“We’re only immortal for a limited time.”
~Neil Peart
Jan 28
Single Rubber Glove
I started to write an entry on the state of news and the world of politics but I felt the life force draining from my body, so I’ve shelved that. Let’s just say: it’s bad and we’re all doomed and leave it at that for now.
However, in a matter that somehow feels vaguely like a visual metaphor for the politics of our time, I share with you another type of rubbish.
– Filling my vehicle with gas one evening, I spotted this single, rubber glove draped over a trash can. This was simultaneously creepy and amusing to me. I wonder how much you’d have to pay the average person to pick up that glove with their bare hands…
“Oh, single rubber glove, discarded without care, what is thy story?’
Somehow, the single glove conjures even darker thoughts about what is in the tied plastic bag beneath it. Darkness and evil lies therein, surely…
And now, I’ve done my duty by sharing this meaningless piece of debris with the world. You’re welcome. Stay tuned for more exciting posts in the year to come! – What an auspicious way to kick-off a new decade!
Jan 26
December 2019 – Quote of the Month
“Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.”
~Charles Dickens
Dec 30
Winter Solstice and Summer Dreams
I’m not a winter person. But this year, (so far) I’ve done better than many winters before. (I count anything after Halloween as proverbial, if not literal, ‘winter’.) My mood has been helped in large part because I’ve gotten out regularly to hike and imbibe nature in spite of the seasonal gloom.
Still, I’m finishing the year with a some kind of cold or contagion and with the winter solstice now behind us and the days getting ever so slightly longer again, I find myself dreaming of summer.
With that thought in mind, I leave the year with a blast from a summer past.
Dec 30
November 2019 – Quote of the Month
“How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself?”
~Epictetus
Nov 30
Catalog
I have 104,403 photos in my photo library catalog. That is the majority, but it isn’t all of them. Invariably, there are a few thousand floating in folders that have not yet been imported.
I often ask myself, what good do all of these photographs do? What will become of all of my efforts to organize, back-up, meta tags and color correct them when I’m gone? Who will care?
So, as happens as more often than not, I find myself at the end of the month trying to fulfill my self-inflicted mandate to post at least once to each section of this website. It also usually happens that on countless nights, as I struggle to sleep, my mind will race with endless musings and prospective blog posts. Invariably, these ideas either fail to come to me as I sit to write or they feel outdated or two unwieldy and time consuming to commit to pixels.
Writing a journal / blog, is a bit like always answering the question a friend or acquaintance might ask you, “What’s new?” … (MIND BLANKS)… “Ummmmmmm… Nothiiiiiing…What’s new with you?”
My frequent fallback position is to dig through my photos for inspiration or at least a nice image that I can quickly post. Today was one of those days.
But for my public facing portion of this site, (“WorldView”), I have a lot of ‘rules’ that I have made up for myself: chiefly around privacy. That means that I generally won’t post photos of myself, people in my life, or details about where I live. That eliminate a LOT of interesting photos as possible sources of posts.
However, as I scrolled through my photos, feeling that I didn’t have much to say, I was once again surprised by all of the pictures on my phone alone. In just the last few months since I last cleared it, there were so many little moments of life captured: vacations, animals, work, meals, landscapes, activities… So many incidental instances that are so easily lost in the fog of living and yet, which comprise the best of life itself.
And that’s just on my phone… Scrolling through my photo library leaves me with a deep feeling that I have lived a lot.
So, I suppose, that at least, is reason enough for the photos and a good enough post for another month.
Nov 30
October 2019 – Quote of the Month
“There is a child in every one of us who is still a trick-or-treater looking for a brightly-lit front porch.”
~Robert Brault
Oct 30
Above a Dark Tor
Taken on a recent vacation while staying at the lovely Arenal Kioro Suites & Spa.
“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.“
~ J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
Oct 17
September 2019 – Quote of the Month
“Change. How do you change yourself?… It’s easy to lose yourself or never find yourself. The older you get, the heavier that baggage becomes that you haven’t sorted through, so you run. I’ve done a lot of that kind of running.
I’ve spent 35 years trying learn how to let go of the destructive parts of my character. And I still have days when I struggle with it.
We all have our broken pieces. Emotionally, spiritually in this life, nobody gets away unhurt.
We’re always trying to find somebody whose broken pieces fit with our broken pieces and something whole emerges.~Bruce Springsteen
A certain kind of magic took place. The music began to take on a life of its own. Life’s mysteries remain and deepen, its answers unresolved. So you walk on, through the dark because that’s where the next morning is.”
Sep 30
Fire Photon Elevators
As I’m want to do, I was watching an old episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show late one evening. The episode was, “Christmas and the Hard-Luck Kid II“. In it, Mary is alone in the news room late on Christmas Eve. Someone has entered the building and she’s frightened, jamming the door with a chair. She stands back and then hears an elevator start up. I heard the sound and was immediately amused by the recognizable sound. Watch the video: judge for yourself. (Sound required, of course.)
Some related trivia:
- The photon torpedo sound was originally created for the “skeleton ray” in George Pal’s War of the Worlds.
- The sound was created by hitting a high-tension wire (like on an antenna tower) with a hammer. (Which I remember accidentally discovering as a child, standing at my bus stop, when I hit a nearby tension wire that held a utility-pole.
- Photon torpedoes were introduced fairly late into the first season of Star Trek: The Original Series. They made their on-screen debut in the 19th episode of the series, “Arena“. Before that, when the USS Enterprise fired shots that looked like globular bursts, they were identified in dialogue as proximity blasts from the phasers, as in “Balance of Terror“. In fact, the early writer’s guide, The Star Trek Guide, made no mention of the ship having photon torpedo armaments.
Sep 27
August 2019 – Quote of the Month
“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”
~Isaac Asimov
Aug 23
Stoned
In February of this year, I visited the local Science Center and was amused by this dispenser, set out-side of the gift shop.
Above the dispenser was a sign that these were ‘gems from around the world‘.
Clearly, something had happened because the original signage for the dispenser was supplemented after it had gone to market with a warning that these are, ‘Real Stones – Do not Eat’.
(Side note: I can also guess that the author of the sign did not know how to make a ‘¢’ sign, because writing, ‘$0.50′ is an atypical way to indicate, ’50 cents’ unless you’re working in a spreadsheet.)
It’s an odd world we live in. Unlike the vast majority of what our ancestors experienced over the millenniums, it is becoming common that the ‘nature’ we experience in our lives is simulated and that we must be warned when we are encountering the real thing, lest we eat stones from machines.
Aug 20
July 2019 – Quote of the Month
“Here is one way to conceptualize NASA’s heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his “moon speech” to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon “before the decade is out.” In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy’s speech and Neil Armstrong’s first historic bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits. All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years.”
~Margaret Lazarus Dean,
Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight
Jul 30
Michael Myers Meets Columbo
As part of my evening ritual to mentally wind down before sleep, I watch old TV shows.
Watching an episode of Columbo, “By Dawn’s Early Light” (first airing Oct. 27, 1974), my attention was caught by this visual:
This location made me think of this fellow:
The reason for the connection is due to the rather (horrifying [for all the wrong reasons]) 2018 Halloween sequel which featured the Michael, aka the boogeyman at the (fictional), ‘Smith’s Grove Sanitarium’:
Even though the courtyard’s buildings were obviously different, I thought the tiles and institutional nature of the buildings to be so similar that they were probably shot at the same location. I just didn’t know if the buildings were actually updated, or digitally replaced between the 1974 Columbo and the 2018 Halloween.
A quick search revealed that the Columbo episode was filmed in South Carolina at ‘The Citadel’ while Halloween 2018 was filmed 4.8 miles away at the at Military Magnet Academy – Courtyard in Charleston.
As it turns out, the Citadel was established in 1842, whereas the Military Magnet Academy was opened in August 1997.
So why do they look the same? Because of this:
“Much of the reason Military Magnet and The Citadel have maintained such a longstanding community partnership is their shared emphasis on academic excellence in a disciplined military environment. The Citadel has greatly influenced Military Magnet Academy, according to Principal Anderson Townsend. In 2009, the Charleston County School District redesigned Military Magnet to look like a miniature replica of The Citadel that includes a red and white checkerboard in its center quadrangle similar to those found in the barracks at the military college.“
So, there you have it: an obscure, odd little bit of TV / Movie trivia, also known as, ‘how I spent three hours of my mortal allotment researching, writing and screen grabbing because of an idle moment of curiosity.‘
Jul 21
June 2019 – Quote of the Month
“Had enough of heartbreak and pain
~ Bruce Springsteen
I had a little sweet spot for the rain
For the rain and skies of grey
Hello sunshine, won’t you stay?”
Jun 28
Tautologies Subject to Tautology
Searching for humidifiers on Amazon one day, I came across this very philosphical description of size.
Jun 21
May 2019 – Quote of the Month
“I’ve got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts – you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn’t do right? Because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing.”
~ D.D. Barant, Dying Bites
May 22
Happy 18th Birthday
GlenGreen.com launched this day, in 2001. Happy birthday website. Now you can vote.
May 17
April 2019 – Quote of the Month
“I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top.”
~ John Keats
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