man & nature # 37 ~ whistling past the graveyard

Erractic split in half • click
to embiggenFor the past couple days, Don has been opining for a return to the good 'ole days:

We now return you to our regularly scheduled photography blog ... and, A silence fell upon the masses......now can we get back to photography, I am 3 credits short of passing this class.

Well, Don - your wish is my command but I feel compelled to correct your statement re: "A silence fell upon the masses".

Point in fact - there have been over 1,300 pages views, over 750 unique visits, and 29 comments in the past 3 days. Now I certainly don't want these statistics to be used out of context or to obscure the fact that these numbers represent real people, but that is a bit of a bump over a more average 3 day span, especially the number of comments. It seems that people are more interested in making comments about the free market than they are about photography.

In any event, here's an attempt to lighten the load - The halved erratic pictured in today's entry is found sitting in a field along a very short road. Anyone care to venture a guess as to the name of that road?

BTW, If I don't get more than 9.666666 comments (the daily average for the past 3 days), I am converting this sucker to a political blog.

Update on Thursday, September 11, 2008 at 02:26PM by gravitas et nugalis

Some of you might be looking at the number of comments on this entry, seeing a 11 and breathing a sigh of relief. But, by my official count, the number is really 7 because cheerleader entries from the wife, admissions of prior knowledge, and second comments from the same commenter DO NOT count.

That said, there some good guesses - Salute to Right Wing Free-market Apologists Ave. and Schism Street are amongst my favorites. Split Rock Road also has a nice ring to it.

man & nature # 36 ~ not voting is an intensely political act

A spot of muted sunlight • click to embiggenI am basically apolitical in the sense that I agree with what Gore Vidal had to say about our democracy:

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

I am also apolitical because, speaking of presidential elections, and this year's event is a prime example, those elections are little more than (again, Gore Vidal) a quadrennial bacchanal of the cult of personality.

That said, in light of the current state of our republic, it is difficult to ignore the ridiculous political circus that is currently unfolding before us. And a wonderful 3-ring circus it is. In Ring One, we have the Obama Circus. In Ring Two, the McCain Circus. And, not to be overlooked, in Ring Three, we have the Media Circus.

All of these performers and clowns are working their butts off to keep the wishful thinking spectators in the bleachers entertained as they wait to see if their Presidential Personality Sweepstakes Ticket pays off.

This year's ubiquitous delusional theme, AKA - song and dance, is "Change" and both the Right and the Left are trying to sell their own particular version of it. However, both versions seem to revolve around the same vague promise of a return to the glory days of the Great American Dream / Promise / Pre-eminence. Unfortunately (for the spectators), none of the 3 Circus' are addressing the actual facts on the ground which pretty much preclude any "return" (we can't return to anything, we can only move forward) to "glory".

The essential fact on the ground in this American culture is elemental - we are no longer a nation with any sense of shared purpose. Thanks to a relentless campaign on the part of Corporate America, we are motley crew of self-servicing "individuals" working like industrious little beavers to build and pad our individual nests. Our only common goal is personal prosperity, wherein the ends justify the "free-marketplace" means.

What I don't understand about the "spectators" in this Circus is that they seem to be totally blind to the results of this paradigm - the inequity in the distribution of income and the distribution of wealth:

bq.... The wealthiest 1 percent of families owns roughly 34.3% of the nation's net worth, the top 10% of families owns over 71%, and the bottom 40% of the population owns way less than 1% - from, Survey of Consumer Finances, sponsored by the Federal Reserve Board.

The share of national income going to wages is at the lowest level ever recorded, while the piece of the pie gobbled up by corporate profits is at its highest point since 1960 ... despite several periods of healthy growth between 1973 and 2005, the average income of all but the top 10 percent of the income ladder -- nine out of ten American families -- fell by 11 percent when adjusted for inflation ... the top .01 percent ... has grabbed most of the gains, seeing an impressive 250 percent increase in income between 1973 and 2005 ...

But, then again, it's not that hard to understand:

The genius of our ruling class is that it has kept a majority of the people from ever questioning the inequity of a system where most people drudge along, paying heavy taxes for which they get nothing in return ... and ... The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent ~ both from Gore Vidal.

What's all this have to do with a photography blog? Well, in truth, not much but I did get sent down this path when I found this quote on a photography quote site:

We have got the fruit of creation now, and need not trouble ourselves with the core. Every conceivable object of Nature and Art will soon scale off its surface for us. Men will hunt all curious, beautiful, grand objects, as they hunt the cattle in South America, for their skins, and leave the carcasses as of little worth. ~ Oliver Wendell Holmes

man & nature # 35 ~ 2 mysteries

A sign of things to come • click to embiggenLuke wrote: The scroll bars on embiggened photos, which had been working nicely, have just today disappeared again. Which, in turn, caused Aaron to write: oh man... I would have waited until noon or something to tell him that. No Coffee yet, no tee time scheduled...things will be flying this morning in that office!

Yep and nope. Yep, the scroll bars which magically appeared have again magically disappeared. Thanks once again SquareSpace, especially for the fact that there has been absolutely no communication about what's going on from them since this latest on-again, off-again scroll bar fiasco started.

Nope, there is nothing flying around the office this AM. Instead, I have channeled my energies into figuring out a way around this nonsense. I mean, point in fact and to get to the heart of the matter, how big a deal is it to offer your subscribers the option to have control over scroll bars / resize on popups? They did it before (although they apparently didn't know they were doing it).

And that got me to thinking - what if used the old code that their software generated in V4? So, I uploaded today's pictures using the new V5 software, copied the image source info from it and pasted that info into the old code in the appropriate places, deleted the all the new/V5 code, and, holy crap, it worked - once again, I have complete control over popup window size, popup window scroll bars, and the popup resize handle.

It's a bit of a pain in the ass workaround, but it does seem to work and therefore worth the effort. I am now anxiously awaiting to see if SS magically f***s this up for me.

So, AS A TEST, today's popup window is deliberately sized smaller than the image so that scroll bars and the resize handle appear.

THIS SHOULD BE WORKING FOR EVERYONE ON EVERY BROWSER. PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF IT IS NOT WORKING.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming

Over the past few years, the Catskill Mountains / Park (a similar but much smaller version of the Adirondack Mountains / Park) in southern NY was overrun by some kind of gypsy moth catapillar(?) infestation. And I do mean overrun. Vast vista of denuded trees where everywhere evident. It was downright butt ugly.

I don't know if today's post is a picture of that kind of infestation or not but I did notice a fair amount of this kind of thing in my traverse of a stretch of the Adirondack Coast region. I hope this not a portent of what's to come.

man & nature # 34 ~ The Adirondack Coast pt. 2

A personal pleasure craft at one of the many marinas along Lake Champlain * NO click to embiggen

Another look at The Adirondack Coast - quaint B&Bs, strawberry festivals, lakeside dining, and captivating sunsets • click to embiggenAs many of you know, one of my "jobs" involves developing concepts and creating marketing and advertising materials. In my semi-retired state, I have limited my activities almost exclusively to tourism clients, the most notable being the Essex County / Lake Placid Convention & Visitors Bureau.

I have been servicing this client in one capacity or another for the past 8 years. During that time, a trend has become apparent in the industry - one that I strongly disagree with. That trend is a direct result of the web-based "information age". What has happened is that many tourism related marketing entities have been seduced by the web's ability to deliver "information" and that has lead directly to many of them confusing "information" with "story telling". Getting the message out (the ubiquitous, come to our wonderful place) has been relegated to getting the "information" out - a sometimes overwhelming amount of information that fails miserably at telling the story of a place.

In fact, too much information can often work against telling the story of a place - it can overwhelm and confuse, which ultimately destroys any notion of romance and desire. IMO, creating an irresistible feeling of romance / intrigue / uniqueness about a place is the prerequisite to instilling the desire to visit it.

What is strange about this trend is that many tourism marketing entities recognize without reservation, the value of PR (public relations) in the form of media articles - travel magazines, special interest publications, newsprint travel sections, radio / television features, etc., all of which are engaged in story telling. And, like Pavlov's dogs, the readers who encounter this story telling set the phones a-ringing and the websites a-clicking.

The conclusion is glaringly obvious - story telling works. The printed word (and pictures) is far from dead (as the web gurus would have you believe). The printed word and pictures can seduce and romance in a way that the web simply can't touch.

The web is a virtual, transient, and "cold" experience - turn the computer off and it's gone. Printed words / pictures have a tactile permanence and warmth - put it on the coffee table, take to the toilet, rip out a page and put it on the refrigerator door, take it to bed and fall asleep with visions of, in our case, majestic mountains and lakes or quaint early American lakeside villages, dancing in your head.

And, as an added bonus, unless you need to upgrade your eyewear prescription, everyone will see the printed / pictures exactly as was intended. There is no need to upgrade to the newest Flash, Firefox, Safari, Quicktime, etc., etc., etc., in order to view the content.

Now, I am not demeaning the web for what it does best - deliver information. What I am suggesting is that a balance needs to be arrived at that utilizes the best of what each medium can deliver - something that many have lost sight of in the "imformation age".

FYI; relative to the part of the above, it seems that those of you who are using less than the latest update of IE are missing part of the show here. Updating on home computers shouldn't be an issue. For those of you visiting from work-based computers, I guess you'll have to convince the System Administrator to get on the stick and get everyone up to date. Good luck.

and BTW, here's a tourism story about me. It's short and sweet and, for something so short, it is filled with inaccuracies - I rocket down the new combined track - bobsled, skeleton, luge - from the halfway point (10 stories, not 20). If I were to drop from the top (20 stories) and survived, I would be hitting speeds approaching 90 mph.

man & nature # 33 ~ The Adirondack Coast

above ~ top, looking at Lake Champlain from the road dropping into Essex, and, bottom, looking back at some of the Adirondack High Peaks from the same spot • NO click to embiggen

The Adirondack Coast ~ Lake Champlain • click to embiggen
Once again, it's another Saturday night and I ain't got nobody, albeit, in fact, it was Labor Day Monday. The wife was off to Philadelphia to deposit coma girl at school, so I decided to venture over to the Lake Champlain Region for a round of golf, dinner, and some picturing.

We live in a state park in a village that is somewhat of a geographic oddity. Approximately 25 miles to the SW of us is the heart of the Adirondack High Peaks - rugged wilderness with 46 peaks over 4000 ft. The same distance to the SE is the Lake Champlain Region (AKA, The Adirondack Coast) - a 130 mile long lake with gentle rolling farmland and quaint New England-style villages dotting the shoreline. The 2 areas could hardly be more different from each other. In fact, it's difficult to think of them as part of the same Adirondack Park.

Yesterday, after golf, I traversed a 20 mile section of the Adirondack Coast from Westport to Willsboro, stopping at a dockside restaurant in the village of Essex for dinner. The village of Essex in its entirety is registered on the National Register of Historic Places. It is home to one of the most unspoiled ensembles of Federal and Greek Revival village architecture in rural America. To say that Federal and Greek Revival architecture is different from the rustic, twiggy, bark, log, and camp architecture that dominates the rest of the Adirondack Park is a vast understatement.

FYI, the mountains across the lake are the Green Mountains of Vermont.

Update on Tuesday, September 2, 2008 at 11:08AM by gravitas et nugalis

FYI: it appears that scrollbars DO NOT appear on the popup windows if you are using the Explorer browser, at least that's the report from some Explorer users. I can't say if they are using the latest and greatest version of Explorer or, even if you are, that the scrollbars will appear.

I would appreciate any and all feedback on this issue. Are scrollbars appearing for you? If not, what browser are you using?

This is just another great example of the tower of babble that results from competing software - good for the developers who are looking for captive audience cash flow, bad for the users who looking for across the board functionality.

It also seems that once, you have a popup window open, opening another popup before closing the first one will cause the second one to be the same size as the first. No problem as long you have window resize capability. If not, close one window before opening a second one.

man & nature # 32 ~ sustainability - there is no free lunch

North country wind farm • click
to embiggenOn the way to yesterday's golf outing, I stopped to picture one of the many wind farms that are springing up just outside of the northern boundary of the Adirondack Park. This area, the St. Lawrence River / Seaway basin/plains, is a natural wind tunnel of sorts. There is also an abundance of open land. From the number of wind farms under construction and projected in the area, it seems that the companies who build these things think that it is a prime location for wind generated power.

I will admit that I have not studied every facet, pro and con, regarding wind farms but I will also admit to having a gut level like for the things. I tend to think that would be the case even if one were to spring up in "backyard".

Obviously, many see these farms as eyesores. I personally consider them to be a lovely vision - to mix a metaphor, they are music to my eyes - because of what they portend - clean, renewable energy. You have to understand that I come from this viewpoint for the simple reason that coal-burning energy plants (although not relevant to wind farms, don't forget auto emissions) in the Midwest are literally destroying the ecosystem here in the Adirondacks. Acid rain and mercury pollution are just a few of the delights that land on Adirondack flora and fauna everyday.

And, even though I take a relatively strong anti-cell tower position for the Adirondacks (they are few and far between and even those are not towers), I wouldn't mind at all if some wind farms dotted the landscape in the Park.

Why is that? Even if you consider wind farms to be visual pollution, I will take that form of pollution any day of the week rather than the invisible, insidious and environmentally destructive air-borne pollution that rains down on the Park everyday. It's that simple.

man & nature # 31 ~ to the victor belongs the spoils

Par 3, 14th at Malone GC * click
to embiggenYesterday, the wife and I participated in a fundraising golf tournament to benefit the YMCA in Malone, NY. We, together with another couple, were entered in the Mixed Flight (teams of 2 men and 2 women).

Thanks to my near-perfect, pressure-laden, and blind (can't see the green) 160 yd. approach shot to 5 feet on the last hole (the crowds gasps and then roars) which ultimately netted us a birdie (again with the crowds gasping and then roaring), we ended up in a 3-way tie for 1st place. Unfortunately, there was no playoff because we would have certainly kicked the competition's butt.

Added to victory, we (the wife and I) also won a stainless steel mini fridge in a raffle at the post event dinner. Man, were we living large or what?

man & nature # 30 ~ it's a chicken

Poultry madness • click to embiggenThe State Fair was fun and hot and crowded. And, much to our surprise, Hugo stuck it out for almost 7 hours.

I introduced Hugo to exotic chickens - I would go to the fair even if exotic chickens were the only thing there - and he seemed to like them quite a bit. The wife, on the other hand, was driven from the building by the aromatic atmosphere, something she calls "stench". I guess that's an unavoidable feature of 1,000+ chickens in a single enclosed space.