Hydrating.
Friday, May 15th, 2020
Sammy came downstairs for a few minutes and, after discussing the migration of the neolithic across Iberia and islands of the Mediterranean, asked if I’d been drinking enough water.
I allowed as I hadn’t really. Had coffee this morning. Did feel a little uncalibrated. So I got up and poured some ice into the tumbler I use for water and filled it up with Atlanta’s finest.
And darned if I don’t feel refreshed.
And then we sat in the sunset light of the dining room and FaceTimed with my brother and sister-in-law 70-some miles away and the four of us lifted an adult beverage to the end of the week, and it was nice to catch up with them.
And darned if I don’t feel refreshed.
Team building.
Thursday, May 14th, 2020
MSNBC screengrab from Joy Reid’s twitter feed. Interesting that Joe and her network’s logo is kinda drifting off the right side of the screen.
End of our day, and Joe Biden is live over on MSNBC proving himself aware that the United States is a country on the planet Earth, and that the way we work with others in the world affects our economy and how we address global problems like this coronavirus thing involves global wisdom and cooperation (as does, lest we forget, climate change.) He’s lucid and fervent and pretty darned informed.
I’d say let’s let this guy take over in November and bring in a team who can turn things on a dime. A really, really big team of smart people. And if Biden is smart enough to do that and take two ego-respectful steps back and let the aforementioned smart people get us out of the muck and mire, he will have earned a lifetime of thanks. And statues in front of hospitals.
And yes, I know that the administration doesn’t change until January 20th, but I know that the moment in November we have real numbers (and MSNBC’s other ‘town hall’ guest Stacey Abrams would very much like us to have real, hard vote numbers efficiently and safely), Biden’s team will assemble with an urgency and sense of mission that will make Tony Stark’s pals seem lethargic.
Surviving.
Wednesday, May 13th, 2020
We spent some time tonight watching the finale of the 40th season (2 per year for 20 years) of Survivor on CBS. This show is traditionally shot with a long lead time and then, months later, the winner of the show is revealed in a live extravaganza from Los Angeles with crowds and hoopla and, well.
So they had plenty of time in spring of last year to shoot and then edit the episodes, but this time the crowning of the winner happened from Jeff Probst’s garage with the three finalists in little pixelated boxes, as is the post-Covid fashion. He said the somewhat simpler backdrop was shipped in pieces to his garage with do-it-yourself assembly instructions. No word as to whether they were Ikea-style instructions.
Sam and I wondered how they would deal with shooting their 41st season, already delayed in production. Their very large crew from the US, Australia, and elsewhere could not obliviously descend on the tiny islands of Fiji and, well, think of the challenges in pandemic-land. But consider as well that this is a big budget prime time reality show on a (still) major American television network. Their solutions (if they come up with them) will be interesting indeed to see play out in a changed world.
Tests of our courage.
Tuesday, May 12th, 2020
There’s a guy at the BBC, apparently “Operations Manager Cross Platform for BBC News”, named Robert Sharpe (on Twitter, @onetakesharpe). He tweeted this fine piece of PPE (shown above.) I presume he made this or got ahold of it somehow. In any case, well done, sir. I especially like that they’re SMPTE color bars (an industry-standard TV test signal).
There’s some other guy, an idiot not worth linking to, who says that men who are men do not wear masks, period. “The mask culture is fear driven,” he says.
He’s an idiot.
I deeply, deeply admire the courage of the men and women out there who are trying to tamp down the spread of Covid-19 with masks, tests, caution, wisdom, restraint, and social distancing. That’s the 21st century badge of courage in my book.
Filter, reduce, sort.
Monday, May 11th, 2020
Today, after grocery shopping during the geezer hour and after shipping off a nice clean version of an archaeology firm’s logo to central Georgia because they’re going to make a sign for their new headquarters, I spent some time unraveling some thorny coding problems that taught me about some functions that real pros use all the time, and for me it was try it once, nope, not it, try again, not quite, try again for the 37th time, ahhh, that’s the correct series of braces, brackets, and commas to make the software happy.
Functions, by the way, are mini-programs within programs. You could make a function where you hand it your birthday and it returns back to you how many seconds you’ve been alive, in a flash.
But this particular satisfying end result was a script where I could put two calendar dates in (or one) and bammo, a web page appears with thumbnails of all the Instagrams Sammy and I shot between those two dates. Both of our stuff, interleaved together, in fact, modestly color-coded so one could see at a glance who shot what.
Although…it’s fairly obvious to the two of us whose is whose, but the distribution! The “oh, you did this at the same time I was doing that” is kind of interesting.
So now we have just one more more-or-less hand-crafted tool in our computer toolbox. And I learned a bit more about filter, map, reduce, and sort, at least as far as Javascript interpreters know those words.
Customary.
Sunday, May 10th, 2020
Last night before going to sleep and sometime this afternoon during our content-consuming marathon, Sammy and I were talking a while about how we, or how humans, or how some humans adjust to what is a very abnormal situation as the days parade by.
I’ve grown accustomed to this pace, it’s not quite like breathing out and breathing in, her smiles, her rounds for getting some steps in, her bandanna for going outside, ah, well, apologies to Lerner and Loewe—and Ms. Sam.
It is quite revelatory how the accustomization happens and how the brain, when you work on relaxing and short-circuiting loops of fretting, just kinda recalibrates and, just like when they moved the garbage pickup day from Monday morning to Tuesday morning (what.. 5 years ago?), without conscious rewiring one somehow rewires sufficiently not enough to forget the old pattern, but to make room for the new procedures, safety steps, rituals.
I think this “making room” at this point in May is good foundational work. I don’t think there will be a reversal anytime soon; it’s more likely we’ll have new ways of being awkwardly overlaid on the old ones.
People used to chain-smoke and accidentally knock over cans of Coke into multimillion dollar video equipment while paying $500 or so an hour for the privilege of waiting for huge machines wind tape to the very place you want an edit to occur. Almost all of that is now in the dustbin of…well, old TV memories, but like this other stuff, it’s not like I’ve forgotten how it smelled (rancid tobacco and overheating electronics is a very distinctive combo), I just made room in my world for a new way of creating and being, and I’m more careful when my coffee mug is near my computer keyboard.
Front page pain.
Saturday, May 9th, 2020
The unemployment numbers are the “worst since the Depression era”, the coronavirus spreads rampantly in long-term-care facilities, meatpacking plants, and prisons…and increasingly among White House staffers.
But in south coastal Georgia, two rogue white guys, one an ex-cop, one his son, are finally arrested for murdering an unarmed jogging black man, and the underbelly of racially unequal criminal justice gets just a little light shined on it.
So I’m going with just a little optimism tonight.
Friday feast.
Friday, May 8th, 2020
I can smell dijon chicken baking in the next room. And carrots and cauliflower. Wait, let me check.
[several hours later]
Yes, that was delicious. It was my intention to head into the kitchen and grab a quick shot of the chicken still burbling away in the oven, but Sammy surprised me and had everything out and ready to go, so it was dinnertime on a friday night!
Because it smelled so good, I didn’t have much forbearance to do anything particularly food stylist-y and make the arrangement of the chicken thighs on my plate just so or compose things for the perfect aspect ratio shot of all our things arrayed for us, I offer you instead this very vertical view of cauliflower and carrots right on the sheet pan from the oven, tomatoes for me and (not seen) cucumber for Sammy, and the chicken thighs with a dijon mustard and garlic and panko breadcrumb thing that is really quite yummy and one of my favorites. Click (I took the picture) and eat.
And it has one of the other characteristic we like during extended home stays, even not under pandemic conditions: it “makes good leftovers.”
It goes well with a modest dessert of Trader Joe’s Dark Chocolate squares—just one or two—and a sip of bourbon. We’re fortunate more than I can say.
Closet update.
Thursday, May 7th, 2020
One of the things that has changed of late in television news or whatever it is exactly that cable news networks offer in the name of television news is that the idea of having lots of people at a very big desk thrashing over the ideas of the day is just too scary, too dangerous, just plain unsafe.
So now they are lots of heads in boxes in very different places. And in some cases, those places historically extend from a very small, very carpeted room in Midtown Atlanta.
When Ted Turner’s independent WTCG/WTBS was first getting ‘SuperStation’-y, cast into millions of cable-tv connected homes via satellite, part of the regular schedule were short news updates, largely rip-and-read wire copy affairs, broadcast in the SuperStation’s one and only tiny-ish studio on West Peachtree street. They tried taping a bunch of these in advance, because it was inconvenient to shut down production just to do a minute-long newscast and then yank equipment back to wrestling or car commercials or whatever else you might be doing. But news being news, y’know, tended to become superseded or obsolete when you’ve recorded a whole day’s worth first thing in the morning. You want fresh news, right?
So the idea came together to do the inserts in a very very small room walled off from the rest of the studio in such a way that they could happen simultaneously with other (more important? profitable?) stuff.
Anchor Tina Seldin, startled perhaps, but on the job reporting from the SuperStation WTBS News Closet™.
This room, which I am both proud and very embarrassed to say I had a big part in designing, came to be known as the News Closet, because really, it wasn’t very big. But I am kinda satisfied that an idea scribbled on graph paper became a functional solution. It was a big deal to get that RCA XL-100 color console TV there up on the desk—it was quite heavy (and deep, with a large picture tube), and back then shooting a TV screen with a huge studio camera was no trivial affair. The colors, the frame rate, ah, don’t get me started. And we worked out the odd angles of the desk so it would look larger than it really was on camera. And behold the fully carpeted walls! (The cleaning crew would vacuum them nightly.) The acoustics in that room were terrific, and you could barely hear wrestlers bellowing outside the door. And there was a totally useless outline of the United States! And a typewriter!
It did get a little warm, however.
Nowadays networks have these small studios, they tend to call them more professional things like “flash cam studios” but they have the same basic idea—a camera more or less in fixed position, a backdrop, and a place for an anchor to originate from. And now that it’s easy to put a big ol’ bright LCD screen right behind your head, the set background just has to come out of someone’s laptop. Same idea as the virtual sets for The Mandalorian, except not really and not nearly.
So in this age of social isolation, the vast majority of news faces you see, when not originating from their basements or their living rooms, are in what I would call a news closet.
And why not?
Waxing tonight.
Wednesday, May 6th, 2020
It’s been windy all day, and when I went out to tuck the car in for the night, I couldn’t ignore the brightness of a very full moon just coming over the east corner of the house. Well, tomorrow the 7th is the actual full moonday, but I’m telling you, it has done some serious waxing this evening. It is big and round and very bright. It blasted my face like a light blue spotlight. And something felt cool, autumnal. Well, basically, it was cool, a cold front having successfully moved through here throughout the day.
My system was fooled by the cool air and the powerful moonlight, just for a second. Good thing I’m not a meteorologist.
But it’s not August 6th, it’s May 6th. We’ve got a summer to get through. We have more drama ahead. The general election is not right around the corner.
I’m telling myself all these things.
Oddsmakers.
Tuesday, May 5th, 2020
What did I do while watching Rachel Maddow tonight with Sammy? I attempted to read Twitter out of the corner of my eye, and caught this:
A bar owner & protesters with weapons were arrested in #Odessa, #Texas today after the bar reopened against Governor Greg Abbott’s orders.
According to the Ector County Sheriff, the owner of #BigDaddyZanes was arrested for violating Gov. Abbott’s orders on reopening business.
And the Twitterverse was lighting up about this violation of constitutional freedoms. So I started typing.
jcb: Their actions go way way beyond private property. Their choices can and do infect others who have no choice. It’s way beyond selfish.
@DLagarry It’s also none of your business.
jcb: That’s the thing. It’s a global pandemic. It is literally all of our business. The more we work together, THE FEWER PEOPLE WILL DIE. If you’d like to fold your arms and watch people die, please check out of the human race before you go.
@Sittinduck21 We aren’t talking NY w/ high population density & public transit. In Oddessa are 84 people sick. If you assume there are just as many asymptomatic people about, that’s 168 people. Odessa has a population of 120,568. Each person you meet would have 0.14% of being infected.
jcb: That’s MORE than enough of a chance of infection where the SMART MOVE is to be a grownup & wear a mask and keep your distance. In Odessa. In Van Horn. In Presidio. In Marfa. And so on.
jcb: I’m not opposed to people doing dangerous, essential work, but when did we start campaigning for the god given right to be dumb? And to let our stupidity put others at risk?
@Sittinduck21 It’s extremely low odds. While I agree its wise to to take precautions to avoid further spread, I also believe in treating the situation with the level of seriousness it deserves. In my area Lowes has allowed the store to reach max cap w/ ppl buying supplies for the same reason.
jcb: I know it feels good to think you, or the Lowes manager knows what “level of seriousness it deserves”, but truth is: nope. Let’s let the folks who study this, who prepare entire playbooks for the possibility of this, let’s let them take the wheel.
jcb: Again, you’re thinking Vegas odds and not thinking epidemiologically. You don’t weigh the odds in a global pandemic. You think of your fellow human and do the right thing, even if your brain tells you “waaah, this is no fun.” BE AN ADULT.
jcb: Your mission is not to avoid getting infected, it’s to avoid being part of the force that spreads it. We don’t have huge huge testing, so we have to do it this way. It involves discipline on your part and maybe a leap of faith. The lives you save may be in Ohio or NM or…?
@Sittinduck21 Like I said, I’m not agreeing with what these guys are doing. I’m certainly not out there protesting restrictions. But I do believe rolling out there with armored vehicles and guns to break up a small grp of people when the odds if infection are low, is excessive.
@Sittinduck21 Odds are used in medicine all the time. You know all the side effects for medication that are terrible? They prescribed regardless because the odds of those effects are low. CDC defines exposure as w/in 6ft for 10 mins. I’m not saying I agree w/ them.
jcb: We’re in this world where we set ourselves up as our own experts. The folks who are getting together unsafely in low population areas are planting dangerous seeds we will not see for 2-3 weeks. They’ve really got to join Team Human Beings.
jcb: With all due respect, you’re kinda saying “I think I can talk about the same things they do” and then you use “odds” in a way that is NOT the way pandemic experts talk about it. It takes courage to say “I’m going to go with what the scientists say” —but you gotta.
@debjonesdj Aside from this one tiny bar & whether it should be open or not, we can’t stay shut down until a “cure” comes along. This pandemic is going to move through the population. People need to work. You probably have a source of income so its easy for you to tell everyone to stay home.
jcb: We’ve really developed a distrusting world—distrust of government, distrust of scientists—exactly when we need to let the people who study this for a lifetime do their jobs. And our job: believe them.
jcb: You have to stay home longer than your brain is telling you. It’d be great if we had a federal govt that made it possible for us to stay apart until the numbers say it’s ok. FEWER PEOPLE WOULD DIE. But we don’t just “reopen”—it will mean death, probably to people you know.
jcb: It’s not easy, and it’s not fun. And they’re not asking for you to shut down until “a cure.” They are asking you to be a grownup and take actions now that are NOT fun but will help people you maybe don’t even know. That’s being human, right?
At this point, my iPad typing finger started to cramp up, and besides, Maddow was through for the evening. And so, I think, am I.
Shortcode cooking.
Tuesday, May 5th, 2020
I spent a chunk of today learning more about JSON and Javascript and to a lesser extent Python. The latter two are (you may well know) the scripting languages that enable easy communications with web servers and their data, often using commands collectively known as APIs, or Application Programming Interface.
Basically, your script or code tells the server give me every Instagram photo or Twitter tweet I have posted from February to present, and it coughs up a big ol chunk of text for each and every picture that gives you in brackets and types with colons, how many likes this picture has and here’s its URL and here’s when to the very second it was taken or posted. Every picture on Instagram, for example, has an ID number; it also has a shortcode that is absolutely unique to that picture and is part of the URL when you use a web browser to call it up. (It happens behind the scenes on the app on your phone, but same deal.) Here’s one of mine: qA4rXrTZcC. It corresponds to a picture of some railroad container boxes I shot in Manchester, Georgia on July 3, 2014.
Yes, you can do useful things with this! And it’s helpful for me to keep clear in my head the difference among javascript objects, arrays, and lists. And their Python counterparts.
It used to be that service providers were very open about allowing you to access this useful information programatically. These days, it involves the most difficult steps for me: authentication and asking for data it in chunks small enough not to annoy the server.
So getting this:
qA4rXrTZcC Thu Jul 03 2014 23:20:50 GMT-0400
Lubalin graph bold has always been one if my favorites. #csx #typography 10 likes
p9y0iNTZQf Wed Jul 02 2014 18:31:56 GMT-0400
Home of sunny cows. #portland 1 like
p9yqcXzZQS Wed Jul 02 2014 18:30:33 GMT-0400
Gon in 60 seconds. #gondola #ttx #trains 4 likes
p9yc2szZf6 Wed Jul 02 2014 18:28:42 GMT-0400
Home of potatoes. #sofa #couch #divan #sprawl 1 like
p4n6cjTZak Mon Jun 30 2014 18:20:25 GMT-0400
Sunset of the #caboose. #penncentral 3 likes
p0Fh3vzZSf Sun Jun 29 2014 00:03:00 GMT-0400
Both Great and Northern. #caboose #trains 2 likes
p0FWsnTZSP Sun Jun 29 2014 00:01:29 GMT-0400
The only backpacker in #seattle. 3 likes
is a (for me) useful way of looking at:
Also killed some mosquitos in the back yard.
You May not.
Monday, May 4th, 2020
Fifty years ago today, four students were killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio. That’s the headline. (and on May 15th, two students were killed and 12 injured by police at Jackson State in Mississippi.)
Some folks are taking a second to stop and reflect on this today, and for some with social media accounts it’s a bigger deal that “May the fourth” sounds sufficiently like “May the force (be with you)” to make this hashtag-StarWarsDay. For them, that whole college unrest Vietnam killing thing seems, well, way back there in the fog of history.
I’m trying to relate to them, doing my own personal math and, yeah, 50 years ago from when I was in high school/college it was the precipice of the Great Depression, which we were taught about but only experienced from the terse and insufficient recountings from our parents. That global event was history-fog-bound for me as well.
But although I was a little young for college, I vividly remember riding with my mom through or around the Ohio State campus and…holy crap, are those tanks, mom? What are those troops doing? Why are they mad at the students?
The answers didn’t come out of any whitewashed official investigation. Later, in 1973, this book was published, and does a decent job of trying to put the actions, reactions, and criminal actions together into a coherent narrative. I get it off the shelf every few years and read through it again. This Monday seemed like a good day to do so.
Even though events out in our chaotic modern world threaten to drown out the Kent State massacre and those that followed, I think about how the current administration appears to have borrowed—forgive me—liberally from the Nixonian playbook. Stonewall, lie, double down, never apologize.
Allison Krause, Sandra Scheuer, Jeff Miller, William Schroeder. The book is dedicated, not surprisingly, to them.
Streaky movie open!
Sunday, May 3rd, 2020
One of the ads I saw, way back when starting out in doing graphics for television was for a film animation studio called Edstan. I remember looking at their streaky, slit-scan-y animation work with huge admiration and wondering how I could do anything like it with the then-crude tools of video.
It’s kind of hard to explain, but this early stuff was done as long, multiple, gel covered exposures on film, using downward-facing film cameras attached to stepper motors that in some cases were attached to Apple // computers—for computer control!—of the crudest sort.
According to various online searches, Edstan hasn’t been in existence since 1991, and the ‘stan’ part probably refers to Stanley J. Beck, who died in January 2017.
At any rate, the idea of a classic “night at the movies” open for the networks has laid fallow for at least a decade or two, when broadcast networks discovered that getting people together for appointment television to watch a semi-recent movie, laden with commercials, wasn’t a big moneymaker.
But times have changed! Maybe!
Tonight at 8 eastern! On CBS! Raiders of the Lost Ark, under the modified-a-little-while-back title Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark will air on CBS Sunday Night at the Movies. And so, people have reported, they—CBS—brought back the old logo and the old open!
Well, not quite. But I will be tuning in (to the open, at least!) to see if they use something like the original music (click here to hear and see a very wow-y poor-res vhs recording of the open dated 1986—the open aired that way for many years before that.) I was going to hope for something like the original announcer, but I heard Morgan Freeman on the 2020 promos, so that’s a pretty good get—if it’s him, well, you got your quality right there.
The original film animation, circa 1979.
The 2020 HD re-creation.
The old animation pointed up all the limitations of film that modern digital rendering makes disappear. Although “filmed out” on 35mm stock, it has “gate weave”—that slight jumpa-jump that you see most often in film titles of the era. It also has dust specks and (probably) very limited resolution, and the moves aren’t splined—ah, getting too far into the weeds there. If transferred to even the best videotape of the era, you’d have 720 pixels by 486, which, as I’ve discussed, is less than 25% of a modern HD image.
But I’ve watched the promo animation carefully a few times now and they’ve done a good job of redrawing the lettering to be similar but not really the same as the original (compare the two type treatments at right), and the lens-flare-y, bursty, streaky animation is the sort of thing Adobe After Effects does these days without breaking much of a sweat, so as an appreciator of the classics, I am smiling and the (at this point anonymous) animator gets a tip of the virtual hat from me.
Flyover country.
Saturday, May 2nd, 2020
Look! Planes! Right over our house!
I know that the Air Force’s Thunderbirds and the Navy’s Blue Angels have a long tradition of being air demonstration squadrons that inspire people with precision high-speed, low-altitude patriotic..uh..flying.
I hope some folks were inspired to redouble their efforts to do what needs to be done as far as social distancing and washing their hands and flattening the curve, but we are a country of short attention spans, so…
May first.
Friday, May 1st, 2020
Welcome to the first May I’ve lived through under a global pandemic. Well, that I’m aware of. How can you know for sure? How do you know from moment to moment what your viral load is, or whether that headache you’re plowing through is just from staring at a screen for hours as opposed to the interactions of a virus and your entire system?
Part of getting through all of this, for me, is becoming comfortable with the elements I can’t know, that I can’t monitor intensively, that I can’t adapt, trim, ramp up, ramp down, control. I guess that intersects with the fabled Serenity Prayer, but I’m not a prayer-fueled person, so I will just take the precepts and run with them. Interestingly enough, the author of the prayer composed the thing in 1932-1933, or, in other words, the Great Depression. As you’ll read if you dive into the Wikip link, it’s a popular mantra for those in 12-step programs, and apparently there is an early draft of it that begins “Father, give us courage to change what must be altered”, which is an important tool in anyone’s emotional toolbox.
After all, to quote Red Green‘s Possum Lodge prayer: “I’m a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.”
Youall have a good weekend. And you Michigan men, please just back away from the legislature. Give it a month or two longer and then you can parade around with guns and camo all you want. You can protest Black Fly season!
