Undebatable.

Thursday, October 15th, 2020

You heard that Trump wouldn’t participate in a split screen debate with Joe Biden. You probably heard the rest of the mess where they ended up in so-called ‘Town Halls’ on competing networks, simultaneously scheduled.

The end result was probably more effective than having the two together could possibly be at this point.

How do I know? I didn’t watch either one. But after an hour or so outage, Twitter was back online again enough to get the general idea. Trump was Trump. Biden was Biden. And Biden was so patient, polite, and empathetic that one Republican complainer said it was like watching an episode of Misterogers. Biden even stuck around and answered questions for at least 15 minutes after the broadcast went off the air, according to the Twitterverse.

Misterogers. That seems like high praise indeed. And maybe some of that is just what we need next year.

Premium pixel gatherers.

Wednesday, October 14th, 2020


On seriously overcast, even rainy, blustery days (like today) we have been known to go out and take our photographic devices with us and see what the world is like out in the weather. It’s satisfying to me what great pictures we get with the iPhone 11 Pro…you know, the one that was “made obsolete” by yesterday’s new iPhone announcement.

But I don’t talk quite as much about another tool in our photo kit, the latest (is it? I guess I should check for any announcements in the last 72 hours. Hold on a sec. Nope, not yet.) …in a series of Sony RX-100 models, the DSC RX-100 VII, which we picked up just over a year ago on Sammy’s birthday.

It’s a wonderful camera. And, in the gloom and the rain, it shot the two pictures displayed above on this very post.

Gee whiz, Tim.

Tuesday, October 13th, 2020

We bought new iPhones 11 Pro last year because we saw a real improvement in the camera from what we were toting before. Apple just announced a bunch of iPhone 12s in various configurations, and they managed to do their classic “improved 10% here, and 17% there, and you can hurl it to the ground 4x harder, and…”

They also seriously touted 5G as a thing that will “change the game” in so many ways. They brought out Verizon’s CEO Hans Vestburg, who (apparently) got within 18 feet or so of Tim Cook on stage…keep your distance there Hans! (Maybe it was all VFX, but then I would have taken the extra time to Americanize Vestburg’s pronunciation of ‘5G’.)

It all smelled of Extremely Big Corporate Behind The Scenes Deal. I keep reading about all kinds of “it isn’t quite there” complaints about 5G (especially the Millimeter Wave 5G that Verizon has spent mucho to install in a small handful of large American cities.) And I know that the national 5G buildout hasn’t reached rural areas struggling with overcrowded towers and dead zones.

Reading between the lines of the presentation, I was reassured that Apple has been working hard on the quirks and weaknesses of 5G (sounds like the steel antenna edge was far from just cosmetic), and that one day, it will be a useful and ubiquitous thing. And of course there wasn’t a word about how much all this more quickly delivered data will cost the end user. Shoot those raw photos! Slam those videos into the cloud! Who needs wifi! No wonder why Verizon’s stock went up after the presentation.

Arrgh. Too many G.

So I went on a short walk away from the online reality distortion fields and casually shot a picture on a beautiful autumn afternoon with my still pristine 11 Pro, and, y’know what? Ahhhh. It was nice. Nice pixels. Good job, phone.

Early signs of commitment.

Monday, October 12th, 2020

Photo by Curt Yeomans, Gwinnett Daily Post.

Early voting began in Georgia, my state, today, Monday. It began with technical fits, starts, and problems, which is consistent with how the current state administration has been running the election system.

There are some 35 early voting locations in Fulton County (including the huge State Farm basketball arena that has been converted into a voting center and some mobile ones that have some unusual hours and dates.)

There are 13 in DeKalb, 11 in Cobb, 9 in Gwinnett.

The Gwinnett Daily Post says Gwinnett sees long lines at all sites on the first day of early voting. The AJC says Heavy turnout and glitches mark start of early voting in Georgia, and they do a good job of explaining some of the tech glitches in a system that seems (to me) way more complicated than it needs to be.

But put simply, in Georgia at least, people really, really want to vote.

Why did the turkey?

Sunday, October 11th, 2020

Back quite a few years ago now I designed a website for a Michigan news organization that, perhaps least importantly, had a header of Michigan images—beauty shots mostly—that rotated and varied with the seasons.

It was kind of tricky to find the right ones because they had to be extremely horizontal and be relatively nonbusy on the part of the image that was covered up by the site logo.

I love this kind of specialized design and when my wife and I wandered up to Michigan we’d shoot some images with an eye towards this particular usage.

Because I end up keeping files on hard drives aplenty and, you know, the cloud, with a tenacity that most computer backup specialists would applaud, I came across a handful of them this evening.

And it’s autumn in Michigan, and so it seems like a good time to enjoy these vistas.

The colors are lovely. The turkeys are…well, to be honest we’ve seen very few turkeys on the hoof since that perfect photo moment. But they were there, in Michigan, when we needed them!

Baking bubble.

Saturday, October 10th, 2020

Not an actual bubble, just me imagining one.

I guess we don’t follow the “this month on Netflix” and the “new on Amazon Prime” stuff as carefully as we should, because I was surprised to see that a new season (“series”) of The Great British Baking Show was becoming available on the Netflix, week by week, three days after the UK airing of the popular program. Produced this year!

And so we watched the first one this evening, and heard about the vast, vast, vast amounts of preparations and cast and crew quarantining together amid intricate scheduling and precautions, precautions, precautions, because they were producing a large, unscripted, very touchy-feely show during a pandemic.

So they used a bubble. Not a real one of course, but the sort of strictly enforced isolation with testing that the NBA used with some success. The usual 12-13 weeks just on weekends schedule was compressed down to six weeks, the contestants had families (and in some cases, pets) quarantined with them, it was all…quite complex.

And then they did the usual thing of making elaborate gooey cakes that were either overflavored or underbaked or ended up as tragic accidents on the tent floor. Apparently the ratings for this pandemic edition have been quite high, and it has been widely viewed in the UK at least as an antidote to lockdown.

I guess here, too.

Possessive about plurals.

Friday, October 9th, 2020

I looked over the titles of the last few posts (I try to write every day, and since 2020, well, since something like January 5th or 6th, I’ve been doing that.)

For some reason, I’ve been writing a lot of plural titles.

Garage queries. Soggy bands. Carefully made warnings. You get the idea.

And then I started to think how few of my post titles had a possessive in it, and how few had a possessive plural, which the Associated Press and I differ on when it comes to usage, but only when the possessing thing ends in an S. Like my name, Burns. Like Athens, as in Ohio or Georgia. Comes up all the time.

They would say Kansas’ republicans, and I (along with the Chicago Manual of Style) would say Kansas’s republicans. I think if they were saying it out loud, they’d pronounce the first one like the second example, but that’s a whole different variety of nuts.

So now I’m left to ponder whether I should go out of my way to write more headlines that are possessive plurals formed from words ending in S. And my conclusion: I need to get some rest.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving to all this weekend.

Conspirators.

Thursday, October 8th, 2020

One thing about going out where the cell towers don’t roam for a nice day’s hike is that one has options when one “gets back into civilization” to catch up on the craziness of the day’s news. Sometimes you fire up your device carefully, as if it might go off, spewing news everywhere.

I think today, with all the distractions around a delightful and wonderful birthday celebration, I opted for waiting until we got back to the cottage to (as they say) log on.

And then, well, wow. This would be big news in any state, but we have a lot of friends in the Wolverine state, absolutely none of whom, we’re relieved to say, who would get at all involved in any of this malevolent idiocy.

And while Michigan hasn’t cornered the market on white supremacy, they do, however, have a hardworking state Attorney General, and apparently in cooperation with the US Attorneys in the two Michigan offices and with the FBI, they rounded up and indicted a bunch of pasty white guys who, evidence shows, plotted to kidnap and or kill the Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, who has worked hard to keep the state together in the face of Covid 19 and a sizable population of goofballs who are unwilling to do their part to curb the disease’s spread. Goofballs who look like…these guys.

I look at these mugshots and try to imagine what I would say to them to rekindle a sense of shame and remorse over doing something this awful. Drawing a blank at this point, I’m embarrassed to say.

Seasonal devices.

Wednesday, October 7th, 2020

A carefully-handcrafted watercolor image of the unboxing of our iPhones 6s in 2015. Just kidding, that Waterlogue app made it look like this.

Last year at this time we had just held the iPhone 11 Pro in our hands at an Apple Store in Ottawa, Ontario, and said “yeah, these could work for us.” This, after having four good years of service from the twin iPhone 6s devices pictured above. We didn’t buy them in Canada (for a lot of reasons) but soon after our return to Atlanta, we did, and we’ve been satisfied customers. Multiple lenses! Computational photography! Fast processing!

Now, around my dear spouse’s birthday, it’s time again (the sites tell us) for another Apple event next week where a fancy pricy phone, or two, or three will be introduced, this year in a Covid-safe online event, of course.

The odds of our upgrading are fairly slim, of course, but I will watch and ponder the improvements and visualize how it could usefully fit into our lives.

It’s the season for that sort of thing.

Garage queries.

Tuesday, October 6th, 2020

We were having a nice socially distanced dinner in a large garage this evening, and, as is the fashion these days, the conversation yielded moments that in the old days would have prompted some staring thoughtfully off into space, or, if vital, a trek inside for the encyclopedias or road atlases or bird books.

Now, of course, the room lights up with the blue glow of screens, with hasty thumb-typing to Google, or a spoken request to Siri:

    Who was the female lead in the movie version of Camelot. Okay, in the Broadway version?

    What was that mournful Irish song that I heard on CMU public radio a few years ago? I don’t know any of the words, but I can hum it…

    What year did John Lennon meet Yoko Ono in that art gallery?

    What did Jaime Harrison say when Lindsey Graham said “Democrats are nuts”?

    What are the side effects of dexamethasone?

    What’s Lady Gaga’s real name? (Sammy had this one mostly on her own.)

    Where was Warren Zevon born?

We had a wonderful, informed evening, and were pleased that technology on a mediocre LTE connection could serve up the answers we all demanded.

We acknowledged the passing of Eddie Van Halen, and then when we got back home, the land of Twitter said singer/songwriter Johnny Nash, of “I Can See Clearly Now” died today as well.

Cleansing view.

Monday, October 5th, 2020

I always used to chuckle when people discussed relaxation techniques related to meditation, yoga, or what-have-you. As a generic midwestern guy, I figured I was basically in command of my stress levels and I could deal with the craziness of work (toiling in the fields of television.)

I think I’ve evolved enough to appreciate the cleansing, relaxing, de-stressing effects of looking out at nature and just breathing, being. Or, maybe my learning curve has been focused by current events.

Looking north, out across Lake Superior, on a gusty, beautiful fall afternoon, I found it easy to take a few deep breaths and let the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue craziness go on…somewhere else.

Phew.

Upbeat prognosis.

Sunday, October 4th, 2020

Dr. Conley said he was trying to “reflect the upbeat attitude” of the medical team and the president. “I didn’t want to give any information that might steer the course of illness in another direction,” he added, bafflingly.

I’m looking back 48 hours or 72 hours (who’s counting really?) at my attempts to set my jaw and march, or at least step confidently through this weekend of not just country-rattling news, but news generously dosed with lies-cloaked-as-positivity and medical press conferences that turn out to be fake positive concoctions for the emotional well being of Participant 1, the guy who was impeached, the patient.

We really don’t know much late Sunday evening except that the president is still alive (as of this writing) and back at Walter Reed Medical Center after a Secret-Service-endangering “joyride” that, well, let’s call it for what it is, a photo op.

Meanwhile, the off-the-record grumblings from the West Wing staff and the Secret Service grow by the hour. “He’s not even pretending to care,” said one unnamed agent.

The Trump campaign should have really picked that as their 2020 slogan.

Bring your own shield.

Saturday, October 3rd, 2020

Saturday night, and before I started writing, I had to glance at the online universe to see if anyone else had been added to the growing spreadsheet of infected leaders of our country. Nah, I think we’re OK.

It sounds like down in South Carolina, challenger Jaime Harrison had a good night against entrenched Senator Lindsey Graham. Again and again, he challenged Graham to own up to his dramatic shifts in policy, and produced some world-class verbal squirming from the longtime Republican senator.

But the really impressive, amusing, and sensible thing is that Harrison brought his own plexiglas shield to the debate to keep (or reduce) the flurry of aerosol particles coming and going from the other side of the stage.

Should Senator Kamala Harris do the same when faced with the supposed Covid-19-negative (but do we really know because the incubation period is, well, 14 days) Vice President Mike Pence?

I think I would.

A bad day scenario.

Friday, October 2nd, 2020

Wrote my post last night around 9 pm, and went to bed. In the morning, Sammy said “I guess you heard the big overnight news.”

Well, you can guess what she was referring to. And, well, here we are. An old man is in the hospital with coronavirus, presenting with what sounds to me very serious symptoms, and he is getting very, very very good care, paid for by the government. Us. Your tax dollars.

I’m ending my day of way too much Twitter reading by watching Rachel Maddow talking to Dr. Jennifer Peña, who worked in the White House for four years in the medical unit. She says her former team planned for what was called a “bad day scenario,” in terms of training and preparation, and this certainly fills that definition.

So we’ll all get through this sober, unprecedented weekend, and I sure hope that we get an accurate accounting of the President’s health, care, and prognosis along the way. I hope the President and his wife recovers, and I wish good health as well with all the other White House staff, reporters, workers, and Capitol Hill staff, workers, Senators, Congresspeople, and everyone else who were placed (?) in harm’s way.

And of course, I wish good health and good outcomes to the tens of thousands of other Americans who tested positive just today.

Busy wires tonight.

Thursday, October 1st, 2020

Some nights reading the Twitter is sufficiently like the old days of ripping the clattering old wire machines, using a ruler to tear the endless yellow paper into individual stories or takes, and then there’s the tape and rubber cement and..ah, forget it. It makes it sound like I learned this stuff in the dark ages.

* * * * *

Several news organizations are reporting that Hope Hicks, one of Trump’s closest advisors, has tested positive for Covid-19 and is displaying at least some symptoms.
* * * * *

Two GOP political operatives, the Donald Segrettis of the modern age, Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, have been charged with multiple felony counts and as much as 7 years in prison by Michigan’s Attorney General for deceptive robocalls aimed at supressing Black voters in the mitten state.
* * * * *

Pope Francis declined to see US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in Vatican City.
* * * * *

The Governor of Texas is trying to restrict ballot drop boxes to one per county, even after several other states (Ohio, for example) lost this battle in court.
* * * * *

And really, there’s so much more. It’s starting to feel a teeny bit like dominoes falling. October is going to be quite a ride.