Local Sportsball...

The Indiana University Hoosiers took on the hapless Purdue Boilermakers in the annual Old Oaken Bucket cross-state rivalry game and dismantled them 66-0, to wind up with an 11-1 record. First time they won the contest since 2019.

This apparently might not be enough to get them into the playoffs, despite the fact that they beat Michigan at home, which Ohio State was unable to do...

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'Tis the Seasonal...

Stepped out the front door at 8:57AM this morning to go shoot photos of the Drumstick Dash. I could hear the countdown for the 9:00AM start from the front porch as I walked to my observation spot, which is at the two mile mark of the 4.6 mile course.

It was 34°F outside when I left the house, and we're still early enough in the season where that feels pretty darn cold. By the first week of February, anything above freezing'll feel like sunbathing weather, but today I was regretting not switching out the cotton socks for the wool socks in my dresser drawer by about 9:30. With good wool socks, the waterproof Merrell Moab shoes I wear in winter are good enough to wear well down into the 20s, but standing around on asphalt, the cotton tube socks just weren't hacking it for insulation.

I took the Canon EOS 40D with the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS zoom lens as well as my usual EOS-1D Mark IV, and even though the 40D is seventeen years old and can be had for less than a hundred bucks these days, I was pretty happy with the first few shots I've processed.

Processing

"Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you." -Satchel Paige

Yesterday was the Monumental Marathon here in Indianapolis. Like last year, I pedaled my bicycle up to the intersection of 58th Street and College Avenue, which is the closest good vantage point. (And it is a good one! The runners are coming right at you as the course heads east on 58th before turning north on College.)

This year I shot the race with the Oly E-M1X. I had a choice of a fast lens or a long one, and chose the long one. Until the sun started peeping through the clouds, I kept it in aperture priority at ISO 400, shooting in the f/5.6-6.3 range. It left me wanting a fast, long lens.

Still culling through the images, hoping for a real winner or two.

Here are the runners headed north on College Avenue.

A reminder for fellow Indianapolis residents...

IndyGo doesn't charge bus fares on Election Day. I'll have a free ride on the Red Line to and from my polling place.

(Not a big deal for me because it's only about a five or six block walk, but hey, a free ride is a free ride. And it might be raining.)

Serutan is natures spelled backwards...

I was complaining about the lack of precipitation causing a certain rather... whiff aroma around the sewer drains at big intersections like, say, 54th & College yesterday morning.

Well, we had a pretty good line of thunderstorms blow through yesterday evening, the kind that would have definitely had me worried about the old hackberry in the back yard were it still there.

The rain was blowing sideways and there was hail lashing the back wall of the house like half-spent turkey shot.

It wasn't a lot of rain in total, probably only a tenth of an inch or so, certainly no drought-buster, but hopefully the fact that it all came down at once provided enough water in the storm sewers to, er, get the mail moving, as it were.

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Drought…

So we’re officially in a moderate drought here in Indy. All but about five days so far this month have seen above average temps and the only rain we’ve seen since the first was a fraction of an inch back in the first week of September. This has two big effects in the neighborhood:

• First, the leaves on the trees are going to turn earlier than usual. Some have already started.


• Second, as I may have mentioned, Broad Ripple has an elderly sewer network that combines both sanitary and storm sewers. Go a few weeks without rain and things can get a little whiff at bigger intersections near the storm sewer drains, since there hasn’t been storm water flow to wash everything down to its final destination.

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It's that time again!

Milking shorthorn ox.

Percheron.

Blacksmithing.

Woodworking.

What in the wide, wide world of sports?

So, a little after seven AM on Saturday morning, a dude here in Indianapolis wanders out to his truck with three kids in tow. He unlocks the truck, retrieves the pistol that he'd had in the cab, cranks a round off into the air, and then hands it to one of the kids, who proceeds to do likewise. The kids then pass it around, each of them popping a few rounds into the sky... at a 45 degree angle, you know, ensuring the bullet will travel as far as possible ...before handing the pistol back to its owner who then empties most of the rest of the mag into the clouds.

It's all on video.

The dude got arrested and, you know what? Good. Lock his ass up for a bit. And he better have to forfeit the blaster, too. Clip a corner off my lolbertarian card or whatever, but maybe gun ownership isn't for him.

Does this look like there's a safe direction in any direction?

Testing my sympathies.

Some guy in Indy got shot by the cops, and when the video of the incident was released, it's pretty clear why they popped him.

Look, if you point a gun at the po-po, especially if they're already pointing guns at you... let alone if you actually start shooting at them ...I have a real hard time mustering up a ton of sympathy, if only from a sort of Darwin Awards standpoint.

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Hot.

Fixin' to be hot today here in Indy. The weather dude says we're likely to tie the previous record high for the date, 95°F, set back in 1913.

Going to be keeping a close eye on the air conditioning, because this would be a terrible day for it to freeze up.

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"You're not here for the hunting, are you?"

So a teenager here in Indy got busted for ordering seven machine gun conversion devices (six Glock switches and a DIAS) from Hong Kong.

For bonus points, at the time of his arrest he was currently on probation... for illegally possessing a machine gun.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess homie wasn't a MENSA member.

Still Here

Roseholme Cottage didn't blow away last night. All we got was a pretty spectacular light show, lots of thunder, and a few spurts of rain. Not even any hail.

Quite a few places across a swath of Indiana just north of us weren't so lucky, however.

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Meteorological Spring

Punxsutawney Phil may only be right between thirty-five and forty-one percent of the time, but he frickin' nailed it this year.

It's supposed to possibly get into the seventies tomorrow here in Indianapolis, and it won't even be the first time this year.

That’s a helluva dunk!

The Indiana governor’s office is about to be vacated vis term limits and the junior Hoosier senator is campaigning for it on a platform of being an “outsider”, because that’s a buzzword that plays well with the low-info GOP voter.

Bobbi is not impressed…

[S]top tryin' to buffalo me, buster -- if a Senator is on the outside, there's no inside left.

She’s got him dead to rights on that bit of goofery.

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Groggy.

In retrospect, it was probably a rumble of thunder that woke me.

All I know is I was laying awake in bed and the curtains over the window flashed white. I thought that someone must have been in the yard, playing the beam of a flashlight across the house. As I sat up and pulled the curtain aside to peek out, the tornado sirens started going off.

I decided to go wake Bobbi, who turned on the TV, and sure enough we were about to get smacked by a hella strong front, barreling straight for Indy at 55 miles per hour.

The house rattled with hail, like someone was throwing handfuls of pebbles against the walls and windows. Bobbi was like "Okay, if we head for the basement, you grab Holden and I'll get Huck," and for a hot minute that seemed like a possibility, but then the first wave was past us and the weather settled down to a normal, albeit heavy, rain. At least it would have been easy to grab the cats, because when it started blowing outside, they both jumped up on Bobbi's bed, looking for some soothing.

There were at least two more lines that passed over us behind that first one, but neither was anywhere near as dramatic.

Still, I didn't get a lot of sleep between two and five AM...

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Unseasonably Balmy

We got a brief cold snap with that snow over the weekend, but things here in Indiana have returned now to our previously-scheduled weather, namely one of the warmest Hoosier Februaries on record.

Today's predicted high of 64°F will be a few degrees shy of the record for the day, which was 69°F back in 2018, but I'll take it.

I could use a good, long walk under sunny skies. Maybe touch some grass while I'm out there.

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Ironically Orwellian

Look, I get that the World War Memorial downtown is an historically significant monument and one of the crown jewels of Indianapolis. We don't want it vandalized and it's probably a good idea to have video surveillance to help apprehend anyone who would do such a thing.

But could they have picked a slightly less ironically Orwellian location for the camera housings?

"Safe beneath the watchful eyes!"

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Stargate

There's apparently a stargate in downtown Indianapolis, on the state government campus, right behind the Indiana Statehouse.

Fuji X-T2 & XF 16-80mm f/4 R WR

David Merrill and I strolled around downtown taking photos yesterday and he was like "Let's go to the stargate!" and I was moderately embarrassed that I was entirely unfamiliar with said sculpture, what with having lived here for years at this point.

Now I'm low-key obsessed with getting the ideal shot of the thing...

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Brrrrr!

It is currently two degrees below zero, fondly Fahrenheit out there.

A reminder to my fellow Hoosiers that 0°F is not, in fact, an arbitrary number like the internet memes say, but is instead the freezing point of brine.

You know what brine is, right? That's the stuff they spray on the roads to keep them from icing up. Well, it's not working quite as good as it should until we get a little warmer today. (And we're only going to get a little warmer. The forecast high is supposed to be a balmy 5°F sometime late this afternoon.)

O hai Jack Frost

I was wondering when winter was going to get here for realsies. It's been unseasonably balmy for the last couple months and we've only had a couple half-assed attempts at snow. Nothing that even rated sweeping the walks clear thus far. (There's no point going out there in the freezing cold with a broom or shovel before dawn if it's all gonna melt off by lunchtime, after all.)

Well, if Weather Underground is to be believed, we won't be seeing the far side of freezing for at least a week. Not much in the way of snow though. I have mixed feelings about that. I'm generally not a huge fan of the white stuff... see the above enthusiasm regarding shoveling ...but bone-numbing cold without snow feels like a ripoff. If you're going to freeze me half to death, Gaia, you could at least be scenic while you're doing it.