware.  Glaciers of ice have been procured and cold beverages are resting on them.  The grass is manicured (sort of) and the hounds have been sent away for the day.  All that is needed are the guests and their appetites.  Frivolity and bom homme will abound and never will be heard a discouraging word.  But that means this will be a very slow day on the site until much later.  So my faithful readers I leave you to your own devices.  Enjoy what is touted to be an ideal summer day.

 

 

 

The Fellowship of the Betrayed

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Let’s face it, we’ve been betrayed.  Not since that fateful night in Gethsemane has anyone been treated worse by “friends.”  I suppose if we were smart, we would shut up, play the woke playbook and start collecting CRT bonus points by attending a BLM riot in black bloc and burn down some poor neighbor’s small business.  That would be the smart play.  I’ve seen plenty of people do it.  I can think of one particular fifty something white guy who has embraced the whole thing.  He spends his work day giving training sessions in unconscious bias and white privilege.  It truly is enough to turn your stomach.  So, I guess I’m really not smart.

Good.  I’ve picked my side.  Now what?  Well, how about make the most of it.  Last Saturday I had the first meet up with the local group of deplorables.  Just some of the guys who were the Coffee Walk back during the 2016 election and their wives.  We had some good food and spent the night talking about life.  Kids and grandkids, work and family, even a little bit of politics.  It was pretty damn great.  We enjoyed it so much we’re already planning the next one.

And the on-line equivalent of that is the comments I get on this site.  I send out my thoughts and if they resonate with someone, he tells me what he thinks.  Now, I’ve never met any of these folks in the flesh but we can talk, we can share opinions maybe compare experiences.  I find this enjoyable, worthwhile.  I wish there were a thousand times more of you all out there.  I especially like when you talk to each other.  That really is the final goal, creating a network.

Taking this to its logical conclusion, smart people should be organizing a platform where this network can be focused on creating some concrete progress toward advancing our social and political goals.  As a for instance, suppose there was an effort to harness tens of millions of consumers to support or boycott some company based on its behavior toward our constituency.  Let’s take Coca Cola as a for instance.  Imagine if one hundred million people coordinated a boycott of Coca Cola for a whole year.  I think it just might drive them out of business.  But even if it didn’t, the damage that would be done to that company would frighten the hell out of all the other Fortune 500 companies.  And the same kind of action supporting a company that treats our people with respect would have an equally powerful effect.

Full disclosure there are websites who are trying to do this very thing.  The Media Action Network tries to coordinate e-mail campaigns against offenders and in support of allies.  But they don’t have the reach that an organization would have if it managed to mobilize the whole Trump electorate.  But that’s the dream, to see all of the deplorables joined together in a cohesive network and using that massive financial and political clout to accomplish concrete goals that would improve our day to day lives.  Imagine if we could scare the whole Fortune 500 into backing off their BLM support.  Imagine if we all quit Facebook on the same day and never opened it again.  I imagine it would knock half the value off the stock overnight.

So, this is my dream, to be part of the fellowship of the betrayed, to be part of a group that just doesn’t take our erasure by the Elites lying down but bands together to fight back.  My contribution is minuscule.  But it’s what I can do until something better emerges.  If you like my idea leave a comment.  If you disagree leave a comment.  Either way I learn something.

Wayne’s World

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Ah, the joys of domesticity.  Today, in anticipation of the weekend barbecue, I am working my way down Camera Girl’s list of chores.  I have swept and mopped the front deck, washed the windows, cleaned the lawn furniture, bought a new toilet seat, bought some stuff I needed to install a couple of air conditioners, bought some stuff to clean the cars and dug out my ladder to clean the first-floor gutters.

Yesterday unexpectedly, the roofer, Wayne, showed up out of the blue after three weeks of radio silence and said he was ready to look at those couple of shingles that had come loose during an EF5 tornado that had moved the house onto my neighbor-across-the-road’s property.  The neighbor’s been real good about us living on his land.  Of course bringing the plumbing and electrical services under the road cost me a good deal but I was looking for more interaction with the neighbors anyway so it’s been a great experience, all in all.

Anyway, Wayne (by the way all roofers in my experience are named Wayne) came over with the ricketiest wooden ladder I’ve ever seen and set it down against the house.  Now, the spot where he wanted to climb slopes at about a 45-degree angle and he proceeded to even it out by piling a couple of boards under one of the ladder’s feet.  I’m looking at this and thinking, is this guy insured?  Wayne’s assistant has the job of putting tension on the rope attached to the ladder.  Looking at this I’m trying to form a diagram in my head of the forces at play in this little scene.  Wayne’s weight, Bob’s tension on the line, the frictional force between the boards and the soaking wet grass underneath them and the absurd angle of the ladder and the ground and the force of my blood pounding in my veins watching this insanity.  I felt like I was participating in a Three Stooges routine in real time.  I suspect I was Moe but I wasn’t completely sure.

Miraculously every one walked away alive and intact including my repaired roof shingles.  Wayne charged me a paltry eighty bucks and I felt like I had gotten off easy in the lottery of life but vowed to find another Wayne in the future.  Unfortunately, Wayne’s perambulation on top of my house woke up my granddaughter who was taking her mid-day nap and this didn’t endear either myself or Wayne to Camera Girl.  We already had a previous roofer named Wayne that she despises due to various offenses against the code of acceptable contractor conduct.  So this only reinforced her hatred for contractors in general and specifically roofers named Wayne.  I will say in defense of the earlier Wayne that he is a staunch fan of Donald Trump and even placed an enormous Trump sign on the side of his work truck.

Of course the danger with outside work in New England is you invariably discover some new and worse damage to home and environs.  I am always fighting a losing battle against snow and moisture damage.  I recently replaced and painted some external woodwork (stairs and railings) and already I saw rotted sections.  But not being someone who quits easily, I am formulating a plan that involves wrapping these areas with waterproof tarps during the winter months.  This seems kind of crazy but the alternative is to replace the wood with something impervious to snow and rain.  I’m guessing concrete or stainless steel are the only sure bets and that would be very expensive.

And walking around the yard I noticed the deer finally put me out of my misery by eating every last one of the daylily flower buds that were growing in one of the more remote beds.  Blah, blah, everyone has to eat, blah blah.  I’m going to move those damn things this autumn and put them within stone throwing distance of my house.  I hope they bring wolves back to New England and they eat these deer into extinction.  Yes I do.

So today was a useful day.  And doing outside work kept me from thinking of Dementia Joe and how badly our country has been damaged.  Tomorrow I’ll return to contemplating the end of western civilization.  But today I got the chores done.

14JUL2021 – OCF Update Mid-July Report

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This will be an outrage free day.  Even though Bastille Day is not my idea of a holiday worth celebrating today is a joyous occasion in my house.  I will therefore accentuate the positive.

I think I will initiate a series of posts devoted to various facets of Western Civilization.  I’ll range over history, culture, ethnography and geography.  I’m tempted to start from ancient historical and geographical facts about the region and then move forward through time introducing the various actors as  they appear on the scene.  Now do I start with the Neanderthals?  Finding out they were red-heads means the Irish may want to claim then for their own.

I will include information on the Yamnaya who appear to have been the mythical proto-Indo-European tribe that expanded East and West and spawned the languages that now dominate half the planet.  Not bad for a bunch of bronze age horsemen from the steppes.  I’d like to touch on especially some of the lesser known nations of Europe, the Georgians, the Lithuanians, the Letts, the Finns and others.  this will serve the dual purpose of allowing me to produce interesting and upbeat content and at the same time satisfy my curiosity about things I’ve always wanted to know.

But just to show I’m not an Indo-European chauvinist, (well actually I am), I’ll include information on the Basques.  These seem to be the descendants of the oldest inhabitants of Europe from a time before the Indo-European ancestors came on the scene.  Or at least before their languages began to dominate.  And I won’t neglect our neighbors to the east.  The river valley civilizations of the Near East were the source of agriculture that was the basis for organized human life on the planet.  So I’ll throw the Sumerians in just to show I’m a sport.  Do I have to include the Egyptians?  I guess I might.  Without them we wouldn’t have had those mummy movies.  Well, we’ll see.

And I mean to trudge on through the third season of Star Trek.  I’ve been dragging my feet because it is a terrible season.  But I’ve promised myself I’ll finish it.  As I’ve mentioned I intend to review Jackie Gleason’s classic 39 episodes of “The Honeymooners” series.  But I probably need to at least start into the Star Trek work to allow myself the reward of watching something fun like the Honeymooners.

The endless rain here in New England continues.  I’ve adapted to the annoying reality of it but I do hope that the second half of July returns to the normal hot dry summer I prefer.  Well, we’ll see.

So this may be a slow day.  I’ll write what the mood provides and enjoy a dinner out for once.  I’m bringing Camera Girl to our favorite Chinese restaurant and we’ll embrace the Orient for a change.

12JUL2021 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

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Another very rainy day!  But I decided to make necessity a virtue.  Camera Girl has given me a list of chores to get done before the party on Saturday (or else!) and first thing was bring out the trash pails to the road.  Apparently, the holiday weekend caused us somehow to miss the pick-up last week and a mistake now would be catastrophic, so out I went.  I had rain pants, rain coat and rubber boots.  After moving the trash and putting the mail in the box I was free (for the moment) and outside of the reach of the female of the species and took the grand tour.  I have never seen the grass and the shrubs so green in the middle of July.  I feel like I’m somehow in Brazil along the edge of the Amazon jungle.  I half expected a caiman or an anaconda to spring out of the undergrowth and clamp its jaws on my shin.  The world smells warm and alive and I expect the rabbits and the deer will take this occasion to eat some more of my daylilies even in the middle of the day, curse them.  I went looking for that young mantis I saw near the pool, but he was gone.  The rain seems to be keeping the deer fly from attacking me or maybe that’s just the rain gear.  Either way it was peaceful and invigorating to be out in the pouring rain.  Camera Girl’s vegetable gardens are lush and growing.  Some of the plants could probably do with a little more sunshine but so far nothing has drowned.

My attempt to grow elecampane (Inula helenium) from seeds three weeks ago may not have failed after all.  I put a packet of seeds in two different gardens and in five or six cardboard flower pots in a raised bed.  None of the seeds on the ground did anything and I presume they are dead.  But I think two or three of the little pots may be growing something.  It’s a big yellow (of course) flower that I’ve wanted to add to the garden for years but could never find for sale.  But with the advent of the internet, things like obscure plant seeds are just a mouse click away.  It turns out elecampane is a “medicinal herb” that can cure evil humors if applied to the patient by a Gaian shaman or crone.  “¡Ay Chihuahua, cuantos Apaches, cuantos Indios sin huaraches!”  But anyway, they may be growing after all.

The blueberry bushes are actually weighted down with unripe berries.  I fear that the deer are just waiting to swoop down and devour the whole crop just as it ripens.  Ah well, as Camera Girl says, “Everybody’s gotta eat.”  Whatever.

I was reading the ZMan’s Monday posts at his site and Taki’s.  They were depressing takes on bugmen like David French and their pernicious embrace of critical race theory in the schools.  It made me think that what will be needed is instruction in the true story of Western Civilization.  Parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts who are interested can point children to older books that reflect the actual story of how we got here.  The history books from two generations ago are full of the true stories of our ancestors and the adventures and tragedies that make up western history.  The Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans, Angles, Saxons, Vikings and the other peoples who have collided and mixed and fought and produced Michelangelo and Mozart and Newton and Maxwell and Edison and all the things that they have created.  Biology, chemistry, physics, engineering, medicine, electricity, engines, nuclear weapons, space travel and computers.  Imagine being ashamed of the people who made these things.  The absurdity of the midgets who want our children to prefer the cultures of people who lived in mud huts and ate each other for dinner.  We should be ashamed of ourselves for even tolerating these people who are ashamed of the civilization that made their lives rich beyond the imaginations of people only a hundred years ago.  I’ll have to start identifying old books that can be used as resources for teaching the young.

Anyway, it’s going to be a busy week.  As I say I have a list of chores to perform before the party and Camera Girl will brook no nonsense from me.  She’s not concerned with my crusade to save America.  She wants the porch swept and the chairs cleaned off.  My ambition is to clean off the grill.  I have some rib-eye steaks to cook on Saturday and I’d like them not to taste like old hamburger grease.  But I promise not to neglect the site and I’m sure I’ll have outrages to comment on and sage advice to distribute to the world at large.

Praying Mantises, Children’s Books and Pa – Part 3 – Dr. Livingstone I Presume!

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So the first survivor has made his appearance in the yard.  This one found his way into the stella d’oro daylilies in the swimming pool area.  May he be the first of many that show up.  My little granddaughter will find out that praying mantises don’t talk like they do in her Eric Carle books but they are very exciting for an insect.

 

 

Good hunting little fellow.

 

Praying Mantises, Children’s Books and Pa – Part 1

Praying Mantises, Children’s Books and Pa – Part 2 – The Arrival

Preying Mantis (photo study)

 

09JUL2021 – OCF Update – photog’s Ark

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Forty days and forty nights of rain has pounded my brain into mush.  Seriously, we’ve had a phenomenal amount of water falling out of the sky on us for the last week or so.  Based on the amount of water I’ve measured in the water bucket I have out in my yard we’ve had almost thirteen inches of rain so far and it’s not letting up at all.

Right now, the rain is torrential and I see no indication that it intends to stop until this whole corner of New England slides off the mainland and deposits itself into the Atlantic Ocean.  What I’m waiting for is the idiot on tv to tell me about the drought condition that we’re currently suffering through.  It’s inevitable.  Apparently, the morons who run the water supply are incapable of understanding that doubling the population of the state means that it will be necessary to increase the water supply to compensate.  Granted that is a monumental task but it has been done in the past and a supposedly progressive state won’t shy away from stealing people’s lands for a state boondoggle.  But in our current Gaia worshipping mood the solution is to ration water until people decide to voluntarily die of dehydration to “save the planet.”

Well, I’ve snapped out of my Stasi induced funk and I once again feel that I’ll outlast these buggers.  I’m an inherently optimistic man and I still believe that knuckling under to these cretins is a mistake and one way or another I’ll escape them and live to see their nightmare system come crashing down.

So, unless I drown in the biblical deluge that we’re currently experiencing I intend to send out a few more rants and other words of scorn at our sad pathetic elites.  Long may they whine and cajole and to no effect.

03JUL2021 – OCF Update

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This will be a quiet day on the site.  We’re having our 4th of July family barbecue at noon today.  Some folks wouldn’t be a able to make it tomorrow so the 3rd will take its place. The burgers and the dogs are waiting for my grilling and Camera Girl has already prepared everything but the corn.

The weather is plain awful for July.  It’s sixty something degrees and it’s been raining on and off and sometimes in buckets full, for three days!  The grass is growing like crazy and so are the weeds in the gardens.  The only thing I can be happy about is I haven’t had to water the plants in four days.  But I’d gladly trade that for some hot sunny weather.

So it’ll be slow on the site.  I have a theme I’m working on about the false choice between white identity politics and civic nationalism but I want to get it just right.  It’s really a case of acknowledging the strategy of identity politics that the Left is using and calling that what it really is. It’s anti-white hatred.    And calling it out for what it is forces those who are going along with it to be seen as the aggressors and therefore a legitimate target for our retaliation.

On the photographic front I hear that Sony is coming out with an A7 IV in September.  Anyway that’s the rumor.  I’ll be renting it to see if it suits my needs and if it does, then I’ll trade up for my A7 III.  But if I do it’ll be just as much to freshen my camera as anything.  I really don’t need a better camera.  The A7 III is the first Sony that does everything well enough to satisfy my needs.  And the 24 mega-pixels is plenty enough for me.  The new camera is supposedly a 40 mega-pixel sensor and that’s a lot of space on the hard drive.  I guess I could just replace mine wiuth another A7 III.  But we’ll see.  camera gear lust can’t be completely sated even in the old.

So enjoy the day.  I’ll post as I can.  Stay tuned.

When in the Course of Human Events – Part 1

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I am grateful to the Haters of America for putting their new Independence Day in June.  I’ve always loved July as the finest time of the year.  And not just because my birthday is slap dab in the middle of it or because it is the hottest and therefore the time when we in the north feel most vitally alive.

But also, because the Fourth of July was every young boy’s idea of the perfect holiday.  You had it right in the middle of your summer vacation (back then we had all of June, July and August off).  It included playing with and watching fireworks, eating huge amounts of barbecued food, corn on the cob and watermelon and drinking lemonade.  We would go down to Coney Island and swim in the polluted waters of Lower New York Harbor and then watch the fireworks display that the city put on for us proles.  It was a mighty fine time to be had by all and sundry.  I can remember neighbors that typically spent most of the year yelling at their neighbors’ kids coming out and sitting on their porches and stoops and talking about the weather and the baseball teams and acting almost human.  We didn’t really think about the patriotic aspect of it.  After all we were boys and therefore barely human.  But I am grateful to the Cloud People and Antifa and BLM and the illegal immigrant lobby and the LGBTQ Mafia and everyone else who hates the normal everyday things that America stood for.  I’m grateful that I no longer have to share the Fourth of July with them.

And of course, the Fourth of July stands for more than just fireworks and hot dogs.  But I wanted to start out with those things because they are the things that make it more than just important.  They make it fun.  And heaven knows we need as many things that can make us happy right now as we can get.  I’m having the family over for a Fourth of July barbecue and the weather isn’t going to cooperate.  After days of 90° weather, it’s going to be in the 60’s and cloudy.  But that just means we’ll be able to have a baseball catch and play horseshoes without getting completely drenched in sweat.

We’re going to have a great time.  After the barbecue I know Camera Girl will have desserts, splendiferous desserts.  Ice cream and whipped cream will abound.  And there will be Italian Cheesecake and maybe even pastries.  And I’ll show my little 2 ½ year old granddaughter fireflies in the yard for her first time.  And we’ll even shoot off a few small fireworks and then maybe watch some of the big stuff in the sky.

And I guarantee there will be not a whisper of white privilege or white rage or reparations or Juneteenth or Critical Race Theory.  But there will be a little history lesson where I’ll find out if the boys all know what the Fourth of July commemorates.

And just to end this part of the post on the right note I’ll include some words that probably are more relevant today than they’ve been since shortly after they were written.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

They almost sound topical.  We’ll take a swipe at it next.

When in the Course of Human Events – Part 2

Dave Freer Over at Mad Genius Club Has a Good Essay on Writing

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Dave talks about what it’s like reviewing your own book for publication and feeling like the whole thing is poor.  I’m writing a book myself and I have to say I understand exactly what he’s saying.  The urge to re-write whole sections is almost overpowering.

Seeing other people pound out multiple books in a year is humbling.  I get side-tracked continuously between blogging and photography and just trying to keep my real life floating along.  Kudos to those who do all that and also create good fiction too.

A good read.