Category: Lopsided Observations

Our next door neighbor, Leo, put this wood splitter together. It is a Heathkit like the stereo systems that early hobbyists built. Peggi’s dad was one of those. He put their first amplifier together in the fifties. My college roommate’s father, Harmon Hoy, built one too and his son, Steve, brought it to school with him. One of the first things Steve said to me was, “Mind if I put one of these stereo speakers on your desk?” I had been gearing up to study in college because I never did that in high school and that question and it’s implications pretty much put an end to that effort.

I borrowed the wood splitter this morning to work on the wood we pulled up from behind our neighbors house when a few trees blew over. I only got through a few pieces when a bolt broke on the handle that drives the shaft and wood toward the blade. I bought a new bolt but we will have find someone to weld the piece fitting on the end of the new bolt. I’m thinkin of giving Sparky a call tomorrow.

Peggi made dinner with the grilled vegetables and pasta recipe from this morning’s paper and it was sensational. We have a Netflix double header of “I Walk With A Zombie” and “The Body Snatcher” for after painting.

Just like the Soccer Moms and Joe Sixpacks, we were really looking forward to the debate tonight and it sort of disappointed. The bar had been lowered so far that Sarah won by not completely blowing it. And when you think about Dick Cheney, Palin did look pretty vice presidential. I have a pretty good track record of picking the losing limbo dancer and I hope I’m wrong this time.

We had to do a Mapquest search to locate Greece Athena High School. We rarley get over to the west side of the city and we were looking for the Performing Arts Center, the same place where Bush gave his sales pitch for Social Security privatization. The whole town is red but we were trying to forget about politics for the afternoon and enjoy the opera.

The Barber of Seville has some pretty familiar music in it. The barber’s name is Figaro and we can all sing that. I heard a Queen cover in the overture too. I was sitting in the back while Peggi attended to her mom in the bathroom. I was there for most of the first act until an usher came in and told me that my wife was looking for me. As I suspected, we would now be heading back to her mom’s apartment so that she could get cleaned up. They never saw any of the opera. I’m down in the computer room on a Windows machine. We plan to head out again, this time to Mario’s, my mother-in-law’s favorite Italian restaurant.

Like everyone else, the chipmunks are slowing down this time of year. Whether they are too fat and complacent from the the bountiful summer or just getting sleepy in preparation for winter hibernation, they are piling up at our door. And our cat, Ornette, is responsible for the slaughter. I guess he thinks he is doing a good thing, bringing them up to the door, like he’s doing his share to put bread on the table. At most he puts puncture wounds in their necks and only occasionally will he eat some of the head. I’ve seen some chipmunks get up and take off after this treatment. It’s kinda gross. Today there were three of them. I keep a shovel by the door to scoop them up and then I toss them out back in the woods.

We did some 4D work this morning and then pretty much blew off the rest. I did take the phone with me when I climbed the ladder out back. Bill Jones called while I was working on the peak and wanted me to check out his navigational scheme on the Bop Shop’s online store. He has been building the data base, the interface and the secure check out with CartWeaver. I told him I would look at it out as soon as I got down but I never did. When we finally quit painting at six or so there was an irate message from a client wondering if we had had a chance to do the changes to his website. I know some of our clients read this thing and if he is, he should know I will get to those asap.

I painted the trim around our living room windows. The oak beams that support this wall of windows were finished with some sort of shellac or wood sealer since the house was built in the forties. I could either sand it all down or strip it or something or just prime it with oil and paint it with the dark brown acrylic we picked out as our trim color. It almost seemed like it was my duty to keep the place up in it’s original form but I went with the latter.

It was in the nineties today of course so we had to visit the pool. We picked tomatoes on the way back and Peggi baked some eggplant for dinner. We ate n the deck and admired our work. We stopped down at the Village Gate to see Lumiare but we got there just as they were doing their last song. We did catch the fire jugglers and I took a few shots in “fireworks” mode.

We stopped out to visit Peggi’s mom in the Living Center and I posted this with her wifi connection. When I get home I’ll put up a photo of the fire jugglers.

I was looking for a poster from the Marianne Faithfull show at Scorgies to put on the Scorgies site and I started rummaging through some old scrapbooks. I came across this “stat” (photo from a line camera used in graphic arts in the old days). Mechanical artists were expected to know how to use a stat camera in those days and you were always running to the darkroom to shoot a logo or blow up some type or just hang around in the dark. The paper that we used could only show black or white, no gray tones, and you usually waxed the back of the photo paper and stuck down on on a mechanical board. This was called a “paste up”. These cameras could do a halftone but you had to put a screen on top of the paper before exposing it. It was usually 65 or 85 line. And your image was still black or white, you just had tiny little black dots to represent the gray tones.

Sometimes the camera was way out of focus or maybe you forgot to put the image you wanted to copy in and you would get some surprising results. I don’t remember how the image above came about. Maybe I just found it in the trash. It still looks pretty good.

Some bigger ad agencies had their their own camera guys. I worked at one place where the guy closed the dark room door, cranked Thin Lizzy and smoked pot all day. He asked that we just slide requests under the door. And the guy at Sibleys would take naps in the dark room. You had to wake him up to get a shot. Of course he was following the Greatful Dead all over the Northeast at night. He had a real darkroom setup in there and he made enlargements of Jerry that he sold at the shows.