Our work to do now.
Friday, October 23rd, 2020
We came home to find our mail-in ballots (which we will be dropping off at legit official no kidding dropboxes) waiting for us. Even while traveling, we have been besieged with political ads from all corners, PACs, and stripes.
I’m happy to see that traditionally underfunded Democratic candidates have been infused with enough cash to do this, on one level. On another, I continue to rue the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that has unleashed this towering cascade of corporate propagandic noise disguised as “speech.”
Our social media pages, our cable tv screens, and our traditional ol’ mailbox has been deluged. And as I say: it’s noise.
So, with our eyes and brains focused, and with the advertising tuned out or as far down as we can, we are voting, and making sure those we know here and elsewhere can do the same, safely, carefully, legally, correctly,
And in a very few days, we’ll see.
Orange avoidance.
Thursday, October 22nd, 2020
We listened to some of the debate while driving toward the very site of the debate, Nashville Tennessee. I thought this was clever and ironic and all until while heading into Music City’s outskirts, I realized all those political people would be high-tailing it to the airport that we drove right by on the Interstate.
A quick look at traffic confirmed: we had to do a little orange avoidance.
Across the top.
Wednesday, October 21st, 2020
I used to live on US 2. Not here. Not 1000 miles from here. But on the chunk of US 2 that, after a brief interruption with Ontario and Quebec, appears in northern Vermont.
We’ve driven it west, all the way out to north of Seattle, across the top of America.
Maybe we will again someday. After the election.
But now, today and again tomorrow, our vector is South. South.
Pe·nul·ti·mate: almost last.
Tuesday, October 20th, 2020
This is one of those words I learned and said to myself, wow, this is nonintuitive, people must get this wrong all the time.
And they do.
But the dictionary is pretty clear on the origin:
late 17th century: from Latin paenultimus, from paene ‘almost’ + ultimus ‘last’
And the English Usage Stack Exchange offers a couple of useful variations to impress people at cocktail parties when there are again cocktail parties:
antepenultimate —third before last, or the one before the penultimate. As an alternative: propenultimate.
propreantepenultimate —(yeegads!) four before the end.
At any rate, our days here are coming to a close, so this applies.
The point is mute.
Monday, October 19th, 2020
This misbegotten planned Presidential Debate is still, as of the moment I write this, on for Thursday, although the Nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates has this evening issued a rule that will probably infuriate the current occupant of the White House.
The two minutes of uninterrupted response time each candidate gets for each topic will be somewhat more uninterrupted at least on television because his opponent’s microphone will be muted for the duration. Now I’m very interested in how far apart the two debaters will be and what kind of mics are being used and how they’re placed, because it may well end up that you’ll hear one candidate (let’s just say Trump)’s distant bleating and bellowing indistinctly in the background.
And of course the other candidate (let’s just say Biden) will be in the room with the infected President, and will have to have the poise to stay focused and keep talking even though there’s a muted guy trying to throw you off.
It’s some sort of attempt at having a debate with content. Will the Trump campaign cry foul and walk away? No skin off Biden’s nose if he does.
Signs of season’s end.
Sunday, October 18th, 2020
Most of our monthlong stay in Upper Michigan, if the morning was at all sunny, I was greeted with a riot of red and gold from this maple outside our window.
But, as seen from directly above this morning, the prime time for this colorful tree has come and gone. I’m sure happy we’ve had an ample chance to enjoy it, but I think it’s trying to tell us “show’s almost over.”
It spreads! It melts!
Saturday, October 17th, 2020
Among the treasures of The Green Cottage:
Oh man, look at that burger with…tiny volleyballs nestled next to it? Mmmm.
Ahh, my appetite, whetted by the prominent appearance of the word “imitation!” And only 49¢! Mom, can I have extra garnishing parsley with my grilled cheese?
Oh…it’s a childhood crayon box.
Tab, retired.
Friday, October 16th, 2020
If you thought of me when you came across the news this morning that Tab, the original diet soda from Atlanta’s Coca-Cola company was (finally?) going out of production, well, yes, I had heard, thanks.
Will I be hoarding cans of the pink stuff? Hmm. Not sure at this exact moment.
Here’s the thing. My fondness for Tab had a lot more to do with taste than nostalgia, and I say that in the face of friends and family who crinkle up their faces at the very idea of it.
I like how it tastes. I especially like how it tastes mixed with a decent Root Beer. And yes, I’ve enjoyed that particular alchemy for decades.
Said one aquaintance (old friend?) on Twitter:
“I don’t care about Tab. It’s a waste of nostalgia.”
(and she then goes on to decry the discontinuation of Odwalla beverages as the real loss here. To each one’s own…nostalgia?)
I lived in Atlanta through the early 80s insanity of the introduction of New Coke and the throngs of people who packed supermarkets to hoard the old stuff and, later, would go out of their way to buy bottles of Coke made in Mexico (“Mexican Coke”) because it tasted better sweetened with real cane sugar than high fructose corn syrup (true enough).
I couldn’t even tell you what artificial stuff Tab is sweetened with at the moment, but I can tell you that Tab tastes good. It’s a strong taste, not at all (and never has been) a clone of a cola. And, as I’ve said so many times, it’s really great mixed 50/50 with Root Beer. Real sugar-cane-sweetened Root Beer or, say, Virgil’s Zero Sugar Root Beer, it’s great with Tab.
At some point in the near future, that won’t be an option for me. But since I tend to only go on two or three soda-buying splurges a year, I’m not sure I’ll notice. I’ll miss the bright pink packaging on the grocery store shelves, but, like many things, like analog television and coins, Tab has had a good run.
Maybe when it’s completely, totally gone I’ll gin up enough nostalgia to miss it. But there will always (?) be Root Beer.
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.
