Tag: This ‘N’ That

03DEC2025 – This ’N’ That

photog Current Events, Trump ,

Finally, a breathing space!  I don’t have to do anything for almost a week.  I spend my time working on getting my book ready for publishing and watching Christmas movies.  I confess that I overindulged on turkey and the fixin’s around Thanksgiving and am still recovering from caloric excess.  But after some vigorous exercise today I’m back in shape for what lies ahead.  And that looks like snow and ice removal!  Dunwich is up to its old tricks.  Instead of three inches of snow we’ve gotten a day of rain which probably will turn into a half inch of ice tonight.  Oh, the pain, the pain.  Luckily neither Camera Girl nor I are compelled to leave the Compound tomorrow so I can slowly work on the driveways.  I wish I had more tube sand but even a hundred pounds or so of it should be enough to prevent the whole thing from resembling an ice-skating rink.

I noticed that the latest fake crisis is horror over cigarette boats filled with fentanyl being blasted out of the water.  I can conceive of no better targets for the US military than narcotraficantes heading for US coastal waters.  What clearer priority do we have than preventing these people from selling poison to our people?  Don’t they realize that Saint George of Floyd was killed by a fentanyl overdose?  Surely that must give them pause.  But Democrats are always looking to side with evil against us.  They can’t help it.

Well, enough about that.  Now, how about those kooky Somalis in Minnesota?  Good old Tim Walz was handing over hundreds of millions of dollars in fake aid to the Somalis and they were sending it to terrorists in Somalia.  Even his own state employees blew the whistle on him and even the New York Times is exposing the sordid details of his cover-up.  Trump said that Walz is severely retarded and I think it’s hard to deny it.  Of course, this doesn’t add to the reputation of Minnesotans for keeping this bozo in office.  Now, of course it isn’t everyone in the state but it’s a clear majority that seems okay with government fraud as long as it goes to a constituency that will vote reliably Democrat.  We’ll have to wait and see if Trump’s Justice Department can find a judge willing to honestly hold Democrat crooks accountable.  Lately it doesn’t seem to be the case.

And finally, early indications are that Hollywood is throwing in the towel on woke entertainment for children.  Disney and its peers have lost so much money on woke movies for children and young adults that they’ve sworn off woke lecturing for the foreseeable future.  For at least the next year or two they’re going to try and remember what “wholesome” means.  No more trans kids, girl bosses or obligatory race-swapping of traditional characters.

Well, anyway, that’s the plan.  But can they do it?  I tend to doubt it.  I’m not even sure they would know an exciting adventure story if it reached out and bit them on the butt.  But it’s hopeful that they’re even trying.  At the very least it means that a whole bunch of woke writers, directors and actors will be out of work for the next year or two.  And that’s a beautiful thing.

16FEB2025 – OCF Update – Nuts and Bolts

photog Current Events, OCF , ,

This is an explanation for the “Test” post today.  I’ve been struggling to eliminate delays in posts showing up on the front page of the site.  There’s a thing called caching that cuts down on the site server’s work and therefore makes the site quicker.  But if it delays updating the site then folks don’t see the new content quickly.  I’m fighting a war to get the cache purge to happen every fifteen minutes.  I may have succeeded but only time will tell.

And now I return you to your regularly scheduled test pattern.

26OCT2024 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

photog Current Events, OCF , ,

Well, another day in captivity.  But there is the possibility I’ll have at least most of Saturday off.  Surfacing and looking around I see that the consensus is growing that Trump is leading Harris in the swing states.  So, of course that means Harris declares him Hitler.  Well, as anyone who’s been on the internet for a few decades knows when you pull the Hitler card you lose.  But it’s always fun to see someone bring back the classics.

Honestly, all of the “drama” in the last week and a half of the election is overblown.  Harris is an unlikable person who comes off as a phony and an emotionally unstable individual.  Really the only question is whether the Democrats have alienated enough of their base to lose so conclusively that normal voter fraud will be insufficient.  And since half the polls are rigged, we’re just going to have to wait until election day (or later) to find out.

Well, I’m fine with that.  I just hope the Democrats are out of snipers.  Trump is doing a rally in Madison Square Garden and there isn’t anywhere to hide on that stage if someone sneaks a gun in.  But let’s assume they’re not stupid enough for a third try.  Honestly, if anything like that happened to Trump at this point, it really would tear this country apart.

Well, anyway, that’s where the election is right now.  In my circles I can tell that the rank-and-file Democrats are very, very nervous.  So, I’m just ignoring all the horse race stuff and shrugging off all the “convincing” arguments about why one or the other of them is going to win.  It’s mostly just whistling past the graveyard.

It turns out the Yankees managed to get into the World Series this year.  Back in the 1990s Camera Girl and I followed them very enthusiastically.  But since Major League baseball started allowing their players to take a knee during the national anthem, I swore off all the sports games.  So, she was watching the game tonight.  Well, she fell asleep and I was writing my post and in the bottom of the tenth down by one run and with two outs the Dodgers get a walk-off grand slam.  Poor Camera Girl.

So tomorrow I plan to enjoy all of this unseasonably warm weather.  I might even try to photograph some of the remaining autumn color that put on such a nice display when I couldn’t shoot it.  I’ll try to find an opportunity to make a few macro focus stacks with the new firmware programming.  Of course, everything is turning to mush after the frosts we had last week.  But who knows with all this heat the bugs and critters might be reawakening.  Now they’re predicting something like eighty-degree weather for Halloween.  That would be something.  But I’ll still be trapped inside so it might as well be Antarctica as far as I’ll be concerned.

Something occurred to me while I was perusing my Complete Shakespeare.  The Honeymooners is sort of a reverse version of “The Taming of the Shrew.”  Basically, Ralph Kramden has set the male sex back about four hundred years.  Over and over again Alice proves him wrong and shows him to be a pathetic loser.  As much as I like the show, it is interesting that the Honeymooners is the template that all modern art uses to describe the relations between men and women.  It’s certainly not a flattering paradigm for us.

You know, maybe it’s time to revive Shakespeare’s play.  We may have reached the inflection point where giving the girl bosses a taste of their own medicine might be the best action.  Even though I’ve never had to beat Camera Girl, I don’t see any reason not to reinstate the rule of thumb.  I’ll have to write at depth about this in a couple of weeks from now.

Well, I’ll leave it there.  Enjoy the day.  I know I will.

21OCT2024 – OCF Update – Babylonian Captivity

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

As previously whined, I am entering an extended period of limited access to the internet and limited time to post.  I will check as circumstance allows but it will be inadequate.  I’ll catch up at night and try to provide content but I predict quantity and quality will suffer.

Apologies from the management.  On with the show!

20OCT2024 – OCF Update – This ‘N’ That

photog Current Events, OCF , ,

Ah, the calm before the storm.  I have this weekend completely off before the next seventeen days of misery and isolation.  So, I’ll enjoy these two days to the hilt and then, “abandon all hope ye who enter here.”  For what it’s worth it seems like Trump is enjoying himself a lot more than Kamala.  Her cackling has diminished and her ranting seems to have replaced it.  From everything I’ve heard she is a truly awful person that makes those around her miserable.  If she loses, I wouldn’t be surprised if her marriage ends and many of her other connections to human society.

The latest “controversy” is that Democrat voters will be using the branding     ,LA      (get it, comma la) on their clothing to get around the restrictions against wearing the candidates’ names or images at the polling place.  So, we’ve reached back to, I guess, kindergarten or at most grammar school in our tactics.  What’s next, will the Democrats be telling “yo mamma” jokes?

Anyway, the weather around Dunwich has been remarkably mellow for this time of year.  I understand we’re expected to have a string of three or four 75-degree days ending on Tuesday.  That’s phenomenal.  But because I’ve gotten used to fall weather, it’s almost too warm for comfort.

I wrote that post about Sony adding focus bracketing to their firmware update for my A7IV camera.  I intended to wait until after my captivity before updating the firmware but it’s killing me to not try it out.  I think I’ll bite the bullet tomorrow morning.  I have this dead luna moth that I found this summer and I’d love to play around with focus stacking it.  Well, we’ll see.  Tomorrow is a busy day.  We have a kid’s birthday party coming up and I’m sure Camera Girl has a laundry list of honey-do’s lined up for me.  And honestly there are several things I should be working on anyway.  So even if I update the camera I may have to wait.

It should be interesting to see how the country changes regardless of who “wins” the election.  I think there’s a growing cohort that realizes that something is very broken with our whole social order.  The fragmentation now extends to a polarization by sex.  Younger women and men are lining up in opposition to each other philosophically.  I really do believe we are seeing the beginning of a permanent split.  Basically, women who have accepted the new template for living for a career will not be having children.  And that means that men will have to find wives who want to have children elsewhere.  I guess mail order overseas brides will become more the rule than the exception and over time the cat ladies will die out.  Well, that’s a solution of sorts.

The “October Viewing” movies has been fun for me but it’s gotten me thinking about what a monster is.  Is it only freakish creatures like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster or can it be a man like Hannibal Lecter or Norman Bates?  Obviously, the actual humans are scarier because they really exist.  When you hear about the things that Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer did to their victims you understand that inside they truly are monsters.  So maybe creating fairy tale creatures like the movie monsters is a way of distracting ourselves from the true horrors that we don’t want to contemplate.  But our society has grown up and now we prefer to scare ourselves with realistic monsters.  I remember when I read Thomas Harris’s “Red Dragon” back in the 1980’s it struck me as an interesting crime story and nothing more.  But when I thought about the way that that the murderer selected his victim families by working in a photo lab that developed family home movies, it chilled me to the core.  If a motivated psychopath could select his victims without any direct connection to him then how could anyone hope to protect his family from this random agent of horrifying destruction?  Basically, you can’t.  Random chance rules all of our lives.  That I found horrifying.  So maybe I should include “Psycho” and “Silence of the Lambs” in my October Viewings.  Or maybe that would take away some of the fun.  Well, October is waning I better hurry up and make up my mind.  What do you folks think?

08JUL2023 – This ‘N’ That

photog Current Events, OCF
The Raven is a Wicked Bird

Yesterday marks a minor milestone.  Last night I posted the last of the 2022 Yellowstone Expedition photographs.  Now, this is a relative statement.  That was a first pass.  Also I have some flower photos that I’m holding off until I can identify them (hopefully).  But interstingly it marks about a year since the actual trip took place.  From now on the photo of the day will be a bit more prosaic and local.

Today is a smaller milestone.  For the last eight days I’ve been working on a very cramped schedule.  Parties, grandchildren and minor missions have prevented me from keeping up with the website.  Today is the capstone of this run.  I’ll be out of pocket and out of state for the whole day and even a part of the night.  Which means this site will be destitute.  I don’t even have the photo of the day in queue.

Horrible things could happen today.  Nuclear Armageddon, fluoridation of the water supply, even adoption of the metric system could happen behind my back and no one would ever know because I would not have recorded it.  Ah, well.

But rejoice!  Tomorrow is another day.  And I vow to do better.

Honestly it is the Silly Season and there is no real news.  Or at least the news agencies aren’t reporting anything worth reading.  Sure, there’s some war news and stupid celebrity hijinks.  And there’s always the government taking something away from us but we can wait a week before hearing that.  Even I can’t summon the usual outrage at the moment.

But the good news for us that live on the Arctic Tundra is that right now the days are long and nights are short and the air is hot and our blood is warm.  Even old codgers feel the irritability that tells us we’re still somewhat alive.  We can smell the roses, toss around a baseball with a youngster and appreciate God’s Green Earth for at least one more day.

So with your permission, I’ll exit stage left, pursued by a bear and see you a little later.

30JUN2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

photog Current Events, OCF ,

Now things are getting into the summertime social season.  We have two family parties this weekend and then Fourth of July and on and on.  This afternoon Camera Girl spotted a big painted turtle on the grass.  Turns out it was laying eggs so being the natural historian that she is she collected them and is incubating them in a sphagnum moss set up.  Apparently, they’ll be a science experiment for Princess Sack of Potatoes and then they be released back into the swamp to maintain the delicate balance between the mold and the mildew that we all depend on here in Dunwich.

I spent some more time struggling with the great GA4 project.  Half of the websites and YouTube videos are people cussing about how much worse it is than its predecessor.  Well, what can you do?

I read a bunch of critiques of the SCOTUS decision on affirmative action.  Even the Z-Man’s Friday podcast was about it.  I think they mostly reflect the feeling that this will be like pulling teeth to get the colleges to obey the law on this.  But my way of looking at it is it’s a starting point for the red state governments to force the colleges in their jurisdictions to obey.  None of the Ivy League schools will.  Their state governments will work with them to ignore the Supreme Court using obfuscation.  Well, let them.  I went to a state college and they could teach science and engineering the same as Harvard and Yale.  Maybe better.  No dirt people are going to get in the Ivy League schools so who cares anyway.

The other interesting case was the Supreme Court once again overruling Colorado in its insistence that people working in the wedding industry must celebrate same sex marriages.  That poor wedding cake baker had the Supreme Court find in his favor and then Colorado brought another case against him, this time over some trans-nonsense.  I predict Colorado will continue to harass this other woman who builds websites and doesn’t want to build a gay themed one.  They’ll find some other trumped-up case, slightly different, and go after her again.  But as I said these rulings reinforce the standing in the red states and if we can hold the Supreme Court for a while, they will provide the basis for restoring the social fabric in the red states.  After we lose the Court, it’ll take brains and guts to tell the feds to pound sand.  Let’s hope we find men who have those attributes when we need them.

It was kind of amusing reading and watching the various lefties running around in circles screaming about the affirmative action case.  There was one video with Joy Reid castigating Justice Thomas.  Now I consider Joy Reid to be one of the stupidest people on God’s green Earth.  The fact that she also graduated from Harvard is conclusive proof that this rejection of affirmative action for college admissions is absolutely necessary.  If she was admitted, a virtual cretin, to the premiere university of the United States then obviously there is no objective criterion for their admissions.  In the video she goes on and on speculating on how Clarence Thomas must have some kind of deep-seated self-hatred that forces him to wreak vengeance upon black people.  If there were any objective standards in this country, instead of Harvard she should have been sent to a group home where she could have performed chores she might be suited for, like filling sacks with sand or scrubbing toilets.  Now the unlucky viewers of MSNBC have to watch her on the screen making absurd claims about talented and serious people.  Maybe someday when MSNBC closes down, she’ll find her rightful place in society as a dunk tank clown.

So, all in all, it was an interesting day.  I will be spending considerable time at these various family gatherings on Saturday and Sunday but I’ll do my best to provide some content for the faithful.  Enjoy your weekend.

05JUN2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

photog Current Events, OCF , , , , ,

Probably the most significant news is that yesterday the long-discussed Ukraine offensive began.  There were several troop and tank movements in the Donetsk

“Russia’s defence ministry released video of what it said showed several Ukrainian armoured vehicles in a field blowing up after being hit.

Russian forces killed 250 Ukrainian troops as well as destroying 16 tanks, three infantry fighting vehicles and 21 armoured combat vehicles, the ministry said.”

Currently the Ukrainians have not released any statements with their take on the fighting.  From what I read the Ukrainian forces involved included about sixty tanks, 3,000 men, artillery and other armored vehicles.

This is still just a small fraction of the forces available for this offensive but it seems clear this wasn’t a feint.  It’s act one.  It will be evolving over the next days and weeks and it will be gut-wrenching for all involved.

……………………………………….

The Z-Man had an interesting post today about the evolving perspective on the dissident right about what the struggle with the Left actually entails.  Instead of the resistance of the Right to slow down the Left’s never-ending push to produce a heaven on earth he posits that the dissidents are aiming to eliminate ideology as the engine of human social advancement.  What’s being rejected is basically the Enlightenment project that gave birth to liberal democracy in the West.  In its place would be a pragmatic program based on the limitations of human society.  No more heaven on earth.  Just earth.

Pretty thought provoking stuff.

…………………………………………..

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about a horror movie (if that’s the genre) called Nefarious.  Apparently it’s a death row prisoner being interviewed by a psychiatrist to see if he’s sane enough to be executed.  The twist is that the prisoner claims to be possessed by a demon who wants the execution to proceed so he can escape to a new body from which he can continue his mayhem.  It’s still in the theater so they want twenty bucks to stream it at home.  Well!  I must be getting old.  I remember when twenty bucks was actual money.  I remember as a kid I once found a twenty dollar bill and I thought I was rich.  So anyway I’m stalling until it comes down in price.  It looks pretty good in the trailer.  The producers aren’t mainstream Hollywood types.  They’re on the religious side of things.  So that makes it even more interesting to me.  Maybe I’ll spring for the twenty bucks.  I’ll probably still be able to eat that week.  And supporting alternatives to woke corporations like the Hollywood studios is almost a religious obligation.  So I guess I’ll fork over the quatloos.

End of the Weekend

photog Current Events

Memorial Day and a small-town parade and remembering those who sacrificed all they had.  And spending time with the kids and grandkids and working on some projects and doing the maintenance for the summer.  And this and that.  Camera Girl’s honey-do list and some foul-ups opening up the pool and work on the vegetable garden.

And before you know it the weekend is over.  But we did get a chance to go to an ice cream store that makes ice cream from their own cows’ milk and it’s so rich that it’s hard to stand up after you’re done eating it.  And I snuck up on some of the turkeys that wander through my fields.  Those things are prehistoric.  I really can see how they’re related to dinosaurs.

And we hosted our grandson’s sports team’s end of season party and they had a good time playing pool and volleyball and eating mass quantities of Italian food.  Wow, I remember when I could pack away food like that.  Now I think it might kill me outright.  Youth is a remarkable gift but only the old appreciate it.  The young just take it for granted.  And that’s as it should be.

I’m getting together with the Coffee Walk Committee next Friday.  It should be interesting.  One of the guys I haven’t spoken to in a couple of years.  It will be interesting to get his take on the old firm and what finally drove him out.  The stories I hear from the old gang aren’t encouraging.  It’s all the classic signs of the social justice convergence.  Supposedly the constant drumbeat of diversity, inclusion and equity (DIE) is driving out the straight white men but also making everyone else who just wants to do their jobs crazy.  And even with the economy beginning to slip pretty badly, good people are leaving.  People just get tired of making believe they agree with the talking points.  My favorite was how this engineering manager explained how diversity being a strength had been proven empirically.  He was claiming that there was scientific proof that hiring people by the color of their skin was measurably superior business wise.  It’s remarkable what Big Brother can get an otherwise intelligent man to say.  Well, he has a wife and kids and a job he wants to keep.  I guess he can do without his integrity.

One of the regulars here sent me a link to a study done by the World Health Organization (WHO) that admitted that there was evidence that the COVID vaccine causes multiple sclerosis.  So, let’s see.  Blood clots, stroke, myocarditis and now multiple sclerosis.  That’s impressive.  Even cigarettes haven’t been linked to all of those.  Only the first two.  Should be interesting to see if the scientific community finally admits that the “vaccine” was an atrocity and all involved criminals.  But maybe I assume there is any honesty left in “science.”

Well, the week begins and we’ll be busy with our own things.  But of course, we’ll make time to read about the Keystone Kops in Washington stealing everything in sight and the boycotts of the various woke corporations.  Stay tuned.

16APR2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

photog Current Events, OCF ,

So I enjoyed writing that review last night of the “groundbreaking” 1960s movie Blow-up.  Mocking something so utterly dumb was life-affirming.  It’s like watching that video of Musk brow-beating that dopey BBC reporter, just wonderfully satisfying.

Today we have a party to go to in the mid-afternoon so it’ll be a limited writing day because I also was handed a honey-do list by Camera Girl and there was a seriousness in her demeanor that leads me to believe that stalling will be seriously frowned upon.  Well, uninstalled new windshield wiper blades and blocked driveway drains are the stuff of wifely discontent so I guess I best bestir myself.

On the plus side I knocked off another 2,000 words on the story.  That’s another 2%.  Pretty good, pretty good.  And on the topicality front I did add an AI character to the story.  And that was before the current mania.  It was probably more an homage to “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.”  Interestingly I’ve made mine a girl and she’s possibly the most enjoyable character in the book.  I’m trying to decide whether to kill her off or her creator.  One of them will have to go.

We had a ninety degree day on Friday.  That’s pretty damn hot for mid-April.  But we’re back in the fifties today.  But the heat really activated the dreaded mayflies.  Yesterday a cloud of them enveloped me while I was pumping gas.  Four of them followed me into the car and I was swatting at them like a lunatic while trying to drive on a busy road.  And the pollen is so thick you can taste it on your tongue.  People are walking around coughing up a lung.  Ah the joys of spring.

But life is good.  We turned the heat off a few days ago and there was still a balance in the heating oil account.  So Dementia Joe hasn’t quite bankrupted me yet.  Camera Girl will put aside her soup recipes and all sorts of warm weather provender will appear on the menu.

I was reading through the daily news and opinion rags with distaste.  The left is made up of dishonest people and idiots.  But the Right is hardly a paragon of virtue and intelligence.  Even when they get something right often it’s like the whining of the village idiot.  It’s just too painful to listen to.

I was watching a vlogger post about how camera photography was dying and how phone photography would kill it off any day now.  Maybe he’s right but that just tells me people are just too lazy to use the best tool for the job.  But he has a certain point.  The convenience of the smart phone has taken a heavy toll on the use of conventional cameras.  But despair seems a little melodramatic.

Well I better get on with my chores or I won’t get fed today.  Camera Girl is a Harsh Mistress. So enjoy the day and I’ll see what I can think of to comment on later.