It's been a couple of decades since I've been here, but the Maquoketa Caves were beautiful as ever. And really fun for the kids, by which I mean all of us.
At home we had a marsupial interlude, an opossum, caught, released and bewondered.
The day after the 4th I went on the Tour de Brew with Steve and Bill. You start out the ride with a beer and a card and proceed to peddle 35 miles with enough stops in between to complete a poker hand and keep you beer fueled... none of that hipper than thou PBR crap, just a choice of one of three excellent (and strong!) hand crafted beers. Prizes go to the winning hands at the end, and of course, there's more beer. Naturally, amongst the beauty of the rolling farm hills and the wind in your hair, this leads to theorizing, if not strategizing, about card distribution methodologies and the finer points of poker. Well, maybe not so natural... in a lot of ways it was a family event, I loved that about it too, though it did occur to me that truly the only way to drink beer correctly is to pair it with bicycling. A brilliant idea. Kudos to the organizers of this event.
We saw Ferdinand along the way. I guess he lives in Iowa now. I think he ate all the big flowers, but you can see there's a little one, right beneath his nose.
last beer stop
Back in the Amana Colonies I ate the best hotdog this year. Maybe the only one... whatever, it could have been a hamburger, it would have been the best one too. It was sooo good. The Beatles cover band, less so. But who cares? We had the winning poker hand...
Back at the K-ranch fam pho—
Sunday, July 13, 2008
Iowa
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
Monday, December 3, 2007
advent snow
On a technical note, this is pretty exciting... the movie posted above is a Flash .swf file, meaning I have control over size, quality, playback skin, and poster (still image that appears as the video placeholder), all of which I have no control over if I (or anybody) posts using Blogger's video upload. Posting .swf's can be done by uploading them to a server and linking them to your blog. Code to link your swf can be cut and paste from here.
On an artistic note, the vid is about 2 hrs. condensed to 1:10 mins. Some of it in "real time" (shot at 1 frame/2 sec. @ 30 F/sec.), and some of it further condensed in post production. Still sounding rather technical I know... but then again how do you divorce tools from artistic production? They are so very intertwined... For the music I tryed some Eno first, but the snow proved repellent to electronic forms(except for maybe static?) in favor of more direct tonalities. The punctual sounds of the piano seem to better shape time and snow. Bach's Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor fit.
The snowball fight was completely unplanned (I had started filming before it was even a thought), but then thoroughly encouraged.
Also—should, per chance, you not be seeing anything... you may need to download flashplayer 9
Saturday, November 24, 2007
tracking tracking everywhere
Everywhere I turn these days someone's mining data. I went to fry up my fishead the other night and found this tag in its jaw : projectCROOS.com and from their site : combining genetic information with digital traceability systems to track Chinook salmon stocks and individual fish for management and marketing purposes.
I guess once we've effected our environment enough to impact resources, it's time to track it. I know the situation can't be reduced simply to that point of view, but I like to step back and contextualize any given situation historically and socially—get the big picture view—before I get lost in the details. With that sort of tracking and breakdown of bio-information, one can identify what river system the salmon is from all the way back up to the spawning tributary... along with a lot of other information. Which present some pretty powerful possibilities... and therein lies the point of revolution. Where our digital age will take us, with its greatly enhanced accessibility to tracking information, revolves around that word, possibilities. Void of context, information is neutral. It can be incredibly useful and beneficial, but used, just as easily, to less noble ends. Take Rapleaf for instance, a company I stumbled across recently while googling the word "contrite."
Rapleaf is a company who aggregates other peoples information and sells it to whoever wants to pay for it— for a fee you can trace anyones e-mail address to everyplace its ever been... which not only seems unethical, but I'm surprised its legal. Often I feel that our constitution, regarding right to privacy issues, hasn't caught up with the digital age. Leech-like business models such as Rapleafs will also impact the whole social networking scene, at least amongst professionals—for how much control do we really have over where our address goes? One can go to Rapleaf and find out if one's profile is listed, but as one commentator noted, in order to do this "one must enter one’s email address. Once an email address has been entered, the profile is made. Joseph Heller would be quite impressed." In addition, if someone looks up your address, Rapleaf, as a 'courtesy,' will send you an e-mail notifying you about it. Which is good, but double pronged, since it also functions as spam. Smart, but devious. Which also applies to their site. Not unsurprisingly, the company has gotten a lot of flack. So they posted a full fledged apologia (aka "contrite") , which one surfer incisively dubbed as "Radical transparency excellently played."
We live in paranoid times. Setting the tone, from our president on down—it is, unfortunately, not unfounded.
Man that salmon head was good!! It's a little known fact that some of the best meat is in the head. Like eating an artichoke, the process has its very own rhythm—there's no quick way of doing it. It requires diligence and close examination—anatomical fascination the bonus side effect. At one point CP asked if she could have an eyeball and I said sure, handed it to her, and she popped it in her mouth. Just like that. With the unadulterated purity of a three year old. I didn't let on, but boy was I proud, in a sociological sort of way. Next time I'm going to have to try one too.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Loving the Rain
I was just warming up with the lichen post below... here we drop the photosynthetical element and are left with straight fungus, of the shitake variety, one of my favorites. Goodness from the garden. We feasted on these all week.
I couldn't resist hauling a log (alder) in for an MP photo shoot...
and from the archives: Getting a head-start in fungal culinary appreciation,
Like a lot of mushroom enthusiasts, my entry came by way of enthusiasm for the entheogenic variety. Paul Stamets, the preeminent authority on matters fungal (just down the road in Oly; see FungiPerfecti), has some great stories about his experimental forays. But beyond the entheogens,
I met his brother, John, a renown Seattle photographer, about a year ago at SAM. He told me how he helped stoke the initial enthusiasm by inviting his brother out to Seattle and introducing him to cyanescens. These days it's not something I'm too interested ingesting, but the thrill of discovery remains—even when you're not looking for them. Just the other day we were out with the kids and stumbled across a patch big enough to waste a small army (in a good way( :), right in the middle of town. It's funny that way, because I remember looking so hard for them back in the day... and not finding any. And now, only marginally interested, they so
Saturday, November 10, 2007
gone trick-or-treating
GDT's Halloweeen Headquarters
A couple of halloween and post halloween photos. CP, now three, totally remembers last year. Especially that one house with the really spooky sounds and body parts spilling from a tipped over wheelbarrow and strewn across the yard as a ghoulish man dragging an axe lurches illuminated by a strobe light... sending the kids running and crying I want to go home! I want to go home! Now!! effectively putting a spectacular end, amidst consoling explanations, to last years trick or treating. We ran into Joe this year before we got there and he said, "yeah, they toned it down this year—the demonic element is gone." Which was pretty much a perfect description and true enough—no tears this year, just full sized Butterfingers.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
Like'n Lichen, take three
Lichens are so beautiful. Even beyond the flower realm of eye candy, they're conceptually satisfying too. Two kingdoms, plant and fungus, converge to form one symbiotic unit, lichen.
Algae, representing the plant kingdom, brings with it the ability to harness the sun via photosynthesis. Fungus brings the ability to harness the earth via decomposition. Functioning somewhat like a corporate merger (the verdict is still out as to the consensuality of the union...) the end effect is beneficial, expanding the range and existence of both partners. Lichens also have the fairly unique ability to fix nitrogen from the air and therefore function as good monitors of air quality.
why take three? because that's how many times I posted to arrive at Bloggers (undocumented) maximum allowed photo height...
The first posting of this photo (that I took of a cascadian lichen) was 640 x 1720 pixels. Despite the requisite html editing (which you need to do if you would like it larger than the standard Blogger automated 400 px Width), the first posting got truncated to a 595 px W. I got it to post the full 640 px W by cropping the html "H" value to 1600 px, which kinda makes sense in a 4x4 sort of way...
Also - a note on the template -
As mentioned, Bloggers automated settings are limited to posting photos at a 400 px max W. I changed my template ("main-wrapper" CSS settings) to accommodate a 640 px photo. Since this change effects other layout elements, a few other additional adjustments needed to be made as well to retain the layout aesthetic.
Changing the template requires modifying the CSS. Even if you don't know CSS this can be fairly easily done by posting something, and then viewing the source file from the browser (View/Source). That way you can see what code is effecting which element, and can work your way back to the template from there. Once you change the width, all the other elements affected by it - header, rules, side bar, etc. - need to be adjusted to accommodate the new layout as well. I just cut and paste the whole template (make sure you enable widgets), into Dreamweaver, or your html editor of choice, and use the search/find and replace function. That way you can keep track of things and have a back up copy as well.
