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Wednesday   February 8   2006

the american way

Drought

Residents come in and out of the local Dairy Queen at Coleman, a town that brags of 22 churches on the billboard at the edge of town. They wear camouflage clothing and drive massive four-wheel drive pickups. I wonder how they'll survive if this false economy in which we live collapses. They seem to be doing OK. But I can't help but think they have no clue how precarious life can be. There's not much meat on a deer. Do they know how unforgiving that parched earth outside their door can be? I know the old ones do. I do. I've struggled with it most of my life. But few my age have. The walls are plastered with old photos of huge herds of cattle and gatherings of people. Times were tough in those days but the town seemed to be hustling and the people optimistic about the future. I don't sense optimism now. It's as though the town is in a state of decay. Lots of houses have for sale signs posted. Most who are young flee to a city at the first available opportunity. Many are gone, fighting in a foreign war. Faces of the local football team stare from the wall, waiting their turn to leave. The churches and the funeral home do good business. We're addicted to Imperialism, from sea to shining sea. This country no longer works from the bottom up, but from the top down. Even those producing something wait for the government to bail them out. Can a correction fix this? Or has it gone beyond that? I don't know. Guess we can pray it can. Or pray we'll survive when it doesn't. I can't give up on praying but there are those that have. Lots of them. Then there are those that aren't even aware just how bad it can be in this world. And that is most of us in these United States. Here's the forecast. Sunny, dry, windy . . .

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Addiction

The key to the stupidity evinced by Mr. Bush's speech is the assumption that we ought to keep living the way we do in America, that we can keep running the interstate highway system, WalMart, and Walt Disney World on some other basis besides fossil fuels. The public probably wishes that this were so, but it isn't a service to pander to their wishes instead of addressing the mandates of reality. And reality is telling us something very different. Reality is saying that the life of incessant motoring is a suicidal fiasco, and if we don't learn to inhabit the terrain of North America differently, a lot of us are going die, either in war, or by starvation when oil-and-gas-based farming craps out, or in civil violence proceeding from failed economic expectations.

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Welcome to Middle-Class Lockdown
Now shut up and buy something
by Joe Bageant

"Take away America's Wal-Mart junk and cheap electronics and what you have left is a mindless primitive tribe and a gaggle of bullshit artists pretending to lead them." -- James "Mad Dog" Howard When I was a boy on my grandparents' farm in the 1950s the neighbors always banded together to make lard and apple butter, put up feed corn, bale hay, thresh wheat, pick apples, plow snow off roads. One neighbor cut hair, another mended shoes and welded. With so little money available in those days in rural America, there was no way to get by without neighbors. And besides, all the money in the world would not get the lard cooked down and the peaches put up for the winter. You needed neighbors and they needed you. From birth to the grave. I was very lucky to have seen that culture which showed me that a real community of shared labor is possible -- or at least was at one time in this country. And if I ever doubt it I can go up to those hill farms and look into the clouded old eyes and wrinkled visages of the people who once babysat me as a child and with whom I shot my first rabbit and quail. They are passing quickly now and I drive by more than a few of their graves in the old Greenwood Cemetery when I visit to that place where there are still old men who know how to plow with horses and the women who can chop a live copperhead snake in half with a hoe then go right on weeding the garden. "Yew kids stay 'way from that damned dead snake, ya hear me?" Fifty years later nobody cans peaches any more, or depends upon a neighbor to cut their hair or get in the hay crop. And fifty years later I found myself in the middle class and softening like an overripe cheese. Given my background, I never guessed I'd see the day when I would be bitching because I could not get Hendricks gin or fresh salmon delivered to my door. (But when you're too drunk to drive or even walk to the supermarket ...). Such is the level of self-insufficiency to which some of us weaker souls devolved. Whatever the case, we no longer depend upon community and other people around us. We live in our houses, idiotically sited vinyl "Tudor-esque" fuck-boxes with brick facade (sorry Neddie, I just had to steal that lick) which grow bigger each year in order to accommodate our massive asses, egos and collection of goods, and we "order out." Or go shopping for it at the mall. Beyond the need to get laid, there is little real reason to be together with other thinking, feeling adults. We do not need each other to do anything important in our lives, because all those things are performed by strangers, often as not thousands of miles away. Including the sex, if your are an internet porn fan. Which leaves us strangers to the natural human community.

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11:56 PM - link

evolution

Irish elk of the Jurassic

Dinosaur paleontologists don't look for fossils simply because dinosaurs are cool. They want to solve evolutionary mysteries. Like all living things, dinosaurs form groups of species. You've got your long-necked sauropods, your head-shield-sporting ceratopsians, and so on. The distinctiveness of a group can make it difficult to determine how it evolved from an ancestor. Whales may be mammals (they nurse their young, for example), but they're all fish-shaped. Some of the best clues to the origins of these groups come from transitional fossils, which are formed by species that evolved some, but not all, the traits that set a group of species off as a group. Transitional fossils can sometimes be very weird. My personal favorites are the early tetrapods (basically fish with fingers) and the early whales (whales with feet). But that's probably because they were the subject of my first book. Each year brings new transitional fossils to choose from. And now comes the latest addition: Guanlong wucaii, a forerunner of Tyrannosaurus rex.

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  thanks to Pharyngula

11:44 PM - link

gerry report part 3

Everything is set for moving Gerry to HomePlace tomorrow. I can't help but think of these last days as being a series of things that will happen no more. Gerry and I went out to lunch today. We have gone out to lunch many times these past months but today was the last time. We will be able to take her out after she moves to HomePlace but it will be in Oak Harbor and it will be with Zoe. We will be able to bring her home for a weekend but I'm not sure that will happen. And probably in another month we won't be able to take her out at all at the rate she is going. So today was the last time Gerry and I went to lunch. A lot of other little things that are also last times. I look forward to tomorrow with trepidation. But Zoe and I are talking about things we will now be able to do that we haven't for the last year. It's all mixed.

11:28 PM - link

military industrial complex

Procurement, Profiteering and Defense Department Corruption Thread

"Chris, Think of it this way. Let's call DoD the Defense Corporation, a massive firm with millions of employees and straphangers and annual sales of about a half trillion dollars. It has major subsidiaries with a very high degree of autonomy, with some small pockets of joint development. The subsidiaries want to do their absolute best to protect their product lines. But the CEO has some pet rocks of his own (e.g. Special Forces) as well as some product lines he wants to pare back, if not shut down in their entirety. But the report to shareholders (the Congress) requires up front marketing (hence the glossy brochure aspect), to which the separate product lines are then appended. By canceling nothing, everybody gets a share of the pie, leaving all free to fight (bureaucratically speaking) another day." Our Loyal Reader continues, "If the most willful Secretary of Defense since Robert McNamara could not force major changes in defense policy and procurement during a tenure that now stretches over five years, then no one can. Ironically enough, the massive budgetary increases since 2001 (in current dollars, a 41% increase, exclusive of the supplemental allocations for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the GWOT) has ended up keeping everything alive. It's only when the numbers really begin to bite that tougher choices are made. So, GM and Ford have no alternative to downsizing, because people aren't buying what they are trying to sell. DoD gets a pass, because the Congress (for all the obvious reasons) can't bear the thought of saying no, especially in their districts. As George Shultz once observed, `nothing ever gets settled in this town.'"

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05:06 PM - link

portrait lenses

I've been planning on using an old lens on my 4x5 Graflex for portraits. It's a 21cm f3.5 Carl Zeiss Jena Tessar, probably made sometime in the 1930s.

I figured that a big lens like this, wide open, would have a different look that would be interesting for portraits. Maybe I might want something even older. I've been following some threads at APUG about antique portrait lenses, particularly Petzval types. Petzval design lenses have two groups with two cemented elements in front and two elements with an air space in back. This is a very early lens design and it is fast for it's time but it has some very interesting characteristics. The center part of the lens is very sharp but the lens has a curved field so it goes out of focus as you get to the edges. Makes for some wonderful out of focus areas when used wide open.

The above picture is here on a page that is part of Jim Galli's website. Jim is the resident weird lens guy at APUG. (I bought a wonderful 150mm Kowa process lens from him.) He has several pages with examples of some of the antique lenses he has come across like these pictures taken with another Petzval. Check out some of the other pages. In addition to the Petzval type there are the soft focus Wollensak Verito lenses. All sorts of interesting looks from these old lenses. There is an interesting site that sells some of these old portrait lenses:

Camera Eccentric

Of course there is always eBay and these lenses can be had cheap if one shops carefully. For example, the projection lenses off of old magic lanterns are usually Petzval types. No iris so they would have to be shot wide open but then that's the whole idea. I will have to wait and see how the 21cm Carl Zeiss does after I get my darkroom going and after I clean up the Graflex but the idea of using the Graflex as a portrait camera with old lenses is looking like a good idea. Here are some of the threads at APUG about these lenses. There is a lot of good information there.

The Petzval Madness Continues...
Saw Jim Galli's images, now need a Petzval-type lens!
Soft Focus Portrait Lens
Dancing with the Devil! Flirting with the Dark side! Have I gone too far for BOKEH???
Petzval focal length vs coverage?

04:58 PM - link