All the Secrets of the Universe and Some Really Important Stuff Too!
I had rather be shut up in a very modest cottage with my books, my family and a few old friends, dining on simple bacon, and letting the world roll on as it liked, than to occupy the most splendid post, which any human power can give.
Thomas Jefferson
I’m back, I’m back! I was in election jail. I was being trained. Oh, the horror, the horror. Please pity me. I will live to regret getting involved in this flying circus. No power in the ‘Verse will be able to make this turn out right. But I’m committed and the wheels are in motion.
That was last night. Today I was out of state and helping out a friend. It involved travelling through rush hour traffic on an alternate route with too many lights and not enough lanes. Just my luck the main highway had a major accident and copious amounts of traffic spilled onto the road I was on. I watched in horror as my remaining time and gasoline trickled away into history as I sat in crawling traffic. The magical E mark on the gas gage and the digital clock on my dashboard competed for my attention. Finally, the gas gage won and I exited into a station. Imagine my horror when the gas pump refused to work! It would deliver about eleven cents worth of gas and then the valve would bang shut. Like some pre-technological savage, I mumbled some kind of incantation to the gods of petroleum and performed mysterious wrist turns to put the gas nozzle at some undefined angle to align the earth and the flow mechanism to ensure a sacred resonance that would grant me more gas. After ninety-nine cents of gas had been delivered (or more likely, had been falsely charged) I gave up. As a beaten man I returned to the road and its molasses-like flow.
My anger was increased when I observed that there had been no increase in the remaining milage in my tank according to the gage’s wisdom, none at all. Those eleven cents-es were completely false. If any of the people on the road were watching me at that point, they would have seen someone screaming to himself and gesticulating like a demented idiot at his dashboard and this witness might have been tempted to call the police for my own good.
When I finally reached my destination, I was a half hour late and below E on the gage. Luckily, the time limit turned out to be either incorrect or a ruse to get me there sooner. This caused very mixed feelings in my soul. But eventually I saw the humor (somewhat). And once the race was over the rest of the errand became suddenly stress free and enjoyable. It was another one of those beautiful fall days that inexplicably appear out of the teeth of typical drab New England clammy cold. It was sunny and in the mid-sixties. I had a nice snack and very good cup of coffee before heading home and at the next Mobil station I filled the tank with no other pain than the usual financial outrage that is now the standard reaction to life in Creepy Uncle Joe’s America. Now with the needle on the right side of the F, I drove with a smile in my heart and a country song on my car’s music system. It was Tobey Keith’s “Red Solo Cup.” And in my new-found joy I sang along with Tobey and suddenly I hadn’t a care in the world.
When I got home Camera Girl saw what a good mood I was in so she told me to empty the mouse bucket traps in the sheds. Well, that brought me back to reality. Nothing like bloated soggy rodents to put things in perspective. But still. It was a bright warm day and the crows looked happy to see my dead mice down by the swamp. The circle of life, and all that. And I saw some good comments on the site and I was reminded that Senator Murkowski is about to be fired in favor of someone on our side of the fence. And that cheered me up quite a bit. And tonight, is split pea and sausage soup which is a very hearty and savory delight. So even though the day was interrupted, I feel that life provided the right ingredients for a successful foray into the world. Life is good.
If the present Congress errs in too much talking, how can it be otherwise in a body to which the people send 150 lawyers, whose trade it is to question everything, yield nothing, and to talk by the hour?
Thomas Jefferson
And another one bites the dust. Sure it’s just a projection but it’s still fun to see. See that little red wedge up there in New England. That’s poor Maggie Hassan falling behind General Don Bolduc for the first time in the race. Sucks being her..
How about Patty Murray in Washington? She’s teetering.
Today I had to get in the asset statement for my business. The government gets to tax the assets of a business. Now if your business is selling books and photographs what are the assets of that business? I would have said my brilliant mind. There was no column on the form for that. So, I put down the computer I type the words out on and the camera and lenses that I take the pictures with.
When I brought in the form the town official who looked it over asked me how much the desk and chair cost that I sit at and on. She had me there. Those things are so old that I really didn’t know how much they cost. And by now the depreciation must have whittled them down to pennies. So, we settled on a guestimate.
The fact that I’d waited until the last day is a feature of my psychology. It’s one of the reasons I have been acclaimed as possibly the laziest man who ever lived. It is also true that it sometimes makes my life rather difficult. But having accomplished the task it renders me almost euphoric for having overcome the unimaginable gravity of sloth.
Here we are only a week out from the election. I think the pundits and readers are almost beyond caring. Fetterman, Oz? Warnock, Walker? Mastro, Laxalt? Who are these strange people haunting our waking hours and promising to be able to solve all our problems? To be fair, if the three Republicans listed are elected then suddenly Creepy Uncle Joe won’t be able to inflict anymore horrible judges on us. We won’t have to pay even more trillions of dollars to Democrat friends selling windmills and solar panels. So, I guess there is some reason to play this game. But it does seem like a carnival act we’re exposed to every two years.
I just wish we had our own party and didn’t have to depend on Mitch McConnell and the other clowns like Mitt Romney that parade around and sell us out for graft and power. But I guess we know that over time the next party will fill with rats just like the old one. But even if we don’t replace the party, we should have a “sub-party” that allows just the normal people to get together and thrash out our thoughts on what needs to be done and decide who we want and don’t want to represent us. And now that Elon Musk paid 44 billion dollars to liberate Twitter maybe he’ll be smart enough to build it into something that organizers can use to communicate with those people.
I mean if this social media is supposed to be good for anything it’s to allow tech geniuses to figure out what people want to buy and then put it in front of them to buy with the click of a mouse. So come on Elon. Sit down with your old PayPal buddy Peter Thiel and build an app that let’s non-progressives build a virtual town square where they can decide what they want in the real world and then make it happen.
I’m pretty sure we’d all pay five bucks a month for Twitter if it had some of the features of LinkedIn and Facebook. Maybe it could have a movie feature like Netflix where premium entertainment could be ala carte.
And when you get around to it add our own PayPal and GoFundMe and while you’re at it our own Amazon. We don’t care if you cheat us just a little just as long as we don’t have to hear the word “your pronouns” ever again.
I have sworn upon the altar of god eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.
Thomas Jefferson
It’s now been very close to a year since we ditched our Sony A7III’s and procured Sony A7IV camera.
As a now pushing 2 decade user of Sony Cameras, starting with the A100 in 2005, I was used to each subsequent camera generation being a huge improvement over the preceding in at least several important aspects. That is until the A7III to A7IV jump. Other than the sensor resolution change from 24 to 33 megapixels, the rest of the differences seem that they were closer to a firmware update than a generational change. And, frankly, I’m not at all certain that my image quality has changed much at all over the last several generations.
I’m now hearing rumors of the Sony A7V but I’m pretty sure I won’t be an early adopter.
I think the Sony that I liked the most was the small APS-C Sony A-6300. It was so small that I could carry it anywhere and you would have had to study long and hard to tell the difference between than camera’s images and the images from it’s much larger brothers. It did give up a LOT in low light though.
In 45 years of semi-serious photography starting with a early 70’s Nikon F1, I’ve come to a couple of conclusions about the order of importance of the various elements to the system that, combined, make a good photograph:
1: The photographer (at least 80% right there)
2: Lens
3: Camera body
3: (tie) The rest of the equipment, filters, tripods, etc.
Though this is hard to admit for an engineer, I question the extent that technical merit even plays in a good photo. Below is a shot that I took 15 years ago standing at my Fathers grave at Arlington National the day after my mother’s body was added.
After his recent comedy link, Updating Some Comedy Gold
I told Mr. Coffee to find a fitting follow up. Although this new edition lacks the earthy flavor of Red Foxx’s genius, it does hit all the talking points that today’s voters should consider.