State Highway 19, Alex, OK 73002
I was hot-footing it through Oklahoma in the snow and rain when this stopped me in my tracks.
The prize at the end of the day was meeting Cindy, Amy, Daryl and Deron. A sweet conclusion
to a trying day.
Clusterflockstock 1.9
If you’d asked me a week ago what color Andrew’s eyes are, I couldn’t have told you. Now I’ll never forget.
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It was a good night
Your cat hates your baby and wants to kill it
Not true!
There can’t be many people who still believe that cats deliberately suffocate babies by sucking the breath out of them, but in case you’re one of them, they don’t. That doesn’t mean a sleeping cat couldn’t accidentally suffocate a newborn baby (there are a few documented cases), so it makes sense to keep the cat out of the baby’s room for the first couple of months.
Pet myths, debunked. The rodent-type animals in this pet line-up are particularly soulful looking. I found this one the most disturbing:
Cats purr when they are happy: True, but they also purr when they’re in pain, and when they’re dying.
In Ike’s Wake. US 87, Port Bolivar, TX 77650
Ireland, a couple of weeks ago
I can report that it’s still here. I took a lot of photos of Connemara earlier this month, which are up on Flickr. I’m still building the set.
Ice. W San Antonio St, Marfa, TX 79843
I Should Kick Myself
The entry into the garage. We had new siding put on the house three…four? years ago. At the time, they also put in new garage doors with openers, new windows in the media room (a 10′x25′ room on the south side of the house). Why I didn’t include this door in the deal is a mystery to me. I remember thinking, “Ooo, this is too much money.” But, honestly, what would another three or four hundred dollars have done to the loan, lien on the house over the course of fifteen years?
Nevermind the decaying concrete ruined by ten years of throwing “snow-melt” on top of it, that now needs to be ripped out and replaced. “All in good time,” I keep thinking. “All in good time.” And then there’s the landscaping. Oh, fuck it. The shoemaker’s kids go without shoes.
AAA Restaurant, US 287, Palestine, TX 75803
It was empty and insecure. The temptation was too much.
A thought occurred to me
there in the shark tunnel with Deron.
So, a lion, two sheep, and a bear are pulling a cart…
Beer On Demand. US 281, Alice, TX 78332
So, I was in Alice, TX. I stayed at a Best Western and ate at a rather nice Mexican restaurtant with a Mexican waitress who would melt your heart. I feel odd saying she was Mexican, but, she was. She asked where I was from and told me she wanted to travel and would love to nurse. I told her that we were screaming out for nurses in England and that if she did some basic training she would get a job real easy in the UK. She was just delightful and so when she was next at the table I asked her if she might like my email address and then if she wanted any information or help she could email me and I’d try and help. She said to me – “I’m not sure how I would do that.” I could have wept. I gave her my email anyway and she said she’d find out how to email.
I fear I may never hear from her, but, she sure made my day.
Charming Lands at Fotofest
A group of 11 photographers I am involved with called Charming Lands is participating in Fotofest in Houston.
We created a group exhibition at Box 13 entitled Panta Rei.
Opening Reception: Saturday, March 13, 7-9:30pm. I hope you can stop by.
Weekly Picture 178
Woman on Her Cell Phone, Austin, TX 3.8.2010
Year 4~Day 82 +53/365 AND Day 1178: Necessity is the Mother of Invention
From a Flickr set by Old Shoe Woman.
I just used everything in the refrigerator to make a sandwich for brunch.
Ford Galaxie 500, US 37, Butterfield, MO 65625
This Is A Metaphor For Something
(via)
Message from Midway Atoll
Taken on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking. To see more of the series click the photo or follow this link.
Forced Entry
February 19, 2010. Dutton Drive. Dallas, Texas.
Would-be thieves had broken into my late mother’s house eight or so months ago, but the kind and vigilant next-door neighbor took it on himself to padlock the door.
Bye-Bye, Boner Party
Today Ned Hepburn shut it down. Boner Party, perhaps the greatest bait-and-switch blog of our time, (I’ll distract you with breasts but really I’m going to talk about how it’d be great to just settle down.) is over and done with.
I’m sad to see it go, but I think the last post sums it all up.
Baby
February 24, 2010. Dutton Drive. Dallas, Texas.
Sometimes you find things exactly when and where you expect to find them. When I entered my late mother’s house, I expected to find this old baby doll of hers in a drawer in a closet in what used to be my bedroom. And there it lay.
Thunderbird Motel, US 67, Marfa, Texas
This place seemed to access a part of me that I thought was off limits.
Compressed sensing
An algorithm that resolves high resolution images from next to nothing.
Compressed sensing was discovered by chance. In February 2004, Emmanuel Candès was messing around on his computer, looking at an image called the Shepp-Logan Phantom. The image — a standard picture used by computer scientists and engineers to test imaging algorithms — resembles a Close Encounters alien doing a quizzical eyebrow lift. Candès, then a professor at Caltech, now at Stanford, was experimenting with a badly corrupted version of the phantom meant to simulate the noisy, fuzzy images you get when an MRI isn’t given enough time to complete a scan. Candès thought a mathematical technique called l1 minimization might help clean up the streaks a bit. He pressed a key and the algorithm went to work.
For Andrew
in response to Photography and Parenthood.
The first few years, I was really just a social drinker.
Bowie, 1966
