I unthinkingly walked past it while crossing the street, then a moment later it registered in my brain and I had to turn back and photograph it.
Looks like some inattentive worker painting the crosswalk stripes laid down the paint over an "errant"😉 leaf.
Taken on November, 2021, which falls within the fallow period of this blog.
This evening's sunset.
Boy, I sure do love me some apocalyptic-style imagery^
Related posts: "Heaven's On Fire"
The instant I laid eyes on this rather odd-looking cloud,
I was reminded of the "salt vampire" from the original Star Trek TV series. The creature bears the distinction of being the "starring m̶o̶n̶s̶t̶e̶r̶ creature" of the very first regular episode of the series to air, titled "The Man Trap".
It was supposed to be the last of its kind, a race of beings who may have created a civilization on an earthlike planet (fandom opinion seems to be divided between those who hold that these creatures are the actual builders of the civilization and those who counter that these are the predators that killed off the true owners of the civilization), and who are capable of creating illusory images of themselves to seduce the perceiver. The result is that different crew members of the starship Enterprise see the creature differently -- as either the person they most fondly remember or the one they most naturally expect to see. Thus, Dr. McCoy sees it as the woman he once had a crush on long ago, and who amazingly "hasn't aged a bit" since then; Captain Kirk also sees it as that same woman, but a sensibly older version of her, due to the passage of time; and a crewman (the first to die, natch^) sees it as a sexy blonde he'd met a short time before on shore leave. The result: disaster.
While checking out some recent images I realized "Modified Photo" plus a number cannot serve as a formal title, as there are many past posts that included modified images but were not included in the numbered series. So from now on it will just be "Modified Photo" without a number.
The bushes on either side of it are withered and dessicated, but the umbrella "takes a licking and keeps on ticking", because... it's non-biodegradable plastic.
I was born long after the heyday of the Hollywood movie musicals, but I grew up watching them on television -- Gigi, Showboat, Easter Parade, South Pacific, My Fair Lady, Singing' in the Rain, West Side Story, The Sound of Music; the list goes on and on. And of course, New Moon. Kathryn Grayson became famous for her rendition of "Lover, Come Back to Me" from the movie (although it was actually sung by Jeanette MacDonald in the movie).
During my time at USC I won a CD of Kathryn Grayson's hits in a contest, autographed by Kathryn herself. To show my appreciation I sent her an origami flower in a box; I don't know if her people ever passed it on to her, because I never received an acknowledgment.
I had piano lessons as a child. Mostly I practiced on formal music intended as lessons, composed by classical musicians, but I also learned to play some "popular" pieces (simplified for beginning and intermediate players, of course). One of the latter was the American folk tune "Turkey in the Straw". That was decades ago and there haven't been many occasions to revisit it since then, but for some reason tonight it was ruling my alcohol-soaked brain. So I looked it up online (natch) and whaddayaknow, there was a whole history behind it, both the tune and the lyrics. I confess I didn't even know it had gone through many incarnations as a song with lyrics; I knew it only as a fiddle tune from the American west(?), but it actually seems to have originated in the British Isles, and boy, it's evolved through many versions over the years, some of which would never pass muster today (check out the cover below and you'll see why).
After checking out a number of different versions of the lyrics I have come up with a goofy synthesis; I'm not worried about it not being "authentic", since there really is no One Correct Version, and so mine is as good as anybody else's.
Oh I had a girl and she was good
but one of her legs was made of wood
her hair was false and so was her teeth
and there wasn't much for me to do
Turkey in the straw, turkey in the hay
turkey in the sea, turkey in the sky
bull frog danced with his mother-in-law
and they all sang a tune called Turkey in the Straw
Thrown out with 16 spokes, a pricier type of umbrella than your average convenience store umbrellas with their standard 8 spokes. And on a sunny day, too.
After fourteen years! This is the cloud, photographed as a baby back in 2012:
And now it's back, all grown up and filled out now, looking like a real tough guy. Time really passes like a fast-flowing river, doesn't it -- where did that adorable little baby cloud go!
I was checking the results of a photo junket from a few days ago when I came across an unusual image.
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It was there in the other photo too, except in a truncated version. I suppose the orientation switch from portrait to landscape might be called upon to explain the change in shape, but that would not explain why the glitch remains in more or less in the same fixed position relative to the background structure -- as lens flares are very sensitive to even small movements of the camera -- nor why its own orientation stays the same in both pictures; if it's a reflection off some internal mechanism within the camera, shouldn't it change position, or disappear, or at the very minimum, turn with the camera?
So then... was it something that was objectively there, independent of the camera, but not visible to the naked eye? I expanded the images and turned up the contrast, sharpness, etc. in the hope of discovering something, but there really wasn't much else to see beyond the mere fact of its being there. That rainbow trail in the first detail shot does rather make me suspect it could be some very unsual type of lens flare, but I don't know -- I looked up lens flares and other glitches and artifacts in shots taken by other people using the same make and model of smart phone as mine, but none of them even came close to resembling these. And the glitch does not show up in any of the many other shots taken on the same day (nor, of course, in the thousands and thousands of other shots taken with the same camera over the past few years).
A fire on the horizon.
A red flag that just happened to be pointing out the urgency when I noticed the smoke while crossing the road.
Perhaps the best example yet of a meaningful meaningless coincidence I have ever seen.
Something makes me keep going back to that scary abandoned apartment block. This time though, I didn't actually go in but just took a few shots of the entryway from outside. Then I noticed someone had set out a saucer under a chair. Was it there before? I couldn't remember. Is it a neighborhood "cat mom" (or dad), caring for strays?
Maybe it was for this cat that I spotted at a corner as I was leaving, placidly munching on grass.
This afternoon I could not recall the word "rhinestone". I could see the things in my mind's eye, but for the life of me I could not remember what they're called. I did searches online under "artificial gemstones" and other similar definitions, but all that came up were terms like costume jewelry, faux gems, simulant, paste, etc. After hours of agonizing I did finally manage to remember the word, and immediately the image of Glen Campbell came up with it. Why Glen Campbell? The song he made famous:
