Observers

2016-11-11observers0935IPPC selfie taken at Capitol Reef early in the formation of the solar system

Oh my goodness!!! What just happened here? Many years ago, like around 128 Badillion B.C. the Intergalactic Political Policing commission came to Earth, although it wasn’t called Earth then but Flyspeck9278459331 on the then used Dull Normal Planetoid scale, to observe the current inhabitants election process. Above is a selfie they took shortly after landing.

After they observed our attempts to wisely choose our leaders and maintain a workable political system they immediately diverted a moon-sized comet from the nether regions of the universe to smack into us and wipe out all signs of sentient life on our planet. This was intended to be a warning to anyone who came later to get their crap together and not be gonzo nuts.

However *The institute who, by the way, keeps in close contact with the IPPC (Intergalactic Political Policing commission) as a precaution and to be aware of their current thinking about our planet, so as not to be included in getting wiped out with everybody else next time, has learned that we have stepped in it again, according to the Chief Supreme Really Qualified Helmet-head leader guy (1st big one on the left above) of the IPPC. Accordingly due to our apparent world-wide psychosis and gullibility, we are not fit to govern ourselves.

Consequently they have once again, and we can say they were pretty darn exasperated with us this time, diverted a planetary body roughly the size of Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan all rolled into one lumpy ball of solid rock traveling at just below the speed of light to crash into the D.C. area mid-afternoon on a Wednesday around 2175. This asteroid, comet, planetoid whatever you want to call it, is known as 1999 RQ36 according to NASA and is the real deal verifiable by googling “Impact Event” and “big freaking rock things that can hit earth” even without the IPPC improving their aim.

We, meaning *The Institute and those people we like and who have adequately sucked up to us, have petitioned for our transfer to another earth-like planet with pre-built housing that is neater than we have now, with better WiFi and no taxes and the ability to send back to the Cinder That Was Earth anyone who proposes to be our leader again. Since we have majorly sucked up to the IPPC, one by repeatedly telling them what a good job they’re doing, and two, ratting out the current band of politicians, we feel we stand a good chance of getting out of here when the asteroid hits the fan, so to speak.

If you’re one of those who think that we’re in deep kimchi, politically, then I suggest you immediately begin sucking up to us at your earliest convenience.  And Yes, We will be keeping lists so act sincere when you tell us how good a job we’re doing.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind. Return to your daily activities. Thank you for your support.

Cloud Cutting

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Many of you long time readers are aware of *The Institute’s weather modification program. We developed this ability to modify and even create certain kinds of weather early on in The Institute’s development. This was done for many reasons, all of them altruistic, but mainly for money. The Institute is expensive to run and maintain and we seek funds wherever we might find them.

We have different projects in the works constantly to fund our operation, from our innovative metal can retrieval program from the roadsides of our Nation’s highways to assisting NASA with their Space Program by supporting probes to Uranus and beyond. We have an outreach program where we have housebound or incarcerated individuals address envelopes for various corporations to help keep the Post Office’s Junk Mail program alive. That keeps untold dozens of postal workers busy and gainfully employed. There is no project too small if it assists us in maintaining the integrity and longevity of The Institute and brings in a buck or two.

Our supremacy had been untouchable in the weather modification arena and we had been so far out front that you had to jump up in the air real high to even see our dust. Then the Aussie’s got in the game. Man, they are tough. Their program to limit rain and cause desertification of huge areas, if not all of their country, has been unassailable. Our program to “drought up” California has been good but we can’t even touch what the Australians are capable of. Which is difficult for us to admit. Right now they’re the ones we watch.

Because of their (we’re talking about those miserably overachieving Aussies here) ability to make inroads into the weather modification business in general, we have had to look for other areas of the business to augment our extensive programs. We believe we’ve hit on something the rest of the WeatherMod group hasn’t touched yet and that is the untouched field of Boutique Weather. This is a small business at this time but we think the potential is absolutely enormous.

There are many very wealthy States that have incredible tourism businesses. States like Colorado, Utah, Arizona ( a biggie ) Montana, parts of New Mexico and when they pay their bills (which is why we have them in a “droughtie” right now) Northern California that are looking for that edge to keep those tourists coming in and to keep them there longer. That’s where we come in. We are already supplying many of those states and other small touristy kind of countries with custom-designed sunrises and sunsets. With our new custom “Cloud Cutting” ability we can custom tailor those sunrises and sunsets by ‘cutting’ the edges and shapes of the clouds so that they can feature or highlight a tourist drawing element, by allowing the light to be directed on them for maximum viewing pleasure. Think, Devil’s Tower, or parts of the Grand Canyon, Isis for instance, where before you had a pleasant sunset that sort of showed off the various elements of the scene, but now with our Patented Applied For “Cloud Cutting” technology, those individual elements can be seen by those money-toting tourists much more clearly and colorfully than ever before. Talk about making it rain greenbacks, we can hardly keep up with the demand for these new custom tailored clouds. Now coupled with our ability to create clouds of any size, shape or profile we feel we have a real winner here. Need God beams, we can do that. Need tiny or large holes or openings in your cloud for extra special effects? We can do that. Right now the sky’s the limit, so to speak.

The image featured above is over the Eastern edge of The Institute’s testing grounds where we work on many of our new weather projects. This is the program at work using the new “Sun nibbling” feature where we are sculpting the edge of the cloud to perhaps highlight a small secluded cove on the Eastern Seaboard, or perhaps one of the little canyons that feed into the Grand Canyon, or a meadow up in Yellowstone where elk graze in the early morning or evening. The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.

We have high hopes for this new element in our Weather modification program and already interest is running high for this unique new addition and we see big things on the horizon. Watch the sky above and stay tuned for further innovations.

* Note: For those of you unfamiliar with The Institute and what it does, please see the page labeled The Institute on the Menu Bar above. That should explain everything. You shouldn’t have one single question remaining regarding The Institute after reading it. None. For those of you favored few who already know about the Institute, Nevermind.

Don’t Be Sad Little Chicken

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Well then, OK… hummm. There are many problems both big and small that plague the birds and animals of Yellowstone. There’s freezing cold and wildfires and big hairy scary things that jump out at you and eat you. There is sometimes little food or else there’s too much and you eat until your size 2 is a size QQXXXL that is only made in certain parts of rural Russia which was the Union of Soviet Socialists Or We’ll Kill You Republic.

But one of the biggest hardships of all is when for some reason they do not have access to BigShotsNow the blog, which is published by The Institute and is the sole source of news and events for all the denizens of the park. Without it they don’t know the results of the annual park inspection report that determines where the individual animals will be stationed within the parks borders, or how much they’ll be making, or who’s baby was just born, or if you’re an elk or buffalo, whose baby was just eaten. Or of you’re a wolf and/or wolf pack, where the best place for elk and bison to hang out. So having the blog is a really big deal for them.

If you read the announcement a few days ago explaining our tale of woe then you know we’re having problems with our image storage system. We’re still having trouble. Big Trouble. NASA kind of trouble. Tesla kind of trouble. Third or Fourth ex-wife kind of trouble. Not mid-east kind of trouble that’s just over the top, but sometimes it feels like it.

We have double shifts working around the clock on it but even with all the help we have, it’s still slow going. We can’t do anything about the current or future news we report on but we can lead you towards our archives where we keep the news of the past. There are literally hundreds of articles and poems and handwritten prose, over eight hundred to be exact, and they are rollicking tales and ripping yarns filled with adventure and mis-stated fact, and thoughts that I bet you haven’t thought your ownself or even could if you tried. They’re all there just begging to be reread. Just go to the calendar and find a blue day, hover your cursor over one and it’ll tell you its name. What could be easier than that. Or you could scroll down under the search box on the far right hand side of the page where it says Archives and see that each month with its corresponding year is listed below and you can poke around in those until you feel funny and have to quit for a while.

We’re working hard and not just screwing off like we do sometimes when there is a problem but really working, so the best we can say is “Don’t be sad, little chicken. We’ll be back up with new pictures and words real soon.”

Going To The Sun

Valley7037-7050Panoclick to enlarge                                                                                         © Dwight Lutsey

Since we are waiting for the 8000+ images taken of the North American Indian Days event to come out of The Institutes proprietary image developer. The one we had constructed under the auspices of our own Hardware Development Group (TI-HDG) and specially built to handle large jobs by a triumvirate of IBM, Apple, and ACME Pixel  Burner and Screendoor factory to finish the initial processing, we thought we would share another shot from Glacier National Park.

This is a 14 image panorama stitched together in Photoshop under a license with Adobe systems and The Institute, which has been carefully monitored by our own staff of  panorama techno nerds using our own casually leased monitors throughout the process. At the risk of boring you stupid with the technical details we realize that are at least three of you out there that actually care about this technical stuff, so we decided to share the details to enlighten the unenlightened and to fill up page space as we don’t have a lot to say about this image otherwise.

The original images were taken with a professional digital camera set to stun and the resulting pixels were ported to The Institutes own diesel-powered mainframe computer where they were checked for robustness and cohesiveness before being divvied up into equal quantities and parceled out to the 14 techs used for the initial joining process.
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The next step is the labor intensive part of the procedure where the individual techs who have each been given the amount of pixels  to complete one image, lay out the pixels one by one in numerical order on a large clean white piece of poster board. When one image is fully laid out the next tech steps up and begins to lay out his pixels adjacent to the first image so that the pixels touch at the long edge of the orientation. Then a specially formulated glue developed by The Institute and the Amalgamated Glue Workers Union under the watchful eye of NASA, because this is Space like science we’re working with here, and each individual pixel is glued to its matching neighbor on the other image until the two images edges are joined. This entire procedure is then repeated until all 14 images are joined into the one big image you see on the screen today.

The resulting panorama must be left on the poster board for at least 3½ hours for the glue to set and another 5 days for it cure properly so that the images do not separate when you lift them off the paper. At this point the utmost caution is required as the image has the consistency of a freshly molded sheet of very thin jello. This is the hard part. The waiting, because you really want to pick up the image and hold it up to the light to see what it looks like. But just like a fine wine, no image can be picked up before its time, otherwise it will fall apart and you have to start all over again. There is nothing more discouraging than to see the thousands upon thousands of pixels drip off the page and gather together like beads of mercury to fall off the table and scatter to the edges of the room. Grown men have cried at this sight.

Usually the whole process is worth the time and expense, not to mention the nerd power tied up in the project, but it still must be used sparingly. You don’t want to waste this on taking a panorama of your sock drawer. This is the valley seen from the Going To The Sun highway just before you get to the visitors center, and it carries Reynolds creek downstream toward Heavy Runner mountain way off in the background there. Now you could have taken this image as one shot with your smart phone, without going through the panorama business, but had you done so everything in the picture would be itty-bitty scrunched up, tiny little pixels and you wouldn’t have been able to see nothing. Just a bad picture, even though your friends would probably say it was beautiful, trust me, it isn’t. They just say that because they’re your friends and they like you.

OK then, we expect to have images popping out the developer soon so we can begin posting them for you to see everything that happened at the North American Indian Days celebration. Hang in there.