Archive for January, 2010

It is a strange thought to consider: what if, right now, it was simultaneously ten days ago in Alaska? Such that if you dispatched a postcard to Juneau, it would likely, in the eyes of the recipient, arrive from the future? Or, to ask an Englishman what happened on the 17th of September, 1752 only to have him respond—truthfully— that the day never happened? What began as a 16th-century Catholic exercise to fix a lagging Easter date became the nearly universally-adopted calendar system to this day.

Photo by counting chest bullets

As mentioned in my post on phenology, I’ve been considering cycles lately. Seasons. Rotations. Circles. Calendars. Orbits. In the next while, perhaps a month or so, I’ll be highlighting content that carries this theme.

Got funny looks photographing this well-used telephone pole in front of the Montage cafe the other day. Don’t care. Come to think of it I’ve been asked three times in the past two days what I’m photographing. Strange. But I seem to be handling it OK.

Wolf Hall concerns in a much-studied time. Writers have plundered the intriguing reign of King Henry VIII and his storied serial wives from hundreds of angles, both academic and artistic. But Hilary Mantel does something new: In this story we have a novel that is, in a certain way, the story of the birth of bureaucracy, centered on a person historians usually skirt around in a rush to more legendary (or, seemingly, interesting) figures. In this novel about Thomas Cromwell, Mantel does something amazing. It’s as if, instead of dealing with characters, we are looking at real human beings.

This was my entry to @dailyshoot for Jan. 12: #ds58 Someone once said "Music is what feelings sound like." Make a photo of something musical to illustrate the quote today.

You can do so many things with this dough that it’s almost not funny. I’ve memorized this recipe because it’s just that useful. Four quick ingredients turn into a stupidly large array of possibilities. My recipes here cover pizza and bagel derivatives, but I imagine that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Photo by Dalboz17

A photo from 1939 or 1940 shows my paternal grandfather inexplicably smoking a pipe, leaning out of a window of a rather decrepit clapboard house (through lace curtains), and simultaneously typing on what might be an Underwood typewriter. He was also a rocket scientist. True story.

Let’s get something straight first. It’s important not to confuse phenology with phonology (linguistically relevant chunks of sound). Nor am I referring to phrenology, with its quackery, skull bumps and excuses for racism. Phenology is the study of recurring plant and animal life cycle stages—many of these events are sensitive to climatic variation and change.

Photo by Anita363

A number of photos I’ve taken in the past few days have an Yves Klein cobalt quality to them. Several were spurred by the @dailyshoot assignment to take photos of one’s favorite color. My favorite color is actually indigo, but examples of that color in my urban environmental surroundings are rare.

David quivered with thrill a month or so ago, when he happened upon a returned Oregon Scientific base station on eBay.

“Weather station! Weather station! Weather!” I heard David shout from his office down the hall. His excited cries devolved into nonverbal coos of glee.

“Why was it returned? What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Who cares? Weather!”