Quiet Spot

Taken during our 3-mile hike during this weekend's Family Camp.

Fall Colors Coming...

Starting to get some fall colors in Southern Illinois.  This is from this weekend's scout Family Camp.  This follows last weekend's Scout Rendezvous.  Two consecutive weekends at Camp Warren Levis.  Last weekend was cold (40 degrees in the morning)...  This weekend was hot, in the 80's by afternoon.  But it was dry both weekends, which is the real key.  Still not a lott of fall colors, but it won't be long!

Roots

I've often been struck by the exposed root structure of trees along waterways.  And I've never (yet) been able to ceate an image that captures the spirit....  Here's more failed attempts, taken in the past week at a local park:

 

Neither image is remotely pleasing to me.  I'll keep trying, maybe one of these days something will "click".  I'm not sure if these are any better than one of my forst attempts, from way back in early 1977 or so:

This was taken on a backpacking trip, on the banks of the upper Potomac River, along the C&O Canal.  Thirty + years, and I still can't get it.  Ah well, next time.

Recovery Summer

A couple of months ago, it seemed like I couldn't go anywhere without seeing dozens of "American Recovery & Reinvestment Act" signs.  Kinda made me wish I owned stock in the sign company...    Recently, I read an article talking about the tens of millions of dollars spent on these signs, and I realized I hadn't noticed any in a while.

So anyway, a couple of weeks later, I was driving around, and came across a sign!  unfortunately, you'll notice that there is no sign of any actual work being done (below):

hmmmm....

Hmmmm.....

I saw these bumper stickers on the car in front of me at a stop light.  I couldn't help wondering if there's a coorelation between the person's hobby, and their politcal leanings....    Wonder if Ms. Minton might prefer to not be so closely associated with this person.  but you can't pick your friends, right?

Disclaimer:  I have no dog in this race, Ms. Minton isn't running in my county, I know nothing about her one way or the other.

Old Garage, off center

OK, this is either really cool, or really dumb.  What do y'all think?

World's Largest Catsup Bottle

I've posted this before, but this is a differnt angle..  I was driving around at lunch today, and came on it from a new (to me) direction.  

Darkness, Darkness... No Color, No Contrast

This is a image from the Scout Campout last weekend. Warren Levis Lake...  About 8:30 or so, well after dark.  It looks pretty good on my monitor, it'll be interesting to see how it translates to the blogosphere.  This is actually my son's favorite of all my images from last weekend.

hmmm... looks pretty crappy.  Even the facebook posting looks better.....  But it reaqlly pops in slideshow mode, w/ a black background.   Oh well, I'm not going to do another version just for blog posting.

Cache, Cache (There ain't no bears in there.....)

So...  I spent most of last weekend at Scout Camp with my son.  Lots of fun.  During one bit of down-time, I decided to wander the area.And, a little bit off the main paths, I found a geocache box!  I've read about geocaching, and occasionally thought it might be interesting....  but never actually looked for one of them.  And then I just found this.  I guess it's cool, right?

In a moment of geekiness, I pulled out my Blackberry, found my current location, and sent myself an email....  Which then gave me the coordinates...  see the little green arrow on the image below (screen capture from Google maps)...

Sing Praise!

A few photos of the (presumably) last peformance by our church praise band.  I'm the bass player, the nearly unseen guy in the back....

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As usual, I'm against the back wall, just to the right of the screen....

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Us shy ones always work to keep a mic styand in front of our face....

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That's my Essex 5-string, if you can't tell...

And the obligatory "every act silly" group shot:

Photos coutesy of Bree towner, I took the liberty of doing some crops / tweaking....

I Need TV, but I’ve Got T.Rex

When Mott The Hoople sang the above lines*, they weren’t talking about the band Television... But that’s still the association I make**… Which is kind of funny, because I haven’t had any albums by Television, and didn’t really know any of their stuff. But they were a known name, and well respected in critical circuits. As noted by Wikipedia: “Despite critical acclaim, the album never achieved more than a cult following in the United States at the time of its release”. The album Marquee Moon was rated #128 in Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Albums of all time, and has been one of the highly rated albums (from that list) that I don’t have. And a recent Facebook post by my brother about Television had them closer to the forefront of my brain.

Anyway: Yesterday I was downloading a Lincoln Brewster song from iTunes, to learn for Praise Band. Well, you just can’t spend $0.99 right? That’s kind of like eating one lays potato chip. So I browsed my “wish list”, and Marquee Moon won out.

I’m diggin’ it. Should have picked this one up 30 years ago.

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*  Lyrics from “All The Young Dudes”, written by David Bowie

** Yes, I know that All The Young Dudes was released in 1972, and Television’s debut album wasn’t until 1977. Obviously I didn’t make the association till later, probably around 1980)

Ballooning

Another oldie, from September 2003.  From St. Louis' Great Balloon Race.  We happened to be driving through St.L., and saw some of the balloons.  We followed and managed to get to some random park as one of the balloons was landing.  Pretty cool, especially for my then-3-year-old son.

What’s in a Name?

So, I was dialing up some Tchaikovsky on the iPod the other day...... Or is it Tschaikovsky?

Seems that he shows up both ways… Now, this isn’t some typo by me, it’s straight from CCDB lookup.  And a glance at any place that sells music shows it both ways:

With an S  ...  Or without the S

Why would I care?? Well, it mucks up my ability to find stuff, or to program in to listen to all songs by that artist… So I need to change to something consistent. Next question: which is “right”? Well, my first thought was TS…. Which probably carries over from any number of old Deutsche Gammophon recordings.  But biography.com cops out by listing both. . It does seem the shorter “no-S” version does is much more common / popular. For example, looking at Google:

Tchaikovsky = 27,700,000 results
Tschaikovsky = 434,000 results, and the dreaded “Did you mean Tchaikovsky?”

Similar results are found on Youtube searches.

Now, while I don’t generally defer to Google as the arbiter of all knowledge, it’s good enough for this particular situation. So Tchaikovsky it will be.

Emergency Only

I've been transferring image files from my archive discs over to my current computer.  A rather massive task, but will allow me to (maybe) find things more often....  Here's one from September 2002, taken on a business trip to Jacksonville Florida:

We stopped by this beach on the way to the airport, wandered around for a few minutes.  Gotta grab every moment you can when you're on the road.....  I've always really liked this one, taken with my very humble Kodak DC210, with True "Megapixel" resolution!

A Simple Kind Of Man.....

Leonard Skinner, the man who provided the name for rock legends Lynyrd Skynyrd died yesterday.  As any rock'n'roll kid from the '70 knows, Skinner was the gym teacher who got the core members of Skynyrd suspended from school due to their long hair.  In a fit of something, the boys decided to name the band after him.  The rest is history.

Of course, Skinner had the last laugh, I suppose, as he outlived most of the band.