Susan's Scribblings the Blog

Monthly Archives: July 2018

• Shudder at the Shutter

  Posted at 1:40 am by kayewer, on July 29, 2018

  I have mixed luck with cameras. Sometimes I get spectacular shots, but mostly I wind up with something unexpected. That’s probably why many people who buy cameras use just the automatic setting, because little or nothing can go wrong.

  Then they forget to take the lens cap off.

  Among my most epic errors; I once shot a sequence of the sunrise at Ocean City, NJ. I got home to develop the film (yes, it was in those days), and found that I had no film in the camera to start with.

  Then there was the time I took my point-and-shoot Kodak to a concert. From the viewfinder I could see everything clearly, but the pictures that came back looked like I was in the next county rather than in row 65. Then there was the time I had an opportunity to take a photograph of actor Barry Bostwick and two of my friends with him. The place was crowded, and nobody was budging to let me back up and get everybody in the frame, so I wound up with a full head shot of him and about 25 percent of each of them. At least they were recognizable.

  One time I was getting a shot of a family with a growing youngster, and I hiccuped and got a “Frankenstein” shot with the parents’ scalps cut off squarely on top.

  Sure, the greats like Annie Leibovitz didn’t score cover-ready shots all the time, either, but in the years since I started taking pictures we’ve progressed to digital cameras, and they are just as complicated as the film versions.

  At least, most of the time, you run a low risk of running out of room to store your photos.

  A coworker of mine is a great photographer, and her camera and lens knowledge is out of this world. She prefers social settings like weddings, and equestrian events for her subjects, but she also catches the occasional woodland creature or landscape. She invited me to pick up her camera and check out the BIG lens that could make a flea at a half mile away seems like it’s about to kiss you on the lips. While getting it up to my eyes to look through it, I got an accidental shot of the building’s parking lot.

  In all fairness, I haven’t been taking a lot of photos over the years, because life has gotten in the way, but I’m taking it slow and trying to get back some of my past joy in looking at the world around me and capturing moments. The other day I tried to grab a shot of some African violets, but the focus had other ideas; the picture looked like I had shot the flowers from the next county. I wanted a close-up, dang it, and the camera wanted some background in the shot.

  You know you have problems when your electronics dictate what they will do for you.

  So on to the manual for some troubleshooting. It seemed I was not in automatic mode, but I don’t know what mode I was in, so I had to go through an entire menu of adjustments here, updating settings there and saving changes in the other place, for a shot of a pot of flowers.

  At least I can take my time renewing my skills at this craft, as violets don’t gallop away while you’re composing a shot.

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• The Pen and the Scarlet Letter

  Posted at 2:09 am by kayewer, on July 22, 2018

  I brought two Sharpie® pens to an event this past week; they were different from the usual type in that they were click pens instead of the usual type with caps. I figured that would be ideal because the caps would not get lost, but I got a surprise when I put the pens out and people tried to use them.

  Everybody immediately tried to pull the black click mechanism off the pen, and when that didn’t work, figuring their fingers were probably slippery or something, they tried harder to wrench the two apart. That would be when I would say, “that’s a clicker pen,” at which they would stare at me as if I had brought up something entirely new.

  I realized something at that moment: our ability to adapt to change has been severely compromised, and I think I may know why. We’re not setting any benchmarks or standards by which we can accept a norm and adapt it, change it or reject it. So the makers of Sharpie® apparently cannot save users the hassle of losing a removable cap by making their pens click instead. Nobody is going to look at the pens and figure it out; it just isn’t right and that’s that. One rejected product can send a company into bankruptcy, but by golly, let’s not go and try to make something better.

  This is the same mindset that is affecting our societal norms and throwing our sense of right, wrong and appropriate counter actions into disorder. If we don’t know what to do with people, how do we know what to do with our things? We have no “scale of change,” or point values to assign to our sense of normalcy, so we’re making it up as we go along, and it is causing some crazy things to happen.

  We are embracing who we are, for example, as long as some magical majority ruling makes it okay. So maybe some magical rule will make marker pens okay to click someday, but some people may not ever have the right to exist anymore. Our rejection isn’t just not using the product, but throwing away human beings just doesn’t seem like a viable answer.

  For example, the Metropolitan Opera continues to produce the works of Richard Wagner, who had a reputation in his lifetime as an anti-Semite, and such behavior is not considered proper today, along with other discriminatory acts.  Jump forward to present day to conductor James Levine, who happens to be Jewish and grew to fame as a music master of the most famous operatic pieces, especially Wagner. Because of some sexual misconduct from his past and recently brought to light, he will likely never appear in an orchestra pit again. Nobody is talking about which is worse, but we don’t seem to be assigning the right actions to the wrongdoings.

  We have been giving a scarlet letter treatment of sorts to all varieties of men and women such as CBS anchor Charlie Rose and Roseanne (who have dealt with the issues they faced differently and seemingly not to any public satisfaction). Whether the actions were recent or years ago, and whether they owned up to the accusations or not. The past sometimes makes the present stagnant, or it can sometimes change. Do we accept the past, change the future, or always stick to what we know? And how do we deal with perceived wrongs?

  In the musical (play and movie) Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye adapted to change and accepted two of his daughters’ decisions to change with the times, but initially he rejected his third daughter for marrying outside the faith. She became, as Kevin O’Leary famously says, dead to him. Later, he relented. Slightly. We knew eventually he would accept her back.

  So maybe somebody picks up that pen and examines it for a moment and thinks, Hey, this might work this way. Or not. I haven’t seen the company in dire straights because they put a clicker on a pen.

  Sure, we can reject a pen, but we can’t keep on throwing people away because of their sins. Aren’t we supposed to punish the actions to redeem the person? Nathaniel Hawthorne must be whirring around in his grave right now. Shunning is akin to bullying, and we know how that goes in our schools. We should be above that. When somebody prominent goes astray, we need to address it and assign a program of reparation to it. Sure, it’s the prodigal son and the last minute change of heart at the end of every sappy sitcom ever, but rejection gets us nowhere. We still lose pen caps.

  So why am I on a rant about this? I just heard that Disney has rejected the director of the next Guardians of the Galaxy movie, James Gunn, from it and future projects because somebody unearthed some provocative social media posts from his youth; though he owned up to how and why he posted the comments, we apparently must be a society free of past sins and ignorant of what it takes to grow a whole person. This from Disney, who produces films about growing and changing and owning up to who we are, who owns the Marvel franchise in which heroes are not perfect but can learn how to be better.

  Nobody is perfect (myself included), and I’m certainly not going to stand on a soapbox and say that there are not some horrible people out there who probably do not fall into the “forgive and forget” category, but being stubborn about what we want things to be won’t change what we do or have done or what we can do now. Take a closer look at the pen, and at who we know. The solution is a better one than what we’re doing.

  *(The purpose of this post is to prop open the door to discussion, and may not reflect the totality of opinions on the issues out there.)

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• Papa Don’t Speak

  Posted at 1:56 am by kayewer, on July 15, 2018

  I once had a nightmare in which everybody’s mouth was covered with duct tape, and communication was reduced to hand-held chalkboards (this was before cell phones, of course).  After reading about Papa John’s pizza founder John Schnatter resigning from his company because of  poor word choice, I wondered if we are truly reaching the point at which what we say, regardless of its volatility, has too high a price?

  Of course, my viewpoint is that of somebody who endured countless verbal abuses at key points in my life, so words like “retard” have a sting not unlike the infamous “n-word” which Schnatter supposedly uttered in the alleged context of having heard that KFC’s own Colonel Sanders used it with impunity. Let’s look at that again: he said that he said the word and didn’t get into trouble for it, so the messenger who said he said it got shot.

  Are you following me? I’m not: I think I missed a turn somewhere.

  As an advocate of eliminating racism, bullying and abuse of all kinds, I don’t like to hear angry verbiage from anybody about anything, but we’re starting to make the very communication of those words into something akin to murder or cannibalism; if we were in the 18th century, putting the Lord’s name next to “damn,” one might be hanged. Imagine if the child in the famous story “The Emperor’s New Clothes” had been unceremoniously thrown off a cliff for verbally pointing out the naked sovereign.

  We are not solving any problems by punishing discussions about our past misdeeds with public shunning. Unless our history books are lying about the whole tragedy of slavery and servitude in our country (and we know they are not), we need to talk about what causes the rift between our nation and do something about it. Banning one word from history won’t help solve the problem. And really, one can’t do it. The word is there, and it needs to be dealt with.

  We’ve been down this path before, and I’ve said that we probably should redeem the man while punishing the misdeed; otherwise we wind up with more people on the outskirts of society than inside the circle. That’s separation all over again. We are supposed to be bringing our brothers together, instead of sending them away.

  So now I don’t know if I can walk into Papa John’s and order a pizza anymore. There are wonderful employees in there who are in danger of losing their jobs without our patronage. They didn’t do anything wrong. But here we are stuck in that “if one, than all” mindset which snubs the group for one person’s errors. At least Schnatter resigned, rather than wait to be shown the door, but the issue still remains, along with all the other anger that seems to be permeating our daily lives lately.

  So I’ve written my piece, and I hope nobody expects me to keep my mouth shut with duct tape, because we still have to talk.

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• Bagging It

  Posted at 1:37 am by kayewer, on July 8, 2018

  I need to warn everybody out there that the grocers may have figured out how to get us to use our own shopping bags; it looks like they’re sabotaging the plastic ones at checkout. It’s going to take an entire new mentality for us to prepare for it, and I’m here to share how I’m getting ready for it.

  While at the self-checkout today, I noticed the lack of paper bags and resigned myself to using just plastic. This trip turned out to be a six-bagger; used to be four, but the sizes of plastic grocery bags seem to have shrunk lately. What used to hold three cartons of milk now barely fits four frozen meals.

  As I lifted a bag with two bottles of juice and a few yogurt cups, it tore and the contents hit the floor. the checkout attendant calmly came over and said, “you have to double bag, because these won’t hold anything.”

  So the staff is in on it. That’s an important clue.

  She helped me double bag everything, and I noticed the holes at the bottoms of all the bags. That’s another major clue.

  So, resigned to never seeing paper-in-plastic again, I took everything home and placed all the defective bags into one big bag to take back to the store next time for recycling.

  Since China is apparently averse to receiving our plastic trash now, I’m not really surprised that we’re being slowly steered like cattle toward using our own bags. But we have a problem: nobody is used to taking bags into the store. The shoppers’ mindset is to go in with our wallets full and come out with full bags and empty wallets (or a wad of credit card receipts, or gigabytes of electronic receipt data, whichever you’re into). so how do we enter a store carrying bags and make it look classy?

  Maybe the solution is to give shopping bags the same treatment as glass bottles; a deposit gives you bags, and when you return them you get cash back toward your shopping trip. Or maybe we need a classy bag in which to bring our bags into the store. Or maybe we need a bag which fits into our purse and expands on demand when we leave the store.

  This is going to take some time to figure out. Meanwhile, the bags we have now are designed to fail us. I don’t know if this is going to kill the supermarket as we know it, but it sure looks like sabotage to me.

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• Two Things I Learned

  Posted at 1:34 am by kayewer, on July 1, 2018

  This week I took some time during my lunch to watch some YouTube videos, and I learned two interesting things. The first involves the name of a town in Wales which is over 50 characters long and difficult to pronounce, but I think I’ve nailed it.

  I discovered it while watching a compilation video of news bloopers: a weather announcer named Liam Dutton from network Channel 4 was tasked with giving the weather in western Wales, and managed to nail the name of a train station/church town called llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. That’s pronounced pretty much like this: Llan vire pool gwyn gill go ger u queern drobool landus ilio gogo goch, the last sounding like “rock” if you have a phlegm-y throat.

  It’s kind of the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious of its time. Since we in the PA/NJ region have places like Schuylkill to pronounce, we should consider ourselves lucky.

  The second thing I learned is that compilation videos cheat sometimes: the clips were supposed to be from this June, but this viral clip is from about three years ago. Looks like they padded out their collection a bit and should pay a visit to the naughty corner, or have to write Llanfair P.G. (as the locals apparently call it) 100 times.

   

   

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