Random beachness

Sick at work

We've had so much rain and heat this autumn in the jungle, that the bugs and the vegetation are still growing fiercely. I mixed up a new batch of ant poison in the sprayer, and pumped it up...just one pump too many, though, and the hose popped off and sprayed a jet of poison 20 feet into the air. I got a few drops of it in my mouth. I quickly rinsed out my mouth, but I don't know how bad that stuff is, or how quickly it acts.

Last night I came down with flu-like symptoms... fever, chills, all-over body ache, but no congestion or coughing. So I took some NyQuil and slept for 10 hours. I feel a bit better today, but not much. Sigh.

Work, work, a little bit of play

Thursday was work all day. So was Friday. I'm not used to Fridays. But it's a condition of my contract that if I work at home, I work 5 days a week. It's a bit annoying. But it's VERY nice to be home.

This morning we worked in the yards....mowed both lawns at our house and at our rental house, and then came back to our house and pulled some of the air vine out of the trees. It's been very hot and humid and rainy, and the green air vine (I don't know its taxonomy) is growing like wildfire. It particularly likes oak trees, because there's plenty to grab onto and spread into a green canopy and soak up the sun with its leaves, even as it chokes the tree beneath it to death. So we got two trash bins full of vine down off the trees. We will try again tomorrow. It's very heavy work, though, pulling with your arms over your head, standing on a ladder 15 feet off the ground. I take a tree pruner pole, jam it into the vine clumps in the tree, twirl it like a spaghetti fork, and haul a bunch of vine down out of the tree. Then my darling wife has to cut it off the pole with scissors. Repeat ad nauseum.

I just got back from the rifle range with Bob. We had a nice time. It was a decent day, but materials are getting more expensive for ammunition, so the manufacturers are cutting the weight of .22 bullets down from 40 to 36 grains. This makes it unreliable in repeating rifles, and they won't cycle properly. Sigh. I will have to hunt for "real" ammo.

Buried in work

I am on hour 12 of my day. I hope I can finish soon. I am working so much more at home than I did on the road. My wife asked me never to take a "remote" job again, where I'm working at home, because it takes too much time away from her for me to be at home. Paradoxically. Sigh.

Flying the unfriendly skies

I see that NASA is withholding the results of an air-safety survey, which purports to show that the skies are MUCH less safe than the flying public has been led to believe.

Like THAT's a surprise. After all, TWA Flight 800 was downed by a missile, said several hundred eyewitnesses on the Long Island shore (and friends in the Air Force who say they saw it on a feed from a spy satellite). And that's never been publicized either, because it would panic the flying public and force the airlines to spend billions of dollars fitting flare and chaff dispensers and infra-red/radar jammers on civilian airliners. So the government and the media refused to discuss the facts.

I know that I am very likely to die in a plane crash, given how much I fly. That's why I always put my boarding pass in the fire-retardant fabric pocket on the seatback in front of me.

That way, they can at least tell where I was sitting, and they can sweep my charred bones up into a body bag and cart me away. Assuming that the entire plane doesn't disintegrate in midair and spread itself over several miles of countryside.

But I'm an optimist. I plan on surviving if at all possible. I always try to sit in the back of the plane, far away from the fuel tanks and the engines in the wings. I wear cotton clothing with long pants and sleeves, to ward off fire. I wear sneakers, to climb over shrieking passengers and force my way out of the escape hatch.

And if all that preparation isn't enough, then it's a comfort, a small but real comfort, to know that I won't die alone.

Halloween decorations

My darling wife goes all out with the Halloween decorations. We do Halloween almost as big as Christmas.






























Our friends Ed and Rosemarie. Ed was a captain in the Navy. Those are his military-issue glasses. Those are not military-issue teeth.


Our wonderful friends who came to our party. The kids are in front; the adults are in back. Not that you would really know it.


Ah, to be young and hip with a hot car (1990 Nissan 240SX).

The Annual Plant Sale

Melba giving the cashiers instructions before the doors open.


The crowd was lined up, waiting to get in.


And they're off and shopping.



We had three cashier lanes. It was a zoo.


Even the littlest shoppers found something they liked.


The floor cleared quickly with 800 people shopping throughout the day.


Every hour, we collected the cashboxes and counted the money. We made more than twice as much as usual, because our volunteers did a great job of advertising, and we held the sale at a city park instead of the eco-house. Much better traffic.


The whole place was empty and torn down by 5 PM.


The few straggler volunteers who stuck it out to the bitter end were reaaaaally tired. So was I.

A day in the office

I seldom go to the office, since it is about 2,000 miles away from my house. But this week was a pleasurable exception.


These are my friends Bill (best man at my wedding and shooting buddy for many years) and Virginia. Although we have many empty cubes in our office (we own the building), they share a cube because they are working on the same project. It's sad that their client is so screwed up. But their project, like my horrible project over the summer, will be over eventually. Nothing lasts forever. Like Bill's beard. It comes and goes. His beard makes him look cute and cuddly. My beard makes me look scary. Plus it scratches my wife, so she has forbidden me to have one anymore. I will have to enjoy Bill's beard experience vicariously.


Guen, our IT director and queen of all things technical. She loooves getting her picture taken. Not.


Is our office a stressful office? Of course not. I have no idea why all these giant bottles of painkillers are here. (The 12-ounce Coke can is there for size comparison.)


Our office manager, Angela, stopped in with her family to say hi. This is Caden (CAY-den). He's two weeks old. I have never held a child so young before. He was so fragile. It did not awaken any paternal instincts in me, however. It didn't awaken him, either. He slept like... well, you know.


Angela's second son Mason is hiding behind father Randy's leg. He's very shy. So is first son Austin, who is the most adept at avoiding my camera. He hid in the supply cabinet, successfully foiling the paparazzi who were hunting him.


My camera has a special setting which ensures that every picture I take of my friend/boss Mary catches her with her eyes closed. It's an amazingly accurate, though completely unwanted, feature.


My friend/boss Dave, who is a thousand years old, and my boss-in-training Katie, who is six.


Mary, and Katie's younger sister Kira, who is five. Kira has just finished a yummy chocolate sundae. And Mary's eyes are closed again.


And again.

In-flight irritainment

Today's in-flight movie is "License to Wed." Even Robin Williams can't save this horrible Orwellian vision of marriage and babies. It's a propaganda film masquerading as a comedy, highlighting the worst aspects of religious marriage classes, wedding preparations, and procreation. Plus the tape has a tracking problem, so the picture and the sound keep jumping. I'm switching back to XM radio.

Oddly enough, my darling wife and I have never taken any religious classes, our wedding was a simple, casual garden picnic with our friends and a nondenominational minister, and we are happily, selfishly child-free. Maybe that's why I don't think this movie is funny. Robin Williams isn't as funny as he used to be, either. He's taken darker roles lately, especially in "One-Hour Photo," which I would like to see at some point.

The end of "License to Wed" is smarmily happy. I love smarmily happy endings, but the middle is so annoying as to make the end of this movie even MORE annoying. Weddings are not so bad, nor are they so good, as the movie makes it seem. Argh.

Imitation is the sincerest form of irritation

"We were talking / about the space between us all / and the people / who hide themselves behind a wall / of illusion, never glimpse the truth, til it's far too late, and they pass away." - The Beatles, "Within You, Without You" from the Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.

Audiovisions channel on XM radio was playing that today on the airplane, only it was an instrumental-only version. I recognized the drums and the tabla and the violins on it, because I think it would be very difficult to mimic exactly the timbre and the rhythms of each musician. I had never heard this instrumental version before. I missed the sound of George Harrison counting under his breath, trying to make sure he came in on the right beat. SPLHCB was really the first album I ever listened to, when I was seven or eight years old. I checked that record out of the library and kept it for weeks at a time, over and over, playing it to death. It was truly a classic album, setting the bar for all concept albums to come after it. Such a wide variety of songs on it, and yet it all fit together pretty well.

The song after that on XM radio, they played a new-age tune that was an echoey piano with the ocean surf in the background. But what was strange was that the pianist was riffing on the first four notes of "Within You, Without You." "We were talking..." "We were talking..." and he kept playing variations on that four-note scale, but he didn't really go anywhere else with it. I don't know if the song was a deliberate homage to the Beatles tune, or if the XM programmer just picked it to follow "Within You Without You" because it sounded similar, or what.

But it was ANNOYING. Finish the damned song! I wanted to yell. Sigh.

Friends in Denver

I visited my friend Loy and her husband Will the other night. It was a wonderful get-together, with a nice meal at a local bistro. She and I have known each other over a decade. I met her when I worked for her on a contract, and we kept in touch after that. She's a wonderful woman... brilliant, musical (a coloratura opera singer) and a workaholic like me. She attended my wedding, I attended her wedding... it's one of those low-maintenance friendships that never goes stale even if we don't talk for a month or two.

They've redone their entire basement. It's beautiful. They live down there and rent out the rest of the house to several different tenants.



The ceilings are low in their basement, but Loy doesn't mind - she's tiny. Will must have a constant headache from banging his head on the ceiling, though, because he's very tall.


This bathroom used to be a scary hole. Now it's light and airy with a claw-footed tub. They put in the travertine tile too. That makes it nice.


They had this odd nook between the bedroom and the hallway and the stairs up to their living room above ground, so they put a desk in it. It seems to work.


This is the upstairs main hall and stairway, where all their tenants live. Lots of pretty wood.
The house is a beautiful... Edwardian? Victorian? Can't remember. Never was good with architecture. 1910-ish, this one is.


The kitchen in their apartment is one of the smallest I've ever seen, but it seems to work. They want to re-do it, but they don't think they can get new cabinets or appliances to fit. So they have to stick with the existing ones.


Szabo, Loy, and Will. Wonderful friends. I am lucky to have them.

Who stole my sunshine?

Denver gets more than 300 days of sun per year, about the same as my new jungle home. But it is trying mighty hard to snow today. The sky is that peculiar smooth gray-white. You never see skies like that in the jungle. You don't see them often in Denver. But today, you do.

Wonders never cease

The Colorado Rockies baseball team, who had a terrible record the whole decade that I lived in Denver, beat the Arizona Diamondbacks last night to win the National League pennant (whatever that is). This is the best season they have ever had, I think.

Needless to say, Denverites are ecstatic, even people who don't follow baseball. I'm not a Denverite anymore, and I don't follow baseball either, so I'm just mildly amused.

A wild day

I got nothing done today, but it was wonderful to see all my friends in the office. Sigh. Hopefully I can get twice as much work done tomorrow.

It's my wife's birthday today. She is not happy with me because I was not there to celebrate with her. Although I am rarely there to celebrate with her, she had gotten her hopes up that this year, I would be. That was before I was called away suddenly to work this week in Denver.

I will need to make it up to her this weekend.

But maybe that's what they WANTED us to think...

Paranoid thought at 3:00 in the morning - the "inevitable Hillary" poll on Fox News was designed to offend voters, and push them away from voting for Hillary.

Clear thought at 9:00 in the morning - there MUST be something more important for me to worry about. Like work, for example. ;-)

Weekend randomness

Saturday we worked the whole day at the annual plant sale, to benefit the Master Gardener educational program run by the county. Since the eco-house has been moved but hasn't been set up again yet, we couldn't hold the sale there like we usually do, so we held it at a local city park a few blocks away. Normally the Master Gardeners don't really advertise, but this time they put ads in the local newspapers, and signs on the major roads nearby. We had more than a thousand customers show up....more than 100 people were in line at 9:00 AM when we opened. All told, we had over a thousand customers that day, and we made more than $8500 selling plants that most of the master gardeners (including my darling wife) had grown for free, and had donated. We also had some donations from nurseries and groundskeeping companies. By 3:00 PM when we closed, I had helped load more than 50 cars full of plants, and we were all dead tired. My wife was the head cashier, responsible for collecting the money every hour from the cashiers, taking it to the county building a block away, counting it out and locking it in a file cabinet there. That was fun. We would lock ourselves in the office in the county building and count the money out. We had stacks of money everywhere.

After the sale closed, we were allowed to take any plants that were left over. There were two Chinese fan palms in big 40-gallon pots that no one had bought; they were priced over $100 to start with. They got marked down to $15 by the end of the sale, so we bought one. When everything became free after the sale was over, no one claimed the other Chinese fan palm, because it was infested with fire ants (the ant equivalent of killer bees - small, red, biting bastards). We took our chances, threw it in the car, wrapped it in a tarp, and took it and the other Chinese fan palm home. We hauled them both out on the driveway and left them out overnight, planning to douse them with antkiller in the morning.

When we woke up, the fire ants were up too, abandoning the palm pot and marching down the center crack in the driveway, heading for the street. We don't know if they got the queen ant out or not, but we sprayed the entire column down with ant poison, and then doused the pot also. It was a massive ant genocide, and it felt good, because fire ants are horrible, horrible things. We generally don't use pesticides in our yard, and we are relatively fire ant-free so far (because they only like soil that has been recently disturbed, like soil around a newly-built home). But we weren't going to take any chances. Death to the fire ants! Other ants are welcome, even carpenter ants, because they perform vital ecological functions (either as predators or as prey). But fire ants HURT when they bite. Therefore they must die.

So we will leave the palms in their pots until we get our culvert pipe installed in our front ditch, and we fill in the ditch and make the front yard smooth. Then we'll plant the palms front and center in our yard. They will grow big and beautiful. Unless I killed them with the ant poison. We shall see.

Stupid Marvin downloaded the camera to our server, and forgot to put the plant sale pictures on the laptop to upload this week. Oh well. Next weekend.

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"Do you hear that sound, Mr. Anderson?" asks Agent Smith in "The Matrix," as he holds Neo down on the subway tracks, waiting for the oncoming train to roar over them and kill Neo. "It's the sound of inevitability."

That's exactly the sound that the media morons are making about Hillary Clinton. In my rant a few days ago, I complained that the American mass media are cheering for Hillary Clinton to be our next president, and they are portraying it as an inevitable fact. Yesterday a Fox News (!) poll was released showing that most Americans are resigned to the fact that Hillary Clinton WILL be the next President. And polls like that piss me off, because they're just another example of how the media is trying to sway voters. It's called a "push poll," and the questions are designed to skew the results toward the desired answer. Most polls are that way, but some are more blatant than others. And this one was just another example. Even though it was commissioned by Fox News, which is not exactly friendly toward Hillary.

So the poll was trumpeted as proof that Hillary would be President, and that apparently pissed a LOT of people off besides yours truly, especially the other candidates in the presidential race, who whined about it the following day.

I'm glad some other people are paying attention. And I'm glad I'm not the only one who's pissed off.

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Since I have been fortunate enough to be working at home, my darling wife has re-introduced me to one of her hobbies: television. Normally I don't watch TV on the road - I watch DVDs. I have bunches of DVDs that I still have not seen. I brought "Band of Brothers" with me this week to finally finish it, 3 years after I received it as a gift for Christmas. I'm only on episode 8. But anyway, there's a nice new crop of shows on. I have no idea what network they're on - my DVR records it and I watch it.

• "Chuck" is a fun yarn about a sad-sack Stanford University dropout named Chuck who's working at the local Buy More electronics store. He receives an email from an ex-friend (who is then killed by spies). The email contains a CIA database of top-secret information which somehow downloads itself into his brain, and gives him the ability to see the connections between different events in the news, and to figure out events affecting national security. Two CIA spies are assigned to watch him, protect him, and (presumably, eventually) kill him if necessary. I don't recognize Chuck or his pretend-girlfriend/CIA protector, but I do recognize Adam Baldwin as the other CIA agent (Adam was on "Firefly"). It's a lot of fun.

• "Moonlight" is a vampire cop show, a plot-for-plot remake of the Canadian show "Forever Knight" from the 1990s. Only instead of a cop named Nick, our vampire hero is an ex-cop-turned-private-investigator named Mick, and his love interest is not Natalie the city coroner, but Beth, an Internet news reporter. (A vampire does work the night shift in the morgue, though, which is handy for the story.) "Moonlight" is similar to "Forever Knight" in that Mick's trying to be good and not kill people, he has a human sidekick/helper, he has an older vampire colleague who's always telling him to be bad, he drives a 1950s convertible, and the story is often told in flashbacks. It's different from "Forever Knight" in that he doesn't have a vampire ex-lover, and he narrates in an annoying voice-over a la "Bladerunner." Still. We loved "Forever Knight," and we hope "Moonlight" succeeds.

• "Reaper" is about Sam, a college dropout slacker whose father was deathly ill when Sam was a child. Dad sells Sam's soul to the devil in exchange for letting Dad live and continue to support the family. So when Sam turns 21, the devil shows up to collect the debt. Instead of taking Sam down to Hell, the devil leaves him in place on Earth, but tasks him to track down and recapture souls who have escaped from Hell, like a bounty hunter does. Sam enlists the help of his slacker friends who work with him at The Work Bench (similar to Lowe's Hardware or other "big box" stores). It's very funny, and the devil (Ray Wise, a veteran of stage, film and television) is hilarious, always bringing Sam a "vessel" with which to capture the next soul, kind of like the ghost traps they used in "Ghostbusters." One vessel is a battery-powered Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner. Another one is a radio-controlled car. A third vessel is an electric toaster. It's interesting to watch Sam figure out how to use each vessel.

• "The Women's Murder Club" is about three female friends (a police officer, a lawyer, and a coroner) who work and play together. A fourth woman is a reporter, who is delightfully geeky but persistent. I like it because it has Jill Bernhardt, who played the character of Daisy on "Dead Like Me" a few years ago. The star is Lindsay Boxer from "Law & Order," which I never watched.

There are old favorites also, such as "Ugly Betty" and "The Ghost Whisperer" (I swear, Jennifer Love Hewitt is trying to set new records for showing as much cleavage as possible). And "Bones" and "House." "Bones" angered us the other night though - it was about a strange type of sadomasochism where one person dresses up in black leather bondage gear and pretends to be a horse, and the other person pretends to be a groom or jockey, and puts the "horse" through "training," making them prance around and run in circles, eat horse food (hay and alfalfa), have sex with them (which has overtones of bestiality, if you think about it), etc. It was disturbing to watch, even though it was just a normal murder mystery where a "horse" was found dead, and they had to find out which "rider" killed him. I find it difficult to believe that such sexual perversions exist, but apparently they do. I just don't think they are appropriate subject matter for a prime-time television show. The world is a sick enough place without promoting such things on broadcast television.

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I get to be in Denver this week. I hope I get to see my "daughter" Alyssa, and my friend Loy, and my friend Robin while I'm there. I will get to see my best friend Bill, so that will be nice. It's very kind of my boss Mary to fly me to Denver at her own expense to let me work with my colleagues. Mary has been wonderful to me. She's taught me everything I know, and has given me the opportunities that let me become the person I am today.

Friday Haiku

Failed bidder for prez
has "won" the Nobel Peace Prize
should I laugh, or cry?

Reach out and touch someone

I went shooting with my neighbor Bob over the weekend. It was the first time since I'd moved in next door that we'd gotten to go play together. It was fun. He loaned me some high-visibility targets. They are like scratch-off lottery tickets, in that they are multi-layered. When a bullet hits them, the surrounding black target material flakes away, leaving a yellow layer underneath, which is much easier to see than just a black hole on black paper.

This is about 30 rounds at 25 meters. To get a group like this is pretty good, I think. I had a few fliers above and below the paper at first - I couldn't see where the rounds were going. It's a .45 ACP, which is pretty heavy recoil for such a small weapon. But that's why I like Glocks. Small, ergonomics of a brick, but very reliable and very accurate. If you hold it with a stiff wrist, it will perform.

I love my little Rosie.

Predicting the future

My darling wife makes me watch "The Today Show" on NBC in the mornings while we eat breakfast.

I can feel my brain cells popping and dying with every vacuous stupid moment spent watching that show. I often get up and walk away because I can't stand it.

Especially because for the past four months, and for the next YEAR, the troglodytes on "The Today Show" (and countless other television shows of their ilk) will run stupid propaganda stories like they did today. "What will Hillary Clinton do when she's President?"

Merely phrasing the question that way makes my stomach churn. By saying "when" and not "if," media morons like Matt Lauer and Meredith Viera promote the idea that having Hillary Clinton as President of the United States is a foregone conclusion. Why, how could we even entertain the thought of Hillary NOT being President?

It makes me sick. Not just because I find Hillary about as attractive a candidate as Pol Pot or Idi Amin, but because the media morons are so desperately trying to forge their fantasy into reality, they are pushing voters like me in the opposite direction. The more the media prattles about Hillary being so great, the more I am inclined to vote for anyone BUT her. It's just the principle of the thing. The more someone says I should do something, the more likely I am NOT to do it.

Perhaps I am merely obstinate. But I like to think that my vote, no matter how small, is mine to cast, and it matters. To have nitwits on television continually tell me that I must vote a certain way, and that resistance is futile if I don't vote that way, makes me all the more determined to resist.

F*ck them and the horse they rode in on. I'm changing the channel.

Beach moment

Just for grins, here's a late afternoon moment at the beach. I won't leave it up here for a long time - it's 30 MB. Next movie will be smaller. ;-)

This is the beach a few minutes from my house. It's a rough day... surf's up. Usually it's glassy smooth. Some days it's REALLY rough, and the roar of the ocean can be heard quite clearly in my room at home. You can smell the salt air, too. Not very good for the silverware in the drawer in the kitchen, though - the corrosive atmosphere eventually eats everything away. Dessicants like Damp-Rid sell well here.

I like this little yellow star, and this tiny ball of mud with its abundance of liquid dihydrogen oxide. I am fortunate to be stationed here, for the fleeting moment that this fragile body of mine can maintain itself before decaying back into its constituent atoms.

Pictures of the Ringling Museum

There is a huuuuuge diorama of a giant circus, at the Ringling Circus Museum. Here are all the circus animals in their wagons, lined up on the midway. It's a portable zoo. In the 1930s, most people had never seen animals like zebras and giraffes and elephants and crocodiles. Circuses gave people that experience.


The circus wagons rolled into town on huge long trains of flatbed railroad cars. They rolled the wagons off and hauled them with teams of horses (also brought by the train) to the site of the circus, usually in a farmer's field that was rented for the day or the week.


The horses hauled the tents and poles and animal wagons and other equipment to the circus site.


The circus site was huge. At the height of the circus as an entertainment form, in the 1930s, a big circus would have two railroad trains. The first train (the logistics train, with cooks and blacksmiths and mechanics and such) would roll ahead at nightfall, to get to the next site, while the circus was playing the last show of the day. The logistics people would get to the next site and prepare for the arrival of the second train. After the show ended for the night, the tents would be taken down, the animals would be loaded in their wagons back onto the railroad cars of the second train, and the performers would get into their train cars, and the second train would roll through the night while they slept, to arrive at the next site. When they arrived, the logistics people would set up the entire circus again on the next site. They would start putting up the tents in the pre-dawn hours, and by 10 AM or noon, the circus would be ready for the first of two or three shows that it would put on that day.

I can't imagine how people could DO that, day after day after day. Most circuses only played one night in a town, and moved on. Rarely, they'd stay three days, or a week.


The diorama had lots of circus sounds being played back over speakers next to each tent, so you could hear what was going on in that tent; cooking, eating, laundry, sleeping, rehearsals, mechanics working on machines, animal handlers tending the animals... it really made it very lifelike, even though none of the figurines moved.

This is the diorama from above. It's about 100 feet long. The big tents are about 15 or 20 feet long.


It even went through daylight and nighttime hours. At "night," all the tents lit up. It was beautiful.


Each figurine had its own handmade clothes. The whole diorama took thousands of man-hours (many years) to make.


This is the "big top" tent in full swing. Animals, performers, trapeze artists, all doing their thing.


This is the dining tent, where the performers and circus staff ate.


This is the cooking tent, where the cooks worked. The big screen shows video of an actual circus dining hall.

The whole diorama took most of an hour to look at, there's so much detail. Truly amazing.

My nephew is coming to visit!

My nephew Andy is coming to visit us tonight. He just moved to the big city north of us with some of his buddies who were tired of the Wisconsin winters. He's coming over for dinner and to do laundry. ;-) It will be nice to see him.

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Urf. A huge linguine dinner and an ice cream cone later, I'm ready to fall asleep. Poor Andy is trying to work up his resume on Monster.com for an interview tomorrow morning. AND he has to drive back to the big city tonight, because of his interview. Poor guy. But it's wonderful to see him. He looks great. Taller than I remember. Or perhaps I have shrunk. Hmmm.

Propaganda as art

I observed the last half of the Cold War between the United States and the former Soviet Union, and waited with resignation for them to immolate each other, making the planet safe for lower life forms such as cockroaches. Alas, it was not to be. It would have been interesting to watch.

But during that period, I gained an appreciation for the propaganda that each side engaged in. The Soviet Union mastered the art of the propaganda poster, providing government-sponsored motivational messages to the people through brilliantly-colored, simply-drawn images. You can see these images on A Soviet Poster A Day. I like this site. It's very interesting, and some of these images I have not seen before. It's quite educational. The United States didn't really do that kind of thing, except during wartime, so the Soviets really came out on top as masters of the art.

It reminds me of a simpler time, when propaganda was acknowledged as being just that, propaganda, and was an accepted tool to be used by government. Sometime in the 1950s and 1960s, it became privatized, particularly among newspapers, television and radio stations, and also among private (and later, public) universities. Now, particularly in the United States, most of the mass media is constantly engaged in one propaganda war or another, against whatever internal enemies they face within the United States. It's very annoying, because most of the warring parties vehemently deny that they are engaged in propaganda, even while they spew more and more of it in response to someone pointing out that it exists. It's sad.

Freedom of speech also includes freedom to ignore speech. I enjoy propaganda when it's obvious, like the Soviet posters. It annoys me when it's subtle, like on NBC or NPR. Which is why I ignore those media outlets. If you're going to spew bullsh*t, be honest and forthright about it. Don't deny that you're doing it.

I think that many people dislike and distrust subtle propaganda, and they like forthright, in-your-face propaganda. That's why the New York Times is approaching bankruptcy, and why Fox News' ratings keep going up.

Go figure.

I think that I shall never see...

...a poem as lovely as a tree, especially the banana trees outside my window. As my butt is glued to this chair 14 hours a day lately, the sight of those trees keeps me sane.

I think I may start posting short videos. A minute of this, a minute of that. Hmmm. What to shoot? Perhaps tomorrow's sunset. If I can unglue my butt from this chair.

Frustration

I am working more at home than I did on the road. Sigh.

Curious coincidences

I woke up last Saturday morning with the Carpenters' "On Top Of the World" ringing in my head, for no particular reason. My brain plays back the oddest things sometimes, in 32-track Dolby stereo. It can get annoying.

"Such a feelin's comin' over me
There is wonder in most everything I see
Not a cloud in the sky
Got the sun in my eyes
And I won't be surprised if it's a dream

Everything I want the world to be
Is now coming true especially for me
And the reason is clear
It's because you are here
You're the nearest thing to heaven that I've seen

I'm on the top of the world lookin' down on creation
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found ever since you've been around
Your love's put me at the top of the world

Something in the wind has learned my name
And it's tellin' me that things are not the same
In the leaves on the trees and the touch of the breeze
There's a pleasin' sense of happiness for me

There is only one wish on my mind
When this day is through I hope that I will find
That tomorrow will be just the same for you and me
All I need will be mine if you are here

I'm on the top of the world lookin' down on creation
And the only explanation I can find
Is the love that I've found ever since you've been around
Your love's put me at the top of the world"


And later that day, I heard it on the radio! That's not very common on the radio anymore.

And THEN there was a ton of billboards on the highway, advertising "On Top Of The World Communities" (new homes). (!!!)

I was getting seriously weirded out about the whole thing by the end of the day, I can tell you.

More pictures from Ringling's house

Here's some more pretty pictures from Ringling's house.


Can you see the statue that someone placed next to the banyan tree? The banyan grew around it, encapsulating it.


A spiderweb, complete with spider, that I almost walked into, under the banyan tree. He ALMOST got me. I'm pleased with the macro function on my little camera. It does a good job. The flash is too hot, though, and it washes the spider out.


Green anole lizards always climb to the highest point, for the best view of approaching predators (and other anoles). They are very territorial.