I’ve been dutifully reading the manuals for the new camera, even though in some cases it is high order calculus to my primitive mind. Still, I wanted to show something for the expense and the effort, so…here is the first image, from Saturday evening.
Whenever possible, I like to start with something DRAMATIC!…
Okay, so today was the day. The Day. After procrastinating for many reasons, both rational and just perverse, Donna and I plunked down our plastic and walked out of ye olde camera emporium with my new camera. I’ve been talking to people, some of them extremely knowledgeable (internet wave to Jennifer—“Thank You!”), and reading blogs and consumer reports and websites and agonizing and today it culminated in A Purchase.
Was a time, mind you, that this would have been the cause of a couple of days of decision-making. I used to be one of the Go-To people about matters photographic. If I needed a new piece of equipment, the only question was, could I afford it this week or did I have to wait a few more weeks.…
Ken Ham is the head of Answers In Genesis, an organization that promotes and perpetuates the Creationist view that the Earth is less than ten thousand years old, that homo sapiens sapien trod the same ground at the same time as dinosaurs, the the story of Noah is literally true, and that evolution is All Wrong. He’s an Australian and a biblical literalist. He built the Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, in 2007. Check the link for an overview by an (admittedly) biased source, but for simple clarity is hard to beat. It is a fraud of research, flagrantly anti-science, and laughable in its assertions (in my opinion).…
I’ve been going through this novel like a reaper, cutting and slashing, removing viscera, changing things around. It’s fun so far. The request was to knock between 50 and 100 pages out of the manuscript, which roughly equates to between twelve and twenty thousand words. So far I have flensed the text of seven thousand. This may sound like a lot, but the book was nearly 140,000 to start with, so it can lose a little weight and probably be much better for it.
The weather has been beautiful and since I am working in my front room, by the big picture window, it’s been pleasant. …
For the next several weeks I’ll be engaged in rewriting a novel, one I thought I’d finished with a few years back. One of the frustrating things about this art is that often you cannot see a problem with a piece of work right away. It sometimes takes months to realize what is wrong, occasionally years. You work your butt off to make it as right as possible and then, a few years and half a dozen rejections later, you read it again and there, in the middle of it (sometimes at the beginning, once in a while at the end) is a great big ugly mess that you thought was so clever when you originally wrote it. …
This will be fairly brief. I found myself once again disappointed in a fellow critter. I don’t know his name so I can’t “out” him, nor would I even if I did. Up until last week, I rather enjoyed encountering him when I walked Coffey—he was always smiling and always had a treat for her. But I am now taking routes at times designed to avoid him.
I thought I’d heard all the racial epithets going around, but he had a new one and as we walked about two blocks together he used it and complained about the people to whom he referred in a general “Them” rant that turned me off.…
In an earlier post on this topic I made the claim that the thing which changed everything in this country was the rise of capitalism as the dominant economic model. It’s time to make good on that claim.
Firstly, we need to understand, once and for all, just what Capitalism is and how it is misunderstood in these sorts of discussions.
Capitalism is an umbrella term used to describe a variety of practices under one general heading, practices like mercantilism, industrialization, and interest-based lending. But to be precise, all these different practices overlap but are not themselves capitalism.
Capitalism is the strategic use of money to determine the value of money and thereby transfer latent wealth from one sector of an economy to another.…
We need to make one more side trip into the 19th Century. The Civil War.
No other event so defines us. I would argue that not even the Revolution is as important to who we are today as the Civil War is. This event, along with World War II, established the national identity in ways with which we still struggle to accommodate today.
Shelby Foote, in his majestic narrative about the Civil War, pointed out the central change of the aftermath. “Before the war, we said ‘the United States are.’ After, we said ‘the United States is.'” A simple enough thing to say, but to comprehend the meaning is to understand that the country underwent a fundamental realignment of perspective. …
The fervor with which assaults on liberalism are launched of late possess a zealotry difficult to understand in any reasonable sense. There is a religious element to it, a battle of ideologies that seem to leave the precincts of fact, data, and logic very quickly, often on both sides. The inability of Left to talk to Right is the equivalent of the sectarian babbling between any two apparently irreconcilable religious groups, both of whom insist on their point of view being not only correct but the only one.
After decades of more or less rational political discourse in this country, many people have been caught completely by surprise at the level of bitterness that, upon examination, seem unsupportable by the issues (with the possible exception of abortion—but even that is ramped up far more than it ought to be given the middle ground of contraceptive use).…
We left off with the Whiskey Rebellion, which more or less blew up in Alexander Hamilton’s face. The tax he pushed through congress on whiskey that triggered the entire affair was shortly thereafter repealed and it was a while before the federal government tried to impose internal taxes. One of the stated goals of the revolution was to end taxation without representation, but in practical terms this meant an end to taxation, period.
The federal government used tariffs and land sales to pay off the debt incurred by the revolutionary war. Jefferson’s purchase of Louisiana was still done by a combination of the two plus borrowing. …