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Monthly Archives: November 2013
The Haves And The Have Nots
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What you are witnessing here is a blatant example of exploitation by the ‘Haves’ over the ‘Have Not’s’. It appears to be a rather bucolic example of prairie life but when you look past the superficiality of the scene you will notice an extreme difference in lifestyles brought about by those with the most seeds over those who don’t have a pot to store them in.
These Brown-headed Cowbirds (Molothrus ater) are a migrating species of insect and seed eating birds that travel from one end of the meadow to the other on a regular basis. They forage and spend their time getting ready for the long winter by eating as much as they can hold and therein lies the problem.
If you observe closely you can see that the greater majority of the flock is walking, while a few who have cleverly figured out a way to coerce these buffalo into being their unwitting servants, carry them from one end of the meadow to the other. So what? you might ask, well the ones riding are not expending any energy to get where they want to go while the poor dumb masses are dragging their hineys through the dirt, expending untold amounts of energy and losing the weight they need to get through the winter, while the fat birds ride in comfort, that’s what.
It’s another clever underhanded plan by those who toiled and saved their seed, invested it and are now reaping the rewards of their efforts. These heartless capitalists are flagrantly flaunting their hard-earned wealth by using it to better their lives, the bastards, while those who don’t work and want to live off the efforts of the successful are thwarted. Where is the fairness there? What is needed here is a strong Cowbird leader that will take most of the seed from these unnaturally wealthy, smart and successful few and give it to the poor Cowbirds that have done nothing to earn it but deserve it because of the dumb choices they’ve made. Then things will be right.
So the next time you see an idyllic scene like this just be aware that all is not as it seems. The Institute tries to stay objective and not be partisan in any way but sometimes you just have to take a stand. We are all about social justice here and are always on the lookout for seeing the wrongs and righting them. It’s what we do because we care.
Kodachrome Revisited
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It’s 1952 and you and your family are traveling through Yellowstone National Park on your very first visit. You are eight years old and your little sister is four and you’re in your dad’s pride and joy, a 1950 Tudor, Palisade green Ford with the grey plush upholstery that only had a few root beer stains on it from the A & W visits. He had bought it used because it was a demo and it only had 28,000 miles on it and it was a really good deal. It was the first nearly new car he had ever had.
Mom is riding shotgun smoking like a fiend because she’s nervous. Dad’s been telling her all the stories of how Grizzly bears have been pulling kids out of the windows and eating them on the spot and although she doesn’t quite believe him you can tell she’s been thinking about it by how much she’s smoking. She’s already made us roll the window up part way.
Dad is in his glory, driving real slow so we can see everything. Telling us everything he knows about each new animal we come across. Most of it was facts gleaned from Disney movies and watching Marlin Perkins on Wild Kingdom, but it was God’s own truth to me. If he would have told us that the birds riding on the backs of the buffalo were specially trained by Norwegian bird herders I would have believed it to my dying day. He didn’t but he might have said that to mom just to see her reaction.
It was hot and sweaty, those Fords didn’t have air in those days and mom’s smoking and the windows being partially rolled up brought out any latent tendencies to car sickness and sis was the first casualty. Dad got the car stopped quick enough that she was able to be as sick as she wanted to be outside, there wasn’t going to be any of those stains on the upholstery. All the while mom kept a sharp look out for bears just in case. The good part of that was mom got convinced to let us have the windows all the way down if we promised to roll them up again at the first sign of danger and she was running out of cigarettes.
Meanwhile I was in my glory. I had the 35mm camera dad had given me and it had an entire roll of Kodachrome slide film in it and I could shoot what ever I wanted to. 36 pictures to spend. I was going to use one to show my sister throwing up but I thought you can see that anytime so I was only going to shoot what would appear in National Geographic and it would have my name on it and I would get famous and go to Africa to shoot lions and tigers, (yeah I know there’s no tigers in Africa, I know it now) and each picture would be perfect.
We were now kind of in a hurry to get to the lodge before all the rooms were gone. We’d had to sleep in the car once before on the way because dad wouldn’t stop driving and by the time mom yelled enough all the rooms were gone and we had to sleep in a parking lot next to a bunch of trucks that kept their motors running all night. We were not sleeping in the car when there were bears around so if you don’t get us a room I will kill you and the bears can damn well eat you. That was kind of what the conversation sounded like between mom and dad so we were heading in pretty fast.
It was then that I saw my first buffalo, in fact, three or four of them and I yelled louder than mom for dad to stop quick, because it looked like sis was going to throw up again. She wasn’t but I couldn’t let my first chance at being famous go by without some kind of attempt to get the picture. While dad made sure she threw up outside whether she wanted to or not, I was able to get my first ever real picture of wild animals. That was it, I was going to be famous. I guarded that camera with my life. There was going to be 35 more images in there that would be the best pictures ever taken. They would be more important for me than bear repellant spray would have been to mom.
The trip went on, adventures were had, cross words were spoken, we saw bears and it was mildly disappointing because they didn’t kill and eat anybody, I filled up my roll of Kodachrome and it wasn’t long before we headed back home. Above is the first picture of the buffalo I would have taken if this trip had actually taken place. It didn’t of course, we didn’t take trips like that, but I’m sure that everything I remember would have happened exactly as described had it actually happened. We went places, I took pictures, just not at Yellowstone, at least not then.
The image above was taken last year at Yellowstone and through the magic of Photoshop it was processed in such a way that it looks exactly like one of the Kodachrome slides that I did take back then. The only difference is 60 plus years and some imagination. Mom and Dad are gone now but I bet if you could ask them about this trip they’d say yeah that could have happened. Mom did smoke like a chimney and yelled a lot, and Dad would drive way too long and maybe sis didn’t get carsick all that often but everything mentioned did happen at one time or another, just not there and not then. But after all, what are memories but things you want to remember. Is there a rule that they have to be real.
The Gray Season
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If you happen to be on this planet at the moment you may have noticed that we are gently but determinately heading into the Gray Season. For photographers the gray season is one in which there is a decided lack of color. This leaves only black and white and of course the average of those two colors, gray. It follows then that when you begin to remove color from the scene, soon you are left with gray and possibly a huge depression if your life revolves around the capture of color.
Luckily if you are prone to that seasonal depression you can combat it by going through your portfolio and finding some of the best color shots you’ve taken and stare at them until you feel well enough to go and eat a plate of spaghetti. Spaghetti and perhaps chili are the only known antidotes to seasonal gray induced depression. And maybe Lasagna. Lasagna’s good.
So if you’re one of the many thousands of seasonally depressed people and you do not have access to public transportation to a place that has color, like, say Tahiti, then take note of the image above where I have managed to pack in every single color known to the human eye just for you. If this doesn’t work drop me a note and I’ll send you the number for the Lasagna hotline.
Ms Lucinda
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This is Ms. Lucinda. She man’s, woman’s, answers our 900 hotline here at the Institute, where she handles the complaints, suggestions, comments, solicitations, threats, follow ups to our Nigerian investments, pizza orders and is our all around girl Friday.
She occasionally becomes upset and loses her composure when handling some of the calls we get since the addition of our new phone service. We pay attention to this as Ms. Lucinda has a rather shadowy background, we don’t know much about her except she did some time in the Merchant Marines and may have been involved with training some of the troops that were used in those failed attempts to oust Fidel in the late 60’s. Be that as it may she has a rather spectacular vocabulary. In fact after listening to her for a while, even with a fair knowledge of human anatomy, you can not believe that people could actually do those things to each other or themselves. Also she carries a knife so we tend to give her plenty of space until she calms down.
The problem is this, when we were shopping around for a phone system to handle the incredible volume of calls we get daily we needed to have an 800 number so our readers wouldn’t have to spend their hard-earned money in contacting us. I’m afraid I must accept some of the blame for this myself, as I went for the lowest bid and worked with “Phones Ahoy” an off-shore media and communications company and was swayed by the glib salesmanship of one of their sales people.
My main objective was to get a reliable 800 number but they were incredibly expensive to operate and as we were between grants at the time, budget constraints led me to choose option B which was a 900 number. Nobody told me what a 900 number was and why 100 silly numbers between 800 and 900 would make such a big difference. The salesperson said it would increase our phone traffic and expand our personal contacts which is what we constantly try to do here at the Institute, to increase our visibility and allow us to raise more funds to do our good work.
Also it would probably have been wiser to inform Ms. Lucinda about the change in our phone system. It turns out that not all of our incoming calls are from our readers, in fact I don’t know if some of the people that call in can read. And who are these people they keep asking for. Glinny the wonder tongue, Helga, Mrs. Whipsong, Maurice, we don’t have anyone by those names working here, and we certainly don’t sell home health care products, whether they’re UL approved or not.
I can certainly understand why Ms. Lucinda gets upset, but in going over our phone statements I’ve noticed that we have been generating a certain additional income from this 900 number thing. It seems that we get money when these strange callers call in so we have instructed Ms. Lucinda to see if she can assist any of these callers further, as it turns out you make more money the longer you keep them on the phone. Hmmmm. So far Ms. Lucinda has been cooperative but I think she may be reaching the end of her tether so to speak, so I’ve instructed her to begin training one of the new interns in our new advanced telephone technique, just as a backup.
We have always been quick to adopt new technology here at the Institute so if this 900 number thing will help our bottom line then we’re going for it. Anything that will advance our ability to help our fellow human beings and make us some fast dough is a welcome addition to our program. Now if we can just keep Ms. Lucinda together until we get that second line in we’ll be golden.
Yellowstone Sushi
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One of the many highlights of a Yellowstone visit is the fine dining available at the many gourmet restaurants in the park. No matter what your tastes are there is always something delectable to eat. When I would ask one of my favorite people in the world what his favorite food was he would invariably reply “Ham, Ram, Billy Goat, Baboon or Bear” but I know he was secretly partial to sushi. He would have loved Yellowstone.
I had the pleasure of dining with one of the parks foremost experts on sushi one beautiful summer day at a casual little restaurant located near the confluence of the Lamar and Soda butte rivers. We spent a delightful hour at our table, I mean riverbank sampling the various offerings and his favorite was the trout. Being a minimalist he preferred his straight out the river with just a small taste of Wasabi. He couldn’t hide his delight as he savored the last few bites.
This restaurant is extremely popular and due to its limited seating, reservations are a must. The best time to visit is the early spring when the cutthroat are running and the tourist aren’t. Bring your own table service and enjoy the company. It will be the peak experience of your trip.
Bad Weather Day
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Gloom Despair and Agony On Me, that’s what ran through my mind as I gazed out the window this morning at a despairing gloomy agonizing gray sky. It was cold, the wind was blowing just hard enough to make its way down your collar no matter how far up you had it zipped, and to pile misery on top of woe it was starting to snow. Not the pretty Hallmark kind of snow that you see falling in pre-Starbucks villages, but the icy sleety Chicago kind of snow. The stuff that stuck to your glasses, stung your face and rolled up into drifts that had the density of cured concrete. That is except where you stepped on it and it broke through to submerge your foot to just over your shoe top in sub-zero water.
Then it dawned on me. Oh merde, the weather modification program that we run here at the Institute had shut down. If that intern had forgotten to program the time change into the auto settings again he was going to be out inventorying webworms on the mountain mahogany in his tighty whiteys til his little fuon bwey bweys turned blue.
We developed our weather modification program to please one of our previous assistant directors and after she went on to her well deserved place in the sun we liked it so much we kept it. It isn’t a big deal we just modify the weather that covers about 3-6 thousand acres, just enough to keep the grounds of the Institute under its effects. It ‘s a seasonal program that is tied to the time change and does things like converting really hot days in the summer to a balmy 65 to 70 degrees and turns a day like today into a sunny day with the deepest blue skies you have ever seen. We add just enough cold that you have to wear a down jacket but you don’t have to zip it up if you don’t want to.
That is when it works. It’s 29 degrees out there right now and the wind is blowing cold gray snow around and it certainly isn’t balmy and I’m on my way to check the duty roster to find out which poor unfortunate soul had the watch and didn’t get the job done. They only have a few responsibilities and if I find that this miscreant was into the Everclear while he was on duty, he will wish he had never been born.
One of the results of the WMD (Weather Modification Default) program is that when it goes down it feeds randomly selected images that are the exact opposite in seasonal conditions into the image stream for the blog. So today you get a color burst that’s bright, cheerful and warm looking. It is the lower Antelope Canyon and it was warm. So enjoy it. I know who I need to speak to about this snafu now and I’m off to give him his new assignment. If he’s lucky he’ll live, but I guarantee he’ll remember the time change this spring.
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