tag/photo_album

Melissa and I had to say goodbye to our dear kitty Dean today - (given his medicine regimen over the past few years we weren't taken unawares but the speed of decline this past week and then this last day were a shock.)

He was such a sweet and snuggly cat. Melissa was thinking of a younger female cat when she first went to the shelter but Dean The Love Machine's (the shelter's nickname for him) head boop was irresistible.

And he was brave! Fellow cat people were impressed by how out and about he was when we had folks over for my birthday...

So here are some photos. I think the biggest compliment we had as his Humans was when someone pointed how relaxed a cat he must be, showing his belly to the world like that in this one photo...

(title is a little riff on a "hello friend" greeting Melissa often used for Dean)

via shhhitsfine.

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Speaking of... this recently unearthed photo from Christmas '79, listening to my dad's heart with a stethoscope I got in a toy doctor kit.

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November 18, 1972 - 50 Years Ago Today Betty Scheinfeldt and James Israel got married!


Decided I wanted to move to something simpler and less chaotic than my Wall O' Peeps and decided to get a thing from inkifi.com - a single largeish framed 4 x 13 grid of square cropped photos. (and I'm labeling them here just for fun...) I find it satisfying to (once again) plumb my photographic past and find photos meaningful to me, mostly because of who is in them but also with an eye towards the visually arresting. And this arrangement was interesting... I decided to build from the bottom up chronologically, with my parents anchoring the corners. Sometimes I used choice of photo or proximity (or lack thereof) to make a message or a joke. I used more photos that didn't show up in previous projects. Final day of photos scanned from my mom's collection... after high school I was more on my own for documenting my life in photos....

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Sometimes, magazines hid their best 'Huh?' moments deep inside stories that were otherwise utterly normal. I was drowsing through a Newsweek cover story called 'Clinton Now' when suddenly a comment by Julia Payne, the ex-president's spokeswoman, made me laugh out loud. 'One night last year he called about 1 a.m, ranting and raving about something,' Payne recalled. 'And I said, "Sir, are you watching Fox again?"'

These days.... that's just how the presidency works! Fox tells Trump what to think. The relationship can be a little adversarial, but it's pretty clear Trump trusts fellow television personalities more than diligent people in the government. All but the first one (my mom and her posse) are my Mom and my Aunt...

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"Jazz is about taking risks... it's the only way you get better!"
"At jazz?"
"At life! Jazz is LIKE life! It goes on for longer than you think, and as soon as you're like, '...oh I get it' - it ends!"

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Oh, I'm becoming so sensible! We've got to be reasonable about everything we do here. Studying, listening, holding our tongues, helping others, being kind, making compromises, and I don't know what else! I'm afraid my common sense, which was in short supply to begin with, will be used up too quickly and I won't have any left by the time the war is over.

I just read Anne Frank's Diary: The Graphic Adaption. I don't recall if I read the original in school or not, but so much more of the day to day life - the banality of it - came through in comic form. And the elegance of her self-awareness is always so moving.

Another quote I liked:

Every child has to raise itself.

Taking a quick minibreak with my Mom and Aunt in NJ (thanks, use-it-or-lose-it vacation policy :-D ) ... I'm raiding my mom's photo collection a bit, so for the next few days I'll be posting some of the highlights of what I liked in her collection.

The Garbers were farm people...this is my grandmother Mary as a young'un.


John + Mary!

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I think the impact of superheroes on popular culture is both tremendously embarrassing and not a little worrying. While these characters were originally perfectly suited to stimulating the imaginations of their twelve or thirteen year-old audience, today's franchised übermenschen, aimed at a supposedly adult audience, seem to be serving some kind of different function, and fulfilling different needs. Primarily, mass-market superhero movies seem to be abetting an audience who do not wish to relinquish their grip on (a) their relatively reassuring childhoods, or (b) the relatively reassuring 20th century. The continuing popularity of these movies to me suggests some kind of deliberate, self-imposed state of emotional arrest, combined with an numbing condition of cultural stasis that can be witnessed in comics, movies, popular music and, indeed, right across the cultural spectrum. [...] I would also remark that save for a smattering of non-white characters (and non-white creators) these books and these iconic characters are still very much white supremacist dreams of the master race. In fact, I think that a good argument can be made for D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation as the first American superhero movie, and the point of origin for all those capes and masks.

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even
a small purple artichoke
boiled
in its own bittered
and darkening
waters
grows tender,
grows tender and sweet

patience, I think,
my species

keep testing the spiny leaves

the spiny heart

The Tufts Concert band went to Bermuda, I went to Gala, I graduated and then... I guess i switched to digital photography...

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"It's special in every aspect. Not only as a manager, but as an individual. Just to manage this team. Everybody knows the history of the city, and history has positive sides and negative sides. And for me, as a minority, to be a manager in Boston hasn't been a challenge. ... And to be able to led this team, it's amazing. It's a great group, very talented, very humble, very hungry."

Also, what a fine last name he has.

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Decided to watch a little Brewers/Dodgers and th--WHAT THE HELL IS THAT SERIF FONT DOING WITH THE NAMES ON THE BACK OF THE BREWERS UNIFORMS

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seriously what is that??
My family went on a 2 week, 3000-mile bus tour of the British Isles. And Veronika came to visit my in NYC for New Year's.

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If you make things long enough, you will fail. That's important enough that I'm going to say it again, with emphasis. If you make things long enough, you will fail. The same thing that put you in the elevated place of being a creative artist in the first place will curdle or invert or fall on its face or on your face and you will be a person who made something that they should not have made. [...] David Bowie said something I really liked. I don't know if he said it often, but it's the kind of thing that you should get tattooed on your leg. He said that creativity is "one of the few human endeavors where you can crash your airplane and walk away from it."

I think it's a good example of being aware of catastrophizing - an individual effort fails, it's so easy to see that as an array of dominos to other creative efforts, to our self-worth, maybe even our ability to make a living and thus ensure our own physical security. But those situations, those kinds of slippery slopes, aren't that common, and usually we can find some place to get traction - that is if the initial failure is even that big to begin with. Which it usually isn't - that's where the ability to cast a "So What" field comes in handy. This effort failed. So what? So I feel like I'm less good of a creator. So what?

Another quote from the book that I liked the sound of:

There was no such thing as distraction. There was only traction.

And then, college. Technically my home address was New York City - some of those shots with the towers are a bit poignant.

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Funny how the aging milestone might shifting from transition lens / bifocals to "cranking up the font size on my phone" Before I started college I got to visit Marcos, our exchange student from Portugal... his friends put on a poetry and fashion show "Fractions of Seconds" and I saw a village bullfight.

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Random notes on reading and vanity:
1. I recently shelled out the $20 to get my old and scratched but great touchscreen Kindle off of ads, so the lock screen is an attractive grayscale image instead. Worth it I think.
2. It's funny that besides column width, my other reason for not using my phone as a reader is so that it's more obvious to onlookers that I'm engaged in reading and not browsing or gaming. This may be one of the most shallow things about me. (On the other hand, I always think it's good when the cover matches the book. So to speak.)
3. Come to think of it, I've switched from iPad Mini to this old Kindle full time. Maybe partially in existential protest to Apple leaving the Mini behind- I'd buy a new model that supported the Pencil in a second. But also, despite the lack of backlighting and color-coded highlighting, e-ink readers are such a chill technology.
4. Since 2000 I've been recording books read, movies watched, games played through, tv-series consumed. It's nearly impossible for me not to gamify this for myself- like I know I'm driven to complete mediocre books just for the little mark. At the end of the year I post a list with comments and recommendations. I'm not really trying to impress anyone with the numbers, just compete with my past self. Maybe I should consider posting the list without counting...

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Arun and his pup Bolt
Ah, the midwest prom. In retrospect kind of weird "the garter dance" was a thing for high school dances...

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Wins at Fenway and Foxboro - nothing to be overconfident about at either but still, it's good to win when you gotta win. Interestingly the 43-40 score was a Scorigami, a score never previously achieved at the end of an NFL game. (I guess there's more opportunities with high scores.)

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On my devblog: the stupid-idea-buddies buddy. Bookended with band trips to Atlanta and Florida, and the musical Hello Dolly in between. Dances, band trips to Detroit and Boston, and ending at Veronika's prom... Ahh, Middle School (as Matt Groening calls it, "the deepest pit of Hell", high school being merely the second deepest.) Fun fact: for most of this time I went by my middle name "Logan". Anyway, mostly school stuff, plus the NEOSA Salvation Army Youth Band's trip to Mexico City.

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Nerf Football Rah Rah Rah

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The biggest and most frightening impact of the AI revolution might be on the relative efficiency of democracies and dictatorships. Historically, autocracies have faced crippling handicaps in regard to innovation and economic growth. In the late 20th century, democracies usually outperformed dictatorships, because they were far better at processing information. We tend to think about the conflict between democracy and dictatorship as a conflict between two different ethical systems, but it is actually a conflict between two different data-processing systems. Democracy distributes the power to process information and make decisions among many people and institutions, whereas dictatorship concentrates information and power in one place. Given 20th-century technology, it was inefficient to concentrate too much information and power in one place. Nobody had the ability to process all available information fast enough and make the right decisions. This is one reason the Soviet Union made far worse decisions than the United States, and why the Soviet economy lagged far behind the American economy.

However, artificial intelligence may soon swing the pendulum in the opposite direction. AI makes it possible to process enormous amounts of information centrally. In fact, it might make centralized systems far more efficient than diffuse systems, because machine learning works better when the machine has more information to analyze. If you disregard all privacy concerns and concentrate all the information relating to a billion people in one database, you'll wind up with much better algorithms than if you respect individual privacy and have in your database only partial information on a million people. An authoritarian government that orders all its citizens to have their DNA sequenced and to share their medical data with some central authority would gain an immense advantage in genetics and medical research over societies in which medical data are strictly private. The main handicap of authoritarian regimes in the 20th century--the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place--may become their decisive advantage in the 21st century.

Sometime during college or shortly thereafter I assembled my own photo album.

A long time ago I scanned it all and put it on my website, but at a relatively low resolution (see here)
so I decided to scan it all again. I reused all the old filenames I used as caption back then - sometimes carrying information I would have forgotten in the mean while.

When I scanned it, I broke it into 9 sections. Starting with "The Young Years" - including shots of my folks before I was around.

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"masculinity is violence on the horizon"