honk if you love rooks

 

Here is something I think about every time I blow my nose.  In chess, rooks are considered more valuable pieces than bishops. That's because rooks move orthogonally (up and down and back and forth across the board) and bishops move diagonally.  That means rooks can move to any square on the board, but a bishop can only move to the same color square that it starts out on; rooks have the potential to control twice as much of the board as bishops.

 

Kleenex is the bishop.  It's great for blowing noses, but you can't flush it.  Toilet paper is the rook.  You can both blow your nose with it and it's also flushable.  Dual purpose!  That means toilet paper is a more valuable commodity than Kleenex.

 

I think about that when I'm looking for something to blow my nose with.  I don't really think about other times.

 

Here's your fun fact for the day:  Up until close to the year 1600, the English language didn't have a distinct word for the color orange.

 

 

There is one corner of our office that is a Bob corner.  There are three offices located in that corner; two of the offices belong to Bobs. Within thirty feet of that corner are four cubicles that belong to Bobs. The percentage of the population named Bob for that small part of the office is about 42%.

 

 

Pen & Ink work in progress

Here is the drawing of Farmington I'm working on. When it's done, it will be 12 x 18 inches.

Hey, Dad and Brian, this guy beat us to it.

A metal detectorist found hoard of 52,000 ancient Roman coins:

 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100708/ap_on_re_eu/eu_britain_roman_coins

 

Finally, some numismatic news to report.

 

For my birthday, my parents have given me a gift certificate to VCoins.com.  Now comes the torture: I have to decide what to spend it on.  How do I make up my mind?  They is a great selection of ancient coins there, but I need to find a way to develop a focus.

 

I've decided I'd better read some history to find something I find particularly interesting.

 

My coins have been very neglected. I really want to go through an do some organizing and weeding, but haven't had the time.  Fortunately—at least, in that regard—I accrue coins so slowly that the disorganization in my collection is a problem that has been looming for years without becoming a crisis.

 

 

Book Report: Neverwhere

I finally read Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. Aaron loaned it to me (about three years ago) thinking I enjoy it since I'd had enjoyed Gaiman's American Gods, and he was right. It comes across as a little bit of a cross between The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Alice in Wonderland; a young Scottish man moves to London for work, and ends up sucked into parallel supernatural London, existing in the forgotten crevices and tunnels beneath the city and on rooftops, inhabited by the overlooked and forgotten. It's a sort of spirit world of homelessness and mythology, capable of observing the "real" world while going unnoticed itself. It's a strange idea, but carried off pretty well.

It's less complex and sprawling than American Gods, with more modest aspirations, but it was fun and involving. It also really, really helped that Gaiman has easy-to-like writing style. I read through it very quickly; it was very well paced; it was frequently funny; and the two main villains were loads of grotesque fun.

It's too bad that the writers of the TV series "Lost" didn't take a few notes here. Both stories dealt with every-day people suddenly thrust into strange worlds governed by alien rules and customs. For reasons I'm still pondering, Gaiman's world seems to hold together better than that of "Lost."

Lockstitch

 I've had a few conversations lately about how sewing machines work.  Everyone I talked to was as mystified as I was. However, I just found this animation.  I hope it works here; I'm not sure I've ever tried posting a .gif file.

 

Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose

 

Laurie, the organizer of the Louisville Area Skeptics meetup group (http://www.meetup.com/Louisville-Area-Skeptics/), mentioned at last night's Science Café meeting that future presenters will include a retired couple from India who now spend most of their time in the United States.  For a few months each year, though, they travel through rural India with a mobile science lab, teaching kids about science.  Laurie mentioned that this is similar to what she does here in our community.  Sometimes she goes to a school that has a science lab, which the kids go to once or twice a week, and it's great.  Sometimes—all too often—there is no science lab at all.

 

This prompted a string of thoughts to run through my head: Is once a week for a science lab enough? That seems so slight.  But shouldn't every subject taught in a school be considered, in some way, a science?  Do I consider all such subjects a science?  Some obviously have more to do with science than others: Math and the other sciences are closely bound.  History involves lots of research, with ties to archaeology, geology, psychology, and medicine.

 

How do you apply science to literature and art, though?  I suppose I'm so used to the skeptical mindset now that it never seems natural to erect a wall between "the sciences" and "the humanities."  They are all wrapped up together.

 

At last night's Science Café meetup, Dr. Lee Alan Dugatkin gave a presentation based on his new book, _Mr. Jefferson and the Giant Moose_ (http://www.amazon.com/Mr-Jefferson-Giant-Moose-Natural/dp/0226169146).  I have not read the book—yet. I now intend to, because if it's even half as interesting and amusing as Dr. Dugatkin's presentation, it should be engrossing.

 

Dr. Dugatkin related how many of our nation's founding fathers became involved in a conflict that was only tangentially related to our war of independence from England.  Biology, literature, history, nationalism, economics, politics, and personal and professional pride were all wrapped up together as leaders in the fledgling United States sought to refute the theory of New World degeneracy: the notion that animal species in North America were smaller, feebler, slower, and less diverse than their Old World counterparts, due largely to the New World's allegedly colder, damper climate.

 

Thomas Jefferson, who proclaimed himself to be a scientist first and a politician second, became obsessed (according to Dugatkin) with refuting these claims, which became widely believed in Europe with the publication of the writings of esteemed French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon.  Jefferson and his colleagues read these theories with alarm, for the notion that the New World was land which was inhospitable to robust life (including humans and all their enterprises) was an assault not just on the truth and their own personal pride, but also on economic ventures and the integrity of their developing nation.  Jefferson undertook an effort to have a huge moose shot, preserved, and sent to France to illustrate the error of the theory.

 

It seemed obvious that Dr. Dugatkin really knew his material, and took delight in answering questions.  He was an engaging speaker on a very interesting topic, illustrated by great anecdotes (and when you mix cultural conflict, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, French naturalists, frontiersmen, giant moose, and Native Americans, you're bound to get some great anecdotes).  It was often quite funny. It even involved weasel penises.

 

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a series of essays for Natural History magazine in which he sought to illustrate the importance of the very human, error-prone personalities who have been involved in our scientific history.  In much the same way as I can't see any real line that keeps science out of art, there is often a false notion that science is an endeavor removed from other human passions.  That couldn't be less accurate; all human prides and prejudices are displayed in the history of science, and without their great motivations, the sciences themselves would be stunted and feeble.

 

New house portrait commission

I just finished this a few days ago.  I'll spare you the self-critism and just say I'm happy with it.
 

 

 

Why is it that if I nod off two or three times during a meeting, I lose track of time and find it nearly impossible to tell whether I've been in the meeting for twenty minutes or an hour; yet if I wake up in the middle of the night, I can usually guess what time it is and be off by less than fifteen minutes?

 

Car painting 100% finished

 I just realized I never put up a photo here of the car at 100% completion.  This picture came out a little too pale and blue, but it's close. I wonder if you can spot the differences between this and how it looked at 99.9% finished?

 

Category change: flower to weed

Last night I had to declare war on these cute little flowers in my garden.  I don't know where they came from; they might have been part of some "remainder" garden center plants that someone gave me a few years ago, but I don't think so.  They only grow to about 12 inches, and end with nickel-sized, lavender-tinted white flowers with yellow centers. They are pretty and sort of subtle.

 

However, the stems also bear needle-like thorns. I tolerated this when it was only growing in one small patch of the garden, because I didn't really have to do anything with it.  Now, though, there are seedlings popping up in the yard nearby, and the seedlings have thorns, too.  They would be quite painful to step on barefoot.

 

With grim resolve, I put on leather gloves, grabbed a spray bottle of Roundup, and attacked the plants.  I pulled up the ones I could find in the yard (there were fifteen or twenty), and sprayed carefully around the sweet corn, asters, bee balm, and mint to destroy what I could find in the garden.  Something tells me the fight's not over yet, though.

 

 

Well, it's been a week, so I guess I better post something before my commercial sponsors desert me.

 

Art:

 

   I am working on two pen & ink drawings.  One is a walnut ink commissioned drawing of a house, and the other is a black-and-white drawing of Farmington.  With the Farmington drawing, I'm working out the best way to capture the bricks.  Bricks always seem tricky.  Drawing each brick seems wayyyy to detailed, but how else do you make brick look like brick?  There are ways…  However, in this case, the question is needless.  I'm working rather large, and I want it to be very detailed, so yeah, I'm drawing each brick.  We'll see how that goes.

 

Garden:

 

  The corn is more than two feet tall and growing fast.  I also planted a little more in the spaces between the peas and the spinach and the onions, figuring that those vegetables were about to expire, and the corn will   grown in and take over the spots.  The corn has sprouted, the peas are bolting and wilting, and the spinach is about worn out, so the plan seems to be working so far.

 

  Helga gave us some bee balm, and I love it.  It is large and bright, and it's the prettiest thing in our garden right now.  I also ate some of the flowers, and they're interesting.  They taste a lot like oregano with a   little bit of a spicy kick to them.

 

Coins:

 

 Missing them.

 

Metal detecing:

 

  Missing it.

 

Books:

 

I   just finished a "Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser" novella called "The Snow Women."  This was the first time I've ever read anything by Fritz Lieber, at least that I can recall.  It was a decent story, and I might read some more of the stories sometime.

 

  A few nights ago we were at a book store, and I commented to Kim that there are so many books that I'd like to read that picking up one and reading it seems like a terrible waste.  How can I choose what to read next? Why bother?  It's like being hungry and only getting a French fry.

 

Movies:

 

  Haven't seen anything.

 

 

More paintings that didn't work out

 

 

Article about why so many coin designs are lousy

http://numismaticnews.net/article/Poor_quality_coin_designs_lamented/

 

 

I'm looking at you, Florida and Indiana state quarters.
 

 

Triptych painting - are its days numbered?

Here is one of the "corner paintings" that I don't know what to do with. It's on canvas, so I could take it apart and re-use the stretcher bars. However, I'm in no hurry, because I almost like this one.

I painted this in 2002 (I think); it's the view from the Falls of the Ohio State Park Interpretive Center's observation deck, looking towards the Falls, on a rainy, misty day when the river was high. It is, to date, one of the largest single painting projects I've ever undertaken. In fact, it might be the biggest.

It never really developed in a way in which I was really satisfied, but I like many of the elements. I like the colors, I like the idea, I like how the bridge looks. I was very conscious from the start that it was a very minimal composition, flat and very straight-forward. The simplicity was on thing that I found interesting and challenging about it: how could it be turned into an interesting painting?

Unfortunately, I don't think I pushed it quite far enough. It needs more engaging textures and a more carefully planned use of color to really succeed, I think. That's one of those things that I think I'm better at now than I was a few years ago.

I like the scale, and I like the subject, although I'm still not convinced that the composition could ever have completely worked, even if the above problems had been taken care of.

painting demolition

Kim and I have decided to clean out the corner of our living room that includes my not-quite-good-enough paintings. The old paintings in the corner must go.  I'll be looking for ways to break them down for scrap or otherwise salvage parts for other uses.

 

I know there are people who get a little worked up about me destroying the sub-par paintings, so I won't hurry through the process.  I'll photograph them, and anyone who is interested can make me an offer.

 

These are all works that I couldn't previously bring myself to get rid of, but didn't really have a place on any wall in my house, and weren't presentable as far as something to give or sell to others.  Some are works from college, and really aren't too bad; some are things that never really developed the way I wanted; and some are merely unfinished, and may still be completed by me in the near future.

 

I'll put pictures of them on my blog soon.

 

 

Illustration

I've had to take an online bloodborne pathogen course for work. This is a page from it that caught my attention.  I'm not so sure about that last sentence: Really, no one has ever gotten a disease from performing CPR?  That just strikes me as unlikely.  I can understand no confirmed cases of HIV or hepatitis B transmission, but c'mon.

 

Also, that is one funky cool illustration.  The sexy protruding yellow lips, the single breast, the funnel-shaped right arm, the hands of two different sizes...that's a woman I want to know.  I actually do like the drawing.  It's pretty wiggy, yet still perfectly and immediately conveys the artist's intent.

 

 

 

 

Ant vs. Pistil

I was out by our mailbox a few days ago, and I noticed that ants really enjoy the primose. Then I noticed this one guy who had his head down in the hole, and the part of the flower that sticks out of the hole -- the pistil, I learned -- was rocking and rotating. I watched for a minute, and realized that the ant was probably trying to chew through it so that he could get at the nectar behind it. I looked around at the other flowers and saw that more than half of them had their pistils detached and sitting on the petals next to the holes. This was evidence that what this ant was doing was routine work for his tribe.

I ran and grabbed the camera, and managed to film his moment of triumph.

Car painting in its nearly (99.8%) complete form

 

 

North Korea and the Axe Murder Incident

You know, I don't often use bad language on this blog, but I just have to make this comment: Craaaaaaazy shit.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe_murder_incident

 

I don't recall hearing about his before. Just thought I'd throw it up here, Korea being in the news so much and all.
 

 

The Car Painting (update)

 

It is nearly done!  I stopped last night around 12:45 (this was my third night in a row of staying up past 1:00 a.m., and I'm starting to feel it).  There is one small area that needs a tiny bit of detail work. After it spends the day drying, I should be able to polish that off in about ten minutes.

 

However, I made the mistake of bringing it in to work with me today.  That means I'll be spending the day looking at it, finding more things to do.  I already spotted one thing I could correct.  It's not something super obvious, I think, but it's hard to tell.  After spending so much time staring at it, it becomes very difficult to tell what works and what doesn't, which mistakes are glaring to a casual observer and which are merely wickedly haunting my second-guessing right hemisphere.

 

I think it looks really good, though.  I'm pleased with it.  I even signed and dated it last night.

 

Figuring out how much time I've spent on it is very hard.  I kept thinking, "I'm probably getting close to fifty hours," but I started thinking that twenty hours ago, at least.  Fifty hours would be a very conservative estimate.  I don't think I hit a hundred.  Seventy hours worth of work is probably about right but really I just don't know.

 

Photos will follow in a few days.

 

I should also add that rubbing a cut garlic clove onto the surface of a painting does, in fact, seem to curtail the beading problem I was having.  Now the painting smells like garlic.  I'm sure it will fade before too long; but in the meantime, Lynette, if you're reading this, and you're not a garlic person, then…sorry.

Bad Astronomy

Bad Astronomer Phil Plaitt wrote an interesting post explaining why the Moon tends to look notably bigger when it is on the horizon:

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/13/why-does-the-moon-look-so-huge-on-the-horizon/

 

He includes this photographic illustration of a Ponzo illusion.  I think this is really amazing.  Look at the two vertical red lines in the photo.  How much longer does the one on the right look than the one on the left?

 

 

 

(Note: I'm sending this post in via email, and when I do that, I don't know where the photo is going to end up in the post.  Sorry if it's placed confusingly.)

 

Another item from the Bad Astronomy blog:  This is a really cool photo from a guy to takes lots of really cool photos.

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2010/05/18/iss-shuttle-transit-the-sun/

 

 

Painting and stuff

For a blogger that is supposed to be at least partially blogging about art, I sure haven't put up many photos in a long time.  I've been painting pretty consistently on the car, though, and I'm close to being finished with it.  I painted for another hour-and-a-half last night.  I need to let the whole painting sit for a few days so that it's dry to the touch, then I can put what might be the lat layer of glazing on it.

 

This has been an educational process; I have done relatively little work in oil glazes before, and I've never before done a single painting that depended so heavily on glazing.  Thank goodness for the Internet; I've relied on articles and discussions to help me work out the bugs in the process.  Once again, Wetcanvas.com was a reliable, entertaining resource.

 

One problem that I have had is with some of my thin layers of glazed paint beading up on the preceding layer.  I learned that rubbing the lower dried layer with a cut onion or garlic will prevent this from occurring.  I haven't tried it yet, but I will.

 

I am also working on another walnut ink house drawing commission.
 

 

You smell delicious!

I think I'll invent a line of fragrances called Grill Scents.  They'd probably work equally well for men or women.  The flagship fragrance would be Tangy Barbecued Chicken, but Jamaican Jerk and Sizzling Steak would be on the shelves with it.  For those who adore subtlety and love anticipation as much as they love payoff, I'll include Freshly Fired Briquette.

 

 

Considering the others

 

Kim and I have failed to locate our Sony digital camera.  It has been missing for more than a week.  We've lost cameras before, but never in such a seemingly confined amount of space and time.  We had it in my parents' van on Wednesday night, and that's the last time we saw it.  After we got out of the van, we got in our vehicles, and drove home.  When Kim looked for the camera the next day, she couldn't find it.

  

There just aren't many places it can be.  We looked everywhere we could think of, and in most cases we looked there three to five times.  I still think there is a good chance it will turn back up.  Maybe it fell behind something at a weird angle, or…that's about all that's left I can think of.

 

We decided we still need a camera while we wait for ourselves to find the missing one.  So Kim bought a little Canon camera.  It's tiny and very pink ("I'm sorry," said Kim, "it's the only color they had left.")

 

I read the small owner's booklet a couple of nights ago, and came across this sentence: "CAUTION:  Do not point the camera at very bright objects (the sun, etc.) Doing so may damage the sensors."

 

I'm intrigued by the "etc."  "et cetera" is Latin for "and the others," and the general modern meaning is that there are others things of the same sort that, for the sake of brevity, aren't listed.

 

So, in other words, it is inadvisable to point the camera at the Sun or other things of that sort.  That made my mind race. What are those other things?

 

First I thought of lit candles.  They are hot, and they are bright.  However, I've never seen a candle as bright as the Sun.  It seems unlikely that anyone would market a $160 camera that would break if it were used to photograph a child blowing out birthday candles.

 

What else is like the Sun?  The Moon?  It's not nearly as bright; it hardly ranks as a celestial birthday candle.  Did you know that the Earth's moon has one of the lowest albedos (abilities to reflect light) in the solar system?  If you lined up all the planets and moons and shined light on them, our moon would be way down at the bottom of the scale.  It's a very dark object, and just looks bright to us because it is so big and close.

 

So, I don't think that the Moon is one of the things meant by "etc."

 

Obviously, stars would have to fall into the category of things similar to the Sun.  Upon careful consideration, though, this doesn't seem to work very well in the context of the owner's manual.  Humans as a rule are only allowed to photograph stars from a great distance.  They are fainter in appearance than the Moon.  I feel that it could not possibly have been the intention of the technical writer of the owner's manual that you should not point your camera at the night sky and snap a photo.

 

This "etc." could serve to warn off lawsuits from NASA several hundred or several thousand years from now.  If scientists prepared an interstellar probe and decided that the philosophy of "faster, smaller, cheaper" meant that a small Canon digital hand-held would be the best choice for imaging technology, then it could spell trouble.  The probe would spend centuries crossing the gulf between us and Proxima Centauri (not a particularly bright star, by the way), point itself at the star, and fry itself.  Another NASA fiasco to frustrate the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchildren of the same engineers who forgot to convert their English measurements to metric on that Mars probe that crashed a few years ago.

 

All this strikes me as unlikely to have been in the mind of the writer of the owner's manual.

 

Another theoretical way to get close to a star is to be abducted by aliens and brought back to their home solar system.  People are always trying to get good photos of UFOs, after all, and a well-documented close encounter of the third kind would be worth a good amount of fame and money.  I don't think this kind of event really ever occurs, but maybe the technical writer is a believer, and he doesn't want someone burning out their camera's optics before snapping some great shots of the Grays, spacecraft interiors, and alien cloning operations.

 

After these considerations, it struck me: The most likely item to fall under "etc." is a nuclear blast.  That has the brightness of the Sun; it can and does occur here on Earth; there are probably lots of people who would try to photograph one if it occurred near enough to see and they had their cameras in their hands.  The warning would be wise to heed for those people who want their cameras to be intact to record the effects of post-Armageddon firestorms, nuclear winter, and rampant hair loss.

 

After thinking of this, it occurred to me that similar energies can be released on a smaller scale and in more tightly controlled conditions during particle physics experiments.  The newly started Large Hadron Collider in Europe might do this.  Grad students, make sure you read your tiny hot pink camera's manual before hooking it up to your research project.

 

That's all I can think of.  Therefore, the camera's manual could read, "Do not point this camera at the Sun, at alien suns around which you may orbit, or at nuclear explosions.  Do not attempt to use this camera to record data for high-energy particle physics experiments."

 

This would certainly make the manual more interesting to most people (not to me; I fill in all those boring blanks myself, obviously.)  There is, however, value in just leaving it as "etc."

 

lunch time detecting

I metal detected very briefly at lunch today—about 20 minutes.  This time I stopped at a park on the way back from getting my allergy shots.  I found a quarter, two dimes, two nickels, and four or five pennies.

 

 

lunchtime detecting

 

 

I detected for a little while at lunch again today.  I was headed for a spot I'd found that had produced a few little interesting things before, but it was being mowed by groundskeepers, so I headed to a quiet spot, way out of the way.

 

I hoped it might be an interesting place, because it is just across the fence from that old military academy.  I looked along that fence line for a while, expecting to find nothing, and finding exactly that in spades.  I found a Coke can, an old tiny bit of iron fence, and a metal disk that isn't a coin (I'll wash it off, but it looks featureless and aluminum).

 

Despite the lack of anything remotely resembling treasure, I had fun, as it was a beautiful day to be out.  I was under some sort of trees that bore fragrant white flowers, and the ground was full of violets, and it was neither too not nor too cold.

Friday at the Oaks

Thanks to our generous friends Candy and Will, who are giving us some tickets they can't use, Kim and I are going to the Oaks on Friday with Jenny and Spencer.  We still have to figure out some logistics (What will we wear? Who will baby sit?), but we're looking forward to a fun day.

 

I am currently taking bets on the success of my bets.

 

 

Book Report

 

A couple of nights ago I finished reading Watchmen, by Alan Moore and David Gibbons. I'd had a number of friends recommend it, but not being a graphic novel type of guy, generally, I'd never got around to reading it.

 

Last year I saw the movie, and though it wasn't great, it was interesting and enjoyable. Then last week when I was at the library I happened across the book, so I checked it out.

 

It really is a good book, and very interesting.  More than anything else, I was captured by the cleverness of it; the layering of words and pictures, the creative juxtaposition of images, and the thoughtful development of parallels within the story telling allowed for a lot of fun, involving reading.

 

Curing

Here's a painting tip I recently picked up: Don't keep your painting in the dark if you want it to dry.

 

I already knew that oil paint dries by oxidation, so that exposure to circulating air speeded drying time.  I also knew that keeping the painting in a relatively warm place increased the hardening of the paint.

 

What I just learned, though, is that exposure to light (especially to ultraviolet light) speeded the process, too.

 

UV light is harmful to paintings overall, but a little sunlight won't hurt it when it's curing.

 

I had been keeping my car painting in the dark garage between painting sessions, but today I decided to take it out and put it in the back of the car for the day.  Maybe it will be dry enough for me to work on some more tonight.
 

 

Bearing the Aesthetic Candle of Truth

 

I spent a long time thinking that artists shouldn't be allowed to title their own artwork, but now I have to file that notion under "misguided" along with the idea that poets shouldn't be allowed to read aloud their poems.  The truth is, in my opinion, that most people shouldn't be allowed to title any artwork, and most people shouldn't read poems out loud in public.

 

The poem thing came from the handful of people in my creative writing classes years ago who tried to read their works for class but it all just came out sounding wrong.  It was too formal and halting, with unnecessary pauses at the end of lines in poems, and a deadly montone.  Bleh.

 

My belief regarding artwork comes from cornball titles such as (and I'm just making these up to give you the idea) "The Lone Sentinel" for a painting of a lighthouse, or "Old Faithful" for a drawing of a rusty old wrench, or "A Little Slice of Heaven" for a painting of a flower garden.  I usually want the painting to speak for itself.  If the title is going to be evocative, I want it to avoid cliché and tell me something I didn't expect.  Otherwise, I just want it for identification purposes.

 

That's what I use titles for, identification.  Uh-oh, I just realized that my block print of garlic is titled "Garlic Lovers."  Well, heck, sometimes it's hard to resist being cute.  But at least it's not a chronic affliction for me.  At least I was shooting for a double meaning.

 

Don't give me a hard time about this.  I know some who read this will want to do so.  I don't favor taking away people's rights to title their own artworks.  I'm just brandishing my right to say a huge percentage of titles are aesthetic poison.  I find "The Lone Sentinel" much less interesting than "Montauk Point Lighthouse, March."

 

By the way, I just Googled "Montauk Point Lighthouse" to see if there was one, and there is.  I figured there had to be.  It's very pretty.

 

Modified Hauck's

This is the same drawing I put up a while back, but I modified the borders. I made them all even because I thought it would really look better. In order to do that, I had to repair the ink drop that fell into the sky; this I did with a little white acrylic paint.

MGA Roadster oil painting work in progress

I wanted to wait until I was done before I started putting up pictures on my blog, but I haven't had any art to post in a long time, so I thought I'd put up what I've done so far. Here are four stages of the painting. The last one was taken this afternoon. I worked a little more on it this evening, mostly on the pavement. The biggest remaining challenge is going to be evening out the reflections in the body of the car. I need to make it a little more uniform, and downplay a lot of the contrasts. I'm pleased with how it is progressing.

Avalanche on Mars

This is from NASA's orbiting HiRISE camera. I saw it mentioned on The Bad Astronomer's blog. Such cool stuff!

I edit this to add: This photo is of a 2,000 foot cliff, seen from almost directly above. The white at the top of the cliff, at left, is ice--frozen carbon dioxide. The camera took the picture just as there was a rock slide down the cliff, stirring up a big plume of dust. This camera has captured other slides as they happened or shortly after. I think it's really neat to see such clear photos of geological processes happening on other planets.

Coughing, painting, sky watching

It's sort of a yucky day.  I've had a cold, and the night before last I was up half the night coughing. Then last night I was up until 1:45 painting, but I probably wouldn't have been able to sleep had I gone to bed earlier because I was still coughing. I finally went to bed, and couldn't get to sleep for an hour because of the coughing, and because my mind was preoccupied (I think sometimes cold medicine does that to me).  Then I woke up again around 3:45 because the smoke detector battery was going dead, making the detector beep.  I was awake for a while after that.  Then I got up when my alarm went off at 5:45.  And I still have my cough.

 

On the good side, though, I feel that I'm making great progress with the car painting.

 

At 6:08 this morning I went out back to watch the International Space Station go over. It's a fairly regular thing, but I thought it would be nice to go out and wave.  It was very bright.

 

 

Garden

 

I finally managed to get a lot of seeds in the ground last night- fennel, spinach, peas, and green onions.  I still need to plant the mustard spinach that Judy shared with us, and I suppose I could go ahead and plant some corn; there's still a danger of a freeze, but the current extended forecast looks pretty good.

 

Topics

 

Art:

 

I was up late painting a picture of a car. It is coming along well, I think. This is a commission. I normally would not do a painting of a car.

 

I have way more ideas than I have time to work on. I'm sure this is a problem that lots a people would like to have. However, it makes it hard to decide what to do next. That is sort of being decided for me, though, as I have one more commission in the wings and a prospective landmark-drawing business opportunity coming up.

 

Last night I had a great idea for a series of lino block prints. It would be fun to do five or six images of Adam and Eve. I have images in my head of Adam and Eve playing poker with a unicorn and a monkey; Adam chasing the snake with a hoe; that sort of thing. Eh, maybe not.

 

I have lots of very old oil paints that are artist-grade, and which came from a yard sale or something fifteen years ago. Some of the tubes of paint are obviously much older than that.  The paint seems to be in decent shape, but the tubes are terrible. They are falling apart, the caps are stuck on, the labels are unreadable and crumbling, and sticky linseed oil coats them. I need to find some containers to put them in, I think. Baby food jars seem too big. I might have some small plastic containers, but I don't know how suitable the plastic is for storing oils. I doubt there would be a problem, but I'd have to mull it over a bit longer.

 

 

Garden:

 

The girls have planted flower seeds. Some of this is supposed to be a secret kept from their mother, so if you are Kim, forget you read this (that's a joke. Kim already knows, and just pretends she doesn't).

 

Today I bought some more seeds: fennel, green onions, spinach, peas, and two types of sweet corn.

 

Helga gave us some bee balm and two other types of perennial, the names of which I forgot. I also can't remember what she said they look like, so there'll be all kinds of garden surprises.

 

 

Coins:

 

No news to report for months and months.

 

lunctime detecting, Wednesday

I metal detected a little at lunch today. I found a dime and a few aluminum cans.

 

The best thing, though, was when I pulled up a can from under the weeds with the intention of recycling it. I could feel that it was full of mud, so I cut it apart with my garden knife to shake the dirt out of it.

 

I saw something brown and orange, and it moved. I realized I was looking at a little tail. There was little muddy salamander living in the can.

 

I took a picture with my cell phone camera, but I don't know if it will come out. I'll have to check that later.

 

After releasing the salamander, I found another can, and when I picked it up there was another salamander under it.

 

I turned over a cut piece of tree trunk and saw two more salamanders. All of them were 3 or 4 inches long. They were pretty cute.

 

 

Lunchtime detecting

 

I metal detected during lunch today at an extremely overgrown former house site. Finds: three rifle casings, a very old rusty nail, and a mysterious but uninteresting rectangle of metal. Still, it was a pretty day to be out.  There won't be many more chances to look around that particular spot before the leaves (and bugs) are in. I noticed, however, that the front end of the wooded and overgrown area I hunted has recently been remodeled to make way for a public sidewalk, allowing easier access to the front end of the site. It's close enough to work that I might go back to check it out.

 

Something lacking

 

I've been thinking and reading about oil painting, and over the past few days I've come to a tentative conclusion about my palette: it is missing a color.

 

For twenty years I have felt something amiss in my paintings. It has been nagging me inconsistently. I think I picked up some form of faulty advice or slightly skewed mindset sometime when I was in college, and this has negatively affected my painting.

 

I need to add black to my palette.  I have mixed my own blacks when I felt it necessary, sure, but I have never used tubed black for anything in oil painting.  Now, though, I think it would help me explore more color subtlety.

 

This from Wikipedia's entry on Myopia:

Chromatic aberration of strong eyeglasses

Close-up of color shifting through corner of eyeglasses. The light and dark borders visible between color swatches do not exist.
For people with a high degree of myopia, very strong eyeglass prescriptions are needed to correct the focus error. However, strong eyeglass prescriptions have a negative side effect in that off-axis viewing of objects away from the center of the lens results in prismatic movement and separation of colors, known as chromatic aberration. This prismatic distortion is visible to the wearer as color fringes around strongly contrasting colors. The fringes move around as the wearer's gaze through the lenses changes, and the prismatic shifting reverses on either side, above, and below the exact center of the lenses. Color fringing can make accurate drawing and painting difficult for users of strong eyeglass prescriptions.
Strongly nearsighted wearers of contact lenses do not experience chromatic aberration because the lens moves with the cornea and always stays centered in the middle of the wearer's gaze.


I experience this. I think it also has a lot to do with the "floating colors" effect I often see when looking at side-by-side complimentary color fields, or bright colors against dark.

Myopia in war

I think I'd be interested in reading a history of myopia in warfare. Would an ancient Greek go off to battle even if he couldn't tell a Spartan from a Persian from more than 20 feet away? Or would a guy like that (which is to say, a guy like me) just be left at home to tan hides or something? Maybe he'd be used as an advanced scout, in the hopes he'd just get caught and killed off. Maybe he'd just be likely to get run over by a chariot before he even left home.

 

Soldiers wore spectacles in the Civil War. Was this eyewear expensive? What if it broke? Did they tell those guys not to shoot, because it was a waste of ammunition?

 

In Afghanistan and Iraq, how quickly do broken glasses get replaced? Pretty quickly, I bet.

 

This year's brackets.

I'm a little late, but I feel that improved my odds. It must be the pressure. Anyway, this year I tried to find a balance between rationality and wishful thinking, which seems to work about as well for me as either strict pragmatism or pure idealism by themselves.

I don't have any money riding on this (in fact, I have it being obliterated in the second round) but I'll feel very proud if it works out.

Go big fat red star!

Ide Tidings

A couple of days ago at work we received some certified mail that was returned to us unclaimed. The office secretary stamped it with the date we received it, and then when I saw it I just had to go around showing it to everyone. I photocopied it, scribbled out identifying info like addressee's last name and his city, and put the picture here for you to admire. For your benefit, I highlited the amusing parts.

Spring Gardening

 

 

We recently bought and ate a spaghetti squash, and I thought it was great. It's so much like pasta, yet a little more interesting. I saved the seeds because I thought it would be great to grow some this year.

 

Now I'm having second thoughts. They're members of the cucurbita family, like pumpkins, watermelons, and zucchini. I've grown all of those before, but had mixed results. None of it was a total failure, but the continuing fight against diseases and insect pests, combined with the huge amount of garden space, means that the effort-to-payoff ratio has been pretty slim.

 

I don't want to give up on those things altogether (I especially like the idea of growing huge jack-o-lantern pumpkins), but I think if I avoid that family of vegetable for a year or two, it might make my garden a little more free of the pests that also prefer them when I eventually get back to them. Might. Probably not, but maybe.

 

Anyway, we had conferences at school a few days ago, and one of the teachers had set out some leftover seeds from the school garden he was working on. The seeds were free for the taking. I picked up a few packets: parsnips, thyme, parsley, fennel, and dill.

 

I also have some bulbs for purple gladioli that I need to get in the ground.

 

The gardening bug is biting me, and I really want to get out and work. There it lots of digging, trimming, hoeing, and raking to be done!

I know I'm among the last 5% of the world's population to watch this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qybUFnY7Y8w

After several viewings, I realized that the thing that probably impresses me most is the camera work. How did they do that in a single take?

How Lux Cargo Met Kim

 

Bananas.

 

Bananas, you say? Yes, I could use one right about now, too.

 

That reminds me of back when I used the alias "Lux Cargo." How I miss those silvery days, tracing the circumference of the Ring of Fire in my yacht, The Lux Cargo Jr. (I named it after myself).  Most pleasurable were my excursions to Fiji and Tonga, where, if one drops anchor in the green-crystal shallows, beautiful women in skirts woven of kelp will wade out with fruit platters.  These women are uniformly tourists from the Midwest who pay good money to do this, and they are slathered in sunscreen, but dang they look fine in their shell necklaces.  They will place macaws on your head and give you pineapple slices soaked in rum. "You are welcome in our huts any time, Lux Cargo!" they would exclaim to me.

 

Fiji and Tonga are much pleasanter than the Aleutians, where the women paddle out in kayaks and offer you platters of sliced whale blubber. Some people really go for that, though.

 

Those were the best five years of my life, if you don't count any of the last ten. How would I ever forget my long conversations over games of go with the 110-year-old Okinawans? Losing money like mad betting on the kickboxing matches in Singapore's back alleys? Being brought to tears as whale calves gently nudged the hull of The Lux Cargo Jr. off the coast of Kamchatka?

 

I never saw those jagged rocks until it was too late. I was distracted by a macaw that was trying to land on my head. Have you seen those birds? Having one land on you is like being slugged by a fifty pound bag of Skittles. I don't blame the bird, though, as the weather conditions were deteriorating and The Lux Cargo Jr. was very inviting place to land, even after the Patagonions had rubbed off all the gold plating on the fixtures to use in their own blasphemous ceremonies.

 

I finally washed ashore, barely held afloat by three mostly empty Windex bottles, in the coastal banana swamps of Talara. After resting, I jiggered up a catamaran from coconuts and bananas (Peruvian bananas are friggin' huge!)  Unfortunately, the coconut banana catamaran was as unseaworthy was it was delicious. After I finished that off, I assembled a giant banana outrigger.

 

You wouldn't believe the looks and guffaws I got from the engineers of the locks on the Panama Canal, nor the hoots and hollers from those on the Mississippi River as I sailed home.  I can assure you, though, that there are Polaroid photos of me and my mega-banana outrigger tacked up in every deckhouse, tackle shop, and fluorescent-light-lit Army Corps of Engineers office between New Orleans and Memphis, where my craft was nibbled into oblivion by grass carp.

 

I hitched the rest of the way home with an awesomely hot trucker named Kim.  That's how we met.  After she dropped off her freight at Target, I took her to dinner.

 

Finds with no metal detector

I found a wheat penny (1958) in the change box at work last week. Today I cashed a ten dollar check that I've had in my wallet for a month, and asked for half dollars, if the teller had any. She gave me five dollars worth, and one of them was a (silver clad) 1968.

(oops, I forgot to attach the drawing to the last post)
 

 

Hauck's on Goss Avenue

I think I'm done. This is a project I started on my own. I liked the view and decided to do a drawing of it in between commissions. I don't remember the exact size, and the drawing is not with me for me to measure right now. I think it about 8 x 10 inches.
 

 

I'm verrrrry interested to see where this goes

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124199042

 

"Last Train" controversy

 

More for the Misc. category

Kim bought some soy cheese to try. Our picky youngest daughter is actually willing to eat it, or at least she has eaten it two or three times now. I tried a little of it, and it wasn't bad.

 

Ways in which is resembles cheese:

- It is orange and comes in a block

- It is possible to chew it and swallow it

 

Beyond that, calling it "cheese" is really a stretch. In both taste and texture it reminded me of olives from a jar, though milder and tenderer. That's not necessarily bad, although if you're expecting something cheese-like it can be a little jarring. I think I would like it best on a burger.

 

***

 

Another question from a 4-year-old, as we drove in the van yesterday: What makes the earth stay floating in the air?

 

I found that one almost as tough as describing how a TV works. The TV one was hard because I only have a very vague understanding, and that understanding probably is even poorer now that the technology is dominated by modern flat-screen TVs and similar displays.  However, even though I don't *really* know what gravity is, I at least have a basic grasp of how it functions.  Trying to relate this to the experiences of a little girls was the hard part; I came up with three or four attempts at answering, but Kim kept buzzing me and saying, "Try again."  It just occurred to me that if I were somehow able to describe my understanding of how it all worked in terms that she was actually able to immediately grasp and understand, she would laugh at the absurdity of it and tell me I was making up stories.