Jim – Alliteratively speaking I have to ask, why would you fawningly ask for our friggin’ opinion as to whether or not you should inflict on a us your fifty-plus years of photos fantastically depicting your favorite flora and fauna?
Haven’t you learned anything from my own postings featuring my song-writing, or Larry Foster’s postings of his drawings and paintings? When it comes to sharing one’s hobbies (ahem, art) here on the forum, one need not ask permission. Hell, what do we forum readers know? The rule of thumb is to just dump away and hope for an appreciative nod or two in response. One shouldn’t ignore the blessing of having a captive audience.
Fire away, my friend. Let the photo-feast frenzy proceed forthwith!
Joe, Sheila, Mark, and others who contacted me per private messages,
Thanks for your encouragement! I shall proceed with my plan.
Mark,
You are the alliterative champ! I concede to your expertise in the English language!
I shall begin to peruse my boxes of old Bell and Howell Slide Cubes, several Kodak Carousels, Kodak Prints in dozens of developer envelopes, photograph binders and several peripheral hard drives full of digital pictures to start this venture/project.
The shots which I'll post will not be in any chronological order but I should be able to put a month and year to each one.
Dave I appreciate your interest in the world of current events.
Along those lines let's play around a bit.
Your word for the day is hamartia.
tell me why I say that.
On a more general note:Thanks to everyone who provided me with advice and sympathy when I shared my disappointment and disillusionment about artificial intelligence and cheating students. I crawled into my shell and did some serious self reflection and I've come up with some strategies that I am looking forward to using. I'm actually both excited and confident at this point. Will share when the time comes. Just wanted everybody to know I'm still around and will get back to posting more regularly at some point.
Jim mentioned our having reached the plateau of 75 years of age. I think I can confirm that and trace how we got here. Follow my thinking here.
I grew up in a Doctor's house. All I knew about doctors was this late middle aged man or even some of his older, grayer contemporaries. I was a boy - doctors were old men - some bald, with thick glasses, and hair growing out of their nostrils.
Then I realized one doctor was a bit younger than the rest of them.
Then I got married and had kids and the doctors were only about my own age.
Then, a few visits later they were younger than I was.
Then I got older, my kids were grown and gone, and I saw a doctor who was their age.
But last week, at my local VA hospital in Charleston, I saw a "Doctor" (or so he claimed - said he was a graduate of Georgetown Medical School - yea right), although despite his scraggly un-shaved, thin beard, could not have been out of Junior High.
Yikes!
(now I am the one with hair growing out of my nostrils)
In the paper today ther was an article about an individual that some of the people in Sausalito want to erect a statute. There is already a drinkink fountain for animals named for that individual dog. The story reminded me of a "Famous" quote that person often stated - If they're going to run you out of town, get ahead of the crowd and make it look like you're leading a parade.
The town was San Fransisco and the person running her out of town was the new D.A., and eventualy Governor - Brown. The "Lady" went on to become a council person in Sausalito, and even mayor. In Sausalito she owned and operated a famous restaurnt named the Vahalla. She was know affectionally as the "Madam Mayor of Sausalito." She had been a Madam in San Francisco in the fifties and sixites, if memory serves me. She went by the name of Sally Stanford.
"It is the desperate hope, and wish, and ultimately the illusory belief that some standardized set of procedures called ‘science’ can provide us with an unimpeachable source of moral authority, a suprahuman basis for answers to questions like ‘What is life…What is right and wrong…How ought we to think and feel and behave? (162)."
Mike, before you use the quote allow me to give you the actual quote out of the article in the San Francisco Chronicle.
"If you are being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make it look like a parade."
Sally Stanford was born Mabel Busby. Shecanged her name a number of times, the last as Sally Stanford. As I remember, when she died they had to hire ten Brinks armored trucks to remove the bags of silver dollars she kept in a house she owned in Sausalito, not her residence.
thanks for putting a smile on my face Nina. That's gorgeous.
I've spent years learning how to grow flowers in Florida in my rather large backyard.So different from what I had in my garden when I lived up north.
Up there I never had to worry about too much sun. Down here shade is critical. I had to learn how to start with shade trees to keep my flower gardens from being baked to death.
We had 4 oclocks when I was a kid and they were small, low to the ground. I brought seeds back from my last trip to Columbus and discovered that down here they grow to be huge, three feet tall in my back yard.
The lesson I learned with flowers are mirrored by the lessons I have to learn when it comes to vegetable gardening. First lesson: The variety of tomatoes I grew up there can't cut it in this heat. I could go on but I'm thinking this is probably more info than anybody wanted to hear in the first place.....but thanks again for the flowers.....
Dave: my brilliant significant other is a far better gardener than I am. Far better than I am at a number of things, actually. While I just kick the dirt in frustration and roll out a particularly vivid subset of my vocabulary she has sent away for tomato plants that are of a kind that prosper in hotter climates. I'd say she's had limited success.
On another front: I ran across a word for our times in a recent article I found in the Atlantic: doomerism.
It goes on to essentially say that the psychology of the US has always been thus; that as a country we have a tendency towards being alarmists. So the article itself is more encouraging than its intro. The point it makes is that the root of “cultural pessimism” is actually a “distinctly American optimism”—we’re hardwired to believe that things could be better, and that means there’s a way out of the doom loop."
I do think we're in the proverbial slough of despond at the moment, though. But I also wonder if we pull out of it. Would be fabulous to see an upswing of some sort before I check out. Personally I've never been happier.
And in the meantime I do like that word - doomerism.
Here's how the article begins. Note that it uses a term at the very end that is a particulary bugaboo to me of late. But I shall triump in the end on that score at least.
The government is paralyzed by toxic polarization. Our economic and social systems make the rich richer and keep the poor poorer. Marginalized groups continue to fight against centuries of systemic injustices. A pandemic has killed more than 1 million Americans. Meanwhile, preventable “deaths of despair”—including suicide and deaths related to substance abuse—are on the rise. Fewer and fewer people are choosing to have children, citing not only economic concerns but moral ones: How could anyone bring an infant into a world as benighted by cruelty and injustice as this one? The thinking goes like this: The inevitable march of climate change will probably wipe out humanity, anyway. At least, if artificial intelligence doesn’t get there first.
Nina, the picture of that flower is stunning. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Michael McL - the article on the state of the country was right on. It gets me down sometimes, but I have little control except at the ballot box (and, of course, in my personal journals).
Today I was reminded of how much I love nearby Savannah Georgia (except for the heat!). I live about 40 minues from downtown Savannah, a beautiful, historic city founded in about 1730. It has beautiful tree-lined streets and about 20 small "squares" (in the old section) with gorgeous large "Live Oaks" who's broad branches reach out 50 feet and hang low. Each park has benches, and usually a hisotric statue at the center. You might recall "Forrest" sitting on one of those park benches chatting with strangers while he waited for a bus. (that bench has been removed to a display somewhere). And the city is full of wonderful historic houses.
There is also a charming water front walk with old cotton shipping warehouses converted to restaurants and shops. Giant freightor ships ease their way along the river front, headed to the massive docks up river.
I first set foot in Savannah in August of 1968 on a day that was 99 degrees and 90 per cent humidity. I was the guest of my "Uncle Sam" who had sent me there from 5 months in West Texas, where I was taught to fly a machine that only a warped mind like Leonardo Da Vinci could have conceived. We were sent here for another four monhts to further our skills in this odd pursuit.
Texas had been "primary" flight school. Savannah (and nearby Fort Stewart) was to be "advanced" flight school. That assumes there was some sort of progression in our learning. And all this in preparation for us heading over to a land of scenic green fields of rice paddies as far as you could see, and thousands of canals.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I was unable to overcome my weakness for heat and dropped like a toy soldier while waiting in line to "sign in" to our new barracks. That was my constant enemy as those four months were spent in un-airconditioned barracks.
But now we were allowed some freedom to leave the Post and we took full advantage of that new-found freedom. I even bought my first car - a new VW that I sold back to Worthngton VW after graduation an my return home 4 months later.
We were getting out on weekends and having fun in Savannah. We even met a few girls and had a few dates. (one super cute girl would not go out with us - her parents would not allow her to date "Yankees" - true story)
So we made our journey over to the "real" flight school in a place that could at times be dull and depresssing, and at times spectacularly beautiful - especailly during an early morning flight to our west in the rainy season - towards the Gulf of Thailand - to places like Roc Gia or Ha Tien. The distant sea was still dark blue that early in the morning. The puffy low clouds reflecting soft pink and orange from the sunrize at our backs. And the sprouting rice paddies as green as Ireland.
So now back home 50+ years later to my old Savannah, where my early adult life had begun.
I have to travel there often - to take occasional dinner parties on my driving job. But on a more regular basis, to drive to the farthest part of the city, to the Savannah VA clinic for various medical matters.
Today I embarrassed myself by showing up an hour late for my scheduled weekly activity. I was ticked off at myself for having been so stupid. I apologized, re-scheduled for next week, and stomped out. What a waste of a couple of hours driving time!
So I stopped at the nearby McDonalds for a chicken sandwitch and a coke. Then I pulled out at a busy intersection and saw a lady, across from me, standing near the stopped traffic so people could see her and read her cardboard sign - and in severe heat! She had a hairdoo that looked like it had not been combed or cut in years. And as I drove past, she had a face that looked like a combination of pre-mature aging, severe sleep deprivation, and possible physical abuse.
I got half way up the block and turned the car around. I was able to catch her just as a younger lady was helping her to her car to get out of the heat. I was just in time. But as I drove home, all I could think of was my didn't I just empty my whole wallet?
But I felt like something had gone right. And I remebered just then that Christ is everywhere, just begging for us to see him and read His sign.
And as I drove off, this was playing on my local "HIS Radio" station.
wow! on the flower front. gonna get some of those. there's a place right around the corner from me.
In the meantime ok found another one on the doomie front, this one scientifically legit but for the moment unconsequential:
scientists have noticed a very very slight shift in the way the earth rotates around its axis - a new "wobble." And they credit it to pumping groundwater out to water vast farming tracts around the world, which alters the composition of the globe itself, and thus its gravity and the distribution of its mass ever so slightly, therefore altering the way it travels through the void - again, ever so slightly.
Of course, messing with the earth's rotation is, well, a bit of a no-no, assuming we like the stability of our little home including the way its tilt regulates the seasons. It's no biggie so far, no immediate danger. Still, I'm adding it to my "omigod omigod! we're doomed i tell you doomed!" file.
Other than that...as you were. And remember our motto: there's always room for DOOM!!!
I just read where National Geographic has dismissed the last of its staff writers.
Wow, I used to receive an annual subscription for years as a Christmas gift from my Aunt. I guess they will continue with a handful of editors. I think I may have learned more about the world we live in from those yellow bordered magazines than any other source in my childhood. I think I may have sold a bunch of them at a garage sale years ago. I imagine they have become collectors items by now. I should have kept them.
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In other news,,,,,,,
Sounds like they will have to change the name of the game "Where's Waldo" to "Where's Walt"? He can't find an attorney, couldn't catch a flight. Probably doesn't know how to blow his own nose without his master giving him permission.
Today's day lily!!! Had to send this picture! Go 🦅
