The Day Before Election Day

[Excerpt] ....So I have a practical suggestion for those of you who are principals, superintendents, school board members, and teachers: Go home from here and revise your core curriculum. Yes, teach the three Rs; teach the ABCs; make sure your kids learn algebra, biology, and calculus. But teach them about the American Revolution – that it isn’t just about white men in powdered wigs carrying muskets in a time long gone. It’s about slaves who rose up and women who wouldn’t be denied and unwelcome immigrants and exploited workers who against great odds claimed the revolution as their own and breathed life into it.

Teach your kids they don’t have to accept what they have been handed. Teach them they are not only equal citizens under the law, but equal sons and daughters – heirs, everyone – of that revolution, and that it is their right to claim it as their own. Teach them to shake the torpor that has been prescribed for them by calculating elders and ideologues. Teach them there is only one force strong enough to counter the power of organized money today, and that is the power of organized people. They are waiting for this message; the kids in your schools have been made to feel as victims, powerless, ashamed, inferior, and disenfranchised. Tell them it’s a great big lie – despite their poverty, circumstance, and the long odds they’ve been handed, they have the power to make the world over again, in their image. - Bill Moyers, America 101

Yes, yes, consider the source, liberal stinking bias, et cetera. But whatever your political persuasion, I believe that Moyers' speeech in its entirity is worth reading and thinking and talking about. What kind of a country are we shaping for our children--and their children?

Are we fiddling while Rome burns?

I'd end this with a reminder to go vote on Tuesday...but I think y'all are already more than aware that we're at the tail end of a particularly nasty and mean-spirited mid-term election. So. Go, Vikings?

Untitled

This shot reminds me of the Greek myth of Icarus.


October 1, 2006

...They passed Samos and Delos on the left and Lebynthos on the right, then Icarus, exulting in his career, began to leave the guidance of his companion and soar upward as if to reach heaven. The nearness of the blazing sun softened the wax which held the feathers together, and they came off. He fluttered with his arms, but no feathers remained to hold the air. While his mouth uttered cries to his father, it was submerged in the blue waters of the sea, which thenceforth was called by his name. His father cried, "Icarus, Icarus, where are you?" At last he saw the feathers floating on the water, and bitterly lamenting his own arts, he buried the body and called the land Icaria in memory of his child. Daedalus arrived safe in Sicily, where he built a temple to Apollo, and hung up his wings, an offering to the god. - Wikipedia

When the original looks like crap...

...and you tweak it but that doesn't really help, why, then it's time to old-photo it. (Ah, the verbing of America.) Presto. Crap shot becomes...something else, with a perhaps Passage to India feel to it (okay, maybe I'm reaching there, but let's just go with it, okay?). Why are there two little girls on an elephant, with a strange building in the background and a man leaning on a fence, watching as they're led...where? What would E.M. Forrester make of this?

Elephant ride at sunset

September 30, 2006

What's this?

Why, it's a post! Before another month has gone by! Jump back!

I think I was playing with exposure when I took this--but I really have no idea. I have a few dozen takes of the same shot, all with different settings. So, I was trying to do something. I'm not quite sure what, though...

This was the best of the bunch. And whatever I was trying to do, I did at least nail the lighting and exposure (but drat, pity about that blur of motion in the bottom left corner, drat); this was outside, in my garden, mid-day.


July 30, 2006

Oops, I did it again

Bleepity bleep, but how has almost another month gone by since my last post?!

Here's the scoop: I've been busy. (You may have guessed this.) Work's doing its level best to be insane (for those of you not in the know, I'm a senior editor for a legal publisher, and since this is an election year, we're buried in, well, legal stuff); and in what passes for my spare time, I'm deep into the third (or is it the fourth?) and dear-god-but-I-hope-this-is-the-final draft of a novel I've been working on for the last five years. Work + novel + the kidlets + all the other usual blah blah blah = reduced time for photos. Alas.

That said, a few weeks ago I did manage to get out and enjoy a beautiful fall day. Fall's already over here--it's cold, most of the leaves are already fallen, I hear that they've had somewhat serious snow up north, it's cold, this morning when I left for work there was a light dusting of snow on the van, and did I mention that it's cold? And it was a rather subdued fall--there'd been a drought earlier this summer, and that stressed out the trees, and so the colors weren't quite their usual glorious selves.

But it was nice while it lasted.

Beautiful day for a bike ride


(Pete is not one of the above bikers, btw...He and Joel were home-brewing that afternoon.)

Vine and Tree


Flames

October 1, 2006


I'd promise (again) to try to be better about posting a little more regularly...but...Well. That'd be silly, wouldn't it?