Items (Blog Notes)

A few procedural notes before I get going today. I've got busy days today and tomorrow (body as well as blog maintenance to address) so things might be a little quiet around here.

Item: First, I did enlist several longtime readers to assist in Comment moderation. Both, I suspect, are more knowledgeable and quite probably much smarter than Yr. Hmbl. Ed. Hopefully once we iron out how we're going to work together, comments you post will appear much more quickly than they have been lately. (Working alone, I had been letting this get more and more out of control, sometimes to a degree that made me feel mildly agitated.) Thanks, too, to those others who volunteered—I accepted the first two people who offered, both of whom are names long familiar to me through their own thoughtful comments on the site.

Item: A few years back I wrote an obituary of the protean working musician Leon Russell called "Blue, Teddy Jack, Tina Rose, Sugaree, Honey, and Coco," which are the names of his children. Well, the other day I got a lovely note from Blue Bridges-Fox, Leon's daughter (Leon's real name was Claude Russell Bridges) thanking me for the article. She didn't say how she had stumbled across it. It's always nice when these reverberations happen.

Item: I should really (really!) personally thank everyone who contributes to TOP, but unfortunately it's like phone calls, which I do not make...a 15-minute phone call seems like nothing, but 32 of them would fill up a whole eight-hour work day. Everything wicks minutes out of the day. Plus, I'm so disorganized. I can't keep track of things. It distorts my whole life, my lack of organizational ability (if you have that ability, count your blessings).

But I digress. Reader Jim A. sent a $50 bill* as a contribution to keep TOP's motor running and the wheels greased, and it came in handy. That very day, Honeybee Dave was coming by in his bee suit to remove a small paper hornets nest under the eaves. He discovered that the bald-faced hornets who built the place had been kicked out and replaced by opportunistic ground wasps—which explains why it was only as big as a cantaloupe melon: hornets build their paper nests as large as watermelons.

His charge? $50. How nice to owe a tradesman and find the payment for him waiting in the mailbox. The nest was uncomfortably close to the back door, and hornets, which is what I thought they were, can be nasty and aggressive. Thank you Jim. And thanks to Alan Z. and John C., who sent checks, and to every other friend o' TOP who has contributed recently. I apologize for not contacting you personally. But at the same time I'm very grateful.

By the way, the wasps were not killed, but relocated; as Honeybee Dave said in his taciturn manner, with a shrug, "wasps are citizens too."

Item: Speaking of nasty and aggressive hornets: Should you happen to be thinking about a new mattress, I have a warning for you. Never, ever open a single YouTube video of a mattress review, the production of which seems to be a minor cottage industry. For if you do, you will for aeons afterward be pelted and pestered by mattress ads of every description and from every direction, any time you innocently log on to the tubes of the Internets. How I wish someone had given me this advice before it was tragically too late!

Item: It's Print Sale season, and I have four possibilities in the way of plans, but have done nothing yet to bring them about. Hopefully I will get as many as two accomplished before Christmas. Several ideas are for multiple-artist sales, which might be touchy to organize. I'm not great at organizing these things, but I'm moving this from the back burner to the front one, metaphorically speaking.

Item: Last but certainly not least, I wanted to offer a word of tremendous sympathy and concern for any TOP reader (and, really, everyone) who has been affected by the heat and fires in the Western United States. This is a disastrous fire season...and in the US, normal fire seasons are pretty appalling. The stories coming out of the affected regions are dreadful. Our thoughts and prayers are with you.

Back to regular programming,

Mike the Ed.

*In the Learn-Something-New-Every-Day Dept.: I meant to illustrate this item with a picture of the $50 dollar bill Jim sent, with my fingers holding it and Butters in the bokeh in the background, but when I tried to open the iPhone snap of the bill, Photoshop refused to open it! Up popped a window that said "This application does not support the editing of images of currency...", etc. Or words to that effect. I never knew before that that would happen.

I wish the enlargers in the school darkrooms where I taught had had a similar function: "You are trying to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, having attempted to print this negative entirely too many times now. It's never going to work; no amount of labor and hope is going to make chicken salad out of chicken shit. Stop working on this and go make another negative, properly exposed this time." It might have saved everybody some time and anguish.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Phil: " That last paragraph of your footnote had me laughing out loud! In every night-school darkroom class I took, the instructor would at some point politely and exasperatedly say to me 'maybe you should find an easier negative to work on.' If the enlarger would have just refused to print my badly-exposed negative (or in some cases badly-developed negative), I probably would have got further ahead in life.  ;-)  "

Comments

[Dan Farmer]

More reading on how image recognition of bank notes works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation

Though in the case of Photoshop, supposedly it's recognising a digital watermark instead - see the brief mention in the section titled 'Counterfeit Deterrence System'.

[Eolake Stobblehouse]

I'm very happy you finally got help with the moderating. I believe I adviced you to do so long ago. :-)

[Dan Khong]

Seems you are as busy as a bee that needs 25 hours a day. Like they say, "Living on borrowed time". There are those who are into the art of doin' nuthin' to rediscover sanity. I think farming out the moderator tasks is a good move....outsourcing is the way for a start!

[Ronny A Nilsen]

Most currencies have systems that alerts technologies like photocopiers and Photoshop to stop working on it. Because counterfeiting is highly illegal, a photocopier will refuse to copy a bill, and Photoshop will reject the image. I have even heard that some photocopiers will lock up and you have to explain to the repairman fixing it why you tried to copy money.

[Chris Kern]

Mike: . . . when I tried to open the iPhone snap of the bill, Photoshop refused to open it! Up popped a window that said "This application does not support the editing of images of currency...", etc.

Many years ago, a technical contact of mine at Xerox Corporation told me his management received a visit from the U.S. Treasury Department shortly after the company introduced its first color electrostatic printers. Modifications were quickly implemented and the G-Men were placated. Today, the entire graphics industry has metaphorically jumped on the proverbial bandwagon.

Apropos of paper currency (like the English spoken by ’Enry ’Iggins Americans, I haven’t used it for years), my sister and her German husband typically arrive for visits to the United States with a fistfull of entirely legitimate $100 bills. They have credit cards, but for some reason they have never satisfactorily explained to me, they resist using them. Anyway, when they stock up on Chinese imports at our local Target and Walmart outlets, they inevitably create lengthy delays at the checkout lines while the sales rep at the register goes through the mandated authentication procedures.

[Kye Wood]

Want to not be overwhelmed Mike? Spend 14 minutes watching "Inside the mind of a master procrastinator | Tim Urban" on youtube.

Otherwise, nothing will change. How could it?

[-et-]

For those who have no frame of reference, I have a couple of comments in regard to your words about the current fire situation in the forests on the West Coast.

I have two granddaughters who are in college in Portland, Oregon. A few days ago they evacuated Portland, not because of immediate danger from fire, which was still miles away. They left because the smoke had made the air very, very hard to breathe. On Monday, Boeing Aircraft notified its employees that their Portland facilities were being closed until further notice because the INDOOR air quality was so bad.

One granddaughter, who relocated to a friend's place in Boise, Idaho, texted that the air quality in Boise was poor because it was getting smoke from the same fire, but was much better than the air in Portland. Boise is approximately 450 miles (~ 720 km) East of Portland by road. Not in danger from the fire itself, but affected by the huge amounts of smoke generated by the record fires burning in the state of Oregon.

- Tom -

[Tom Duffy]

My tenacity in the printing of bad negatives is directly proportional to the time/effort/difficulty in making the negative. As an example, being eaten alive by mosquitoes after a half hour trek on a bad trail while making the negative is usually good for a couple of hours at the enlarger. :)

[MikeR]

I need one of those devices between the shutter button and my finger!

[Steve Rosenblum]

Forget the $50 bill, I would have loved to see a photo of Honeybee Dave!!

[You've seen pictures of Dave numerous times, for instance on his tractor recently, in his peach orchard a year or two ago, and standing next to a chimney he was building three or four years ago.

https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2020/07/open-mike-up-the-hill.html

https://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2019/10/random-snap-eat-a-peach.html

You've even seen pictures of eggs layed by his hens, his house hiding in its clump of trees, and his beehives in his fields. Dave is here often! --Mike]

[JimH]

Mike,

Your mention of the fires in California brings thoughts of photographs and photographers to me. We've been inundated with photos from the fire areas, with the best perhaps from the Atlantic:
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/09/photos-wildfires-rage-across-american-west/616219/
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/09/photos-oregon-communities-devastated-wildfires/616344/?utm_source=&silverid-ref=NDQxMDMxNjIyMjg0S0
I'm amazed by the courage (insanity?) of the photographers in the middle of the fire zones snapping away. It reminds me of war photographers who also live on adrenaline.

Wildfires defy comprehension. They move at speeds of up to 50mph. The heat is incredible - one fire near us reduced a neighbor's Dodge Viper and Helicopter to a puddle of aluminum.

I've lived here almost 20 years, most of it on a farm in a rural area that had its share of fires. We lost half our citrus trees in one fire that burned the hill just across the road with such intensity that the side of the trees toward the fire got roasted. Fortunately we had left for refuge in the city. I investigated one fire for a magazine I write a monthly column for and posted photos of the aftermath: http://www.jimhayes.com/cahome/07fires.html

But the CA wildfires are just part of the chaos in the world. We get bad news -and photos- from everywhere.

I just finished my monthly newsletter for the FOA and ran a short article about a guy who owns a company doing fiber optics in Beirut. While we were discussing his work, the massive explosion in Beirut occurred and did severe damage to the city, including the telecom infrastructure and his apartment and office. I ran a photo of his office covered in glass shards from the windows that were blown out by the explosion 1km away. (iPhone shots BTW -https://www.foa.org/foanewsletter.html#Beirut

Then there's the hurricane in the Gulf. Every time we have a hurricane, we get calls for help rebuilding the fiber optic communications systems and iPhone photos of the carnage. We'll see them in a couple of weeks.

And the story about the ice shelf in Antarctica that's cleaving off - a potential for 10 FEET sea rise. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2020/09/14/glaciers-breaking-antarctica-pine-island-thwaites/?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most)
We work with crews at Amundsen Station monitoring this too.

Is there anywhere on Earth that's not in chaos now? And photographers are there documenting it.

Can we please have some good news?

PS: You are breathing the toxic air from our wildfire areas now too. Except your "Air Quality Index" is 23 and ours 146.

[Ed Kirkpatrick]

Sure enough, PS would not open my scan of a $20 bill. So much for that aspect of my retirement plan.

[Earl Dunbar]

When I worked at Xerox, I learned that the Document Centres (I supported the software and networking) had built in software that prevented reproduction of currency.

They DID reproduce NYS license plates with high fidelity, though. Don’t ask my former co-worker why he wanted to do that!

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Ooh, should try to remember to check for comments more often!