It was like a feather from an angel's wing (I know, schmaltzy), but it grew from down to plume to flight feather and eventually to pheasant tail over some ten minutes. There is a bit of a jump between the second and third images because as I followed the movement of the cloud, at one point I had to wait at a street crossing for the notoriously long Korean traffic signals to change and there was a tree blocking the view while I waited.
Two days ago I went to check out Ilsan Lake Park, just north of here, after a longish hiatus since my last visit. Actually, I had made a half-hearted plan to attend the International Flower Festival there, which took place just a couple of weeks before, but, well, laziness and intertia intervened. But (here cometh the rationalization) in a way that was a good thing, because now I was able to enjoy the park without the big crowds that would have thronged there for the event. Anyway, by the time I got to the park it was already mid-, going on late-, afternoon, and the light was beginning to take on a warm golden tinge. I took full advantage of it and took a bunch of shots, and when I checked them out later, I was struck by how much they reminded me of the animation style of Japan's Studio Ghibli. The warm and rich, yet soft, pastell-like colors reminded me most particularly of the overall look of Spirited Away, (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi), which is one of my favorite movies of all time, animated or live.
Related posts: Magic Tree
Just ambling along, looking right and left, down at the ground and up at the sky, as usual looking anywhere but where I'm going, when I noticed this:
An elevator shaft that looked to be maybe 3 degrees or so out of whack with the rest of the building. Why? Surely it cannot have been deliberately designed to be that way? It really isn't a good candidate for a "witty design" factor, as it's just too small a breach to stand out; on the contrary, most people probably wouldn't even notice it on the roof of the building as they passed it by, all preoccupied with their own individual pressing businesses. As it stands now, all it does is just bothering the heck out of my OCD-addled brain, which demands that corners and edges align cleanly. On the other hand though, I can't imagine how such a small but obvious misalignment can have passed muster before breaking ground. Did something go wrong during the construction, maybe? Some minor but unfixable flaw only noticed when the project was already past the point of no return? It's just so odd-looking.
Just walking along, looking at everything but where I'm going, and spotted this. Got my obsessive-compulsive disorder and/or the suspected high-functioning autism to "thank" for this discovery.
"𝑆𝑒𝑒𝑚𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑠𝑖𝑏𝑖𝑙𝑖𝑡𝑖𝑒𝑠 𝑐𝑎𝑛 ℎ𝑎𝑝𝑝𝑒𝑛, 𝑏𝑢𝑡 𝑜𝑛𝑙𝑦 𝑠𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠"
Another card from the mysterious unknown deck
(Is it pretentious that I got it translated to Latin?^)
Some random shots taken while perambulating around GwangHwaMun Square this afternoon and evening, plus one on the way home.
Today I was just ambling along, on my usual afternoon walk around the neighborhood, when I spotted a glove in the road.
Its placement was a bit unusual, as it was not on the sidewalk but in the traffic lanes.
Something just occurred to me. A question, rather. Humans are diurnal creatures -- we are evolved to be active by day and quiescent at night. But throughout most the evolutionary history of our species the hours of darkness weren't just about resting and sleeping; night was associated with the very real danger of being killed and eaten by night-prowling natural enemies, and the fear and sense of vulnerability it inspired. As a result modern man, even though he no longer need fear being attacked by wild beasts, still feels a vague, nameless atavistic fear of darkness and of the state of helplessness engendered by the loss of visual awareness in the dark.
It then naturally follows that animals that have evolved to be active at night and are able to see well in darkness, like owls, cats and tarsiers, would lack a fear of it (outside of the specific fear of predation that is, which anyway can happen in broad day as well). So does this mean that once technology has advanced to the point where our natural vision can be augmented or entirely replaced by perfect night vision, and we can see just as well in complete darkness as in daylight, we will no longer be afraid of the dark (although, I suppose by then darkness itself, at least in the physical sense, would logically have lost its meaning; so maybe that should be "afraid of '(supposedly)dark' places" instead), and as a result all the traditional stories of ghosts appearing at night and monsters in dark corners will have lost their power to frighten, and instead be relegated to a time in mankind's primitive past?
I felt like Mexican food for dinner, so I went out to pick up a few tacos. On the way I saw these paired trash bins with cute ears. One for ordinary refuse, the other for recyclables (the bins, not the ears^).
Or maybe they were meant to be protruding eyes, like the eyes of frogs and toads.
Then, on the way back after picking up the tacos I saw this Japanese izakaya with these vent pipes. Ordinarily I find them slightly sinister, like giant serpents waiting to gobble up pigeons, but paired up like this I found them rather humorous for some reason... even "cute".
No, this isn't another one of those Dead Bird (#1, #2, #3, #4) posts. I just happened to spot this stain on the sidewalk
and knew instantly what I had to do with it. I brought it home, did some simple basic edits -- and it was reborn in dramatic fashion as the fabled Phoenix, the immortal bird that, having reached the end of a five hundred-year cycle (sources may differ on this point), immolates itself in a pyre and then is reborn from the ashes, young and renewed, as the next generation of itself.
.jpg)
