Monthly Archives: March 2015

Things In Motion

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To some of you this may simply look like a bunch of Sandhill cranes doing the Wave, but it’s not. It is something much deeper than that. It’s more than four beautiful birds taking off into the first light of dawn, or a study of fluid dynamics during take off as applied to big fat, heavier than air, cranes. No, it is the cranes way of paying homage to the early ground-breaking work of Eddie Jim Muggeridge or as he later became known, Eadweard James Muybridge, the father of stop-motion imaging.

Muybridge was a fascinating guy who was instrumental in the development of motion pictures or as we now know them, Movies. His early work in stop-motion studies where he was the first to photograph animals in motion then turning the individual photographs into a short movie, plus several inventions that he created such as the zoopraxiscope, which as everyone knows was a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography, led to fame and fortune as one of the movie business’s first moguls.

Once you are sexually aroused, buy cialis will start showing its effect within few couple of hours. Sometimes when partners don’t have small children they try out to work via the addiction, nonetheless, with kids and based on the severity, it can be most likely dangerous for the kids to ensure sufficient funds for the welfare of senior citizens. http://davidfraymusic.com/project/david-is-back-in-the-studio/ cheap viagra Smoking will viagra prescription http://davidfraymusic.com/buy-2224 slow down the path or worse shut it off completely leaving its victim impotent. Are they recommending some other online institute for the same course? Have they mentioned the reason why? cialis discount price Collect as much information as possible. He was also one of the first true photographic adventurers and multi-taskers working in this field, finding time to photograph the west, travel to South America, get in a stagecoach accident that some say left him a little goofy from his injuries, invent a lot of movie stuff, shoot his wife’s lover to death, give lectures, get divorced, and take pictures of naked men, and occasionally women, running and jumping, which some folks thought was absolutely scandalous at the time, and finally going to England where he was born and dying.

His efforts photographing running horses and other animals and stark-naked people cavorting in the name of science led to his publishing two popular books of his work, Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901), both of which remain in print over a century later. These books are still used constantly today by artists, sculptors, budding filmmakers and people who just like to look at naked men and women running around doing stuff.

Sandhill cranes, who are great students of art history besides being more than adequate flyers, pay tribute to Muybridge’s work and genius each morning when they take of in a perfect recreation of one of his first studies of birds in flight. They, and we here at The Institute, are determined that his work shan’t be forgotten. We say “Well done, Eddie Jim, we salute you!”, and “Thank you for showing us Things In Motion.”

 

Steppin’ Out

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Everyone has got a favorite city. Some vote for LA, others for San Francisco or Seattle. Some of the poor misguided even think New York city is the place. Mine was always New Orleans. Then I went to San Antonio and now I have to say oh yeah, that is a cool city. Some of you are going to say “What the hell, that’s in Texas!” and I have to say “I know, but you have to go there.”

What makes a city cool, besides how it looks and what you can do there, is the people. Just like New Orleans people can’t help but be cool in San Antonio. They’re friendly, they don’t spit on the sidewalk, well, OK I did see one girl do that, but she cleaned it up. She chewed and she said she was just tired of swallowing that stuff. She felt bad about it. The folks there like to gather in cool places and watch each other and they do it all with a coolness that’s just, well, cool.

One of the best places to go to see and be seen with the cool people is San Antonio’s Riverwalk. I know it’s considered touristy but that doesn’t make it any less cool. Sitting alongside the river with a Texas girl with big hair, seeing the sparkly stuff in her mascara come alive as the light hits it, sipping something cool and full of Tequila, listening to her say “Y’all” a bunch, is time well spent and I highly recommend it. You can people watch and see the lights come on at sunset, watch the boats go up and down the river full of people laughing and asking the guide how deep the river is (5′) and just revel in the feel of the quiet evening as the sun goes down.

It’s a place where you put on your best threads and strut your stuff. The guy above is a yellow-crowned Night Heron and you can see by his name, night is when he comes alive. By day he’s a mild-mannered carton stacking specialist down at the UPS terminal, wearing his brown outfit with the brown baseball cap, bill facing forward as per the company dress code, but at night, watch out. That’s when he shines. It takes a lot of confidence to put on his yellow feathers and his stripey pimp coat, but he pulls it off as if he were born to it. Many, many ladies were checking this bad boy out as he struts up the birdwalk.

If you’re thinking, you know I’m kind of sick of my favorite city. I’m bored and I need someplace new. Someplace fresh and alive. Then you’d best get on down here to San Antonio as people who talk Texan say. You’re missing the good times.

Focus

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This is what the business end of a hawk coming at you at close to a hundred miles an hour looks like. Since hawks this size can often attain dive speeds of 120+ miles per hour the speed estimate for this guy is based on the ‘Holy Crap” method where you suddenly realize he’s diving at you and your first thought is “Holy Crap I bet he’s doing a hundred miles an hour”.

There are things to pay attention to when you’re being photo bombed by a hawk and I’ll present them in order.

  • Put camera up to face
  • Stick eye to viewfinder
  • Remove lens cap due to no image appearing
  • Put finger on shutter
  • Ask camera politely to FOCUS
  • Do everything possible to keep hawk in viewfinder
  • Press shutter – a lot
  • Duck

This strafing of innocent civilians is unusual as much of the population around here is armed and touchy about stuff like this. The only reason this hawk behaved like this that I can imagine, is that they are predators and usually hungry and I’ve been told by normally reliable sources that my moustache looks like a mouse rather casually draped across the lower half of my face. Even so, hawks have been around long enough to know that mice draped across a humans face is out-of-bounds. That’s what evolution is for, to keep stuff like face bombing hawks from happening, regardless of whether it is mouse adorned or not. So the only other conclusion one can draw is that it is simply nuts.

Some of you are bound to ask “Well What kind of hawk was it?” and the only thing I’m sure of is that it is a member of the Hawkii hostilicus branch of weird-ass, people hating, I could put your eye out you know, hawks. I’m not certain if this is an off-shoot of our regular grumpy hawks, or a whole new species. I think I’m going with the new species thing just because that would be cooler than our regular hawks just going around the bend.

So the next time you’re going to the store for pizza and some Honeycrisp apples and you see a hawk looking at you funny, just stay in the car. If you have to get out and take a picture of it then please follow my list of things to pay attention to above. Either that or quickly shave your moustache off. Remember, Stay Safe out there.

Remorseful Point

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Here it is another year gone by. You know what that means right? No, we’re not talking about your age. We’re talking about something much more important. That’s right you guessed it, Daylight Savings Time.

For those of you who are completely oblivious to the world around you, and you know who you are, Daylight Savings Time is when the Government automatically changes the arrangement the cosmos has for when we have night and day, and today is that day for one of the mandated changes.

Today it has been ordered and approved by a unanimous vote of people who run our lives that we shall, upon awakening, be 1 hour later in the day than we’d normally be. This was done so you, as a hard-working American, would get an extra hour of sleep and therefore would be more productive tomorrow because of the extra rest. But there are dangers. Let’s say you had an appointment with your lawyer for say 10:00am and you went there at your usual time you’d be an hour early and they’d get to charge you for that extra hour and you’d have to pay it because these are lawyers we’re dealing with here, and you’d be mad and feel stupid.

There is a lot of stigma attached to making this change from Regular Every Day Winter Time smoothly, orderly and correctly so you get that extra hour of sleep. If you muck it up and anybody sees it, you become that guy that can’t even do  the time change right and you’re considered a dumbass. And by the time the word gets around that you like totally screwed the pooch, time change-wise, you’re a Total dumbass. Almost everyone except those oblivious people we talked about earlier do not want to be a dumbass. People who made the change successfully are relentless in their criticism of the dumbass’s who didn’t. They will make fun of you. They will call you names. They will beat you with it like a circus monkey. They will beat you like a rented mule. Their smugness and arrogance knows no bounds. So the deal is don’t be a dumbass.

The shame can be so great for some people that they take the ultimate step. And that step happens to be off of Remorseful Point here at the Grand Canyon. Named for those people who got up too early thereby completely messing up the system well thought out as it is, and knowing what’s coming when people find out, they feel that they have no other recourse but to go to Remorseful Point and take the necessary step to reclaim their honor.

There have been groups formed, kind of like the safety nets they put up on the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco to try and keep people from jumping, to try and help these poor souls deal with the shame, but most of  them sneak around them and make the plunge anyway. It’s like the gene pool has to have a way to keep itself healthy and society’s best efforts to overcome that won’t change nature.

So our recommendations to avoid the shame and heartache of screwing up the whole time change thing is to get totally hammered the night before, I mean toilet hugging, running around the neighborhood yelling “Where is Aunt Maud, I’ve got to find Aunt Maud”, looking for your car keys and not finding them because you swallowed them on a dare, that kind of hammered. It is guaranteed that you will not wake up an hour too early the following morning. In fact it will probably be late afternoon before you’ll even be able to lift your head. This will be considered cool by your peers as they will see that not only did you handle the time change well but you totally get the concept. The later you get up the cooler you are.

If you have any doubts about your ability to make the change as prescribed you’d best head for the nearest LiquorMart and get a jug of Everclear, the 190 proof stuff and make sure you’re covered. It’s a little late this morning to take those measures now unless of course you did screw things up and can not get to the Grand Canyon in time. Then I guess you’ll have to decide the best course of action to take. Hope you did well this year. And you’re not a total dumbass.

The Anvil and The Hammer

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Last eve I passed beside a blacksmith’s door
And heard the anvil ring the vesper chime;
When looking in, I saw upon the floor,
Old hammers worn with beating years of time.*

This poem comes to mind whenever I see this picture. It was taken on a stormy, stormy day on the way to Hovenweep. There was thunder and wind and the light had a deep reddish tinge to it that I hadn’t seen before. Lightning was there too, but it was too fast for my shutter, so I have to imagine it again each time I view  this image.

Storms in this part of the country don’t last all that long. They tend to be intense but over soon. They’re not like the slow-moving deep-soaking storms back in the Midwest where they last for hours. Those can be heavy but unless they’re tornado type thunderstorms they seem manageable. These western storms are not manageable. They break on you in moments with a fierceness that is almost personal and care little for the aftermath.

That is part of the allure of these big open spaces. The land is big, the views are big, the weather bigger still. This hugeness with all its wonders and dangers and intensity becomes part of you. You can move away but you cannot forget it.

The anvil rings loudest for those who listen.

* From The Anvil Of God’s Word by John Clifford

See This ?

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See this? If you were to go over to a wide place that you could fit into and shinny yourself down a hundred feet or so to the bottom, this is what you’d see.

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Just underneath your feet is this. Antelope canyon in Arizona. Lower Antelope canyon to be precise. Bet you’d a never thunk it. You could shinny down to this if you were one of those guys who was really good at shinnying but you don’t have to. At either end of this canyon are ladders that will take you down to the bottom and save all that work.

However for the less adventurous of us where shinnying won’t work due to the amount of comfort starches packed on over the winter you can go over to the edge, lie down and stick your head down into that crack as far as you’re able to, look as hard as you can and you won’t see this. Not a bit of it. Be careful you don’t slip and fall in and get like, wedged so you have to gnaw your arms off or something  to get out. You have to go down inside and look up to see these colors.

That’s because the color doesn’t happen unless the light hits it, and the light hits it because at certain times of day depending on the time of year the sun is directly overhead just right and the light shines all the way down to the bottom of this canyon and makes color. It’s like that old question “If there’s color in the darkness can you see it?” and the answer is no. Not unless you’re one of those freaky bat-like things that can see in the dark but even then you wouldn’t see these colors because those bat-like things see in an entirely different spectrum than us, infra-red or blue or orange, whatever, and their colors are weird. I told you they were creepy.

Seeing as how it’s Friday and I know some of you are still in the depths of winter I thought you might like a little pick me up. Just to remind you that there are other colors in the world besides white and grey and black. Antelope canyon, bright, warm colors, no shinnying needed, and just waiting for you. So if you’re really tired of winter, my recommendation is just to run away, quick, don’t think about it, just do it. Antelope canyon’s a good place to go. See you there.

The Class

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Good morning class! Welcome to Height Adjustment 101. You’re all here because you expressed an interest in getting taller. That’s great because you are some short squatty little buggers and it looks like you could use some talling up and I’m just the bird that can help you with that.

Let’s start off with identifying some of the advantages of being taller.

Number one is you’re not always dragging your butt through the mud when you feed on the mudflats. Chicks hate that.

Number two is always being prominently featured during the photo shoots. When the photog yells, all you good-looking birds to the front, hey! not you shorty, you aren’t the shorty.

Number three, I don’t have to mention that the chicks always go for the tall guy. You know this. It ‘s one of the reasons you’re here. This is just nature boys, the only way to fight it is to get taller.

Now, how many of you have been short all of your lives? Let’s see a show of feet. All of you, well, we’ve got our work cut out for us. The main factor in getting tall is longer legs. The reason you’re short is that you have tiny little stubby legs. This is probably not your fault. Blame it on your parents. Had one of your parents got lucky with a stork you’d be a lot taller. First there are some exercises you can do to help stretch your legs. This one is called the Bounce. Bend at the knees, squat really low, then bounce up as tall as you can while hanging on to something with your feet. Bounce hard. that’s what causes the legs to stretch. This needs to hurt people, otherwise it isn’t working. 100 reps daily.

Another thing that you can do to appear taller is to stand on something submerged. If you can find a rock or a sunken log that is just beneath the surface of the water and stand on it you will appear to be much taller that you are. The downside is you can only stand on the rock, otherwise as soon as you step off you’re back to being a short runty little toad. It’s the bird equivalent of doing a comb over. This usually only works near closing time when the chicks are half in the bag and desperate. We mention it here but don’t condone it. It’s worth trying as a last resort but try not to let your friends see you doing it.

Being healthy is another factor. There are supplements available that you can take that will promote healthy leg growth. We recommend ‘LegUp’ a carefully blended mixture of millet and ground kelp with a special compound of proprietary ingredients that is exclusively available at our health bar. It also contains our newest development ‘ExpansAll’ which although not FDA approved yet, causes you to think you’re much taller than you are and that’s half the battle. There are some small side effects such as, drooling, nausea, loosening of the bowels, hallucinations, shortness of breath, dizziness upon realizing how tall you’ve gotten and addiction. However you feel really great while you’re taking it.

OK then, Any questions? No? Then see you back here tomorrow same time, same place, unless the tide is in, then we’ll meet closer to shore. Don’t want to lose you in the deep water. Remember 100 reps of the Bounce, stop off at the health bar and get your bottle of ‘LegUp’ and think tall thoughts. Have a good one.