My submission for the Daily Post Photo Challenge theme: Enveloped. I took this a month ago or so when the cherry blossoms were going crazy here in Seattle. For a few days, it felt like the whole neighborhood was covered in a kind of pink snow– without all that bothersome cold. To get this shot, I had to get right inside all of the branches, and I was nearly lost for a few moments, surrounded by the coming spring.
NaBloPoMo Day 21: Color
Today’s NaBloPoMo Prompt: How often do you look back at photos you’ve taken?
Little things have contributed to finding an excuse to go back and look at old photos. For example, the wife and I decided it was time to organize all of our photos, which meant coming up with a filing system, and during the process I would find myself browsing decades-old pictures.
And I recently came into using Adobe Lightroom, and I am finding my retouching journey an education. Or should I say I am finding my self-administered retouching education to be a journey. Or something. Again, I go back to old photos, looking for ways to make some of them better.
Then there’s the urge to use websites like Flickr, 500px, and Viewbug. In an effort to pick out the best pictures among the gigabytes on my hard drive, I’ve been browsing and browsing.
It seems as if, every so often, some new innovation results in coming across pictures long forgotten. Like the time We tried Picasa, the photo library thing, and in it’s exploration we explored old pictures the program had archived.
So the answer to the question is “often” but only accidentally. I’m not wont for reflecting on memories in this way.
Today’s NaBloPoMo Photo Prompt: Color
When I first saw this prompt, I thought to myself, “go find a picture you took with lots of colors in it.” But then I realized “color” can be singular, and lo, a flower I found one day next to a library.
Judge Not, Lest Ye Be Cured
Postaday for May 20th: Placebo Effect. If you could create a painless, inexpensive cure for a single ailment, what would you cure and why?
I read somewhere that when our cells reproduce, they can only do so a certain number of times. There’s some strand of DNA or alleles or something, I don’t know, that doesn’t copy well and after so many tries it just can’t do it any more. Cancer cells, on the other hand, don’t seem to have this problem, which is why they reproduce like crazy and eat everything. Which is pretty darn bad, and so I should say I’d cure cancer if I could.
But consider the case of Henrietta Lacks, who’s cancer cells have benefited so much oh humankind (if not herself or her family: read the book about her for more info). I’m sure there’s some moral logical fallacy in what I’m suggesting, but if cancer had been cured, what non-cancer ailments would the world still suffer from?
And while I appreciate the prompt’s call for an “inexpensive” cure, I am nevertheless a cynic, and I can’t help but feel that a cure for cancer would somehow be compromised by one lobby or another, and somehow even a cure as cheap as “rub an apple on your head” would be turned into a multi-billion dollar business.
Thus I find myself not considering the prompt’s spirit, but all of the ways I’d have to defend against my choice, mostly defend against my own warped imagination. Because no matter what horrible ailment I consider, somehow there’s going to be an argument for how my choice is a terrible one.
And therefore I will choose the ailment of “being a judgmental jerk” as the ailment I would like the cure the most.
Of course, many many people might insist that diagnosing someone a judgmental jerk is a matter of opinion, not fact. To those people I say, “get thee to a pharmacy, thou sick bastards.”
I’ll be first in line for the cure, by the way.
Review: The Global War on Morris
The Global War on Morris by Steve Israel
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Picked this up at the library because I liked the title and the inside jacket description was intriguing. And at first the book delivered. A sort of funny main character, dripping in stereotypes. More caricatures in subsequent chapters, those evil republicans that ran the US government during Bush II. Lots of fun Government Acronym Salad (GAS), lots of fun idiosyncratic GAS bureaucracy.
But that was it. Nothing bloomed in this fertile soil. The stereotypes stayed stereotypes, and the so-called climax came half-way through the book. This comedy of errors ended up being nothing more than a parody of itself. And a boring one at that.
And since the climax came half-way through the novel, the ending was drawn-out and tedious. And fell flat. Maybe the difficulty for the writer was that he was trying to base this on too much reality, and just as the Bush II era kinda fell flat and ended lamely, so too the book. Too many punches pulled, too many opportunities skipped over.
In my opinion, this was a novel that tried to excoriate but also poke fun, and you really can’t do both at the same time. Not if you want to stay historically accurate. Novels require larger-than-life characters or plots, or at the very least, larger-than-life themes. The Global War on Morris has none of these.
It has an old man who makes only a few mistakes, that aren’t really mistakes, and an actual malefactor who goes entirely unpunished. Only in writing this, in a review does such a juxtaposition warrant analysis; in the novel itself, these factors are minutiae lost in the details of the aforementioned GAS.
I guess we were supposed to marvel at a conservative-built computer AI that made all of the decisions leading to our reluctant protagonist’s suffering. If this is supposed to be a symbol of Red State Paranoia, it was meagerly applied. RSP would have everyone flagged as a potential threat to our nation, and I found myself not really caring what happened to anybody in this novel.
Except that actual malefactor I mentioned, and as I said, nothing happened to him. I finished the book dissatisfied.
So Much Sky (Photo of the Day)
NaBloPoMo Day 20: Drama
Today’s NaBloPoMo Prompt: Do you still print out photos in albums or are most your photos digital?
“Still.” Ha. As if I ever did. Nope, I’m one-hundred percent digital, one hundred percent of the time.
My pictures are for Instagram, Flickr, 500px, Viewbug, Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter. I do hope that people look at them, but I don’t know what the point of printing them out in an album would be.
We only have one photo album in this house, and that’s our wedding album. We had a professional photographer at our wedding (it was a three day event, actually) but after we bought the photos it took us a year to pick the pictures we wanted and do the layout and have the darn thing printed. Now it gathers dust. Oh, for the first few years when people came to visit us for the first time, the wedding album would be on a coffee table for folks to look at. And a few people who weren’t at the wedding liked looking at it. But just once. I mean, maybe 5% of all the photos made it into that thing.
I’m trying to think what would be the point of printing out the photos at all. In another post I mentioned a cookbok my wife compiled and we printed for her sister. It has a few pictures of food I took, but I don’t know if that counts. And then there’s this service we found that will print a bunch of greeting cards for you using your instagram photos. Does that count as printing pictures.
Broken record alert: I’ve said it before, that I don’t take pictures just to create memories, and so photo albums are just not a part of my universe. I suppose when I go to someone’s house and see an album sitting there I’ll flip through it out of curiosity. But just the once.
And all of this begs the question if the pictures I take are even print-worthy.
Today’s NaBloPoMo Photo Prompt: Drama
139 Lies Down, 226 to Go
Postaday for May 19th: State of Your Year. How is this year shaping up so far? Write a post about your biggest challenges and achievements thus far.
Well, let’s see. Some things I can’t disclose because there’s a very off chance that the wrong person will read this and we can’t have that. Suffice it to say that soon, if you need a home loan, call me.
That’s a lie, by the way, purposefully vague and enigmatic. Or was it? Trust me, it was.
And yes, I appreciate the irony of saying “trust me” just a two sentences after confessing to having lied.
Also, I appreciate the smug nature of saying I “appreciate” something that I, in fact, wrote.
Otherwise, this year has been, more or less, 139 days long. Went to San Diego, so that was good. Twice. Went to Las Vegas, but just the once. Went to Woodinville, drank a lot of wine. Ran a half marathon, and when I say “ran” I mean eight miles of it. I’ve got a new nephew. I’m going to a bachelor party. I’ll be having egg slad for lunch today
Challenges? Need to lose weight. Need to run more. I’ve challenged myself to write more. And to not let boring topics like this one stop me— and I don’t mean the prompt is boring, I mean the reality of my life is boring. But that shouldn’t keep me from writing.
For example, this year, so far, I’ve earned well over three million in illicit profits. Now, this, too, is a total lie, and may or may not have anything to do with the lies I told above. The point is, since there’s no point to really doing any of this, I’m kind of allowed to do anything. Like confess, finally, to all those cars I stole. Another lie. Or is it? It is.
I swear it is. And if you happen to drive a blue BMW 3 series with oyster-leather interior, and it’s missing, and you live in the greater King County area, don’t come to my house and look in my garage because it’s not there. I did not steal it, nor was stealing it a kind of gift to myself after having stolen 100 other vehicles, a milestone if you will, and it is certainly NOT the case that said grand theft auto was in part payment on a debt I owed to drug lords.
I don’t do drugs, or sell drugs, or buy drugs. I don’t steal cars. I don’t hardly ever even drive my own! So when I tell you that this year has been pretty good, averaging about .8 stolen cars per day passed, I am lying, because my life is otherwise not worth writing about very much.
Certainly not from the back seat of this Lexus is250, on “my” iPad, hiding inside a warehouse, waiting for the police helicopter to go away.
American Flag (Photo of the Day)
NaBloPoMo Day 19: Vintage
Today’s NaBloPoMo Prompt: Have you ever asked someone to take a photo down? Tell us about the experience.
No, and I can’t imagine doing so, because that would mean some either too a picture of me without my knowing, which doesn’t happen very often, or while I was doing something embarrassing, which I wouldn’t care about, or while I was doing something criminal, which has never happened. Just about the only thing I can think of that would approach illegal in a context where cameras where expected would be smoking weed at a party. But marijuana is now legal in this state, and I don’t choose to partake, (since my wife can’t, as she works for the federal government) and besides, as I have said many times, I’m usually the one behind the camera.
I guess It might happen that someone in some way steals one of my photos and puts it someplace— but in that case I would just ask for attribution, not necessarily ask them to take it down. If someone was using one of my photos to promote a surly agenda, I guess then I might ask them to take it down. Or not, if I’m getting paid. I am shallow enough that just the the thought of getting paid for a photo I took is making me question my own morals.
A third example occurs to me, where I ask someone to take down a photo of someone else. Not sure if I’d bother. I think maybe I’m a little lackadaisical when it comes to this sort of thing.
Today’s NaBloPoMo Photo Prompt: Vintage
I’m not Lazy, I’m a Genius!
Postaday for May 18th: To Sleep, Perchance to Dream. Sleep is one-third of our lives: write a post about it. Do you love naps? Have trouble falling alseep? Wish you could remember your dreams? Remember something especially vivid? Snuggle under a blanket, or throw the windows wide open? Meditate on sleep.
Out of all the human organs, the brain is the least understood. And out of all the things it does, why it sleeps is the biggest mystery. And yet there are some fairly compelling theories out there, theories that I find fascinating. For example, one theory holds that when we sleep, our brain shrinks in on itself a little bit. This opens space between the folds, and spinal fluid literally washes our brains, removing free radicals (destructive oxygen molecules) that have built up during the day.
Which is why I reject utterly that manliness or toughness includes being able to go long periods without sleep, or being able to survive on very little sleep. There’s nothing manly about a dirty brain.
If the brain is so little understood, and sleep is at the top of what we don’t know about the brain, then dreaming is at the top of what we don’t know about sleep. And yet, one very interesting theory holds that dreaming is nothing more than a function of learning. When we have experiences we encode those in short-term memory. When we sleep, we “move” these memories into long-term memory. Sort of like moving patterns out of RAM into a hard-drive. And to continue the computer analogy: the “pointers” our brain uses to “catalog” memories for easier retrieval are novel associations. The “weirder” the better. And that’s why dream can seem so weird: we’re experiencing our brain’s making odd associations to help us remember things later.
When we’re conscious, we don’t experience the novelty of these associations, usually. Who won the last Superbowl? My brain tells me it was the Patriots, and it might have “tagged” that for me when I went to sleep on one bitter night last February, maybe by creating a picture of Christmas carolers throwing flattened volleyballs at a guy in prison stripes eating a bowl of chicken soup. That’s Pete Carol, head coach of the Seahawks, a lynch mob for RB Marshawn Lynch, deflated balls and a criminal for the Patriot’s so-called deflate-gate scandal, a volleyball or a “Wilson” for QB Russell, and chicken soup for Bill Belichick, the Patriot’s head coach.
(I’m pretty sure, if this theory is accurate, our brains are much more subtle than the above scenario.)
So, given these theories, I for one embrace sleep and and encourage it in everyone. As I said above, I am never impressed when someone tells me how little they’ve slept (in hospitals, I always ask residents: how long since you last sleep, and how much did you sleep? If the answer is not satisfactory, I ask for another doctor). Teenagers need to sleep in— it’s essential to their brain health. And this is why newborns sleep up to 20 hours a day.
So every nap— and I take a lot— is like an IQ boost. I’m not lazy, I’m a genius!