Lazy list...

We keep a dry erase board in the kitchen to list both things that need doing and household supplies that need purchasing. Notice that cat litter or paper towels or shampoo is running low? We'll jot it on the board right then while we're thinking of it.

What I've started doing lately before making an errand run is, rather than standing in front of the thing and transcribing the list onto a Post-It note or into my little notepad, I'll just use my phone to snap a picture of it and then call the picture up on the phone's screen while I'm at the store.

It's not like it's any huge time savings, maybe a half-minute, but it feels so Jetsons.
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Snow.

First real snow of the winter. Not bad at all, really. Maybe four inches, tops, of easily-shoveled powder. I probably could have cleared the front walks with a push broom in a pinch.

Getting it shoveled promptly was important, because after it gets up to about 20°F at lunch today, the mercury is scheduled to plummet to -7°F tonight, and anything that has slightly melted is going to turn to sheets of ice.

Still, a little shoveling never killed anybody (although a lot of shoveling often does.)
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TROLLOLOLOLOL

who tf is paul mccartney???!??! this is why i love kanye for shining light on unknown artists
— :/ (@CurvedDaily) January 2, 2015

RX: "Imagine kids not knowing who Paul McCartney is!"

Me: "The Beatles are old. They're kids. If they listen to pop or hip-hop..."

RX: "That'd be like me saying 'It was nice of David Bowie to help out that unknown Bing Crosby.'"

Me: "How many people from our generation think Led Zeppelin wrote 'When The Levee Breaks?'"

Dog.

Pedestrians have the undivided attention of the neighbor's pooch.

Ilford XP2 cheater B&W film almost always comes out with some funky color cast to it, like the quasi sepia tone in the top image. I had to GIMP it.

QotD: Hold The Pickles Hold The Lettuce Edition...

I often lament the "Value Meal" nature of contemporary American politics. You know what I mean by "Value Meal": You're driving around, you've got a soda or cup of coffee or whatever, and you pull into the drive thru and tell the attendant you'd like a Tasty McSammich.

"Would you like to add fries and a drink?"

"Nah, I'm good. Just gimme the sandwich."

"It's actually cheaper if you order the Value Meal."

"No, thank you; I don't want fries, and I have a drink. I'd just like the sandwich, please."

Now think of the political version of this:

"Welcome to McGoppers*!"

"Yeah, can I please get a McGunRights sandwich with low taxes, hold the wiretapping?"

"Would you like to add prayer in schools and a ban on gay marriage, and make it a Value Meal?"

"Nah, I'm good. Just gimme the sandwich."

And, in the unlikely event that you get just the sandwich, they've screwed up your order and it's got wiretapping on it.

Oleg brilliantly expressed the reason I keep trying to order at that particular drive-thru (and how did I miss it at the time?):

"As an aside, the conservative side isn’t above trying to restrict dissemination of knowledge either. I designate gun control as the more pressing problem because it would easier to face hordes of right-winders with a rifle in hand than to face hordes of left-wingers with nothing but a condom for a weapon."

*I'm more prone to try McGoppers because none of the local DemoKing franchises even have low taxes on the menu, and no matter how many times you ask them to hold the war, they put it on your sandwich anyway.
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It ain't a trip to the museum...

...without a picture of the short-faced bear.

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That was educational...

Just got back from a trip with some friends to visit the Indiana State Museum. They have a great temporary exhibit there on Prohibition (you know, the thirteen year period in this country that created modern organized crime and from which we learned absolutely nothing?)

Check this out:

That's the actual phone in question from Olmstead v. United States, the case where the Supreme Court decided 5-4 that listening in on a dude's phone lines without a warrant to catch the guy incriminating himself somehow didn't violate either the Fourth or Fifth Amendments.
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Broadly Applicable

I keep running into this, over and over again.
It's like some meta-application of "Simplify, and then add lightness."

Then again, sometimes gear is the answer to the question.
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A thousand words to make one better picture...

Neat beginner's guide to photography that's spread between these two sites:

• I Still Shoot Film
• Nathan Jones

While there are a few film-specific posts, a lot of it is broadly applicable to picture-taking in general. If you want to get more out of that DSLR you got for Christmas, there's plenty there for you, too.
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Conundrum.

Most of the writers at Foreign Policy hold views on foreign policy that would be called "neoconservative" were those views held by Republicans, in that they're all about spreading democracy and the sort of quasi-mercantilist liberal corporatism that passes for capitalism in most of the developed world these days. These are apparently good ends as long as they're achieved by the United Nations and peacekeepers and not George Bush and the 82nd Airborne.

Anyhow, the relentless cheering that accompanied the Drang nach Osten of the Eurozone and associated NATO involvement makes for a grimly amusing contrast with the concerned hand-wringing regarding increasing friskiness on the part of Putin's Russia. While it can be debated which came first, the EU/NATO chicken or the Russian saber-rattling egg, one thing's for certain: If the wheels come off the European wagon for the third time in a century, America's going to find herself hip-deep in it yet again.
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End of the line?

It bugs me that, in a world that contains this...

...the last one of these in the wild is going to wind up dying because some Chinaman thinks its toenails will give him a chubby.

A distressing number of the species listed in this article are teetering on the brink of extinction due to their use in what the author tastefully calls "traditional Chinese medicine". Translation: Your kids or grandkids will likely live in a world without the Amur leopard, Siberian tiger, and Javan rhinoceros because some guy who lived in a Shanghai penthouse and owned computers and smart phones still believed that ground up tiger gall bladders, or whatever, would put lead in his pencil*.

If I had Bill Gates money, I'd spend it on an ad campaign in China about the 'til-the-break-of-dawn properties of various wild pig and whitetail deer bits and subassemblies.

*Don't get too cocky. Plenty of Americans have McMansions and computers and smartphones and believe in homeopathy. But at least labeling a bottle of tap water as a 20C dilution of zinc oxide is unlikely to kill any tigers.

ETA: It turns out that "traditional Chinese medicine" has a boner, as it were, for deer penii. Which raises the question: Why can't I drive to Brownsburg without practically having whitetail in my lap because of the overpopulation of the Eagle Creek Park herd, and yet there are barely enough Javan rhinos on the planet for them to play an intramural game of American football? The Indonesian government is trying to protect the rhinos, while the mayor's office in Indianapolis would pay an enterprising Chinese dude to take some deer off its hands.
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That didn't work as planned.

House cats are ambush predators who thrive on a certain amount of intellectual stimulation and the occasional bout of physical play. Toward this end, Bobbi acquired a cat toy that is a sort of treat dispenser maze where they have to use their little cat brains and a bit of physical effort to get the treat out.

Each level has little portals the cat can reach through to paw at the treat, and adjustable apertures leading to the level below. If you're a cat, you reach in with your furry little mitt, bat the kibble chunk through the hole to the next level down (which can be made larger if you're a special cat that uses the short litter box) and repeat until the treat is dispensed into the trough at the bottom.

Rannie enjoyed fishing through the portals for kibble immensely.

The problem is that Huck played at that for a bit until he realized that he was large enough to rear up and stick his head through the opening on the top. While he was snorfling the food through that portal, the wiggling of the whole apparatus caused a couple treats to be dispensed. After gobbling those, Huck gave the whole thing another experimental shove, which dispensed a couple more. Then he just knocked the contraption on its side, causing it to spill treats like a burst piñata.

Clearly it will need to be affixed to a broader and heavier base, and possibly a lid will need to be jury-rigged.
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2015

Today, we make promises that we have no intention of keeping next year. For many, it’ll be the closest we ever get to being in Congress.
— Daniel Lin (@DLin71) December 31, 2014

It's 2015, well into the flying car era. My Spacely Sprockets stock is soaring, even though their price war with Cogswell Cogs saw them relocate production to Mars; those four-armed green-skinned wogs work for nothing. Buying that Venusian parts supplier and moving the corporate HQ to Ishtar Terra was a stroke of fiscal genius.

Here in the future, it is still customary to make lists of resolutions for the New Year. In 2015 I resolve to:

1. Ride the bicycle more. If it's over 50°F and not raining, there's no reason to crank up a car for any errand between Illinois Street and the Monon, or 52nd to the White River, that doesn't involve twenty-pound sacks or gallon jugs.


2. Take the timer (with a full charge, please) to the range on every visit. I'm doing good with keeping a log, but too much of the time it just records simple round counts and fairly abstract notes. Every range trip should include at least a little structured, measured practice if I want to continue improving.


3. Get out and shoot pictures more, and take the training wheels off some: Program mode is for snapshots. And use film more.

Gratuitous Gun Pr0n #118...

Smith & Wesson Model 469, 12+1 rounds of 9x19mm, made in 1983
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Surreal World

"The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has just published in its latest English-language magazine Dabiq what it claims is an "interview" with the Jordanian pilot captured in Syria."

ISIS published in its what now?

ISIS has an English-language magazine? Man, if you see back issues of that in your dentist's waiting room, it's a big ol' no-go signal, am I right? "No, it's cool, tell Dr. Farouq I've got to cancel. I've got a thing. People I need to see. No, no, I'll call him."

Also: File under "Literature you do not want to discover in your seatback pocket on climb-out from LaGuardia."
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Meanwhile...

...have a cat picture.

"Is that food you have? I, too, am interested in food."

It took him a while to grow into those extravagant mustachios.

There's no getting away from the wookie suit.

With cars or motorcycles the government is all up in your grille with regulations: Safety regulations, emissions regulations, getting all bent out of shape if you try to do a buck-ten down residential side streets... Motor vehicles are not a hobby for the regulatory-averse.

Firearms? If the do-this/don't-do-that climate around motor vehicles makes you itchy, gun laws will make you break out in hives. Even the federal government agency in charge of enforcing firearms regulations can't make up its mind about the laws half the time.

Collecting old cameras, though; that should be safe, right? I mean, how can the government possibly dick up old cameras?

Like this, that's how.

Oh, government! Is there any parade on which you won't rain?

I'm afraid to take up new hobbies at this point because no doubt there are hidden crimes or ridiculous regulatory hurdles buried in everything from knitting to flower arranging.

This is how wookie-suiters get made.

"O" is for Old Ones...

Hey, Marko! Are the sprogs too old for this now?
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Things I wish I'd paid more attention to...

• I've spent hours and hours hanging out with my friend Oleg talking about all kinds of stuff, and never once did I think to data-mine him for all the photographic awesomeness he contains.


• Les Jones' photography posts. Dude has been very consciously building his pickcher-takin' skills and noting the things he's learned in blog posts for years and years, and all I've been doing is looking at the pretty pictures and not following the notes.

Stargoyle.

The neighborhood gargoyle has gone from a thing I took pictures of for the fun of it to my standard reference target for new cameras or lenses. I've snapped his pic with everything from cell phones to film SLRs, from the bicycle, the Zed Drei, and the Subie.

I figure people who take the time to put shades on the huge gargoyle statue in the lawn aren't going to be put off their feed by the occasional vehicle stopping and cranking a window down to snap its picture.